15
I close up my shop at five o’clock, still none the wiser what the time on the painting and the clock might mean, and I head next door to see Adam.
‘Gosh, you have made some progress this afternoon,’ I tell him, looking around the shop at all the neatly stacked bookshelves. ‘It looks like you’re almost ready to open. The whole place looks amazing.’
‘All except that wall,’ Adam says, looking at the wall with the metal door in. ‘If we can’t find out how to unlock it, I’m going to have to put the bookcase back again.’
‘I know. It’s so frustrating, though – I feel like we’re so close to finding out what’s behind there. Oh, I need to tell you about the picture Barney and I hung this afternoon in my shop.’
‘That’s odd,’ Adam says when I’ve explained.
‘I remember that picture in my grandfather’s study; he often used to point it out to me, but I wasn’t really interested in art when I was young.
It was so different to all the other artwork he had in the house, though – that was much more traditional.
Do you know who did the painting – is there a signature on it? ’
‘No, I’ve looked. Which is odd in itself. I wonder where your grandfather got it from?’
‘Absolutely no idea. So you think the tree in the painting might be the same as the one engraved on the front of the grandfather clock?’
‘It is very similar.’
‘You know I’ve looked around at all these books today,’ Adam says wearily. ‘And there’s none with an eleven in the title. That’s incredibly frustrating too. Where is eleven when all the others were clearly on show on my grandfather’s bookshelves?’
‘Do you think we’re thinking about this too hard?’ I say. ‘Is the answer staring us in the face?’
‘Probably. Do you fancy a drink?’ Adam asks. ‘I could murder a pint.’
‘Sure, why not? Maybe it will help us relax so we can begin to think clearly.’
‘You’d better hope so. Otherwise that door is going to have to go back into hiding until we have some more clues.’
After Adam has insisted on cleaning himself up, we head out of Clockmaker Court and across to the pub where we both celebrated our birthdays back in February.
‘Seems quite apt, doesn’t it?’ I say as we head through the door.
‘What does?’ Adam asks, holding the door open for me.
‘The name of this pub – The Timekeeper – with what’s happening with the books and the clocks.’
‘Yeah, I guess it does. This is a bit busy tonight,’ Adam says, looking around the packed and unusually noisy bar.
‘Bank holiday, isn’t it, that’s why. There’s some more seating outside. Shall I see if there are any tables free?’
‘Why don’t you see if there’s any tables free?’ Adam says, obviously not hearing me above the chatter. ‘And I’ll get the drinks in. What would you like?’
‘I’ll have a lager, please.’
Adam nods. ‘Half or pint?’
I smile. ‘Half will be plenty, thanks.’
While Adam goes up to the bar, I head out of the back door to the little beer garden. On first glance there don’t seem to be any tables free, but then I spot Luca at one of them with a couple of people I don’t recognise.
‘Hey, Eve!’ Luca says, waving. ‘Over here.’
‘Hello.’ I walk over to him. ‘Great minds think alike.’
‘Are you here on your own, my darling?’ he asks.
‘No, Adam is trying to get served at the bar. It’s busy in there tonight.’
‘It is the beautiful weather this evening, bella ! It’s brought everyone out again after the rain earlier. Do you wanna sit with us? Or would you prefer just the two of you?’ He wiggles his eyebrows suggestively.
‘Luca!’ I shake my head. ‘Joining you would be great if you don’t mind.’ I look at the other two people at the table.
‘Go for it,’ a man with an American accent says, pulling out a chair for me. ‘We’re about to head back to our hotel soon anyway. Early flight tomorrow.’
‘This is Annie and Ed, friends of mine from America,’ Luca says, introducing them. ‘This is my Eve. She owns one of the shops in Clockmaker Court.’
‘Oh, which one?’ Annie asks, also with an American twang to her voice.
‘The antique shop.’
‘I’ve been in! It’s wonderful – you have so many amazing things in there. You weren’t there when we visited, though – there was a young guy?’
‘Yes, that’s Barney; he works with me.’
Annie nods eagerly. ‘All the shops in that little court are so quaint. Like something time forgot.’
‘Yes, they are a bit.’
‘When Luca first sent me photos of his little clothes shop, I squealed, didn’t I, Luca?’
‘That’s what you said, darling,’ Luca says calmly.
‘I never thought I’d hear the end of it until I agreed to come here while on our holiday, to England,’ Ed says, rolling his eyes. ‘We must go and see Luca’s little shop, was all I got for at least a year!’
‘I’m not that bad,’ Annie says reproachfully. ‘We’ve had a wonderful time, though. We’ve been all over England over the last few weeks; you have so much fabulous history here we don’t have in the US.’
