Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (29 page)

Michael had fallen asleep at four o’clock in the morning, after trying to match Finn’s restless sleeplessness all night long. He didn’t wake as Finn slid out of bed two hours later, having grown impatient with darkness and waiting and his own thoughts.

Finn slipped his feet into slippers and wrapped a dressing gown around himself, looking down at the barely visible lump in his bed that was his sleeping lover. It had been a shit week, and he had been bitter and difficult to live with, and here Michael still was, reliable, calm, and affectionate through it all.

He wanted to blame the guy for all of this, for shopping him to the police, for setting him up for this trial, for forcing him to face the consequences of his own actions. But the truth was that this, or something like this, was inevitable the moment he had opened his stupid mouth and confessed to Lady Harcombe in her library. It had slipped out on its own in a wave of self-righteousness, that perhaps meant he had begun to have the instincts of an honest man.

Michael wasn’t to know that, of course, but with his background he would naturally assume the truth would come out sooner or later, would assume it was best to tell it yourself and have the world give you extra credit for owning up.

If Finn wanted to be honest about it, he had pretty much accepted this the moment he’d accepted Michael.

He reached down and pushed his fingers into Michael’s thick shock of black hair. Michael nuzzled into the touch but didn’t wake, worn out. Shagged out, more likely.
I hope you appreciate what I’m doing for you, darling.
Finn found himself smiling despite the nauseating twist of his nerves.
Because it doesn’t get much more heroic than this.

It didn’t get much more heroic than leaving the man to sleep, when Finn would have appreciated the company. He opened the bedroom door as quietly as he could and tiptoed downstairs.

The garden was eerie in the predawn hush. Not a car on the street, only a flash of black movement at head height as a cat jumped from the back wall. The plate of shepherd’s pie he’d put out this evening sat on the table with cold mashed potato gone runny with rain, and cat paw prints amongst the gravy.

For the second night running, his ghost had not appeared, abandoned him without a word of thanks. He hoped nothing terrible had happened to them, wondered if this was another case for the police. But what exactly could they do? He’d never seen the ghost’s face, could not describe their clothes except for
dark
, knew no name, or circumstances, or age. Had lost any DNA traces in the dishwasher two nights ago.

Like an electric shock, it struck him that tonight he might not be here either. He might be inside. What was it like in there? Surely not as bad as American media would have you believe, with their jokes about dropped soap in the showers and their smug unstated assumptions that prisoners were getting what they deserved. Such things would not be allowed to go on in a British jail, with the assumption that the purpose of the institution was to rehabilitate rather than to punish.

He raised shaking hands and rubbed them over his face, his burning, gritty eyes. Not this again! Could he not even control the inside of his own mind. What was the point? What was the point of making himself sick with worry like this, when it would either happen, or it would not, and worry would do nothing to prevent it?

He felt like a dropped glass, only his willpower keeping the pieces from flying apart, holding time and ruin still by determination alone.

Thank God, it would be over today, and he could accept . . .

Snatching up the unwanted plate, he hurled it against the wall, where it smashed with a slap and a crash that wasn’t satisfying enough. He picked up the seat by the table—wrought iron, almost too heavy for his shaking arms—and tossed that after, gouging holes in the ancient brickwork. A plant pot full of spring bulbs—it shattered and rained daffodils and soil all over him.

He couldn’t accept it. He wouldn’t accept it. He didn’t want to go to jail.

A bigger planter, with a hebe in it. As he struggled to raise it off the ground, Michael’s arms slipped around him and pulled him back into the warmth—a blazing warmth now that Finn was thoroughly chilled—of a sturdy body.

“Let me go! Let me go!” He kicked and struggled. Michael’s grip eased instantly, letting him twist around and slap the man hard across the cheek. “I hate you. I fucking hate you. Why did you do this to me?”

