Winter Sparks

by Rebecca Fairfax

  “Sounds like an orgy.” Keren turned from the mirror, interested.

  “No. Like a puzzle. Like those locked room things, but a bit of a workout?” Alessa didn’t really know. An invite had come from the activity’s organisers or some group a day or two ago and she hadn’t paid much attention. She guessed whichever company owned the interactive entertainment centre must run ads in the Herald, as Jim had received the invite and told her to go and write the place up.

  “Locked in a room with a group for a workout? As I said, orgy. You’d better get changed.”

  “I am changed!” Alessa indicated her cargo pants and sturdy boots. “It said to dress in something practical and comfortable for work in the field. Whatever that means.”

  She found out not long after the taxi dropped her off—Purple Reggie spluttering his no-go protest—at what she remembered used to be a warehouse, then very briefly a recording studio, in an area she thought had probably once been a goods depot, in a siding of the railway station. A staff member, looking out for her, met at the door of the big building, its neon sign saying BE A-MAZE-D, and cut short her apologies for lateness, instead getting her signature on a form while rattling off his spiel about physical and mental skills, mystery puzzles and challenges and time limits and penalties and forfeits at machine-gun speed. He crammed a helmet and safety goggles on her, slung a satchel across her shoulder and pressed tools and instruments into her hands.

  “So if you’ve no further questions?” He opened the door at the end of the corridor.

  “Actually—”

  “Good luck!”

  And she was urged through into a huge, dimly lit smoke-and-sound-effects-filled cavernous space…where the first person she saw, stretched out flat and examining what looked like a tomb, was Hugo.

  “Alessa.” Xander, also there, stepped up before Hugo saw her.

  “There’s been some mistake.”

  “No, there hasn’t.” Xander motioned her for to walk behind a jutting rock. “Look, I don’t know you and I don’t know what went awry between you and Hugo, just that you were briefly together and now you’re not.”

  She eyed him, refusing to be intimidated. “And it’s your business because…?”

  “He’s my friend, and he’s hurting.”

  The man’s mix of physical hugeness and soft gentleness confused Alessa. He paused to let his words sink in. “I want you two to try and work things out, fix what went wrong. If there’s no chance you can do that, then yes, leave now.”

  He looked at her, all melting brown eyes and flexing muscles, and Alessa turned and marched away. She whipped back around to see Xander staring after her, his face fallen. “Gotcha,” Alessa couldn’t help crowing. Like she couldn’t help the excited little wiggle her heart was doing at the thought of being with Hugo again. A huge smile spread across the man’s face.

  “You’re taking your business too seriously, you know, with all this playing Cupid,” she commented, squinting around the huge space she was in.

  “Or I started the business because I like to play Cupid,” Xander countered.

  “As long as you’re not playing God. Look. Did you know? About Hugo? Stupid question. He’s your friend. About his past, I mean.”

  “Past. As in, it’s passed? We’re in the present now. And facing the future.”

  “Wow. You must eat a lot of fortune cookies.”

  A loud buzzer sounded, and a voice intoned the time they had left to solve the task. Smoke billowed and the noise intensified.

  “Sort that out later. Come on!”

  Xander took her hand and raced her over to the others, all similarly dressed to how she and he were. Are we explorers? Archaeologists? Alessa only now wondered. The look on Hugo’s face when she appeared in their midst was indescribable.

  “Alessa? What are you doing here?” He glanced at Xander.

  “He invited me.” Via my boss, she realised. Oh, God, she hadn’t wanted this to happen in public, and in front of his friends, but… “I’m here. I’m willing to try.” She attempted to convey everything she couldn’t put into words.

  “I’m glad you’re here.” Hugo’s face, which looked more pinched and thin, relaxed.

  “Well.” Alessa coughed, mindful of the scrutiny of the rest of the group. “Seems you lot need some help with whatever the hell this is?”

  “Hey, we’ve got it covered!” protested a red-headed guy Alessa had seen on posters at the Players Theatre. “We’ve got Xander for brawn, Ash for brains, Hugo for smarts, me for looks, Vijay for cunning, Luc for questions of legality—” He was laughing and dodging punches too much to go on.

