Blue Steel Chain (Trowchester Blues Book 3) Read online

  Aidan laughed and was surprised by the sound of it, he so rarely heard it these days. “But I don’t want to go yet.”

  “No, of course you can’t go yet.” James stood and helped him to his feet. “There’s that little matter of the pot first. This way.”

  So a little while later, he found himself in one of the empty galleries, sitting at a bench with a dozen other idle persons who were trying to replicate a Bronze Age beaker out of a long sausage of wet clay.

  It had been too long since he’d been allowed to touch clay. He was almost frightened his hands had forgotten, but as he laid down the base of his pot and smoothed it, his sureness of touch returned. Even through the thin plastic of the glove James had given him to protect the taped up fingers of his left hand he could feel that the clay didn’t want to be a beaker. He scraped it up again and rerolled. It wanted to be a bull, with a bull-leaper doing a handstand on its horns. He rolled legs and attached them to its barrel body, twisted horns and dug in his thumbnail to give it eyes, made its nostrils flare and its bowed head ready to toss.

  For a short time he was aware that the chatter around him was going quiet, and people were craning over to watch him work, but even that awareness faded as he brought his mind into the place of creation, making himself a conduit for the thing that wanted to be born. One of James’s partying Etruscans, he thought, almost able to see the man, but not quite ready to let that sight run out through his hands.

  “What do they wear?” he asked James, who was a golden presence by his shoulder, who should have been distracting but was instead illuminating, like a sun that lit up his inner world. “The bull-leapers?”

  “Nothing,” James whispered, as if he was in awe.

  So out of the disciplined potentiality of his own mind, Aidan brought a curly-haired bull-leaper with sloe eyes and not a stitch of clothes, and set him on the bull’s back, doing a one-handed somersault to safety behind it.

  “It’s astonishing,” James said when it was done, still with a note of reverence, but his grey eyes looked almost hurt. “And he doesn’t let you do this?”

  He said it like he couldn’t believe it. Like it wasn’t just Aidan who thought Piers’s stricture was unreasonable, like it was objectively wrong to stop Aidan messing around with wet mud. Aidan’s back-of-the-mind rage took a step up at the words. He shook his head.

  “Well, I will. I’m going to extend the workshop for another week. We’ll find the money somewhere. And you leave that bull with me and I’ll get him fired tonight. You can take him home tomorrow.”

  “No,” Aidan said firmly, though normally he had some difficulties with the word. James looked at him, encouraging, kind, almost as impressed as if he knew how rarely Aidan said no to anything. “He’ll break it if I take it home. Besides, I made it for you.”

  James was called away after that to deal with some administrative crisis to do with a housing development encroaching on a Roman villa. But Aidan still had a lovely afternoon. He paid his dues to James’s interests by wandering slowly through the exhibits on the third floor where they had first met. All the cabinets were full now, and the few areas of empty wall were covered in colourful informative displays. There was even a console in the centre of the room giving a brief history of the Bronze Age, showing reconstructions and clips of film apparently populated by acting students from Trowchester Academy, and bringing the artefacts to life.

  Aidan read all the handwritten commentaries beneath each item, picturing James writing them, his glasses for once in their place, and that look of intent absorption on his face, like he was reaching into the past to pull out the exact words. James might not create things with his hands, but Aidan knew the look of a man communing with muses nevertheless, and it made him warm all over that James knew what it felt like—knew it was a part of yourself you couldn’t shut up without risking the death of your mind and your soul.

  And that thought sent him back to the pottery workshop where he spent the rest of the time working with clay. If the food was already making him feel physically stronger, this too was healing him. He plunged back into it with all the appetite he had desperately feared he’d lost.

  Gradually, as he made replicas of the pots he had seen in the gallery, other people began to ask him for help. By the end of the afternoon, he was running an impromptu master class, museum workers poking their heads in to see what the buzz was all about, some of them sitting down to join in. And he would have burst out crying again at how wonderful it was, but he was determined not to spoil it.

