Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (7 page)

Finn stepped away but didn’t stop smiling. “Well, stop by here early on. You can say hello to everyone, and I can give you the book for next week. Then you can come Friday week. There’s no rush, after all. We’ll be here when you’re ready.”

With his plan and flier in hand, May staggered back out into the early-afternoon light with a sense of having left a parallel world. A better one. The bookshop door closed behind him with a sense of finality, and although he was perfectly aware it was because there was a stiff spring bolted to it at the top, it still felt like a portent—as though the magic had decreed that was all he was allowed for today.

Probably just as well. He was going to have to think about this with some deliberation, give himself time to turn it over in his head and pry it all apart. Something was definitely nagging at him, beneath the worrying flutter of butterflies and heat. Abandoning the idea of a day spent idling in the library, and unable to progress on the boat until he had cleared the use of the land with the Lis, he went home and spent the rest of the day stripping his father’s wallpaper from every room.

“You know he’s fucking filth, man. Right?”

Kevin had been fidgeting in the corner of Finn’s eye all afternoon, clearly working up to this. Finn appreciated that he had kept it to himself until he’d ushered all the customers out, closed the shutters on the window, and locked the door.

“Your grammar, boy,” he lamented, trying to turn the conversation away from himself. “Could you put that in a form your teachers would recognise?”

Kevin smoothed down his T-shirt and fiddled with his rainbow dog tags. He was a pretty little thing and hardly needed to wear the flag to advertise what he was. His face had been cut open once already because he was so gamine, so slender and effete it wasn’t possible for him to hide. Finn admired that about him, but it fortunately did little to stir his loins.

What he liked was something a little more rugged. Something with wider shoulders, with lots of bruising physical power.

“That bloke you were all over today. He is a policeman.” Kevin managed to produce one-and-a-half unobjectionable sentences. It deserved a response for sheer effort.

“And I am an honest businessman with nothing to hide. As, I hope, are you.”

The trouble with the fucking bruisers was that they liked to think they were in control. Generally they took one look at Finn and assumed he wanted someone to tell him what to do. They were so preoccupied with being macho that they couldn’t recognise his strength when they saw it, couldn’t reconcile themselves to being bossed around by anyone as small, as breakable, and as offside as him.

But Michael May had stood in his shop like a lost child waiting for a parent to pick him up. With his stupid curly hair and his bull neck and the open shirt he’d been wearing over his T-shirt that utterly failed to hide pecs like steel. Twice as wide as Finn, and he was willing to bet that all of it was muscle . . .

“I’m just saying,” Kevin said, sullenly as though he knew it was useless, “he’s probably come from London, recognised your mug shot, and is checking you out for the plod down there.”

“He’s welcome to check me out anytime.” Finn suppressed a stir of discomfort at the boy’s words. It seemed unusually subtle of the police to send in bait so perfectly calculated to appeal to his tastes, but he supposed it could be true.

It made no difference if it was, because Finn had put it all behind him with his partner’s death, buried it six feet deep, and run away to mourn and become an honest man. If the police were here to investigate him, they would find nothing worthy of their scrutiny.

And maybe that was part of what called to him about Michael May—the fact that he knew how it was to have left everything behind and started again utterly new. He recognised the fragility of the man as something he had lived through himself. And when it came wrapped up in such a sturdy little package, all vulnerable and lost, well, how could he stay away? He loved a paradox.

It occurred to him perhaps belatedly that Kevin might be concerned on his own behalf rather than on Finn’s. “You
are
currently unobjectionably employed and not entangled with the criminal fraternity?”

Kevin took a moment to parse this into something closer to the form of English he preferred, his restless hands constantly tweaking at the careful disorder of his hair. “Yeah,” he said at length, giving the inside of the locked door a worried glance. “But you know how they are. They don’t let you go, not ever. Did you see how he looked at me? Like he was just waiting for a chance to have a go. Like I was fucking scum. You get a record, and they never let you forget it.”

Finn had seen. He’d been lurking behind a bookshelf when Michael ambled in, all compact muscularity and aimless curiosity, like an inquisitive bear. He’d been checking out the man’s very fine arse in those blue jeans when Kevin had made his move, and he’d seen it perfectly. The way all that unassuming, shambling gentleness had hardened and grown taut with the threat of imminent violence, terrifying and arousing all at once.

“Oh, I saw. It was delicious. Tell me you didn’t want to just lie down in the middle of the floor and let him have his way with you right there?”

Kevin dropped his head into his hands and shook it. “You’re fucking weird, man. Me, I like a nice college boy. Someone you can talk to, you know? Not that they look twice at losers like me.”

“You should enrol.” Finn picked up the old argument with a sense of relief. Thankfully Kevin had had enough of talking about his employer and had returned to the safer subject of himself. “It’s not as though we’re overflowing with business every moment of the hour. You could study for A levels when there are no customers in the shop and apply to the university next year.”

Kevin gave him a complex look he interpreted to mean,
You’re so old you don’t have the faintest idea how things work anymore, but thank you anyway
, and said, “Yeah. Maybe. I gotta go.”

“Cheerio. See you tomorrow.” Finn followed the boy through to the back door and gave him an ironic wave as he decoupled his bicycle from the drainpipe and pushed it out between the planters of geraniums, under the arch of brick wall, and onto Cattlegate Street, where the rush-hour traffic was simmering bumper to bumper from one medieval wall to the next. Their windscreens reflected the sunset like so many panes of glorious stained glass.

He locked the door behind the lad, and put the books to bed, closing those that had been left open, reshelving those that had been half-read by his regulars, Old Mrs. Granger and Reverend Thomas, who came in most days to occupy his cushioned bench and while away an empty day in the warmth.

