Stop, he told himself firmly. He’s not interested. He’s made that perfectly clear, even if he was lying about being straight. No straight man ever looks at another man’s mouth like that. It’s clear he doesn’t want an entanglement, and I’m not getting into another doomed relationship. It’s irrelevant that he’s smart and funny and has a killer smile and the voice of an angel and a biteable arse and beautiful arms and, god, those hands of his. I want to warm them up for him.
James smiled at him when they reached the door, and Gabriel, with that superb impulse control, simply offered him a bland smile in return.
James pushed the door open, took the suitcase through and turned again, amusement glimmering in his blue eyes. ‘Consider this a formal invitation to enter.’ James’s expression was fleetingly sad and then sardonic once more.
Gabriel stepped past James and walked to his new room. He flung the rucksack on the bed and propped the easel against the wall. He’d shop for bedding tomorrow. The sheets Baxter had left weren’t too clean, but Gabriel had slept on worse, and less. Then he’d get his art supplies from Helene’s place, and work out what else he needed.
James dropped Gabriel’s suitcase by the wall and withdrew again. ‘Tea?’
‘Ta, yeah.’
‘Right then. No milk, sorry.’
‘I’ll live.’
A melancholy smile greeted the comment. Soon after, they sat down to strong black tea. James sipped his slowly, as though every mouthful was elixir.
‘You Scottish, then?’ Gabriel asked.
‘Technically. I lived in Edinburgh with my mother and Granda until I was 15. We came to London after Granda died. Mum got a job at the London office of her insurance company. I lost most of the accent at school. How about yours?’
‘My what?’
‘Your accent. Though it’s not an accent as such, but the way you talk shifts about. Ah. Sore point?’
Gabriel poked moodily at his black tea with a spoon, even though the sugar was well dissolved. He put the spoon on the saucer with a clink. ‘Not everyone notices,’ he said.
‘It’s only sometimes. I’ve got a good ear.’
‘I’m out of practice, I suppose. I tried to get shot of the posh accent when I was at university.’ And after, when it could get him beaten up by people wondering why a posh kid was sleeping rough. Gabriel tried to be wry about it. ‘What gave me away?’
‘You mentioned Helene was your au pair. You have some grand turns of phrase, as well.’
‘And here was me thinking I was doing proper Estuary English, an’ all.’
‘Tell you what,’ said James, all seriousness, ‘I won’t tell anyone you’re secretly posh if you don’t tell anyone I’m secretly dour.’
‘Was that a secret?’
‘Aye. A right crabbit auld bastart, my Granda used to say.’ James’s mouth quirked. ‘But he used to call me a wee scunner as well.’
Gabriel didn’t know what a wee scunner was, but that nostalgic glimmer in James’s eye suggested it was fondly meant.
Talk was more businesslike after that, though James’s house rules were simple. After tea, James insisted on washing the tea things, so Gabriel retired to unpack his few belongings and choose the best place for his easel.
That done, he stood at his window and looked out across the patch of grass behind the flats; across red brick walls to tight-packed houses, ramshackle sheds, lights coming on in small windows in homes all across Plaistow and West Ham.
No ghosts here, he decided. I can be safe here. Everything’s going to be fine.
After living for the first few days on Tesco’s sandwiches – there was hardly any food in the house and Gabriel was responsible for his own groceries anyway – Gabriel did a proper shop. He returned with provisions to find James watching the news.
Gabriel stared at James sitting motionless in front of the screen, so devoid of movement and colour that Gabriel could have sworn the man was dead. Gabriel had seen dead people in his time, and he knew that nothing living was ever that still.
He’d seen other things that looked dead too, but he’d touched James when their hands had met over his suitcase. James was real, solid flesh, not a wisp of light or the product of a febrile mind. Other people had spoken to James. Baxter and Helene and the estate agent. No way was James a ghost.
Cautiously, Gabriel placed the bags on the floor, walked over and poked James in the shoulder.
James jerked away from him as though scalded.
