Trowchester Blues Read online

  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 snicked 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.

  “Did I hurt your tender feelings? Well, I’m sorry, but this is not going to persuade me to ever do business with you again.”

  Benny took a set of white cable ties from his pocket and snapped one around Finn’s wrists. Then he kicked out the back of Finn’s knees and collapsed him to the ground, securing his ankles with another.

  “You hurt our rep,” said Lisa, her pasty face still shadowed by her hood, but her pink-gloved hands pulled his books off the shelves and piled them up like kindling at her feet. “People think you can defy us, then they think they can too, so—”

  “Nothing personal, but—” Benny kicked him in the kidneys and then put a foot on his wrists to keep him from getting back up.

  Lisa tilted her head to give Finn a manic-pixie-girl smile. Shifting the gun back to her elbow, she took a box of matches from her pocket, lit one, and then let it drop into the pile of books.

  “Bye.”

  No.

  The flame caught in dry paper as of course it would, spread from leaf to leaf with eager voracity, pausing to really get its teeth into the leather-bound end boards before moving on to the next book, and the next.

  “You fucking barbarians! I’ll fucking have you!”

  Lisa was already backing towards the door. The foot on Finn’s wrists went away, but only to return as a kick to the back of his head that burst the world apart in a red rose. He barely followed the sound of retreating footsteps as everything went momentarily grey.

  The inside of his nose stung when he next possessed conscious thought. His nose stung and his eyes watered. His raw throat burned, and the air he breathed caught at his lungs like a cigarette. He coughed hard a couple of times, but it didn’t help, nor could he blink the grey mist out of his eyes. Truth was that the air was grey, grey with smoke, and the heat on the soles of his feet was making his shoes blister and melt.

  He rolled onto his stomach and then to his knees. Pressing his forehead against a bookshelf gave him the leverage to straighten up, still with his hands locked behind his back and his ankles strapped tight together. In the centre of the room the pile of books burnt more strongly than ever, flames crackling over it, shooting up to lick and blacken the ceiling, creeping across the matting towards further bookshelves.

  He tried to wipe his streaming nose on his shoulder, couldn’t reach, while he thought. There was a Break Glass Here fire alarm and sprinkler system point in the hall, which he could not break without his hands free. If he tried to hop there, the flames would reach the bookshelves long before he had it activated. Besides, he wasn’t keen on the idea of flooding his shop with water. Scarcely less damaging to the books than fire would be.

  Lisa had not thought through the shape of the bonfire. If he could smother the flames on the carpet, there was a good chance it would burn itself out without spreading, leaving only a scar on the floor and ceiling. But how to suppress the fire on the carpet without the sprinklers, while he was equally unable to run for the fire blanket in the kitchen as for the fire alarm?

  Paint bubbled on the ceiling overhead. His hair was smoking and his face tightening painfully in the heat. It hurt; it hurt to go closer, but maybe he could . . . He hopped towards the blaze, to the narrow avenue between shelves and bonfire over which a questing tendril of flame had begun to nose. Biting his lip, partly against pain, partly against the realisation that this was a truly awful idea, he stamped on the little blaze. Heat boiled through the melted rubber of his soles and scorched his feet.

  He yelled in agony and jumped away, his shoulder colliding with the shelves, barely managing to hold himself upright. Now he was terrified—terrified of falling forwards into the flames, una
ble to pick himself up again, rolling in them face-first with his hair and his clothes going up like tinder and the rest of him like a wet log, taking far too long to die.

  And yes, he couldn’t stamp out the flame again. But even if he did make it to the sprinkler control valve, he couldn’t operate it without his hands.

  He sent up a quick mental apology to the maker of the clockwork and rammed it with his shoulder, tipping it onto the floor. It shattered in a burst of gears and springs. Carefully kneeling down he groped behind him for a shard of the display case. He cut his fingers twice before he had it angled up between his wrists and could push it forwards against the floor until the sharp edge sliced through his bonds. After which it was easier to cut the tie around his ankles.

  Dropping the bloodstained glass into the ruin of his room, he sprinted for the fire suppression system, fumbled it with shaky fingers until only the single room was selected, and turned the sprinklers on. He stood out in the corridor while a wall of wet white smoke rolled through the house, choking him. The fire hissed like a basilisk, and for a moment he thought it grew stronger, leaping up all yellow-gold among the streaks of falling grey. He could see it, the water, hitting the books, flooding the shelves, staining bindings, unmaking the paper, soaking into the glue of the spines, crinkling the pages, and he didn’t know whether to cough or to cry.

  He thought the siren outside was his imagination—a wail of grief appropriate for the death of a whole room of his books—until the front door burst open again, rammed into the wall, and he found himself standing, shaking, hyperventilating, grabbed by the shoulders by an unexpected fireman.

  “What the—?” he said, looking a long way up at a fresh-faced black child with buzz-cut hair. “I didn’t call for you.”