He hastened to open the wine before he leapt on her. Caspar’s hands shook as he twisted the screw cap. Fuck, I’ve got it bad. And there was an elephant in the room with them that he had to give its marching orders before he could relax. Caspar needed to believe she wouldn’t walk out after he confessed. She already knew part of it. He handed her a glass, being careful not to touch her, otherwise he suspected he’d have a cock on the verge of explosion.
“May you make it to heaven fifteen minutes before the devil knows you’re dead,” Ally said, and chinked her glass against his.
“Amen to that,” Caspar said, particularly in his case.
Ally took a sip of wine and licked her lips. At the sight of her pink tongue, Caspar took a long blink, his glass hovering at his mouth.
“It’s not too bad,” she said. “Not that I’m an expert.” She put the glass down. “Is there anything I can do to help? Apart from skinning a rabbit. I draw the line there. Mind you, I don’t want to eat rabbit either. Oh God, you’ve done rabbit, haven’t you? Me and my big mouth. Well, I’ll taste it, but tell me where the bathroom is first in case it hops back up.”
She was nervous too, Caspar realized. “No rabbit. Vegetable soup to start. Armadillo to follow.”
Tell her, tell her, tell her.
Ally smiled. “No problem at all with armadillo, providing it’s free range.”
“Naturally. Take a seat. I’ll be on the boxes.”
Caspar carefully put the bowls of soup on the table and took the rolls from the top oven. He settled on his makeshift seat and only remembered the napkin when he saw Ally take hers from the ring. He’d completely lost his appetite. All he could think about was taking her by the hand and leading her upstairs to his bed, except he wasn’t sure they’d make it that far.
“This is fantastic,” Ally said after she’d taken a spoonful. “So tasty. You made this herb bread too? You’re amazing.”
Tell her, tell her, tell her.
“I had a bit of help.” Not that, coward. “My parents’ housekeeper supervised.”
Caspar could barely take his gaze from Ally as she ate, mesmerized by the way she opened her mouth for the spoon, the evident pleasure as she swallowed the soup, her little moan, faint but there. Oh God, what will she sound like in bed?
“Hungry?” she asked.
He looked down at his bowl to find it empty. How had he managed that?
“Starving,” Caspar said. Not far off the mark in more ways than one.
His cock was rock-hard now, determined to burst out of his chinos. Caspar hoped it was too dark for her to see the bulge in his pants. He moved the empty bowls from the table and took plates from the top oven. Martha had explained everything to him, written down the timings so he couldn’t go wrong. He dropped pasta into boiling water, turned up the heat on the sauce, and while he still faced away from her, took a deep breath and said, “You know I’ve been to prison.”
When she didn’t say anything, Caspar turned to look at her.
“So I heard,” Ally said. “It’s amazing, isn’t it, how complete strangers feel obliged to interfere in stuff that has nothing to do with them?”
She seemed unperturbed. Did his record really not bother her?
“I wonder how the lady off the bus would have liked it if I’d told people she pretends her shop-bought cakes are homemade, or that her husband likes to wear a diaper and call her Mummy?”
“She’s the vicar’s wife.”
Ally tsked. “She ought to know better then. One problem with a small village, I suppose. I’d been thinking how friendly everyone was, but now I’m imagining seething intrigue lurking below the surface. Hey, do people here get naked on a full moon and dance in the woods? I might be up for that.”
He gave a choked laugh. Caspar had expected her to ask what he’d done, but she didn’t. Did she know? Flustered, he drained the pasta and stepped back to stir the sauce.
“You don’t have any questions?” Caspar put the plates of food on the table and sat down.
Ally had refilled the glasses, and he took a gulp of wine.
She tapped her fingers on the table. “Would you dance naked in the woods?” He rolled his eyes and she sighed. “Did you do what you were sent to prison for?”
“I confessed.”
Ally’s eyes widened as she stared straight at him. Her jaw fell and her fork froze on the way to her open mouth. “You didn’t do it.”
