Trowchester Blues

by Alex Beecroft

  “But you seem to like him, and I feel it’s the responsible thing to tell you there were rumours he was fleeing London because he was wanted by the police there. Our local bobbies were in and out of his shop for months.”

  Michael remembered the dropped sandwich and the quick way Finn had redirected the conversation when he’d mentioned being a detective. Put that together with the fact that Lian seemed a reliable witness, and it added up to something he didn’t want to think about.

  “To be fair—” She raised her gaze and made fleeting eye contact before he looked away. “After that they left him alone. But then he went and hired Kevin Watts, who’s already been in jail twice for burglary. The Watts family is notorious. Always fighting in the street and yelling at three o’clock in the morning. Setting cars on fire, stealing people’s plants from their gardens. So. I don’t want to speak ill of anyone without cause, but . . .”

  “You thought I should be warned.” With an effort, Michael kept the dread down long enough to say with civility, “I appreciate that, and everything else. Thank you again.”

  It was only when he walked over the collapsed fence onto his own land that his nascent good mood popped like a soap bubble, and his mind replayed Finn’s flinch again and again like an earworm he couldn’t scrape out.

  He cleared the last of the rubbish from the boat, closed the doors, and ran up the generator. The space was bare now, chipboard furnishings standing unpainted, the only splash of colour the bright-red duvet cover and the faded blue curtains. He wondered what had possessed him to buy bedding the colour of freshly spilled blood.

  That led him to wondering where Finn lived and what kind of high-fantasy concept his rooms were modelled on.

  And that led him to wonder again whether Lian was right and there was something dodgy about the guy. Maybe something he used his charm and his eccentricity to cover up, to distract from? A tease of a memory kept almost forming at the back of his mind, telling him he had seen Finn before, and where else was there but in the police database? Well. There was an easy way to find out.

  Once the generator had settled down, he plugged his computer in. He checked Google first just in case, but nothing came up except for the bookshop, so he Skyped Jenny next. She was slow to answer, and wearing a fluffy pink-and-mint-green dressing gown when she did. Surprised, he checked the time, and it was half past midnight.

  “Sorry.” He smiled apologetically at her bleary look. “I didn’t realise it was so late.”

  She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and gave him a rueful grin. “No problem. I’m glad to hear from you. How’s it doing?”

  “Fine,” Michael said, automatically.

  She raised an eyebrow. Rebuked, he rubbed both hands over his face and tried again. “The house is shit. He locked me out. I had to crawl across the roof and break into an upstairs window to open it up. The removal men have just arrived. My stuff is piled in boxes in the middle of each floor, and I’m not unpacking until I’ve gutted the place.”

  The other brow went up to join the first. “Fair enough. Where are you living now?”

  “Boat at the bottom of the garden.”

  “And that’s okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking again at the bare boards. A lick of white paint and a couple of Moroccan-style cushions. Maybe a rug. He could see himself warming to this space easily enough. “Yeah, that’s one of the good parts.”

  “There’s already more than one good part?” she picked up with a grin. “I’m impressed. Such as?”

  “The neighbours seem nice. And I . . . I met a guy.”

  “Oh.” She pulled a hair tie from off her wrist and bound up her messy caramel-coloured hair in a sign that she meant business. “That was quick! Tell me all.”

  Michael bowed his head and tried to sort through his thoughts. They were deeply conflicted. On the one hand a shy, almost sly joy—a joy that knew it wasn’t safe in his neighbourhood but was sidling in regardless, turning the lights on and softening what it touched. On the other, a kind of dull suspicious ache, the fruit of too many stones turned over to reveal hidden monsters—a certainty of betrayal and the anger that went with it.

  He didn’t know how to get all of that out in words, or what Jenny could be expected to do about it if he tried. “Well, I kind of want you to tell me.”

  “Because my psychic powers have never been stronger?”

