The bookshop was a picturesque fifteen-minute walk from the house. Located in the village square, it was tucked between a deli that smelled strongly of ripe Stilton cheese on a warm day and a bakery selling loaves of sourdough and goat’s cheese paninis. It was a pretty village, with brightly coloured hanging baskets adorning shop fronts, cobblestoned streets and not a McDonalds as far as the eye could see, which you would think would mean the shop was guaranteed footfall, but the village was slowly being suffocated by the bigger towns around it with their superstores and branded retailers. Once an area full of huge homes owned by the wealthy, the village and its surrounds were now characterised predominantly by holiday homes for those who could afford such luxury, summer rentals, and pensioners seeking a quieter way of life and a library card. Pastel-coloured bungalows with ramps and stair lifts juxtaposed with modern behemoths of glass and sharp edges.

As a result, the bookshop was always teetering on the edge of insolvency, but that didn’t matter to Helen. It had never been about earning money. She loved books. Reading them, writing them, inhaling them. She always had. It had been the one constant she could fully engage with when she was younger and it became her saving grace as a teenager. A way to shut everything out with the turn of a page or the click and clack of her typewriter. It was still her therapy now, even as a married woman with a daughter, two stepchildren, a husband of seven years and a geriatric rescue dog.

So when the bookshop was in the midst of one of its usual downturns, she supplemented the shop’s coffers with the meagre income generated from renting the tiny flat above the shop and the even more meagre royalties from the books she wrote under a pseudonym.

At the end of the day, she would lock up the shop and head home, back to the weirdly gothic house at the top of the hill overlooking the Cornish sea, that wild, rugged narrator of many a tale of stolen treasure and scandalous adventures.

The keeper of many secrets.

She opened the heavy, wooden front door, her hands hurting from the handles of the shopping bags. Clive, her ageing British bulldog, shuffled over to greet her, his eyes alight and his bum dancing. Some days she took him with her to work where he loved to chat to the customers, greeting them eagerly with enthusiastic wiggles of his ample bottom, his presence as much a part of the fabric of the village now as the bookshop was, but today it had been drizzling when she left and he wasn’t one for outdoor excursions in inclement weather. He had looked at her witheringly when she’d brought out his lead this morning, before sloping back to bed without a second glance.