Night Music Read Free Page A

not to spend so many hours alone. That way, you’ll avoid making mistakes of this nature again. You do understand me, don’t you, sir?”
    The implication was clear. Being mistaken was not a crime, but wasting police time was. Mr. Berger climbed down from the stile.
    â€œI know what I saw, Inspector,” he said, but it was all that he could do to keep the doubt from creeping into his voice, and his mind was troubled as he took the path back to his little cottage.
IV
    It should come as no surprise to learn that Mr. Berger slept little that night. Over and over he replayed the scene of the woman’s demise, and although he had not witnessed the actual moment of impact, still he saw and heard it in the silence of the bedroom. To calm himself, he had taken a large glass of his late mother’s brandy upon his arrival home, but he was not used to spirits and the alcohol sat ill with him. He grew delirious in his bed, and so often did the woman’s death play out before him that he began to believe that this evening was not the first time he had been present at her passing. A peculiar sense of déjà vu overcame him, one that he was entirely unable to shrug off. Sometimes, when he was ill or feverish, a tune or song would lodge itself in his mind. So entrenched would its hooks become that it would keep him from sleep, and he would be unable to exorcise it until the sickness had passed. Now he was having the same experience with his vision of the woman’s death, and its repetitive nature was leading him to believe that he had already been familiar with the scene before he was present at it.
    At last, thankfully, weariness overcame him and he was able to rest, but when he woke the next morning that nagging feeling of familiarity remained. He put on his coat and returned to the scene of the previous evening’s excitement. He walked the rough trail, hoping to find something that the police might have missed, a sign that he had not been the victim of an overactive imagination—a scrap of black cloth, the heel of a shoe, or the red bag—but there was nothing.
    It was the red bag that bothered him most of all. The red bag was the thing. With his mind unfogged by alcohol—although, in truth, his head still swam slightly in the aftermath—he grew more and more certain that the suicide of the young woman reminded him of a scene in a book: no, not just a scene, but perhaps the most famous scene of locomotive-based self-immolation in literature. He gave up his physical search and decided to embark on a more literary one.
    He had long ago unpacked his books, although he had not yet found shelves for them all, his mother’s love of reading not matching his own, thus leading to her preference for large swathes of bare wall that she had seen fit to adorn only with cheap reproductions of sea views. There was still more room for his volumes than there had been in his own lodgings, due in no small part to the fact that the cottage had more floor space than his flat, and all a true bibliophile needs for his storage purposes is a horizontal plane. He found his copy of Anna Karenina sandwiched in a pile on the dining room floor between War and Peace and Master and Man and Other Parables and Tales , the latter in a nice Everyman’s Library edition from 1946 about which he had forgotten, and which almost led him to set aside Anna Karenina in favor of an hour or so in its company. Good sense quickly prevailed, although not before he had put Master and Man on the dining table for further examination at a more convenient time. There it joined a dozen similarly blessed volumes, all of which had been waiting for days or weeks for their hour to come at last.
    He sat in an armchair and opened Anna Karenina (Limited Editions Club, Cambridge, 1951, signed by Barnett Freedman, unearthed at a jumble sale in Gloucester and acquired for such a low price that Mr. Berger had later made a donation to charity in