  “Because you’ve got access to the database. He’s, um . . .” Michael attempted to marshal a description of Finn—the big, clever eyes and the way his hands and his body moved with such grace and such crackling energy. The hawklike delicacy of his face and his slender collarbones peeking from the open collar of his shirt, the way he unsettled and soothed and mocked Michael all at once, mercurial and fascinating.

  He couldn’t say any of it. “His name is Fintan Hulme. He runs a bookshop here in Trowchester, but he apparently came up from London five years ago following some kind of brush with the law. If local rumour can be believed. Can you hunt him up? Tell me what you find?”

  Jenny leaned back in her chair, taking the top of her head out of frame, giving him a good view of the shape her mouth made as she sighed out uncertainty. It was paler than usual, bereft of its daytime shade of rosy lipstick. “Michael, don’t do this to me.”

  “Do what?” he said, although he knew.

  “Don’t make me remind you that you’re not in the force anymore. I can’t just go giving out police information to private citizens. You know that, and you shouldn’t be asking me.”

  “I do know,” he agreed, the rejection biting like winter. “And I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. But— I guess I really like this guy, you know? And I thought I’d better know before I got in too deep. But I can check from here. I guess I could just ask him, right?”

  “Communication.” She tipped back into view again, relieved. “It’s a radical new thing in relationships, so I hear. Louise did mention you had problems in that area, so maybe you could work on that, this time around.”

  He flashed back on long evenings spent with Louise, side by side on the sofa, each absorbed in a different book. He’d thought it was an idyllic form of companionship, right up until she started yelling at him for being emotionally cold and negligent and withholding.

  “Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. “I’ll just come out and ask him if he’s some kind of criminal. I’m sure that will go well.”

  “Ooh,” Jenny laughed. “Burn. I’ve really been missing that sarcasm of yours.”

  “I’ve been missing you.”

  Another moment where he had said too much with too little disguise. Jenny’s chin crumpled as she looked away. “Yeah. Listen. I’ll see what I can do about the database. But this is the last time, all right?”

  He wasn’t sure if he felt more relief or fear. “I promise. Thank you.” For a moment, they were both in danger of crying, and then the kettle boiled on its gas ring and he got up to pour water on his coffee. When he sat down again he had it back under wraps. “So tell me any news you can. What’s been going on in your part of the world?”

  “You won’t believe this.” She too was a little overbright. Neither of them mentioned it. “DI Cartwright is pregnant. No idea who the father is, but says she’s going to keep it anyway, and DC Howard is already eyeing her office . . .”

  When she signed off, the place felt emptier, lonelier, a million miles away from anywhere. The boat looked bare and the bed cold. Michael tried sitting on it, but in the small space, the curving walls seemed to be clenching around him, crushing him. He wondered how long it would take before whatever it was that was gnawing away at his insides would finally swallow them and let him die.

  Okay, so it was a choice between lying here sleepless and watching the ceiling, or going out to walk aimlessly around town. It had been a while since he’d had any sort of beat, but he yearned for it, the measured peace of it, a strange kind of meditation.

  Pointless wandering around town it was, then. He tugg
ed his boots on, picked up the torch he kept by his bedside for late-night reading. And maybe he could stroll past Finn’s place, see if there were any lights in the window. Decide what to do about it when he was there.

  Naturally, the night was soft with rain, the weightless drifting drizzle that was the closest anyone could get to being inside a cloud. Michael pulled the hood of his duffle coat over his head, stuffed his hands in his pockets and headed upstream.

  The hulk on its crane loomed out of the darkness to his right, the chains that supported it groaning as the wind tried to set it swinging. He stopped and examined it for a moment before climbing inside.

  His money was gone, as was the blanket. The empty glass which had once contained a candle glimmered from beneath two inches of water in the well. He found a stick and fished it out, wiping the scum from it and putting it back on the platform of scrap wood at the stern with a sigh.

  So he had frightened them away, whoever it was. Damn. One more thing to feel guilty about, one more poor soul out there in the world without a roof because he just had to pry.

