Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (16 page)

Except . . . He folded his arms and sighed, letting the daydream go. He’d already made himself a promise for how to use this boat. He’d have to make a new one for Finn. Maybe make it with him—add more bookshelves, maybe some carvings, leather bench seats . . . gargoyles around the waterspouts? Something less generic than this. Unique as Finn himself.

It was a measure of how much better he felt that the prospect sounded exciting rather than simply exhausting. Committing himself to it, he washed and dried an old takeaway coffee cup with a lid, wrote a note saying, “I’m in the house, the boat is empty,” and folded it into the cup. He dropped the hatch key in after it and fastened the lid on tight, sellotaping over the drinking hole.

Then he left the boat to air, and climbed back into the hulk. It hadn’t rained for three or four days, and the inside was drier than before. There were still no signs the girl had come back. Wedging the coffee cup into the edge of her sleeping platform, above the green scum line that indicated the highest water mark, he knelt in the arched darkness for a moment and addressed a God he was afraid to believe in anymore.

“If she needs it, let her think to come here. Let her come here and find it. Let her be safe.”

Of course he’d prayed the same thing for others. He’d prayed the same thing for Stacey and look how much good that had done. But maybe Trowchester was a place where God listened. Maybe Finn had turned his luck around. When he flashed back for the nth time that morning to the visceral memory of Finn giving up, giving everything up to him in utter abandon, he didn’t see how it could be otherwise. Finn restored his faith in everything, in God and man, in the earth and the sky and even in himself.

Buoyed by the first flush of infatuation or love, depending on whether his cynical or romantic side was in the driving seat at the time, Michael braved being upstairs in the house for long enough to haul the futon out of the guest bedroom, heave and slide it downstairs, and assemble it like a sofa in the stripped living room. This looked like a war zone still, but most of its memories had ended up outside in the skip, and he had already proved to himself that he could sleep here if necessary.

He dropped a sleeping bag and pillow on the futon out of a Boy Scout notion of being prepared, but it was with the lightness in his stomach and the tingle in his lips of a man who expected something better. Making a bed, spreading out a sleeping bag on top of it, just brought back memories of last night, anticipation for more. He yearned not only for sex but for arms around him, to fall asleep wrapped in a tangle of limbs, Finn sleeping heavy and relaxed against his chest, breathing a wash of hot and cold air into his neck.

With the minimum done for survival in the house, he decided not to risk his good mood by staying inside. If he was to build a boat for Finn, something they could call theirs—the first fruits, maybe, of a newly shared existence—then he should get started before winter put the kybosh on everything.

He spent a productive afternoon in the workshop, cleaning it of years of neglect, sweeping away the spiders and the nest of hedgehogs who had made a home under some of the piled timber. With the aid of his laptop, he figured out the fuse box and restored power to the sockets and the lathe and the circular saw. By the time it began to get dark, he’d begun to scale up the plans Finn had sold him, transferring the shapes onto thin plywood templates, which he would use to cut out the structural timbers of the boat—keel, ribs, gunwales—the rudder, cabin, and all.

Straightening up from slotting together the first few shapes, he discovered that the light outside had faded to blue, that the small of his back felt as though it were stuffed with knuckles, and two of the blisters on his hands had popped, so that he was leaving bloodstains wherever he worked. Time to call it a day. He smiled up at the early moon, his good mood only getting better. Time to get some food to keep his strength up for tonight, and to make himself presentable. While he didn’t suppose Finn would mind too much that he’d forgotten to shave, he suspected the guy drew the line at hair full of dusty spiderwebs, and old grease and graphite under the nails.

Once he was clean, and with his blisters plastered, he heated an individual lasagne and opened his laptop to check his emails. The rental firm managing his flat had finished subdividing it and found tenants already, so he could expect an income at the end of the month. A bank he did not have an account with was asking him to reenter his personal details, and two different people were apparently so concerned about the size of his penis they were offering him pills to enlarge it. It was very pleasant indeed to switch his usual mental response of
Who the hell cares?
to
Actually my partner likes it as it is
, and he felt altogether smug as he scraped the last of the meat and tomato sauce out of the silver foil with his spoon.

As if to complete a great day, the Skype alarm flashed up. He folded down the empty lasagne container and stuffed it in the bin, cradled the laptop in one arm, and hit Answer as he settled onto the comparative comfort of the futon.

“Hey, Jenny. Great to see you.”

“You too,” she said, looking like a bad clone of herself—slightly twitchy and with the hair all wrong. She’d always had problems with it being too long, too thick, and too slippery to control. Twisted up in a bun, it slithered out. Her ponytails were too thick for an elastic band to go round enough times to be tight. And yes, he’d joked about her getting it all chopped off, but now that she had, he wasn’t sure he liked it. There was something terribly vulnerable, brutal even, about the short pixie cut that had replaced it.

“I like the hair.”

She flashed a smile. “You mean you hate it, but you don’t have enough of a death wish to say so.”

“Pretty much. Your idea?”

Jenny rolled her eyes. “DS Egmont’s. At least, he finally came out and told me he thought it looked unprofessional long. He’s been in such a mood since you left that I thought I’d better take the hint.”

He felt a twinge of automatic empathy. “Things not going well at the station?”

“Oh, it’s shit.”

And it was accompanied by an unexpected surge of lightness. Not his problem anymore. Egmont getting pissy, demands of overtime, heckling from the cells, being attacked in the corridors, jockeying for promotion, all of that was behind him too.

He was designing a boat for Finn. Good hard work for what he hoped would be an appreciative audience, and he didn’t have to wade in any of that shit anymore. It was the first time he’d felt good about leaving. Maybe it showed, because Jenny’s litany of complaint wound down into silence.

