Chapter 5 The Bookmarks Silent Clue
The morning of the fifth day since Silas Blackwood’s death broke clear and cool, with a sky the colour of washed linen stretched tight above the rooftops of Meadowbrook.
I had spent the two days since Julian Blackwood’s arrival tending to the ordinary rhythms of The Yarn & Needle, restocking the skeins of undyed wool that had sold through faster than I had anticipated and placing a fresh order with the mill in Stow-on-the-Wold.
The knitting circle had met on the third day, a subdued affair at which Florence Albright had not appeared, and Eleanor Finch had reported that her nephew Alistair was still spending his afternoons at the bookshop,
working through Silas Blackwood’s papers with the methodical patience of a man who did not quite know what he was looking for.
That detail had lodged itself in my mind and refused to loosen.
I had watched Constable Finch at the scene on the day of the discovery, had noted the careful way he had taken down my statement and the furrow that had settled between his brows as he examined the fallen stepladder.
He was earnest, I did not doubt that, but earnestness was not the same thing as experience, and the slow pace of the official investigation had begun to wear on my patience.
The village had returned to its routines quickly enough, the way a pond smooths over after a stone has been thrown into it, but I could not stop thinking about the cold that had clung to the bookshop air, the open book on the shelf,
the button of horn or bone with its pattern of interlocking circles that had lain beside the body.
Two days of waiting had felt like a great deal longer.
I closed the shop at half past twelve and set out along the high street, past the bakery where Gareth Davies was wiping down his front window with a cloth that left long, soapy streaks on the glass, and turned onto the narrower lane that led to the bookshop.
The stone walls on either side were dry now after the rain of the previous days, and the afternoon light fell in a clean diagonal across the path, picking out the pale green of the moss that grew in the cracks.
I had not been back to Lavender Lane Bookshop since the morning I had found Silas Blackwood, and as I approached the familiar facade with its faded gold lettering and its single step worn smooth by decades of footsteps, I felt the same quiet tightening in my chest that I had felt then,
though I could not have named it precisely.
The door was unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped inside, and the cold air met me at once, dry and still and carrying the faint, papery scent of old books that had always been the shop’s particular signature.
The front room was dim, the blinds drawn halfway down the windows, and the dust motes that usually danced in the afternoon light hung suspended and motionless, as though the air itself had forgotten how to move.
I stood for a moment just inside the door, letting my eyes adjust, and then I heard the sound of a chair scraping against the floorboards in the back room.
“Constable Finch?” I called, keeping my voice low, the way one does in a place that has been touched by death.
The scraping stopped. A moment later Alistair Finch appeared in the doorway that led to the small office at the rear of the shop, his uniform jacket unbuttoned and his fair hair standing up on one side as though he had been running his hand through it repeatedly.
He looked tired, the kind of tired that settles into the bones and makes a person’s movements slower than they ought to be, and when he saw me his expression shifted into something that was not quite a smile but was not unfriendly either.
“Miss Croft,” he said, and there was a note of relief in his voice that he did not trouble to conceal. “I wasn’t expecting anyone. Please, come in.”
I stepped further into the shop, my shoes making a soft sound on the worn floorboards. “I hope I’m not intruding. I wanted to see how you were getting on. Eleanor mentioned you’d been here most afternoons.”
He gestured vaguely toward the office behind him, a gesture that took in the stacks of papers and the open ledgers and the general air of slow, patient frustration that seemed to hang about him.
“Getting on is one way of putting it. Mr. Blackwood kept very thorough records, which is helpful, but he also kept a great many of them, which is less so. I’ve been going through his accounts, his correspondence, his inventory lists. It’s slow work.”
“Have you found anything that might explain what happened?” I asked, keeping my tone carefully neutral.
Constable Finch rubbed the back of his neck with one hand and let out a breath that was not quite a sigh.
“Nothing that jumps out. No sign of a struggle, no evidence of forced entry, no obvious motive. The official line is still that it was an accidental fall. The coroner’s report should be finalised by the end of the week, and unless something new comes to light, that’s likely to be the conclusion.”
He said it as though he were reciting a line he had practiced, and I heard the uncertainty underneath the words, the small hesitation before “accidental fall” that told me he was not entirely convinced.
I did not press him on it. Instead I let my gaze drift across the room, past the front counter with its neat stacks of bookmarks and its lost-property tin, toward the second display room where the tall bookcases stood in their quiet rows.
“Would you mind if I took another look at the room where I found him?” I asked. “I know it’s irregular, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I thought perhaps seeing it again might help me put it to rest.”
He considered this for a moment, and then he nodded. “I don’t see why not. The scene’s been processed, such as it was. Just don’t touch anything you don’t need to.”
I thanked him and made my way into the second room, and the change in the air was immediate.
The cold was sharper here, a dry, settled cold that seemed to have taken up residence in the spines of the books and the grain of the wooden shelves, and the faint, metallic tang that I remembered from the morning of the discovery was still present,
though it had faded now to something barely perceptible, a ghost of a scent rather than the scent itself.
I stopped in the centre of the room and let my eyes move slowly across the shelves, taking in the familiar geography of the place: the low case of poetry near the door, the long wall of history and biography, and the tall bookcase against the far wall where Silas Blackwood had been found.
