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There were 23 photographs in all, each taken at a slightly skew, almost jaunty angle, allowing the viewer to see the elegantly tooled leatherette binding and the title on the spine of each. They had, apparently, been taken on a coffee table; a coaster and the bottom third of a mug emblazoned with the RSPB logo were visible in the top right hand corner of each image.
Faramir pushed his hand through his hair and sighed. How was he to compose a diplomatic email declining the request from P. Jones (Mrs) of Oswestry? The lady in question had inherited from her great aunt a large set of Readers’ Digest abridged works of classic literature. (“Poor Great Aunt Brenda – Mrs Trellis as was. She never got over the passing of her dear Humphrey and went into a terminal decline.”) The good Mrs Jones had assumed (presumably due to the collection including Walter Scott’s The Antiquary) that an antiquarian bookshop would be the appropriate resting place for the volumes, in all their pseudo-gilded glory.
The opening sentence that sprang to Faramir’s mind was “While I wholeheartedly agree that the larger part of Walter Scott’s oeuvre is best read in abridged form,…” and unfortunately, having sprung to mind, refused to be budged. It was clearly much too unkind as an opener, but had driven all other thoughts out of his head and reduced him to a state of mental paralysis.
The bell above the shop door jangled. Faramir looked up, and drew in a sharp breath. An exquisitely beautiful, willowy blonde woman stepped into the shop. She met his eye and gave a slight nod.
“Is it okay if I browse? Just looking for inspiration for a present for my uncle.” Her voice was a low contralto, a hint of the West Coast of Scotland in her accent. For a moment Faramir struggled to frame his thoughts, then managed to pull himself together enough to respond.
“Of course – do make yourself at home. Is there any particular thing you think might appeal to him.”
The woman cast a quick glance at the shelves nearest to the window. “Trollope – he loves Trollope. I’ll just have a look at these, if that’s all right.” She slipped into the gap between the shelves and the Christmas tree which took up most of the bay window facing the street.
Faramir gave her a smile (hoping he was not looking like a complete lunatic) and forced himself to turn back to the vexed question of Mrs Jones’ email. Finding himself distracted by the way the low winter sun glinted on his customer’s hair he abandoned that in favour of running through some invoices which, though annoying, could at least be handled on autopilot. Every so often he sneaked a glance at his customer.
She was dressed casually, in jeans and a puffer jacket, with her hair in an untidy plait from which slightly curly tendrils escaped, almost like downy feathers as she stood silhouetted by the window. After several surreptitious glances her way, Faramir couldn’t help but feel she was paying as much attention to the building opposite, a block of very expensive serviced apartments, as she was to the books she occasionally took from the shelf in front of her.
After a few failed attempts to get engrossed in his invoices, Faramir looked up again, only to see the woman pretending to read, but really peering over the top of the book. He watched her as she watched an extremely expensively dressed couple slide into the back of a glossy black car (Boromir would know the make, Faramir thought fleetingly, but his only thought was that it looked as expensive as the clothes).
The car drove off and the woman slid the book back onto the shelf. She pulled a phone out of her pocket and quickly tapped out a message. Then she took a smaller volume over to Faramir.
“Can you forgive her? Lesser known, but one of my favourites,” he said with a smile.
“How much is it?” she asked.
“Well, that’s an 1866 edition, so we’re looking at £120.”
Her face fell.
Faramir hastily interjected, “I do have a 1940s copy of the first print run of the Oxford Crown Edition for £30.”
She brightened slightly. “Yes, that’s probably more my sort of price range.” She pulled out her wallet. “Could you wrap it?”
“Of course.”
“And,” she hesitated for a moment. “Could I have an itemised receipt?”
“Of course,” said Faramir, hoping he’d controlled the slight raise of his eyebrows. While customers asked for receipts when they were acting as buyers for wealthy third parties, they tended not to for presents for relatives. He pushed the thought out of his mind.
