Subtle Blood

by KJ Charles

  As if things needed to get worse, the section on Johnnie Cheveley’s death said Kim had been “accompanied by decorated ex-serviceman William Darling”, and there was a bloody photograph. It was from the inquest, showing Will with his arm in a sling and his hair for once sleeked under control, but it was still recognisably him. Will felt cold all over, looking at it. He didn’t want to start seeing himself in newspapers. He had too many notches on his knife and his bedpost for that.

  At least there was nothing on Peacock, and nothing that would hurt Phoebe. Nobody would read the piece and come away liking the Secretans, but that was the least of their worries.

  Kim still hadn’t called back. Will hovered over the telephone for a bit and stopped himself from picking it up. If Kim wanted to call, he would. He told himself that several times as the next hour ticked by, with the slow-growing feeling in his gut that he’d really bollocksed up.

  He didn’t pay much attention when the man came into his shop, though in fairness, if he kicked out all the shifty-looking characters, he wouldn’t sell many books. This one was a sharp-faced chap in a mac. “William Darling?”

  “That’s me. Can I help?”

  “Terence Welwyn, from the Daily Mail. I wonder if you have a minute.” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I hope you can give me a bit of background. I’m writing about the Chingford case. You know Lord Arthur Secretan pretty well, don’t you?”

  Will’s first instinct was to turf him out by the seat of his trousers, but his first instinct hadn’t served him well yesterday. He went for his fallback position: obstructiveness. “Don’t know about that.”

  “He’s been working here, hasn’t he?”

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s very interesting. Why is a lord working in a bookshop?”

  “He likes books,” Will said, letting his face assume the Stolid Incurious Rustic expression he’d used a lot in the Army.

  “What’s he like to work with?”

  “All right.”

  “Would you say he’s a good bookseller?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “He’s a highly intelligent man. First from Cambridge, I believe. A rich one, too, and of course a marquess’s son. And with respect, Mr. Darling, this isn’t the most glamorous establishment. What is it about this shop that attracts Lord Arthur?”

  Will gave it a long moment’s consideration. “Well...”

  “Yes?”

  “He likes books.”

  They went round that one a couple more times, then Welwyn changed direction abruptly. “You were with Lord Arthur at Etchil Manor when Lord Waring and John Cheveley were killed. I read the inquest report. How did you come to be there?”

  “By car.”

  The reporter was beginning to develop a twitch around the eye. “How is it that you were invited to a stately home, Mr. Darling? Did Lord Arthur know there would be trouble before he went? Is that why he brought you?”

  “It’s all in the report.”

  “It doesn’t say how a Bolshevik lord who refused to fight comes to be so close to an enlisted man who holds the Military Cross. How did you get to know Lord Arthur in the first place?”

  “Now, let me think.” Will did some lengthy musing. “I reckon... Aye, I reckon he came in here to buy a book. He likes books.”

  Welwyn bit back an expletive. “What was it like for you? In a stately home, with Lord Waring dying and John Cheveley holding a gun on you? How did you feel?”

  Will just shrugged. Welwyn sighed, then perched on the edge of the desk, leaning in with a confiding expression. Will looked fixedly at his intruding arse until he got up again. “Look, Mr. Darling, our readers want to know about this. There’s a man dead. Word is Lord Chingford’s going to be arrested for murder any time now, and if he hangs, Lord Arthur will become his father’s heir. There’s a lot of public interest in the sort of man he is. Some people look at his past and don’t think much of him. They say he’s a coward and a Red. Would you agree with that?”

  Will wondered if he could rethink the decision not to resort to violence. Left to himself, he’d throw this man out by the scruff of his neck, and he wasn’t sure he’d open the door first. “Not my business.”

  “Would you say they’re wrong?”

  He was going to be quoted in some form, he knew it. He stood. “You asked for my time and you’ve had plenty. Are you here to buy books? This is a bookshop, and I’ve work to do.”

  “I’d be very pleased to. Perhaps I could put down a deposit?” Welwyn fished in his pocket and brought out a pound note, which he fingered in a casual sort of manner.

