Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (21 page)

Finn laughed again, a little more naturally. “Darling, leave me space to breathe. You’re far more of a stick in the mud than I could ever be.”

Which was at least not any kind of lie.

“See you then.” Michael couldn’t keep the warmth from his voice or tamp down the pleased excitement at the thought, parts of him not at all troubled by questions of illegality, the rest of him troubled that he even had those parts.

“See you.”

Considerably happier, Michael rang off and turned towards home, intending to take Sarah her jeans and jumpers and new shoes, to call on Tai and ask if they wanted to come over for a visit, and maybe to finally get some more work in on the new boat.

There was still a little over five hours until six thirty. Plenty of time to do everything else that needed to be done. Five and a half hours was frankly a lifetime.

“That was him, wasn’t it? Your mysterious lover?” Idris paused in his grimy task of levering the rolled-up carpet out of the door, bending it to try to fit it through the passage without smudging the paint so that it could be taken out to the back garden.

“Whatever gives you that idea?” Finn tucked his phone away with the sensation of being three stone lighter, the constricting bands of tension around his chest having loosened at Michael’s call.

“Oh, that’s a besotted smile.” Idris gestured, the loose shapes of his hands seeming to describe something that was self-evident. He caught James’s eye and gave a little jerk of the chin, inviting his opinion. “Wouldn’t you say? That’s the smile of a man who’s in deep.”

James—their local archaeologist—had taken a day off the digs at Wednesday Keep, Trowchester’s Bronze Age hill fort, to lend his expertise with all things small and delicate. He tugged his reading glasses down and looked at Idris and Finn over the top of them. “I don’t believe this invisible boyfriend of his even exists. I thought he was supposed to come to the book club? I note he never appeared.”

He raised an eyebrow sceptically, turned back to the plinth where he was carefully sorting the gears of the automaton that he had earlier retrieved from where they were scattered around the room. The retrieval had taken him an hour, and the cataloguing another two, but he had just begun the process of fitting everything back together, and it was going like a charm—the benefits of the scientific method.

“I’ve seen him,” Idris insisted.

“Well, you’re the only one who has.”

“Does my experience count for nothing, then? Am I such an unworthy witness?”

Finn tried to tuck his smile away as he finished wiping the residue of ash and water off the now-empty shelves. He’d rung everyone in the book club soon after breakfast. David and Peter had come over at once and put in two hours shovelling the worst damaged books into bin bags, while he took those he thought might be salvageable upstairs so he could work on them. At nine o’clock, they had gone off to their jobs, and Idris and James—both of whom were their own bosses and could take time off when it pleased them—had taken over.

The room was stripped and clean, even the flaky black soot scraped out of the scar in the ceiling. The floor beneath the carpet had proved to be tiled, and was blackened but otherwise unharmed. The shelves were intact, and altogether he was convinced it could have been a great deal worse.

After emptying the washing-up water down the drain, he returned it to the kitchen. Took a dose of Paracetamol and codeine for the pain in his hands and feet, thankful that they had come away so relatively unscathed. Made a pot of tea and brought it down on a tray with the cake Idris had brought.

His return only sparked the conversation again as though he had never been away. James had that philosophical twinkle in his eye that tended to presage a long discussion on authorial intent, and the statistical likelihood of whatever plot twist they were discussing. The look of a man who liked to argue logic just because it was there. “In the absence of Finn saying anything at all about this ‘boyfriend’ of his, there’s nothing to prove Idris is not hallucinating the whole thing.”

Finn turned the heating up, emptied the water from the dehumidifier he had brought from the basement, and smiled at them both.

“You can’t just refuse to talk,” Idris protested, drawn close by the responsibility of cutting the cake evenly. “Tell him. Tell him about your pocket-sized bear.” He switched his attention to James, who had just fitted a copper disc on the back of the time machine and was checking to make sure it still rotated. “It’s gorgeous. It’s like they’re specially scaled down for each other. The guy is Finn’s height but built like a bulldozer. Handsome in a brutal sort of way. Alexander the Great was short, wasn’t he? That’s what the guy looks like—tiny, but hard-core.”

“Are you casting aspersions on my altitude again?” Finn tried for lighthearted, but found he didn’t quite have the resilience to laugh off short jokes at the moment. “I carry my inches somewhere else.”

“Uh-uh.” Idris waved a finger under his nose. “You don’t get to deflect this even with well-phrased dick jokes. Tell the man I’m not making this up—that you have fire in your heart as well as in your buildings.”

That was in such bad taste it startled a laugh out of Finn. “I’ll tell him what I told you.” Finn perched on the lower steps of the stepladder to pour the tea, and conceded the point—they were helping him put his life back together out of mere friendship. Perhaps they deserved to be included. “Which is that I don’t know whether he’s my lover or not.”

“There’s a simple enough test.” James wound up the clockwork time machine and beamed with satisfaction when it began to whirr, good as new. “Did you sleep with him?”

Finn rolled his eyes and sighed gustily. “Yes.”

“Well, then. And are you going to sleep with him again?”

Finn’s cup clattered in its saucer. He put it down quickly, but not quick enough to avoid James’s sharply sympathetic glance.

“Scared him off?” said the archaeologist, settling on one of the stools Finn had brought in to access the upper shelves. “I don’t think any of us have failed to notice by now that you always recommend the BSDM novels. A bit too vanilla for you, is he? Not open-minded enough?”