Moments later, he handed over the parcel, neatly wrapped in brown paper. With a dazzling smile, the woman tucked it under her arm and walked out of the shop, the bell jangling jauntily. How, Faramir asked himself, could a death knell sound so bloody jaunty? Then he pushed his hair back from his forehead again; it was a pretty customer leaving, not the end of the world.
But she had not just walked out of his shop; she had walked out of his life.
~o~O~o~
Or so he thought. Two days later, as he made his way back to the shop having spent a couple of hours in a nearby auction house in pursuit of some early folios at sufficiently good prices that he could still turn a profit (a sore point between him and his brother, sleeping partner and money man), he approached a pavement cafe.
Just for a moment he didn’t recognise her. Gone was the smart casual, the glittering stray hairs framing her face. She sat in an elegant wool coat, beautifully shiny boots, hair coiffed into a sleek French chignon, the most Audrey Hepburn of sunglasses obscuring half of her face. Clapsed round a cup of cofee, her hands were encased in tan leather gloves so smooth as to induce a sensation of synaesthesia where simply to look was to feel them, soft as butter beneath one’s finger tips.
For a moment Faramir’s heart soared. Then sank a little at the thought of “way out of your league…” Then plumbed the depths as he noticed the fair-haired man sitting at right angles to her, reading the business pages of the Telegraph. Every so often the man would say something to her, and she would reply – yet as with her perusal of Trollope, Faramir had the odd that she wasn’t really engaged in the conversation at all. It was hard to tell, given the sunglasses, but he thought her attention was actually fixed on the building opposite, that same block of apartments as before.
It was only when he made it to the safety of his bookshop that the thought struck him. A woman who could afford clothes like that wouldn’t quibble over a hundred pounds or so of book for a much-loved relative.
~o~O~o~
It was several days before he saw her again. Not that the intervening days were entirely without incident.
There was the Open Reach engineer, a young lad with a mop of curly brown hair and twinkling mischievous eyes, who didn’t seem to do anything to any of the wires in front of him, and who seemed almost startled when Faramir asked him if the shop was likely to be subject to an internet outage.
“I’m not really sure…” he muttered ineffectually “Sorry.” Faramir wandered back inside, the bell jangling cheerily, at odds with Faramir’s feelings of slight unease.
Then there was the tramp with a dog on a string, a slightly mangy looking collie, tucked into a doorway a few shops down. He was well plastered in dirt, and wearing a beanie hat and filthy donkey jacket, but Faramir was sure it was the same man he had seen reading the Daily Telegraph a couple of days earlier.
At least the tramp/Telegraph reader looked at home with the dog. Which was more than could be said of the Open Reach engineer the next day.
The same dog, given a good shampoo and a smart red leather collar, reappeared in the road outside the bookshop. It was trotting along, tail wagging triumphantly, on the end of one of those wretched extendable leads seemingly expressly designed to garotte the ankles of passers-by. The other end of the lead was held by the curly headed engineer, now dressed as a student. The young man eyed his unlikely canine companion with a level of distrust probably not seen since Dr. Watson contemplated the Hound of the Baskervilles. As Faramir passed him, the dog attempted to dart into the traffic in pursuit of a cast-off chicken takeaway. The young man cursed, tried (and failed) to lock the lead, and muttered something under his breath about the dog being “Worse than Farmer M’s bloody hell-hounds.” Fortunately the collie was both lightning quick and reasonably streetwise, and returned to the pavement with its trophy and nothing worse than an expletive from a passing taxi-driver by way of punishment.
Then the tramp took up station in his doorway once again – this time devoid of dog. Faramir, now accustomed to taking surreptitious glances out of the window, saw the limousine draw up. But this time, two heavy-set men got out and stared at the tramp. Faramir, who had perhaps been watching more TV police dramas than was good for him, thought “They’ve made him.” Just as the taller of the two men stepped from the kerb, a pair of police officers strolled past on Faramir’s side of the street, a man and a woman. The tramp suddenly lurched to his feet.
He appeared to stumble, then with more deliberation, slapped the bottom of the woman, mumbling (in the manner of Rab C. Nesbitt), “Someboadishe-zoan-ur!”
The heavy retreated back to the limo as the cuffs were slapped onto the tramp.
