Half Moon Chambers (29 page)

* * *

I led him away. I tried to, anyway, but after a
couple
of steps it was clear that he was leading
me
. The crowd parted for us. They didn't seem
fazed
. Maybe they thought the artist always came
and
kissed some man from the audience at the end
of
his display. The manager remained on his spot
as
if cast in wax, the only moving part of him his
goldfish
mouth. I had golden handprints on my
jacket
. I was laughing over this, my arm wrapped
tight
round Rowan's waist, when we stumbled
straight
into Jack.

He was close enough to have seen. Any hope
that
he'd missed it vanished when I met his eyes.

I'd never imagined how he would look when cut to
the
bone with hurt. To my shame I hadn't thought
him
capable. I wanted to wipe out his pain, but that
comfort
was no longer mine to give him; would
have
been a lie and a betrayal. "Jack," I said
awkwardly
. "This is..."

"Rowan," Jack finished for me. "Your, er...Your witness. Good. Are you both okay?"

"Fine. Rowan, this is Jack Monroe. He used
to
work with me."

"Brad Pitt," Rowan said softly, as if to
himself
. Someone somewhere had taught him nice
manners
and his clasp of Jack's hand was generous
and
unreserved. He'd been holding me firmly
round
the shoulders. Now he released me, as if I'd
been
stolen goods. "Nice to meet you."

"You too. Er... Brad Pitt?"

Footsteps echoed on the wooden floor, began
to
crunch in glass. Four uniformed officers
appeared
at the end of the gallery, one of them
peeling
off to deal with Rowan's gunman, still
sprawled
like a whale amid the glimmering shards.

"Cavalry?" I asked, glad of the interruption. I
hadn
't let go of Rowan's waist, and I could feel
him
tense beneath my arm, ready to step away. To
surrender
. I tightened my hold.

"Yeah. Better late than never."

"Did you sort out your lad downstairs?"

"Course. We broke a couple of souvenir
snow
globes, but nothing compared with your
performance
up here. And the girl's okay."

"The girl?" Rowan looked up. "Rachel, in the
shop
?"

"Yeah. Police doc's having a look at her, but
she
was just scared."

"Why would she be
--
"

"Rowan," I interrupted him. "The guys who
came
here today
--
they were dead serious. They
took
your friend hostage to stop anyone else getting
through
, but Jack got her out of it, okay?"

He swallowed. "Okay." He glanced between
me
and Jack. "She's nice. She always kept a
lookout
for me, if people like them came, or..."

"Or people like me." I waited till his
attention
was fixed on me again
--
until a faint,
questioning
smile lit up the fear and resignation in
his
eyes. "Listen. They didn't just try to get at you
here
. They started at Half Moon Chambers. There
was
a fire, and..."

I couldn't do it. The place had been the whole
world
to him. I'd only spent one night there, and I
was
dismayed at the loss of it. Jack laid a hand on
my
arm. "Get him out of here," he said. "Tell him
before
these big flat-footed plods from
Mansion
Street do. I'll head them off, and I'll send a car
round
the back for you in five minutes or so."

There were fire doors a few yards away. I
looked
back once at Jack as I shepherded Rowan
through
, but he was walking to meet the officers,
hands
extended in that disarming gesture I knew so
well
. I loved him
--
always would
--
but he was
falling
away from me into an irretrievable past,
and
my own hands were full, the future bursting on
me
moment by moment, bright and uncontrollable
as
fireworks.

Rowan spun to face me the instant the doors
closed
. We were in a narrow passageway, almost
nose
to nose. "You came to save me."

"Yes. To try, anyway. I wasn't sure you were
here
. But your flat was gone, and..." I shuddered,
leaning
my brow against his. "You had to be here.
You had to be."

"My flat... There was a fire?"

"Yeah. God, I'm so sorry. A complete rip
-
through
. They used an accelerant, and
--
"

"Was anybody hurt?"

"The fire crews didn't think so. Most people
were
out. But all your books and paintings,
Rowan
--
your murals..."

"Bugger the murals." I eased back a bit to
look
at him. He was smiling tremulously. "I can do
more
of those."

"Yes. It looks as though you can. What
happened
?"

"I don't know. When I ran into those bastards
in
the glass rooms, I just thought
--
I'm never gonna
get
away, no matter who I testify against. No
matter
how sorry I am. For years I'd accepted
that
--
you know, that I
deserved
to spend the rest of
my
life on the run, or on my knees. Then I thought
about
you, and something snapped."

I chuckled convulsively. "I can have that
effect
."

"No, stupid. Everything you'd done to haul my
arse
out of other fires, like
you
didn't think I was
worthless
. Being with you. Wanting to be with you
again
." He brushed his fingertips over my face,
carefully
skirting the damage. "And I was so
bloody
furious that they weren't gonna let me. I
didn
't wait for them to come after me."

