‘You talk as if I’m an axe murderer. I may not be perfect, but there are plenty worse than me.’
She laid a finger on the back of his hand, a touch that said you’re perfect to me. ‘You’re so reasonable. Not everyone’s like that. They don’t know you, but they think they do. Let me try and explain.’
He inclined his head, seeing too clearly how her family might see him. ‘Okay.’
‘You’re right. I’m a bit of a rebel. They don’t love me any less for it. But they don’t trust my judgement.’ She managed a wink, because she knew he didn’t trust her judgement either. ‘That’s fair enough, isn’t it? I haven’t chosen well in the past.’
He turned back to his coffee, contemplating Bronte’s previous romantic adventure, her love affair with a handsome, charming anarchist. When the silence and the memories became too much for him, he turned back to close his hands over hers — a sudden, desperate attempt to ease the pain she couldn’t hide. What happened to her had been his fault. Her hands trembled in his. Memory was a brute, gripping like a mantrap and never letting go.
‘You’ve forgiven me. They can learn to forgive me, too.’
‘It’ll take longer than you think.’
‘Maybe. At some point you’ll have to tell them.’
‘Sure, I will. And then my dad will be so angry that I’ll be hard put to stop him coming over and tearing you limb from limb.’
‘He can try.’ Marcus flexed the muscles of his forearms. He could look after himself. He might not be a man who relished a fight, but surely Bronte would be worth fighting for?
She withered him with a look. ‘He will try. Did I tell you he used to be a professional boxer? He still boxes. I wouldn’t fancy your chances.’
Silence. He broke it. ‘Then I don’t know where we go from here.’
‘You’ve forced me into a corner, haven’t you? I’ll tell them. You’re right. I know I’m going to have to. All I’m trying to get across to you is that it won’t be easy, and you mustn’t expect them to like you. I didn’t put myself through the misery of keeping secrets for fun. But you have to be prepared to help me take the flak.’
His phone went then, thank God, and it was the locksmith.
Chapter 8
Cas was out in the yard talking to his friend, the one he’d never introduced Celina to, the one who rarely came up to the farmhouse, as if he didn’t want anyone to see him. Cas’s hands were deep in his pockets, shoulders hunched in what looked like frustration. Wet snow drifted down and settled on his collar until he shook himself like a big, amiable sheepdog, sending a spray of water into the air.
Celina, staring out of the window at them, pulled her cardigan round her as if by so doing she could make up for its sheer incompetence in the face of the unseasonal weather. She disliked the friend who, on the thankfully rare occasions that she had to deal with him, had struck her as tightly-controlled and aggressive. She didn’t know his name, but Cas always referred to him as ‘yer man’, and so that was how she’d begun to think of him.
Today, as he spoke to Cas, Yer Man waved a curled fist out of the car window, and the expression on his prematurely-aged face revealed naked fury. Unwilling to be seen to be too inquisitive, she stepped back from the window, drawing a quick comparison between Cas’s constant charm and Yer Man’s constant fury as she did so. So often in the past few months, she’d made the calculations and considered herself fortunate but today, for the first time, doubt crept into her mind like a draught beneath an ill-fitting door. Perhaps getting into bed with Cas wasn’t the good idea it had seemed back in the autumn.
Generally speaking, Celina didn’t spend a lot of time thinking — her life had been short on opportunity for it — but one doubt always breeds another. If she’d paid a little more attention to her lessons in school, she might have picked up a basic grasp of the English language. Her options then, might have been broader.
She chewed her fingernails, reviewing her weaknesses. Languages weren’t her skill set. Even in her own language, Polish, she’d never performed more than adequately at school. She could string a sentence together well enough when it came to speaking, but she’d never been able to spell, and grammar eluded her. Numbers weren’t her forte, either. In fact, school hadn’t uncovered any academic strengths at all, so she’d had no option but to rely on her looks and her body. It was easy enough when you were nineteen years old, blonde, and curvy in all the right places.
