Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  Copyright Information

  Quiet Neighbors: A Novel © 2016 by Catriona McPherson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Midnight Ink, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  As the purchaser of this ebook, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

  Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the author’s copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First e-book edition © 2016

  E-book ISBN: 9780738747811

  Book format by Bob Gaul

  Cover design by Kevin R. Brown

  Cover illustration by Dominick Finelle/The July Group

  Editing by Nicole Nugent

  Midnight Ink is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McPherson, Catriona, 1965–author.

  Title: Quiet neighbors : a novel / Catriona McPherson.

  Description: First edition. | Woodbury, Minnesota. : Midnight Ink, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015044401 (print) | LCCN 2015047082 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780738747620 | ISBN 9780738747811 ()

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6113.C586 Q54 2016 (print) | LCC PR6113.C586 (ebook) |

  DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044401

  Midnight Ink does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

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  Midnight Ink

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  www.midnightinkbooks.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  For Audrey and Wendy, with all my love.

  Books make such good friends and quiet neighbours.

  One

  It was the last thing on her mind when she fled across London. She had her passport and meant to take a train to the airport then buy a ticket for the farthest place on the departure board, to put time zones and maybe the dateline between them. If she could have, she’d have blasted off and gone to Mars.

  But the northern stops on the west coast mainline caught her eye—Penrith, Carlisle, Lockerbie—and she remembered a face, kindly and curious, peering round a door with a conspiratorial smile. Before she knew it, she was on the Glasgow train, in the corner seat of an empty four in the quiet carriage. On the sunny side, as though it were meant to be.

  Who runs away to a bookshop? she asked herself as the train rattled through grimy suburbs. That place was the only bright spot of the whole two weeks, she answered herself. And then: I should have twigged right then that something was wrong.

  For a start, it was the first time he’d suggested a quiet bit of Britain for a break instead of flying south for the sun and some culture. She’d thought it was romantic; what it really was, of course, was cheap. And Max didn’t want to be spending money just then. She’d wondered if he had a big splurge planned for her fortieth.

  So they’d had a fortnight in a cottage of laminated signs—do not pour oil in sink, leave wet boots in porch, nothing but paper in septic tank—and on the middle Saturday he had suggested a day trip to Scotland’s Book Town. He hated it. Maybe he thought it would have five branches of Waterstone’s, a WH Smith, and an Amazon warehouse. Whatever. When he saw the quiet square of Georgian buildings, the antiquarian map shop, the Women’s Studies specialist, the dragon’s dungeon, and the rest of it, he’d checked his watch and said, “Quick look round, since we’re here?”

  Which had made Jude want to stay until the last tea shop clingfilmed its scones and rolled the blinds down. From cussedness, from complacency, she’d checked out not just the maps and the feminist poetry, but also pictorial histories of the ancient world, guidebooks to places she’d never go—Southport, Oban, Roxburgh—and sermons by Victorian ministers with comic facial hair and tragic prose. Then she found Lowland Glen Books. It was no more than a doorway onto the street, opposite the clubhouse of the bowling green in the central square. The green-keeper had taken the chance of this single sunny day to feed his precious grass, and now he was pressing it in with a hand-roller, a cloud of flies following him, drunk on the pungent stink of manure. Jude sat, gagging, on one of the benches around the edge of the green, drinking bad takeaway coffee while Max paced up and down near the car and glared at her. Such complacency. More like oblivion.

  From her vantage point, the Lowland Glen sign had beckoned. It was hand-painted, suspended from the two upstairs windows by means of washing rope tied to the pull-loops on the insides of the frames. The windows, consequently, were open a little at the bottom and the gaps were stuffed with what looked like bundles of cloth. Est. 1972 the sign said. Jude had drained her cup, repelled by the thought of what lay behind a sign like that after forty years, drawn to find out like a moth to a candle.

  She walked past the door twice, bewildered. There were two shop fronts—a children’s books cum toyshop and a crafts specialist with one wall of books and three walls of knitting wool—but the door between them looked so much like the entrance to a house that she dismissed it until, on the third pass, she noticed that one etched-glass panel had a letter L amongst all the leaves and barley-twists and the other a letter G. She grasped the brass handle, still expecting to find a householder in slippers with a teacup halfway to their lips, to have to retreat with apologies. She pushed the door open anyway.

  Books. Wavering, tottering piles of books. Brick-stacked towers of books. Woven dykes and leaning spires and threatening landslides of books. Unsorted. Fs upon Bs upon Ns, paperbacks and hardbacks, outsize to Mr. Men, novels and cookbooks and crosswords and plays. Jude snapped her eyes away and faced forward.

  The passage was perhaps five feet wall to wall; the way through the middle of it, defended by carriers full of books wedged like sandbags into the bulges of more books behind them, was eighteen inches and not a squeak more.

