Page 64 of The Little Teashop of Lost and Found
‘I think I must be having a nightmare,’ Kev said faintly.
‘If you kiss me, the enchantment will probably come right again and we’ll be transported to our very own happy-ever-after. Do you think I’m pretty?’ she added.
‘I suppose,’ he said, eyeing her generous curves, big blue eyes and corn-gold hair. ‘I like a girl with a bit of meat on her bones.’
‘Why?’ asked Beauty, puzzled. ‘Do you want to eat me?’
The previous day I’d remembered the white crockery that Tilda had stashed away in the cupboard, and quickly posted details of it on a free recycling website, hoping someone would take it off my hands.
I only had one taker, whose user name was the unpromising ‘MrMajestic’, but at least he wanted the lot and, when I gave my address, said he’d be right round to collect it and he didn’t need directions, so I assumed he was local.
With hindsight I should have asked his real name, because had I known it was Jim Voss, proprietor of the ghastly Gondal Guesthouse, I’d have said the china had already gone.
He arrived the back way, which showed a familiarity with the former owner he’d previously denied, and I think he might have shown a certain familiarity with me, too, except that when he walked right past me into the kitchen uninvited, he came face to face with Nell.
She’d dropped by with a piece of her own lardy cake for me to try, which she was just releasing from its greaseproof wrappings, and she regarded him with acute disfavour.
‘It’s you then, Jimmy Voss, is it?’ she said. ‘I might have known you’d be after something for nothing, for a little snirp you were as a boy and you haven’t changed that much since.’
‘Ha, ha!’ he laughed unconvincingly. ‘You will have your little joke, Nell.’
‘Miss Capstick to you, flower,’ she corrected him firmly.
‘The china’s all in those boxes in the back room you just walked past,’ I said pointedly.
‘Right,’ he said, glancing round at the chaos in the kitchen with beady-eyed inquisitiveness. ‘You’re certainly spending a lot of money on renovating the place. I suppose you’re buying new crockery too?’
‘There’s no need, when all the Misses Spencer’s lovely willow-pattern china, from when they had the Copper Kettle, was still sitting there in the cupboard,’ Nell said.
‘Oh? There was a lot of good china hidden in a cupboard?’ he asked quickly.
‘It wasn’t hidden, it was just under the basement stairs – and it’s about the only thing Mrs M didn’t clear out of t’ place, cheating poor Alice here out of what she’d paid for,’ Nell said.
‘Oh, well – I know nothing about all that,’ he said hastily.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything from Mrs Muswell?’ I asked. ‘I’d still like to talk to her – and so would Nile Giddings, seeing as she sold some antiques of his that she was displaying on the café walls, but didn’t give him the money.’
‘I’m sure he must be mistaken about that,’ Jim Voss said quickly.
‘No he isn’t, because either Tilda or me was there when she sold the things. It was when she was over here getting the place ready to close up early and Nile was away. She knocked them down at bargain prices and pocketed the cash.’
Jim Voss gave her a very unloving look. ‘But I’m certain she would have kept the money separately, so she could pass it on to Mr Giddings. And I’m afraid I still don’t have her current contact details, but then, now she’s sold the café, she has no need to stay with us, does she?’ He gave me an insincere smile, then looked at his watch, gave a stage start, and said he must be getting on and he’d fetch the boy, who he’d left in his car at the back, to give him a hand with the boxes.
‘Like I said,’ Nell remarked, once they’d finally gone, ‘a little snirp!’
When Nile texted late in the afternoon to say he’d come round later and put the spare bed together, I didn’t protest in the least.
To be honest, I’d had so much else to do that it had gone right out of my head and anyway, there’s independence … and then there’s sitting back and letting someone else do the tricky stuff.
It took him about fifteen minutes to put the brass bed together – I expect he was ace with Lego as a boy. Then he unwrapped the mattress, which had arrived earlier, and laid it down on top.
‘You look as if you’d like to fall on it and sleep for a year,’ he said, looking at me in amusement.
‘So would you, if you’d been running up and down a flight of stairs all day, while trying to work, answer the phone and chase up deliveries,’ I snapped.
‘I spent a quiet day going through sales catalogues and ringing contacts and clients, but that is my work,’ he said mildly. ‘I thought Jack was doing everything and the boy – what’s his name?’
‘Ross. Jack is organizing everything, but he seems to want me to go downstairs about every fifteen minutes – and then I had an unwelcome visitor earlier.’ I told him about Jim Voss and the way Nell had seen him off.