No reaction. He didn’t know what reaction he wanted, but indifference was definitely not it. Fucking dolt. Fucking immovable, unfeeling bastard. Finn balled his fist and threw a punch, anticipating the crunch and the pain as bone met bone and he broke Michael’s nose.

But Michael caught his fist in one hand, tugged and twisted, doing something Finn didn’t quite follow, that ended with Michael behind him again, Finn’s arm held firmly and tightly across his chest, trapping his other hand. Disarmed and defenceless except for his words.

“I hate you.”

“I know.” Michael bent his head, tucked his face into Finn’s neck and held on, the way he did when they slept, when it was cold outside and he was afraid to wake. “I’m sorry.”

They shook together in silence, wound tight, Michael’s right hand still hard around Finn’s wrist, his left spread wide on Finn’s chest, over the heart, increasingly holding him up. Finn’s legs gave way before his resolve not to cry, but that followed soon after. He hid his face in Michael’s biceps and let the guy pick him up and take him back indoors.

“It’s going to be okay,” said Michael, patiently and unconvincingly as he sat Finn down at the window seat and kissed his eyes. “It’s going to be fine. I promise. I’m sorry.”

“You piece of shit. You’ve ruined my life.”

Michael winced. His mouth tightened and turned down, his gaze fell to the floor, and his shoulders hunched as if crushed by a heavy weight, every line of him expressing a kind of mute, unbearable, animal misery. “I’m going to make you some breakfast.”

He fought to get to his feet—Finn could see the struggle in the stiffness of his movements, as though his muscles had locked over terrible pain. And Finn hated him—hated that he cared about him too much to bear to watch him suffer like this. It wasn’t fair. It
wasn’t fair
that he had to be the magnanimous one, but if it came down to a choice between forgiving Michael or driving him away by doing this to him, forgiveness didn’t seem so hard.

“I’m sorry,” he managed, before Michael had entirely left the room. “I’m just scared. I didn’t mean that.”

“I’m scared too.” Michael turned back slowly, looking wretched. “And it was true.”

By eleven forty-five, when his case was called, Finn had moved through fear and raw, peeled pain into an exhausted acceptance. There was something very numbing about the institutional carpet of the courthouse, the heavy, old oak furniture, lacy with the gouged graffiti of earlier generations, the bustle of ushers and solicitors, policemen and witnesses. It was all very businesslike and boring.

Michael sat by his side with the expression of a man in hospital beside the bed of his injured wife, looking helpless and guilty and sad. Finn’s resentment finally cracked at eleven thirty, with the knowledge that this might end up like the last time—he might lose the chance to tell Michael what he felt before it was too late.

So he nudged his shoulder against Michael’s, looking studiously in the other direction as he did. “I’ve already forgiven you, you know. I’d have thrown you out much earlier if I was going to.”

“You say that now, but—” Michael glanced warily around, arranged a coat between them and grasped Finn’s hand under it, holding on tight. “If it does go bad, you’re going to hate me.”

Ridiculous, that Finn had to be the one giving comfort. But it had been this way with Tom too. Arguments were tricky things for both sides to win if no one ever gave way first. There was something terribly domestic about the small sacrifice of ego, of first place. Sure, sex was a fine thing, but a fight at the end of which the pair of you were more lovingly entangled than ever, that was closer to being one flesh, one soul, than anything else.

“Don’t flatter yourself, there. I knew what I was getting into when I took you on. I think I always knew it was going to come to this.”

The pressure of Michael’s hand bent his bones, as Michael’s face shuttered down on some intense emotion, maybe gladness, maybe anguish. “And you thought I was worth it?”

“I did so. And I do.”

“Mr. Fintan Hulme?” the usher called, even as Mr. Todd, his solicitor arrived, looking inappropriately sunny in a pale suit and a yellow tie. Michael picked up the coat, but Finn didn’t allow the man to let go of his hand, so they walked in to court together, under the gaze of the recorder and the prosecution solicitor and the magistrate high on her bench, looking untouchable in her blue cashmere suit. A single pendant diamond the size of a fingernail shone like an oncoming headlight in the hollow of her throat.

