Cartmel The Paperback Sleuth - The Ashram Assassin

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80336-793-4
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

Humorous cosy-crime caper in which a feisty, amoral book dealer uses her unique skills to catch a murderer, desperate to hide the secrets kept by the yoga-obsessed staff and students of a West London ashram. When a set of rare, impossible-to-find yoga books are stolen from a West London ashram, its leaders turn to Cordelia, the paperback sleuth, to recover them - a set-up that's a little awkward as they've previously barred her from yoga classes for selling marijuana to their students. But what begins as a hunt for missing paperbacks soon becomes a murder investigation as those involved with the ashram can't seem to stop dropping down dead - murdered with a whisky bottle to the head or a poisoned curry. Can Cordelia work out who the killer is and bring them to justice before they bring an end to her sleuthing for good.

Andrew Cartmel was born in London and grew up in midwestern Canada where, among other things, he learned the meaning of the words 'wind chill factor.' The fine public libraries of his childhood provided a rich feast (Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, the Oz books) and Andrew never wanted to be anything except a writer. On returning to London to study at university, his game plan was to support himself writing for television while getting established as a novelist. This led him into a detour - and down a rabbit hole - which included a distinguished sojourn script editing Doctor Who for three years (search 'Cartmel masterplan'). At the same time, he began writing for comics and today he co-writes the Rivers of London graphic novels. A playwright and crime novelist, Andrew created the Vinyl Detective while listening to a lot of music, most of it good. Most of it very good. Andrew Cartmel lives in London with too many books, too many records and just enough cats.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Cartmel, Andrew

Leseproben

2: SET A THIEF

On the preceding Wednesday, Cordelia was thinking, Set a thief to catch a thief.

It was a cliché, all right, but an apt one.

And it amused her to reflect on it. Not least because the people who wanted to hire her didn’t realise this was exactly what they were proposing.

Edwin did, though.

Edwin was Cordelia’s landlord. And he’d lined up this job for her—potentially a juicy lucrative job, thank you very much, Edwin—through one of his girlfriends. Although “one of his girlfriends” made Edwin sound considerably more exciting than he actually was; perhaps “latest girlfriend” would be more accurate.

But even that made him sound undeservedly exciting. Edwin was pretty much dullsville… except in one spectacular regard.

And it was that aspect of him which guaranteed Cordelia made damned sure she paid her rent on time every month.

Anyway, Edwin’s latest dreary girlfriend was into yoga. His paramours were always into something like that—growing biodynamic vegetables in their gardens, performing Tai Chi as the sun rose over the village green, going on long boring bicycle rides (Edwin’s own special passion) or, in this case, doing lots of yoga.

Lorna, for that was the girlfriend’s name, was a regular attendee at the local ashram or, as Cordelia preferred to think of it, mantra-chanting clipjoint. To wit, the Silverlight Yoga Centre on Abbey Avenue.

Cordelia knew it well because she had once been a regular attendee there herself, before being booted out for dealing weed—an activity that had not amused the ashram fascists. As soon as they’d found out about it, they’d summoned Cordelia upstairs to the meeting room for a thorough scolding before drumming her out of the place for good.

As they warmed up to her ejection they’d taken pains to explain it wasn’t the fact that she’d been dealing weed per se that they found so objectionable. Oh no, they were far too hip for that. What they really couldn’t tolerate was the degrading exploitation of their premises for purposes of rapacious money-grubbing capitalist transactions.

The fact that the meeting room in which they reprimanded Cordelia was situated above the ashram’s gift shop, where you could buy yourself sustainably farmed hemp yoga mats in a variety of attractive colours for—wait for it—300 quid a pop did not escape Cordelia, and she didn’t scruple to point this out to the admonitory morons, along with a few other home truths along similar lines.

This drove them batshit crazy with rage because, of course, Cordelia was right and they knew it. But hell hath no fury like a hypocritical yoga capitalist in loose-fitting orange pyjamas when you call him out. And, as satisfying as Cordelia’s tirade had been (delivered at volume and well spiced with profanity), it didn’t prevent her from being booted out.

Ever since then, she had nursed a grudge against the Silverlight Yoga Centre. It wasn’t so much that she missed the opportunity to deal weed there—she’d phased that out anyway, as she was earning enough from her vintage paperback hustle—but she missed the yoga itself, not to mention the regular festive feasts provided at the ashram. These were really spectacular curry banquets that caused her mouth to water even now.

How dare the orange-pyjama-wearing bastards tell her to leave and never come back?

Well, as luck would have it, Cordelia now had a chance to make them eat humble pie. To eat crow. To eat humble crow pie. Possibly curried.

Because Edwin’s girlfriend, the aforementioned Lorna, had told him about a robbery at the yoga centre. A robbery of, wait for it, books. And not just books—paperbacks.

