The Alibi
in the Atlas

The man who wanted his donation back had brought nothing to carry it in.

Ruth Mercer looked from his empty hands to the four boxes taking up the passage between Travel and Cookery. They had been there for eleven minutes. One corner was already beginning to interest Mallow, the shop cat.

'All of them?' she asked.

'Not the books. Anything inside the books.'

'Usually we give people a chance to forget what they used as a bookmark.'

Owen Pike did not smile. He was wearing a new raincoat with the manufacturer's little cloth label still stitched to the cuff. Ruth remembered him in a camel coat, then in the same coat with shiny elbows, and finally without it, after somebody had said something about moths. She could not recall ever seeing him with a new thing.

'Letters. Personal papers. That sort of thing.'

'Of course. We always try to return those.'

'Yes,' he said. 'So I understand.'

He touched the lid of the top box and took his hand away. The movement had the careful incompleteness of someone stopping himself from checking a pocket again.

Behind Ruth, the stepladder gave a small metallic complaint.

'If there's a list of exceptions,' Kit said, 'now would be a good time. Before I alphabetise somebody's will.'

She was on the second step, fixing a notice that announced the Wrenmouth Secondhand Book Fair. Ruth had asked for the notice to be moved an inch to the left. The notice was half an inch further left.

Owen looked up. 'You're Rose's girl.'

Kit pressed the last corner of the notice flat.

'I'm Kit.'

'Yes. Of course. I didn't mean... You used to come to the reading days.'

'A long time ago.'

'We did some good things there.'

Kit came down the ladder, folded it and carried it into the back room. Ruth watched the narrow gap she left in the door. There were questions which could not be asked while a donor stood in the passage, however little room his boxes had left for anyone else.

'Have you an address for anything we find?' she asked.

'I'll be at the fair tomorrow. Same place as usual.'

Owen had asked for the table by the main doors, where visitors could not avoid him, and paid late for it. Ruth had allotted him the table by the wall, where visitors could.

'I meant a postal address.'

'You can telephone.'

He wrote a number on the back of one of Ruth's business cards. His pen took several attempts to begin. When he had finished, he stared at the card before passing it across.

'You haven't put your new address.'

'Nothing is settled yet.'

For a moment she thought he was going to say something else. Instead he bent, took an atlas from the top box and laid it on the counter. It was broad enough to cover the space Ruth reserved for books she was actually selling.

'That one might fetch something.'

'I'll look.'

'You'd know about its age.'

'I can look at the publication date.'

'Well. You're thorough.'

He left before she could decide whether it was a compliment.

The bell above the door rang, swung once and settled against its little felt stop. Ruth had fitted the stop after a customer had complained that the bell sounded lonely. She had never worked out what a contented bell ought to sound like, but felt had been cheaper than a philosophical discussion.

Kit returned with a roll of brown tape.

'He used to call me that when I was small.'

'Rose's girl?'

'As if I hadn't managed a name of my own by then.'

Ruth moved the atlas aside. Its cloth was the colour of dried peas. The spine had been repaired with a strip of darker fabric, sewn rather than glued, and the title, A World Atlas for the Home, had almost disappeared from the cover.

'Do you want his books out of here?'

Kit looked at her. 'Why?'

'You didn't seem pleased to see him.'

'I'm not pleased to see the gas bill either. I don't make you send it back.'

She knelt by the first box. Ruth found the little notebook in which she recorded objects removed from books. It lay beneath the till, next to a biscuit tin containing three photographs, a bus pass, a child's paper medal and a small envelope labelled Possibly tooth. The envelope had arrived inside a guide to rose pruning. Nobody had claimed it, and Ruth was in no hurry to become more certain of its contents.

Last week she had returned a knitting pattern with a handwritten correction. Its owner had been more grateful for the correction than for the pattern. Two days before that, a man had claimed a faded cinema ticket, then admitted it belonged to his late brother and asked whether he could keep it anyway. Most of the things in Ruth's drawer had no value until someone recognised them.