Not a question but a statement, and something snapped inside Caspar, a crack splintering the brittle shield he’d erected between himself and the world. She was the first to say that, the first not to assume the fact that he’d confessed meant he’d done it.
“Oh my God. You confessed and you didn’t do it? Are you crazy? Why the hell did you do that? Is that what you always say when people ask you if you did it? ‘I confessed’?”
Caspar opened his mouth and closed it again. The easiest answer to “Did you do it?” was yes he did. He’d been punished for it. Now it was over. Except it would never be over.
The hardest answer was the truth.
“No, I didn’t do what I was sent to prison for,” Caspar said, “but you can never tell anyone.” Because he deserved to be in prison for what he didn’t do.
“Why not?” Ally asked.
“Because there’s no point raking it all up. It won’t change anything.” Not in England anyway.
“It might change people’s attitude. Almost everyone I’ve met has warned me off you.”
He gave a short laugh. Good to know the Home Guard remained on active service.
“Don’t you care?” Ally asked.
Caspar only cared what she thought. He filled his mouth with linguini so he didn’t have to speak.
Ally swallowed another forkful and sighed. “This is delicious. The pasta is perfectly cooked, the armadillo is tender and tastes just like chicken—fancy that. The cabbage delightful—”
“There isn’t any cabbage—ah—very funny.”
There was a smudge of sauce at the side of her mouth and Caspar couldn’t take his eyes off it. He wanted to lick her lips, but her tongue beat him to it.
“So what didn’t you do?” Ally asked. “You might as well tell me. I have a grade-three certificate in torture. I got up to the use of thumb screws and caterpillars. You won’t last five minutes.”
Caspar had never felt such a need to unburden himself. She was easy to talk to, said just the right things, made him laugh. The words piled up in his head ready to flood out. He knew—without understanding why—that Ally would believe him, that she already believed him.
“I had a sister, Jemima, seven years younger than me, adored by everyone, including me, even though she was the favorite child. You couldn’t help but love Jem though she wasn’t…” He couldn’t bring himself to say she wasn’t normal. In many ways she was better than normal. “She trusted too easily.” Caspar swallowed hard. “She had learning difficulties. We had to look after her long past the point that she should have looked after herself.”
Her sweet face came into Caspar’s head and he gulped in distress.
“I went straight into the Foreign Office after university. My second overseas posting was to Albania as an economics advisor. Jem came out to see me when I was in my first post, in Greece, and she wanted to come to Albania. Our parents brought her to celebrate her twenty-first birthday. The day after, while they had a rare evening to themselves, I took Jem to an aquarium then to a bar and I lost her.”
Remembering the horror of that moment, the second he realized his sister no longer sat where he’d left her, made Caspar want to throw up everything he’d eaten. He took a deep breath.
“I ran everywhere, trying to find her. The security staff looked. The police came but she’d gone. When I told my parents, my mother collapsed. Jem was a child in a woman’s body. She couldn’t see danger. She’d have believed any lie. I’d told her to stay put. I made her promise. It was no more than a few minutes, but that was all it too
k to ruin everyone’s life.”
He looked across the table into Ally’s face. She stared at him without blinking.
“I bribed, threatened, walked the streets and misused my diplomatic status until I eventually discovered who’d taken her. A slimeball called Bekim Hassan. He was known to embassy staff. A trafficker of women, drugs, alcohol, anything that made him money.” Caspar bent the napkin ring in his fingers. “I tricked my way into his building, barged into his apartment and found her. When I saw Jem—oh Christ—she was trussed up like a— I lost it. Bekim and I fought. Only one of us survived.”
Ally slid her hand across the table and wrapped her fingers around his. “Oh God, Caspar.”
