The Bookshop Detective
Dedication
For Dad, the original “Harold”.
Contents
Chapter 1: The Reading Room
Chapter 2: A Surprising Supper
Chapter 3: No Place Like Home
Chapter 4: Mind the Gap
Chapter 5: Making Plans
Chapter 6: A Long Walk
Chapter 7: Sisterly Advice
Chapter 8: A Blast from the Past
Chapter 9: A Visit to the Library
Chapter 10: Past Times
Chapter 11: Some Local Knowledge
Chapter 12: Connie Brings News
Chapter 13: Dan Finds a Solution
Chapter 14: Digging in the Archives
Chapter 15: An Exciting Proposition
Chapter 16: Joyce is Coming
Chapter 17: Ask the Expert
Chapter 18: Window Dressing
Chapter 19: Festival Time
Chapter 20: All the Fun of the Fair
Chapter 21: An Interesting Encounter
Chapter 22: Philip Has Visitors
Chapter 23: Combemouth Manor
Chapter 24: Skeletons in the Cupboard?
Chapter 25: The Briefcase
Chapter 26: Unexpected Gifts
Chapter 27: A Date with the Vicar
Chapter 28: An Exciting Discovery
Chapter 29: Seafaring Tales
Chapter 30: Fact or Fiction?
Chapter 31: The Secret Author
Chapter 32: Seaside Snappers
Chapter 33: A Difficult Meeting
Chapter 34: Big Preparations
Chapter 35: Let’s Party!
Chapter 36: Secrets Revealed
Chapter 37: Two Weeks Later…
Chapter 1: The Reading Room
It all began when Maureen saw the ghost ship.
“I’m telling you now, I saw it with my own eyes, as clear as day.”
“But I thought you saw it at night,” said Connie, pedantically.
“Twilight, actually. The sun was setting right behind it, which is why I saw its spidery outline so clearly.”
“What’s all this?” Eleanor, who had been gathering books off the shelves to make up a customer’s order, now returned to the front of the bookshop to find her mother Connie chatting with their neighbour, Maureen.
Eleanor had been talked into giving Connie a part-time job and now her mother was half-heartedly tidying up greetings cards in between gossiping with her friend from Ye Olde Tea Shoppe across the high street. “Maureen’s been making rum babas again and I think the fumes have gone to her brain.”
Maureen, who had popped over to Eleanor’s shop for a break from her customers, folded her arms under her substantial bosom and huffed. “You can mock if you like, Connie, but I know what I saw and what I heard.”
“And what was that?”
“As I was telling your mother,” she said, turning towards Eleanor, “I was up on the moor taking Peanut for a walk when I heard this strange groaning sound.”
“You hadn’t trodden on the dog, had you?” Connie was really a cat person and thought her friend’s Chihuahua was especially ridiculous.
“Ignore her, Maureen,” said Eleanor, pulling up a chair and sitting beside her. “I want to know all about it.”
“I was walking towards the headland when I heard a sound like timbers creaking or branches rubbing together, except there aren’t any large trees along there, as you know.” Eleanor nodded in agreement. “The wind had come up and was blowing in off the sea, which isn’t unusual, but it was carrying this odd noise with it. Peanut had had a good scamper so we were heading back to the car, but there was something about the sound that made me stop and turn around.” Maureen was pleased to see both women leaning in, apparently gripped by her story. “So I looked across to the horizon and there she was – as plain as the nose on your mother’s face.”
“There’s no need for personal attacks.” Connie leant back now, looking cross.
“Sorry dear,” said Maureen, tartly. “It was the first comparison that came into my head.”
“Okay ladies. I don’t want any cat fights in my bookshop, thank you,” said Eleanor. “Go on with your story, Maureen.”
“There she was in the distance – a big wooden ship, just like the ones pirates have. And Johnny Depp.”
Connie waggled a bookmark at her friend. “And how precisely could you see what kind of ship she was, at night and with your cataracts?”