She opened the atlas at its front cover.

A bookplate showed a sailing boat with a badly uneven mast. Underneath, in a child's large handwriting, were the words Rose Vale. The capital R had been decorated with small leaves.

'Kit.'

Kit had a stack of guidebooks on her knees. She read the name without getting up.

'She let me do that. I spoilt the boat.'

'I think it's a very good boat.'

'It would go round in circles.'

Ruth kept her hand beside the bookplate, not on it. Kit put down the guidebooks and came to stand next to her.

'I haven't seen this for years.'

'You should have it.'

'It's been donated to the fair.'

'I can buy it.'

'You don't know what it costs yet.'

'I know the woman doing the pricing.'

Kit ran her thumb over the cloth at the hinge. The little diagonal stitches were remarkably even.

'Mum did that repair. She said glue was what you used when you couldn't find your sewing basket.'

'Would you like me to put it in the back?'

'Can we check it first? He made rather a point of the things inside.'

They carried it to the long table under the window, where the daylight was better. Beyond the glass, a council van was attempting to reverse past a delivery bicycle. Both drivers seemed to think that a stationary vehicle had a moral advantage. A gull waited on the roof of Edie's cafe with the expression of a spectator who had paid for a longer performance.

Ruth turned the pages in small groups, keeping her hand beneath their weight. There were coastlines in colours nobody used for countries now, railway lines that ended in places with unfamiliar names, and a pencilled route from Wrenmouth to the county record office.

'She took me there once,' Kit said. 'I had to be quiet for an entire afternoon. She bought me a roll afterwards. No butter. We were being economical.'

'I remember her coming into the hotel with you.'

'You remember everybody coming into the hotel.'

'Only the ones who asked for something difficult.'

'She would have done.'

A sheet of thin cream paper slipped from the map of southern England and landed on the table.

Ruth did not pick it up at once. She knew the printed bell in the top corner. For twenty-six years she had seen it on stationery, napkins, staff rotas and bills that people disputed after eating everything on them.

THE BELLWETHER HOTEL.

Beneath the heading were the boxes she remembered. Date. Received from. Room. Amount. A narrow line at the bottom invited a signature.

The paper had been folded into quarters and opened often enough for one crease to show white. There was no envelope.

'Hotel bill?' Kit asked.

'Receipt.'

Ruth angled it towards the window.

14 October 2008.

Received from O. Pike.

Room 214.

£62.00. Cash.

Kit's hand stopped on the edge of the atlas.

'What date?'

Ruth read it aloud. She knew the date, of course. She had lived in Wrenmouth then. She remembered a photograph in the local paper, the queue outside the bakery on the morning the news went round, the awkward kindness of people who could think of nothing useful to say.

Remembering the date was different from hearing it spoken next to Rose's daughter.

'Was he staying there?' Kit asked.

'I don't know.'

'Wouldn't you have known?'

'Not every guest. Not every night.'

Kit drew the receipt closer. She did not touch the writing.

'It's the night Mum died.'

Ruth looked again at the boxes. There were eighteen guest rooms at the Bellwether. They had been numbered one to eighteen before she arrived, and they were still numbered that way when she handed over her keys. Guests sometimes demanded a sea view when they had paid for the car park. Nobody had ever demanded the two hundred and fourteenth room.

She turned the receipt over. The reverse was blank.

'What?' Kit said.

'That room wasn't there.'

Kit read the number again, as if allowing it a second chance.

'An office? A booking number?'

'Possibly somebody's mistake.'

Ruth had made enough mistakes on hotel paperwork to recognise how ordinary they could be. A late guest, a tired clerk, the wrong box. Yet Owen had put this particular book on the counter and told her she was thorough.

She reached for the business card with his telephone number.

'Before we decide anything,' she said, 'we'd better ask the man who gave it to us.'