Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3) Page 4

  Piers looked up and caught Aidan’s eye. He was expecting a comment. Conversation. “It’s nice that they can be so openly gay,” he ventured. “That’s an improvement on the seventies.”

  It was a good response. Piers scoffed, pleased that Aidan had said something so obviously naive, that he could correct with his superior wisdom. “It’s almost exactly what happened in the seventies. People like David Bowie. Baiting the crowd with titillating hints of perversity and then going off and marrying women. Pandering to teenage girls who dream of being the ones who cure them, while the men in the audience are laughing at how ridiculous it all is.”

  He turned the page, and the laugh Aidan had been going to use to cover up his scepticism got trapped in that strangled throat of his and a wave of stinging needles raised the hairs on his neck.

  The first sentence of the article was in bolder type than the text. He could read it even upside down. “Upcoming supergroup Iluvatar’s Angels on tour.” Shit. He scanned the photos with a new urgency. One of these people was James’s other half. A direct line connected this article with James and thence with him. He put down the tea towel on the countertop and wrung his hands, wondering if he could justify making a break for the toilet.

  But Piers was still talking to him. “They’re neighbours of ours, apparently. Or the lead singer is, at least. There’s a section here about his country retreat in the ‘little-known town’ of Trowchester. Little known! Go ahead and advertise your ignorance, why don’t you?”

  Shit shit shit. Aidan backed away until his arse hit the sink. Tried not to look guilty, terrified. Tried not to look like he was trying not to look those things. Tried to look natural, damn it. Please, please, please, he thought, eyeing the knives in their block and then trying to convince himself that he had not been doing that. He was doing a shit job of controlling his breathing, could hear it going rapid and shallow and shaky.

  This could get ugly very fast, but he shouldn’t panic just yet. There was no guarantee this article was connected to the photographers on Friday. Could they even take a photo one day and have it be in a glossy magazine two days later? Probably not. Anyway, the article was about James’s boyfriend, not James himself. Even if they had taken photos of Aidan, why would they use them? Why would they do it? He’d had a hood on—they couldn’t have seen his face. But the hill . . .

  The page turned.

  Piers would recognise the hill.

  The silence crystallized around him, trapping him in place. He felt it slide from uncomfortable to deadly as if it had grown razors.

  Piers breathed in. His chair creaked as he sat forward. Aidan lifted his gaze from the floor with a struggle, his throat raw inside, his nose stinging at the stench of fear that suddenly lifted off him, rank as an outhouse.

  And yes. There he was, captured in the Sunday supplement, the turn of his cheek unmistakable even if Piers hadn’t known the hoodie, the trousers, the shape of Aidan carefully honed over the years. His own back garden. And James, looking up at Aidan’s averted face with a look three parts amused and one part dazzled, which Aidan hadn’t seen at the time but that would have stopped his heart if he had.

  Piers pushed his chair back from the table and stood up.

  “I didn’t go out of the garden.” Aidan slid inch by cautious inch along the counter, towards the door.

  Piers rolled the magazine in his fist and brandished it. “Who the hell is this?”

  “I didn’t. I didn’t do anything wrong.” He made a break for the door, but Piers was faster, his fist like a hammer to Aidan’s already bruised cheek. Aidan kept his head down, raised his hands to protect his face, tried to back away.

  “How long have you been going behind my back, you fucking slut?”

  “I didn’t! He’s an archaeologist. He wants to dig up the hill. We talked over the hedge, that’s all.”

  Piers went utterly still for a moment, as if he’d turned to stone. Aidan half expected him to shatter when he moved again. “He wants to what?”

  “Dig up the hill.” He took a cautious step back, turned on his heel, broke, and sprinted for the bathroom. Felt Piers fingertips brush his belt as he just missed the grab.

  “You come here! You come here, you fucking little cunt!”

