Fifteen Postcards Read online

  FIFTEEN POSTCARDS

  KIRSTEN MCKENZIE

  This book is dedicated to the following people:

  David Brettell, my father, who gave me his love of antiques.

  Geraldine Brettell, my mother, who shared her love of books and reading with me.

  Fletcher McKenzie, my husband, who loved me enough to encourage me to do this.

  Gareth Brettell, my brother, who pays me to do a job I love.

  Sasha and Jetta McKenzie, my daughters, who I love, just the way they are.

  31/12/39

  Dear Phil

  Wishing you a Happy New Year, wherever you may be.

  I’m baking a cake today, and I wish you were here to taste it, and tell me that it’s simply the best you’ve ever eaten.

  Nothing tastes any good without you, so I have no idea if it is the best.

  Stay safe.

  B xxx

  Contents

  Chapter One: The Old Curiosity Shop

  Chapter Two: The Mixing Bowl

  Chapter Three: The Kitchen

  Chapter Four: The Maid

  Chapter Five: The Study

  Chapter Six: The Friend

  Chapter Seven: The Lord

  Chapter Eight: The Heir

  Chapter Nine: The Email

  Chapter Ten: The Auction House

  Chapter Eleven: The Savoy

  Chapter Twelve: The Father

  Chapter Thirteen: The Arab

  Chapter Fourteen: The Aunt

  Chapter Fifteen: The Necklace

  Chapter Sixteen: The Collector

  Chapter Seventeen: The Bush

  Chapter Eighteen: The Church

  Chapter Nineteen: The General Store

  Chapter Twenty: The Minister’s House

  Chapter Twenty-one: The Natives

  Chapter Twenty-two: The Dinner

  Chapter Twenty-three: The Riot

  Chapter Twenty-four: The Bible

  Chapter Twenty-five: The Basement

  Chapter Twenty-six: The Candelabra

  Chapter Twenty-seven: The Scholar

  Chapter Twenty-eight: The Road Trip

  Chapter Twenty-nine: The Hustler

  Chapter Thirty: The Phone Call

  Chapter Thirty-one: The Vanity Case

  Chapter Thirty-two: The Boat Trip

  Chapter Thirty-three: The Fishing Fleet

  Chapter Thirty-four: The Port

  Chapter Thirty-five: The Ambush

  Chapter Thirty-six: The Major

  Chapter Thirty-seven: The Rescue

  Chapter Thirty-eight: The Brother

  Chapter Thirty-nine: The Matriarch

  Chapter Forty: The Ball

  Chapter Forty-one: The Fight

  Chapter Forty-two: The Picnic

  Chapter Forty-three: The Hunt

  Chapter Forty-four: The Tiger

  Chapter Forty-five: The Gift

  Chapter Forty-six: The Gambler

  Chapter Forty-seven: The Viceroy

  Chapter Forty-eight: The Theatre

  Chapter Forty-nine: The Raja

  Chapter Fifty: The Troubles

  Chapter Fifty-one: The Fire

  Chapter Fifty-two: The Soldiers

  Chapter Fifty-three: The Lodge

  Chapter Fifty-four: The Meeting

  Chapter Fifty-five: The Injured

  Chapter Fifty-six: The Englishman

  Chapter Fifty-seven: The Farewell

  Chapter Fifty-eight: The Frame

  Chapter Fifty-nine: The Body

  Chapter Sixty: The Agreement

  Chapter Sixty-one: The Estate

  Chapter Sixty-two: The Friends

  Chapter Sixty-three: The Amnesiac

  Chapter Sixty-four: The Invalid

  Chapter Sixty-five: The Baby

  Chapter Sixty-six: The Officials

  Chapter Sixty-seven: The Letter

  Chapter Sixty-eight: The Handover

  Chapter Sixty-nine: The Robbery

  Chapter Seventy: The Refusal

  Chapter Seventy-one: The Police

  Chapter Seventy-two: The Punishment

  Chapter Seventy-three: The Folder

  Chapter Seventy-four: The Auction

  Chapter Seventy-five: The Recipient

  Chapter Seventy-six: The Postcard

  Chapter Seventy-seven: The Delivery

  Accent Press Titles

  The Old Curiosity Shop

  In a cramped little street, in a dusty corner of London, stands a set of two-storey brick facade shops. An architectural relic from last century, miraculously untouched by the bulldozers of modern developers. A greengrocer, a boutique, a gentlemen’s tailor, the ubiquitous Chinese dumpling shop, and The Old Curiosity Shop, an antique shop named after the Charles Dickens classic of the same name. The sort of shop passers-by would wonder if anyone ever went in or, indeed, whether they actually ever sold anything.

