Quiet Neighbors (6 page)

“I was just going to say what a sweet man you are,” Jude told him, straight-faced and twinkle-eyed. “But then you kept talking.”

Russian royals were still in need of a permanent home. All the royals were, come to that; Biography in general, and History too, and Travel and Non-Scottish Poetry, and Plays and all the really dusty stuff like Theology, Philology, the Humour that was never funny, and the now heart-breaking Reference section. As she emerged from the staircase, there on the landing was a beautiful set of the poor old Encyclopaedia Britannica, half calf, buff buckram, tooled in gold, tissue over the woodcuts, clicked into Wiki-oblivion.

I know how you feel, she said silently to them, trailing a hand over their gilt-edged pages as she passed. You and me both, Britannica. Then the portcullis came down.

Up here it was easier to see that Lowland Glen Books had once been someone's home. There were fireplaces in Fiction and Literature. Shame they couldn't be lit when the wind whistled in around the rags plugging the windows. Jude looked at a shelf or two in each and tried not to form a view. John Irving and his brothers were in Literature; Sarah Waters and her sisters in Fiction. She turned away from both and from the awkward conversation she might need to have with a kind man who'd taken her in, given her a roof over her head and a bed to sleep in, and filled her pockets with tenners.

The little back room above Miss Buchan's Boudoir that Jude had earmarked for Poetry and Plays, since its shelves were so narrow, was actually a bathroom. It had a plate screwed over the old toilet hole, but the washbasin was still there, filled with Beatrix Potter, heaped up against the taps, held together with cobwebs. She could look at it, holding one wrist in the other hand, and feel her pulse slow and steady, like a lizard's. One day soon she would have to empty that sink, and then she would soak herself pruny in scalding water in the cavernous Jamaica House bath as every stitch she'd had on sloshed around downstairs in the drum of Lowell's washing machine.

The room next to it, above … Jude wasn't familiar enough with the layout to say … but the next room was a bedroom decorated in the sixties with those emetically cute rabbits on the wallpaper—long lashes and little satchels—and Blu-Tak marks from where posters had been removed. As though the child that chose the bunnies had been stuck with them into the pop group years and had covered them with posters.

She was at the landing window, by the foot of the stairway to the attic floor (even steeper, even narrower, behind an even smaller door), when she heard something. It was a short
chunk
of sound halfway between a squeal and a groan, and it stopped dead after less than a second. Jude cocked her head and, as she turned, she thought she saw something too. Just a flicker of movement and nothing to con
cern her since it was outside, glimpsed through the half-bare
branches of the yellowing apple tree down there. As she moved closer to the tiny grimy pane to take a better look, though—
bam bam bam!
Someone was pounding the front door loud enough to shake the building's rickety bones, stirring dust and setting the mice in the walls—silent till now—scurrying and scrabbling. Jude heard the beat of wings and wondered if gulls had risen from the roof or if somewhere in the eaves of the attic floor an owl or even a bat had been woken.

Six

Bam bam bam!

Police! Jude thought. Who else would pound on a door like that? But police usually shout through it too.

And as she thought it, the shout came. “Hurry up and let me in—I'm drowning!”

Jude fumbled the door open and was bundled aside, staggering against the nearest carrier bag of paperbacks as a woman, coatless despite the drizzle, hurried inside.

“What a pigging awful day,” she said, shaking the two flaps of her cardigan. She had poolside flip-flops on and the toes of her socks were wet from the puddles.

“He's—I'm—We're not really open,” Jude said.

“I'm not buying,” said the woman. She was perhaps sixty, but her hair was older than the rest of her, from years of home perms (or at least cheap perms) and a colour chosen when she was young and never noticed again. “Maureen,” she said, wiping her hand on her jeans and holding it out. “From the Cancer. Charity shop,” she added, seeing Jude's eyes widen. “I'm overdue for a rootle.”

She strode off along the corridor, clicking on lights, quite at home.

“Lowell lets me have his Dan Browns and I give him our Bookers.”

“Well, okay, if you're … ” Jude said. She had never lived in a small town. “How do you know where to start?” she said, looking up and down the choked passageway and thinking about the three floors around and above them.

“You're not wrong!” said Maureen. “I could have danced a jig when I heard you'd arrived.”

“Me?”

“To take a shovel to it.” Maureen turned sharp left at the desk, into the short off-shoot by Art and Architecture, where Lowell kept a kettle and some mugs on a counter. He filled the kettle from a spout above the tiny washbasin in the toilet and Jude tried not to think about the pipes, nor about the coffee-crusted spoon in the sugar bag and the sugar-crusted spoon in the coffee jar. She would take them back to Jamaica House and soak them. Better, she would buy plastic ones at Tesco. He might not notice that either.

“Can I get you a cuppa?” she asked.