“Only you can’t do things like that in Albania without consequences. The next day I was dragged out of the police cell and told Bekim’s brother had suffocated Jem as she lay in her hospital bed. He’d been shot and killed while attempting to escape. When the police finally let me out on bail, I drowned myself in alcohol, and a woman called Deanna spiked my drink. While I was unconscious, someone injected me with heroin and left more around for the police to find together with a list of girls I’d supposedly supplied with drugs in return for sex. Guess what? They all testified I’d screwed them and fucked up their lives. As if the murder charge wasn’t enough.”
Caspar couldn’t look at Ally. He just wanted to tell it all.
Almost all.
“The murder charged would be dropped and self-defense accepted if I pleaded guilty to supplying. My lawyer advised me that if I didn’t plead guilty, I’d get thirty years in jail, which meant fifteen years served if I behaved myself but I’d seen inside an Albanian jail. I wouldn’t survive fifteen years. So I confessed. I was sentenced to eight years and released after four. The judge was lenient because of my diplomatic status and because of the murder of my sister.”
“Bloody hell, Caspar.” Her hold on him tightened, her fingers digging into his hand.
“I lost everything. My sister, the love and trust of my parents, the respect of everyone who knew me, my job and my future. I was a rising star in the foreign office, destined for big things, and I fell out of the sky.”
“But why would they believe you’d take and supply drugs? Surely those you worked with knew what you were like?”
“Deanna Mantel was the ambassador’s daughter. She said I’d confessed everything to her, including the murder of Hassan. The embassy went for damage limitation. Better drugs than murder.”
“Why would she lie?” Ally asked.
Caspar gave a short laugh. “Because I wouldn’t fuck her, because I thought it was more than my job was worth to shag the ambassador’s daughter. Maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe she needed money, drugs or was being blackmailed herself. Sort of destroyed my belief in people.” In women.
“Surely your parents know the truth?” She squeezed his fingers again.
Caspar’s heart clenched. “It wasn’t the first time I’d been in trouble. I was expelled from school for smoking pot. I was almost sent down from Cambridge for snorting cocaine. I lived on the wild side in Athens. I don’t have a good track record, and anyway, I admitted I’d done it. In the UK, I’d have pleaded not guilty and taken my chances, but not in Albania.”
He’d thought they might kill him once he was inside, some relative of Hassan and his brother finding a way to get to him, but being alive was almost a worse punishment.
“Have you ever talked about what happened to you in prison?” Ally whispered.
Caspar smiled. “You know me so well already. It’s done and dusted. What’s the point?”
He didn’t want to think about what his life had been like. He never wanted to relive a second of those four years.
“Why don’t you issue a statement to the press or write a book or something to set things right?” Ally asked.
He gave a short laugh. “I did speak to a couple of persistent journalists after I came back to the UK, but they made it look like I was whining about what happened to me when what happened to Jem was a million times worse. And they were right. They also had an ulterior motive. They were looking for dirt on Deanna’s father. Mantel’s back in the UK and a government minister. He’s not going to let that position slip through his fingers. It was made clear to me that if I opened my mouth about his daughter, I’d come off looking worse than I do now. If that’s possible.”
“Where’s Deanna?”
“She died. Fell off a balcony in Tirana. Supposedly an accident, but I didn’t believe it. What could I do from prison?”
“Oh fuck.”
“That sort of sums it up. So if you want to walk out, feel free. You can take the chocolate pudding. It’s in the fridge. I’m not good for women. I’d hate you to end up dead.” He gave her a wry smile. He was doing the right thing for once and pushing her away, only it didn’t make him feel good.
“Thank you for telling me,” Ally said. “I’m sad for you to have all that happen, but I have to tell you, if you were a dying baby seal, I’d be clubbing you over the head right now to put you out of your misery.”
She glared at him and Caspar tensed.
“You’re wallowing in it, Caspar. You didn’t dig all of that hole you’re in, but it’s not an excuse for staying in it. You continue to live in a place where everyone despises you. Why?”
He tried to wrench his hand from hers, but Ally held on tight.
“You think it’s easy?” he snapped.
“No, and I guess that’s why you’re doing it. You’re punishing yourself. You won’t allow anyone to get too close in case they make you feel better.”