Who would steal paperbacks? you might well ask. And the answer would be Cordelia, for a start.

Not that she’d robbed the yoga centre. Indeed, she’d known nothing about the heist until Edwin told her about it. But she had, once upon a time, stolen some paperbacks herself. Rather a lot of rather rare and valuable paperbacks.

That theft had landed her in a good deal of trouble. Potentially terminal trouble. But good old Edwin had helped her get out of that trouble. Thank you, Edwin. And because he’d provided this assistance, it had been unavoidable that he should learn all about the cause of the trouble: Cordelia’s bijou book burglary.

So when Edwin heard through Lorna that the Silverlight Yoga Centre had suffered a break-in and were desperate to get the books back—were, in fact, willing to pay a tidy sum to get them back—he’d thought…

Set a thief to catch a thief.

“You didn’t think I might have done the robbery myself?” said Cordelia when he told her about it.

“Of course not,” said Edwin. He spun the wheel of the bicycle he was repairing, or maintaining, or something, and smiled at Cordelia through the spinning spokes.

Edwin was a tall, lean bloke with untidy sandy hair. He was almost good-looking… if you liked goofy types who did the Guardian crossword puzzle with the tip of the tongue slightly protruding from the corner of the mouth in concentration, and whose idea of a good time was listening to the opera on Saturday night on Radio 3.

“I know there’s no love lost between you and the Silverlight Yoga people,” said Edwin. “But they weren’t your sort of books. The sort of books you were likely to pinch, anyway.”

The two of them were standing outside the house they shared in the leafy London suburb of Barnes—Edwin ensconced in the flat at the back of the ground floor, Cordelia in the attic room at the very top of the house—accompanied by Rainbottle, Edwin’s dog.

Cordelia had become Edwin’s lodger soon after she left university, when she was starting her vintage paperback business. Edwin seemed suitably gratified to have a gorgeous (in all modesty) young babe in his attic room—though, very much to his credit, he’d never have dreamed of hitting on her. Which was just as well, because Cordelia couldn’t see herself accompanying him on long bicycle rides or helping ponder the Guardian crossword.

Rainbottle was sprawled on the grass beside Edwin’s beloved bicycle, which was upside down, resting on its saddle and handlebars while Edwin crouched over it and worked on the wheels. He had a specially designed contraption he could have used that would have held the bike handily in place while he ministered to it but, as was the way with these things, it was too much trouble to set it up and he generally ended up doing his bicycle work in a manner similar to this. (It really was remarkable how little trouble something had to be to be too much trouble.)

“They weren’t crime novels,” continued Edwin, pausing to wipe the sweat of honest labour from his brow. Rainbottle whined in agreement and gave his tail a few experimental whacks against the lawn.

It was true, crime fiction was Cordelia’s forte. Or was it her métier? Anyway, it was her thing. “Any idea what sort of books they were?” she asked. “Yoga stuff, I suppose?”

“They said they’d provide a list. They’ll email you to arrange a meeting and then they’ll give you all the details.”

*   *   *

But the thing was, Cordelia wasn’t hurting for money and she didn’t especially need the work. And, that being the case, it was just too tempting to get her own back on the ashram idiots by bluntly telling them “no” and leaving them in the lurch. After all, who else could they turn to?

So, with cool cordiality and consummate professionalism, she turned the job down flat. She pushed send on the email politely rebuffing them, with a wonderful sense of satisfaction and old wrongs finally righted. Take that, you orange-pyjama-clad fuckers.

And that was that.

Or, at least, that would have been that if fate hadn’t then taken a hand.

And shown a considerable dry sense of humour into the bargain.

Because, within minutes of her emailing the ashram and telling them to get lost, a message pinged into her inbox from Murder Silhouette Books.

Murder Silhouette Books was an elegant and well-stocked shop located above a trendy café in Soho. And, as their name suggested, they specialised in crime fiction.

It should have been just the sort of place for Cordelia, except for two factors…

Firstly, their prices were astronomical. True, they had a splendid vintage paperback section that often featured rare titles, in exemplary condition, but they expected you to pay through the nose for them. And if, like Cordelia, you were operating on a margin—attempting to buy low to sell high, hopefully very low and very high—there was no chance of turning a profit on anything purchased there. In fact, their prices were so extortionate that she even hesitated to buy stuff for her own collection.

The other factor that militated against Murder Silhouette Books, in Cordelia’s view, was the shop’s owner, Duncan Fairwell. A short, hairy, bearded man with an unfortunate passion for argyle tank tops, Fairwell had earned Cordelia’s enduring enmity one murky winter afternoon of smoky skies and intermittent rain, several years ago, on her very first visit to the shop.

She had found Fairwell himself sitting behind the counter and manning the till (she would later learn this was a task more usually delegated to a series of vacuously comely young...