The stepladder was gone now, presumably removed by Constable Finch or his colleagues, but the bookcase itself stood exactly as I remembered it, its upper shelves still crammed with volumes in their dark, sober bindings.
I walked toward it slowly, letting my gaze travel upward, and when I reached the shelf that had been at eye level with the stepladder’s top step, I stopped.
The book was still there. It was a large volume, bound in dark green cloth with gold lettering on the spine that had been rubbed almost to illegibility, and it was not pushed flush with its neighbours but sat slightly forward,
its lower edge resting on the shelf while its upper edge leaned against the book beside it at an angle that was just wrong enough to catch the eye.
The ornate bookmark, a length of silver thread with a tassel of twisted silk, hung from between the pages, its tassel dangling in the still air like a question mark that no one had answered.
I reached up and touched the spine of the book with my fingertips, and the cloth was cool and faintly rough under my skin.
The volume was heavier than I had expected, its weight a solid, satisfying thing that spoke of good paper and proper binding, and as I tilted it gently forward to read the title, I noticed the scuff mark.
It was small, no larger than my thumbnail, a pale, abraded patch on the dark green cloth near the base of the spine where something had rubbed against it with enough pressure to lift the nap of the fabric.
The mark was fresh, the edges still sharp and the exposed fibres still pale, and it had not been there when I had first seen the book three days earlier.
I was certain of that, though I could not have explained the certainty to anyone else.
I opened the book carefully, letting it fall to the page where the bookmark had been inserted, and the scent rose from the paper at once.
It was faint, almost imperceptible, a sweet, floral note that reminded me of dried lavender or perhaps the powdery fragrance of old roses pressed between the pages of a diary.
It was entirely different from the sharp, metallic tang that I remembered from the morning of Silas Blackwood’s death, and it was not a scent that belonged in a bookshop.
The pages themselves were clean and unmarked, the text dense and scholarly, and the bookmark lay across them with a carelessness that was utterly unlike the man who had owned it.
Silas Blackwood had kept records of his books for thirty years.
He had swept his floors every morning and used his stepladder without fail.
He would not have left a fine bookmark jammed haphazardly between the pages of a volume he valued.
I closed the book and replaced it on the shelf, aligning it carefully with its neighbours, and then I stood for a moment with my hand still resting on its spine.
The scuff mark, the scent, the misplaced bookmark: each detail was small enough to dismiss on its own, but together they formed a pattern that I could not ignore.
Someone had handled this book recently, had handled it in a hurry and with a carelessness that did not match the habits of its owner, and whoever that someone was, they had left traces behind them that the official investigation had not thought to look for.
I turned away from the bookcase and walked back to the front room, where Constable Finch was sorting through a stack of papers on the counter. He looked up as I approached, and I saw the tiredness in his face again, the slight droop of his shoulders that spoke of long hours and little progress.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Constable Finch, the book on the top shelf of the case where Mr. Blackwood was found, the one with the silver bookmark. Have you examined it?”
He frowned, a small crease appearing between his brows. “The book? I noted it was there, yes. It didn’t seem particularly relevant. Why do you ask?”
“The bookmark is misplaced,” I said. “It’s been tucked between the pages at an odd angle, as though someone put it there in a hurry. Mr. Blackwood was a meticulous man. I don’t believe he would have left it that way.”
Constable Finch’s frown deepened, and I saw him weighing my words, turning them over in his mind the way he might turn over a piece of evidence that did not quite fit. But after a moment he shook his head, and the frown smoothed itself away into something more like polite dismissal.
“A misplaced bookmark isn’t much to go on, Miss Croft. People are careless sometimes, even meticulous people. It could have been like that for weeks.”
“It could have been,” I agreed, and I did not press the point.
I had seen the doubt flicker across his face before he had smoothed it away, and that was enough for now.
I would not convince him with a bookmark and a scent and a scuff mark, not yet, but I did not need to convince him.
I needed only to convince myself, and I had done that already.
I thanked Constable Finch for his time and left the bookshop, stepping out into the clean afternoon light with the sweet, floral scent still faint in my memory and the image of the misplaced bookmark fixed firmly in my mind.
The high street was busier now, the lunchtime crowd beginning to thin as the afternoon shoppers took their place, and I walked past the bakery and the post office and the small greengrocer’s with its crates of apples arranged on the pavement without really seeing any of them.
My thoughts were still in the cold, still room at the back of the bookshop, turning over the details I had gathered and fitting them together like the pieces of a pattern I had not yet learned to read.
I reached The Yarn & Needle and unlocked the door, and the familiar scent of wool and lanolin rose to meet me, warm and comforting after the dry chill of the bookshop.
I hung my cardigan on the hook behind the counter and stood for a moment with my hands resting on the worn wood of the till, and then I reached for the small notebook I kept in the drawer beneath the register.
I opened it to a fresh page and wrote, in my neatest hand, the words that had been repeating themselves in my mind since I had left Lavender Lane: the book, the bookmark, the scuff mark, the scent.
Four small things, each insignificant on its own, but together they pointed toward something that I could not yet name.
I closed the notebook and tucked it back into the drawer, and then I turned the sign on the door to Open and waited for the afternoon to bring me whatever it would bring.