  And inside the crowded little antique shop, you’ll find a treasure trove of discarded history: towering stacks of china plates; bundles of old newspapers announcing the armistice with the surrender of Italy and that man has landed on the moon; unloved gifts; and abandoned childhood memories. An extraordinary melting pot of treasures from many cultures, mingling with the more mundane domestic items to create an entirely idiosyncratic mix; part shop, part museum.

  Looking through windows smeared with street dust, you’ll see a young woman, dressed in jeans, a shirt, and sensible leather loafers poring over a bundle of black and white postcards, her wavy brown hair tucked behind her ears.

  The girl behind the counter, Sarah Lester, a licensed antique dealer, pawnbroker, and sole proprietor of The Old Curiosity Shop, slowly thumbed through the postcards until the one about the cake caught her eye. With the patina of age, the ink had faded, the words on the lines shrinking with the passing of time.

  After reading the postcard she’d picked up out of an old Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin, Sarah leaned back on her stool, her eyes sad. She glanced wistfully at the old porcelain beehive mixing bowl waiting patiently on the counter to be priced up and purchased, and once again used with purpose. Somewhat battered, with a couple of chips, it was the perfect size for a family. As an only child, family was the one thing missing from Sarah’s life, which was why she adored reading tatty old postcards. The sentiments expressed in postcards couldn’t be found on Facebook or Twitter. People just didn’t feel the same way about friends and family. Nowadays, they were too busy to care. But back when postcards were popular, people truly loved each other – in her opinion, anyway.

  Sarah had only been thirteen when her mother vanished, a mystery the police had never solved, and about which the neighbours still gossiped. With no suspects or motivating factors for her mother’s disappearance, it was officially considered a ‘cold case’. All she’d ever been told was that her mother had last been seen in the shop while Sarah was at school. Her parents had been tidying up before the busy Christmas season. Her father had left the shop to pick up lunch and when he’d returned, his wife was gone, the shop unattended, and everything exactly where it had been beforehand. No money was missing, the jewellery was still sparkling in its cabinet – there was just a void where her mother, his wife, had been.

  For years, the police issued annual press releases on the anniversary of her disappearance, saying much the same thing: appealing for witnesses or new evidence; that they were committed to solving the disappearance. They had nothing to go on, and privately assumed her mother had walked out on the family to start a new life with another man. Her father refused to believe this, insisting there was something far more sinister to her disappearance.

  As a result, she’d been lovingly, but suffocatingly, raised by her desolate father. She’d
done well at school and, influenced by the antiques around her, she’d gone on to study at Oxford University, obtaining her degree in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies. Like all teenagers, she wasn’t the best correspondent with her father. Sometimes weeks went by where they didn’t speak at all. He was busy, she was busy, and, just after her twenty-first birthday, she’d received a call from the police. The shop had been unattended for several days and neighbouring shopkeepers, concerned that something was wrong, had contacted them.

  Sarah returned to London and, with the assistance of the police, broke into the shop. Finding no sign of her father, nor of anything suspicious, they’d checked the family home in Raynes Park. The house backed onto Malden Golf Course, as the only thing her father loved more than antiques was golf. She half expected to find him slumped over his golf clubs in the garden. But no. Just like her mother, there was no sign of him.

