Beach Hut Surprise: Escape to Little Piddling this summer — six feel-good beach reads to make you smile, or even laugh out loud

by Libertà Books

  That got her a narrow-eyed look. "It's more than just something on your mind. You look as though you've had a shock."

  "Yes, someone creeping up behind me on the stairs." She went into the galley kitchen that opened onto the living room and filled the kettle. "Tea or coffee, Mr Dumaine?"

  "Henry, for heaven's sake. Is it decent coffee?" He took the packet she thrust at him with one hand as she reached for the cafetière with the other. "Yeah, coffee, please. Black and one. What's this?"

  "Nothing."

  Henry perched on a bar stool on the other side of the island and opened the book. "The old brewery ledger? This is great. What's the date?"

  "Eighteen nineties." She wanted to snatch it away but poured the coffee with a steady hand instead, then slid his along to him.

  "What happened here?" He'd flipped through to the cut page.

  "That's the last thing that Bertram Bascombe wrote before he disappeared." Henry looked up and she found herself telling him. "Someone stole the recipe for a fabulous new beer, Piddling Perfection. The brewmaster wrote it down, then had a heart attack or something the next day. Bascombe found the recipe was gone before he had a chance to study it. Then he went for a swim and vanished."

  "Drowned? Suicide?"

  "No one knows. I don't think there was a note."

  "Poor guy." Henry ran his fingertips over the scrawled swear words. "Strange. I wonder…" He looked up again sharply. "How do you know all this if the recipe's gone and Bascombe left no note?"

  "I—er—guessed. Pieced it together." Jac gulped coffee.

  "Really? Down to knowing what this fabulous beer was going to be called? And working it out left you pale and jumpy at eight o'clock in the morning?"

  "If I told you, you wouldn't believe me."

  "Try me."

  "Do you believe in ghosts? Or time travel?"

  "No and no. Nor alien invaders, nor that the earth is flat."

  "Exactly what I think. But… Look, I wanted some peace and quiet to think about—about stuff. And I wanted to read this ledger. So I took it down to my beach hut early this morning. And I'd just found the cut page the hard way." She held up her paper-sliced finger, still with a blood smear. "And then Bertram turned up."

  Henry opened his mouth. Shut it. Drank some more coffee. "As in, Bertram Bascombe, brewer, deceased?"

  "He wasn't deceased, he was very clear about that. He was stark naked, dripping wet and very indignant that some strange woman was in his bathing hut."

  "Do you often hallucinate naked men? Wet, naked men?" There was an interested glint in Henry's eye that she didn't trust.

  "Not as a matter of routine, no. Not ones with a small pot belly and side-whiskers at any rate. I gave him a towel. He told me that this was May the twentieth, eighteen ninety-nine. Then he saw the ledger, forgot about me intruding in his bathing hut and went off on a rant about what had happened to the recipe for Piddling Perfection. When he got really agitated, he vanished."

  "Have you ever considered writing fiction? Scripts for TV? The producers of Doctor Who would love you."

  Jac slammed down her mug, then shifted the ledger away quickly when the coffee slopped out. "Look—look there. Do you think I'd take the trouble to drip water on the page just in case my neighbour ambushes me on my stairs and I decide to spin him a yarn?"

  Henry narrowed his eyes at her, then sniffed at the page, rubbed his right index fingertip on the biggest splash, still damp. He licked it. "Salt."

  "Exactly. Cunning of me to traipse down to the sea, which is a fair way given that the tide's out, just to add verisimilitude to my fantasy by sprinkling the book with salt water."

  "OK. I'll buy it for now. You saw something, or you genuinely believe you did. And I like a mystery. Piddling Perfection, you say? This town's name really is the gift that goes on giving, isn't it?" He pushed the wine bottle towards her. "The first release of wine from my new vineyard. I wanted to celebrate with a neighbour."

  Jac tilted the bottle to read the label. Dandelion Vineyard. Petit Piddling Grand Reserve 2018. It was a relief to think about something that didn't involve dead men and lousy beer. The label was elegant with a faintly Edwardian flavour to it and a stylised dandelion in the bottom left corner. "Dandelion?"

