Trowchester Blues

by Alex Beecroft

  “Next door saw the smoke and called us in.”

  He noticed that he was putting no weight on his feet—the child was holding him up. Also berating him in a manner he resented. “You should have got out, sir. You could have been hurt. You should have got out first, and let us deal with this.”

  “It would have—” He squirmed to be put down, but the moment his feet touched the ground he buckled—his shoes were still melted, still hot. The fireman slung him unceremoniously across his back and carried him out. Which was frankly a great deal more pleasant as a fantasy than as a reality. He had not counted on being soot-stained and bleeding and weeping so hard that his nose ran, when he conjured up such an event in his dreams. “It would have spread and damaged my shop.”

  The man set him down on the step of the fire engine and looked at his bleeding hands and his melted shoes. “Better than dying, sir. As we tell everyone that tries to be a hero, providing they’re still alive to hear it. How’d you cut your hands?”

  Finn scarcely had control over himself—it was over, and because it was over, he was safe to finally feel all those things he had held away from himself for so long. He wrapped his arms around himself in a comforting hug, incidentally hiding the cuts and the bruised wrists from the gaze of authority, and shuddered under waves of fear and fury, silently mourning, and considered his options.

  A little farther down the road, an ambulance drew up to the pavement and parked. The emergency services were all in each other’s pockets. If he told this nice fireman how he’d cut his hands, the nice fireman would get the police involved. And it was none of their fucking business. They could stay out of it.

  They had better stay out of it. They had better not start looking into the business of the abbot’s psalter. They had better not, please God.

  And where the fuck was Michael? Why hadn’t he come running like the white knight he was supposed to be? Had they—his blood turned to ice—had they got to him first?

  Belatedly he remembered he had been asked a question. “I, ah, hurt them on the fire alarm. It had a break-glass cover, and I didn’t have anything to break the glass with except my hands.”

  Would Lisa and Benny know about Michael? He fumbled his phone out of his pocket, slippery though his fingers were with still-seeping blood, hit the number, and it went to the answering machine. The pair of them weren’t known for their research. Would they know Michael was someone Finn cared about?

  Paramedics came over. Between them and the fireman, Finn found himself coerced to sit in the ambulance, to have his hands and feet bandaged and his breathing monitored for smoke damage.

  “I think we’d better take you in,” the paramedic said. “Just overnight. I don’t like the look of your breathing. You may be in danger of going into shock.”

  It snapped him back to his own concerns with a vengeance. “I can’t just leave the place like this! I have to get back in, save the books that can be saved before the water damage is irreparable. I’m not in shock, I—”

  His friendly fireman leaned in through the ambulance’s open doors, looking grimmer and older and considerably more concerned. “I’m going to have to tell the police that in my opinion this fire was deliberately set. They’ll have to come and look it over. No cleaning up until that’s done and signed off. You’re best out of it, mate. Honestly.”

  Finn raised a hand to his head but couldn’t close his bandaged fingers enough to pull his hair in frustration. Fucking officious do-gooders. Fucking interfering neighbours, trying to help when he had everything under control. Why couldn’t they all leave well enough alone? He tried not to think of the police station, the police cells, the cold, stolid, respectable disdain of a society that didn’t actually care if he lived or died so long as he obeyed the rules. The police were coming here with their questions? Then maybe he did want to be somewhere else.

  He hit redial on his phone. It went to voice mail again. “Michael. If you were going to come by this evening, don’t. I’ve had a trifling little emergency—nothing to be concerned about but . . .” Maybe there was something to be said for the idea that he was in shock. He couldn’t think how to end that sentence. He let it go. “But let me know that you’re all right, okay? Phone me back. I . . .” All his words were slithering away. “I worry.”

  He gave up and allowed himself to be strapped in for the journey to the hospital, trying to calm himself down with reason. After all, Lisa and Benny would have said something, the odious creatures. If they had hurt Michael as a way of hurting Finn, they would have had every reason to tell him and none to keep it silent.

