Martin Edwards - The Serpent Pool

Marc shook his head. ‘What kind of fool would climb a mountain in this weather?’

A dreamy look came into Cassie Weston’s eyes. Her lips parted, revealing front teeth that slightly overlapped. Somehow the imperfection made her all the more attractive.

‘Someone who likes living dangerously?’

‘Living dangerously is one thing. Killing yourself is quite another.’

‘I brought you a hot drink.’

‘You’re very good to me.’ Her expression was unreadable. ‘You were miles away.’

He waved at the chaotic mess of paperwork on his desk. ‘You caught me out.’

‘It’s not as if you were doing something wicked.’

Most people would have said something wrong . But Cassie wasn’t most people.

‘I should be checking the unpaid invoices. Cash flow is king, and all that.’

She handed him the mug. ‘What were you thinking of?’

He might have asked her much the same question. Cassie had worked for him since the autumn, but he still couldn’t make her out. One minute distant, the next, almost intimate, as if she were on the verge of confiding a secret. Whenever he tried to find out more about her, she pulled up the drawbridge, but this elusive contrariness was part of her appeal. What made her tick, what turned her on? Once upon a time, he’d wondered the same about Hannah. Cassie was a fresh challenge, a conundrum he yearned to solve.

More than once, when the shop was shut and the staff had gone home, he’d pulled her file from the cabinet and pored over her CV like a detective in search of clues. But he found so few. She came from Carlisle, and after a year spent studying for a degree in English literature, she’d given up on university in favour of the real world. Over the years she’d drifted from job to job. Typing here, waiting on tables there. Her job application mentioned that she wrote short stories in her spare time, but the one occasion he’d asked about them, she’d shaken her head in embarrassment and changed the subject.

‘I’m a book man,’ he said. ‘Living dangerously isn’t for me.’

‘You never know till you try.’

‘A place like this can’t be too exciting for a young woman like you.’

‘That isn’t what I meant,’ she said softly. ‘I enjoy it here. I find it fascinating…to learn from you.’

He’d tried to explain how much he loved it here, surrounded by thousands of second-hand books. Each had a story to tell, and not just in words written on the page. Every volume on every shelf had a past life. Sometimes all was revealed by an inscription in a flowing hand — ‘To Daisy, Merry Christmas, 25 December 1937’, ‘Given to Hubert Withers for one year of unbroken attendance at Cark Sunday School’ — sometimes the books came with no provenance and you had to play detective to find out how a rare book printed in Gibraltar when Victoria was on the throne finished up in a junk shop at Gateshead one hundred and twenty years later.

He relished teaching her how to buy and sell rare books, couldn’t help feeling flattered by the way she hung on his words as he described the tricks of the trade. How to spot books that weren’t what they seemed, like alleged signed firsts of The Man with the Golden Gun and Octopussy — neither of which was published until Ian Fleming was dead and buried. Book values flipped up and down like the stock market.

Pricing had little to do with literary merit, let alone critical acclaim, when the books were new. Winnie the Pooh wasn’t worth quite as much this year, while a set of early whodunnits by Miles Burton in pristine jackets would set the rich collectors aquiver with desire.

‘I’d hate to bore you,’ he said.

‘You don’t bore me at all.’ She considered him. ‘But has anyone ever dared to suggest you care more about books than people?’

From someone else, the question would be offensive. He wondered if she was referring to Hannah. He leant against the desk and smelt the coffee. Pungent Arabic, spiced with cardamom. Still too hot to drink.

‘Depends on which people.’

She pointed at the clutter of documents, paper clips and ring binders. ‘But you hate being a businessman.’

‘Running the shop and having to worry about cash flow and stuff is the price I pay for being my own boss.’ She was trying to find out about him, she must be interested. ‘There are plenty of other things I dread more.’

A light shone in her eyes. ‘Such as?’

‘The taxman, for a start,’ he said lightly.

She frowned, as if the answer disappointed her. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

As she moved away, he felt a stab of disappointment.

‘Any time,’ he said.

When he took the empty mug downstairs to the cafeteria, Cassie was behind the counter, talking to a customer on the phone. Some long and complicated inquiry about a search for a book whose title and author the caller couldn’t remember. A frustratingly common form of amnesia. She didn’t spare Marc a glance as he walked past.

A coal fire burnt in an inglenook on the ground floor, in between the bookshop and the cafe. The wind whistled in the chimney and from cracks in the window seals, but the crackling blaze kept the winter at bay. Marc warmed his hands before helping himself to a fat slab of chocolate gateau. As a penance, he sacrificed a couple of minutes to an exchange of pleasantries with Mrs Beveridge, who had taken over the running of the cafe from Leigh Moffat. A slice of the legacy from Aunt Imelda had enabled Marc to take a lease on premises in Sedbergh, now designated as a book town. For the moment, the store was little more than a handful of shelves annexed to Leigh’s cafe. He missed her, and wondered if she missed him as much.

Mrs Beveridge was efficient but voluble and he was already bored with her jokes about the suitability of her surname for someone who spent her working life serving tea, coffee and soft drinks. She was large and jolly and smelt of banana cake. Every now and then, she told him that he ought to make an honest woman of Hannah. Once, in frustration, he’d trotted out the old joke about what you feed a woman to put her off sex. When he said the answer was wedding cake, she’d uttered such a groan of dismay that the floorboards rattled. You couldn’t beat marriage for companionship, she maintained, although he gathered her recipe for connubial bliss involved keeping her husband well and truly under her thumb. Mr Beveridge was a retired chauffeur (‘and he still drives me to distraction!’) who spent every daylight hour on an allotment in Kendal, no doubt to keep a safe distance from his wife’s relentless chatter.

The kitchen staff had left early to get home before the weather worsened, and there wasn’t a customer in the shop. The mill was one of half a dozen buildings grouped around a yard; the others housed an assortment of craft shops, and visitors often drifted from one store to another. But not today.

He fled from Mrs Beveridge’s clutches to the detective fiction shelves, and blew dust off a set of squat reprints lacking dust jackets. Hack work produced by long-forgotten practitioners with names like Bellairs, Morland and Straker. Titles as hard to shift as aged relatives who have long outstayed their welcome. It was increasingly difficult to sell anything that wasn’t out of the ordinary. He blamed the Internet, as most booksellers blamed the Internet for whatever went wrong with their business. An Agatha Christie reprint from the Sixties, a Ruth Rendell from the Eighties? No, thanks. You could get them online for a handful of pennies.

Rarities. He must keep finding them, if his business was to survive. He didn’t need Hannah to remind him that he couldn’t live off the legacy for ever. He had a few scouts, people with the know-how to search out scarce books, who were ready to sell at a hefty discount in order to make a quick profit. Charity shops and car boot sales were a waste of time, but he haunted book fairs, although the good buys were to be had from fellow dealers early on the first morning, long before the doors opened to admit Joe Public. Even the punters were savvier than ten years ago. Internet comparison sites and online auctions made everyone an expert.