Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (9 page)

“I don’t like all that old stuff,” she said, bundling the notes together with an elastic band and printing him a receipt. “Now if you started stocking real books—stuff published this century, I mean—then you might be talking.”

“Alas, I have no room for your modern trash.” He tucked the receipt into his waistcoat pocket with his heart beating faster than it should and a tremble in his fingers he found most irritating. “If it’s not bound in leather, I’m not interested.”

The cashier tipped him a wink. “Said the actress to the bishop, eh?” And they both laughed as he made his way back out into the rain.

It was a good recovery from letting slip an accidental truth, but the regret came back almost as soon as he was alone. Was it really any better for the abbot’s psalter to be locked in a sterile cage where it would never be read than it was for it to be burned? And if it wasn’t any better, then for what reason had he just sold the integrity he’d been working so hard to establish since Tom died?

He bought Danish pastries at Bernadette’s on the way back for himself and for Kevin, but couldn’t muster much appetite for them, tainted as they were by the pieces of silver with which he’d bought them. He felt as hunted and as defenceless as he’d been in the police station the day they’d arrested him. They’d put him in the cells to wait for Tom to arrive with the bail money, and he’d seen how easily he could end up spending
years
in this place where an ability to talk fast was always going to lose out to the clenched fist. If he was honest, that experience had scared the shit out of him, and he couldn’t face it again. Even the thought that tonight Michael might be looking in at the book club made him queasy with guilt.

Stopping outside the shop to adjust the awning over his table of charity books (
Take and donate as it pleases you. If you have no money, take anyway.
) to make sure they were out of the rain, his gaze was caught by the wet cobbles, by the long street of receding shop fronts, now populated only by one other human being bundled into a dark coat and disguised under a yellow umbrella. It was a moment where everything stopped. Everything stopped and waited for him to reach his decision.

“Never again,” he said, inviting the rain as a witness. “That was it. That was the last time. You hear me, rain? This time I really mean it.”

He thought perhaps something had heard. The weight eased a little off his chest. The clouds chose that moment to part, and the street glittered as though diamonds had been spilled underfoot. At the touch of sunlight on his face, he breathed in, and something released in him. Who would have thought he’d been carrying that reservation all these years without even knowing it? That little hidden place that said, “I know we’ve gone straight, but perhaps . . . If the reason is good enough. If it seems like fun . . . we might go back. We don’t want to be boring, after all.”

And now it was gone. Five years later, and he’d finally accepted this was the right move.

He found himself smiling as he walked in the door. All of his leather chairs, armchairs, and window seats were occupied. Kevin took his feet off the desk abruptly at his presence but failed to look convincingly guilty. And it was Friday, a busy time, but he’d just had a revelation, and he deserved to celebrate that. He put the pastries down on the desk and gave Kevin a smile that made the boy side-eye him in return.

“Sweets for the sweet. My boy, how do you fancy holding down the fort here while I give myself a well-earned holiday?”

“Do I get paid for doing your job as well as mine?”

“I suppose you do.”

“Then have a great time.”

Boatbuilding plans and a house with a narrowboat at the bottom of the garden. Finn walked along the towpath, looking up at the expensive grey stone houses that lined the river. A less self-aware man might have tried to pretend he was not hoping to accidentally bump into the object of his interest, but Finn was not that man. It was ridiculous to have to wait the many hours until this evening when a little application of reason and effort could engineer a meeting earlier.

He clambered over Petty Curie lock, its great black wooden levers jutting out into the path in the shut position, as a blue-painted canal boat with a willow-pattern theme began to float up to the higher level. A charmless concrete arch of a bridge spanned the river here, and when he stood on it, he could see a neat little marina on the left-hand side, a rotting barge in a rusty crane, and beyond that a faded red narrowboat veiled under willows at the end of a garden. Glimpses of a house were all solemn stone walls and wrought iron, but he spared it scarcely a glance, because there was a figure by the river’s edge, clearing junk out of the narrowboat, and there was his quarry, as large as life and twice as handsome.

Finn strolled down from the centre of the bridge and stood on the same side of the canal as Michael, thinking. If he was a cop on active duty, merely lying to pique Finn’s interest, then he would surely be at work right now, plodding round the district with his partner. He would not be at home alone like this in the middle of the day, trying to deal with his dead parents’ detritus.

Yet here he was. Clearly, the poor man needed company. It would be an act of goodwill to go and say hello. And of course it didn’t hurt that today Michael had left off his overshirt and had obviously been working in the rain. The way his T-shirt clung across his chest left very little to the imagination and confirmed Finn’s initial impression that the man was ridiculously hot.

“Hello,” he said, walking up just as Michael was bending to lift a TV the size of Scandinavia. He paused to unashamedly admire the line of the man’s back and his arse and the way the strain made his shoulders and biceps bulge. “What a surprise running into you here. Here in your own back garden.”

Michael put the TV down on the footpath and straightened up, turning to Finn with an expression of wary surprise. Finn had been remembering him a little wrong. He recalibrated. It was a heavy face, to be sure, with sturdy bones, but there was a classical handsomeness to it that he had underestimated in memory. The eyes that he had taken for brown, in his shop, proved under autumn sunshine to be a light hazel that verged on gold. And he had almost forgotten the soul inside, the impression of something powerful reduced to helplessness, trapped and lost and waiting to be rescued.

