Boxer, Beetle

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The book collection wouldn’t even be unpacked until 1952, when the job was given to a college student on work experience who probably wished he was helping out at a summer camp. By then the Gottafchen Goethe, with its fond inscription by Hitler and scattered marginalia by Goebbels, had escaped on to the open market. And some fifty years later it passed into the hands of Horace Grublock, the London property developer who until his violent death earlier this year was an irregular employer of mine.

Between 2002 and 2007 Grublock gave me three volumes (from Prometheus through to Iphigenie auf Tauris) in exchange for errands, promising that one day, if I were loyal, I would collect the whole set. It was humiliating, but Grublock said he’d never sell — and even if he did, the sort of dealers who could handle the Goebbels Gottafchen Goethe wouldn’t have taken so much as a telephone call from the likes of me, Kevin Broom — and even if they would, I could never have afforded it — so I had no choice. That’s why, one day in September, when Grublock called at ten o’clock on a Thursday night, back when I’d never even heard of the town of Roachmorton, I ran for my phone with toothpaste still dribbling from my mouth, knowing it had to be him.

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