‘Sorry,’ said Gabriel, keeping his tone level. ‘Just checking.’
‘Just checking what?’ snapped James.
‘That you’re real and still breathing.’
‘I…’
James’s expression tumbled through all kinds of reactions, none of which Gabriel had been expecting. Irritation. Horror. Distress. Shame. That last one made no sense.
‘I had a flatmate once,’ Gabriel explained conversationally, ‘Well, flatmate’s overstating it. We went to sleep under the same bridge. I woke up in the morning and he was as dead as a doornail.’
‘Oh.’
‘Don’t ask. It was a bad week and I had to sleep rough, that’s all. Denton was 40 going on 300 by then, or his liver was, so it was hardly a surprise. At least he’d had a hot meal for a change. Sometimes,’ Gabriel pouted thoughtfully. ‘I wonder if it was the pie and mash that did for him, but I couldn’t have said no to the poor bugger.’
‘Ah. Well. Sorry. Still breathing.’ James spread his hands in a demonstrative gesture and took a deliberate deep breath through his nose. ‘See?’
Gabriel grinned. ‘Well, keep it up. The paperwork for reporting a death is tedious, and more to the point, if you shuffle off the mortal coil, what am I supposed to do for a place to live?’
‘If you like, I can leave you the old pile in my will,’ said James thoughtfully. ‘There’s nobody else to take it. Then you can have all the fun of scoping out lodgers and making the monthly payments.’
‘Now you’re giving me motive for murder.’
‘I’ll take you with me to see my bank manager next time I have to negotiate a delayed payment. Then see how motivated you are to stab me in the gullet.’
‘I wouldn’t stab you. Too messy.’
‘Aye?’ James’s good humour had returned, and he awaited elaboration.
‘Poison, maybe. Or I’d take you for a walk by the canal, smack you with a rock and push you in.’
‘You’ve thought this through.’
‘I got bored yesterday. It passed the time.’
James’s laughed morphed into a positively infectious giggle, setting Gabriel off. Gabriel liked James’s laugh, the more so because most of the time James seemed unspeakably sad. A happy James was a lovely thing.
‘So,’ said Gabriel. ‘How would you get rid of me?’
‘Fork to the kidney,’ said James without hesitation. ‘And I’d eat you over a couple of days. Dispose of the evidence in a nice French casserole with peas and tatties.’
‘Bullshit. You’d never eat me. You never eat.’ Gabriel smirked at James’s startled expression. ‘Baxter said so, and you’ve nothing in the house except that half pack of gingernuts he didn’t finish nicking off you. In any case, you’re a doctor. You’d use me for terrible experiments in the cupboard under the attic stairs. Like Dr Moreau.’
‘Sprung,’ said James ruefully, but the startlement had fled.
Gabriel unpacked the groceries neatly into the kitchen cupboards while James returned his attention to the TV. That done, Gabriel picked up a fresh apple from the mound he’d stacked in a dusty fruit bowl, dropped into the spare chair and bit into the fruit.
‘I googled your stuff online,’ said James, muting the program. ‘At the Dupre Gallery. Your work’s extraordinary.’
Gabriel knew what the critics said of his art; the ones who hated it, and thought it “cheap emotional exploitation”, as well as the ones who loved it. Dare’s art, said
one of the favourable analyses, paints glimpses of street life, homelessness and crime with compassion as well as a palpable sense of danger. Another had called his work stark but humanising. On the whole, Gabriel didn’t much care what the critics thought of his work one way or the other, though it was, as Helene said, a relief that some were selling at last. Anything that kept him from having to use his father’s money was a good thing.
But Gabriel liked it very much that James liked his work.
‘My family would prefer I painted things that were more conventional,’ he confessed suddenly. ‘They think my work is too dark.’
‘The world is dark,’ said James. ‘You find the hope in it anyway. That’s important. The capacity to see hope in the darkness is important.’ His tone was oddly yearning.
‘I think so,’ said Gabriel, taking another bite of his apple. He wondered exactly what in James’s experiences had made him understand, and long for, hope in the dark and dangerous places of the world.