“I had them done after Christmas and now I can see perfectly well. Doubt me if you will, Connie, but I know what I saw, and whether you choose to believe me or not is entirely up to you.”
“What did your little dog do?” asked Eleanor.
“In what way?”
“Did she howl or anything? Aren’t animals supposed to react to ghostly presences? I’m sure Bella would run off and hide if there was anything scary around. You’re not much cop as a guard dog, are you?” Eleanor’s Welsh spaniel, Bella, had wandered over and rested her head on her owner’s lap.
Maureen’s brow furrowed in concentration as she thought back to the event. “Now, it’s funny you should say that, but Peanut did squeak a bit.”
“Conclusive proof,” said Connie, laughing. “If Peanut squeaked, it must have been a ghost ship.”
Maureen pursed her lips. “I don’t expect you to understand the ocean’s mysteries, being a Londoner. You don’t have the sea in your blood like I do.”
Connie tried not to smile. “No, mine’s full of Thames water,” she said, patting her friend on the shoulder.
“Thanks for coffee.” Maureen picked up her bag. “I’d best go back across the road and see how Anton is getting on with the cottage pies.”
As she stood by the shop window watching their neighbour cross the street to the teashop, Connie turned to Eleanor. “All that ‘sea in the blood’ stuff is nonsense, of course. She’s from the Midlands, which is as far from the sea as you can be in this country.”
“So she’s not local, then?”
“No!” Connie laughed. “I think she kissed a sailor once in Weston-super-Mare and her late husband was a Devon man. But now she has Anton in her life…”
“Mother, really! You make it sound like they’re up to no good when in fact he’s young enough to be her grandson.”
“Ever heard of cougars?”
Eleanor guffawed. “Yes, but I’m pretty sure Maureen is not about to pounce on Anton.”
“I wouldn’t be too sure. We may be ancient ladies but there’s life in us old girls yet, you know.” Connie winked and went to tidy up their coffee things.
“Spare me the gory details.”
Eleanor stood at the cash desk and looked around her empire. The bookshop was empty apart from a Belgian couple in matching beige anoraks examining the postcard rack and an older gent looking at historical biographies. In the past, Eleanor would have fretted when the shop was this quiet but, in the six years she’d owned The Reading Room, she’d become familiar with the rhythms of the week.
Monday mornings were always deathly quiet, but she knew the following day would be better and trade would pick up even more on Wednesday, when the farmers’ market was held in the town square. At the weekend, visitors came to Combemouth to walk along the prom, paddle in the sea and enjoy the town’s seaside charm. Plenty of them also made a point of visiting Eleanor’s shop to rummage through her enticing selection of books and pick up some postcards or a storybook to keep the kids quiet on the journey home.
While it was quiet, Eleanor decided to refresh the shop window. Easter had been and gone and the bunnies and plastic daffodils decorating the space were beginning to look tired. It was time for a change.
Smiling to herself, she dashed back
and forth between the shelves, going from science fiction and self-help to crime and romance, seemingly picking up books at random. When she’d finished the arrangement, she asked Connie to join her on the pavement to admire her work.
“What do you reckon, Mum?”
Her mother pursed her lips. “It’s interesting, dear, but what’s the theme?”
“I’ll write out a title, then you’ll see.” Eleanor went into the office and found a blackboard and a piece of chalk. “This should do it,” she said, slotting the board into its stand and placing it in the window. On it she had written “I Can’t Remember the Title, But the Cover’s Blue”.
Connie chuckled. “That’s very clever and I think it’ll be helpful for those of us whose memories aren’t as sharp as they were.”
“That’s an excellent point,” said Eleanor, laughing. “Perhaps I’ll do a red display next time.”
Across the road, she could see Maureen and Anton giving her the thumbs up from the teashop, which now appeared to be full of shoppers eager for tea and a bun.
“We seem to have the Latvian vote.” Eleanor waved back, smiling with satisfaction at a job well done.
* * *
Anton had appeared in town some months before, having journeyed from Latvia via London and various music festivals where he’d had a great time until his money ran out.
