The Pebblewick Chronicles - Chapter three - Sunday

Sunday Morning

Sunday.

After everything that had happened the previous day, I decided that The Salty Page could survive opening a little later than usual.

Sunday was never a particularly reliable day for business.

Mostly, it was a reminder that people preferred walks, roast dinners and afternoon naps to buying books.

The previous few Sundays had been especially disappointing. One memorable morning had produced exactly two visitors. The first wanted directions to the public toilets. The second came inside purely to avoid a passing shower.

Neither purchased so much as a bookmark.

By the time I unlocked the door and turned the sign to OPEN, the bells of St Bartholomew's had fallen silent and the congregation was already emerging from the church.

I paused for a moment on the pavement.

There were more of them than usual.

Quite a few more.

Attendance at St Bartholomew's had been declining for years. Reverend Finch continued his duties with admirable determination, but there were Sundays when the choir seemed in serious danger of becoming the majority of the congregation.

Not today.

Today the churchyard was unexpectedly busy.

Groups stood among the gravestones talking in low voices. Others lingered by the gate long after the service had ended. Even those making their way home appeared in no particular hurry.

Horace would undoubtedly have described it as an encouraging congregation.

I suspected the Almighty had received rather less credit than circumstances.

After all, only twenty-four hours earlier an American tourist had died inside the church immediately following a wedding.

This was Pebblewick.

Curiosity was practically a local industry.

The wedding was already becoming the wedding.

The one future conversations would refer to without needing further explanation.

"You remember the wedding?"

"Which one?"

"The wedding."

And everyone would know exactly which wedding was being discussed.

By breakfast several competing versions of events were already circulating through the village.

According to one account, Hank had collapsed in the middle of the ceremony.

According to another, he had collapsed moments after it ended.

Someone else claimed that he had died during Here Comes the Bride, although how this fitted with the established fact that he had remained alive throughout the wedding remained conveniently unexplained.

Facts had never been particularly important to a good village story.

Meanwhile, Mrs Watkins had announced that she had solved the mystery.

"I knew it was a heart attack," she informed anyone willing to listen.

Apparently she had known this almost immediately.

This was not entirely how I remembered matters.

I distinctly recalled Mrs Watkins hurrying towards the church with the enthusiasm of a woman who had spent forty years waiting for Pebblewick to produce its first genuine homicide.

One could hardly blame her.

Real murders were thin on the ground.

Unfortunately for Mrs Watkins, there had been no murder.

No poison hidden in the wedding cake.

No sinister stranger lurking among the guests.

No disputed will.

No secret inheritance.

No dark conspiracy.

Simply a heart attack.

Mrs Watkins had therefore decided that correctly identifying a natural death constituted successful detective work.

I saw little advantage in challenging that conclusion.

Near the church gate someone had placed a small bouquet of flowers.

There was no card attached.

No name.

Just a simple gathering of wildflowers left in memory of a visitor whom, until a few days ago, nobody in Pebblewick had known existed.

For a short while people would remember Hank.

They would remember the cheerful American in the Panama hat.

They would remember his booming laugh.

They would remember the afternoon he was pursued along the harbour by a determined squadron of seagulls.

Molly would remember the scones she had put aside for him.

Mrs Watkins would remember the mystery that wasn't.

Reverend Finch would remember the man who died in his church.

Assuming, of course, that he remembered his name.

Then, gradually, life would continue.

It always did.

By the end of the summer, most people would probably have forgotten Hank entirely.

That sounds cruel, but it is simply the nature of villages.

Places like Pebblewick remember everything right up until something newer arrives.

I stepped inside The Salty Page, straightened a display of paperback novels and settled behind the counter to await my first customer.

Nothing happened.

Half an hour drifted by.

Still nothing.

I made tea.

Another half hour disappeared.

Nothing.

The churchyard slowly emptied.

The conversations faded away.

Harbour Street returned to its usual gentle quiet.

Even the seagulls appeared to have declared a morning of rest.

By midday I had sold precisely nothing.

Not a novel.

Not a postcard.

Not a local-history booklet.

Not even a bookmark.

After the excitement, confusion and sadness of the previous day, I found the stillness strangely reassuring.

Pebblewick, at last, seemed to be returning to normal.

I really should have known better.

Sunday Afternoon

The afternoon, as it turned out, had no intention whatsoever of remaining quiet.

At first there was little indication of this.

By half past twelve I had finished my tea, eaten a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps and settled down behind the counter with the weekly order book.

There are aspects of running a bookshop that sound far more exciting than they actually are.

Ordering stock is one of them.

Most people imagine booksellers spending their days discussing great literature, recommending forgotten classics and engaging in fascinating conversations about philosophy.

In reality, a surprising amount of time is devoted to staring at forms and wondering why Mrs Watkins has once again purchased a novel containing at least three murders before Chapter Five.