“Slick move,” Faramir thought, still channelling his inner TV script-writer.
The next day felt as though Christmas had come a fortnight earlier – the beautiful blonde ran past. She was dressed in the sort of athletic leisure wear the Chelsea set wore, powder pinks and dove greys with piping down the side-seams of the tracksuit bottoms, above gleaming white trainers which had clearly not seen service in any of the nearby parks. The outfit just looked wrong. Then Faramir realised the easy, loose-limbed gait she ran with was not at all the sort of gait you saw among the sort of women who normally wore such carefully coordinated sports clothes.
She paused for a good ten minutes, carefully stretching her muscles with the aid of the junction box (the one subjected to non-repairs a few days earlier). The limousine came and went, the expensively suited man (alone this time) got in, the blonde sent her text then ran off towards Oxford Street at a fair old clip.
Faramir’s imagination started running riot.
An icy blonde from a Hitchcock movie, embroiled in organised crime. A private eye staking out the most expensive divorce of the decade. A beautiful jewel thief casing the home of a wildly rich couple of oligarchs. An agent for MI6 carrying out surveillance a terrorist mastermind. A post-cold war game of cat-and-mouse (here, his fertile imagination even supplied snippets of dialogue in Russian; his father had been fluent, for reasons that Were. Not. Discussed. and had insisted both his sons learn at school).
Faramir started to give the principal characters names: Inept Engineer, Tramp, the Heavies. Unable to decide between Italian and Russian Mafia, he christened the expensively dressed man Don Vladimir, and his glamorous companion became Mata Haryovna. The blonde woman remained unnamed, simply occupying a pigeon hole in his mind labelled “the most wonderful woman I have ever seen.”
Each story became more convoluted in his head, and gradually they all started progressing inexorably towards the same ending, an ending in which Faramir threw off the traces of his bumbling bookshop persona and arrived at the final confrontation with the villain in the limousine just as he was about to draw a gun on the beautiful heroine. Channelling the rugby player he had once been in his student days, or indeed the soldier before an IED had left him with a crocked leg, he wrested the blonde out of the line of fire just as the sniper on the nearby rooftop lined up the headshot and took out the villain.
Then sanity would reassert itself, and he would remember that he was as likely to be Walter Mitty as he was Roger Thornhill.
~o~O~o~
She was in his shop again!
This time the pretext was a travel book for her “brother.” He noted that the travel books, most conveniently, were on the shelf the other side of the window, so once more she could “read” while keeping watch on the entrance to the apartments.
Again, his concentration was shot to pieces.
Then the bell jangled. Faramir actually jumped, to his embarrassment.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, brother dearest!” Boromir carried a box which he plonked onto the counter. “Presience. You’ll definitely feel like you’ve seen one when you’ve checked out what’s in here!”
Faramir raised a dark eyebrow.
“Last of our dear departed dad’s library. The private volumes from the locked cupboard…”
Both Faramir’s eyebrows disappeared somewhere into his hairline. Out of the corner of his eye, he swore he saw the blonde’s spine stiffen slightly. Her attention was now split between the apartment block and the brothers. Of all the ways he didn’t want to get her attention, this surely had to be near the top of the list.
Boromir grabbed a volume from the top of the box, opened it (or rather let it fall open – it had been Boromir’s theory since adolescence that “they always fall open at the naughty bits”) and began to declaim, switching between fluting falsetto and basso profundo as he felt the material demanded.
TULLIA. Wag thy buttocks, Ottavia, as I am wagging mine. Keep time with me: it will be most agreeable to him and thee. Admirably! admirably! How the quivering lubricities of thy loins are stirred up!
RANGONI. Endeavor to move up and down in rapid successsion; thou likewise, Tullia. Forward the work by your own activity. Bravo! Bravo!
There was a distinct snort of laughter, hastily muffled, from by the window. Faramir wanted the ground to swallow him up. Or join her in helpless laughter. He wasn’t quite sure which. Boromir eyed him, waiting for a reaction, looking for the opening for a bit of friendly goading. Faramir decided professionalism was the way forward.