  Another police file was opened, and although the shop was reasonably profitable and no note had been found, the police suspected her father had committed suicide due to the delayed reaction to his wife’s disappearance, coupled with stress brought on by slowly declining sales – exacerbated by the success of Internet auction sites – and they were confident a body would turn up in due course, probably in the Thames. Sarah did not share their belief. Although her father was a technophobe, he wasn’t fazed by competition from the Internet, and she’d been confident that over time he too would have embraced selling online. Not a day went by when she didn’t wonder where he was, and what had forced him to leave a daughter and a business he loved.

  With no employee to run the shop, Sarah, in consultation with her father’s solicitor, resigned from a brief stint as a junior cataloguer at a minor auction house to take over the business her father had started in the Seventies. The convoluted process of managing her father’s business, and having access to his accounts, even his bills, had taken years to finalise. After a Coroner’s Inquest, he’d been declared dead, and Sarah had inherited the Raynes Park house, the block of commercial buildings containing the The Old Curiosity Shop and the stock. She’d sold the family home to pay off the shop and chose to live upstairs to minimise her overheads, as her parents had once done before she was born.

  The Mixing Bowl

  The Old Curiosity Shop was disorganised and excessively full. Her father’s record keeping was almost non-existent and his stock records indecipherable, but somehow he’d been profitable, mainly due to clever buying, a stable of regular customers, and his mantra of ‘Leave something in it for the next guy’. She was trying her best to follow his lead, but without her father to guide her, she’d seen a downward slide in profits for the seven years she’d been running the shop. All the Global Financial Crisis had achieved was that people were keener to sell to her than they were to buy.

  Reading postcards distracted her from her troubles, much like gambling or knitting distracted others. She’d found these postcards tied in a bundle in the old biscuit tin from a deceased estate she’d bought. She’d been surprised when the solicitor had accepted her offer for the estate, as even she considered the offer on the low side. The house was a fair hike out of town, and transporting the contents back to her shop would’ve been painfully time-consuming, so she’d come in low. Her father wouldn’t have given the transport a second thought. He’d have made the perfect offer and got down to the business of moving the stock on as expeditiously and as profitably as possible. How he’d managed to move his goods so fast was a complete mystery to her.

  With mixing bowls, postcards, and thoughts of declining profits distracting her, she failed to notice an elderly man entering the shop, until he placed a cardboard carton on the counter with a muted thud. With a yelp, she held her hand to her heart and fixed her startled stare on the man.

  ‘You made me jump! How can I help you?’

  The old man replied, almost whispering, ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, but I found these in my mother’s house. I didn’t want to throw them away if they are of use to someone else. Will you take them?’

  Sarah only just refrained from rolling her eyes; one of her bad habits. The usual drill, no doubt. He thinks he has valuable heirlooms. She’d have to tell him his stuff is worthless and that no one would ever buy it. She’d offer him a ridiculously low price, then he’d squawk and postulate that whatever was in his box was worth hundreds of pounds.

  With a sigh, she hopped off her tatty stool and lifted the flaps of the cardboard box. The familiar smell of mothballs and silverfish assailed her nose, and what met her eyes confirmed her thoughts.

  A jumbled mess of mismatched crystal glasses wrapped in newspaper, two pairs of old spectacles – possibly with gold frames, a ribbon-wrapped bundle of photos, odd cutlery, several pieces of a Victorian dinner service, and a little trinket box filled with ladies’ costume jewellery.

  With a quick mental calculation, she asked, ‘How much were you expecting for this?’

  ‘Nothing’ he replied. ‘I just didn’t want to throw them away, in case they were any good to anyone. My mother liked things to be used …’ he trailed off.

  Sarah, who, in all good conscience, couldn’t take the items for free from a man who looked like he was barely surviving on a pension, offered him twenty pounds for the lot.

  Surprised, the stooped old man accepted her money and limped out of the shop, the door closing quietly behind him.

  A quick coffee and then I’ll get onto this lot, she thought. A caffeine hit always helped when she had to price up a whole pile of odds and ends, or rubbish, depending on how generous she was feeling about the items. Seldom were they antiques of any note. Sure, she may get the odd set of Waterford whisky glasses, or a beautiful gold filigree brooch, but mostly it was old dinner sets and cutlery given as wedding presents to middle-class couples forty years earlier, unused and kept for good, then sold by their ungrateful grown-up children.