Maureen shuddered, making her smile. Then she batted back a curtain just beyond the kettle counter, another of Lowell's curtains, and opened a door Jude had never seen. She followed to the doorway and peered in.

It was a room about ten feet square, stacked high with carrier bags, wall to wall, all the way from the back to the door.

“I—I didn't—” Jude said.

“O-ho!” said Maureen. “He's kept this bit quiet, has he?”

Jude let her eyes travel over the mound of bulging bags. It filled the room, washing up the walls and brushing the ceiling. She had seen something like it once before, an illustration in a history text about the third Reich. Inside a bookshop, it was obscene.

Some of the bags were tied shut, but most gaped, showing a coxcomb of yellowing paperback pages, the odd flash of colour from a jacket or glint of gold from an embossed title. Jude couldn't bear to imagine the bottom layer—crumbled bindings, torn pages, crushed spines.

Maureen had fished out her phone and was scrolling through her pictures.

“Here we go,” she said. “This is the only way I can do it.” She held the phone out and showed a photograph of the room taken from exactly the same spot where she was standing. “Three new ones,” she said, comparing the image on the screen with the view before her. She slipped her phone back into her cardigan pocket and poked open a Safeway bag halfway up the front of the pile.

“
Casual Vacancy
,
Bake Off
,
Fifty Shades
, Picoult,” she said. “This is your typical Supermarket Sadie. Save a fortune if they'd just put their name down at the library. I'll just bob up and check Lowell's got these already before I nab them, though. I know where to look.”

Jude nodded dumbly. She pulled at a thin, yellow carrier that had bulged out of place at floor level like a lumbar disc. Jilly Cooper's
Riders
was just visible inside. If it had been discarded after one reading by another impulse buyer that meant there was roughly thirty years' worth of mouldering paperbacks in here. And she had actually thought she was
winning
.

“I'll leave the Picoult.” Maureen had returned. “But he's got the rest. Well, not
Fifty Shades
. Ask him why not if you want a laugh sometime.” She had rechecked her phone and was reaching up to a second bag. “Now then, what do we have here? Oh, this is different. Yellow hardbacks. I know better than to touch them.”

“Gollancz edition,” said Jude. When she'd first started in the library, the long stretch of yellow Gollancz Michael Innes was something to navigate by when she was shelving. Like the soft pink block of Mazo de la Roche and the fat spines of the Susan Howatch blockbusters. All gone now.

“And … ” said Maureen, stretching to the final new bag, “ … comics. I'll tell the lads up at Kapow! Lowell can't be fashed with comics.”

Jude barely heard her. She had walked away to Coasters and Key Rings. “I'm not here, I'm not here,” she said.

“That's me sorted, hen,” said Maureen, coming to join her with a short stack of books under one arm. “Do you want to get the door after me?”

Jude nodded and smiled, over her slump already. It was all good. That's what the happy people were saying these days to anyone who'd listen.
It's all good.
Yes, there was an extra week's work in there; a fortnight's maybe. But that meant an extra fortnight's pay and an extra fortnight's—she tried to stop the thought before it was finished, but it came anyway—safety.

“I'll let you out the back if it's easier,” she said to Maureen. “This weather! Are you parked out that way?”

“Parked?” Maureen said. “There's no parking out there. It's a garden.”

“But didn't you come round?” said Jude. “I thought I saw you.”

“Round where?” said Maureen. “There's nowhere to … you thought you saw
what
?”

“Doesn't matter,” said Jude. She walked briskly and opened the front door, then watched as Maureen scuttled up the street with the paperbacks held tight inside her cardi. Then she locked the door again and wandered slowly back through to the Boudoir. It had been a laundry room once, or whatever a utility room had been called in those days, with a door to the drying green.

Jude opened it as quietly as she could and thought she saw, was almost
sure
she saw, through the high stalks of old hollyhocks and the lowest branches of the apple tree, that same flitting movement again.

She
knew
she heard the sound; the squeal that was more like a groan. But this time it ended with a sharp
smack
. Jude made sure the laundry room door was propped open, misusing a tattered copy of
Highland Verse Vol II
that lay on the floor, and picked her way down through the tussocky November grass, feeling the cold and wet begin to seep in at the seams of her shoes. The apple tree had outgrown its space over the years and now filled the garden side to side, like a bouncer in a nightclub doorway. Jude ducked under its lowest boughs but must have brushed against at least a twig because she showered herself with droplets and shivered as she straightened again.

When she got to the end of the garden, she knew what the noise had been. There was a door in the high, stone wall. Peeling paint and sodden wood with an iron handle rattling loosely on its one remaining screw. And, on the path, an arc where the moss had been scraped down to the stone as the old door opened as far as it would go. Jude tried it, just to make sure, and there was that noise for a third time. She poked her head out and looked up and down the lane, but it was empty. Just clusters of wheeliebins standing in groups like gossiping housewives and no noise but the rain, heavier suddenly, pattering on their plastic lids.