  "Pissenlit in French," Henry said, straight-faced.

  "Pis… Literally piddle in bed? That's truly awful."

  "Couldn't resist," he admitted.

  "I hadn't realised the vineyard was productive yet." She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of smiling at his dual-language pun.

  "Very productive, that south-facing slope is perfect. But it takes a while to mature the wine from that first harvest, to experiment, to get it just right. My ancestor bought the land when he came here as an émigré during the French Revolutionary Terror at the end of the eighteenth century. My grandfather planted the vines, but my father wasn't so interested. It has taken time to get it to this stage."

  "But how do you know about it? What to do? I know you have the family wine business, but that's selling the stuff, not growing it. I know about selling it, serving it, but I wouldn't be able to make it."

  "After uni, I studied in Alsace, then New Zealand and one of the Sussex wineries."

  "All good places for cooler temperature wine-making."

  "Exactly."

  "Congratulations." She wanted to be pleased for him, but the smile was an effort.

  "I had the vines, the tradition, the training. You haven't any of those for brewing, have you? It must be tough. You need an experienced brewmaster."

  It took no effort to let the smile slip. "Thank you for mansplaining that to me. I have the one I can afford. Andy might not be experienced, but he's keen, he's creative, he knows good beer when he tastes it, and he's a friend."

  "And cheap?"

  "And cheap," Jac admitted. "Look, thanks for the wine and for not assuming I was out of my mind, but Andy will be arriving soon so we can work on the latest experimental brew and I want to see what I can find online about Bertram."

  "I'll help." Henry stood up, stretched. "You know, the best place to start would be the local newspaper. Hard copy, though."

  "What, the Piddling Post? That's just a 'what's on' handout, isn't it? We've got some in the bar that the Tourist Info people drop off. Adverts and vouchers and snippets about the new zebra foals at Piddling Magna zoo."

  "It used to be a decent broadsheet newspaper until the seventies. I found a few old copies when we cleared my grandfather's place and it was the real thing, packed with local news. But the back issues haven't been digitised. I checked, because I wanted to see what I could find about my nineteenth-century ancestors, thought if anyone had made the headlines it might make an amusing piece to put up in the wine bar. I couldn't find anything online, went along to the office and they told me they'd got a storeroom full of the back issues." He shrugged. "I didn't have the time to wade through them, so I left it." He tapped one finger on the ledger. "We could go and look now."

  "You've got time now? Being so busy." It was hard to keep the jeer out of her voice. The jealousy. He'd got a flourishing business, an exciting new winery and she was slowly sinking. Even if she and Andy came up with a decent brew, she still didn't have enough cash—or credit—to turn The Tap into an attractive pub.

  "Nothing much on, it's the quietest day at Dumaine's. I can take it off; the staff can manage."

  "Well… But I've got to spend at least an hour with Andy."

  "Meet you at the brewery at half-ten?"

  "OK. Yes. Thanks."

  Jac closed the door behind him, listened to the sound of his feet as he ran down the stairs, the creak and thump of the fire door opening and closing.

  Henry Dumaine was attractive, intelligent, nice enough not to fall about laughing at her story. It was ridiculous to wonder what his motives were in agreeing to help with her mystery. He probably simply enjoyed that kind of thing.

  Or he finds me attractive, intelligent… That theory lasted a
s long as a confrontation with the bedroom mirror: blonde hair doing a passable imitation of a haystack thanks to a stiff sea breeze, sloppy old hoodie, just the wrong shade of blue for her eyes—eyes with nice dark shadows under them. Jac made a dive for the hairbrush.

  Chapter Two

  "The summer wheat beer is coming on. Close, I think." Andy offered her a glass of rather cloudy pale-gold liquid. "Still needs tweaking," he added when Jac sipped, made a maybe, maybe not rocking gesture with her free hand.

  "You're right. It is close. Refreshing, but needs a bit more bite, more citrus."

  "The winter-warmer dark style is better this batch, I reckon." He offered another glass, this time a rich mahogany.

  "Colour's good." Jac took another mouthful. "Chewy but not very… I don't know… memorable. Are we aiming for a Strong Old Ale style with this?"