Still, there were compensations.

Book orders told you a great deal about people.

Sometimes considerably more than they intended.

Captain Haddock, for example, had requested a book on the knots used by sailors of different nationalities in ports around the world.

I looked at the title again.

Knots Used by Different Nationalities in Different Ports.

I frowned.

I had never previously considered that knots possessed national identities.

Did Dutch sailors tie ropes differently from French sailors?

Was there a knot favoured in Genoa but regarded with deep suspicion in Liverpool?

Did experienced mariners travel the world identifying nationalities from mooring ropes?

"Ah yes," they would say knowingly. "Definitely Belgian."

Perhaps there was a perfectly sensible explanation.

Knowing Captain Haddock, there almost certainly was.

Unfortunately, discovering it would require asking him.

That carried the very real danger of receiving not merely an explanation but a complete maritime history stretching back to the Phoenicians.

I moved quickly on.

Next came Mr Milton-Price.

Pebblewick's self-appointed gentleman farmer had ordered two books.

The first concerned sheep and cattle breeds.

That seemed entirely reasonable.

The second was a history of Georgian architecture.

That seemed substantially less so.

I studied his name.

What precisely was Mr Milton-Price planning?

His farmhouse was not Georgian.

Neither was his barn.

Nor, for that matter, his tractor.

His parents had arrived in the village many decades earlier, purchased a smallholding and embarked upon what the family referred to as farming.

Mr Milton-Price had continued the tradition.

He now possessed several sheep.

At least I assumed he did.

The number appeared to decrease every time I passed his fields.

Whether this represented poor accounting or an agricultural strategy beyond my understanding remained unclear.

Whatever the explanation, Georgian architecture seemed an unlikely development.

I decided not to investigate.

Experience had taught me that asking Mr Milton-Price simple questions often resulted in astonishingly complicated answers.

Miss Cartwright from the village school had ordered a book entitled Teaching in the Next Century.

I stared at the title.

A little late for preparation, surely.

Unless Miss Cartwright possessed information regarding the future that the rest of us had somehow missed.

I ticked her order.

Then came Mrs Watkins.

Another crime novel.

Naturally.

Less than twenty-four hours after declaring that finishing her previous murder mystery had left her emotionally exhausted, she had purchased another.

Mrs Watkins recovered from literary trauma with remarkable speed.

I reviewed the list once more.

Captain Haddock. Knots.

Mr Milton-Price. Livestock and Georgian buildings.

Miss Cartwright. The future.

Mrs Watkins. Murder.

Everything appeared perfectly ordinary.

That, in retrospect, should have worried me.

Pebblewick had a habit of becoming interesting immediately after things started to look normal.

I was considering whether to make a second cup of tea when I heard the sound of an approaching engine.

Not an unusual occurrence in itself.

The manner in which it was approaching, however, was.

The vehicle was travelling down Harbour Street at a speed that suggested either an emergency or someone operating under the mistaken impression that Pebblewick was considerably wider than it actually was.

I looked up.

The engine grew louder.

A moment later tyres screeched.

I nearly dropped my pencil.

A dark car came hurtling around the corner and stopped directly outside The Salty Page.

The brakes protested loudly.

Before I had time to rise from my chair, the passenger door flew open.

A young woman stumbled onto the pavement.

The door slammed shut again.

The car accelerated immediately.

For a brief second I thought the driver might be turning around.

Instead, he shot towards the harbour end of the street, swung sharply around the bend and disappeared.

The entire incident lasted perhaps ten seconds.

Silence returned.

I remained sitting where I was.

The young woman remained standing on the pavement.

My pencil rested halfway across the order book.

For several moments nobody moved.

Then I stood and walked to the window.

The girl looked no older than eighteen or nineteen.

She was carrying no luggage apart from a shoulder bag.

In fact, she was not carrying even that.

As I watched, the bag came sailing from around the corner where the car had vanished.

It landed several yards away and slid across the pavement.

The driver evidently believed in thoroughness.

The girl looked after the departing vehicle.

The vehicle did not come back.

Yesterday an American tourist had died in the church.

Today a young woman had apparently been deposited outside my bookshop by a stranger who then threw her belongings after her.

I sighed.

So much for a peaceful Sunday afternoon.

I opened the shop door and stepped outside.

Juliette

I hurried outside.

The girl was still standing exactly where she had been abandoned, staring down Harbour Street as though she expected the car to return and explain itself.

It did not.

A shoulder bag lay several yards away on the pavement where it had evidently been thrown after her.

For a few moments neither of us moved.

The gulls watched from the harbour wall.

Harbour Street watched from behind its curtains.

Pebblewick had always possessed a remarkable ability to notice unusual events without appearing to do so.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

The girl looked at me.

