The pages of the book aren't so much yellow with age as grubby, a greyish tinge added to the usual off white of cheap paperbacks. There are blotches, brown, maybe from coffee but more likely tea, earl grey, taken black with a generous spoonful of honey. The words are blurry, fuzzy and smudged from having long, deft fingers trace each letter time and time again. The cracked 'Penguins Classic' cover is so worn that the cardboard seems almost as thin as the paper, little white lines running up and down the red, from where the book's been folded to fit in a pocket. The dog eared pages are marked with a slanting chicken scratch cursive, what could be mistaken for complex annotation, the reader's thoughts on the meanings of the novel but are actually just little notes taken down when he didn't have any paper on him; '7 o'clock, Burger King' and various phone numbers and addresses. On the inside of the cover, in the same handwriting, the owner's name, the blue ink faded now, 'St. John Allerdyce'. And in the corner, in a different style and a different pen, the letters more rounded and not joined up, the little message 'To Johnny, Merry Christmas, Love Bobby'.
When John realizes that he left the book at the mansion, it feels more like he's left a part of himself behind. He wonders, with a low steady ache and not for the first time, if Bobby too, keeps his Kings in the back row.