  A bribe. He was being offered a bribe to talk about Kim. Naturally there could be no meaningful relationship or loyalty between him and Lord Arthur Secretan. Of course Will would sell him out for the right price.

  Kim would take the money and say something trivial, Will knew it. He’d paint himself as a betrayer but not a useful one, and be left alone for good. Kim was clever like that, and willing to let people think the worst of him if it served his purposes. Will was not Kim, and the very thought of taking the money ignited a deep red rage.

  “If you want to buy a book, you can buy a book,” he said as levelly as possible. “For what it’s priced at. And when you do that, what you’ll get for your money is a book. You can leave now.”

  The journalist opened his mouth, met Will’s eye, and retreated. He breathed in and out several times, for a count of ten. It didn’t help.

  The phone rang half an hour later. He answered, desperately hoping it was Kim. It wasn’t. It was the Daily Express, and the next one was the Mirror, after which a man from the Evening Standard turned up in person with a five-pound note folded in his extended palm. Will closed the shop for stocktaking at that point because he was uncomfortably close to panic. He had no idea how to handle this sort of thing or why they were all descending on him at once, and if he made a botch of this, he could give Kim serious trouble.

  Why the hell wasn’t Kim calling back?

  He was probably besieged too, Will realised with a decidedly sinking feeling. Who’d want to talk to Will Darling if they could get at Kim Secretan? He telephoned the flat again, but there was no answer. Kim was probably doing something; Will bloody hoped it was something useful. He bought the lunchtime papers, horribly self-conscious and irritated to be supporting the vultures, but needing to know if he was in there.

  He wasn’t yet, and there was still no arrest. An editorial in the Daily Mirror had strong opinions on that, wondering how it was possible for a murder to take place undetected in a closed building full of people, and remarked on the importance of justice being seen to be done at all levels of society. The implication was very heavily of a conspiracy in high life.

  The day dragged on. He would have liked to go to the pub, to let a pint and a bit of normality soothe the itchy-scratchy feeling under his skin, but he couldn’t face the idea that the other regulars might have read the papers. The journalists had probably been in the Black Horse, come to that, buying drinks and listening.

  He was alarmed, aimless, and restive, he hated this enemy he couldn’t fight, and he was missing Kim.

  That was ridiculous after a single day, although perhaps natural after months of regular companionship. He’d seen Kim most days and many of the nights since March, and when he hadn’t, he’d known when the bugger would turn up again. Now he didn’t know what was going on in Kim’s perverse mind, or why. And if Chingford hanged and Kim became heir to a fortune and title, when Will had just demonstrated his utter incapacity to blend into that world...

  Bad enough he didn’t know when he’d see Kim again. He was starting to wonder if.

  Will sat in his bookshop as the evening darkened around him, listening to the faint sounds from Charing Cross, and tried to think about Kim not coming back. About risks that were too great, and threats nobody wanted to live under, and obligations to things he didn’t know how to weigh in the balance, like name and land and fami
ly. About the impossibility of it, because it had always been impossible, really. Kim was starlight and privilege; Will had his feet firmly fixed in the mud. They didn’t belong together.

  Except they did. Kim belonged in this bookshop, leaving everything behind in the smell of paper. Maybe parts of him belonged in a mansion flat too, or a gentleman’s club, or some bloody great estate in East Anglia, but he damn well ought to be in this shop and the bed upstairs, and Will was not going to sit here and watch everything turn to dust around him without making an effort.

  He jumped to his feet, took two steps toward the telephone to make one last call before he went round to Gerrard Mansions and kicked the door in, and heard a noise from the back room. His heart gave a single giddy thump that for just a second made him feel dizzily like the sixteen-year-old boy who had been permitted to walk Mary Alice Goodman home. And then the lock clicked, and the door opened, and Kim was there.

  His eyes were very dark and very weary. He stared at Will without speaking, and Will stared back, aware of the undrawn blinds, the plate glass windows, the oppressive weight of being seen.