  “And I’m, what, the token blonde?” Alessa grinned, acknowledging the more conventional introductions to Piers, actor, John Ashby, or Ash, Luc Ford, barrister, Vijay and Leif. “I feel like the dumb blonde—what are we doing?”

  They were relic hunters, Alessa learned, charged with finding artefacts and assembling them into a key that would free them from this tomb before it caved in on them, once they’d also found the door. It was fast and intense, a crazy three-dimensional challenge, with penalties for taking wrong twists or turns.

  “Why the hell are we even doing this?” Alessa panted, halfway up a rope they’d found and lassooed over a jut of rock high up that they needed to explore, her being the lightest, who could be caught if the rope broke or slipped off.

  “Because the team from the Black Horse challenged us. Penalty shootouts at football weren’t enough, apparently.” Hugo threw a glare over at Xander.

  “They’re the Gentlemen’s rivals. Hugo can fill you in later,” Xander called up. “Just, they’re doing the zombie invasion one and we have to beat them, so could you climb any faster?”

  She tried. Hugo was a natural organiser, marshalling them all into separate units and back again, coordinating, taking the lead, stepping back. “Wait!” he cried, making a grab for the impetuous Piers, who was prising white stones free from a mosaic. “The pale pebbles do spell PART, yes, but also—”

  “TRAP,” he finished seconds later, after an air horn sounded and water deluged the spot he and Piers were standing in. A minute after that came a buzzer and the ceiling dropped a foot.

  “You’ve triggered the first part of the curse!” Ash bemoaned.

  “Just shut it and translate that Latin!” a dripping-wet Piers ordered.

  Alessa didn’t think she caught her breath the entire time, whether from rushing around the cavern, ascending its ledges or descending into its depths, or from laughing. She loved seeing Hugo more relaxed and his camaraderie with his friends, who welcomed her into the group. They hunted far and wide for clues, deciphered symbols, solved puzzles, pored over the maps and items they’d been given and yelled in triumph or groaned at setbacks. More smoke was billowed at them, horns blasted, lights flickered on and off and another misstep got her and Vijay sprayed with white foam.

  “Oh! It’s a musical scale!” yelled Luc. “I see that now. Piers, come and sing these notes!”

  Time was running out. Squeezed through a tiny hole into a small chamber at the very end of the playing arena, Alessa and Hugo fitted the keys they’d found into the corresponding locks on the slab set into the floor and expected the door on the wall opposite to open. Instead, the slab split in two and began retracting back into the walls on either side, revealing a pit beneath.

  “Erm…” Alessa bent to peer back through the small hole at the rest of the team. “Suggestions, guys? Looks like glittery green slime down there!”

  The slab under her feet retreated farther into the wall, leaving her a smaller and smaller piece to stand on as the seconds ticked by.

  “Make a bridge!” called Leif.

  “I know you’re an engineer, man, but…” Hugo shrugged.

  “Hey! The Latin translates as a leap of faith!” came Ash’s voice.

  Alessa looked across the divide at Hugo. “Make a bridge. A leap of faith… Are you thinking—?”

  “What I’m thinking?�
�� He nodded, stumbling as he almost fell into the ever-gaping pit. “On my count. One, two—”

  “Three!” And Alessa tilted herself forward over the gap, at the same time Hugo did, so they caught each other. Caught and held, bracing the other, leaning at extreme angles to support the other. The stone slabs stilled and a chorus of victorious disco music blasted out.

  “Seems to be working,” Hugo shouted over the music. “Alessa, God. Seeing you here…”

  She breathed him in, his scent, his warmth, holding him tightly.

  “My marriage ended when Amanda cheated on me. She lied and deceived me and eventually moved in with the man she was sleeping with.”

  “Hugo—” She could see the pain this recital caused him. The stones beneath them moved forward an inch.