  At half four, James turned up by his elbow and stood there smiling with approval as he finished helping a small girl rescue the crumpled sides of her cup. “The café closes in a quarter of an hour, but I thought we could nip down and have an early dinner. I don’t think they’ll have anything hot left, but there’s usually a few slices of quiche no one wants.”

  So they ate dinner together, Aidan quiet because the museum was closing in an hour and he would have to go home. James filled the awkward silence with ethnographic chatter, always interesting even if Aidan couldn’t quite follow it. It occurred to him very late indeed that he had been so very self-centred he hadn’t asked James anything about himself at all.

  “Did it— Did it cause you trouble too, that picture?”

  James’s expression of scholarly delight faded for a moment into grief and hurt.

  Aidan wished he hadn’t said anything. “I’m sorry,” he said automatically. “I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have asked.”

  “No, it’s fine.” The corners of James’s mouth struggled to hitch into a smile. “It’s only fair you should know. It wasn’t that picture that was the problem for me. Dave and I had never said we would be exclusive, and he . . . he’s been seeing someone else. So he had no leg to stand on, condemning me for doing nothing more than talking to someone.”

  Aidan wondered if he dared reach out, return some of the kind touches James had given him. He didn’t think that kind of boldness was in him, but then his hand closed around James’s hand almost without his permission. James smiled. Smiled as a result of something he had done. It was exhilarating.

  “But, well . . . he’s so often away, and long-distance relationships are notoriously hard, and he’s changed so much—become very narcissistic. Which is not at all surprising when he has thousands of people telling him how wonderful he is. But . . .”

  James put down his fork and pushed the last corner of blackberry and apple crumble away. “Well, I thought nonexclusivity wouldn’t bother me, but it turned out it does. I felt as if he should put me first, you know? Or at least second. I could deal with being a secondary spouse. But not last. I don’t have a lot of pride, but I won’t stand for that.” He shook his head, looking both grief-stricken and oddly fierce, and burst out with, “No, I wouldn’t be happy with second best. I want to be first. I want to be first in my lover’s heart. Is that so wrong?”

  “Of course it’s not wrong.” That at least was a grief Aidan had never had to deal with. Piers wanted him too much, but he had no doubt at all that he was the centre of Piers’s life. “It’s no more than you deserve. I don’t understand. Why would anyone need anything more than you?”

  “Oh, what a lovely thing to say.” James gave Aidan what looked like a slightly brave smile. “At any rate I told him I deserved better. I’m currently divided on the question of what I would do if he turned up begging my forgiveness. Half of me says if he was willing to change we could still make a go of it. The other half just wants to shut the door in his face and watch him look puzzled. I’m fairly sure, though, that he won’t even ask. He’ll write a heartrending song, send someone around for his stuff, and that will be the end of it.”

  Aidan wasn’t sure that congratulating him on having a relationship he could walk away from was tactful. He tried to think of something better to say but an announcement came over the PA system that the museum was closing. James leaned forward on his elbows, suddenly intent, serious. “Listen. I know you don’
t want to talk about this, but I can’t help but notice you’re limping and bruised and starving and frightened. Do you have to go back to him?”

  It was a question that splintered the nature of reality. A question that couldn’t be asked. And James was asking it. Aidan reeled while the underpinnings of his universe shook around him. “What else can I do?”

  James ducked his head. “Well, I don’t know exactly. You could come and stay with me until you figure something out.”

  Aidan’s reaction frightened him—the sheer raw desperation in it. “He’d find out. He’d find out and he’d kill you.”

  “I have a lot of friends. If he tried, I dare say they would protect me.”

  Aidan wanted to say yes. He wanted to just never go back to that house again, to stay here and be safe and sheltered all the rest of his life. But at the same time, when he thought about Piers trying so hard to keep his promise, not wanting to be that man anymore . . . Piers who had given him everything, who used to be so wonderful and who had practically raised him after his parents threw him out. How could he do that to Piers? He owed the man something, surely?