  A steaming coffee in hand, Sarah returned to the scratched shop counter, half-covered in a box of old novelty pencil sharpeners, a pair of Edwardian vases of dubious taste, postcards requiring sorting, chinaware from the estate lot she’d just purchased, and now the old man’s carton. Sarah pushed her wayward hair behind ears decorated with tiny, nondescript diamond studs. No fancy cascades of Tiffany’s pearls or bewitching rubies the size of cherry tomatoes here in London, not in The Old Curiosity Shop.

  She was about to read the next postcard from the Huntley and Palmers tin when she was interrupted by two women of indeterminate middle age, dripping with ostentatious jewellery, loudly entering the shop and marvelling at the array of treasure inside.

  ‘Oh, this is such an Aladdin’s Cave. How ever do you manage the stocktake?’ one of the women trilled.

  Inside, Sarah grimaced. That was right at the top of the ‘Five Most Asked Questions’ list she kept in her head. The rest comprised:

  ‘You wouldn’t want an earthquake in here, would you?’

  ‘Who does the dusting?’

  ‘Do you ever sell anything?’

  and her favourite, ‘How do you know where everything is?’

  Swallowing her frustration, she answered, ‘Everything has a stock number, and I mark it off every night in the stock register.’

  The perfectly coiffured women looked astonished, and, after asking where the English china dinner plates were, they began ferreting happily through the racks of plates. Sarah left them to their own devices, and again began peering at the postcards.

  All written in the same elegant hand. All addressed to ‘Phil’. All signed by the mysterious ‘B’. The photos on the fronts of the cards were scenic shots – sheep grazing, brooks bubbling. That sort of thing. The postmarks on the reverse sides were mostly illegible.

  Sarah cursed the lazy mail clerks who never bothered to check if their franks were clear and legible on the mail leaving their post offices.

  She was interrupted again by the women as they carried a pile of china up to the counter and, without any care, slammed it onto the
countertop. Sarah winced, but no damage was done, and she graciously put through a sale for twelve mismatched plates. The women excitedly told Sarah they were hosting a dinner party with a ‘vintage’ theme, how different it was going to be, and that afterwards all their friends would flock to her store to copy them.

  Sarah nodded, smiled, and exclaimed politely ‘That sounds wonderful, I may have to try that myself one day!’, to which the women beamed.

  Little did they know that almost every other Englishwoman of a certain age was following the same craze this summer. Once it appeared in Vogue Living, all the ‘ladies who lunch’ raced in to copy the latest trend, thinking that they were the only ones clever enough to source their themed crockery from an antique shop.

  After she’d carefully wrapped the plates in old newspaper and the ladies had left, she found the postcards were again all jumbled up. In a fit of frustration, Sarah scooped them up and dumped them unceremoniously into the mixing bowl.

  The instant those postcards landed in the bowl, the very millisecond Sarah’s hand brushed the battered surface of the porcelain bowl, the impossible happened.

  Sarah Lester disappeared – leaving no sign she’d ever been in the The Old Curiosity Shop.

  19/6/40

  Dear Phil

  They’ve asked us all to knit winter socks for you boys. If I were to knit something, it would probably end up hobbling you! So instead I’ve collected some wool for Miss Swiveller. She has a much better idea of what to do with it than I.

  I can’t imagine that you’ll be there for another winter, so I’ll stick to my embroidery. My flowers are really quite beautiful and remind me of our last spring together.

  Stay safe.

  B xxx

  The Kitchen

  She reappeared, slumped over the vitrified mixing bowl. The very same bowl which had been on her counter, except here its age was disguised by its contents, half-mixed, egg whites still runny, a basic wooden spoon abandoned in the mixture. The bowl was brand new, unchipped, no crazing, ten a penny. Every kitchen in England had at least one; larger kitchens had several – at least they did in the 1890s …