Jo Merz has written five crime novels. None of them has been published. I want to be gentle about this, because some of the best writers in history spent years collecting rejections, and because Jo is now, suddenly, in a great deal of trouble.
The Inspector found a copy of Jo's fifth novel in Eduard's desk. Its summary is waiting for you in the shop, on the page where we introduce readers to authors worth discovering. Scroll right down. Jo is the last entry, and she's never been on a list of authors before.
Read it. Then read it again, slowly, and pay attention to the last paragraph. The novel matters. So does who read it.
The Inspector's note, underlined twice: Life imitating art, or someone imitating Jo?
Meanwhile at Laaste Hoofstuk. The Professor asked the Inspector, very politely for once, whether he might see the Drood, only for a moment, only through the evidence bag. She let him. He held it in both hands for a long time, turning it over, looking at the spine, the boards, the endpapers. "It was never there, was it," he said at last. It wasn't a question. He handed it back and went out to sit on the dam wall, looking at the water.
PS: In the 1920s, the Afrikaans poet and naturalist Eugène Marais published a series of newspaper articles about the inner life of termites, written from years of watching them in the Waterberg. In 1926 the Nobel laureate Maurice Maeterlinck published La Vie des termites, which drew heavily on Marais's ideas without crediting him. Marais never got the recognition he deserved in his lifetime. Being copied is not always a compliment.