Honeycote by Veronica Henry Read Free Book Online Page A

was taking them seriously.
    It was a credit to Graham Cowley and his loyal customers that his bank, or rather the bank of which he was manager, was the only one in Eldenbury to stay open five days a week. The little town couldn’t really sustain any more. It was situated on the Oxford to Evesham road, and was essentially split into two. The Oxford end was rather smart and served the tourists, being filled with antique shops and art galleries that required a bell to be rung before entry. The Evesham end was more utilitarian and served the locals, with its Budgens and Chinese takeaway. The Horse and Groom sat firmly in the middle, with a foot in both camps, and Cowley could see it from his office window, the Honeycote Ales sign swaying gently in the breeze.
    Honeycote Ales’s greatest strength, he reflected as he flicked through their file, and probably its saving grace, was the fact it made bloody good beer. A rich, deep gold, with a curious sweetness that matched its name, the brew was acclaimed both locally and nationwide. Real ale fanatics, notoriously purist and difficult to impress, lauded Honeycote Ale as one of Britain’s finest, and recommended all the pubs in their guide as being unspoilt and traditionally welcoming, all sharing an uncontrived charm. Largely of local Cotswold stone, they were rickety, quaint and warm. Their decor was conventional olde worlde – original, not faked by a design company – with the usual smattering of horse brasses, farming implements, hunting prints and fading, tattered chintzes, the patterns barely discernible. Open fires, beams, flagstone floors: traditional country hostelries where locals, from landowners to farmhands, could rub shoulders to moan about the latest dictates from Brussels, and could, if they wished, choose a warming soup or a hearty casserole from the menu. There was nothing adventurous in the culinary stakes – no polenta or rocket – but good, wholesome, home cooking that the landladies had learned at their own mothers’ feet.
    Thus packs of ramblers planned their routes along the Cotswold Way via Honeycote pubs, knowing that they could slake their thirst with a well-deserved pint of the local nectar and confident that they would not be greeted with snotty requests to remove their muddy boots, but with platters of doorstep sandwiches filled with thickly cut beef and eye-watering horseradish. Most of the locals had been weaned on the stuff, and experienced their first kiss giddy on its hidden strength. Londoners with weekend cottages brought their chums in for a ‘proper’ pint, not the gaseous excuses for beer served in the pseudo-Victorian hostelries they frequented in the City. But none of these were enough to sustain the monstrous overheads the brewery now faced.
    Good beer and loyalty – customer loyalty, staff loyalty and family loyalty – that’s what had kept Honeycote Ales afloat and seen it through many a rough patch. But even that magical recipe could fail in the wrong hands. And charm wasn’t enough any more. Of course, you had to have a Unique Selling Point (Cowley despised all these new marketing terms, with their over-important capital letters and acronyms), but it was what you did with your USP afterwards that mattered and the truth was Mickey Liddiard did nothing but the bare minimum.
    Cowley wasn’t looking forward to his meeting with Mickey that morning. Their meetings were usually kept on an informal level, with Mickey taking him on a guided tour then standing him a good roast lunch at the Horse and Groom. Being a bank manager in a small market town didn’t allow for much fun and Cowley had always enjoyed these little outings. He appreciated good beer and found the somewhat antiquated machinations of the brewery fascinating. Honeycote Ales was small enough to allow itself the luxury of traditional methods and high standards. The mounds of golden Herefordshire hops and malt barley, the ancient wooden tuns and vats, the pure clear water