She said nothing.

Up close, she appeared no older than eighteen or nineteen. She had dark hair pulled back loosely, travel-weary clothes and the exhausted expression of somebody whose day had gone spectacularly wrong.

I retrieved the bag and offered it to her.

"Come inside."

She hesitated.

Then nodded.

A few minutes later she was sitting beside the counter in The Salty Page, holding a glass of water with both hands.

Now that the immediate shock had passed, she looked close to tears.

"You're safe," I said.

Nothing.

"You're all right now."

Still nothing.

I tried again.

"Are you hurt?"

The blank expression remained exactly where it was.

Then understanding dawned.

Not on her.

On me.

The problem wasn't that she wasn't answering.

The problem was that she hadn't understood a word I had said.

The girl dabbed at her eyes, took a breath and spoke.

"Bonjour. Je m'appelle Juliette. Je viens de France."

That much, fortunately, survived from my schooldays.

Hello.

Her name was Juliette.

She was small and slender, with shoulder-length dark brown hair that had become rather untidy during her journey from France. She had large brown eyes, an expressive face and the sort of smile that appeared cautiously at first and then seemed to transform her completely.

She was dressed simply in jeans, white trainers and a pale summer blouse, with a light jacket tied around her waist. Around her neck was a small silver pendant which, I would later discover, had been given to her by her grandmother.

She came from France.

My French vocabulary had not expanded much beyond that in the years since.

Still, diplomacy had begun from weaker foundations.

"Bonjour," I replied.

Excellent start.

Encouraged, I attempted a second sentence.

"Je m'appelle..."

Then, for reasons I cannot explain, I became suddenly uncertain whether I remembered the correct French pronunciation of my own name.

"Harold."

Juliette looked at me.

I looked at Juliette.

After a moment, she smiled.

At least one of us had successfully introduced ourselves.

What followed was less a conversation and more a carefully choreographed international incident.

My French consisted largely of forgotten classroom fragments, while Juliette's English appeared to be equally limited.

As a result, communication depended heavily upon pointing, shrugging, smiling and increasingly ambitious hand gestures.

"You've come a long way," I said slowly.

Blank expression.

I pointed towards her.

Then towards the door.

Then made a pair of walking fingers across the counter.

"France?"

"Oui."

I spread my arms dramatically.

"Long way."

Juliette nodded cautiously.

I pointed at the floor.

"Pebblewick."

Then towards her.

"France."

Then stretched my arms so far apart that I nearly knocked over a display of local history books.

"Long way."

This time she laughed.

Not a large laugh.

Just enough to suggest we were making progress.

The progress itself remained modest.

Nevertheless, it was progress.

After several minutes Juliette suddenly remembered something.

Her eyes widened.

She opened her bag and began searching frantically through its contents.

At last she produced a folded newspaper cutting.

The mystery resolved itself immediately.

It was an advertisement for a summer position at the Pebblewick Hotel.

Apparently the management, for reasons known only to themselves, had placed the advertisement in a French newspaper.

The hotel was seeking seasonal staff.

Juliette had answered the notice.

I looked at her.

Then at the advertisement.

Then at her again.

"At least we know why you're here."

She smiled politely.

Which was fortunate, because she clearly had no idea what I had just said.

I telephoned the hotel.

After some explanation, reassurance and a brief discussion during which I attempted to describe the situation without sounding as though foreign tourists were routinely being abandoned outside my premises, I was assured that someone would arrive immediately.

While we waited, I wandered over to the travel section and retrieved an atlas.

Juliette joined me at the counter.

I opened the map of France.

"Home?" I asked.

This worked spectacularly better than anything else I'd tried.

Immediately her face brightened.

She leaned over the atlas and pointed towards Brittany.

Then to a tiny dot.

"Locronan."

"Locronan?"

"Oui."

I studied the map.

A small village in Brittany.

A small village beside the sea.

In that respect at least, Juliette may have travelled hundreds of miles, but she had not entirely left home behind.

The bell above the shop door rang.

I looked up.

Mrs Caroline Evans stood in the doorway.

If efficiency had ever taken human form, it would have looked remarkably like Mrs Evans.

Tall, neatly dressed and perpetually composed, she possessed the air of a woman who organised her life using carefully labelled folders and expected the rest of the universe to do likewise.

Even on a Sunday afternoon she looked immaculate.

Cream blouse.

Dark trousers.

Sensible shoes.

The sort of person who could probably balance the hotel accounts during a hurricane.

She and her husband David had taken over the Pebblewick Hotel five years earlier.

They were still considered newcomers.

This was not unusual.

In Pebblewick you could live somewhere for thirty years, raise a family, chair charitable committees and have a memorial bench dedicated in your honour, and there would still be at least one resident referring to you as "not originally from here."