Over the next fortnight, Gabriel and James settled into a comfortable routine.
True to his word, James didn’t pry into Gabriel’s odd visitors, who arrived sporadically from Gabriel’s third night in his new home. He noticed them, though. Haunted, harried people. Young people who looked out of old eyes; old people who looked out of eyes dimmed with pain. The people from Gabriel’s paintings.
Gabriel made sure that James was aware of the visitors, whatever time of the night they arrived, with a soft tap on the bedroom door. James was always awake, betrayed by discreet tell-tales from his small bedroom – the soft footsteps pacing the carpet, the crinkling hush of pages turning, and a low light that glimmered faintly under the door. Other nights, Gabriel would hear his landlord padding about the living room on bare feet. He went out for a glass of water once to see the doctor watching the lamplit street.
As far as Gabriel could tell, James Sharpe rarely ate, either – the half packet of gingernuts remained undiminished, although James drank black tea regularly and an uneaten biscuit often rested on the saucer. He had no friends that Gabriel could see and James never spoke of any.
James had other peculiarities, harder to define. Like the day Gabriel returned from the paint suppliers mid-morning only to find James setting out teacups and biscuits as the door opened.
‘How did you know I was coming home?’
‘I heard you on the stairs.’
Gabriel hadn’t made a sound on the stairs, he was sure.
On top of this was the afternoon he’d taken his sketchbook to the garden to capture the shrivelled ivy vine’s patterns on the brickwork. One moment, James was a dozen yards away at the laundry door, and the next moment he was at Gabriel’s side, a wasp held by the wings in his pinched fingers.
‘It was on your neck,’ James explained. ‘About to sting you.’
‘You’ve got good eyesight,’ Gabriel had noted, determined not to be startled at the speed and unlikelihood of the rescue. ‘And quality reflexes, as promised.’
James was odd.
Which could as easily describe me, Gabriel thought, and didn’t dwell on it.
He had other problems. Some of his street acquaintances had, for want of a better term, disappeared.
Chapter Four
Gabriel lay awake in his bed, facts tumbling over and over in his head without making the slightest bit of sense. Ben Tiller had gone missing; so had Alicia Jarret. Both of them were old hands on the streets.
The last he’d heard, Alicia had found a bed in a proper shelter, and now pfft. Gone. Ben had been doing better, too. His brother, Ethan, had been in touch and while Ben hadn’t been comfortable trying to stay in the small, neat suburban house with Ethan and Ethan’s girlfriend Jess, they’d connected. They were trying. And now Ben was missing too.
People vanished on the streets all the time, Gabriel was only too aware. Even people who were making progress. But people usually turned up again: sometimes dead of an overdose under a bridge, true, but Alicia was a drunk, not a user.
Ben might have succumbed, but none of Gabriel’s contacts knew of anyone who Ben – who was acutely paranoid – trusted enough to buy from while his semi-regular supplier was in stir. It was the absence of a source Ben didn’t think was trying to poison him (well, for certain values of poisoning) that had cleaned him up enough to allow the rapprochement with Ethan.
Gabriel’s phone rang out with the first few lines of the Mikado’s song from Gilbert and Sullivan. Michael. Two o’clock in the morning and Michael thought nothing of calling him. As always, an irritating warmth fluttered underneath the more usual testiness that he was calling at all.
Gabriel held the phone to his ear. ‘Piss off.’
‘Ah, Gabriel,’ came the unruffled reply. ‘It is always so refreshing to see that the passage of years that in others heralds maturity finds you as juvenile as ever.’
‘Michael, it’s so delightful to find that, as always, you’re cementing your routine as a pompous octogenarian only four decades in advance of the need. Did the foreign office send you on a special course for that, or are you accepting tutelage in Old Fartdom direct from the Chancellor of the Exchequer?’
‘I’m not with the foreign office, or the Exchequer, as you well know.’
