Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (17 page)

“Did I hurt your tender feelings? Well, I’m sorry, but this is not going to persuade me to ever do business with you again.”

Benny took a set of white cable ties from his pocket and snapped one around Finn’s wrists. Then he kicked out the back of Finn’s knees and collapsed him to the ground, securing his ankles with another.

“You hurt our rep,” said Lisa, her pasty face still shadowed by her hood, but her pink-gloved hands pulled his books off the shelves and piled them up like kindling at her feet. “People think you can defy us, then they think they can too, so—”

“Nothing personal, but—” Benny kicked him in the kidneys and then put a foot on his wrists to keep him from getting back up.

Lisa tilted her head to give Finn a manic-pixie-girl smile. Shifting the gun back to her elbow, she took a box of matches from her pocket, lit one, and then let it drop into the pile of books.

“Bye.”

No.

The flame caught in dry paper as of course it would, spread from leaf to leaf with eager voracity, pausing to really get its teeth into the leather-bound end boards before moving on to the next book, and the next.

“You fucking barbarians! I’ll fucking have you!”

Lisa was already backing towards the door. The foot on Finn’s wrists went away, but only to return as a kick to the back of his head that burst the world apart in a red rose. He barely followed the sound of retreating footsteps as everything went momentarily grey.

The inside of his nose stung when he next possessed conscious thought. His nose stung and his eyes watered. His raw throat burned, and the air he breathed caught at his lungs like a cigarette. He coughed hard a couple of times, but it didn’t help, nor could he blink the grey mist out of his eyes. Truth was that the air was grey, grey with smoke, and the heat on the soles of his feet was making his shoes blister and melt.

He rolled onto his stomach and then to his knees. Pressing his forehead against a bookshelf gave him the leverage to straighten up, still with his hands locked behind his back and his ankles strapped tight together. In the centre of the room the pile of books burnt more strongly than ever, flames crackling over it, shooting up to lick and blacken the ceiling, creeping across the matting towards further bookshelves.

He tried to wipe his streaming nose on his shoulder, couldn’t reach, while he thought. There was a Break Glass Here fire alarm and sprinkler system point in the hall, which he could not break without his hands free. If he tried to hop there, the flames would reach the bookshelves long before he had it activated. Besides, he wasn’t keen on the idea of flooding his shop with water. Scarcely less damaging to the books than fire would be.

Lisa had not thought through the shape of the bonfire. If he could smother the flames on the carpet, there was a good chance it would burn itself out without spreading, leaving only a scar on the floor and ceiling. But how to suppress the fire on the carpet without the sprinklers, while he was equally unable to run for the fire blanket in the kitchen as for the fire alarm?

Paint bubbled on the ceiling overhead. His hair was smoking and his face tightening painfully in the heat. It hurt; it hurt to go closer, but maybe he could . . . He hopped towards the blaze, to the narrow avenue between shelves and bonfire over which a questing tendril of flame had begun to nose. Biting his lip, partly against pain, partly against the realisation that this was a truly awful idea, he stamped on the little blaze. Heat boiled through the melted rubber of his soles and scorched his feet.

He yelled in agony and jumped away, his shoulder colliding with the shelves, barely managing to hold himself upright. Now he was terrified—terrified of falling forwards into the flames, unable to pick himself up again, rolling in them face-first with his hair and his clothes going up like tinder and the rest of him like a wet log, taking far too long to die.

And yes, he couldn’t stamp out the flame again. But even if he did make it to the sprinkler control valve, he couldn’t operate it without his hands.

He sent up a quick mental apology to the maker of the clockwork and rammed it with his shoulder, tipping it onto the floor. It shattered in a burst of gears and springs. Carefully kneeling down he groped behind him for a shard of the display case. He cut his fingers twice before he had it angled up between his wrists and could push it forwards against the floor until the sharp edge sliced through his bonds. After which it was easier to cut the tie around his ankles.

Dropping the bloodstained glass into the ruin of his room, he sprinted for the fire suppression system, fumbled it with shaky fingers until only the single room was selected, and turned the sprinklers on. He stood out in the corridor while a wall of wet white smoke rolled through the house, choking him. The fire hissed like a basilisk, and for a moment he thought it grew stronger, leaping up all yellow-gold among the streaks of falling grey. He could see it, the water, hitting the books, flooding the shelves, staining bindings, unmaking the paper, soaking into the glue of the spines, crinkling the pages, and he didn’t know whether to cough or to cry.

He thought the siren outside was his imagination—a wail of grief appropriate for the death of a whole room of his books—until the front door burst open again, rammed into the wall, and he found himself standing, shaking, hyperventilating, grabbed by the shoulders by an unexpected fireman.

“What the—?” he said, looking a long way up at a fresh-faced black child with buzz-cut hair. “I didn’t call for you.”

“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.