Shuttlecock Read Online Free Page A

it with a frosty look and a scowl, and I resented it. But it was true. You soon learn to forgo the thrill of detection in our department. To begin with, we are not detectives – that is somebody else’s job. We are only, as it were, specialized librarians. What blander job is there than a librarian’s? And then, as with any work, ours too is routine. Most of the time is spent in mundane chores like cataloguing and indexing. Real inquiries don’t come our way thick and fast (though they’ve been getting ever more frequent recently). And even here the law of routine applies. No matter how extraordinary the material you work with, it becomes, when it’s your daily business to deal with it – unextraordinary.
    But then again, I’m wrong. It isn’t like that. I’m trying to say something, perhaps, that I don’t really feel at all. It’s in the nature of routine not so much to make things ordinary as to numb you against recognizing how remarkable they are. And you’d be surprised at some of the things contained in our files. You’d be appalled at the black and desperate picture of the world they sometimes offer. In certain corners of our office there are some gruesome little collections – which we have to consult quite often – which consist of police pathologists’ findings and coroners’ reports on cases in which there has been police interest. I have dipped into these files too many times to think much about them; and yet sometimes I am suddenly startled – the bubble of routine bursts around me – when I actually stop to contemplate some of the things that pass through my hands.
    Here, for example, is a piece of ‘routine’ that I dealt with only last week. The police, of course, closed the case. The whole thing was handed over to psychiatrists –and it’s a psychiatrist (psychiatrists are some of our most frequent customers) who wants to dig it out again now. It seems that a woman, who has since died, had to nurse her husband, at home, during an illness that eventually proved fatal. The husband had been – I shan’t mention names – a figure of some renown in his field. During the later stages of the illness the wife refused to have the husband admitted to hospital and, after a certain time, to allow any medical supervision whatsoever. As well as the husband and wife, there was a son, aged eleven. When the husband died, the wife not only failed to inform the authorities or to do anything with the corpse but adamantly believed that her husband was not, in fact, dead. Furthermore, she turned viciously against the son, accusing him of being responsible for what had happened to the father. Some days after the death, the wife locked the boy up with the corpse and told him he would not be let out until he had brought his father back to life again. What the boy
thought
, shut up like this with his dead father, is conjecture. What he
did
was clear enough when the matter came to light two days later. He found a penknife, belonging to the dead man, in one of the bedroom drawers, and with it – for reasons never established, though according to the boy himself, ‘to find out what his father was made of’ – systematically disfigured and mutilated his father’s body.
    And all this you have to bring home to a wife who tends house-plants and two healthy kids whom you take out on the common at weekends to play with frisbees and cricket bats.

[3]
    I travel home on the Tube. The Northern Line: seven stops to Clapham South. Up, out of the ground, and then down into it again. I am struck by the way people behave on the Tube. They look at each other beadily and inquisitively, and something goes on in their thoughts which must be equivalent to the way dogs and other animals, when they meet, sniff each other’s arses and nuzzle each other’s fur. But animals do this innocently and – who knows? – with affection. What goes on in the Tube is done with suspicion and menace. It is as if everybody is trying to