  “That’s recently fallen apart and now she’s thinking she can pick up with me again. No, let me finish. Things soured when I left the forces. She’d enjoyed that life and appreciated me being away so much. I take the blame. I knew she wasn’t the one, even before we married.”

  “So, why…” It hurt her too.

  “I was selfish. I wanted her. Wanted someone.” The two sections of the paving under their feet were making their slow way to the middle, to make one whole piece.

  “I’m so sorry.” It wasn’t what she thought she’d say, in reaction to his confession.

  “I don’t find any of this easy to talk about. I’m not accustomed to navel gazing.”

  Of course not. He was English, and an ex-soldier. And even now, there was so much he wasn’t saying, things he’d never processed, was still in denial about, going back to the pain of his adolescence, with his father suddenly gone, the father he’d thought he’d known never really having existed…

  But wait! She could use her skills and resources to unlock his past, research Peter de Winter! She— Jumped, when the slabs beneath their feet met in the middle with a theatrical sound-effect clash. A klaxon blared and the door on the wall swung open, trumpet music playing.

  “Yessss!” Xander squeezed past them. “Did we do it? Did we beat the team from the Black Horse?” He practically shook the clipboard-toting staff member who stood there, then yelled in his ear and swung him around in a bear hug on hearing that they had. “Oh, well done, you two. I knew you could do it,” he called over his shoulder.

  “You can probably let go of each other now,” Piers suggested, waiting politely for them to uncouple and exit so the rest of them could leave. “Anyone for an enormous drink? I need a vat of gin and tonic after that.”

  “You buying?” queried Ash. “Yeah. Thought not.”

  “They’re free.” Piers indicated the table of drinks in the room they entered, its door labelled Decompression Chamber. He sipped from a glass of wine and shuddered. “Oh. I see why.” A minute later, another group of people tumbled into the chamber from another door, and Xander jeered, leading the taunts and catcalls against their opponents.

  “Shall we?” Hugo ushered Alessa out of the noisy madness.

  Out in the light of day, or evening, Alessa took a deep breath. “Hugo, things got a bit frantic.”

  “Yes.”

  From the way he looked at her, she knew he understood, that she referred to more than the crazy puzzle-solving, treasure-hunt evening. Thinking of that experience made her grin. “Do you think Xander planned it as a metaphor?” She hardly knew him but wouldn’t put anything past him.

  Hugo smiled, half-shrugging. “So, we take things slower.”

  “Like go and have a drink and—” She broke off at the chanting coming from behind them, the Gentlemen serenading the Black Horse team in a song that dubbed them the pony club and old donkeys. “Or perhaps forget the drink and just take me home.”

  “Not out for supper? I’m sure I must owe you.”

  “Next date,” she promised him, fearful of too much, too soon.

  “Hmm. Does taking you home but taking things slowly involve a kiss outside your apartment?”

  It did, but she didn’t invite Hugo in. She didn’t trust her resolve, even with him looking somewhat less polished in damp, foam-flecked and glitter-sprinkled combat trousers and sweatshirt. Not that she looked much better. No—she had work to do, to make a start on her new project, finding out about Hugo’s past. Until she’d done that, they’d have to take it slow, yep.

  “Tom, hi!” Alessa jammed her phone into the crook of her shoulder and grabbed her pen and notebook. “I want you to drop everything!”

  “Really?” She heard him sipping from a glass. Red wine, probably. “Why? Don’t tell me you’re outside wearing nothing but a raincoat and a come-hither smile? I’m getting up to look.” Alessa rolled her eyes. Men. Tom would fit in well with Xander and his Gentlemen.

  “No. And aren’t you seeing Juliette, anyway? Tell me all about it later. You have got to research Peter de Winter.”

  “Who? Another historical figure with a connection to Montford?”

  “No. Well, sort of. He was an aircraft engineer or scientist who worked in jet aircraft tech and was arrested for spying, then committed suicide in 1981. Part of the spy ring in Lantborough, Hampshire?” And that was pretty much all she knew.

