Crossed Bones Read Free

yellow as a rat’s. ‘Should fetch a few quid from a specialist collector. Where did you say you got it from?’
    Michael hadn’t. ‘Oh, a friend. Selling it on behalf of a friend.’ This wasn’t the entire truth, but it wasn’t too shy of it. ‘Look inside, look properly,’ he urged impatiently. ‘It’s a lot more extraordinary than you might think at first glance.’
    He watched avidly as the book-dealer blew on the pages and separated them gently, making faces as he did so. ‘Well, it’s all there,’ he said at last. ‘The patterns and slips and all.’
    Michael looked deflated. ‘Is that all you can say? Come on, man, it’s unique, a… a palimpsest! Can’t you see the secret text, written in the margins and between the patterns? It’s not easy to make out, I’ll admit, but you can’t have missed it!’
    Bywater frowned and reapplied himself to the book. Eventually he closed it and looked at his friend oddly. ‘Well, there’s certainly no palimpsest here, dear boy. This is paper, not vellum: there’s no sign of scraping, no scriptio inferior, nothing that I can see. Marginalia, well, that’s quite a different matter, as you should know. Now marginalia in the author’s own hand, that would add some value, possibly double it – ’
    ‘It’s not in the author’s hand, you idiot: it’s written by some girl. It’s a unique historical document, and it’s probably priceless! You must need glasses – ’
    Michael snatched the book roughly from the dealer’s hand, opening it at random, and flicked through it frantically as if the writing he had seen the previous day might magically reappear.
    After a minute, he put it down again, his face like thunder.
    Then he ran to the phone.

3
    I knew Anna, Michael’s wife, from university. There, we had been the Three Amigos, me, Anna and my cousin Alison, as unlike from one another as you could imagine. Where Anna was petite and doll-like, Alison and I were of solid Cornish stock, raised on rich dairy products and pasties. When I let it down, I could sit on my blonde hair, while Anna’s was short and black and model-perfect; and Alison’s shoulder-length hair was chestnut brown, then red, then black, then scarlet and back to brown again, depending on whether she was teaching English or Drama. Together we made the perfect symbiotic unit for getting through the trials of university and our first post-degree jobs – Anna in a bookshop, Alison teaching, me in an endless series of cafés and bars.
    Alison and I messed around, took drugs, got drunk, got laid, had fun, but Anna made shapes with her life: she took the threads of her experiences and wove them into something purposeful. She worked hard, and it showed. She was now a successful fashion-magazine editor, earning a small fortune, although ironically she was the only one of us who never really needed the money. Her family were, from what I could gather – though she was quite secretive about her background, and a bit shy around me and Alison and our noisy and frequent financial crises – really rather posh.
    After college it was, I suppose, inevitable that we should drift apart. Alison met and married Andrew, for a start. I have to admit I was never that keen on Andrew. He was one of those ruddy, sweaty, rugby-playing men, hearty and over-confident, with a tendency to grab your knee, or something else, in the middle of a conversation, depending on how drunk he was. But he had a wicked sense of humour and no facility for embarrassment, and he made Alison happy, for a while at least, and so I did my best to make friends with him. They took me in time after time when I got my heart broken by one unsuitable man after another, poured drink down me, and Alison would look on indulgently as Andrew flirted clumsily with me while I laughed and wept and choked on my wine. When he cheated on my cousin and caused her to come running to me in tears, feeling that her life had come apart and could never be put back