What he hadn’t seen before was the misery behind that uncertain gaze. He was just having second thoughts—did he really want to play the part of rescuer, which seemed like hard work—when Michael smiled. Only a little smile but very sweet. And Finn stayed.

“You showed up at my house.” Michael bowed his head to smile at the ground before Finn’s feet. “Are you stalking me?”

He hadn’t forgotten the tragic directness, though. Bless the man, he made himself so vulnerable, being utterly transparent like that. “If I was, would you object?”

Michael raised his head as though something else was holding it down. But when he looked Finn in the eye, finally, the challenge in his gaze went straight to Finn’s groin. “I think I can handle you.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.”

They smiled at one another, as if aware how ridiculous the exchange was, and Michael lost some of his wariness. He picked the TV back up again and nodded in the direction of the house. “My father filled the boat and the house with crap. Let me just take this to the skip.”

“I know some people who could use a TV.” Finn thought of Kevin’s pregnant sister and her ne’er-do-well boyfriend in their squat. “If you’re just throwing it out.”

“It doesn’t work.” Michael stood with the great bulky thing in both arms. One of the old-fashioned ones made of thick glass and thick wood that Finn probably couldn’t raise off the ground at all, and Michael apparently hadn’t yet begun to notice the weight. “Nothing around here works. If it had worked, he would have sold it before he died.”

A yellow skip stood in the drive, on top of a flattened fence that had evidently once separated the front and back gardens. Michael tossed the TV on top of sheets of old wallpaper, broken chairs, and tables. One or two whole mugs and unbroken white plates with gold rims said that not everything had been rubbish
before
it was trashed. Even the blanket box with its lid torn off was broken from the inside out with marks that seemed to match the sledgehammer that stood by the back door.

“You want a coffee?” Michael gestured him inside. Finn was pretty sure he recognised rage in the heaps of broken things piled in the skip, but he’d been curious as a cat all his life, so he went in.

The kitchen had been completely stripped. Tiles and paper gone from the stained plaster of the walls. Carpet torn up and standing in a roll by the fridge. Dismantled cupboard doors that matched some of the carcasses outside had been stacked by the boiler, which together with the sink were the only two things left standing. A kettle stood on the bare concrete floor in an island of jars, looking like a refugee in the middle of a minefield.

Even more curious now, Finn put his head into the living room. The rage tornado had not yet reached this room, but Michael was probably right that the stereo didn’t work. It must have been made in the seventies. A second TV was a little more modern, on a carpet that was bland and blue. The cream upholstered sofa had probably been bought in the fifties and was stained with brown streaks on one side. The kitchen was a war zone, but this was something worse.

Finn had a vivid imagination and this room was like something undead. He expected the walls to start leaking blood at any moment and all the doors to open onto emptiness with eyes outside.

The kitchen was comforting by comparison when he backed carefully into it and found Michael watching him with interest. “You can do the tour if you like.”

“Is it haunted?” Finn asked, trying to put his finger on the feeling that was making his hair stir and prickle all over his body.

“To me, yeah.” Michael’s shoulders hunched as he followed Finn’s gaze to the rest of the house. “But I’m surprised you feel anything.” He gave a self-deprecating snort. “Haunted by memories, I mean. I hate the place, but I assumed that was just me.”

“I’m very sensitive that way,” Finn admitted, and added together the house’s aura of malevolence and the misery Michael had been carrying like a weight for the whole conversation. “I’m gathering it wasn’t a place where you were happy.”

“You could say that.”

Hmm. Big, strong guy with anger-management issues? Possible cop. Finn told himself to walk away and close a mental door on this attraction as firmly as he could. Padlock it too.

“So how about I take you out for coffee?” he found himself saying instead. “Or tea. The best tea shop in the county is only about a mile farther down the towpath. They do curried parsnip soup and cheese scones to die for. Or if that doesn’t appeal, there are two pubs and an ice cream van around the same park. Come, let us disport ourselves among the dairy products.”

The desolation in Michael’s eyes was covered over by a wash of amusement. “Is it expensive? I’m between jobs right now.”

Finn could have kissed him twice. Amusement suited him, gentling some of his more brutal edges. And he wasn’t a policeman at all, so Finn had been fretting for nothing.

“Well, I’m feeling flush at the moment,” he admitted. “Call it my treat.”

“This is . . . um. A bit genteel for me.” Michael looked up at the Mermaid Tea Rooms as Cinderella in her rags must have looked at the ball. Finn suppressed a smile and wondered what exactly it was that the man found intimidating.

The river had been widened here into a basin in which the boats could moor up and turn around. In harmony, the towpath had also spread out into a little paved plaza lined with pubs, an independent cinema, a neatly kept stand of public toilets and an avant-garde statue of what Finn believed was a crayfish made out of fibre optics, which was subtly coloured in the daytime but unpleasantly garish at night.

The tea shop on the south of the plaza, by contrast, was a study in how to do English countryside right. Its white-and-yellow façade was half-obscured by climbing roses. Its window boxes trailed verbena almost to the ground, and its door had the perfect balance of aged, peeling paint and bright door knocker. The door stood open on two large rooms where half a dozen tables were visible, draped in white tablecloths and centred with flowers.