The Magus of Hay(37)

‘Because?’

‘Basically, because I’m a nosy cow.’

Tom Armitage was silent for a moment. Betty heard a semi-distant sawing in the phone, somehow not a sound you associated with antique furniture. She saw Jeeter Kapoor outside his shop, talking to the old lady who whistled.

‘Trouble with me,’ Armitage said, ‘is that as long as everything’s ticking over nicely I tend not to ask too many questions. That, of course, is one of the things about me that irritates the hell out of women.’

‘Luckily, I’m very accommodating.’

‘We must meet one day. Are you a divorcee?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I see. So he’s off at last, is he?’

‘Who?’

‘Jamie Oliver.’

‘We’re renting it. From Mr Oliver.’

‘Ah. And somebody told you bad things about the shop, did they?’

‘Are there bad things?’

‘Way I see it, the only reason you’d be talking to me, well out of town, is not wanting someone to know you were asking. Now that could be Oliver, in which case, fair enough. A smug git. I can tell you we more or less used it as a store room. We’d have big items in the window and if anybody was interested there was a phone number to call.’

‘Who had the place before you?’

‘My old man, actually. This was when Booth was getting into the papers as King of Independent Hay. Idea of that appealed to my dad, so he sold his business down in Essex, came up there, bought a big place and accumulated other bits of the town over the years. Of which Back Fold was one.’

‘When was this?’



‘Early nineties.’

‘And he bought it from…?’

‘Bloke who’d been there about a year and, if my old man was interested, was selling it off cheap. Because… ah, this might be what you’ve heard about. There was a chap who dealt in ancient comic books – war comics. We kept finding pages under floor-boards or lining shelves. Stormtroopers with bayonets, screaming Die Englisher pig! Which he did, apparently.’

‘Who did?’

‘The guy who sold the comics.’

‘Died?’

‘Overdid it with the drugs.’

‘Oh.’

‘Look, I don’t… I don’t know the details. Except that he apparently wasn’t found for about a week.’

‘Where?’

‘Well… where he lived.’

‘Over the shop?’

‘I suppose.’

‘I see.’

‘Which is the only bad thing I’ve heard connected with that shop. But we all have to die somewhere, don’t we?’

‘Can’t have been pleasant,’ Betty said, ‘for whoever found him after a week.’

She was looking at the whistling old lady, who sounded angry with Jeeter Kapoor.

‘If you en’t seen it,’ she said, ‘you got no right to say it en’t true.’

‘All right.’ Kapoor had his hands up. ‘So it’s true.’

‘Pleasant?’ Tom Armitage said. ‘No, it wasn’t, apparently. Place probably needed fumigating. They said you could smell him for… quite a while afterwards. In fact – oh hell, if you want the truth, an implausible amount of time afterwards. See, anything goes a bit putrid in a cupboard now, you’ll be wishing I’d said nothing.’

‘People who OD on drugs, they’re often a bit disturbed.’



‘I wouldn’t know, Mrs T. Like I said, I seldom ask questions.’

‘Not uncommon in the antiques trade, I’d guess,’ Betty said.

‘Oh, you are a caution. Are you beautiful? You sound beautiful.’

‘Face like the back end of a Renault Megane. When you sold it to James Oliver… did you tell him about the history?’

‘There is no history, for heaven’s sake! If some chap had gone berserk and slaughtered his entire family there, I’d’ve felt obliged to mention it, but nothing happened. So a guy OD’d on something. Commonplace end in those days. And Oliver was such a superior sort of fellow – agreeing a price and then coming back with a lower offer, saying he’d found something wrong – that I probably wouldn’t have told him anyway. Look, I’ll break the habit of a lifetime and ask: has something scared you? Have you smelled anything?’

‘I don’t get scared by this kind of thing,’ Betty said.

‘Good for you.’ He sneezed. ‘Sorry… bloody sawdust everywhere. Look, all I’d say to you is that places like that tend to become a refuge for people on the run. I don’t mean from the police or anything, but from something drastic in their lives – broken relationships, bereavement, unexpected job-loss. Not always happy people, that’s what I’m saying. And they tend not to stay long. I’d guess that shop’s been an unhappy stopgap in too many lives. So nobody’s ever bothered to make it look or feel good. How’s that?’