“Makes you glad you’re out of it?”

“Yeah,” he admitted, shamefacedly. “Sorry.”

“No problem.” She leaned back, stretching, the webcam giving him a good picture of her little flat behind her, chrysanthemums in a blue jug on the windowsill, and rooftops beyond. “I looked up your guy, by the way.”

Oh shit. He’d forgotten that he’d asked. He shifted on the uncomfortably thin mattress of the futon that didn’t quite pad the slats beneath and washed his palms across his face. Could he tell her he’d changed his mind and he didn’t want to know?
Did
he want to know?

“It’s good news, right? On the level, honest businessman, unknown to the police?”

Her look of sympathy gutted him. “Oh, Michael, you haven’t fallen for the guy? You were supposed to wait until I checked him out. I went as fast as I could.”

All of his new hope drained away. It became so hard to breathe, he was convinced there was actually something physically wrong with him. He hunched forwards over the pressure in his chest. “You sure you looked up the right bloke? I mean, Fintan Hulme, could you get a more common name? There must be hundreds of them.”

She laughed dutifully at the joke, but didn’t allow him to get away with it. “Well, this one was a high-class fence in Marylebone. His name came up in connection with numerous thefts from public buildings, art galleries, and private collectors. Charged and bailed on thirteenth August 2009, but the case was dropped for lack of evidence.”

He took that and gripped it like a lifeline. “So maybe he was innocent.”

“More like clever. One of those cases where everyone
knows
it was him, you just can’t find evidence that will hold up in court. He left London soon after the dismissal, five years ago, and dropped off our radar. He was known to deal in all kinds of goods, but he specialised in antiquarian books.” She gave him a soft-eyed sympathetic look that made him want to break something. “Sound like your guy?”

My guy
, he thought, putting his elbows on his knees and bowing his face into his hands. “Yeah. Yes. It does.”

Finn had been waiting, too wired to read or drink or do anything but pace his apartment and sit and stand at random for an hour. When the knock at the door finally came, it relieved a building pressure of conviction that something had gone wrong. Thank God, it hadn’t. Michael was not now lying dead in his house of some sledgehammer-induced accident, or wired up on machines in the hospital because he had not been looking the right way when he crossed the road . . .

And oh God, what an old woman Finn was, to be sure. It was just that he had expected the man two hours ago, and been waiting for a phone call at least ever since to explain why he was so late.

But it was fine, here he was in person. Hopefully with a bottle of wine and an explanation, or at the very least a great deal of guilt to be taken advantage of.

Finn removed his reading glasses from where he had shoved them up onto his head like a hairband, put them on the mantle instead. Then he took a quick look at himself in the mirror by the door, raking a hand through his fringe to give it that artistically dishevelled look. He considered taking his tie off, and then he considered all the fun they could have with it on, and simply loosened it a little, to avoid being too formal.

Well, he would never be love’s young dream again, but neither was Michael. They would have to make do.

Just the anticipation had him skipping down the stairs like a spring lamb. He threw the door wide, beaming, so convinced he would see Michael there that he couldn’t comprehend what had hammered him in the chest and sent him reeling back to land on his arse in the corridor, until he was scrabbling to get up.

“What the fuck?”

The door
snick
ed shut and for a moment in the dim of the corridor all he was aware of was that there were two shapes and neither of them was Michael’s. Two dark figures in hooded coats, their cowls pulled down around their faces. Both tall, both skinny, one carrying something in the crook of its elbow.

“If you’d only—”

“Welcomed us like that—”

“Last time. We wouldn’t be—”

“Having this little tiff.”

Benny loped forwards on his long legs and put down a foot in Finn’s stomach, stopping him from getting up. Lisa made a gesture he couldn’t parse, at first, and then the
clunk
and the two round gun barrels that had levered up into place added themselves together in his mind, and he saw with disbelief that she was aiming a double-barrelled shotgun at him.

Michael. Now would be a good time to turn up. Where’s a fucking cop when you need one?

He raised his hands, rather stereotypically, and attempted a calm, reasonable tone of voice. “Lisa, Benny? Look there’s no need for all this cops and robbers nonsense. We’re not in an episode of
The
Bill
. Let’s talk this out like reasonable adults. What can I do for you?”

Lisa gave her compatriot an encouraging nod. Benny leaned down to grab Finn’s wrists. He pulled them away, but she made a jerking movement with the end of the gun that called his attention to the fact that he didn’t want to provoke her.

Finn let Benny twist his arms behind his back and wrench him to his feet. He scarcely felt the pain of being manhandled, his mind too busy with imagining what it would feel like to have a slug of lead penetrate your bones at a hundred miles an hour. What kind of damage did a gun like that do anyway? Would it make a neat, survivable hole, or would it blow out the back of his spine?

“This is why I didn’t want to deal with you two in the first place,” he said, something wild in him getting in between reason and the desire to survive. “I prefer to have civilised customers, and you two give Neanderthals a bad name.”

“Go ahead and insult us.”

“See how that works out for you.”

Benny hauled him into the Jules Verne room, named after the clockwork model of the time machine that stood on a plinth in its centre. The thought of Pegasus, still half-wingless upstairs, of Lisa’s soulless vandalism, of the possibility of the same fate befalling this jewel of creativity—he forgot about the gun and kicked back hard, jamming his heel into Benny’s shin.

Benny reacted by jerking both of his arms so high his shoulders almost ground out of their sockets. He wasn’t even aware it was him screaming until the sound tapered off and the agony subsided enough for him to tell his throat was raw. Some fear tried to worm its way through his anger, but it failed. The big kids used to do this to him in the playground. He fucking despised them then, and he despised them still.