Page 76 of The Bookshop of Forbidden Books

“Why the lie, then?” Mitch probed.

“To imagine, for just a moment, what my life could have been if I had any convictions. To slip into the skin of a man who wasn’t a fraud. I still don’t know what I did to deserve those honours, and my own ignorance sickens me. I thought maybe there’d been a mistake. I looked into it. I thought perhaps there was another teacher with the same name. But no, it was me. You can doubt me all you like, but everything I told you – about the medal, the Academy membership, the title – that did actually happen. Last year.”

“Didn’t it ever occur to you that maybe they were finally recognizing your actual work?” Mitch asked incredulously. “Wouldn’t that have been the most logical conclusion?”

“Don’t mock me. That’s just mean,” Verner muttered.

Now Anna stepped in. “Could Madame Ateltow have—”

The music teacher rounded on her, furious.

“Have you no shame? How dare you suggest that? After everything she’s done for Mitch. Not just helping him with those secret meetings, but everything she taught him when he was—”

“My dear Georges,” said a voice from behind them, calm and clipped, “you are a wonderful man. Probably the most chivalrous soul I know. But I don’t need you to fight my battles.”

Madame Ateltow, also wrapped in a dressing gown, stepped out from the conductor’s dressing room, where she had eavesdropped on the whole scene. She tidied her hair quickly and approached Mitch.

“No, I didn’t turn you in to the police, and it wounds me deeply that you would ever think I could have. The only thing I have ever lied to you about was that I knew you’d been arrested.

“Georges had no idea at all, believe me. I never told him. I never told anyone. I kept quiet, scared out of my mind that I’d be dragged into it too. I was your accomplice, after all. My son… he would never have forgiven me. He’s obsessed with his image: he values respectability above all. To stay in his shareholders’ good books – most of them are in government, you see – he’d have claimed I was senile, that I’d lost it completely. And then he’d have locked me away in a nursing home. The only crime I’m guilty of is pretending not to know what had happened to you, but I had no choice.”

Mitch shrugged. He wasn’t interested in judging anyone. Not now. The blackmail Anna was facing was far bigger than anything else. The corrupt detective had given her one night to think about his offer. But Mitch had already done all the thinking he needed to do. Tomorrow, he was going to put an end to it.

Chapter 27

To Kill a Mockingbird

Later that night, Mitch paused in the bathroom doorway and gazed at Anna, who was brushing her teeth. She turned away from the mirror and smiled at him.

For so long they had been starved for sweetness in a world that had come to hold very little of it. In the warmth of Anna’s bed, Mitch longed for just a little bit more. Tomorrow, at the end of the day, he would go to police headquarters and confess to murdering Salinas. Already counting down his final hours of freedom, he coiled around Anna and murmured a secret he’d never told anyone.

“When I was in prison, I used to tell stories to some of the other inmates, in the canteen during mealtimes. We weren’t allowed to have books, so I’d recount the plots of novels I’d read, from memory. I told them about The Grapes of Wrath, Sweet Thursday, The Count of Monte Cristo, parts of Les Misérables. Steinbeck, Dumas and Hugo were probably rolling in their graves. The irony of the whole situation was almost funny; those books were all on the banned list, and there I was, reciting them in front of the guards, who didn’t have a clue I was breaking the law right under their noses. Well – that’s what I thought, at least.

“Until the day one of them came up to me during our exercise hour in the yard and slipped a paperback copy of The Plague by Albert Camus into my hand, and said, very quietly, ‘I don’t agree with them. They’ve all gone mad.’ That was the only time we ever spoke to each other. Sometimes I wonder if he ever worried I’d rat him out. Or if maybe something like friendship bloomed for just a second, in that moment of courage. I read The Plague so many times, I know that whole book off by heart. Every line. Every word.”

“Why are you telling me this now, Mitch?” Anna asked softly.

“No reason,” Mitch replied, switching off the light.

There are so many ways to cope with pain. To forget the futureless days. To live with nothing but intangible memories.

Anna fell asleep almost immediately. Mitch wanted to reach out, stroke her face, curl up beside her. Instead he just looked at her, lying very still, like a man on the edge of a cliff, afraid that the slightest move would cause him to fall.

* * *

At three o’clock in the morning, Anna got out of bed and tiptoed downstairs to the kitchen, where she found her notebook and began scribbling her thoughts down with a shaky hand:

Fahrenheit 451

How did they get in?

The anonymous informant

Verner…

Why was Mathilde’s case file at the top of a stack?

She chewed the end of her pencil absently, deep in thought.