Graham, who ran the hardware store a few doors down from the bookshop, had found Anton sleeping in his doorway one morning and was not best pleased. He asked the lad to move on, which he did during the day, but in the mornings when Graham came to open up the shop, there he’d be, curled up on the tiled floor in his thin sleeping bag, his boots and few belongings in a tatty carrier bag to one side.
They weren’t used to homeless people pitching up in Combemouth, so no one knew quite what to do. Being a civilised and friendly bunch, the locals talked to Anton, gave him warm clothes and bought him hot drinks and Cornish pasties from the bakery. But everyone knew that “something had to be done”, not least because a pale young man sitting on the pavement rather spoiled the jolly effect of Graham’s brightly coloured plastic windmills. Eventually, Eleanor called the police who gave Anton a lift into the closest big town, where there was a shelter for the homeless.
After a week, Anton was back in Graham’s doorway saying the shelter was full of “druggies and alkies” who shouted all night and he was too frightened to stay. Could he perhaps sleep in the doorway again in return for helping out in the shop? And so Graham reluctantly let him work there. He also lent Anton a tent and allowed him to camp out in the tiny garden at the back of the premises. At the end of a fortnight, the tent was abandoned and Anton was kipping in the back room and making himself useful in the hardware store. The only problem was that Graham couldn’t afford paid help and Anton needed to earn some sort of living.
A meeting was held at the community centre where the shopkeepers decided to share out Anton amongst themselves – everyone needed help for half a day or a day here or there. So, the young man ended up working in the high street shops and sleeping at Graham’s place in return for a few hours spent cutting up roofing felt and selling bin bags. It was a solution that suited everyone, not least Maureen who was happy to have a smart young man’s help in the teashop.
Chapter 2: A Surprising Supper
When Eleanor told her husband Daniel what Maureen had seen from the cliff top, she was surprised by his reaction. Rather than laughing at the ghostly tale, as she had expected him to, Dan seemed to take it quite seriously.
“Oh, that’ll be the Santa Ana. She’s occasionally seen at this time of year, though not normally so early in the evening.”
“Hang on a minute,” said Eleanor, pausing from dishing out the bangers and mash they were having for supper, “are you saying Maureen saw a real ship instead of an apparition?” Daniel was such a sensible individual that Eleanor found the idea of his believing in supernatural events quite surprising. Her husband was an architect, a man focused on measurements and straight lines; a man who thought deeply and could be undemonstrative. When they had first met some two years before, she was sure Dan didn’t like her. In fact, he liked her a great deal, but was struggling to cope with the fallout from a recent divorce.
Since then, Eleanor had discovered that Dan was sensitive and creative, which she guessed was what allowed him to believe in the unbelievable. They’d only been married for six months and Eleanor loved the fact that her husband constantly surprised her.
“I guess you could say she’s both ship and apparition. There have been similar sightings on and off for years.”
“Sorry – you’re going to have to explain this to me.”
Daniel took the plates from Eleanor and laid them on the kitchen table. “According to legend, the ship Maureen described was a Spanish ship that was blown off course by the weather. She was on her way home, became lost off Ireland and foundered on Bonnie Sands.”
Eleanor frowned. “Foundered? You’re talking to a landlubber here.”
“She was stuck on the sandbanks that lie four miles off the bay. It may look calm and beautiful out there, but this part of the coast can be treacherous at low tide.”
“Couldn’t the captain wait until the tide came back in then sail away?”
Daniel topped up their wineglasses. “That’s not how it works, unfortunately. As the tide goes out, a ship will keel over and be broken up by the incoming waves, which is what happened in this case, apparently.”
“How awful,” said Eleanor, in between mouthfuls of mashed potato. “How did the crew get off?”
“Ah, now that’s the interesting part. There was a terrible storm followed by a dense fog that meant no one could go out to the Santa Ana until the morning. All night long the cries of the sailors – and some of the womenfolk they’d picked up in Ireland – could be heard. The water was coming in, you see. When the rescue boats did eventually make it over there at dawn, she was gone. Completely disappeared.”
