The Secret of Happy Ever After (23 page)

Michelle ignored the hand but followed him towards the back, trying to suppress the part of her brain that
was
suddenly considering the advantages of a haunted bookshop.

At the end of the main room, where the doorway had been knocked through to create one long space, she hesitated. Rory, though, strode on.

‘It’s not . . .’ Michelle began, and then, as she spoke, something black darted across the room, and she let out a shriek.

It was huge. A huge black . . . rat? She almost wished it had been a ghost now, because whatever it was, it was massive – it looked like the sort of mega-rat that was meant to be breeding in the London sewage system. Michelle felt sick. The whole point of moving out of the big city was supposed to be getting away from things like that.

To her horror, Rory was on his knees, crawling towards it.

‘I’ll get a box,’ she called, from a safe distance. ‘We can trap it under there and get someone from the council to come and zap it.’

‘No need,’ said Rory. He sat up and reached into his jacket pockets, patting them down until he found what he was looking for. ‘Ah. Good.’

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Michelle was frantically tipping paperbacks out of a nearby cardboard display box. ‘Should I get gloves from next door? It’s probably riddled with fleas.’

‘Possible, but I doubt it.’ Rory peeled off the top two Polo mints and offered them to the bottom shelf of boarding-school books in the children’s section.

Michelle stared at his long fingers with horror, waiting for whatever it was to leap out and gnaw them with its sharp teeth.

‘Come on,’ said Rory, in a soothing, sing-song tone. ‘It’s OK, it’s just me. Come on.’

Slowly, very slowly, a black nose appeared from under the shelf. A mass of black hair followed it and Michelle’s stomach turned because it was filthy and dirty and still looking pretty mega-rat-like to her and . . .

‘Don’t
touch
it!’ she blurted out, as Rory’s hand deposited the Polos in the thing’s mouth and then fondled its black ears.

‘He’s not an it,’ said Rory. ‘He’s a he, thank you very much.’

Michelle put a table of local maps between it and herself. ‘What the hell is
he
?’

‘Charming. Tavish, this is Michelle Nightingale, your new landlady. Michelle, this is Tavish, your shop dog.’

‘
My
shop dog?’

‘Well, not yours, technically.’ Rory reached out and grabbed hold of the collar buried under the matted coat. ‘Cyril’s.’

‘There was nothing about a dog in the lease. How long’s he been here?’ She racked her brains. ‘We’ve been open nearly two months, don’t tell me he’s been hiding under the floorboards all that time? What’s he been eating?’

‘I doubt he’s been here that long. He’s been living up at Four Oaks kennels since before Christmas, I do know that.’ The dog was now snuffling about Rory’s jacket pockets, in between licking his hand gratefully. Its tongue darted out from the matted fur, a shock of pink against the black. Michelle couldn’t even make out any eyes.

‘You’re in a bit of a state, aren’t you, laddie?’ he crooned, more Scottish than ever. ‘Ye couldn’t get him a biscuit, could ye, Michelle? Poor wee lad’s awful peckish.’

For a moment, Michelle considered telling Rory what to do with his dog, and his biscuit, but it was late, and she was tired, and spooked. Despite herself, relief was pounding through her system that it wasn’t a ghost or a super-rat, neither of which would do her business any good.

And although the voice in her head was wailing in irritation, she couldn’t help feeling sorry for the poor bedraggled mutt. He looked exhausted, and more scared than she was.

‘Take him through to the staff room in the back,’ she said. ‘And stop doing that awful Braveheart voice.’

Rory straightened up, hoisted the little dog under his arm and smiled crookedly at it. He didn’t seem to care that the dog was depositing dust and drool on his wool coat. In fact, he seemed quite pleased to see it, and Tavish seemed relatively sanguine about being tucked under his arm like a camp handbag.

‘Shouldn’t Scottish terriers be more trimmed than that?’ she asked, before she could stop herself.

Rory turned his crooked grin in her direction. ‘Bit of a personal question. He is, normally. Bit of a doggy expert, are we?’