Caspar could feel his jaw twitching. “Got a degree in psychiatry? You’ve no idea what I went through. I’m not going to run away. Though you seem to think that’s the answer.” He tugged harder and dragged Ally’s hand across the table, but she still clung to him.
“I ran from London because someone tried to kill me,” she said.
Caspar froze in shock then made a noise somewhere between a laugh and grunt of disbelief.
Ally stared straight at him. “I didn’t fall in front of the train. I was pushed.”
He gaped at her. Caspar suspected his mouth was opening and closing like a fish.
“Same way the car that hit my bike didn’t clip me by accident but intended to throw me into traffic. And the flowerpot that tumbled from a balcony was meant to hit me not the pavement. And the shove on the escalator wasn’t from an impatient commuter. And getting locked in the basement was deliberate. Not that the police believed any of it.”
Caspar was astounded. “Christ, Ally.”
“I’ve obviously pissed someone off.”
“An angry ex?”
“Oh yeah, I drove all my lovers crazy.”
Caspar didn’t like the word “lovers”.
“Or was it the other way around? I found Mark, my ex, with his face buried in the breasts of a naked woman. He had the nerve to look annoyed when I refused to make it a threesome. Dickhead.”
“What did the police say?”
“Threesomes aren’t against the law.”
Caspar glared. “Ally!”
“They said the flowerpot was an accident. Cyclists are always falling into traffic. The shove on the escalator happens all the time. Getting locked in the basement was just one of those things. No one saw me pushed in front of the train, the platform was packed, though my tumble was captured on camera. But I know what I felt. Someone pushed me.”
It still sounded farfetched to Caspar. He wasn’t a fan of the police, but accidents sounded far more likely than attempted murder. “Why would someone want to kill you?”
She shrugged. “Not for money. Hatred? Because I upset someone, sometime, somewhere? It wouldn’t have been deliberate. I go out of my way to make sure I’m liked. Too far sometimes when I interfere in stuff I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s a guy from my past who I don’t remember. I even wondered about my birth father, whoever he is.”
“You don’t know who
?”
Ally shook her head. “My birth mother wouldn’t say. She didn’t want me but she wouldn’t let anyone adopt me. She broke off all personal contact once I was with Finn’s parents, as if she wanted to punish me. I don’t even know if she’s still alive, and to be honest, I don’t care. Unless it’s her who’s trying to kill me.” She sighed. “I know it’s crazy, but I’m not making it up. I can still feel the shove between my shoulder blades.”
Surely she was mistaken. A series of unfortunate coincidences and a vivid imagination rather than attempted murder.
“You’re hiding up here?” Caspar asked.
“In a way. No job, no income, no money for rent and someone trying to kill me. A change of scene without telling anyone where I’d gone seemed a good idea. Whereas you’ve decided to reside in a wasps’ nest. If you’d gone anywhere else, maybe no one would have known who you were.”
“Anywhere else, I’d have had to pay rent.”
Ally laughed. “Snap. I’m not paying rent either.”
He smiled. “I feel better.”
“So do I.”
“It might be my fabulous meal.”
Ally smiled. “Or the thought of dessert?”
Or just you sitting there listening to me, not condemning me, talking to me.
Caspar rose to his feet and moved the plates to the sink. He took two pots of chocolate mousse from the fridge and put them on the table.
“You’d better be good in bed,” Ally said, and Caspar almost broke his teeth with the spoon.
“What?” he blurted.
“Fabulous food. Gorgeous face. Sensitive, sad and funny with more history than me, which just about makes you the most interesting guy I’ve ever met. It would be too cruel if you were a disappointment between the sheets.”
“Define disappointment,” he said, and offered Ally a spoonful of his pudding.
Her eyes closed as she sucked and then licked the spoon. “Leaving your socks on.”
Caspar waited. “Is that it?”
Ally shrugged.
Kiss a Falling Star Page 8
