He smiled and turned back to the shopkeeper. ‘Very literal: house of light. One island had alighthouse. My father was a keeper of those in my country, so I would like to take a book back from England for him about your lighthouses here.’
‘Oh aye?’ He wished the suspicious consideration would stop. This seemed to him a fairly reasonable request in a bookshop. After this uncomfortable and, to him, unnecessary pause, her only offering was, ‘You’d best not be calling this England then for starters.’
He was entirely floored by this odd pronouncement, and was quickly translating, trying to make sense of it, when she pointed to a large flag which hung at the back of the shop. White cross on a black background. ‘You’re in Cornwall, not England.’
The flag was new since he’d last been in. Underneath, was wovenFleghes Kernow. At his frown, she translated helpfully, ‘Children of Cornwall.’
He was no further forwards with his quest, so just repeated a little lamely, even to his own ears, ‘Lighthouses?’
She nodded towards a bookshelf over to the right of the counter. ‘All our local books are there.’
‘Thank you.’ He wandered over, and as he was pretending to browse, said conversationally, ‘My father was put out—is that the right term?—when his light was, hmm, automatic made…’
‘Same thing happened here. Good few decades ago now.’ Something to do with blood and stones crossed Aleksey’s mind and it wasn’t the expression most people used.
‘He did not work again. Very sad.’
‘Lots of fishing round these ways if jobs be needed. But you’d be knowing that seeing you both be off one of those trawlers that destroy our fishing grounds and steal our fish.’
He pondered this for a moment and couldn’t resist. ‘Can you own fish?’ He felt a presence alongside him and a slight nudge of reprimand. He wrinkled his nose. He’d been about to have some fun, but Ben was right. ‘We have very small boat. No damage.’ Well, they’dhadquite afewsmall boats, but there’d been no damage to any fish that he knew of. Not so the boats, obviously. But he had another very good lead now. The retired lighthouse keepers might have become fishermen. The small fleet of local trawlers was moored alongside a commercial wharf on the south coast of the island. He looked at his watch. He could feel the waves of hunger radiating off his silent other half. He scooped up half a dozen books, took the stack of children’s ones Ben had selected from him and put them all down on the counter.
As she rang them up, he tried to estimate this woman’s age. Somewhere between his and Ben’s, he reckoned. She was tanned and bit scraggy—slim and agile, if he were more inclined to be generous to her, which he wasn’t—as if she normally spent more time outdoors being active than in a shop. Not at all unattractive, he supposed. He sincerely hoped she wasn’t a rower, but suspected she might be. He didn’t have a very good track record with any women, and this had recently gotten a lot worse with ones that rowed. Although he had not told Ben (why break the habits of a lifetime), he sometimes dreamt of the moment when Madeline’s ear had torn away between his teeth, and it was not always an unpleasant recollection.
Now that Ben had joined him at the counter, she priced and bagged the stack of books with a noticeable thawing of the oddly hostile reception he’d received. As usual, Ben, even being quiet, garnered a much more favourable response. He was about to produce his card to pay, but then thought better of this and fished out cash instead. At a little under two hundred pounds for their purchases, he was glad he wasn’t a fisherman off a foreign trawler.
He glanced once more at the flag and its proud proclamation, recalled their skull and crossbones and their island, and smiled privately. He had to agree: independence was a wonderful thing.
They only had time for one thing if they were to catch the flight—food or lighthouse keepers, and Aleksey surrendered to the inevitable. As they started towards the restaurant, Ben was laughing openly, trying to suppress it but failing miserably.
Somewhat testily, Aleksey asked, ‘What?’
‘What the hell was that all about?’
‘I don’t know! She’s supposed to be an author—historian. I expected to be spun long stories of nefarious doings, but that was odd even for these locals.’
‘I think you upset her.’
‘How? I was excessively polite.’
‘I don’t know. But it was so funny. You don’t work so well out of the suits—your disguise.’
‘Thank you. You have no idea how ironic I find that from the man who persuaded me out of them.’
‘Every time I can.’
The private shoulder bump that came with this cheered him up a bit, and by the time they were seated at their favourite table overlooking the harbour and had large breakfasts in front of them, Miss Morwenna Eames and her odd rudeness were forgotten.
* * *
Chapter Thirteen
Arriving back at the glass house never lost its appeal. Despite the surreal beauty and otherworldliness of the island and Guillemot, this little Dartmoor valley was more than home to them: it was part of the family. The sense of returning began as soon as they turned off the A38 and took the lanes to the north towards the moors. It intensified the moment they navigated carefully into the narrow track that led down to the ford. In mid-September, the beech-hedge banks of the lane were full of autumn colour, the stream rushing as if they had had a recent downpour in Devon that they’d not suffered right down in the tip of Cornwall. As Ben was accelerating to hit the water hard and fast, which he always declared was a much better way to ford it than slow and steady and checking for unseen hazards, Aleksey said as casually as he could, ‘I think I forgot to mention to you that I am planning to build DS Mailer and her team a base—somewhere they can relax when they’re not on shift, and somewhere they can bunk if they need to on an overnight. What do you think?’
Once the huge splash was over, the unnecessary spinning of tyres done and they were out the other side, Ben replied, ‘A guardhouse you mean?’
‘That’s a little militaristic.’
‘Cottage then.’