“Sailed away? Sunk?”
“No one knows. All that was left was the anchor and chain, which had been ripped away from her side.”
Eleanor looked thoughtful. “But if she’d been broken up, wouldn’t there be debris?” She winced at the thought. “Bodies?”
“You’d expect there to be tons of debris given the circumstances, but everything was gone. Sails, cargo, people. Puff! She disappeared into the fog. And the story goes that those poor Spanish sailors can still be heard praying and calling out, Madre mia, sálvame. Save me.” Daniel came around from the other side of the dining table, grasped Eleanor’s shoulders from behind and whispered the words into her ear in a singsong voice.
“Stop it Dan.” Eleanor shivered and pulled away. “That’s creepy. To think all those Spanish sailors died at sea – and so close to where we’re sitting now drinking Rioja.”
Daniel shrugged, pushing away his plate. “Do you think so? For one thing, we don’t know for sure they actually died and in a way I find it comforting to believe old sailors keep sailing on.”
“Don’t say that – I worry about you enough as it is.” Eleanor’s husband loved to sail and she did sometimes fret when he went off alone for hours on end. “To wander the oceans forever, never able to go home or see family and friends. It sounds awful. When I’m gone, I want to be properly gone, not pacing up and down the aisles of my shop, endlessly rearranging the non-fiction shelves and chasing up orders.”
Dan smiled. “You do that anyway, darling.”
“Exactly, but I can always stop for a cup of tea, which I doubt will be available in the afterlife. Ugh. Fancy spending all eternity without tea. This is getting morbid. Put the kettle on, will you darling?”
When the dishes had been cleared up and they were settled on the sofa, Eleanor turned to Daniel. He’d been so unfazed by their earlier topic of conversation that she had to ask. “Have you ever seen a ghostly vessel?”
Daniel frowned, rubbing his chin. “You know, I’d completely forgott
en about it until now, but I did see something once.”
“Ooh, what happened?” Eleanor pulled up her legs and rested them over Daniel’s lap. “I enjoy a spooky bedtime story.”
“Let me think, now,” he said, frowning. “I must have been about nine or ten years old and I was out in the boat with Dad when we saw what appeared to be a large ship in the distance.”
Eleanor’s father-in-law Malcolm was a retired engineer and mathematician and absolutely the last person she could imagine believing in creatures from the afterlife. “I’m stunned you and Malcolm saw a ghost ship and neither of you thought to mention it to me!”
“It was nearly forty years ago, El. And neither of us really knew what it was we’d seen.”
“Fair enough. Go on.”
Daniel dredged his memory for the details. “We’d been fishing for mackerel outside the bay, so I guess it was late spring. After a couple of hours, we had three nice fat ones for supper, so Dad decided to head back to shore. It was getting dark and we knew my mother worried if we stayed out too late – exactly as you do,” he said, playfully squeezing Eleanor’s toes in their stripy socks.
“Too right!” she said, wriggling around to face him.
“Anyway, that’s when we saw a craft very like the one Maureen described. I remember the ship seemed immensely tall from where we sat on our little boat.”
Eleanor sipped her tea thoughtfully. “Call me an old cynic, but couldn’t what you saw have been a large yacht? Or a container ship?”
“What Dad and I saw definitely wasn’t a regular boat – she had three or four massive sails and she wasn’t displaying any lights, which was most irregular.”
“Creepy!” Although it was evening, the curtains weren’t yet drawn. Outside, the spring sky was turning deep blue as Eleanor tried to imagine the scene.
“I agree it’s hard to rationalise. I guess you could say the Santa Ana is the Combemouth version of the Loch Ness Monster – no one has been able to prove the truth of her existence one way or the other. Personally, I think the vision is most probably all down to a trick of the light caused by the way the sun hits the horizon at this time of year. Or perhaps a play in the waves.”