Her mother, on the increasingly-rare occasions when she was sober, used to say you had to take your blessings wherever you found them and Celina had found hers that morning in the summer, when the boss had drifted up to her to introduce himself as she snatched a moment’s relief from the back-breaking task of raspberry picking. I’m Casimir, he’d said to her, in Polish, with an appraising smile. Call me Cas.
Out in the farmyard, Yer Man’s fury continued to spew out of the car window, and Cas continued to meet it with passive resignation. Her mind shifted to the other thing that worried her, the thing that mattered most.
I wonder where Jan is? She’d asked herself that over and over for the last forty-eight hours and soon, when she found the courage, she might ask Cas that, too. She frowned out of the window. Yer Man, talking through the window of his beaten-up blue Volvo, was looking severe. Cas, who had his back to her, had been forced into some kind of response, and was waving his hands in an abdication of any responsibility.
A shred of guilt troubled her conscience, but she subdued it, without mercy. When you’d been dragged up the way she had, with all the disadvantages that life had thrown at her, there was no time for guilt. It had no value in a hard life, where conscience was a luxury for clean livers. In this world, you did what you had to do to survive.
Jan had never learned that. Maybe conscience had pricked at his soul, too. Maybe that was why he’d gone without a word to her or to any of the others. Thinking about it, she experienced a surge of anger at his abandonment and betrayal. She’d done everything for him. She’d brought him over from Poland for his own good, as well as hers, when there was no-one else to look after him. The least he could have done was tell her his plans.
Celina, in truth, didn’t rate herself very highly, but she was proud of one thing. She was loyal. She was loyal to Jan, because he was her brother and Fate had yoked her to him by an accident of birth; and she was loyal to Cas, because he’d offered her protection when she needed it most. There was a price, and you couldn’t afford to be too fastidious in paying it. She understood that. Jan never had.
Outside, the two men concluded the conversation. Yer Man wound the window up and spun the car into a vicious three-point turn at the gate to the farmhouse, holding onto the road by a miracle, and roaring off down the lane in a cloud of exhaust fumes. Cas turned away with an expressive shrug, then stuck his hands back in his pockets and trudged back up to the house.
She hurried to open the door for him. ‘Can I get you a coffee?’
‘You’re a good girl. Yes. Make it a strong one.’ He bent to unlace his boots and kicked them off. Unlike Celina and Jan’s series of evil-tempered stepfathers, or never-quite-legal equivalents, he wasn’t a man to take his bad mood out on her. ‘On second thoughts, take the boys their tea first. I can wait a while for coffee.’
Obediently, because it was always wise to be obedient, she loaded up a tray with the beef casserole that had been bubbling on the stove, a loaf of bread, and a warm apple pie. ‘I’m getting good at waitressing,’ she joked with him, as he leapt to open the door. ‘You should have given me a job in your café.’
‘So I should.’ His eyes darkened, and he turned away. ‘It’s too late now.’
The sleet made the concrete farmyard slippery under her feet, and she navigated her way carefully round the side of the house to the bunkhouse. Setting the tray on the wall beside her, she unlocked the door. It was only in the past couple of days, since Jan’s disappearance, that Cas had seen fit to trust her with the key, but even now she knew he was
n’t quite sure of her. A glance over her shoulder showed him standing at the window, just as she’d done — a little way back, so as not to be too obvious.
Gratitude washed over her. He was her port in a storm, the blessing that fortune had cast in front of her. If you landed up in a strange country with no skills, no friends, no money, tied down by an older brother who depends on you, and you find someone who’ll look after you — that was luck. Cas wasn’t bad-looking, was roughly satisfying in bed, and was fond enough of her to be kind. More to the point, he was fluent in Polish, so he could talk to her, and in English, so he could speak for her. That had made it an easy decision to sleep with him, even if there hadn’t been plenty of other good reasons to do so. She didn’t have to do the hard labour. While the others were working hard picking the fruit on the farm, she could take it a little bit easier by virtue of being the boss’s mistress.