  Kim’s lips parted. Will said, “Come up.”

  He stopped at the foot of the stairs. Kim went past him first, in silence. Will followed, and they rounded the bend of the stairs and were out of anyone’s view, and then Kim was in his arms and they stumbled and crashed down and rolled onto the landing, kissing with a frightening urgency. Kim’s fingers were digging in; Will had handfuls of his hair; it wasn’t clear whose legs were where for a minute until Kim ended up on top. The pair of them half on the landing, half off, Will wedging his heel on a step for balance and uncomfortably aware of the extremely cheap hessian stair-carpet, so unlike Kim’s deep pile that a man could fuck on without severe grazing. Mouths, lips, tongues, biting and devouring, feast after famine.

  And Will wanted to make love to him properly, slowly, all night in a bed rather than a quick one on a brutal floor, but he also needed to ride this wild wave. He fumbled with buttons, feeling Kim doing the same. Kim’s fingers pushing between bodies, wrapping round Will’s rigid cock and pressing Kim’s against it. His gasp into Kim’s mouth.

  Kim reared back and stared down in the dimness of the unlit stair. Will looked up at him, hopelessly lost. The moment stretched out and as it did, the bookshop clock began to strike. They both waited for the tenth chime, poised and still as it lingered in the air. Send not to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

  Kim started to move his hand, working them both, and Will lay back on the hard floor and gave himself up to the sensation—ridged skin, tense fingers, satin-slippery fluid, and the feel of Kim’s strokes, in time with his sharp, harsh breaths. The world contracted to Kim over him, around him, taking him away, and he came like that, bucking on the floor. Kim shifted like a rider to keep his balance and his grip, then doubled over and cried out his own release with what sounded like pain.

  Will let his head clunk back against the floorboards and gasped for air. Kim swayed forwards, resting his head on Will’s shoulder, and they stayed like that for a few moments. The silence felt too precious to break.

  “Will,” Kim said at last. “Christ, I missed you. You needn’t say that’s my own fault.”

  “I was just about to ’phone again when you turned up.”

  “Great minds. Ugh. I had slightly more elaborate plans than this, but now I don’t want to move.”

  “I don’t either, but there’s a stair rod in my back.”

  “In that case, I will admit my knees are raising objections to this hair shirt of a stair-covering. I must be getting old.”

  “Antiquarian,” Will suggested.

  “At least you didn’t say second-hand.” Kim leaned in to kiss him, gently this time, and clambered off. “I’m sorry for yesterday.”

  “It was my fault. I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “He started it,” Kim said. “And I don’t want you to keep your mouth shut. I don’t want you to have to. I dragged you into a place I knew you’d loathe because I didn’t want to go there alone, and brought you face to face with a man you should never have met, and then complained when you didn’t take it with grace, as if you ever take injustice with grace.”

  “I should have had more sense, all the same. I don’t think I understand how hard this is on you, or the ways it is.” They were both still sitting on the floor. Will wrapped an arm round Kim’s shoulders; Kim leaned against him, forehead to forehead. “Talk to me, Kim.”

  “I met my father today.”

  “I didn’t think you spoke.”

  “We don’t. He’s in London over this business—I assume pulling strings on Chingford’s behalf for what good that’ll do—and I was summoned to the presence. His lawyer did most of the talking. How did I know Rennick, what was I doing at the Symposium, what use could I be. My father took the opportunity to inform me that the best I could do was not to make matters worse, and that should I step into Chingford’s shoes, he will whip me into shape as he should have done when I was a boy. Apparently he’s forgotten he tried that and failed. South America may not be far enough.”

  “You’re a grown man. He can’t make you do anything.”

  “He can make my life bloody unpleasant while trying. Can we have a drink? I need one.”

  There was a bottle of single malt Scotch on the bedroom mantelpiece these days instead of the cheap stuff. Another little piece of Kim in Will’s daily life. He poured them both generous slugs and they sat on the bed side by side, shoulder to shoulder.