When the shop was tidied and dusted, he took the rope off the stairs and went up to his flat. Unlocking the single door on the upstairs landing, he stepped through into the pokey little hall from which all his rooms opened. He’d occasionally thought of knocking some walls down, making everything more open-plan, but when no one saw the flat but him, it hardly seemed worthwhile to beautify it. He spent so much more of his life downstairs. The kitchen had a pleasant air, though, with its window that opened towards the sunset, its view on the back garden, and the vintage French country table he’d found at a car boot sale.

His cookbooks rested snugly in a glass-fronted cabinet which boring people might have used for plates. He gave them an affectionate look but left them alone, having no patience for recipes tonight. There was spinach in the fridge, and thyme and parsley growing in the window box. He put a pan of pasta on to boil, finely chopped some garlic and herbs, then sautéed them in olive oil with salt and pepper. Added the chopped spinach and then the cooked pasta, served it onto two plates and shaved a little Parmesan on top.

Then he put his own plate into the oven to keep warm, took the other downstairs into the back garden, and set it on the iron table where sometimes in midsummer he took his midday meal.

Once back upstairs, he switched off the electric light, lit a candle, poured himself the last glass of the nice rosé he’d been drinking since Monday, and looked out of the window just in time for his dark-adapted eyes to pick out a slender, hooded form eeling down the garden path. It took the plate, dropped into a cross-legged sitting position, its back against a table leg, and wolfed down his cooking in indiscriminate gulps.

Smiling, he took his own dinner out of the oven and tucked in. It wasn’t at all like the companionship he’d once had, but there was still something comforting in knowing he wasn’t eating alone.

Candlelight always brought memories of Tom. In the early days of his loss it used to conjure him out of the darkness in strokes of gold. He’d be looking away and would catch the curve of Tom’s cheek, the glint of his wheat-blond hair in the corner of his eye. He’d turn to it with a stab of anguished hope, desperate for a ghost, a vision,
something
real. But there would be nothing.

Thank God, there was nothing about Michael May that reminded him of Tom. The man was as dark as Tom had been fair, with something Greek—or Italian perhaps—about his looks. Tom had been six feet tall, which made kissing an exercise in a cricked neck, had Finn not moved it horizontal more often than not. Michael was scarcely taller than Finn himself.

Tom had spent so much time in the gym, he’d been sculpted to perfection, a living work of art almost too perfect to be real. He’d been vain of it too, Finn admitted with fondness. Always wearing the tightest garments, and as few of them as he could get away with, so everyone could see and marvel at what he’d made of himself.

Michael on the other hand dressed like a straight man. A man unaware that anyone might be looking at his figure with interest. Loose trousers. The shape of his shoulders and waist concealed under the unbuttoned shirt he’d shrugged over his T-shirt. It hadn’t quite managed to disguise the fact that he was built like a brick shit house, but it had played coy with the exact details.

And that just made Finn’s fingers itch to unwrap and explore and discover, out of pure academic curiosity. Pure academic curiosity being in Finn’s case a drive almost as strong as lust.

“Don’t be jealous, darling,” he murmured to the empty chair opposite his, careful not to stir up a grief that had finally burnt down into embers. “I’m going to assume that if you can hear me at all, it’s because you’re in a place where everything makes you happy. So . . .” Ah, perhaps this train of thought had been unwise after all. His throat was closing and his eyes welling up despite his care. He pushed on through it because it was important. Because he would not be defeated by anything as mundane as death. “Be happy for me that I’m still alive.”

He pushed the wine away, knowing better than to drink while morose. Five years was enough. It was enough by anyone’s standards. He had perhaps, barring accidents, another forty, fifty years to live. He was not going to spend them alone, not even for Tom.

“You’d have hated this growing-old lark anyway.” He forced a smile, picked up the one-sided conversation again. Man could not logically prove the world existed. Even Descartes’s proof that he himself existed was flawed at base. Since the universe had to be taken on faith, he felt he could hardly rule out other things more up front about their lack of proof. It was possible Heaven existed, and that Tom still listened when he spoke, even though he never replied. “Wrinkles. Sagging. You’d have despised it.”

But that sentence led to
Perhaps it was for the best you died while you were still flawless
, and he was appalled he’d almost thought it.

Candlelight appeared to be detrimental to his mood. He blew the flame out, went to curl up in the corner of the sofa in his tiny living room, and picked a book at random from the piles that balanced around its feet.

Typically, he’d just got comfortable, just found his place, when someone hammered at the squid knocker of the front door like a judge’s gavel. He pulled a piece of junk mail out from behind the cushion for a bookmark, closing the book on it with a scowl.

His pocket watch said ten thirty, which was—in his now unobjectionable small-town life—a little late for visitors. Something about the urgency of the knocking lit up warning signs in his head, making him consider grabbing the fire poker before he investigated. But violence, however sexy, was not really his forte, so he made do with slipping his mobile into his pocket, so he could call the police if necessary.

The door admitted more rain, the dark bulk outside it not distinguishable until it stepped into the corridor and dripped on his matting. He let go of the sides of his phone and stepped back. Not a physical threat, then. That would have been too easy.

Howey Briggs rubbed a hand over his bald head to wipe off the water, and looked down on him with an expression of mingled smugness and disdain. “Well, this is nice. They said you’d skipped town. I had such a time figuring out where you’d gone. You should’ve given out cards, you know? Change of address.”

“Change of life.” Finn tried to root his weight in the corridor, to prevent Briggs from coming further in, but Briggs simply walked forwards, shouldered past him, knocking him into the wall in the process, and turned into the shop.