  She let the door close at her back and stood in the sudden quiet as the street sounds were shut out. The books, in an instant, had deadened everything. She could hear her breath in her head and her blood in her ears, the swishing she used to think was the sea when she held up a shell to hear it. Max had taken that away, telling her on one of their first dates that it worked just as well with a cupped hand, nothing to do with the sea at all.

  Twelve feet ahead of her, a faded brocade curtain was drawn over the width of the passageway and a little soft light showed around its edges. Jude turned sideways, clamped her bag tightly under her arm, and edged forward. She could feel particles of dirt shaken loose by her brushing past, could feel the motes drift through the air between the bo
oks and her body and lodge in the weave of her clothes, settling in the folds of her ears, nestling among the roots of her hair.

  The curtain let out a complicated puff of dust as she drew it aside. All of its life was there in the mix of sweet pipe tobacco, harsh cigarettes, boiled food, cooking oil, the faint suggestion of one small rodent somewhere in the long years, and most of all, of course, the books: the must of their pages and the reek of their old leather covers, crumbling or mouldy; the touch-stains of countless fingers on their buckram-covered boards.

  Jude smothered a sneeze, compressing it into a grunt in case it sounded, to the bookseller, like judgement. But when she looked up to check, there was no one there. A big old teacher’s table was set across the entrance to a back room to form a counter and there was a lamp on it, casting light on piles of papers and coils of old till receipt. A heavy grey computer was whirring, its fan at full tilt, straining against the dust in its innards. Pushed back from the desk was an empty chair, duct tape over the splits in its vinyl covering, a ring cushion on its seat, and a fawn cardigan slung over its back.

  Fawn, Jude said to herself, nodding. It wasn’t taupe or stone or oatmeal; it wasn’t even beige. It was an honest-to-God fawn cardi and, without knowing why, she was smiling as she turned away to look at the nearest shelves.

  archaeology said the label on the edge, and above it were crammed railway timetables and rolled LNER posters tied with faded pink auditor’s tape. She slipped around the desk and sidled into the small room behind it. gardening, cooking, handicrafts was printed on an index card pinned above the door, and volumes of military memoirs stood in two tall stacks just inside. Jude ran her eyes down the nearest pile and up again, looking for something—thematic, alphabetic, chronological?—and finding nothing at all. She slid volume five of Churchill’s WWII out of its place and wiggled it in between volumes four and six a few books higher up. That slowed her breath and, before the absence of the first three could quicken it again, she turned away.

  Her eyes came to rest on a glass-fronted case full of Scottish fiction. She knew it was Scottish fiction; she would recognise those sets of Scott and ugly seventies Muriel Sparks anywhere. And on the third shelf down, after the Marion Chesneys but before the Dorothy Dunnnetts, there was one single book smaller than all the others, with a custard-yellow jacket and a rust-red logo at the bottom of its spine. Was it …?

  Jude surged forward. It was!

  She opened the front of the case and drew the little book out with something between a gasp and a whoop, pressing it to her chest with her eyes closed, giving thanks for it before she started to inspect the jacket and binding and state of the pages. It might be no good after all—ex-library, grubby and stamped, glue from old tape on its end papers. But the yellow of its jacket was so bright, even the spine unfaded.

  She opened her eyes and screamed, dropping the book.

  The man, noiselessly sprung from nowhere, dipped and caught it in one deft hand, like a crocodile snapping its jaw on a gobbet of tossed meat.

  “That’s my favourite sound,” he said. “I mean, dear me, of course I mean the gasp, not the shriek. The cry of a book lover sighting a treasure.” And he bestowed on Jude a wide grin, revealing strong, yellow teeth, stained in grey stripes from coffee or tobacco. He was undoubtedly the owner of the fawn cardigan and the haemorrhoid cushion. A tall man, egg-shaped from sloping shoulders and a comfortable paunch, with frizzy, iron-grey hair slicked down and brushed back but escaping its bounds this late in the afternoon and beginning to form a halo around the high dome of his forehead and the double sickle of his roughly shaven jowls. His eyes, bright above extravagant dark pouches, twinkled at her for another moment before he looked down to see what he had saved from falling.

  “Ah,” he said, smoothing the little book in his large, papery hands. “Miss Buchan. I join you in your gentle delight.” And with a bow that detached another few strands of hair from their Brylcreem binding, he put the book in Jude’s hands.

  “O. Douglas,” said Jude, looking down to check she had not made a mistake. Right enough, there was O. Douglas’s name in the familiar font over the sentimental drawing: a family gathered at a fireside, sewing basket, terrier, little boys in shorts and jerseys.

  “Oh quite, quite,” said the large man. He had exactly the sort of accent people said oh quite, quite in. “But, dear me, she’s John Buchan’s sister, you know. Of The Thirty-Nine Steps renown? She eschewed the allure of his reflected glory. Like dear old … dear old … Nicolas Cage and the Coppola connection.”