  Michael was probably fine.

  He was certainly fine.

  Why the hell wasn’t he answering his phone?

  A hammering at the door dragged Michael back to consciousness. He wormed a hand out of the sleeping bag and groped for his watch. 7 a.m. And he’d finally crashed at five. The walls still swung around him, pulsing in and out of focus, because he had not yet slept off the drink.

  But whoever was at the door did not give a fuck about his hangover or his sleeping habits. They were not going away, and they were not toning it down. “What? Wait!” he growled, unzipping himself and rolling out of the bag onto the still-gritty floor. His stomach lurched as he stood, and his brains swirled in his skull like water around a plughole.

  He found the keys inside his shoe and fumbled the deadlock open, twisted the Yale lock, and swung the door ajar. The two policemen on the other side gave him identical stares. He could feel them taking in the scruff of beard, the sweat- and dust-stained T-shirt in which he’d slept, the bleary gaze, the scent of booze, and the bandaged hands. He knew exactly what they were thinking because he would have thought it too.

  “Mr. Michael May?” The senior one recovered first, his politeness underlining his disdain. He was a fine figure of a man, well over six feet tall, athletic, with clean-cut features and the kind of polished-silver hair normally reserved for movie actors. He looked down on Michael quite literally as he moved in, trying to force an entrance by mere politeness. “I’m Constable Shipton, this is Constable Lane. May we come in?”

  “Sure.” Michael moved away from the door and picked up his trousers from the floor, hastily pulling them on while the police officers sized up the state of his house and drew what were undoubtedly correct conclusions. “What can I do for you?”

  He didn’t like this. The police were his people, his clan. They were everything he had aspired to all his life, the family he had chosen. To have them turn up at his house like this—to have them look at him the way they were looking at him now—dropped the floor out of his universe.

  I’m on your side. I’m one of you.

  “Are you acquainted with a Mr. Fintan Hulme of the Bibliophile Bookshop, 43 High Street?”

  Michael swallowed nausea and rage. Sat down on his futon bed, letting them stand over him. It was a mistake, drawing their eyes to the half-empty bottle of whiskey and the tin mug next to it.

  Fuck.

  “I am.”

  “You are in fact Mr. Hulme’s boyfriend.” It wasn’t a question so much as a condemnation. Oh, there was nothing unprofessional in the man’s expression, movie-star perfect as it was, a kind of bland, dispassionate curiosity, but the contempt flowed off him like a liquid and closed over Michael’s bent head.

  Was he Finn’s boyfriend? He wasn’t sure. I slept with him once wasn’t going to go down better. “I don’t know,” he admitted, wrong-footed and on the defensive, capable of admiring the officer’s interrogation technique and being appalled by it at the same time.

  “You don’t know?”

  This time the second man actually laughed, a polite little scoffing noise as he opened the door to the hall and looked upstairs, where torn-up carpet and torn-down wallpaper clogged the landing. Michael’s disappointment and betrayal last night had been channelled into finally getting everything out of his parents’ bedroom.

  There had been only one thing of hers that his father h
ad not already sold—a tiny glass unicorn Michael had bought on a school trip to Venice. He’d found it under the carpet, under the bed, hidden under a loose floorboard, its legs and horn broken. That had been what started him drinking, and once he had started, there hadn’t seemed to be a good time to stop before he passed out.

  He took the mug into the kitchen, filled it with water, and drank carefully, trying to dilute the dizziness and the despair. Why’d he ever thought that moving back here would make things better? Things were shit everywhere. Everywhere in the world.

  He put the kettle on. “You want coffee?”

  PC Silver Screen gave him another jolt of condescension. “I would just like you to answer my questions, please, sir. Are you intimate with Mr. Hulme?”