"No. I gathered that. You're a suicidal fucking
idiot
, you know
--
they were armed."

"I didn't care. I wanted my life back and I
grabbed
it. And then I..."

"And then you could paint."

"Yes. God, yes!" He squeezed my shoulders.

"I could paint, and I could love you."

"You did both. Right in front of your boss."

He frowned. "My boss was there?"

"Oh, Rowan."

I cupped his skull to kiss him. He was shaking
finely
, tears of reaction starting to spill. Their salt
was
rich in my mouth. His tongue met mine and we
clutched
one another. I could taste my own blood,
and
a coppery terror of loss that faded as I got both
arms
round him, pressing him up against the wall.

Anyone else who wanted to hurt him would have
to
go through me. When we were both breathless,
heat
flaring in the places where we touched, he
pulled
away. "The only thing I'll miss from the
flat
... I wish I had the sketches of you. The ones I
did
while you were asleep."

"You can do more of those too."

"Can I?" He stroked my spine, ran a hungry
caress
down to my backside. "Will I get the
chance
? Your partner - whatever happened
between
you, he's nuts about you now. I could see
it
. Don't you want
--
"

"Rowan, I want you." One day I would tell
him
how my life had almost ended outside
Half
Moon Chambers in the smoke. "Just you. Come
home
with me."

Chapter Seventeen

I
didn't know what had woken me. Probably
only
a slither of pigeons on the roof tiles, but I was
instantly
wide awake, pulse racing. I got out of
bed
, slipped into my jeans and a shirt. My weapon
was
hanging off the back of the bedroom door. I
shrugged
into the harness. One glance at the
rumpled
bed behind me told me everything was
right
with that part of my world, and I padded
downstairs
.

The locks were secure, the windows intact. I
came
down a bit off my alert, but there was still
the
garden. God knew it would offer little cover to
intruders
, one patch of balding grass and an
exhausted
lilac bush as it was. Nevertheless I
opened
the back door and went out.

The night was unseasonably mild. This
happened
sometimes in the winter city. Warm air
would
steal in from somewhere, just enough to lure
spring
scents from the soil. Then the frosts would
snap
back down, extinguishing hope for another
month
or two. I breathed in a lungful of fresh
leaves
and car exhaust. This was a grim
neighbourhood
, the house and its patch of lawn just
one
in a grey sea of nearly identical others, so bare
of
distinguishing features that I had to remember
the
number and count back to it from the end of the
street
when I'd been out for milk and a paper.

Perfect for a safe house.

Of course I hadn't been allowed to
carry
Rowan off to my box in the sky. When Bill Hodges
had
got hold of us and heard the news about the
gallery
and Half Moon Chambers, he'd turned into
a
ferocious hen with one chick, or maybe two, and
called
time on half measures of surveillance and
arm
's-length escort. Rowan had been packed off
into
protective custody. He didn't own a thing
except
the clothes he stood up in, but Bill had seen
to
all that, sending a constable shopping for him,
contacting
the authorities to reconstruct his basic
paperwork
. The trial was only five days away.

The police department of Newcastle upon Tyne
had
brought down Val Foster, Bill had declared,
pacing
the squad room. Damned if it couldn't keep
one
skinny witness in one piece until he reached
the
stand. He ordered round-the-clock supervision,
a
total blackout on the media. The one concession
he
made was that, since I too was a witness under
threat
, I might as well share the same safe house.

That way one officer in a car out the back and
another
keeping watch from a bedroom in the
house
opposite might do for both of us. Hot-
shot
Chief Inspector as he was now, he had reminded
me
, he still had a budget to watch.

"Vince?"

I turned, tucking away my gun. The back door
had
creaked gently open. Rowan was standing on
the
step, his eyes wide and wary, full of the
luminous
spring night. I'd left him curled up in a
pair
of striped pyjama bottoms my granddad might
wear
, and the T-shirt he'd pulled on was
emblazoned
with the dates of Lady Gaga's last
tour
, not to mention an unflattering screen-print
portrait
of the diva herself. God alone knew what
the
shopping constable had been thinking. He still
looked
like sleep-tousled heaven. "Hi," I said. "I
thought
I heard something. But everything's all
right
."

He came down the frost-cracked garden path
and
took my outstretched hand. We were both
barefoot
, which was stupid. I led him to the garden
bench
beneath the lilac. Its slats were moss-eaten
but
it must have been nice once, a pattern of
sunflowers
in cast iron across its back. "How are
you
doing? I'm sorry I woke you up."

"That's okay. I didn't think I'd sleep at all
tonight
."

"Yeah. Big day tomorrow."

"But I practically dropped into a coma, after
you
'd finished..."

