Chapter 9 A High-Value Acquisition
The morning arrived with the kind of sharp, clean light that made every object in the shop seem more solid than it had been the night before, as though the world had been rinsed in cold water while I slept.
I had woken early, before the streetlamps had fully dimmed, and found myself standing at the counter in my dressing gown with the ledger open before I had properly decided to be there.
The symbols on the page had not changed overnight, but they seemed to press against my eyes with a new urgency, as though they had grown impatient with waiting.
I dressed quickly and made a pot of tea, and by the time Eleanor arrived the shop was filled with the smell of fresh leaves steeping and the low hum of the electric kettle cooling on its stand.
She came through the door with her handbag tucked under one arm and a leather satchel slung over the other shoulder, and she set both down on the counter with the air of someone who had not slept but had instead spent the dark hours in a state of concentrated thought.
"I've been working since half past four," she said, drawing a sheaf of papers from the satchel.
Her handwriting covered three pages in tight, orderly rows, each line a translation of the symbols we had stared at the night before.
"The cipher is consistent. Silas used it for every transaction that involved a book of genuine value. The rest of the entries, the ordinary stock, he recorded in plain English. He wanted the rare acquisitions hidden, but he wanted them recorded all the same."
I poured her a cup of tea and set it beside the papers. "What did you find?"
Eleanor spread the pages across the counter and tapped the top sheet with one finger. "The September fourteenth acquisition. The one marked 'exemplar unicum.' It is a first edition, and it is specific enough that I believe you will recognize it."
She read from her notes, her voice steady and precise.
"The entry describes a volume bound in dark green cloth, with gilt lettering on the spine and a frontispiece engraving of a country house. The title page bears the date 1892, and the publisher is named as Hatchard and Company of Piccadilly. Silas noted that the copy was in exceptional condition,
with uncut pages and the original endpapers intact. He paid for it in cash, and he recorded the sum only as 'pretium solutum,' but the symbols he used for the amount suggest it was considerable."
The description settled into my mind piece by piece, and then it locked into place with a clarity that made my hands stop moving on the teacup.
I had seen that book. I had seen it on the day Silas Blackwood died, half-open on the shelf in the second room of the bookshop, its dark green cover catching the light from the window and its pages fanned out like a hand half-raised in greeting.
I had noticed it because it was the only book in the shop that had been left open, and because the silver bookmark that should have been marking its place was lying on the floor beneath the shelf.
"I know this book," I said. "It was on the shelf when I found him. It was open, Eleanor. Silas would never have left a book open like that. He was too careful."
Eleanor looked up from her papers, and her expression was the one she wore when a piece of a puzzle had just found its neighbour. "Then someone pulled it from the shelf in a hurry. Someone who knew what it was worth."
I walked to the window and back, my fingers brushing the edge of the worktable as I passed. The shop felt smaller than it had a moment before, the familiar walls pressing inward with the weight of what we were assembling. "The ledger. Does it say what happened to the book?"
Eleanor turned to the third page of her notes.
"The entry for October first, the day Silas died, is the last one he made. It reads 'emptor ignotus' and then the symbol for collection. But there is a mark after it, a small cross beside the entry, and in the margin he wrote a single word in plain English."
She paused, and I saw her hand tighten on the edge of the paper. "The word is 'missing.'"
The word hung in the air between us, small and final.
I stopped at the counter and looked down at the ledger, at the neat rows of symbols that had seemed so impenetrable the night before and now read like a confession.
Silas Blackwood had acquired a rare first edition in September.
A buyer had been due to collect it on the first of October.
And on that day, the book had gone missing, and Silas Blackwood had been found dead at the foot of a bookcase he had climbed every day for thirty years without once losing his footing.
"It wasn't an accident," I said. The words came out flat and certain, the way a door closes and you hear the latch click home. "Someone took that book, and Silas died because of it."
Eleanor set her papers down and reached for her tea.
Her hand was steady, but she held the cup for a long moment without drinking.
"The question is who knew about the book. Silas kept these transactions secret. The cipher, the coded entries, the cash payments. He went to considerable trouble to ensure that no one in Meadowbrook knew what he was acquiring."
"Florence Albright knew," I said. "She had the ledger. She had the button from my shop, the one that matches the button found beside Silas's body. She knew enough to take both and hide them."
"Florence knew something," Eleanor agreed, "but did she know about this specific book? The ledger was hidden in a compartment in her own shop. If she had read it, if she had understood the cipher, she would have known the book's value.
But if she had simply taken it from Silas's office after his death, she may not have deciphered it at all."
I thought about Florence's hands trembling on the counter of her shop, the way her voice had tightened when I mentioned the scent of lavender.
She had been frightened, but frightened people do not always know the full shape of what they fear.
"She might have taken the ledger to protect herself, not to use it."
"Or she might have taken it because she knew exactly what it contained." Eleanor set her cup down and straightened the papers on the counter, aligning their edges with the care of someone who had spent a lifetime handling documents. "There is another person we should consider."
I knew who she meant before she said the name.
"Julian Blackwood," Eleanor said. "He arrived in Meadowbrook two days after his uncle's death. He claims to have been estranged for ten years, and yet he appears at precisely the moment a valuable book goes missing and its owner is found dead. That is a coincidence I find difficult to accept."
I pulled out the stool from behind the counter and sat down, my hands finding a skein of wool that had been left on the worktable and beginning to wind it without conscious thought.
The rhythm of the winding was steadying, the wool slipping through my fingers in a familiar pattern.
"He said he came back to settle the estate. But if he knew about the book, if he knew what his uncle was hiding."
"Then his return may have had nothing to do with family reconciliation and everything to do with a first edition worth a great deal of money."
Eleanor watched me wind the wool, and her expression was the careful, measuring look she reserved for moments when she was about to say something she knew I would not want to hear.
"I think we should watch him, Penny. Discreetly. He has been in the village for a week now, and we know almost nothing about what he has been doing."
I nodded, and the wool slipped once before I caught the rhythm again. "I can ask Gareth to keep an eye on him at the bakery. Julian goes there most mornings. And I can find a reason to speak with him myself."
"Be careful," Eleanor said. "If Julian is involved, he will be watching for anyone who takes too close an interest in his uncle's affairs."
I set the skein down and looked at the ledger on the counter, at the coded entries that had transformed a tragic accident into something far darker.
A rare book had been taken, and a man had died, and somewhere in Meadowbrook there was a person who knew exactly what had happened in the second room of the Lavender Lane Bookshop on the first of October.
The investigation had shifted beneath my feet, and I felt the weight of it settle into my shoulders, a new and unfamiliar pressure that had nothing to do with knitting patterns or craft fairs or the ordinary rhythms of village life.
"We need to know who else knew about Silas's collection," I said. "If he kept these transactions secret, then the list of people who understood what he was acquiring must be very short."
Eleanor folded her notes and tucked them back into the satchel. "Then we start with that list. And we start with Julian Blackwood."
Outside, the morning light had strengthened, and the street beyond the window was beginning to fill with the ordinary traffic of the village.
A delivery van pulled up outside the bakery, and someone laughed in the lane, and the world went on in its accustomed way while I sat behind the counter of my shop and tried to remember how it felt to believe that Meadowbrook was a place where everyone's secrets were harmless.