  But he didn’t. He tore across the living room and leaped up the stairs three treads at a time. Piers cursed behind him, ran for the gym. Crashing noises from behind the gym door spurred Aidan to sprint faster. He reached the bathroom, put his shoulder to the door, and shot the bolt, defiant and terrified of his own nerve, a little exhilarated by the disobedience, and shaking, shaking with terror.

  Two breaths. He clutched onto the basin, tried to stop hyperventilating. He just had to wait now. Just wait until Piers calmed down. He would calm down eventually and they could talk and he would be fine, it would all be fine . . .

  Bang! The door shuddered in its frame. Aidan’s heart imploded. His throat closed and his lungs withered around it. Piers was battering at the door with something heavy, and the hollow plasterboard was bending outwards, cracks spreading from the lock. Aidan was so far gone he actually looked around for something to defend himself with, but there was nothing and he wouldn’t, he couldn’t raise a hand to Piers anyway. What had he been thinking?

  Smash! and the door opened, slamming into the shower cubical, the handle shattering a star in the glass. Piers swung the fist in which he held the forty-pound dumbbell, drove it into Aidan’s sternum, making the world stop for him in a great burst of unbelievable pain, pain like a doorway to Hell.

  He dropped to his hands and knees, covering the back of his neck with his hands. The weight bounced off his hip with a crack like gunfire, and agony crackled up his spine and down his legs. A moment of relief when he heard the weight roll up against the bath and stop there, before a steel rod came down across his shoulders, the pain sharp, deep, shattering.

  As Piers pulled the weapon back for another blow, Aidan saw enough to recognise it as a golf club—the fist-sized lump of metal on the end of it lethal if it came down on his skull. He tried to crawl away, but there was nowhere to go. Scrabbling to the bath, he pressed his face into it, tears sliding against enamel, arms linked protectively over his head as the rod came down again over his arse, over his spine, and then over his fingers.

  He screamed with abandon. Screamed with a vague idea that maybe someone would come. But there was no one. In this huge house, miles away from anywhere, who the hell could hear? Who would care if they did?

  Blood made the tile floor beneath him slippery as he scrabbled to get up, get away. This was not . . . this was not . . . not right. Not like Piers. He’d be sorry. He would be sorry, Aidan knew it. His knees skidded out from under him, lubricated with gore, and he fell face-first onto the tiles even as something volcanic started in the pit of his stomach, a wordless shrieking panic that told him to get out, get out.

  Because he was starting to believe that the trainer was right. He was starting to believe this was murder, that Piers wasn’t going to stop until he was dead, and he couldn’t just let . . . “Please, stop! Piers, please!”

  Piers shifted his grip on the club and the next strike brought the head into play as Aidan sobbed and shrieked and choked under the brutal impacts. He was inhuman for a timeless while, and then he was nothing.

  At the smell of smoke, James finally looked up from the computer. He’d only sat down for a second, because the toast was taking forever to grill, and there must be something more interesting happening in the archaeology online forums. Surely he’d only been here for a couple of seconds. Not nearly long enough to . . .

  And yet there was dark-grey smoke pouring from the kitchen. As he caught sight of it, the smoke detector in the hall went off, filling the quiet Sunday morning with stridor. Cursing, he ran into the kitchen to turn off the grill and grab a tea towel before he loped out into the hall to flap frantically at the alarm, trying to waft the smoke away from the sensor before the appalling beeping woke Dave from his
jet-lagged slumber upstairs.

  “Damn it! Damn it, you. Shut up!” Even the most energetic fanning seemed to be having no effect. He opened the front door in an effort to dispel some of the smoke.

  Flashguns went off in his face.

  “Oh, good grief!” There were three of them—not quite the crowd that would have spelled the upper echelons of stardom—but three was already too many. Particularly when James was wearing only boxer shorts and furry slippers and his reading glasses pulled down low on his nose so he could see over the top. He didn’t know a lot about the world of folk metal or whatever it was called, but even he could guess it wasn’t an appropriate mode of dress.

  “Haven’t you people got anything better to do?”