“May I?” He held out a hand. Rather than let the pages fall where they might, he began to leaf through systematically. “Original binding, first edition… I could be wrong, but I think I’m on fairly safe ground thinking father owned this for its monetary value rather than its literary – or other – merits.”
“You think?” said Boromir, in the tone of a sibling who has sold his brother the most outrageous dummy and now sees a clear run to the posts opening up before him. “It was beside a wooden box with, how shall I put this, interesting contents. A little glass bottle of expensive, slightly scented oil (sandalwood, I think) and several clean silk handkerchiefs.”
Faramir groaned and buried his face in his hands.
The noise from the window recess could better be described as a bark of laughter rather than a snort.
~o~O~o~
Faramir walked towards his shop, absently carrying his coffee, and indulging in a day dream in which the blonde appeared once more, but this time he managed to make a witty, sophisticated (and non creepy yet worldly-wise) reference to his father’s books which elicited her laughter once again and opened a conversation in which he was able to find out more about her (her name would be a good start…)
This was why he almost missed the unfolding of the Hitchcock moment across the road. A moment replete with genuine damsel in distress.
The apartment door swung open, pushed by one of the two heavies, who then held it open. He gave a curt nod to his boss, Don Vladimir, dapper as ever, as he exited, followed by the second heavy. Heavy number two had a tight grip on the elbow of a young woman, whose dark eyes darted to and fro as if searching for an escape route. They shone luminously in a pale face, beneath a shock of auburn curls.
Faramir stopped mid-stride. The girl looked terrified. For an instant he had a flash back to a dusty village in Kandahar. The eve of a strategic retreat, the surrender of ground gained to the enemy. That was the last time he had seen a woman look that scared.
In the chaos that followed, everything happened at once. Faramir took a step towards the party, not sure what he could achieve. At the same moment, Inept Engineer rounded the corner of the narrow alley that led down the side of the apartment block. There was the collie on its equally useless lead.
Then, from the other side of the party, the indigent Glaswegian Telegraph reader stepped out of a doorway and gave a piercing whistle. The collie took flight towards him. Another two-tone whistle, and the dog neatly wrapped its lead round the heavy’s ankles. The man loosened his grip on the girl just for an instant, and she took to her heels, bolting straight towards Faramir.
For a moment, he felt the surge of adrenaline that comes with combat. Then a chill struck the pit of his stomach. Behind the running figure of the girl, he saw the glint of blue-grey gunmetal as all three men drew pistols. The one entangled in the dog lead fired first, towards the engineer – but by a rare stroke of luck was caught off balance, his shot catching the younger man in the thigh rather than the body, before the ever-tightening lead pulled him to the ground.
The second heavy fired at the tramp, who retreated into the doorway. Faramir could see him holding his cuff to his mouth and speaking rapidly, his eyes darting round the scene. Heavy number one advanced towards the doorway, but carelessly, cockily. The heavy door caught him flat in the centre of his forehead. He lurched, and the tramp was on him, the two of them wrestling for possession of the gun. In the time this took, the girl had finally reached Faramir, and he caught her arm, swinging her round behind him, trying to offer some cover.
“Back… Towards the buildings behind,” he said. She didn’t move. Instead she uttered a single word.
“Pomogi mne.”
Faramir dredged up the best of his schoolboy Russian and repeated the instructions. She edged towards the kerb behind them, Faramir keeping himself between her and the advancing Don Vladimir.
The gun glistened in a disturbingly steady hand. The man closed the gap rapidly on the pair backing clumsily away from him.
“Get out the way and you won’t get hurt.” The man’s voice was clipped, business like, cold as ice and (unsurprisingly) had a hint of a Russian accent.
Faramir put his arm behind him to check the girl was still safely blocked by his body.
“I’m not going to do that. I don’t believe you’re going to shoot me in the middle of a London street.” He’d hoped to keep his voice steady, but he felt it waver in his throat.