Someone, Jude thought, had been in the garden, creeping around until they were startled by Jude coming out the back. They were gone now, leaving nothing behind but a single footprint in the mud at the edge of the lane, the toe distinct but the heel a skidding swipe, like the mark left on the path. Jude felt in her pocket, ready to take a picture—already the print was softening in the rain—then remembered her shattered phone.

The rain had soaked through at her shoulders and the top of her head was cold, so, with a final glance both ways, she shoved the gate shut and hurried back up the garden again.

Police wear Docs, she told herself, not Nikes. But plainclothes police—detectives—could wear anything, could leave a footprint exactly like that one. But detectives wouldn't run at the sound of a loud knock. It was probably kids. One kid, she corrected herself, and felt her spirits lift. Police detectives went round in pairs, and it was definitely a single flitting figure she had glimpsed.

Back inside, with
Highland Verse
kicked away and the door locked behind her, she leaned against it and closed her eyes. Concentrate, Jude. What had she really seen? Something dark. Very dark. Black, in fact. Too long to be a face, too narrow to be a piece of clothing across someone's shoulders, and too high to be a cat, which was what it had looked like most. The glossy flank of a black cat.

Trick of the light, she told herself. Trick of the gloom; trick of the rain.

“Lonely?” she said, in answer to Lowell's hearty greeting. He had returned before lunch, the hoped-for Audubon carefully wrapped in brown paper and a bagful of Ian Flemings (unexpected and so extra-welcome) slung over his shoulder. “I haven't had a chance to be lonely. I had Mrs. H. just after breakfast and then Maureen popped in for a rummage. And someone was in the garden too.”

“Maureen?” said Lowell, and shifted a little. “Ah. Yes, right. A rummage. Did you … ?”

“I did,” Jude said. “You're lucky I stayed. Lucky it's raining.”

“But of course I didn't ever mean the dead room to be part of your remit,” Lowell said. “Shut the door on it and pretend it doesn't exist. That's what I do.”

“I believe you,” said Jude. “But I was joking. Now I know it's there, I'll have to dig in.”

“Nonsense,” said Lowell. “I couldn't possibly ask it of you.” He was unfolding the brown paper with great delicacy.

“It's that or leave,” Jude said. She was being honest. It had worked once. “It'll keep me awake at nights.” Lowell unwound the last turn of the parcel. “Occupational hazard,” she added, shrinking back into the comfort of lies. “Twenty years a book wrangler, you see.”

“Well, well,” said Lowell. “I'd have said a librarian and a bookseller were kissing cousins.” He looked around himself. “Perhaps not though.”

“Anyway, the
dead room
?” asked Jude. “Is that what you said a minute ago?”

Lowell gave her a shrug and a sheepish smile. “I can't say no,” he said. “Sometimes the relatives still have tears standing in their eyes when they bring the bulging bagfuls round. I can't just say ‘no time to sort them; take it all to the dump,' now can I? But once I've accepted them, I can't let the grieving children see the books just lying around.”

“So what's all that then?” said Jude, pointing at the choked passageway.

“Kindles and divorce,” Lowell said. “They don't count.” He had finished unwrapping the Audubon, and he took his spectacles from his breast pocket and hooked the wires round his ears. “My precious,” he said in a voice that left Jude halfway between laughter and alarm.

“You're an enigma, Lowland Glen,” she said. “So do you get many grieving children coming round?”

She never forgot it. Those words were still hanging in the air when the street door opened. The words were in the air, Lowell was wearing his reading glasses, and she, Jude, had just decided she could cope with the “dead room.” Was patting herself on the back for taking it in her stride.

“Oh! Oh!” Lowell said. He slumped in his chair and his face drained until it matched the fawn cardigan on the seat back.

“Ah!” said Jude. She recognised it as the girl turned away to close the door. It was too small to be a jacket and too long to be a face; it was a sheet of hair as black as a witch's cat, still wet at the tips from her skulking in the garden.

As the girl turned back to face them, Lowell pushed his spectacles up his forehead and rubbed one of his large, papery hands over his jaw.

“Dear me,” he said. “You remind me of someone I … ” Then the words died in his mouth.

She was ethereally thin, small and bird-boned, but her belly stuck out in front of her as round as an apple.

“No,” Jude breathed, and she knew from the twitch of Lowell's forehead that he had heard her.

The girl picked her way towards them between the books. Her eyes were wide with fear and her chest was hitching with each breath, but she spoke with a voice as clear as a bell, liquid and warm, with an accent Jude couldn't place.

“Are you Lowell Glen?” she said. Jude saw him nod once and saw too that the hand resting on the Audubon was shaking. “Well, then, I think you're my dad.”