  One of them had a microphone in his hand. He stepped forward with an avid look and shoved the damn thing in James’s face. “Mr . . .?”

  James pushed his glasses up his nose and raised an eyebrow at him. If he didn’t know James’s surname by now, James was not going to tell him.

  Behind him, the smoke detector gave a couple more warbles and died down.

  “What’s your reaction to the article in the Sunday Times, Mr. Huntley? What do you think of the rumours that your partner is sleeping with his lead guitarist?”

  James hadn’t heard the rumours before now. He swallowed and backed towards the door. “I . . . um. I would really like it if you would get out of my drive.”

  “Is there any truth in it? Things all right at home, are they?”

  Nosy bastards. James tried to think of a parting shot, something that would make it look as if he wasn’t just running away in shock. But as he was just running away in shock, nothing came to mind. He pushed aside the intrusive microphone and shut the door, tried putting his back to it, leaning on it for support, but he could hear them still outside, laughing with one another, presumably about him.

  It really rather took the gloss off what had been quite a pleasant morning.

  With all the heat let out, it was cold in the hall, raising goose bumps on his exposed skin. He thought of going upstairs to find his dressing gown, but a sinking feeling told him it wasn’t on the back of the door where he usually kept it. Which meant it must be somewhere else in the house—under a sofa, under a cushion, kicked behind a bookshelf—and he couldn’t face searching. He picked Dave’s long leather trench coat from the coatrack instead and huddled into that.

  Returning to the kitchen, he got through throwing out the charcoaled slices of bread, cutting another two slices, and putting them under the grill before the press’s questions recurred to him. When they did, he took the chopping board off the Sunday papers and pulled out the arts supplement.

  Dave obviously wasn’t exaggerating about his big break—a four-page spread in the arts section of the Times was nothing to be sniffed at. But James couldn’t quite feel the pride he should.

  They’d started going out when Dave’s band was a little indie affair that played around the local pub circuit, when Dave had considered it a great month if he could contribute to the rent and had cherished invitations to play for free at the local folk festivals, calling them “fantastic exposure.”

  James had thought they were fantastic too. They’d had some great weekends, rolling up together to a field somewhere, where Dave would go and rehearse while James would do a bit of light hill walking and sample the beer in the beer tent. Then in the evening James would watch the show, going home with Dave afterwards, full of pride at being seen with him.

  But then the band had had a hit. It turned out that while folk fans considered the band’s thrash metal streak something of an insult to the purity of a great musical tradition, rock fans considered their folk streak innovative and exciting.

  Blown away by popularity, they’d remodelled themselves, rebranding as something halfway between rock stars and Rohirrim, and had been surfing an ever-increasing wave of popularity ever since.

  James tried to stir himself out of his lengthy contemplation of the photo in which Steve was all but arse-to-groin with Dave, their lips almost touching as they sang together into one microphone. His head snapped up as the scent of smoke began to intensify once more. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck it! This time he got to the toast before it burst into flame, but it was still thick with a burned black layer of soot.

  Sighing, he admitted defeat, threw the second ruined breakfast in the bin, and poured himself a bowl of cereal instead. The newspaper, open on the kitchen island, drew him back, inexorable as gravity. He chewed and swallowed mechanically, looking at the picture, wondering when the last time was that Dave had looked at him like that.

  Of course it probably didn’t help that Steve was beautiful and talented and ripped and looked like a Viking god in those leather trousers. And he could talk to Dave about music and share his dreams and enjoy his stardom and . . .

  His spoon clattered on the bottom of the bowl. He looked down and discovered he had eaten the whole thing without tasting anything. He rose to put the coffee machine on. This deserved the real stuff. Nothing instant from a jar was going to cut it this morning.

  When he had an oily-black cup full of adrenaline substitute in hand, he returned to the magazine and turned the page. Oh. There he was, as if by contrast, looking mousy and weedy and unkempt in his wellies and his earth-stained coat.