  “So,” Will said. “What’s your brother’s chances?”

  “Exceedingly poor. The options are the M’Naghten insanity defence; arguing that he was intolerably provoked, which would make it manslaughter; or kicking up enough of a smokescreen of reasonable doubt to persuade a jury they can’t safely convict. Stratton doesn’t think the insanity defence will work, but my father is in any case refusing to countenance it. Provocation is unlikely to succeed given the elapsed time between the row and murder, not to mention that the stupid bastard won’t say what the row was about. And reasonable doubt founders on the fact that he almost certainly did it.”

  “Only almost?”

  It was a joke, sort of, but Kim wrinkled his nose. “I could believe him a murderer with no trouble. But—well, you said it yourself, Will. Three silent steps and a single, precise blow. Either a brilliant improvisation or a cleverly planned killing. Since when was Chingford capable of silence, precision, or cleverness?”

  “That’s true,” Will said slowly. “I could have been wrong, but...that’s true.”

  “As far as it goes. And yet everything else is against him. The evidence is circumstantial, but it’s plentiful, and we don’t have a wide range of other candidates. Nobody else had reason to kill the blasted man.”

  “Oh, right,” Will said. “You haven’t heard that Fairfax was a blackmailer?”

  Kim ricocheted upright in a highly satisfying way. Will gave him Yoxall’s story, and he took a deep breath. “Will, you are a miracle. And you went and got this yesterday, after I shouted at you? Good Christ, I don’t deserve you.”

  “Is it good news? It’s a pretty obvious motive for Chingford.”

  “Yes, but he pretty obviously did it. And it’s a well-established principle of natural justice that blackmailers have it coming, so that might conceivably sway a jury to manslaughter. If we can prove it, of course, and if the stupid sod will admit it. Although...” His voice slowed. “Hmm. What was your connection to Yoxall again?”

  “His uncle was a captain in my battalion, ran my group of trench raiders. He was a good man, for brass—always counted us out and counted us back. Not the brightest spark, but he stuck his neck out for us.”

  “And this George Yoxall struck you as a decent chap? Reliable? Honest?”

  “I’d say so. I liked him.”

  “I trust your judgement,” Kim said. “But does it not strike you there’s a couple of awfully odd things about
his story?”

  “Like what?”

  “The fact that he felt able to tell Fairfax to clear off. Most people don’t: it’s why blackmail is a lucrative line of work.”

  “Well, he wasn’t being threatened with gaol, or having his own doings exposed.”

  “That’s rather my point. The sins of the fathers don’t count for much these days. If all you can threaten your victim with is embarrassment—I don’t feel convinced that a blackmailer would try his luck on such a weak hand.”

  “He might have lost his girl and her money.”

  “But look at what Fairfax had to lose. The machinery of the Club protecting its own would have swung into action. He might well have been expelled, and the word put out about him. If he was living off the secrets of the wealthy, he’d surely not risk losing his access to them.”

  “So maybe he needed the money right then?”

  “Badly enough to take that risk?” Kim asked, and then, more slowly, “Yes, perhaps. Because he didn’t get the money, and then someone stuck an ice-pick in his ear. Post hoc ergo propter hoc?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “I’m wondering if we’re on to something. Let’s assume Yoxall is telling the truth. That suggests Fairfax was sufficiently in need of money to risk his standing at the Symposium on a very shaky bit of extortion. He got killed subsequent to his failed fundraising efforts—by whoever he owed money to? Or by another victim, because we can surely assume there were more? Oh, this is marvellous. If we’re looking at not just other blackmailees, but also people to whom Fairfax owed money, if we can argue that Fairfax had other enemies, we have the beginnings of a case. Threads of reasonable doubt for my father’s lawyers to weave into whole cloth, if you’ll forgive the overextended metaphor.”

  Will had other concerns than metaphors. “Hold on. If you can do the reasonable doubt thing, won’t Chingford get off?”

  “If the prosecution can’t persuade the jury of their case, the verdict should be not guilty. That’s the law.”