Nobody liked her for it, but in the end, she had the last laugh. When most of them moved on at the end of the season, scratching around for the next job, she stayed, along with the other lucky ones who Cas had taken pity on — the ones he got on with and was prepared to give a home to over the winter in return for a little bit of casual, undeclared work when the opportunity arose.
It was an unwritten, unspoken contract; but it was a contract nonetheless.
Knowing that he was watching emboldened her. Lowering the door handle with her elbow, she eased her way inside, and a fug of stale air smothered the savoury aroma of the casserole. ‘Dinner,’ she called out, as though there were any other reason she’d be there.
Three pairs of eyes, all dull, all listless, watched her as she came in. Milek, his thin face sallow from a lack of sunlight, sat with his hands behind his head, smoking. Roch, half-dozing in the corner, shook himself awake. Only Krystian, the youngest of them, jumped up from where he’d been staring into space and came to help. ‘Smells good, anyway.’
‘About time.’ Milek ground the cigarette out on a saucer next to him, not taking his eyes off her. She stared back at him, less comfortable now that Jan wasn’t there. Not that he’d have been much use if she’d needed someone to look after her, but Milek’s gaze was always a little less obvious when her brother was present.
‘Beef stew.’ She put the pot on the table by the window. Roch, lifting himself out of his lethargy, got plates and cutlery from the cupboard. Milek, she noticed, had a couple of empty beer bottles by his side; she kept a wary eye on him as she backed away from the table. ‘I’ll come back for the dish later.’
‘Aren’t you going to stay and eat with us?’ Milek knocked one of the bottles over as he stood up. The dregs dribbled out onto the carpet, another ugly stain that no-one would clean up.
‘I can’t. I’ve things to do.’
‘You think you’re too good for us now?’ His eyes locked onto her and an obscenity, low and foul, crept out, a sour full-stop to his sentence.
Obscenities never worried Celina. She had use for a few herself, or would have done if Cas hadn’t been the kind of man who liked women to be sweet-spoken and ladylike, but there was something in Milek’s tone that alarmed her. ‘I need to get back over to Cas.’
‘Ah. Important business with the boss. Right, sweetie.’
Neither the endearment nor the exaggerated wink that accompanied it was meant to amuse, and she shrugged both aside. When the weather improved, she’d see if Cas would let her clear the place out while the boys were out working, give them somewhere marginally better to stay. It wasn’t much, but it was better than the alternatives — prison, or being returned to the places they’d all tried so hard to get away from.
Every time she came in, every time she put her head into the stale air of the bunkhouse, the tension had risen a notch from the time before. If she was any judge, Milek was scared as well as frustrated, and she could hardly blame him. ‘You boys need to get out more,’ she joked, in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere.
‘Chance would be a fine thing.’ Milek again, unwilling to let it go. Krystian thought before he spoke, and Roch never spoke at all these days. At least with Jan, there had been some lightness, always a smile, someone pleased to see her. ‘Ask your mate at the big house. Or ask him to ask his mate. We don’t know anything.’
‘Where did Jan go?’ she asked, out of the blue. ‘Why?’
They stared back at her, varying degrees of desperation. Krystian, thoughtful. Milek, malevolent. Roch, just plain disinterested.
‘You must know something. I know he’d have told me what he was planning to do if he’d had the chance.’ But he hadn’t. She’d been too busy looking after Cas’s every whim, convinced that that was where their best interests lay, and so she’d missed the chance of Jan’s confidence, of knowing where to find him. ‘Why won’t you tell me?’
‘You aren’t one of us any more, sweetie.’ Milek’s eyes bored into her. This time she shuffled backwards, unable to stand up to the naked hostility in them. ‘You’re the boss’s whore.’ He reared to his feet like a snake about to strike. ‘Bitch,’ he breathed.
Unnerved, she jumped back, her face flaming red at her own weakness as much as under his soft and menacing laugh. ‘I’d better go. Cas will be wondering where I am.’ She was as trapped as they were, and they all knew it. Hard though she struggled to carve out something worth having in this closed little world, she couldn’t persuade herself that it was all it could have been. Somehow the four of them — the five of them, if she included Jan — had embedded themselves in a trap of someone else’s making.
