Read Online Quiet Neighbors by Catriona McPherson - Free Book Online Page A

between a squeal and a groan, and it stopped dead after less than a second. Jude cocked her head and, as she turned, she thought she saw something too. Just a flicker of movement and nothing to con cern her since it was outside, glimpsed through the half-bare branches of the yellowing apple tree down there. As she moved closer to the tiny grimy pane to take a better look, though— bam bam bam! Someone was pounding the front door loud enough to shake the building’s rickety bones, stirring dust and setting the mice in the walls—silent till now—scurrying and scrabbling. Jude heard the beat of wings and wondered if gulls had risen from the roof or if somewhere in the eaves of the attic floor an owl or even a bat had been woken.

Six
    Bam bam bam!
    Police! Jude thought. Who else would pound on a door like that? But police usually shout through it too.
    And as she thought it, the shout came. “Hurry up and let me in—I’m drowning!”
    Jude fumbled the door open and was bundled aside, staggering against the nearest carrier bag of paperbacks as a woman, coatless despite the drizzle, hurried inside.
    â€œWhat a pigging awful day,” she said, shaking the two flaps of her cardigan. She had poolside flip-flops on and the toes of her socks were wet from the puddles.
    â€œHe’s—I’m—We’re not really open,” Jude said.
    â€œI’m not buying,” said the woman. She was perhaps sixty, but her hair was older than the rest of her, from years of home perms (or at least cheap perms) and a colour chosen when she was young and never noticed again. “Maureen,” she said, wiping her hand on her jeans and holding it out. “From the Cancer. Charity shop,” she added, seeing Jude’s eyes widen. “I’m overdue for a rootle.”
    She strode off along the corridor, clicking on lights, quite at home.
    â€œLowell lets me have his Dan Browns and I give him our Bookers.”
    â€œWell, okay, if you’re … ” Jude said. She had never lived in a small town. “How do you know where to start?” she said, looking up and down the choked passageway and thinking about the three floors around and above them.
    â€œYou’re not wrong!” said Maureen. “I could have danced a jig when I heard you’d arrived.”
    â€œMe?”
    â€œTo take a shovel to it.” Maureen turned sharp left at the desk, into the short off-shoot by Art and Architecture, where Lowell kept a kettle and some mugs on a counter. He filled the kettle from a spout above the tiny washbasin in the toilet and Jude tried not to think about the pipes, nor about the coffee-crusted spoon in the sugar bag and the sugar-crusted spoon in the coffee jar. She would take them back to Jamaica House and soak them. Better, she would buy plastic ones at Tesco. He might not notice that either.
    â€œCan I get you a cuppa?” she asked.
    Maureen shuddered, making her smile. Then she batted back a curtain just beyond the kettle counter, another of Lowell’s curtains, and opened a door Jude had never seen. She followed to the doorway and peered in.
    It was a room about ten feet square, stacked high with carrier bags, wall to wall, all the way from the back to the door.
    â€œI—I didn’t—” Jude said.
    â€œO-ho!” said Maureen. “He’s kept this bit quiet, has he?”
    Jude let her eyes travel over the mound of bulging bags. It filled the room, washing up the walls and brushing the ceiling. She had seen something like it once before, an illustration in a history text about the third Reich. Inside a bookshop, it was obscene.
    Some of the bags were tied shut, but most gaped, showing a coxcomb of yellowing paperback pages, the odd flash of colour from a jacket or glint of gold from an embossed title. Jude couldn’t bear to imagine the bottom layer—crumbled bindings, torn pages, crushed spines.
    Maureen had fished out her