Trowchester Blues Page 7

  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.

  When they sat, they were brought two menus, the first with a choice of light lunches, the second with 108 varieties of tea. Finn was trying to calculate the odds on whether Michael would go for Number 1: Ordinary Tea, or whether he would be more adventurous than that.

  “The owner is one of my book club members—Idris,” Finn said, enjoying the return of Michael’s slight smile. “They told him the town wasn’t big enough for another coffee shop, so he came up with this.”

  “And blew the competition out of the water?”

  “Exactly.”

  Molly, the waitress, returned to take their orders. Finn lost a fiver to himself when Michael ordered the tiger tea—black tea laced with ginger. His raised eyebrows must not have been as subtle as he thought, because Michael gave him that look of challenge again. It dried his mouth right out and made his body sing like a taut string.

  “What? You figured I’d play it safe?”

  “I admit the thought had occurred to me. You seem a man who’s comfortable with convention.”

  Michael snorted. “I’ve always tried to be.”

  Finn watched the waitress put down a china teapot on a tray with a milk jug and a pot of hot water, a strainer, and a lace-covered sugar bowl with silver tongs for each of them. A teacup and a plate for cakes came next, followed by a cake fork and a five-tiered cake rack with a selection of sandwiches and sweets. The table shrank to crowded patches beneath the onslaught of delicately flower-patterned tableware.

  Michael poured himself tea and looked at the kitsch with a disbelieving eye.

  “I can’t believe we’re having a talk about how macho I am about my tea.” Michael’s smile spread into the crow’s-feet around his eyes. “I don’t know what the hell has happened to my life.”

  “Ah, well.” Finn relaxed, pouring his own Lady Grey and smirking. “I’m like the Spanish Inquisition.”

  “Nobody expects you?” Michael’s speaking voice was a pleasant low growl, his laugh a few tones higher, more boyish.

  “And I take care to keep it that way. So tell me all about yourself, Michael May. Why do you live in a house of horrors? What is the tragedy that shadows you? And more importantly, why has some discerning boy not snapped you up already?”

  Away from the house, the vague sense of danger Finn had been getting from Michael was ebbing slowly away, leaving him oddly comforting to be around, like a big dog flopped on a hearth rug, dozing.

  Michael filled his plate with a selection of sandwiches and lived down to Finn’s expectations by putting milk in his tea, still with a faint, almost ironic smile.

  “I don’t know where to start on all that,” he admitted, with a quick glance up to check if Finn was still looking. Shy didn’t seem the right word for his mannerisms, but it was close. He shrugged one shoulder. “But you should probably know I’ve been bisexual passing as straight most of my life. So, no discerning boys because I’ve been married ten years, and divorced and bitter for another three.”

  “And then one day you decided, ‘Sod that for a lark. Time to come out’?” Finn wasn’t quite sure how a man could go half his life fighting against who he really was and then turn it about in three days, but perhaps it had been boiling under the surface for a while, like a long-expected volcano.

  “I wish I could say it was that deliberate.” Michael frowned at the tabletop. The expression made him look five years older, scored deep gashes in his forehead and his brows. His face had grown so used to stress it had remodelled itself around the expression. “But no. I lost my job. I was with the Met? And antiharassment laws aside, it wasn’t a good move to be openly queer in the force. I’d been gradually resenting that more and more over the years, so when I left I thought, ‘Fuck that. Fuck that. Why am I even bothering anymore?’ And I stopped.”

  The Met? Finn dropped a slice of cucumber sandwich on the floor, dipped his face out of sight until he could control his expression. The Met was the force that knew him in his old life. God, they were the enemy. What the fuck was he doing, consorting even with an ex-member of the Metropolitan police?

  Some of Michael’s rage made sudden sense to him. If it had scared Finn shitless to be in their hands for a day, what must it have been like trying to be one of them, hiding your differences all your life in an environment full of judgemental people, every one of whom was trained to meddle?

