Chapter 6
Chapter Six
L uke didn’t know if it was the guilt he felt over taking his eye off the ball, getting distracted by the bookshop and Esme and island life, or whether it was some buried seam of self-destruction that he had inherited from his old man, but he closed the bookshop early and walked down to the car park without telling anybody on the island where he was going. The sunset had been bleeding red across the sky, but the dark was rolling in fast now. He got into his ancient Ford Fiesta and took his phone out of his pocket, trying not to think about how big a mistake he was probably making.
Tobias had told him he looked settled and he knew it was true. He felt settled. But that was all wrong. His brother had reached out to him. And, ignoring the actual text of Lewis’s message, it meant one thing only: that there was a chance Lewis was alive. To stay playing shop on Unholy Island, ignoring that reality, wasn’t right.
Luke had kept in touch with some of Lewis’s more reasonable friends, asking them to let him know if they heard anything from his brother, and one of these had a contact who could put him in touch with Dean Fisher, the supremely dodgy guy that his brother had been working for before he disappeared, in return for a Bitcoin payment. His thumbs hovered over the screen for a moment before he began typing.
A loud knock on the car window made him jump, dropping his phone. ‘Fuck!’
Hammer was looming outside the vehicle in the twilight, looking terrifying and furious. So, pretty much the same as he always did. Luke wound down the window. ‘You want something?’
‘Going somewhere?’
‘Maybe,’ Luke said.
‘Mind if I tag along?’
‘Why?’
‘I just have a feeling you’re about to do something stupid.’
Just because Luke had made the same assessment, didn’t mean he liked Hammer pointing it out. ‘If I am, it’s none of your business.’
‘Tobias told me about your brother. He made contact.’ Hammer wrenched open the door. ‘Get out. Or I’m getting in.’
Luke weighed up the possibility that Hammer would be able to haul him bodily from the car and made a gesture that was halfway between ‘be my guest’ and ‘fuck you’.
Hammer didn’t crack a smile or move around to the passenger side, probably because he assumed that Luke would take advantage of the delay to drive away. Instead, he opened the door behind Luke’s seat and folded his gigantic frame into the backseat.
‘So, where are we going?’
Luke gave up. ‘Nowhere.’
‘Excellent choice, pal.’
Winter was a time of rest and recuperation. All living things lying quiet under the frozen earth and waiting for the turning of the year and the return of the light. Bee, more than her sisters, felt these cyclical changes deep in her bones.
Sitting in the plant-filled front room of her island home, she closed her eyes and immediately felt the gentle sway of travel. Her summer was spent moving from town to town with the fair, some large and sprawling, some tiny, not much larger than a village. It was both strange and wonderful to wake up each morning in the same place she had gone to sleep, but she knew that if she lived on the island all year round, as Lucy and Diana did, that she would go slowly mad.
‘Are you still up, sister mine?’
Bee opened her eyes to find Diana with her watering can and an absent expression. ‘I can hear a thirsty plant and I knew I wouldn’t sleep until I found it.’
‘Just reading,’ Bee said. She did have a book open on her lap and she turned her attention back to it. A sudden certainty flowed through her. She would finish the last chapter tonight and visit the bookshop in the morning to swap it for something new.
The next morning, Luke awoke to snow on the skylight of his bedroom. He got dressed in warm clothes and headed downstairs to make tea before opening the shop. As he walked through the rooms, he felt as if the bookshelves were leaning in a little, greeting him. The lights had gone on, too, bathing the shop in a welcoming glow.
He made a large mug of tea and took it to his reading chair. Alvis’s book was waiting for him, back on top of his reading pile. ‘Fine,’ he said out loud. ‘You win.’
Flicking through Alvis’s book, Luke quickly realised why the shop had been so keen for him to read it. There were several things that he ought to have been doing, some to do with keeping drains running freely and home maintenance, and some to do with running the shop. And, most importantly, there was a stockroom. Well, he assumed Alvis meant stockroom. What she had actually written interchanged between ‘repository’, ‘repository/public’, and ‘vault’.
‘Where is the vault?’Luke asked out loud.
He looked around the empty shop and waited for a new doorway to appear. Then, feeling faintly foolish, he walked through the corridors and small rooms, asking ‘hotter?’ and ‘colder?’ like he was playing a game. The shop lights stayed unhelpfully steady, and the atmosphere was one of a breath being held. The shop was holding out on him.
He stopped moving and looked around at the bookshelves in an accusatory manner. ‘I thought you wanted me to look?’ The shop didn’t answer.
Frustrated, and feeling slightly foolish, he headed back to the front room. Sitting in his reading chair, he flipped the red book shut and picked up his John le Carré.
He tried to lose himself with Rebus, but his skin was prickling and his ears seemed to hum with the silence in the shop. Luke had felt atmospheres in buildings before, the sense that it was a place or calm or sadness or joy, but he had never known the feeling that the building was actively thinking. It shouldn’t be possible to pick up on an atmosphere of petulance from a structure of bricks and wood and plaster, but that was exactly what was happening.
He wasn’t going to give into the shop. He read the same paragraph for the third time, determined to ignore the silent battle and the rapidly cooling air. He had the feeling the shop wanted him to apologise, but he was damned if he would. For starters, he had no idea what he had done wrong so it would be insincere. He sighed and started the paragraph for the fourth time, hunching his shoulders against the chill.
Luke was a stubborn man and would probably have stayed locked in that cycle for a good while longer, but the bell on the front door jangled and gave him an excuse to put his paperback down and stand behind the till.
‘Gies a hand, pal?’
The Scottish voice belonged to a small wiry delivery guy wearing a grey polo shirt with a stitched logo. He had a metal trolley stacked with boxes and was trying to manoeuvre it in the narrow entrance.
‘I didn’t order anything,’ Luke said, confused.
The man shrugged. He had a clipboard resting on top of the uppermost box and he handed it to Luke.
The docket was from the delivery company and the bookshop was listed with the correct address. There wasn’t a name under ‘contact’ and Luke wondered if that was because whoever had sent the boxes knew that Alvis had passed away or whether it was because this whole thing was a mistake.
Once he had signed and the delivery guy had wheeled his trolley grumpily back up the wynd, Luke carried the heavy box into the front room and hefted it onto the counter. He used his penknife to carefully slit the packing tape.
He wasn’t entirely surprised that it was filled with books. They were, however, not books he had ever seen in real life before. Wrapped in layers of acid-free tissue paper, these books were old. The kind you saw behind glass in museums.
Luke was so intrigued that it took him a couple of minutes to realise that the atmosphere in the shop had changed, too. He felt as if the shelves were curving inward, as if the shop wanted to get a better look. ‘This is beautiful,’ he said out loud as he unwrapped a thick leather volume with detailed tooling on the cover and brass fixtures. The air in the shop warmed in response.
Soon, the counter was filled from the edge to the cash register with a stack of leather-bound books of varying sizes. The last book in the box was smaller and lighter than the others. He plucked the tissue-wrapped parcel and placed it on top of the sturdiest books on the counter to unwrap. The book inside was clearly modern, at least compared to the others. It had a thin, flexible leather or faux-leather cover and it was the size of a trade paperback. It looked a little like a high-end journal and he half-expected it to have blank pages inside.
He didn’t get to find out, though, as the moment he flipped it open he felt a wave of fiery heat burning his fingers and racing pain ran through his entire body. It was pain so intense that his thoughts shorted out. All was pain, and he didn’t know if he was going to be sick or pass out. Then his vision went black.