Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (18 page)

“You don’t know?”

This time the second man actually laughed, a polite little scoffing noise as he opened the door to the hall and looked upstairs, where torn-up carpet and torn-down wallpaper clogged the landing. Michael’s disappointment and betrayal last night had been channelled into finally getting everything out of his parents’ bedroom.

There had been only one thing of hers that his father had not already sold—a tiny glass unicorn Michael had bought on a school trip to Venice. He’d found it under the carpet, under the bed, hidden under a loose floorboard, its legs and horn broken. That had been what started him drinking, and once he had started, there hadn’t seemed to be a good time to stop before he passed out.

He took the mug into the kitchen, filled it with water, and drank carefully, trying to dilute the dizziness and the despair. Why’d he ever thought that moving back here would make things better? Things were shit
everywhere
. Everywhere in the world.

He put the kettle on. “You want coffee?”

PC Silver Screen gave him another jolt of condescension. “I would just like you to answer my questions, please, sir. Are you intimate with Mr. Hulme?”

“It’s hard to say,” Michael tried again, aware that it sounded like he was being evasive when actually he was telling the absolute truth. He put a spoon of instant granules in a mug while he wrestled with a better way of putting it. “I only just moved into town, only just met him. I, uh . . .” The kettle boiled. He poured the hot water, then sipped scalding coffee in the hopes it would sharpen him up enough to get some kind of handle on this conversation. “I like him. A lot, actually. But I wouldn’t say I really know him.”

“How about these people?” Shipton passed him a photo of a hard-core-looking couple, a tall man and a woman with a gaze like a fist.

His stomach settled enough to risk a larger mouthful of coffee and let him turn his head in search of the Paracetamol he’d bought yesterday for his hands. “I don’t know them.”

“They were seen yesterday coming out of Mr. Hulme’s premises. Can you tell me what his relationship is with them?”

It pissed him off, the clear assumption that he was lying. “I have never seen them before, so I have no idea.”

“You can’t say what they were doing in his shop last night?”

“No, I can’t.” Michael realised with a shock that he was glaring, leaning forwards into Shipton’s personal space, and that his hands were clenched so tight the blisters were bleeding again.

“How about this man?” Another photo, this time of a man he almost recognised. Seen once on a file brought over from another division, maybe.

“What’s this about?” he asked, rather than say so. They had to have looked him up, they must know he was an ex-cop. He really didn’t want to drag all that into this conversation, have them accuse him of being a quitter or a coward or a traitor.

“Since you’re new in the area—” Shipton gave him a falsely avuncular smile, one cop to the other “—you may not know that these charming young people are wanted in connection with the burglaries of several stately homes around here, over a period of several months, including Harcombe House itself. Now we find them consorting with a known fence in our patch, with whom you have also been consorting. It would be remiss of us not to look into how much you know about that.”

“I don’t know anything about it!” Michael’s head hurt, and his heart hurt too, dropped straight out of hope into condemnation. He should have known. He should have known that anything that seemed so good was too good to be true.

Shipton exchanged a glance with Lane, who had been notably absent for the past five minutes, no doubt checking the upstairs for stolen goods. Lane shook his head minutely, and Shipton dialled back the aggression only to replace it with extra quantities of disgusted pity, as he took Michael out of the mental category of
villain
and put him into that of
dupe
. He swept a dismissive gaze over the wreck of Michael’s house and life.

“Well, then, you can consider this a warning, sir. It’s easy to be taken in by these charming types, but you heed my advice and have nothing further to do with Mr. Fintan Hulme. Ignorance is no excuse in court, after all. And now you don’t even have that.”

After they finished questioning him, Michael followed them out into the garden to watch them leave, uniformed in their high-visibility squad car. By that time, it was half seven and the Lis would all be awake, maybe watching out of their windows. Michael didn’t care. He didn’t care that his respectable neighbours now had every reason to look at him askance. He didn’t care about the aspersions cast on his good name and his honour and his honesty.

He didn’t fucking care, all right.

In the absence of something to punch in the front garden, he staggered back inside, made it to the bathroom in time to throw up wretchedly in the toilet, tile floor cold against his knees and his eyes streaming from acid and misery. When he’d finished purging the alcohol, he rested his forehead against the ceramic tiles of the wall, let the early-morning chill pierce through him and bring the kind of peace that snow brought with it.

Carefully, he gathered himself together again. He didn’t care. He took off gritty, shameful clothes and soaked himself pink in the shower. He didn’t care.

Avoiding meeting his own eyes in the mirror, he shaved and brushed his teeth and tried to slick his too-long curls down into something professional, as though he could somehow reset the whole interview with the police, restart it with himself as he was when he was prepared and armoured and ready to look normal and competent and . . .

Except he didn’t fucking care, all right?

He forced down half a bowl of cornflakes and another cup of coffee. The headache receded to a dull throb between his eyes, but his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He told himself that he’d had a narrow escape. That he should do as Shipton suggested. He should write Finn off. Get himself together, make that boat and sell it. Plough the money back into a new business, concentrate on good, hard work and his good neighbours, ask them, maybe, to introduce him to other friends. Keep his head down and his nose clean, and get away from this stumble as fast as he possibly could.

He tried laughing, but the sound of it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Dressed in clean clothes, he shifted his phone out of the pocket of his dirty jeans, turned it on, and saw that he had missed a half a dozen calls. Four of them from Finn.

Boats wouldn’t build themselves. He sank back onto the futon, looking at the little shining screen. Sooner or later his savings would run out, and he should have something big to sell by then because not even the rent on a London flat would keep the wolf from the door forever. He should be the sensible grown-up he knew he was and delete the messages unheard. He should make the break, right now, while disillusionment and anger would still make it easy.