  But why would you try? Why wouldn’t you run as far away as fast as you could?

  “You okay?” Michael asked as he came back up. And of course the man had noticed his flinch. Of course he had. That was what he was trained for. Part of the bulldog breed. Get their jaws in, and you’ll never pry their teeth out of you again . . .

  But this freak-out was not helping. Finn forced himself to laugh, scrambling for a way to turn Michael’s attention away until he could get himself under control. “Just. Well, just recalibrating my expectations. I never met a forty-year-old virgin before. I should have handled you more carefully.”

  Michael laughed. “I’m not—”

  “Ah, ah. Women don’t count.” He waved aside Molly’s narrow glance with a quick, “In this context. How many men? Go on, you can tell me.”

  Michael bowed his head, looking hugely amused, a little embarrassed, and very definitely distracted from Finn’s business. His hair was growing out of what must have been a very short cut. Rebellious wisps of black curls had begun to stray over the nape of his neck and his ears, but they could not quite hide the blush.

  “I. Uh. I don’t have to answer that.”

  And Finn couldn’t help it, he was charmed.

  He didn’t make an excuse to leave, though he probably should have done. Michael was a long way from London, apparently hacking himself out of his old life with a machete. Finn was here to celebrate leaving his own. So maybe it wasn’t time to run quite yet. He did, however, change the subject. “So tell me about the house? Was someone murdered there?”

  Michael lifted his head and skewered Finn with a gaze like he was driving an icicle through Finn’s eyes.

  God, they were?

  “You can feel . . .?” When smiling, Michael had sensuous lips, but they thinned to white lines under the pressure with which he cut off this thought. “‘Murder’ is not the right word.”

  Outside, the light dimmed to grey and a faint spatter of rain hit the panes of the windows. Molly came out of the kitchen with an arm full of logs and knelt to light the fire in the grate, while Idris leaned in the doorframe and waited until Michael was watching the flames. Then he gave Finn a subtle thumbs-up.

  Finn waggled hi
s hand in return. Undecided. “So if ‘murder’ is the wrong word, what would be the right one?”

  Michael was all gentleness again by the time he looked back. A big, gentle puppy of a guy. “‘Neglect,’ I guess,” he said slowly. “Or, I don’t know. What would you call a cat that played with its prey but never actually harmed it? That was what he was like, my dad. You could hardly call it abuse. He was just having fun, lying, jerking you around, you know? I mean, yes, he had a temper, but he never hit us or anything. I always think I’m remembering it worse than it was, but then I go back there and I can’t breathe.”

  Or maybe not gentle at all, but soft—like a garment that’s had all the stiffness beaten out of it. Finn swallowed against an upwelling of pity so strong he hadn’t known he had such sympathy in him. He remembered calling Michael bereaved—the sudden collapse the word had caused—and adjusted all of his assumptions again to take into account the fact that this was Michael alone, raw with loss and having a succession of bad days. He was meeting a Michael who was at his lowest ebb, and he was still all but hooked. How much better would it get when the man began to recover? “Your father’s the one who recently died?”

  “Yeah.” Michael watched the flames catch in the grate. One eye gold in the light, the other dark. “I should be happy he’s finally gone. I don’t know why I’m not.”

  Finn gave up on trying to figure out the pluses and minuses of pursuing this relationship, let his instinct take him. He reached out and closed his hand around Michael’s square fingers. “The human heart isn’t well-known for doing what it should.”

  Michael’s head turned. His deep and thoughtful gaze locked with Finn’s. And yes there were edges and hardness in it that scared him, but there was such a sweetness underneath that came welling up slow and warm and strong to spill like honey over Finn’s skin. His breath caught and the hollow of his chest filled with exultation. Before he knew what he was doing he had pressed Michael’s hand into the table, immobilising it, leaned across the stacks of chinaware, the porcelain cups, and brushed a first, exploratory kiss over Michael’s closed lips. The flare and dazzle of arousal was like a firework going up.