  "Yeah." Andy scowled at the cask he'd tapped for the sample. "Not malty enough for that yet, though. No chocolate or fruit in there, either."

  "We've got time to get the heavy beer right and a month, perhaps, for the wheat beer, but what we need right now is a good Best Bitter, something to replace Prime Piddle, or I'm going to have to buy beer in, which I can barely afford at the same time as buying all the supplies to keep experimenting."

  "And it's hardly the Brewery Tap if we don't serve our own beer," Andy said mournfully. "We could keep on serving Prime—the tourists like it."

  "The tourists find it amusing. There's a difference. Look, I've got the ghost of a lead on something better, but it means digging in the archives at the Post. You OK if I go along there this morning? I'll be back for the lunchtime stampede."

  The sarcasm left Andy even more hangdog. The stampede would be a trickle, easily manageable by Jac alone behind the bar, and they both knew it. "I'll check stocks now," he offered. "Then get back to reading up on Best Bitters." He turned to walk back to the old gleaming coppers, his shoulders straightening as he went, as though they gave him confidence.

  Henry was waiting when she left through the brewery office door. He had one shoulder propped against the wall, his eyes narrowed critically on the front of his wine bar across the square. "Needs more planters," he muttered as Jac joined him. "More typically French. Bay trees in small Versailles tubs, do you think?"

  "My knowledge of French gardening is restricted to the fact that they plant acres of pelargoniums and their parks have the kind of sandy gravel that gets between your toes when you're wearing sandals. Oh, and that loopy green metal stuff round the edges of the lawns." She fell into step beside him as he cut through the alleyway into the maze of small streets behind the promenade.

  "How's it going with the brewery generally?" he asked. "Besides trying to find some new brews, I mean. Haven't had time to wander over to the Tap during opening hours yet."

  It could just be friendly interest, one local businessperson to another.

  "OK. Just some teething problems, lots to do all at once."

  Or it could be a business rival snooping, because that was what Henry was and the rivalry was all one-sided. At the moment. I'll get there.

  "You OK? You walked right past the office."

  "Oh. Thinking." Jac turned and walked back, peered at the narrow shopfront. "They're open."

  "I know. I checked."

  "Of course you did, Mr Efficient Businessman," Jac muttered as she followed him in, trying not to think about what a truly excellent bum he'd got in those faded old blue jeans. That white linen shirt looked good, too. French? "Sorry?"

  "What dates do we want to look at?" Henry asked with exaggerated patience.

  The lad behind the counter, who was surely not old enough to be out without his mum, fiddled with a piercing in his upper lip that looked painfully inflamed and waited. He seemed moderately alert. Perhaps a trip into the vaults was light relief.

  "Um. First of April eighteen ninety-nine to the end of May nineteen hundred, please."

  "Down here." He rummaged in a drawer, took out a key and led the way through an office with three desks jammed in, each with a slightly dated PC, some filing cabinets, a sink with a stack of mugs. A woman was opening a vast brown box.

  "Morning."

  "They want the old stuff, Mo."

  "Archives. Oldest at the back. There's a table in there somewhere." She went back to rummaging. Clearly no one was going to rush into the Piddling Post crying, "Hold the presses!"

  "Don't smoke in there!" she shouted as the door closed behind them.

  The back room was lit with fluorescent tubes and stuffed with metal industrial shelving loaded with bundles of newspapers tied up with tape. The lad wandered out again as Henry forged through to the back, clambering over some discarded office chairs and a box marked Christmas.

  "Aagh!"

  "What? Are you hurt?" Jac tried to find a way through the maze.

  "No, just picked up a mouse-sized spider. This time travel thing may be spreading—it's probably from the Jurassic. Here we are. Nineteen hundred."

  They finally settled opposite each other at the table, Jac working forward from the first of April eighteen ninety-nine and Henry going backwards from the end of May, a year later. The paper came out weekly on a Wednesday so, as she expected, she found something in the first edition after the twentieth of May, which had been a Monday.

  Under a grainy photo of the brewery, the headline read: Concern Grows For Respected Local Businessman.