  “It’s hard to say,” Michael tried again, aware that it sounded like he was being evasive when actually he was telling the absolute truth. He put a spoon of instant granules in a mug while he wrestled with a better way of putting it. “I only just moved into town, only just met him. I, uh . . .” The kettle boiled. He poured the hot water, then sipped scalding coffee in the hopes it would sharpen him up enough to get some kind of handle on this conversation. “I like him. A lot, actually. But I wouldn’t say I really know him.”

  “How about these people?” Shipton passed him a photo of a hard-core-looking couple, a tall man and a woman with a gaze like a fist.

  His stomach settled enough to risk a larger mouthful of coffee and let him turn his head in search of the Paracetamol he’d bought yesterday for his hands. “I don’t know them.”

  “They were seen yesterday coming out of Mr. Hulme’s premises. Can you tell me what his relationship is with them?”

  It pissed him off, the clear assumption that he was lying. “I have never seen them before, so I have no idea.”

  “You can’t say what they were doing in his shop last night?”

  “No, I can’t.” Michael realised with a shock that he was glaring, leaning forwards into Shipton’s personal space, and that his hands were clenched so tight the blisters were bleeding again.

  “How about this man?” Another photo, this time of a man he almost recognised. Seen once on a file brought over from another division, maybe.

  “What’s this about?” he asked, rather than say so. They had to have looked him up, they must know he was an ex-cop. He really didn’t want to drag all that into this conversation, have them accuse him of being a quitter or a coward or a traitor.

  “Since you’re new in the area—” Shipton gave him a falsely avuncular smile, one cop to the other “—you may not know that these charming young people are wanted in connection with the burglaries of several stately homes around here, over a period of several months, including Harcombe House itself. Now we find them consorting with a known fence in our patch, with whom you have also been consorting. It would be remiss of us not to look into how much you know about that.”

  “I don’t know anything about it!” Michael’s head hurt, and his heart hurt too, dropped straight out of hope into condemnation. He should have known. He should have known that anything that seemed so good was too good to be true.

  Shipton exchanged a glance with Lane, who had been notably absent for the past five minutes, no doubt checking the upstairs for stolen goods. Lane shook his head minutely, and Shipton dialled back the aggression only to replace it with extra quantities of disgusted pity, as he took Michael out of the mental category of villain and put him into that of dupe. He swept a dismissive gaze over the wreck of Michael’s house and life.

  “Well, then, you can consider this a warning, sir. It’s easy to be taken in by these charming types, but you heed my advice and have nothing further to do with Mr. Fintan Hulme. Ignorance is no excuse in court, after all. And now you don’t even have that.”

  After they finished questioning him, Michael followed them out into the garden to watch them leave, uniformed in their high-visibility squad car. By that time, it was half seven and the Lis would all be awake, maybe watching out of their windows. Michael didn’t care. He didn’t care that his respectable neighbours now had every reason to look at him askance. He didn’t care about the aspersions cast on his good name and his honour and his honesty.

  He didn’t fucking care, all right.

  In the absence of something to punch in the front garden, he staggered back inside, made it to the bathroom in time to throw up wretchedly in the toilet, tile floor cold against his knees and his eyes streaming from acid and misery. When he’d finished purging the alcohol, he rested his forehead against the ceramic tiles of the wall, let the early-morning chill pierce through him and bring the kind of peace that snow brought with it.

  Carefully, he gathered himself together again. He didn’t care. He took off gritty, shameful clothes and soaked himself pink in the shower. He didn’t care.

  Avoiding meeting his own eyes in the mirror, he shaved and brushed his teeth and tried to slick his too-long curls down into something professional, as though he could somehow reset the whole interview with the police, restart it with himself as he was when he was prepared and armoured and ready to look normal and competent and . . .

  Except he didn’t fucking care, all right?

  He forced down half a bowl of cornflakes and another cup of coffee. The headache receded to a dull throb between his eyes, but his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He told himself that he’d had a narrow escape. That he should do as Shipton suggested. He should write Finn off. Get himself together, make that boat and sell it. Plough the money back into a new business, concentrate on good, hard work and his good neighbours, ask them, maybe, to introduce him to other friends. Keep his head down and his nose clean, and get away from this stumble as fast as he possibly could.

