Immediately, Cooper was surrounded by books. They were crammed on to shelves right in the doorway, so that he couldn’t get past without brushing against them. Further in, the tiny rooms had been stuffed with books from floor to ceiling. They were piled on the floor and on the bare wooden stairs, and no doubt they filled the upper rooms as well. On a table, Cooper saw a set of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories and a 1935 almanac with board covers mottled with mould. There was an overwhelmingly musty smell of old paper – paper that had soaked up the damp from many decades spent in unheated stone houses on wet hillsides.
‘Hello?’ called Cooper.
Lawrence Daley wore a silk waistcoat with a fancy pattern that was none too clean, and his brown corduroy trousers had become baggy at the knees from hours of crouching to reach the lower shelves. On occasions, Cooper had seen Lawrence wearing a bow tie. But today he had an open-necked check shirt, with his sleeves rolled back over pale forearms. His hair was uncombed, and he looked dusty and sweaty, as if it were the height of summer outside with the temperature in the eighties, rather than creeping up from zero towards another snowfall.
‘I’ve been trying to sort out the Natural History section,’ said Lawrence when he saw Cooper appear round the stacks. ‘Some of these books have been here since Granny’s day. They’re still priced in shillings, look. A customer brought one to me yesterday and insisted on paying fifteen pence for it. I couldn’t argue, because that was what the price on the label converted at in new money.’
‘Are you throwing them out?’ asked Cooper, wrinkling his nose at the musty smell and the cloud of dust that hung in the air.
‘Throwing them out? Are you kidding? I can’t throw them out. They just need re-pricing.’
‘But if they’ve been here since your grandmother ran the shop …’
‘I know, I know. They’re not exactly fast sellers. But if that were all I was interested in, I’d stack the place to the ceiling with Harry Potters, like everyone else does. It’s Detective Constable Cooper, isn’t it?’
‘Ben Cooper, yes. I wondered if you had any books on aircraft wrecks. There are so many wrecks around this area – there must be something published about them.’
‘If you go right to the back and through the curtain on the left, then down a few steps, you might find something halfway up the shelves,’ said Lawrence.
‘Thanks.’
Cooper made his way through the aisles of books. He passed Poetry and Literature, Biography and Philosophy, until he reached a dead end at Geography. He turned left at Art and found Music lurking in a curtained-off alcove at the head of a flight of stairs leading down into a cellar. The sides of the stairwell had been filled with more bookshelves. A few creaky steps down, Cooper came across Air Transport. It seemed a curiously modem subject for Eden Valley Books, and he wasn’t surprised that it was hidden away. He looked down into the darkness at the bottom of the stairs and wondered what Lawrence had chosen to confine to the cellar. Probably something like Computers and Information Technology.
But there, sure enough, were two slim volumes on Peak District aircraft relics, exactly what he wanted. He wondered if this place was really some kind of Aladdin’s Cave where you could find anything you truly wanted, if you wished hard enough. Lawrence Daley made a strange genie, though.
‘Just the thing, Lawrence,’ he said, when he had made his way back to the counter. ‘I found two.’
‘Amazing,’ said Lawrence. ‘And is there a price on them?’
‘Well, no actually.’
Lawrence sighed. ‘Then I can’t charge you anything at all, can I?’
‘Of course you can.’
‘Not if there’s no label. It’s against the Trade Descriptions Act.’
‘I’m not sure that’s how it works,’ said Cooper. ‘Anyway, I can’t take them without paying you for them.’
‘Well, fifty pence then.’
‘If you say so.’
Cooper began to go through his pockets. He found the estate agent’s leaflets and pulled them out of the way while he felt at the bottom for some change. His pager was vibrating again, but it could wait.
‘Hello,’ said Lawrence, ‘have you fallen into the company of conmen and thieves?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Estate agents,’ he said, pointing at the leaflets. ‘Are you buying a house?’
‘I can’t afford that,’ said Cooper. ‘I’m just looking for a place to rent for a while.’
‘Ah. Striking out on your own? Or is there a live-in partner involved somewhere?’
‘On my own.’
‘Oh. And have you not found anywhere yet?’
‘No.’
Cooper handed over his fifty pence, and Lawrence rattled it into the drawer of his till, then found a striped paper bag from somewhere under the counter. Cooper stood looking at some postcards and fliers stuck to a board near the counter. Most of them were advertising the services of typing agencies, clairvoyants and aromatherapy specialists, but there was one that caught his eye.
‘There’s a furnished flat advertised here,’ he said. ‘It’s in Welbeck Street, by the river.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lawrence.
‘That’s handy for town. I could walk to work from there. And it sounds quite a reasonable rent, too. Do you know who this person is? Mrs Shelley?’
‘I’m afraid so. It’s my aunt.’
‘Really?’
‘She lives in Welbeck Street herself, but she owns the house next door as well,’ said Lawrence. ‘My uncle had dreams of knocking the two places together and creating some kind of palatial town house to swan around in. God knows why – there were only ever the two of them, with no children.’
‘I have an uncle like that, too – he loves unfinished projects. It seems to give him a sense of immortality. He doesn’t think he can possibly die until all the jobs are finished.’
‘It didn’t work with Uncle Gerald – he died before he could even get round to knocking any walls down.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Aunt Dorothy wasn’t. She was over the moon to be rid of him. She had the house next door split into two flats. She had a proper job done of it. I think she wanted the workmen to pound the memories of Uncle Gerald into dust with their sledgehammers and cover him over with a nice layer of plaster and some magnolia wallpaper.’
‘And one of the flats is empty, is it?’
‘It was, when she asked me to put the card up,’ said Lawrence. ‘It might have gone by now, she hasn’t said. I’ve told her to make sure she lets it to the right sort of person. Reliable and trustworthy