“Good God.” Finn glared at them both, Idris round faced and amused like an onlooker carved on a sexy temple fresco at Khajuraho, James infuriatingly perky under his spiky haircut. “You see. This is why I didn’t want to discuss it. Can a man not keep his perversions to himself in this town? There’s a reason they call it a ‘private’ life.”

James seemed to realise that he’d gone too far. He spent a long time dissecting his slice of carrot cake as though he expected to find a Bronze Age burial in the centre of it.

“We ask because we’re your friends,” Idris said, closing a hand around Finn’s wrist. “And because we can’t help noticing that the thing that upset you most this morning was that someone wasn’t answering their phone. When I put this—” he gestured at the bare, burnt room “—on one side, and him on the other, and I realise that he is more important to you than the burning of your books. Well, that’s serious. All joking aside. That’s serious, isn’t it?”

Finn’s head and hands and heart all still hurt. It had been a hard morning’s work, and he was tired. He put his cake down and drew his stinging hands in to his chest to cradle and keep them warm. Maybe it
was
time he started being an honest man in other areas, not just his business but his private life too. Michael would approve.

“Yes, it’s serious.” He gave in, talking to his hands rather than having to watch their faces. “And yes, he’s a lot more vanilla than I thought, but I think we could work that out, given time. It’s just that he’s an ex-cop and I’m . . . Before I came to Trowchester—well, I may have done some things that were not strictly legal, and he may have just found out about them.”

In the terrible silence that followed, he died a couple of times, somehow not having thought that this confession might cost him his friends, realising it too late, only when the room filled with startled thought.

“But you’re on the level now,” James said carefully, the words weighted somewhere between a question and a statement.

“Yes.” That came out a little too vehemently. Finn toned it down for the next sentence to improve believability. “I turned over a new leaf when I came here. That was
why
I came here—so I could leave it all behind.”

“Well, then.” Idris’s response was also too much—too positive, too bright. “All you have to do is tell him so. He’ll believe you. What kind of a lover wouldn’t believe you? And it will be fine.”

Finn pushed his plate away, the relief of hearing Michael’s voice again fading, because it was clear enough that Idris already had doubts about what he was saying, and the man didn’t know the worst of it—didn’t know his contacts were pressuring him to go back, didn’t know he’d already slipped.

In a way, the failed trial had drawn a line under his activities in London. There wasn’t enough evidence to prove they had actually happened at all, and the trial, the accusations, the lawyers, being unable to be there for Tom . . . He’d been punished for them nevertheless and he felt clean of them.

But the abbot’s psalter was new, and he could just feel it now—it was going to gnaw through the inside of everything like a worm in the apple until all he had left was a handful of rot.

Briggs wouldn’t even have burned it. He would have found someone else to fence it for him. How could he have ever believed such a blatant lie? He was such an idiot.

And now it was too late, and everything was ruined. He’d lose Michael for sure. He’d be lucky if he even kept his friends.

“Yes,” he said and tried to smile. “Of course he’ll believe me. I’m such a reliable witness, after all.”

They flinched, both of them, but they stayed, and he was grateful for that. “In the meantime, let’s not be maudlin. Time to put some books back on these shelves.”

“I’ll be going home now, then, Mr. Hulme.” Kevin put his head around the shower curtain that Finn had secured in the door between the damaged room and the rest of the shop. Like a trooper, Kevin had manned the cash register and kept the shop open while Finn and his friends worked to restore the Jules Verne room. The boy deserved a Christmas bonus, something in cash he didn’t have to declare to the tax man—or his parents. Something just for himself.

“Thanks, Kevin,” he said. “You’ve done a grand job today. I appreciate it.”

Kevin reacted with a duck of blue hair, embarrassed, and grunted something unintelligible in return as he swept through the room and paused with his hand on the back door. “It’s looking good.”

Finn stretched the aches out of his back and regarded his work. A new coat of paint on the walls had made the place clean again. He had painted suckers and questing fingers onto the tendrils of scorching that rose over the ceiling and embedded two faceted red buttons into the centre of it that winked as you turned your head, very like shifting eyes. He’d painted flames around the burn marks on the floor and attempted a trompe l’oeil scene of a rift opening into Hell, from the centre of which a semiruined arch supported the shelves he had stocked with his horror and true crime volumes.

It wasn’t the greatest work of art, but it gave the impression of being deliberate, as though he’d chosen it, as though it had not in any way been forced on him. That was the effect he’d been going for.

“Not so bad for a day’s work,” he agreed. “I think we can open the whole shop tomorrow.”

“I know you don’t want me to know what’s going on.” Kevin stuffed his hands in the belly pocket of his hoodie and shifted from foot to foot. “But someone did this, right? ’Cause you pissed someone off, somehow. Are they going to come back and do it again?”

There was another question he didn’t want to think about. Curse inquisitive employees and nosy friends.

Benny and Lisa would almost certainly come back, bringing something they had stolen and wanted fenced. He would refuse them again and yes, they probably would do it again. Or worse.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said and opened the back door, pointedly. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“It something to do with your old patch? Because my dad knows some people. He could probably arrange to put the frighteners on whoever it is. Keep ’em away.”