  He tried laughing, but the sound of it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. Dressed in clean clothes, he shifted his phone out of the pocket of his dirty jeans, turned it on, and saw that he had missed a half a dozen calls. Four of them from Finn.

  Boats wouldn’t build themselves. He sank back onto the futon, looking at the little shining screen. Sooner or later his savings would run out, and he should have something big to sell by then because not even the rent on a London flat would keep the wolf from the door forever. He should be the sensible grown-up he knew he was and delete the messages unheard. He should make the break, right now, while disillusionment and anger would still make it easy.

  Of course he didn’t. “Michael.” Finn’s faint Irish accent made the name sound exotic, made Michael’s limbic system sit up and beg, flushing him with memories of how it had sounded gasped out in bliss. “I have a trifling emergency. If you’re thinking of coming over, don’t.”

  He stabbed the recording off, anger joining the unwanted arousal. Don’t come over? Why? Because Finn’s accomplices had turned up unexpectedly, and he couldn’t risk having an ex-cop around. Why the hell? Why the hell had Finn led him on the way he had if he’d known, as he must have known, that Michael was the enemy? Had he done it deliberately to undermine Michael’s reputation with the local force? Or just to mess with Michael’s obviously vulnerable heart because it was there and he could?

  Earlier in his career, he might have thought that picking up his keys, putting on a coat and scarf, carefully locking the door behind him, indicated calm premeditation. The fact was he did them without thinking, found himself outside, halfway to Finn’s without any conscious intention of going there at all. Something seethed in him, making his breathing hard and his steps long and easy. His hands were too tightly clenched to shake, but he could feel the vibration nevertheless, inside his bone marrow, inside his blood, reverberating in his brain with a thin shrill.

  The door was open. Burst open, in fact, the lock splintered. Someone else had come in here in a fury. It didn’t surprise him. Finn was a lying, twisted little bastard. If he’d played with Michael, it stood to reason he’d play with others too—others less reasonable. He slapped the door aside, stormed through the passage down into th
e shop.

  Black marks streaked along the ceiling, and the place smelled of tar and ash. Pegasus’s empty plinth mocked him—Finn had lied about what happened to the sculpture. He had lied obviously, lied with abandon, lied like it was an Olympic sport. And Michael, Michael who knew exactly what it was like growing up in the snares of a man who was deceitful just because it was fun, had still somehow found it endearing.

  He was such a fool. He was such a fucking loser. He deserved every iota of this misery.

  Down and to the left, the burned smell strengthening, he followed the marks on the ceiling, the stench. His feet squelched on the coconut matting. He turned the corner, and there Finn was, in the centre of a black star whose tendrils crawled out over the floor, over the bookshelves, over the ceiling like some kind of obvious metaphor of evil.

  Finn glanced up as Michael came in, and Michael’s fury missed a step. Finn looked so lonely there, so slight and undefended and sad. The green eyes raised to Michael’s angry gaze were so peridot, like willow leaves. If they had lit with pleasure to see him, he might still have smiled back. Something in him very much wanted to engulf Finn in his arms and bury his face in Finn’s neck and hold on tight until it all went away.

  If Finn had seemed at all receptive to that . . .

  But Finn didn’t. He raised his chin and narrowed his reddened eyes and said, “Where the fuck have you been, then?”

  And Michael had had just about enough of this shit for one lifetime, thank you very much.

  Finn debouched himself from a taxi at a godforsaken hour in the morning in front of his shop. His feet were not as bad as he’d initially feared, only tight feeling, stinging, and stiff, but he had not slept, despite being forcibly pinned to a hospital bed all night. Partly this was because who could? Surrounded by six other burn victims, all tossing and groaning in their sleep. Surrounded by nurses who walked briskly through the wards, wheeling carts full of things that clattered, and who congregated in the corners to whisper in scarcely lowered voices. Who could sleep through that?