‘No,’ said Michelle and marched out to the front of the shop to close up.

By the time she went back to the kitchen, both Rory and Tavish had got stuck in to a packet of digestives. She put a fresh cup of coffee in front of him, having made one for herself, and he slurped from it, setting Michelle’s teeth on edge. She added to her own list of Rory’s irritating tics, to counter the good biscuits.

‘So, how come he’s here and not up at the kennels?’ she said, nodding at the dog. ‘This would be a good time to come clean, you know. Have you been keeping him in the flat? As well as your occasional child?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Rory stared at her, surprised.

‘Anna mentioned you had a son. The buggy, the other day. Upstairs. You never said it was
your
child when you told us to move the books.’

It had sounded a lot less rude in her head. Michelle wished it hadn’t slipped out, but now it had, she couldn’t take it back. Living alone had made her very witty on email, but not so good on non-edited, real-time conversation.

‘Should I have done?’ Rory carried on staring at her, and she found his expression hard to read. He wasn’t embarrassed, but he was clearly ticked off at being discussed. ‘I do have a son, yes, with my ex. And what else did Anna say?’

‘Nothing. Well . . .’ Michelle realised that she was annoyed he wasn’t embarrassed. Walking out on a pregnant woman was about as low as it got. It was cowardly. ‘She didn’t say anything else. Just that you and the mother split up before the baby was born.’

‘We did. I ended it, as a matter of fact.’ He sipped his coffee and regarded her squarely over the top of the mug. ‘Sorry, should I have issued you with some kind of press release about it? I didn’t realise you were running some kind of relationship drop-in centre as well as a bookshop.’

It hung between them, along with Michelle’s bubbling sense of outrage and his defensiveness. Hot air and cold air, mingling. Michelle couldn’t put her finger on why she felt so furious on behalf of a woman she’d never met, but she did. She fizzed with it.

‘Life is complicated,’ he said, in response to her glower. ‘I’m sure there are things in your life that haven’t worked out the way you hoped.’

Michelle opened her mouth to argue back, but something knowing in his tone stopped her. Was it so obvious, her failed marriage? Did he know? Was her mother right – that women who walk out on perfectly good marriages, looking for greener grass, ‘have that desperate air about them’?

‘You’re right,’ she said stiffly. ‘It’s none of my business.’

Rory looked surprised, as if he’d expected more of a fight from her.

‘What?’ She lifted her hands. Refusing to argue always wrongfooted Harvey; it was a tactic that had taken her a long time to learn. ‘I’m sure you had very good reasons.’

He left a thoughtful pause, then said sadly, ‘I did.’

‘Good. So did I.’

‘For what?’ The grey eyes were right on her face, at once, reading her.

Michelle couldn’t believe he’d lulled her into that. ‘For . . . the things that haven’t worked out,’ she said. Even that was more than she’d intended to say.

Rory said nothing, but let the tension slowly dissolve, which was helped by the dog’s curious snuffling.

‘So this was Cyril’s dog?’ asked Michelle, for something to say. ‘I didn’t notice it in the park. Did he walk him?’

Rory had brushed Tavish’s coat and now Michelle could make out a pair of shiny boot-button eyes above the black beard. He was staring at her with the same unnerving directness that Rory had.

‘Not since Agnes died. She had a little West Highland White terrier called Morag. You must have seen them. They used to go to the dog café on the high street.’

‘Oh,’ said Michelle, remembering. ‘Anna used to call them the salt and pepper dogs. Did they have matching coats?’

‘They did. Agnes and Morag died about the same time, then Tavish just stayed in with Cyril. I used to give him a quick trot round the block every so often, when I moved in upstairs. You’d be amazed how fast he could shift when he got near that café; I used to wonder if maybe he thought they’d be there, waiting for him.’