Two other magistrates sat with her, one on either side, both of them looking shifty and worried. “She got to them,” he whispered, as he was forced to let Michael walk away to the public benches. “Look at them, they can’t even look me in the eye. They’re going to do whatever she wants.”

“I’m sure you’re imagining things, Mr. Hulme,” Todd humoured him with a tolerant smile, spreading out his files on his own bench as they sat, waiting for Finn to be accused.

The prosecutor rose to read the charge. “Remember,” Finn’s solicitor whispered beneath the drone of his opponent’s voice, “when he asks you how you plead, you’re going to answer ‘guilty.’”

“On this charge, Mr. Fintan Hulme, how do you plead? Guilty or not guilty?”

Finn stood up, opened his mouth, and Lady Harcombe made a stop gesture with a hand constellated with diamond rings. “A moment. Mr. Hulme, Mr. Todd. I would like to speak to you in camera.”

Todd gathered all his papers together with a
harumph
, as though this was highly irregular. The magistrates rose, and Lady Harcombe led the way out of the court through a small side door. Finn and Todd followed.

For an inner sanctum, it was very disappointing. More scrubby wood panelling and threadbare carpet, a scuffed desk piled with cardboard folders, a single chair in which Lady Harcombe sat enthroned.

“You asked us here so you could gloat?” Finn allowed himself to be unwisely goaded by her little small smile. “It’s not enough to get me jailed, you have to apply the personal touch first?”

“This kind of behaviour is not helping you, Mr. Hulme,” Todd whispered urgently, trying to press down his thinning hair as if it too were being dangerously rebellious.

Lady Harcombe laughed. “Don’t say that, Mr. Todd. I find it rather charming.”

Pretentious, condescending, evil-minded witch.

“So utterly self-defeating. You don’t even know what I’m about to say, Mr. Hulme.”

“I’m sure you’ll tell me soon enough.”

He wasn’t going to show her fear, that was for sure. He could survive this, and he would. He would come out and be done with it, ready to start a new life blameless as an angel with a man who was ready to stand by him however long it took.

Dear God, he already missed Michael’s presence at his elbow, that sense of patient, silent support. Why would he not come back for that?

“I understand that I have you to thank for the retrieval of my book, Mr. Hulme?”

“That’s right.”
Much good it did me.

“Mr. Hulme, please look at me when I’m speaking to you.”

He did, if only to check that she’d really had the audacity to say such a thing. She must have done. She was smiling.

“We had an agreement, you and I.” Pink lipstick, like an English rose, and a smile as cunning as any serpent’s. “Did we not? You would help me get my book back, and I would let you go.”

His mind took a wrong step and tripped up. Why would she say that? Where would that sentence take her that she could possibly want to go?

“You may have said as much,” he ventured, trying to see how the agreement might harm him, but coming up empty.

“Well, then.” She offered her outspread hands as though passing him something—a conclusion. “I strongly advise you to plead ‘not guilty.’”

“So you can send me up for trial? So I forfeit any leniency I might get? So my punishment is worse?” What was she up to? Was she making absolutely certain he would go to jail? Was she really that devious?

“I saw your young man in the public seats.” She toyed with a pen, turning it over and over, and stars danced from her hand to run along the walls. “Perhaps you could pass on a message to him from me?”

Finn inclined his head to signify that he was still hearing her words, even though they were not making a lot of sense.

“Tell him I am obliged to him. I was about to do something—” she took a lawyer’s pause, as if hunting about for less incriminating language “—ill advised, that night. Something I might have found it difficult to live with afterwards. He prevented me, and I am grateful. For his sake as well as for yours, take my advice and plead ‘not guilty.’”

Finn looked to his solicitor for an explanation, but Mr. Todd seemed as lost as he was. “Well, you’re my legal counsel. Counsel me.”