  "May twenty-second. They say he has not been seen since the night of the nineteenth," Jac said. "The housemaid—looks as though there was a cook-housekeeper and a maid living in—found his bed slept in on the morning of the twentieth and assumed he had gone for an early-morning swim as was his habit from the beginning of May. He did not return for breakfast and Cook asked at the brewery, but no one had seen him there. When he was still not home at midday, she called for the Constable and he searched Bascombe's bathing hut, which was the one I now own. It says the PC found his clothes, his watch and his card case and some cash amounting to three pounds and seven shillings. There was no note. A tragic accident is feared."

  "They'd be careful not to suggest anything else in those days," Henry said.

  "What—murder?"

  "Suicide, which would be far more scandalous than murder. Failing business, perhaps?"

  "It wasn't failing until he disappeared," Jac protested. "And someone stole that recipe. That hardly sounds like a harmless prank."

  "There is no other brewery in town. Piddling Magna doesn't have one, either. Who would have it in for him? A disgruntled Prime Piddle drinker?"

  "What did...? No, never mind." She could hardly ask Henry exactly what form his ancestor's business took in those days. A wine merchant shouldn't have been in direct competition with a brewer, but what if wealthy Mr Dumaine had decided to branch out? She turned to the next week's issue.

  "He's front page news now. Look." She moved the paper so Henry could see the picture of Bertram Bascombe with the headline in large type under it: Have You Seen This Man?

  "They searched the house and the brewery and the Tap and found nothing. No note. The brewery manager is reported as saying that Bascombe had seemed a little distracted the previous week, but that there were no financial difficulties and he envisaged no problems continuing to run the business under the supervision of Mr Bascombe's solicitors until his return."

  "It is beginning to sound like a straightforward accidental drowning," Henry said. "Poor devil. But he was probably alone on the beach that early in the day, and the sea is still cold at this time of year. If he got cramp or was caught in a rip, there'd be no one to help him."

  "Let's keep going; we might find a report of a body being washed up."

  "Here's something." Henry jabbed a finger at a column. "It is understood, with the approach of the anniversary of the tragic disappearance of Mr Bertram Bascombe, that his solicitors will announce that, although he is still missing, they will not be applying to the courts for an Assumption of Death notice and intend to ke
ep the business running until the seven years has elapsed before death may legally be assumed. Mr Bascombe leaves only a cousin in Australia who approves of this approach and is reported to be praying for his relative's safe return."

  "They couldn't continue to run the business if his assets were frozen, so they wouldn't risk that," Jac said. "The law is different now. I suppose that, without an owner at the helm, it began to go downhill and the Aussie cousin sold it after the seven years were up. I'll just see if there's anything in the next few issues."

  They found nothing more about the Bascombe disappearance and advertisements for Bascombe's Beers continued to be run. Then, a month later, at the end of June, Jac spotted another name.

  "Here's something about your family in the Society column. The return of Mrs Dumaine to the town after her sojourn in the Swiss Alps has been greeted with great pleasure by all persons in Society. Mrs Dumaine's energy and leadership in all aspects of Little Piddling's social and charitable life have been sadly missed.

  Henry counted on his fingers. "I think that's my two times, no, three times great grandmother. My grandfather's grandmother. There was socking great oil painting of her in my grandparents' dining room that I inherited—all pompadour hair, fierce corseting, strings of pearls and an impressive bosom. Quite a looker in the style of the time."

  "I wonder what she was doing in the Alps for a stay that was long enough for her to be missed to that extent," Jac said.

  "Could just be creeping on the part of the newspaper—what an important person you are, don't forget to give us the guest list for your next dinner party, sort of thing."

  "Very upper-class Edwardian, swanning off to the Alps for your hols. She wasn't one of Edward VII's mistresses, was she?"

  Henry snorted. "Not unless the family's been keeping it very quiet. She didn't bring any souvenirs back from Switzerland, which is odd, now I think about it. My grandparents' house was full of everything from tiger-skin rugs to hideous Venetian glass chandeliers from various travels down the generations. We've even got an elephant's foot umbrella stand, of all the ghastly things. But no cuckoo clocks or carved wooden bears."