Of course he didn’t. “Michael.” Finn’s faint Irish accent made the name sound exotic, made Michael’s limbic system sit up and beg, flushing him with memories of how it had sounded gasped out in bliss. “I have a trifling emergency. If you’re thinking of coming over, don’t.”

He stabbed the recording off, anger joining the unwanted arousal. Don’t come over? Why? Because Finn’s accomplices had turned up unexpectedly, and he couldn’t risk having an ex-cop around. Why the hell? Why the hell had Finn led him on the way he had if he’d known, as he must have known, that Michael was the enemy? Had he done it deliberately to undermine Michael’s reputation with the local force? Or just to mess with Michael’s obviously vulnerable heart because it was there and he could?

Earlier in his career, he might have thought that picking up his keys, putting on a coat and scarf, carefully locking the door behind him, indicated calm premeditation. The fact was he did them without thinking, found himself outside, halfway to Finn’s without any conscious intention of going there at all. Something seethed in him, making his breathing hard and his steps long and easy. His hands were too tightly clenched to shake, but he could feel the vibration nevertheless, inside his bone marrow, inside his blood, reverberating in his brain with a thin shrill.

The door was open. Burst open, in fact, the lock splintered. Someone else had come in here in a fury. It didn’t surprise him. Finn was a lying, twisted little bastard. If he’d played with Michael, it stood to reason he’d play with others too—others less reasonable. He slapped the door aside, stormed through the passage down into the shop.

Black marks streaked along the ceiling, and the place smelled of tar and ash. Pegasus’s empty plinth mocked him—Finn had lied about what happened to the sculpture. He had lied obviously, lied with abandon, lied like it was an Olympic sport. And Michael, Michael who knew
exactly
what it was like growing up in the snares of a man who was deceitful just because it was fun, had still somehow found it endearing.

He was such a fool. He was such a fucking loser. He deserved every iota of this misery.

Down and to the left, the burned smell strengthening, he followed the marks on the ceiling, the stench. His feet squelched on the coconut matting. He turned the corner, and there Finn was, in the centre of a black star whose tendrils crawled out over the floor, over the bookshelves, over the ceiling like some kind of obvious metaphor of evil.

Finn glanced up as Michael came in, and Michael’s fury missed a step. Finn looked so lonely there, so slight and undefended and sad. The green eyes raised to Michael’s angry gaze were so peridot, like willow leaves. If they had lit with pleasure to see him, he might still have smiled back. Something in him very much wanted to engulf Finn in his arms and bury his face in Finn’s neck and hold on tight until it all went away.

If Finn had seemed at all receptive to that . . .

But Finn didn’t. He raised his chin and narrowed his reddened eyes and said, “Where the fuck have you been, then?”

And Michael had had just about enough of this shit for one lifetime, thank you very much.

Finn debouched himself from a taxi at a godforsaken hour in the morning in front of his shop. His feet were not as bad as he’d initially feared, only tight feeling, stinging, and stiff, but he had not slept, despite being forcibly pinned to a hospital bed all night. Partly this was because who could? Surrounded by six other burn victims, all tossing and groaning in their sleep. Surrounded by nurses who walked briskly through the wards, wheeling carts full of things that clattered, and who congregated in the corners to whisper in scarcely lowered voices. Who could sleep through that?

Even when he had slipped into a doze, he found himself being woken every two hours to have his breathing checked, to reassure everyone that his lungs hadn’t been cooked from within by residual heat, or eaten away by the acidic residue of the smoke. Imagining that had naturally led him to be afflicted by phantom chest pain all night long.

And while he lay, not sleeping due to this onslaught of irritants, he could not help but picture the police in his poor flat. He was fairly certain he no longer had anything incriminating or illegal on hand. The supplies he used for falsifying provenance on objects without it could be readily explained away as supplies he needed to create books like the one in the window. Other than those, everything was aboveboard and paid for.

It didn’t mean he liked the idea of the plod rooting through everything with their cold eyes and their cold hands. Lumbering up and down his stairs, opening his cupboards and fingering his things. Looking at his pictures of Tom and raising their eyebrows at one another because these days they couldn’t get away with the full-blown sneer.

They’d fixed a hasp with a padlock over the front door to secure it after the fire brigade had smashed in the lock. He hobbled gingerly in through the back garden, where he kept a crowbar in the shed and levered the hasp away, more out of principle than rational thought. After he’d done it, he regretted it, but he hadn’t been able to bear the thought of having the police’s lock on his front door—a lock for which he didn’t have the key. No one locked his door against him, damn it.

He would phone a locksmith as soon as the shops opened. Until then, he could lock the flat upstairs and put up with a few early tourists wandering in out of the cold.

They hadn’t let him shower at the hospital, and his clothes were still full of ash. He headed up to get clean and to eat something. His insides felt TARDIS-like, cavernous, bigger and emptier than anything his skin should be capable of containing.

He wasn’t liking this business of being an honest man so far. But fuck them. Fuck them all, if they thought they could bully him out of it.

Bathing and dressing in clean clothes did a little to alleviate his mood, but not even eating bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, and coffee did anything to fill the hollow inside him, where everything that he was had drawn itself deep inside, retreated, squeezing itself together in a singularity of soul so buried he couldn’t tell if he was angry or sad or calm.

The sun had risen and was lancing through the bookshop windows when he ventured back downstairs again to see the damage. The open front door framed a yellow tree in front of the bakers’ steamy red-painted windows and the nodding purple violas in their hanging baskets. It was also cleansing some of the smell of char and heartbreak.