Talking to his brother, Gabriel fell naturally back into the rhythms and vocabulary of his upbringing. ‘No. You skulk around the halls of power in Westminster with the face of a lugubrious turtle and offer a word in season to anyone who looks lost and in need of counsel, which is almost all of those tossers. What is it you do again? No wait. I remember. The secretary to the permanent secretary of the Cabinet Office. It was that or the tea lady.’
‘Gabriel–’
‘Is there an opening for the undersecretary to the secretary of the permanent secretary, or do you just want someone to help you hand out the biscuits? Because you’ll find that, as always, my answer is sod off. Would you like me to help you spell that for your diary?’
‘Grow up, Gabriel,’ snapped Michael Dare.
‘And get old before my time like you did? You’re 40, Michael, not 60.’
‘And you’re 27, not a teenager. Don’t you think it’s time you got a proper job.’
‘No, I don’t. I need to make my rent and pay for groceries and all those getting-by things that I’ve been doing for years without you and without our father. I know it pisses you both off, but what can you do?’
‘Are you quite finished?’
‘Just about. I want to remind you that I have a job at Wilcott’s Art Supplies and my paintings do sell. Don’t fall off your chair.’
‘Marvellous. Before you rally for your final bout of infantile banter, I wanted to let you know that your mother sent a postcard today from Santiago. She sends her love.’
‘And you had to let me know this in the middle of the night.’
‘First chance I’ve had to call,’ said Michael. ‘And I knew you’d be up.’
‘How?’
‘You’re an artiste,’ said Michael, and Gabriel could hear the sardonic humour in it. ‘You keep the hours of a trollop.’
Gabriel smirked, working hard to make sure his much older brother didn’t hear his smothered laugh. ‘Thanks for the Maternal Update, Michael. You can tell her I’m not dead and thanks for asking.’
‘I’ll be sure to do so.’
‘I know she didn’t ask,’ Gabriel went on softly. ‘She never does. And I know she didn’t send me a postcard. But thanks for pretending.’
Gabriel heard Michael sigh.
‘I’ve a roof over my head,’ said Gabriel firmly. ‘I’m housed and fed, I have a part time job, and my paintings are selling. You don’t have to worry about me. And I know the old man didn’t ask either, but if he does, which he won’t, I’m fine.’
‘You won’t reconsider the job offer?’ Michael asked. ‘I could use some help distributing the biscuits.’
Gabriel let his brother hear the laugh this time
. ‘The civil service would drive me spare. I lack civility.’
‘I noticed.’
‘See you around, Michael.’
‘Chance would be a fine thing.’
Gabriel rang off and put the phone back on the bedside table, allowing a grudging fondness for his brother to taint his thoughts. Michael was a self-important gasbag who would have been happier hobnobbing with Disraeli and Gladstone, but for all his sins, he wasn’t a complete twat. Not like their father, who was as complete a twat as nature and disposition could make him.
Gabriel had once tried feeling sorry for his father, but it hadn’t stuck. It must have been hard, the old bastard’s first wife running off with the accountant and leaving him with a solemn seven year old to raise – a task he outsourced to boarding schools and home tutors. The next wife hadn’t even waited to find someone to run off with. She packed her bags when Gabriel was four and, apart from the occasional Christmas and birthday card, never looked back.
Gabriel had been raised, like his half-brother before him, by a succession of nannies to begin with, and then by schoolmasters and tutors – and, thank heavens, by his wonderful Helene Dupre.
Having actually met his father, Gabriel didn’t blame anyone for taking the first available escape route. He was less forgiving of his mother for not taking him with her, but screw it. She was as much a stranger to him as his father, and it didn’t matter, even though Michael thought it did. Michael thought a lot of things that weren’t true.
Like the fact Michael thought Gabriel was childish for turning his back on their father’s money, and on a high-paying job in the city or the government. Michael had more than once expressed the opinion that they should get something from their connection, even if was just a roof and an education. He thought Gabriel an idiot for choosing to sleep on the streets sometimes rather than accept a penny from their father, and for pursuing art after spending all that time gaining a chemistry degree. As though defiance was the only reason for either.
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