  Jude had been so primed for the name of dear old scholarly someone she’d never heard of that it took her a beat or two to understand him and then she laughed, as delighted with this oddity before her as she was with her find.

  “Do you have any more?” she said.

  “Douglases?”

  “In Nelson editions with jackets in good shape.”

  “Not at the moment,” he said. “Which are you missing?”

  “I’ve only got The Setons and Pink Sugar,” said Jude.

  “Well then you’ve barely begun!” the man said, his voice rising almost to a shout. “You’ve years of small adventures in store. Unless … ” He put a hand to his mouth. His shirt cuff was frayed and his nails, like his teeth, were strong and yellow and striped in darker lines, but they were clipped short and very clean. Jude could imagine a manicure set to match the pair of brushes he must use to swipe at his hair, a velvet pad for buffing his nails every Sunday and Wednesday evening.

  “Unless what?” she asked him.

  “There’s always that thing,” he said, cocking his head toward the desk, where the computer sat whirring. “You could have the lot. Plop, plop, plop on your doormat.” He looked at her with a wide-open gaze.

  Jude wrinkled her nose and immediately, he wrinkled his too, looking ratlike as his lips drew up above his front teeth.

  “Exactly!” he said. “Where’s the fun in that?”

  He wrote her a receipt in illegible handwriting, tore it from a receipt book with carbon papers between its leaves, and put her purchase, along with a bookmark, in a pale-grey paper bag bearing a logo just like the L and G etched into the glass of the shop doors.

  “Where have you been?” Max shouted to her from yards away when she was back out on the pavement again. “I wanted to get a jump on the rush hour.” Jude looked around the square. There was a tractor with a trailer of silage crossing the top and two boys on bicycles, riding hands-free so they could eat their crisps, freewheeling down the far side.

  “Rush hour?” she echoed.

  “Where were you?” said Max.

  Jude looked at the fiction and knitting shop and the children’s and toyshop, her gaze passing over the door to Lowland Glen Books again.

  “The Leaky Cauldron basically,” she said. “But let’s get going. I need a shower.”

  “Of course you do,” said Max.

  She hugged the pale grey bag close to her as she followed him to the car.

  That was the last day of the holiday that it didn’t rain. When they got back to the cottage, the sky was just above the tree tops, the air thick with threat. The first few drops fell, sweet and dusty, as they carried the supermarket bags from the open boot to the cramped little kitchen. By the time the kettle had boiled and the cold stuff was packed in the fridge, sheets of water were pouring down the windows, rods hammering on the roof.

  For the five days they had left, as Max prowled through the three rooms trying to get a decent signal on his phone, Jude stayed curled on the nubbly brown tweed of the armchair nearest the front window and read Penny Plain, from beginning—“It was teatime in Priorsford”—to end—“I’ll go out of the world cheering”. And it took four days, such a short book, because half the time she wasn’t reading at all; she was staring into space. Into the blank spaces of a typical holiday cottage, cleaned every changeover and kept bare
to deter theft. It soothed her: the empty mantelpiece where ornaments would normally be; the lack of junk mail needing sorting; the neat shelves of books and games without the detritus of life that might otherwise gather there. There were no batteries, no cracker prizes, no phone chargers or dead remotes. And in the kitchen, no twists of cardamom bought for one curry and left to moulder, no sticky pots with one spread of jam left, no single gherkins swimming like sharks in jars of vinegar. And outside, just the sodden grass and dripping trees, nothing to weed, nothing to prune, nothing to turn from. So she gazed out at it and, while she did, she was thinking of a kind face and that cautious, semi-strangulated voice—Oh quite, quite. Gentle delight. Years of small adventures—and laughing again every time she remembered dear old, dear old … Nicolas Cage.

  From Lockerbie, she took the Dumfries bus full of schoolchildren headed for late-night Thursday opening, and care workers in their polo shirts and tabards starting their shifts in the red sandstone villas, full of the elderly now that the merchants were gone. There was no chance of a bus all the way to Wigtown though, and the only taxi firm she phoned told her it was a big night, Thursday; she’d be lucky to get a driver to waste his time. So she went as far as she could, to Castle Douglas, deserted but for the pub-front smokers once the shops were closed, and spent the night in a room above the bar at the Something Arms, listening to the men downstairs bedding into their night’s drinking, and the phone calls of the salesman next door, loud over the sound of his television through the thin dividing wall.

  She had no change of clothes and was ashamed to go into breakfast in the same black suit and grey shirt the staff had seen the night before, so she bought a pasty in a paper bag on the way to the bus stop and then spent the journey to Newton Stewart with the empty bag folded in her hand, wishing she could throw it away. She saw nothing of the scenery, turned away from it with her eyes closed, in case the memory of her and Max on this very journey the summer before should bring her to tears.