Krystian, getting to his feet, followed her to the door, placing an arm across it as if to come between her and Milek. ‘Let’s just hope Jan found what he was looking for, eh?’
‘What was he looking for?’ she asked, lowering her voice.
A smile, without the aggression that Milek wished upon her, hovered on his narrow lips. Krystian was a young man, thoughtful and slow, easily biddable. She liked him, more than either of the others, and couldn’t help smiling back. ‘We’re all going a bit mad in here. Getting bored of one another’s company. You know how it is.’
She, at least, didn’t stay shut up inside all day, as they did when they weren’t out doing whatever work Yer Man lined up for them. Sometimes Cas would take her on a run into town, though never into Pitlochry, where people knew him. The others never had that luxury. ‘Yes.’
‘He’d had enough of being stuck inside. That was all. We’ve all had enough of that. He must just have been more desperate than us.’
‘Dying would have been better than this!’ mocked Milek, from behind him.
‘He just said he couldn’t bear it any longer. He didn’t say what he was going to do.’
‘Would you have stopped him? If he had?’
His expression — a flat, defeated look — deflected any further questions. ‘Maybe we would. Maybe we’d have tried to go with him. Who knows?’
She’d have asked more, but Milek shuffled closer and her pulse raced with sudden fear. Surprised at herself because she wasn’t normally afraid, she nevertheless understood. It had been a long winter, and the situation in which they found themselves was better than any other she could realistically hope for, but the bunkhouse reeked of desperation. That was the only thing she was still afraid of — despair.
‘I’d better go back to Cas,’ she said, addressing herself to Krystian.
‘Yes. Off you go. Take care.’
She closed the door on them with relief, and turned the key in the lock. Cas hadn’t been so careful about locking up until Jan disappeared, but the day after they’d discovered him missing, he and Yer Man had had a blazing row out there in the yard, almost coming to blows. After that, he’d made sure the others couldn’t get out, and talked about bars on the windows, too.
She crossed the yard, opened the front door, and replaced the key to the bunkhouse on its hook in the hall. Cas, in the kitchen, had made himself a cup of coffee and sat in front of the stove, stockinged feet stretched out towards it.
‘All present and correct?’
‘Yes. Is everything all right?’ There, she’d dared to ask him.
He turned a closed expression to her, eyes narrowed in his weather-beaten farmer’s face. ‘Shouldn’t it be?’
She picked up his coat from where he’d dropped it over the back of the chair, and hung it up on a hook behind the door. ‘I just wondered, that was all. Your friend seemed concerned.’
‘It was nothing. Just something he thought I should have done. He over-reacts.’
She made herself a cup of coffee, found a packet of shortbread, and offered it to him. The she tried again. ‘Has he heard anything of Jan?’
‘No. Why would he?’ Cas took a biscuit, crumbling round the edges, then went back for a second. ‘I asked him to keep a look out.’
‘The boys are scared of your friend,’ she said, without thinking.
‘Aye. So they should be.’
She stiffened. It wasn’t the answer she wanted. ‘Will Jan be all right?’
‘Of course he will. Why wouldn’t he?’ He dipped the biscuit in the coffee and the frown on his face intensified.
Because he’s vulnerable, she wanted to say. Because he doesn’t have any money, and we don’t know when he went or where he was trying to go, or even if he was trying to go anywhere and didn’t just get lost. Because he might have got caught in the storm. But she didn’t say any of it. Cas was good-hearted, but a lingering fear, learned from others who were not, kept a hold on her courage and silenced her doubts. ‘I suppose he must have found shelter somewhere.’
‘Of course he will, kochanie.’ He smiled at her, but the shadow in his eyes didn’t lift. ‘He’ll be back sooner rather than later, I imagine, cold and hungry, and having learned a lesson or two from his adventures. All we have to do is wait.’
Chapter 9
Storm Child (Dangerous Friends Book 3) Page 5
