The Bookshop Chairman Shoved Her Into the Spinning Rack — Then the Ledger Recorded His Neighbour's Books
"You've been pocketing the takings, Dot." Gerald said it with his hand still on her elbow, right as the spinning rack went over.
Dot Ackroyd is 67. Five years behind the counter of the village charity bookshop, a bottle-green supermarket fleece, and a name nobody in the parish had ever once said a hard word about. Now she is on one knee on the flagstones with paperbacks all around her and every face in the sale queue turned her way.
Gerald Pemberton is 60, chairman of the shop committee, brown tweed waistcoat, gold signet ring on his little finger, and the loudest benefactor the shop has. He had come in at nine bragging about his latest donation with the removal van still ticking in the lane behind him.
What Dot stands to lose is five years of quiet service and a spotless name. What the shop stands to lose is thirty-four pounds, ten shillings from the till and the whole morning's takings, if he gets his way. He was already saying the word police.
Dot got up, dusted her knee with the flat of her hand, and said one line.
"Count the till, then."
Sanjay behind the counter counted it out loud, because he counts out loud when he is nervous. He counted it twice. The morning's money was all there, every note and every coin.
Gerald laughed before he finished his sentence, the way he always does, and reached for the boxes on the trestle table to take them home. He said he would not leave his own donation in a shop that harboured a thief.
Then Dot put her hand inside her coat.
She had been shelving here five years and she had never once corrected a customer. She corrected Gerald Pemberton in front of the whole queue.
What she drew out was a worn accession ledger, its ruled lines filled in three or four different inks. She opened it flat at chest height and ran her finger down four lines she had written herself, then turned the page so the queue could see.
On the flyleaf of every book in those donation boxes sat the same faint violet oval stamp. An estate stamp. And under it, in pencil, in her own careful hand, a name: Mr Ashworth. Written in beside Gerald's name, where he had put himself down as donor.
The queue went very quiet.
Sanjay said what everyone was thinking. He had sniffed those donation boxes twice this week and told Dot they smelled of the same pipe smoke that hung in Mr Ashworth's front room. Nobody had listened to him then.
Gerald never carried a box in himself. Not once in five years. The removal van always arrived before him, and the driver never spoke to anybody.
Then his keys swung on their heavy fob as he took his two steps back, and a small tin came out of his waistcoat pocket and rang on the flagstones. The float tin. The one Dot had counted at seven o'clock and put in the drawer, the same one that was missing when Sanjay opened it.
He had taken the day's float out himself that morning to pay the van that emptied a dead man's house.
The doorbell went over all of it, and a woman in a rust wool coat walked in. Copper bob, glasses on a chain, and she was reading the spines before she looked at anybody. She stopped just inside the door, and in her hand was her uncle's library ticket.
Andrea Ashworth walked up to the ledger, read her uncle's name in Dot's handwriting, and said the quiet thing that finished it. The library was never given away. Not a single book of it. She had come in this morning to buy back what she could find.
Gerald backed into the paperback table and sat down hard.
Dot turned the ledger so the queue could see the stamp one more time. Four accession lines, read aloud, in a flat Yorkshire voice, with the whole village watching a man who had decided her worth from her apron.
Whose hand wrote that stamp, and what happens to the books now that Mr Ashworth's own niece is standing in the shop doorway?
The next part has the afternoon committee meeting in the back room, the float tin in Gerald's waistcoat pocket held up in front of him, and the question Andrea asks Dot before she leaves about a whole house of books that were never supposed to leave it. Dot's answer to that is downstairs in the link.
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