As he spoke, Rory stroked the dog’s long upright ears and it leaned in towards him, comforted. Michelle felt her heartstrings being tugged, but she resisted. She knew from experience how easy it was to let dogs sneak under your defences, and she had no room for one right now. Her heart still ached for Flash every time she spotted a spaniel in the park, and more than once, lonely in the middle of the night, she’d come up with a wild plan to kidnap him from the house when Harvey was at work.

Maybe in Phase Two, when she’d established both businesses, sold Swan’s Row for a profit and met an attractive silver-fox type man, she’d go back and get him. When she wasn’t scared of Harvey turning up, demanding access.

‘Did you run back here looking for your master?’ Rory asked the terrier, tickling his beard. ‘Have you been looking all over the town for him?’

‘Don’t!’ That had kept her awake for months, the heartbreaking image of Flash escaping to look for her, getting lost, starving, alone. ‘He’s fine now,’ she said, when Rory looked at her, startled at her outburst. ‘Can’t we just take him up to Cyril, if he’s such a quiet dog?’

‘Nope. They’ve got a strict no-pets policy at Butterfields. That’s why we had to take him to the rescue centre on the hill. Well,
I
had to take him.’

‘You did? Is that something you offer all your clients?’

Rory looked properly cross. ‘His son didn’t have time, and Cyril couldn’t face handing Tavish in – abandoning him, as he put it – so I said I’d do it. Not a fun experience.’ Tavish licked Rory’s hand. ‘I’d hoped someone would had given him a nice retirement home by now. I’d have taken him in myself, but we can’t have dogs in the office. Litigation risk. Shame, really, because he’d just sleep under the desk all day. They’d never know he was there.’

‘All dog owners say that,’ said Michelle darkly. ‘You
always
know they’re there. They have ways of making their presence felt.’

Rory snapped a biscuit in two, offered half to Tavish, and raised his eyebrow.

‘And that doesn’t help,’ she said without thinking. ‘He’ll get plaque.’

Rory gave Tavish the biscuit. ‘We’ve got to take our small pleasures where we can, at his age.’

Michelle’s heartstrings gave a mighty twang and she steeled herself. ‘Give the rescue a call, let them know we’ve got him,’ she said. ‘He can sleep down here tonight if they can’t come and get him till tomorrow.’

Clearly anxious at being left again, the little dog followed Rory as he tried to go, but he bent down and picked him up, plopping him on Michelle’s knee.

‘There,’ he said. ‘You might want to try to make friends with the wicked witch. She’s your new landlady for tonight.’

‘Just for tonight,’ said Michelle, raising a finger at them both.

12

When Anna arrived at the shop in the morning, having dropped Lily at school with a promise to talk to Pongo about whether he wanted to read
The Starlight Barking
next, she was surprised to see Michelle and Rory standing by the front desk, apparently engaged in quite an animated discussion.

Rory was definitely talking while Michelle kept trying to interrupt him by waving her arms about and pointing at things. Particularly something by the lower crime shelves.

Anna was intrigued. What could they be talking about? Not books, surely. More likely it was something to do with the shop. Michelle had her business face on. Her stern one.

Don’t glare like that, Michelle, thought Anna, with a rush of matchmaking excitement. Be nice to him! Rory was single – despite the child complication – and there weren’t many nice single men under fifty in Longhampton. Not many that were smart enough for Michelle, anyway. She’d despatched most of them over the starters round at the McQueens, just for liking football or short-sleeved shirts.

Rory’s body language was a lot more encouraging than Michelle’s: he was really trying to engage her attention. Not only was he smiling and pulling amused faces, he reached into his briefcase and offered her a book. Michelle, predictably, did her best not to take it.

Then Michelle glanced up, responding to a question, and although Anna ducked, it was too late. Michelle caught sight of her and pointed through the window display, then pointed to the desk, then at her watch.

Anna pushed open the door and went in, all casual smiles.

‘Good, you’re here,’ said Michelle, rubbing her hands together briskly as if she’d been caught doing something she shouldn’t. ‘Just to let you know, Rachel from the kennels will be coming in before ten to collect Tavish . . .’