Night Music Read Online Free PDF

Lending Library.
    â€¢â€ƒâ€ƒâ€¢â€ƒâ€ƒâ€¢
    The town hall in Moreham proved to be a source of little illumination on the matter. The library building was owned by the Caxton Trust, with an address at a P.O. box in London. The Trust paid all bills relating to the property, including rates and electricity, and that was as much as Mr. Berger could find out about it. An inquiry at the library in Moreham was met with blank looks, and although he spent hours searching back issues of the local weekly paper, the Moreham & Glossom Advertiser , from the turn of the century onward, he could find no reference to the Caxton Library.
    It was already dark when he returned to his cottage. He cooked himself an omelet and tried to read, but he was distracted by the fact of the library’s apparent simultaneous existence and nonexistence. It was there. It occupied a space in Glossom. It was a considerable building. Why, then, had its presence in a small community passed relatively unnoticed and unremarked for so long?
    The next day brought no more satisfaction. Calls to booksellers and libraries, including to the grand old London Library, and the Cranston Library in Reigate, the oldest lending library in the country, confirmed only a general ignorance of the Caxton. Finally, Mr. Berger found himself talking to the British representative of the Special Libraries Association, an organization of whose existence he had previously been unaware. She promised to search their records, but admitted that she had never heard of the Caxton and would be surprised if anyone else had, either, given that her own knowledge of such matters was encyclopedic, a judgment that, after an hour-long history of libraries in England, Mr. Berger was unwilling to doubt.
    Mr. Berger did consider that he might be mistaken about the mystery woman’s ultimate destination. There were other buildings in that part of town in which she could have hidden to escape his notice, but the Caxton was still the most likely place in which she might have sought refuge, and he was certain that he had heard a door closing. Where else, he thought, would a woman intent upon repeatedly reenacting the final moments of Anna Karenina choose to hide but an old library?
    He made his decision before he went to bed that night. He would become a detective of sorts and stake out the Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository for as long as it took for it to reveal its secrets to him.
VIII
    As Mr. Berger soon discovered, it was no easy business being a detective on a stakeout. It was all very well for those chaps in books who could sit in a car or restaurant and make observations about the world in a degree of comfort, especially if they were in Los Angeles or somewhere else with a climate noted for warmth and sunlight. It was quite another thing to hang around among dilapidated buildings in a small English town on a cold, damp February day, hoping that nobody one knew happened by or, worse, some passing busybody didn’t take it upon himself to phone the police and report a loiterer. Mr. Berger could just imagine Inspector Carswell smoking another cigarette and concluding that he now most definitely had some form of lunatic on his hands.
    Thankfully, Mr. Berger found a sheltered space in the old cooperage and chandlery that afforded a view of the end of the lane through a collapsed section of wall while allowing him to remain relatively concealed. He had brought a blanket, a cushion, a flask of tea, some sandwiches and chocolate, and two books, one of them a John Dickson Carr novel entitled The Crooked Hinge , just to enter into the spirit of the thing, and the other Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, the only Dickens he had yet to read. The Crooked Hinge turned out to be rather good, if a little fantastical. Then again, Mr. Berger considered, a tale of witchcraft and automatons was hardly more outlandish than apparently witnessing the same woman attempt suicide twice,