  Rumours that all is not roses in the Debourne household may be strengthened today by this picture of David’s partner in intimate conversation with a hunky neighbour. Both men declined to comment, but we think a picture is worth a thousand words, and if this is going on at home, is it any wonder that our boy is looking for a little comfort elsewhere?

  It had been amusing the first time a journalist asked him his opinion on Dave’s success. Nice to be acknowledged—the gay partner of an openly gay celebrity. But it had long since stopped being nice.

  He got another coffee and sat down again, pulling the magazine closer. And yes, he was smiling up at . . . God, he didn’t even know the man’s name. Twice they’d met, and mystery guy had managed to tell him nothing each time.

  Except that he was an artist being denied the chance to make art. Except that he flinched when James raised his voice, and fled like Cinderella at the ball like everything was going to turn to vermin and scraps if he didn’t leave at the right time.

  “Ugh . . .” Dave shuffled into the kitchen with his hand in his hair, wearing low-slung jeans and James’s dressing gown, his bloodshot eyes half open. “The fuck was all that noise?”

  “Just your friends the paparazzi.” James helped him to a seat and put coffee in front of him. He looked that rough. “They wanted to know what I thought of this.”

  He turned the page back to the damning photo of Dave and Steve, slid it across the table to nudge against Dave’s elbow where he was propping up his head on one hand. “I didn’t tell them anything. Largely because I didn’t know about this.”

  He wasn’t sure if he was angry or just very sad and resigned because perhaps he’d been expecting this for quite some time, because perhaps the signs had been getting more and more blatant for years.

  “About what?” Dave unearthed loose tobacco from his jeans pocket and proceeded to make his first roll-up of the day. He barely looked at the photo, but of course it wasn’t new to him.

  “You and Steve. How long has it been going on?”

  “Don’t be a wanker.” Dave got up to light his cigarette on the gas hob, returned to leaf with apparent disinterest through the rest of the article. “That’s just pretend, right? It’s for the fans. They like it. They fucking write stories about it, yeah? It’s hilarious.”

  He passed the final page. Stopped. Turned back. “But who the fuck is this? I go away on tour and you hit up the neighbours? It’s fucking rich you getting all uppity at me singing with another member of my own band when you’re whoring your way around all the pretty boys on the estate.”

  All right, perhaps there was some anger in him after all. James rose to his feet, clutched at the lapels o
f his coat—Dave’s coat—which was perhaps not making the point for him. “How dare you! You leave me for months. You hang out with your band and your roadies and your groupies and you foster the belief that you’re fucking your coworker, and then you dare get upset that I talked to someone who has a burial mound in their garden? I’m an archaeologist! It’s what I do.”

  Dave flourished the magazine in his face. “Right. Right. And it’s got nothing to do with the fact that he looks like Tom fucking Hardy, and you’ve got your tongue so far out it’s brushing your knees.”

  James struggled to deny this, but his internal censor was too strong. The truth was that mystery guy did look like Tom Hardy, and that James was . . . to a certain degree . . . partial to that. The combination of muscles and tattoos and intelligent, sensitive eyes. It was a good one, there was no denying that.

  “I don’t even know the guy’s name,” he said, vague guilt leaving him willing to de-escalate the row. Pushing the magazine aside, he went for his most reasonable tone. “We talked pottery and Sutton Hoo. Just because your stupid papers write some ridiculous speculative drivel doesn’t mean it’s true.”

  Dave let the magazine fall to the table and rubbed his eyes as if he was far too hungover to cope with any of this. He backed off a couple of steps, sat down, and blinked, looking at his coffee as if trying to work out what it was. Then he glanced up and gave James the roguish, innocent grin that had first summoned James across a student bar to say hello.

  “You wanna know what’s going on in the band? You want to know what’s going on with me and Steve? You should come on tour with us. Be good to have you. Like old times, yeah?”

  James sighed. “That sounds nice, but you know I have the museum and the dig to look after. I can’t just—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Dave stubbed his cigarette out in James’s empty bowl. “Well then, you don’t really care that much, do you?”