He sensed, rather than saw, the other’s finger start to tighten on the trigger. With all his might he shoved the girl sideways, trying to dodge himself as he did so. Too late. There was a popping noise – why did hand-guns always sound quieter than one expected them to? Then a searing, burning pain in his left side. He staggered, took a step, then crumpled to his knees.
Sweat dripped from his forehead, beading in his eyes, but even with blurred vision he was aware of another figure sprinting into frame. Blonde hair, grey, pink…
Even his knees seemed too much effort and he sagged sideways onto the ground.
Don Vladimir swung round to face the new threat.
“You really think you can get the better of me? You think I didn’t make your half-assed surveillance operation on the first day? Six’s standards have really dropped since Sir Denethor retired.”
Faramir clutched his hand to his side. Somehow this was just typical. Shot by a man who’d learned his English in America, bleeding out in the gutter, with the shade of his bloody father haunting his final moments. With a superhuman effort he moved his head a fraction of an inch to get a look at the blonde.
The bloody Russian had her covered, was still crowing. If this were a Bond film, this was the moment where the villain’s loquacity would prove to be his undoing, but Faramir held no such hope in this instance. Still, the man just would not shut up.
“You must know that no man can kill me. It is my fate – lineal descendant of Rasputin and the Tsarina.”
Bloody hell, bleeding out in the gutter, haunted by my father AND shot by a man with delusions of grandeur, Faramir thought.
The blonde stood her ground. In what now seemed to be the far, far distance, as if captured through a slightly unfocused telescope, Faramir saw Inept Engineer crawling towards the gun dropped by Heavy Number Two. As Don Vladimir finally moved towards the blonde woman, Engineer flung the gun across the tarmac. She dropped and rolled, grabbing the gun as she did so.
There were three shots in close succession.
A perfect double-tap to Don Vladimir’s chest. Faramir could see his eyes glaze as the life left them, before his body even hit the ground.
“Just as well I’m not a man, you twat,” said the blonde woman. The last thing Faramir registered was a red bloom blossoming across her grey and pink sweatshirt, and her swaying on her feet. Then he lost consciousness.
~o~O~o~
Faramir shuffled across the linoleum towards the toilet, leaning heavily on the IV drip stand that was currently his constant companion.
A figure stepped out of the bay containing the women’s beds, and Faramir almost collided with her.
“You!”
He looked up from the slippers, to the dressing gown and up to a cloud of blonde hair in an untidy plait, curly tendrils framing her face.
“I suppose it would make sense, this being the nearest hospital… I’m Faramir, by the way.”
She gave a quiet laugh.
“Éowyn.”
Faramir gave her a smile, then started to shuffle towards the toilet once more. Then stopped. Fortune favours the brave, after all.
“I don’t suppose you fancy a bit of company do you? I’m a bit NetFlix-ed out.”
~o~O~o~
Eowyn had come to see him. Eowyn was in his shop. Not because she was staking out the building opposite. But to see him.
He gave her a huge smile, and took both her hands in his. For a long moment they stood there, suspended in time.
Then a figure stepped out of the back office. Damn and blast.
“What the hell is this, brother dearest?”
Faramir reluctantly let go of Eowyn’s hands and turned to look at his brother. Boromir stood beside the large cardboard box, holding a leatherette bound volume of The Antiquary by finger and thumb, as if closer contact would irredeemably pollute him.
“Ah, Mrs Jones… Erm, I just couldn’t think of a way of turning down her books that didn’t seem rude, so I, err…”
“You bought a whole box of 1970s Readers’ Digest books! You idiot. How much did that set you back?”
Faramir gave an embarrassed cough. “Never mind about that… Uh, I was wondering, could you and Pamela put them in the car boot sale at your kids’ school tomorrow? See if you could get something for them?”
Éowyn looked on, eyes sparkling with amusement. “Was Mrs. Jones pleased?”
“Oh yes, delighted. I did say I couldn’t pay very much for them, but if they unexpectedly sold for more, I’d forward the difference.”
The sparkle of amusement softened into a look of extreme fondness, and to Faramir’s surprise, Éowyn stood on tiptoe and kissed him, full on the lips.