Read Resolution Way for Free Online Page A

had forgotten that Jaqui was from up North. Liverpool, wasn’t it? He should have asked her for some tips, though he could well imagine her response: “I am not some expert on all things Northern, Alex”, the waspy expression, the heavily plucked eyebrows arching. Karen said she thought Jaqui wore too much make up, and that was quite a Northern trait. And that she flirted with him, which she did.
    The window displayed a number of New Age tomes behind a sheet of dusty, transparent yellow plastic that had failed to stop what little sun the street enjoyed discolouring the covers:
    The Shaman’s Path, The God Within, Healing Through Past Lives . Fractal spirals, cheap renderings of the cosmos, gaudy woodlands, levitating yogi, and iridescent crystal pendants. Had Crane been into all this shit? Hard to imagine, but then, in the early Nineties, new age and hippy-dippy Rave mysticism must have been everywhere.
    Inside it was piled high with unsorted paperbacks, and smelt damp and musty.
    Hi, Hello, Alex Hargreaves called out, and received an equally questioning hello in response that he traced to the back of the shop through one of the number of small rooms that made up the ground floor. There the shop owner sat in a shaft of sunlight, bearded, middle aged, a faded black Hawkwind t-shirt on, smoking a roll up and resting a cup of tea on his belly. This couldn’t surely be Robert Gillespie; he looked to be a decade older for one thing, dumped there in his chair like a great damp haystack. This must be Howard.
    How may I help you?
    Ah. Interesting, voice rich and plummy, Southern, aristocratic almost.
    Oh just a book lover like yourself who happened to be passing through, Alex Hargreaves told him, offering his most winning smile.
    I see. Anything in particular?
    Oh, I Iike to stumble across things, generally, he said, but then he couldn’t resist testing the water. So, say, well I’d love a first edition of Lucerne’s House by Oleg Trentmoller.
    A slurp of tea. Wouldn’t we all! You’re down from …
    London, Alex said with an apologetic grin.
    Ahh, it’s been a while since I was up there.
    Are you a Londoner originally?
    Well, yes. But I haven’t lived there for the best part of thirty years now. And I have been here for what, almost twenty. He smiled, missing teeth, the others the colour of creosote.
    Alex had come in through the doorway now and pulled up a chair.
    Actually, he said, I am a specialist in rare, really rare books and unpublished manuscripts. I mean, there is such a dearth of really original writing around these days and it occurred to us, you know, that our time might be just as well invested in going back and digging up, digging out all those unpublished and self-published novels and seeing which of them really had been lost to time as much as wading through the slush pile.
    He extended his hand. Alex, he said.
    Howard.
    Well, Howard, someone suggested that the owner of this place may have lots of small-scale, kind of indie published stuff in his collection.
    Well I am the co-owner. Who mentioned me?
    A friend, Dominic Bowes. He’s a literary agent, knows everything.
    Well, Howard said, I don’t have much of a collection myself.
    Maybe the other person you own it with. Are they around?
    Oh, them. Howard said, his face darkened, he took another slurp of tea. Indeed, no they are not around and haven’t been for some time. I say co-owner of course but in reality my partner has had no involvement in the place for a decade. And he owes me money.
    Well, I am sorry to have raised the subject, he said. The sunlight was making his right eye water and so he closed it for a moment and shifted his position in the chair. I see, he affected a crestfallen expression, then I’ve come all the way down here for nothing.
    Yes, I believe the person you’re looking for is Robert Gillespie, who almost certainly took anything and everything of even the remotest value when he decided to return to Bonnie Scotland for