Five years barely qualified as a trial period.

Mrs Evans rarely appeared flustered.

But when she saw Juliette, something softened in her expression.

"Juliette?"

The relief on the girl's face was immediate.

It was as though somebody had suddenly opened a window.

"Oui!"

Mrs Evans crossed the room and immediately began speaking fluent French.

“Bonjour, Juliette. Je suis Caroline Evans, de l’hôtel. Vous allez bien?”

Juliette nodded quickly.

“Oui… oui, merci.”

“Vous êtes blessée?”

“Non. J’ai eu peur, c’est tout.”

“Je comprends. Vous êtes en sécurité maintenant.”

Juliette’s eyes filled with tears again, although this time they seemed to be tears of relief.

“Merci. Je ne savais pas quoi faire. Je ne parle presque pas anglais.”

“Ne vous inquiétez pas. Je vais vous aider.”

I stood behind the counter listening to them.

I understood bonjour.

I understood merci.

I was fairly confident anglais had something to do with English.

After that, I was largely a spectator.

Mrs Evans continued.

“Comment êtes-vous arrivée à Pebblewick?”

Juliette began explaining, slowly at first and then more quickly as her confidence returned.

“Je suis partie de France. Je suis allée à Calais, puis j’ai pris le ferry pour Douvres. Après, j’ai pris le train pour Londres…”

Mrs Evans nodded.

“Et après Londres?”

Juliette hesitated.

“Un homme m’a proposé de m’emmener en voiture. Il a dit qu’il allait vers l’ouest.”

Mrs Evans’s expression changed.

“Vous êtes montée dans la voiture d’un inconnu?”

Juliette looked down.

“Oui.”

Even without understanding the words, I recognised that particular tone.

It was the international language of You did what?

Juliette continued more quietly.

“Il m’a amenée jusqu’ici. Puis il s’est arrêté devant la librairie. Il a jeté mon sac dehors et m’a dit de sortir.”

Mrs Evans stared at her.

“Et il est parti?”

“Oui.”

There was a short silence.

Then Mrs Evans put a reassuring hand on Juliette’s arm.

“Vous avez eu beaucoup de chance.”

Juliette nodded.

“Je sais.”

I looked from one to the other.

“You speak French?”

“A little,” said Mrs Evans.

I considered the conversation I had just witnessed.

“That looked considerably more than a little.”

Mrs Evans gave a small shrug.

I looked at Juliette.

Then at Mrs Evans.

Then I thought about the previous twenty minutes of me waving my arms around the bookshop.

“Of course you do.”

Mrs Evans sat beside Juliette and explained to me what she had said.

Slowly, the story of Juliette’s journey to Pebblewick began to emerge.

Juliette had seen the advertisement in a French newspaper and telephoned the hotel.

She had been offered the summer job.

Then she had set out for Pebblewick.

From France she had travelled to Calais, crossed to Dover by ferry and then taken the train to London.

After that, things had become considerably less straightforward.

With limited English and very little knowledge of Britain, Juliette had somehow managed to arrange a lift with a stranger who said he was travelling west.

He had brought her most of the way.

Then, for reasons Juliette herself did not entirely understand, he had suddenly stopped outside The Salty Page, thrown her bag onto the pavement, told her to get out and driven away.

I looked through the window towards the empty road.

“She was lucky.”

Mrs Evans nodded.

“Very.”

Apparently, the hotel had first placed the advertisement in France the previous summer.

Nobody had responded.

They had arranged for it to run again this year and then promptly forgotten about it.

When Juliette telephoned, Mrs Evans had been so surprised to hear from an actual applicant that they had decided to give her a chance.

Mrs Evans helped Juliette gather her things.

They were almost at the door when Juliette stopped and turned back towards me.

She said something in French.

I looked at Mrs Evans.

“She wants to know if you have a French copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel.”

I blinked.

“The French edition?”

Mrs Evans nodded.

It was an unusual request.

Fortunately, unusual requests were something of a speciality at The Salty Page.

As it happened, I had an old French-language copy tucked away on one of the shelves.

I found it and handed it to Juliette.

She opened the cover, looked at the first page and smiled.

“Combien?”

I understood that one.

I shook my head.

“No. Gift.”

She looked uncertainly at Mrs Evans, who translated.

Juliette’s smile widened.

“Merci, Harold.”

“You’re welcome.”

Juliette tucked the book carefully into her bag.

Mrs Evans opened the door, and together they set off towards the Pebblewick Hotel.

I watched them go.

A young French woman from Locronan had arrived in Pebblewick for the summer.

She spoke almost no English.

She had been in the village for less than an hour.

I had a feeling she was going to fit in perfectly.

I looked at the clock.

For the second day running, I decided to close early.

Some weekends, owning a bookshop was exhausting.