  “I vaguely remember something about the Lantborough spies—traitors in that huge aerospace and defence company there, passing on secrets of guided weapon tech to the Russians?” Tom was on speaker phone now, clicking away on his laptop. Alessa felt guilty for dangling such a plum and ruining her friend’s Friday evening. “It’ll be tough to find all the details.”

  “What, because it was the early eighties, pre-Internet?” Alessa, confused, stopped rootling around in the fridge in search of supper. Or food of any kind. “But we know so much about the Cambridge spies, for instance, and that was in the late-fifties.”

  “More because any kind of scandal about missile technology is always hushed up, to prevent anything else leaking out, I guess, in addition to the government not wanting to fuck up the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement. The more it was known that the UK leaked nuclear secrets to Moscow, the less the US would exchange materials tech and info with us. Plus Thatcher was building up that industry, creating the sector, jobs, etcetera, aiming to sell British contributions to electronics and high explosives back to the US.”

  Alessa plonked herself down on the kitchen stool. “How do you know all this?” They weren’t vid-conferencing, but she could imagine him twiddling a dark curl around his forefinger, as he did when absorbed in his reading.

  “It’s called an education? Rather than being too hungover to go to lectures at university? But, yeah, I guess even if you had, journalism and creative writing?” He scoffed. “Not quite as useful as politics and economics…”

  “Oh, don’t come it with me, Mr Holier-than-thou—you just read all that on Wikipedia.”

  “It’s a fair cop.” He sniggered. “But, Ali, this does look interesting. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of info on the ring, including de Winter. What’re you thinking, to write a long read on him? I’m assuming there’s a Montford connection? Did he have a getaway property there, some remote cottage?”

  “There is a property, yes, still connected to the family. Not really a hideaway house. An old farmhouse in Blazeby, just through the village.” Hugo had said it was family property, and Alessa was presuming his father’s side, rather than his mother’s, due to the study full of Peter de Winter documents.

  But, thinking about it, the papers and photos looked more as if they were stored there, and she hadn’t gotten the vibe that the place was an old family home, going back generations. In fact, it hadn’t looked very lived-in at all. Yet it must have cost a pretty penny—that part of the county had always been exclusive. Had Peter brought it with the money he’d gotten for selling out his country’s secrets, then died before he’d really taken up residence? The question she’d been squashing flat ever since last weekend popped up again, loud and insistent—had the cottage been Hugo and Amanda’s marital home, before they’d split? “I’ll email
you the address and anything else I can think of.”

  “Hmm. Still connected to the family, you said? As in, family members still about? Might be useful for research.”

  “I’ll handle that side. I’d…rather.” God, she didn’t even want to think about the ethics—or lack of them—of digging into someone’s past in this way without telling them. But the ends justify the means, right? They have to. “And this is strictly between us,” she cautioned Tom.

  “And, of course, you can’t afford to pay me.” He groaned. “Well, how about I get half the credit if it pans out? And do most of the interviews about it, when it’s a bestseller? I always fancied myself on the BBC.”

  “Yes, on kids’ TV, dressed as a dinosaur. Okay, we need to get all the background we can. How’s best to do this? I could handle the newspapers that have fully searchable digital archives—I have access at work. Could you start with the ones that don’t? They’re all in London anyway. The ones I can read are…”

  An hour later, with the two of them having coordinated and distributed what work they could plan so far, Alessa felt exhausted but happy. Her plans were underway. She’d soon have information for Hugo, after which it was up to him. Until then, it was just a matter of taking things slowly with him, as hard as that might be, when she was more than fascinated by the handsome, witty, crazily sexy man. But it was necessary. Firstly, she was a little apprehensive about the winter-spring aspect of things and couldn’t foresee a frank conversation with Hugo about it being on the horizon—that would require him to open up.

  But, mostly, she couldn’t risk giving herself and losing herself in someone who wasn’t able to give himself in return. She wasn’t conceited or stupid enough to think she could be the exception to Hugo’s rules. She couldn’t be another Amanda.

  Chapter Nine

  “Is everything…all right now?”

  “Everything…?” Hugo enquired of Xander, wanting to see how far his friend would go.

  “With Alessa.”