‘It’s private property,’ she snapped. ‘You’re here at the owner’s invitation, and talking of which … POSY!’ Bellowing like a Billingsgate fishwife wasn’t enough. Nina was forced to jump down from her stool, always a tricky manoeuvre in a tight pencil skirt, to push open the office door as the flame-haired usurper made another note on his iPad. ‘POSY! Some strange bloke is trespassing.’
The strange bloke muttered something under his breath, the pale skin beneath his freckles pinking up. ‘I have every right to be here,’ he said stiffly, and Nina was sure that he reminded her of someone but she couldn’t think, for the life of her, who. Maybe that ginger bloke from last year’s Great British Bake Off?
‘Yeah, he does,’ said Posy, sticking her head round the office door. ‘This is Noah. Didn’t I introduce you?’
‘No, you didn’t.’ Nina swept another glance over this Noah. He was wearing a suit – a navy-blue suit, a white shirt and a narrow navy-blue tie. Honestly, who wore a suit and tie in this day and age? Apart from Posy’s husband Sebastian, but at least he accessorised his suits with polka-dot handkerchiefs or brightly coloured socks. Not like this guy, who coordinated his suit with his tie. Why would anyone do that?
‘Well, I’m pretty sure I did. I definitely introduced him to Very and it serves you right for being fifteen minutes late,’ Posy said implacably. ‘Noah’s a business analyst. He’s here to analyse the business. We did cover this in the staff meeting yesterday.’
‘That was yesterday. Have you any idea how much vodka I’ve drunk since then? Anyway, you know the business side of the business isn’t any of my business.’
Nina was genetically designed to tune out certain words like ‘business’ and ‘analyst’. And also ‘index-linked pension’, ‘slippers’ and ‘early night’.
‘Nina!’ Posy said with a sigh. ‘You knew we were looking at ways to grow the business. Working smarter. Digital whatnots. All that jazz.’
Noah, the business analyst, that Nina was still pretty sure she hadn’t been told about, had been silent during this exchange, but now he took a step forward.
‘I’m just here to observe your best business practices,’ he said, though Nina wasn’t sure she had any of them. She just turned up, clocked in, sold some books then trooped upstairs to get ready to go out and blow her wages on boys, booze and um, something else beginning with b.
‘It’s very creepy to just stand there and watch someone when they obviously don’t know you’re there,’ Nina persisted.
‘I did say hello, but you were shouting about coffee so perhaps you didn’t hear me,’ Noah said. ‘Anyway, it’s been established that I’m Noah and you’re Nina. Posy filled me in on the rest.’
‘I did,’ Posy said blandly, which could mean anything. It wasn’t as if Nina had led a blameless life. Far from it. ‘Nina, I’ve really got to go to the accountant’s now. He gets very stroppy if I’m even a minute late.’
Nina was feeling very stroppy herself and maybe Noah got the message because when Posy left in a panicked scramble, he decided to relocate to the office. Verity, though quiet herself, was sure to take a very dim view of being quietly observed, but as Nina perched on a stool and waited for the first customer of the day, she could hear unsettling noises from behind her.
Verity was chattering away. Laughing. Once, even snorting with mirth. It was very unlike Verity, who rarely chattered, or laughed, or snorted with mirth in the presence of strangers. ‘Can you believe that we still input stock into a ledger?’ she giggled.
‘You mean you write it down in a book?’ Noah, the so-called business expert, asked incredulously.
‘Yes, and then when we sell a book, we tick it off in the ledger.’
‘I didn’t notice a barcode scanner on the counter and your till … it belongs in a museum, doesn’t it?’
Nina patted the old-fashioned till affectionately. Bertha was at least forty years old and a little temperamental. Her drawer tended to stick but there was a particular spot you had to thump when she did, and then she was right as rain.
‘Lavinia – who owned Bookends, and left the shop to Posy, who turned it into Happy Ever After – was quite set in her ways,’ Verity was explaining earnestly. ‘Especially after her husband Perry died. She didn’t like things that beeped, and I like that the shop is quite quaint and charming but … but …’
‘But what?’ Noah prompted. ‘You can tell me. I’m just an observer. No judgement, no consequences.’
‘Don’t trust him!’ Nina wanted to yell but at that moment the door opened, the bell tinkled and two women came into the shop, so she was forced to stop earwigging and pin a smile on her face. ‘Welcome to Happy Ever After. Let me know if there’s anything in particular you were looking for.’
The women were middle-aged and in sensible shoes, slacks and pac-a-macs, but Nina knew not to try and second guess any customer’s reading preferences from their outward appearance.
‘Vampire erotica?’ One of the women queried, proving Nina’s theory right.
‘Erotica section is the end room on the right. Paranormal erotica on your left as you go in, then the vampire fiction will be on the top two shelves,’ Nina told her. ‘We’ve had a new book in last week by a woman called Julietta Jacobs about a vampire mafia boss. It’s pure filth.’
‘Oooh, sounds just my thing,’ the woman said, and she and her friend went through the arch on the right.
Meanwhile Verity was still happily complaining to Noah about how rubbish the shop was. ‘… it all has to be inputted manually so everything takes three times as long as it should. Stocktaking, inventory, cashing up; it’s a bit of a nightmare really.’
‘Yeah, it doesn’t sound very time-effective,’ Noah said in a sympathetic voice even though he wasn’t meant to be offering opinions.
Already Nina didn’t like him and she had famously low standards when it came to men. Her scowl was interrupted by another customer; Lucy, a pretty woman who worked at the council offices round the corner, came through the door. She read a romance novel a day, three on the weekend. Nina worried that there might come a day when Lucy had read every romance novel ever published.
Not today though. ‘Are those the new releases?’ Lucy asked, her eyes gleaming at the sight of the pile of books on the counter.
‘They are,’ Nina agreed. ‘Have at ’em!’
Verity was giggling again – she hadn’t been right since she fell in love a few months back – and Noah was murmuring again, but the bell was tinkling, more customers piling in, and Nina’s hangover had abated enough that she felt well enough to leave her stool and actually venture onto the shop floor to help them.
‘She burned too brightly for this world.’
Noah and his infernal iPad left the shop before lunch, not to return. Nina hoped that he was done with his creepy, silent observing but when she got back from the accountants, Posy said that Noah would return the next day.
‘He seems nice though, doesn’t he?’ she insisted. ‘He’s a friend of Sebastian’s.’
‘Really? Sebastian has friends?’ Nina shook her head. Sebastian Thorndyke was many things: a digital entrepreneur, Posy’s childhood nemesis and now recently wed husband, but he was also the Rudest Man in