‘And we ended up here in Cambridge,’ Ed says. ‘My family come from here originally.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, I’m going back many years, though.
My grandfather was stationed here during the Second World War at Duxford.
He met my grandmother here, and, after the war ended, he stayed in England and they moved around to various airbases where US troops were stationed.
My father was born here and it wasn’t until he met my mother that they decided to move back to the States. ’
‘Gosh, my great-grandmother was stationed at RAF Duxford during the Second World War too.’
‘Holy moly! That’s amazing. Maybe they knew each other?’
‘Maybe they did,’ I say, smiling at him.
‘What did she do after the war?’ Ed asks. ‘Did she continue to serve?’
‘Sadly, she died in 1944.’
‘Oh, how sad,’ Annie says. ‘Was she killed by a bomb? A lot of Brits were killed in air raids, weren’t they?’
‘Luckily, Cambridge didn’t get too many bombing raids during the war. When I say she died, she actually went missing.’
‘Missing? Like behind enemy lines?’ Annie asks excitedly. ‘Ooh, was she a spy?’
‘No, nothing as exciting as that, I’m afraid.
She was stationed here in Cambridge for the whole of the war, I believe.
She was, however, one of the first female engineers at Duxford.
’ I’m surprised at how proud I feel saying this.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dotty lately since we found that photo of her.
Ed and Annie aren’t the only ones keen to know more about her story.
‘So how did she go missing?’ Ed asks, appearing genuinely interested.
I explain as quickly as I can what I know about Dotty.
‘Gee, that’s quite the family mystery you have there,’ Ed says. ‘And sadly one I doubt you’ll ever solve all these years later. I thought I’d uncovered some twists and turns in my family – Annie and I have both been tracing our family trees. That’s how we met Luca.’
‘Oh, yes?’ I turn to Luca. ‘I didn’t know you’d been doing that. Are you guys related, then?’
‘No,’ Luca says, shaking his head. ‘But that’s how I met Annie – on a Facebook group for finding families. When she said she was coming over to England, I said she should pop in if they were ever in Cambridge.’
‘And here we are!’ Annie says. ‘I’m sorry about your great-grandmother, Eve.’ She pats my arm. ‘But the internet is a wonderful place for trying to trace people. Maybe you should try sometime. I can see it bothers you not knowing what happened to her.’
I look down at Annie’s hand on my arm. And, for some reason, her kind gesture touches me. ‘Funny thing is, it didn’t bother me too much before. It wasn’t until recently that I started thinking about it and wondering. It was just one of those stories passed down through the generations.’
‘What happened recently to change your mind?’ Annie asks gently.
‘Change your mind about what?’ Adam asks from behind me and I turn to see him deftly holding a bottle of lager and an empty glass in one hand, and a pint of beer in another.
‘Adam!’ Luca leaps up from his seat. ‘Come and sit by me here – there’s room for two on this bench.’
‘Nonsense,’ Ed says. ‘Annie and I will share. You take my seat, Adam.’
Much to Luca’s disappointment, we have a little shuffle around, so now Luca, Adam and I have our own seat, and Annie and Ed share the little bench Luca was perching on.
‘Right, now all that’s done. Shall we begin again,’ Luca says. ‘This is Adam. He owns the bookshop next door to Eve’s antique shop.’
‘As yet unopened,’ Adam says, smiling at Annie and Ed. ‘I hope to open soon, though.’
‘Luca met Annie and Ed when he was tracing his family tree,’ I say to Adam. ‘Ed had family in Cambridge too. His grandfather was stationed at RAF Duxford during the war.’
‘Really? What a small world,’ Adam says, nodding. He casts a purposeful glance in my direction before turning to Ed. ‘Did your grandfather see any action in the war?’ he asks.
‘Yes, we believe he flew a few successful missions over Germany,’ Ed replies.
‘He never really spoke much about it to anyone, though. People back then didn’t, did they.
Not like now when people share everything about themselves on social media.
In those days it was a stiff upper lip and all that.
’ He tried, unsuccessfully, to do an English accent and apologises as we all smile.
‘Bombing another country wasn’t something he was particularly proud of, I’m sure.
But I guess it had to be done. I’m sure many of the German pilots felt the same.
You said before, Eve, that Cambridge didn’t get bombed too much during the war?
How come? I thought all the big cities were hit. ’
‘I’m not really sure.’
‘Some say it’s because we didn’t have many big factories or major transport links back then,’ Luca says to my surprise. ‘But there’s another theory, that Britain and Germany made a pact – the Germans wouldn’t bomb Cambridge or Oxford, if we spared two of their big university cities in exchange.’
‘Really? That’s incredible if it’s true,’ Ed says.