He broke off. His face was close to mine,
and
I felt the warmth of his blush. We were at a stage
of
such wild-abandon intimacy in the bedroom that
even
talking about it anywhere else had become
painfully
awkward. We'd been in seclusion for
five
fraught nights. In the featureless bedroom
upstairs
, we'd brought down the men from the
Half
Moon Chambers painted walls, embodied and
made
them real. Our days had been almost as
shocking
in their domestic detail. Nothing to do
whilst
waiting for a trial to come on. Neither of us
cared
much for cards or Harold Robbins novels or
any
of the other safe-house amusements provided.

We were allowed out but only one at a time, and
only
as far as the corner shops, our loyal
plainclothes
guardians loitering nearby. We
couldn
't have been thrown more completely
together
if we'd been stuck in a lift. It was a
baptism
of fire in relationship terms. We should
have
been awkward, uneasy.

Instead we'd sat together on the lumpy 1960s
sofa
, and we'd talked, or kept silence, and he'd
rested
his shoulder against mine and the hours had
rushed
away. We'd taken turns to cook, or at any
rate
he had cooked and I had heated things up from
tins
. Evening light had faded to black while we
ate
, and then the kitchen table had become the
arena
for our silences, our low-voiced exchanges.

I'd held his hands across the stained melamine
surface
. More time had melted to nothing,
swallowing
us up into another night.

"I don't want to leave here," Rowan said.

"Which is odd, considering what a shithole it is."

I nodded. Bauhaus it wasn't. Nor was it a
chamber
of dreams sailing out across the city in a
baroque
ocean liner. Houses like these were how
my
parents had lived. I'd tried so hard to distance
myself
from the dirt, from Phil and petty crime and
squalor
. I'd forgotten the lilacs needed the dirt to
live
. "It's a dump," I agreed. "But somewhere like
this
would do. Wouldn't it?"

He looked at me. As usual I shivered slightly
under
the impact. Stripped of fear, his gaze met a
place
in me that felt like my soul. Made me feel
like
I
had
one, alive and well in spite of
everything
. "Would do for what?"

"Well
--
for us. Not in this part of town but up
near
Jesmond Dene, maybe. With a bit of a garden,
and
room for you to paint."

His pupils dilated. "You want me to live with
you
?"

"When all this is over. Will you think about
it
?" I shrugged. He might as well hear it all. He'd
certainly
seen most of it over the past few nights. I
couldn
't have surrendered further. I had grazes on
my
palms from clutching the base of the bedhead,
laid
out on my back while he fucked me. "To be
honest
, I've been racking my brains to think how
the
hell I'd live without you."

He shifted lithely, straddled me on the bench.

He had the advantage in all our erotic manoeuvres,
and
he'd used it so kindly, so thoroughly, that I'd
almost
forgotten my limitations. "Vince," he
whispered
, diving down to kiss the side of my
neck
. "Oh, God, yes. A place like this would do."

"That's settled, then." He was making me
hard
. I wouldn't have believed it after our earlier
collision
. I could manage fine, we'd discovered, if
he
braced on his hands and knees for me, if I could
hang
on to that hard-worked headboard. It
slammed
the bed frame off the wall, but the house
next
door was empty. Yes, he'd almost made me
forget
... "Listen," I said, escaping his kisses for a
moment
. "You know I'm booked in for my
surgery
."

"Yeah. We'll be okay. No matter what
happens
--
we'll cope, love."

"I don't mean wheelchair ramps and bath
seats
. I mean there's a real chance
--
bigger than I
ever
told you
--
that it might snip the wires
completely
. I might not be able to..." Why couldn'
t
I just say it? Our harassed school biology teacher
had
yelled at us that if we couldn't use the right
words
, we shouldn't even be thinking of doing it. "I
might
be impotent."

He sat back. He was holding his weight off
me
on his strong thighs, but the brush of his arse
against
my lap was maddening. He tilted his head a
little
, and I'd learned what that meant
--
he was
taking
on board all his facts, coming to a
conclusion
. "I told you. We'll cope."

"Think what you're saying. I wouldn't tie you
to
me, Rowan. Not if
--
"

"It's been a weird few days for me, Vince. I
never
thought I'd find talking to a bloke as good as
fucking
him." Again we both rocked a bit under the
word
. We'd given it back its punch, I supposed, its
force
and meaning. He grinned, his face bright and
intense
as a fox's in the starlight. "In its own way,
of
course. I'm not saying we shouldn't make the
most
of you... while you're there."

I fell back. I rested my head on the crumbling
brickwork
behind the bench and looked through the
mesh
of lilac twigs into the night sky. We were
still
deep in winter. Orion was still in mid-leap
across
the zenith, Sirius flashing off infinite
colours
in the space between the brickworks and
the
power-station cooling towers. No way I should
be
warm enough in a thin cotton shirt, but I felt as
if
anyone in orbit round the Dog Star might be able
to
see me too, a fire on chilly planet Earth.
And
Rowan too seemed to have lost his dislike of the
cold
, or to have other things on his mind.