She has always felt safest surrounded by books. The library back in Dodsworth, happily browsing the early readers while her mum graded papers in the reference section. Blackwell’s in Oxford, a cornucopia of culture, everything from Aeschylus to X-Men comics. The Bodleian—an actual living temple to literature and learning. The quiet of the library at Pelham, with the low shaded lamps glowing off the dark wooden desks. Hannah has never understood people who get married at their college chapel—she has no religion, she feels no connection to that remote, austere place with its psalms and hymns and Latin lessons. She and Will got married at Edinburgh’s town hall, in a civil ceremony that lasted only a few minutes. But the library… yes. If she could have married Will in the Pelham library, that she could imagine—in the deep, reverential quiet, surrounded by all that humankind has ever known about love—every novel, every poem, every word.
So when she came to Edinburgh, all those years ago, running away from the unanswered letters from Pelham, filled with questions about her future that she couldn’t answer, perhaps it was natural that she looked for bookshop posts. A professional librarian position was out of the question, without a degree. So was work at a publisher. Once, Hannah had dreamed of being an editor, stacks of manuscripts on her desk and a wall of books she had edited in her living room. But the adverts all specified a BA at minimum, some of them asked for a master’s, or specialist qualifications. Bookshops, though… bookshops were not so prescriptive. Cathy didn’t even mind about her lack of retail experience. “As long as you love books,” she’d said, “it’ll all work out.”
And it had. At first she and Cathy had worked side by side, Cathy teaching her how to work the till, how to keep track of stock, who to help and who to leave alone.
Now, nine years on, Cathy is semi-retired and it’s Hannah, as much as anyone, who runs the shop—she and Robyn between them. It’s Hannah who speaks to the reps, checks the stock, decides how many of the new Paula Hawkins they will want, whether to put Haruki Murakami in the window, and when to ask Ian Rankin for an event. Robyn is their children’s specialist, and takes care of the shop’s Facebook page and Twitter feed.
Today, it’s been raining hard since twelve, and they’ve had only one customer in that time—a young man who has been browsing in the back room of the shop for a while. Cathy doesn’t like them to harass the customers with offers of assistance unless they look actually lost; Nothing worse than feeling jumped on, she always says. But customers who lurk out of sight in the back room are a bit of a red flag for shoplifting, particularly students with a rucksack, and it’s the nonfiction section, housing some of the most expensive books in the shop—academic reference volumes, and the fifty-pound Taschen art books. If you were going to steal stuff, that’s where you’d start.
“He needs to shit or get off the pot,” Robyn whispers to Hannah when she comes back from the staff room to find him still there, and Hannah laughs.
“I’ll go and see what he wants.”
She coughs as she enters the nonfiction section, not wanting to be seen to sneak up on customers. The man straightens and turns around and Hannah sees that he’s not as young as she thought. From the other side of the shop there was something about his sandy hair and flushed cheeks that made him look like a teenager with a schoolbag, but up close she can see he’s quite a long way past that, and as he stands, she catches a pink flash of scalp through the thinning hair at the back of his head. He’s probably in his mid-twenties, a little younger than her. Not a student, then. And probably not a shoplifter either.
“Can I help with anything?” she asks.
“Oh, h-hi,” he says. “Yes, actually.” His voice is tentative, and there’s a slight lilt in his accent. Not Scottish. Welsh, maybe? “I’m looking for a biography of Ted Bundy.”
Ted Bundy.
Hannah feels her lips thin. She tries not to be judgmental about reading—No such thing as a guilty pleasure is Cathy’s motto, and it’s one Hannah largely subscribes to. Jeffrey Archer to Geoffrey Chaucer, Outlander to The Outsider—they all keep the wheels of publishing turning and money coming into the tills, and if they give someone a happy few hours, that’s good enough for her. But still, she doesn’t really understand why anyone wants to buy true crime. Why would they voluntarily soak themselves in the misery of people like her?
“I’m not sure,” she says, trying to keep the tightness out of her voice. “You’re in the right place—it’ll be in this section if we have one. If not, I could order one in for you.”
They stand, side by side with their heads tipped, looking down the stack of true-crime biography, and at last Hannah shakes her head.
“No, sorry, it doesn’t look like we do. Was it specifically Bundy you were after, or can I recommend something else? I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is supposedly very good.” She taps the spine. “I haven’t actually read it, but my colleague Robyn liked it a lot, and it had great reviews. It’s about the hunt for the Golden State Killer. It’s not exactly a biography—more about the investigative side of things, I think.”
“Okay,” he says, somewhat to her surprise. He pulls it out of the bookshelf—a hefty hardback retailing at north of twenty pounds. “Thanks, I’ll take it.”
“Great, was there anything else?” Hannah asks.
She’s turning away for the till, expecting him to say no, but something in his face catches at her. He’s looking oddly… nervous. Expectant.
“Actually, yes,” he says. His voice flutes up half an octave, like a teenage boy’s. “Are you Hannah J-Jones?”
She stops in her tracks.
Her whole body goes instantly stiff, and then her cheeks flame with heat. For a long moment she just stares at him, frozen, trying to figure out what to say. Should she lie? Walk away? Refuse to answer?
It doesn’t matter what she says. Her stricken silence is an answer in itself, and she can see from the man’s face that he knows it, in spite of the subtle ways she’s changed her appearance since the trial—the glasses she started wearing full-time instead of just for watching TV; the long hair she sacrificed to anonymity. The difference is enough to fool the casual observer. But this guy is clearly far from that. He’s trying not to look pleased, but he is. He has hit the bullseye.
“Who are you?” she manages at last, and her voice surprises her. It is a hiss of anger. “Who are you?”
The young man’s pink-and-white face falls a little, and he looks slightly hurt.
“I’m a writer. My name’s Geraint.”
Of course.
“I’m sorry,” he’s saying. “I emailed asking if it would be okay if I p-popped past to introduce myself, but I didn’t hear back so I thought—”
Fuck.
Fuck.
The man is still speaking, something about an article, a podcast, an interview, but the words make no sense above the ringing in her head.
“I can’t do this,” she says, interrupting him. Her voice is still harsh and strange in her own ears. “Not here. You can’t come here again, do you understand?”
“I’m really sorry,” he says, and now he looks it. His face is crestfallen. “I should have thought. It never occurred—”
“Just—go,” she breaks in desperately, and he nods and sets the book gently back on the shelf.
“I am really sorry,” he repeats, with more emphasis this time, but she’s walking away from him now, unable to look him in the face, unable to think of anything except getting away from him. “Ryan said—”
It’s that one word that breaks the spell.
Ryan.
She stops, turns around.
“You spoke to Ryan?”
“Yes, he’s a good friend. It was Ryan who suggested coming to see you.”
“How—how is he?”
“He’s… I mean, he’s all right. He’s better than he was.”
She swallows, unable to admit that she wouldn’t know—because she hasn’t seen him for more than five years. What kind of friend does that make her?
“I really am sorry,” the man—Geraint—says again, miserably this time. “I really apologize for springing this on you like that. I should have realized this wasn’t the right time and place.”
“It’s okay,” she says, though it’s not, and it never was, and she wants to kick herself for saying it. “Look, email me, okay? I’ll reply, I promise. But you can’t come here. This is my work—they don’t know anything about—that time.”
“I understand,” he says, dropping his voice to a whisper, as though they are conspirators. “I’ll email. Thanks, Hannah.”
And then he’s gone.
After the shop door swings shut behind him, Hannah finds her legs are trembling and she gropes her way to the story corner beanbag and sits, her face in her hands, trying to stop shaking.