  “He’s . . .” Aidan reached up to rub his ear, which stung with a nostalgic, naive kind of pain. “He’s on a business trip this week. Comes back Friday afternoon.” He dared not look James in the eye, but fixed his gaze on James’s watch instead, caught by the relentless tick of the second hand, counting down the moments of his freedom. His stomach lurched at the thought, and he pressed his good hand over his mouth to keep both food and hope inside. “Could you give me a couple of days to think about it? I . . . He frightened himself when he did this. He’s trying to change and I . . . I feel as if I ought to support that. But I . . .”

  James sighed, and after several attempts to find his wallet, brought out a business card. “From what I’ve heard, people like that don’t change. Here, at least take my mobile number so you can call me to come and get you whenever you decide.”

  For safety’s sake, Aidan took one of the museum’s Biros from a display on the way out and wrote the number on his wrist, where he could wash it off once he had memorized it. Reluctantly, he left the card in the foyer with the dinosaurs. He wanted to keep it—a tangible reminder that someone other than Piers cared about him—but he knew better than to bring evidence of that anywhere it could be found.

  Even though he knew Piers wasn’t there, the shadow of the house was enough to place a weight back on his chest, to squeeze his throat and make his breath come short. He let himself in through the front door, slipped off his shoes, and put them on the rack. Now that he was in, his good humour began to return. He poured himself a shot of whiskey and downed his painkillers with it. Maybe that ruled out a swim before bedtime, but he could watch his own choice of film, or cook something he could take in to share with James for lunch tomorrow, or . . .

  He stopped at the stairs, blindsided by the idea. Or he could pack a bag of clothes and his e-reader and the picture of his parents he had taped to the underside of the bed. He could take it all into the museum tomorrow and never come back again.

  His feet took him upstairs, dazed by possibilities and a little by the mix of alcohol and drugs. Something stirred in him, a sense of wonder. And then a shadow moved out of the bedroom and clubbed him in the stomach with a baseball bat. He doubled up, shock and pain tearing through him as his already-delicate stomach reacted by trying to throw up. He fell to his knees, heaving, but his throat had gone solid again, and he could hardly breathe, could only turn his head and look up as Piers’s foot snapped into his face, throwing him backwards.

  His shoulder collided with the wall, bounced off, and he was sliding, tumbling downstairs to end up bleeding on the living room floor as he had so many times before. He wasn’t astonished; he was only a little dully disappointed. A part of him had expected this all along.

  “I knew it!” Piers picked him up by the necklace, dragging him along the floor as he choked and scrabbled at the chain, trying to breathe. “I knew you were seeing that fucking nobody from that magazine.”

  Aidan tried to deny it, but couldn’t speak. He tried shaking his head, though it sawed his neck against the links of the chain.

  “Don’t lie to me.” Piers dragged him through the hall and tumbled him down the uncarpeted steps into the basement gym. Aidan told himself he should fight back, but that was ridiculous. He didn’t fight against Piers. He didn’t . . . didn’t want to hurt the man.

  “I knew you were up to something,” Piers snarled, kicking him in his tender healing ribs. Aidan’s body reacted by itself, jerking away from the blow, scrabbling back on hands and knees, trying to get away. “This is why you’re so bloody frigid all the time, isn’t it?” The baseball bat slammed into his hip as Piers strolled beside him, untouchable and unhurried, herding him farther into the room. “Because you’ve been behind my back with that dickhead. All I had to do was tell you I was going away and you ran straight to him. Some nob-headed dusty freak. Shit, Aidan, if you were going to betray me after all I’ve done for you, you could have at least picked someone who wasn’t a fucking insult.”

  Aidan opened his mouth to protest, his throat a lava pit and his lungs spasming around agony, but Piers just shoved him up against the T-bar machine, around which he had wrapped a length of heavier gauge chain. He padlocked Aidan to this by the necklace, and stood over him, looking coldly furious, and more in control than Aidan had thought he was capable of being when he was this angry.

