Bad Sons (Booker & Cash Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

feet either, which I find strange.’
    ‘She wouldn’t have gone out in yesterday evening’s weather without a coat. No one of her age would. And she wouldn’t have gone out in a coat without doing it up first. It was raining when I arrived. What was the weather like during the day?’
    ‘Same. It rained all afternoon in Folkestone.’
    ‘I can’t see how a fastened coat could come off anyone in the water, can you?’
    She looked to be giving this some thought. ‘Where do they keep their coats normally?’
    I showed her the cupboard. There were several coats and jackets for each of them. Impossible to tell if one was missing. Or two.
    We went downstairs.
    The smell hit me like a spell, stimulating memories like only a scent can. Pungent old books. Despite my uncle’s preference for modern first editions he had also accumulated, through bulk purchases, hundreds of older books over the years. It was their mustiness, their tooled leather bindings, their ancient paper and ink that overpowered all other competing odours. It was a smell I relished and a look he’d liked. I noticed Detective Constable Cash inhale it and I liked her for it.
    The shop was a decent size for an independent bookshop. It spread over the whole of the ground floor. There were walls of order and islands of chaos, shelves of hardbacks and piles of paperbacks. Colourful dust-jacketed spines stood uniformly together generating stretches of intrigue. Along one long wall oak bookcases had been made to measure and match a long time ago, locally, when that kind of thing wouldn’t need a remortgage, and these had aged to a distinctive rich brown.
    Floor to ceiling was higher down here, perhaps ten feet. The books went all the way to the top. There was a ladder that ran on a rail just like in the old-fashioned libraries of aristocrats in the movies. It was my uncle’s indulgence, although at his age he didn’t glide up and down on it like he used to when he was younger and showing it off.
    A good solid counter made out of matching timber stood between the shop floor area and a couple of smaller rooms off to one side: a toilet and a small kitchen.
    My uncle and aunt spent years working out of this space, often six days a week, and in those years they had made it more like a browsing library than a retail establishment; more of a home than a workplace. There were a couple of good leather sofas and matching wingback chairs, and dotted around a few little matching leather footstools for people to sit on while they perhaps sampled a chapter or two of a potential purchase.
    In truth there were fewer and fewer physical callers in later years; the vast majority of the business was Internet and mail order, but those that did come, and it was mostly by appointment only, were always welcomed and pleased to be there. It was a shot of nostalgia for most of them as much as anything else; a reminder of the good old days.
    I noticed Detective Cash give the room a long appreciative look. ‘This place would make a fantastic boutique coffee shop, if you thinned the stock out and tidied up a bit.’
    I gave her some good advice. ‘I wouldn’t mention that to my uncle when you see him.’
    We explored independently and probably for different reasons. The shop looked much like it always had. There were maybe fewer books as my uncle and aunt had stopped buying and concentrated on selling. I wandered around the shelves and the alcoves renewing some old acquaintances, prompting some memories.
    I felt better in the shop than in the flat and it was with a start and a pang I remembered that only a couple of hours before I’d seen my dead aunt pulled out of the English Channel.
    When my uncle showed up nothing was ever going to be the same again for either of us. He’d need me and I experienced a jolt of what I had to recognise honestly as guilty relief that I would now have to delay my return to my home, my work and my domestic troubles in Istanbul.
    Detective Cash came out