Stephen smiles. ‘You old romantic, Bogdan. What was her name?’
Bogdan raises his eyes from the board, and raises his hands in a slow shrug. ‘We all forget things, Stephen.’
Stephen smiles, and nods. ‘Very clever. But you would tell me? You would tell me if something was up? I can’t ask Elizabeth. I don’t want to worry her.’
Again, Stephen has asked Bogdan this question a number of times. And Bogdan always answers in the same way.
‘Would I tell you? Honestly, I don’t know. What would you do, if it was someone you loved?’
‘I suppose if I felt it would help, then I would tell them,’ says Stephen. ‘And if I felt it wouldn’t help, then I wouldn’t tell them.’
Bogdan nods. ‘I like that. I think that is right.’
‘But you think I’m all right? A bit of fuss over nothing?’
‘That’s exactly what I think, Stephen,’ says Bogdan, and moves one of his pawns further up the board.
Stephen stares at the board. ‘But it leads me to another question. A worse question.’
‘We have all day,’ says Bogdan.
‘Is Elizabeth OK?’
‘Sure,’ says Bogdan. ‘I mean, Elizabeth is never OK, you know. But she is well.’
‘She was in a tizz,’ says Stephen. ‘The other night. She was talking about a library and a Viking, making no real sense, and when I questioned her about it, she took herself off. Dose of the waterworks, which she tried to cover up. Very unlike her. What’s that, do you think?’
‘Doesn’t ring a bell at all?’ asks Bogdan.
‘Good question actually,’ says Stephen, making his next move. ‘The question of the day, I’d say. “The Viking” – your guess is very much as good as mine, but the library. I didn’t think about it at the time, but I have been in a library recently. I’m sure I hadn’t told Elizabeth about it though.’
‘What library?’ asks Bogdan.
‘Friend of mine,’ says Stephen. ‘Bill Chivers, you know him?’
‘Bill Chivers? No,’ says Bogdan.
‘Where do I know you from, Bogdan?’ asks Stephen. ‘Where did we meet?’
‘I came to fix something in the flat,’ says Bogdan. ‘I saw the chessboard, and we started playing.’
‘That’s it,’ says Stephen. ‘That’s it. No reason why you’d know Bill Chivers, then. He’s a book dealer. Bent as a nine-bob note, between you and me.’
Bent as a nine-bob note. Bogdan always likes to discover a nice new idiom.
‘Only he invited me up to his place, forget where, got Staffordshire in my head, but that can’t be right. But big old pile, doing well for himself, and there I am in his library, and I’m looking around, Bogdan, being nosy, you know me …’
‘You never know what you might see,’ says Bogdan.
‘Always been that way,’ agrees Stephen. ‘And, anyway, I finally come to my point, there are books on the shelf that shouldn’t be there.’
‘Shouldn’t how?’
‘Expensive,’ says Stephen. ‘Famously expensive. Not first editions but one-offs. Should be in museums, but some are in private collections. Worth tens of millions if you want to add them all together, but there they are in Bill Chivers’s library. So what do we make of that?’
‘In a library, in a big house in Staffordshire? You saw these books?’