  For a brief moment, Aidan was extremely thankful to have had such a good last day on this earth. Maybe he would go to James’s Etruscan heaven. That wouldn’t be so bad. And maybe James would remember him fondly when he didn’t come back.

  “I can’t have other people touching my things,” said Piers very reasonably, gently tapping the bat against his calf. Trussed and defenceless, Aidan would really have preferred he got this over with. Sometimes, when Piers became quiet and calm enough to think, it meant his plans were about to become meaner.

  “It’s amazing how easy it is to find people’s personal addresses when you have their name and their place of work.”

  Aidan got his fingers under the necklace, tried to scramble to his feet. The choke chain was too short. It jerked him back, cut cruelly into his broken fingers. His voice was swallowed up entirely in horror, but his eyes streamed. Fruitlessly, he tugged again, was throttled again.

  Piers smiled down on him, obviously pleased with his panic. “You stay here. I’ll deal with you later. But first I’m going to teach this professor of yours, the fucking thieving bag of shit, what happens when he touches what is mine.”

  The door slammed behind Piers. Aidan pulled again at the chain around his neck; it gave no more than it had done previously. All his struggles achieved was to drive the links into his neck until the skin parted and blood trickled under his collar.

  James! He threw himself against the restraint in panic. It was okay for Piers to hurt him, that was what he was for, but it was not okay for him to hurt James. James in his aura of light, James spotlit by stained glass and orbited by dinosaurs and curiosity and comfort and kindness. Aidan was not going to fucking let any harm come to James. He was not!

  Again the chain snapped taut, driving all his own weight, all his panicked strength into his own throat. The pain was blinding, but more terrifying was the way the rest of the world blurred away. No! He could not afford to black out. He had to get free so he could warn James, so he could stop Piers, so he could fix this . . .

  So. First he needed to be calm. He stopped fighting, slumped against the pedestal of the T-bar machine and struggled to breathe deep enough to get a grip. After too long a time gasping and wheezing, his mind began to clear. He noticed how much more slack there was in the chain than there had been—his struggles must have pulled the larger chain tighter around the pedestal. And that meant that there was a little play in it.

  Aidan worked the larger chain looser again, got his fingers under it, and pried and haule
d it upwards, moving it millimetre by millimetre up the pedestal. Even his unharmed hand ached and cramped by the time he had pulled it up and over the widest point of the machine’s base. But when he did, the great coils of chain were suddenly loose, fastened now only around the machine’s central metal pole.

  Now he could stand up, at least. He still couldn’t get away, but he had a larger radius of movement. He looked around, hoping that the gym might have sprouted a useful crowbar or pair of pliers while he wasn’t looking, something he could use to break the chain. But there was nothing.

  How far could Piers have got by now? He wasn’t at the museum yet, was he? No, he was going to James’s house, he’d said. How unfair was it that Piers knew where that was but Aidan didn’t . . . and this train of thought was not helping.

  All right, all right. He considered the setup again, the larger chain wrapped around the iron pole, the smaller around his neck. If this was a sculpture, where would be the weakest point? Where would it be most likely to break?

  The chain links were solid, but the padlocks were designed to open, given the right impetus. The hefty padlock on the large chain was probably impervious to anything he could do . . . But the small one? It had been made to be worn as jewellery, and okay it was stronger than his flesh, but it must be weaker than everything else. What could he do to break the heart-shaped lock?

  He hesitated at the thought, because he knew what that meant. It meant breaking the thing that held him to Piers. Breaking whatever trust still lay between them. It would mean the end. The end of a life he’d grown accustomed to, a protection he’d needed, useless and unwanted by all but Piers.

  But this wasn’t about him. This was about James. He forced himself out of his moment of indecision, knew what he had to do.

  He undid his belt and looped it under the machine’s seat. With his new freedom of movement, he engaged all the weights, pulled down on the T-bar to raise the stack of metal high into the air. Then he buckled the other end of the belt around the bar to keep it there.