  As he climbed down, the beam of his torch caught muddy footprints to the side of where he landed. Sneakers, by the look of things, both with treads so worn down that the most recognisable thing about them was the crack across the ball of the left foot. He followed them across the yard, behind the boat shed, and to the far boundary, where a child-sized gap had been pushed through the hornbeam hedge.

  Getting scratched and prodded for his trouble, he tracked the sneakers across a brook, up into the car park behind the Methodist church, where he lost them on the smooth tarmac. The tall backs of three-storey houses squared off against each other around the empty parking lot. A single streetlamp gave an amber cast to the rain and showed a distant children’s playground, fenced with railings, with a wet slide glinting yellow, empty swings, and a spidery climbing dome of ropes.

  That hadn’t been there when Michael was a child—truth was, nothing had been on either side of the river but fields in those days. But he found himself drawn to it nevertheless, with some idea of sitting on the swings and rocking until he lulled himself to sleep.

  He hadn’t got to the gate before his idly sweeping torch picked out something that made him stop dead. In the far corner of the playground, a huge pipe had been set into the ground and covered with earth and grass to form a tunnel. From the near end of this trailed the corner of a blanket he recognised.

  Instinctively, his gait smoothed, his footsteps growing silent. He lifted the latch of the gate with both hands to prevent it clanging and swung it quietly open. Pressing the bulb of the torch against his coat to conceal the light, he came within six feet of the tunnel end and hunkered down to try to see into the inadequate shelter. It was too dark.

  Cautiously, he aimed the beam of the torch into the tunnel. There was a gasp and a stir. An impression of eyes, their pupils gleaming red-gold. Whoever it was, they were about to bolt, and he would lose them again.

  “Sorry!” he said and flipped the torch, aiming it at himself. He could almost feel the light as it streamed past his face. “Hi. I’m sorry I disturbed you the other night, but it’s okay. Come back and sleep in the barge where you were, if you like. It’s no problem, and it’s got to be better than this, right?”

  His straining ears could just about pick up breathing, rapid and nervous, but no other sound of movement. This was going better than last time at least.

  “It’s up to me what happens to the barge,” he offered, trying to sound soothing. “So if I’m fine with you being there, no one else can kick you out.”

  A long, long pause. He thought the sound of breathing evened and slowed a little. Then there came the scuff of a worn-down sneaker against pipe. “You’re not going to call social services?”

  Michael had to put both knees down in the mud to keep from falling. He covered his face. It was a girl’s voice. Midteens, he thought. Same age as Stacey. The desire to weep took a slow swing into the desire to hit something. He unclenched his fists carefully and bowed his head into them.

  “Shouldn’t I? How old are you? You shouldn’t be sleeping out here in the—” he swallowed a fucking in case it frightened her “—mud all alone. You should have a proper roof over your head and someone to look after you. And social services would—”

  He was hunched forwards, blinded by the beam of the torch and his own hands. About as vulnerable and unthreatening as it was possible for him to get. Although he hadn’t intended it that way, it seemed to lure her out. He heard the whisper of cloth against cloth and the all-but-silent footsteps as she moved.

  “Social services would put me in a fucking home again,” she said, bitterly. Nearer to him. He began to wonder whether she was armed. A baseball bat or a length of four-by-four to the back of the neck and he could be waking up—if he was lucky—two days later stripped of his wallet and his keys.

  He’d told her which was his house. She’d have time to rifle through it for stuff to take or sell, and with the money she could buy a ticket to London to seek her fortune. God, he must at all costs prevent her from going to London.

  He uncurled, reached down to grab the torch and aimed the beam at her. Caught in the light, she froze. Fourteen or fifteen, was his guess. Thin and nervous as a whippet yet bulky in many layers of coats, her dazzled eyes squinting beneath a tracker hat the colour of mud. She reeked like a fox.

  “Would that be so bad? You’d have food and warmth and safety—”

  “Safety?” She hissed it at him, catlike, backing away. “The last time I was in one of them, three boys tried to do me. Three of them and one of me, so of course everyone believes them, even though I’m the one with the bruises. I’m not going back there. Never!”

  Another pace back. He could see her reaching the end of the invisible tether that connected them. If he wasn’t careful, she would snap it and bolt, and he wasn’t sanguine enough to believe he would ever meet her again. If he was to do her any good, it must be now. He raised his hands in surrender. “It’s okay. It’s fine. I won’t tell them you’re here. I promise.”

  “What’s it to you anyway?”

  As she edged away, he could see there was no weapon in her hand after all. Only the blanket with its dirty pink stripes.

  “My dad died, recently. I guess I know what it’s like to be alone. What about your family? Can’t you go to them?”

  “They’re the ones who fucking threw me out in the first place, aren’t they? Just ’cause I had a girlfriend, and how sick is that? They threw me out in the street! They were supposed to—”

  She seemed to realise she was yelling, her words rapid-fire and all but unintelligible with tears. Another step back and she breathed like a weight lifter, calming herself down.

  “Come back to the boat,” Michael insisted gently, hurting for her, and scared. “We’ll pretend I don’t know you’re there. Or here’s a thought . . .” He could do this. If the alternative was letting her run off to London to get scooped off the streets by the next psycho, he damn well would live in the damn house if it killed him. “I have a narrowboat at the bottom of the garden. It’s dry and warm. There’s a proper bed and a shower. Somewhere to cook. Winter is going to be here soon, and you’ll die if you try to tough it out without shelter. Come and sleep in my narrowboat instead.”

  She gave an ugly chuckle, her little heart-shaped face hard with grown-up cynicism. The big, star-grey eyes swept him up and down sullenly. He knew perfectly well what she saw—a harsh-faced, brutal-looking man three times her size wheedling with her to come back to his house? Yeah. He wouldn’t have bought that one either.

  Fuck. Fuck being a man anyway; sometimes the guilt-by-association was paralysing. What could he do? If he lunged for her to try and get her by force, that would be the very end of any kind of trust between them, but if he let her run away . . . Well, Watkins wasn’t the only psycho out there.

  “I only want to help you.”

  “Yeah,” she said, and laughed again.
“But the price of that is always too high.”

  “Don’t—” He got up on one knee, arm outstretched, but it was too late. A flash of white from the soles of her sneakers, and she was gone. Driven out of another refuge by him.

  So, that was the end of any possibility of sleep for the night. Feeling like he no longer deserved to seek out comfort for himself, Michael went back to the house and started on the deconstruction of the living room. The sofa . . . the sofa with the bloodstains down the arm of his mother’s seat. Yeah, that had had retribution a long time in coming. He got the sledgehammer out of the porch and went to town.

  The heft of the heavy lump of metal pulled at his shoulders like a butcher’s hook as he laid into the wooden frame. Dull impacts thudded through his hands, down his back, made his head throb, and could not keep the memories away.

  His mum had cut her arms to the bone and sat there bleeding. She’d sat there weeping, rocking to and fro, while the old bastard called her names. Called her a psycho bitch, a failure of a mother, a useless wife. Called her selfish, lazy, a waste of air and space.

  Sweat made the sledgehammer slip in his grasp, but he only felt blood in his palm. He’d been eleven. He’d run to her side, kneeling there, her hand in his, her blood running over his fingers and his tears falling like salt into her wounds.

  “I’m sorry,” she choked, as he tried to pry the knife from her hands. “I’m sorry, darling, but I can’t. I can’t do it anymore. I just can’t.” And he knew exactly what she meant because he couldn’t either. But he had to.

  The back of the sofa separated with a tearing crack, and he whaled into it like it was a body, the soft resistance satisfying now, so much like the softness of flesh, of ribs.

  He never knew what made his father finish once the man had started. He’d just run out of steam eventually, rise and walk away, and with the predator out of the room the two of them could move again. Michael had torn up his sheets for bandages. Together he and his mother had staunched the blood and wept themselves dry and picked themselves up to carry on another day.