“Whaeerrr?” God, I must look scary. I’ve been lying here for two days straight. I’m sure I’ve been getting up to go to the toilet, but the inside of my mouth doesn’t think so and my clothes are showing evidence of this not being the case. But then, I haven’t showered for two days, so things might not be as bad as they look. “Blurhurgh?”
Cal. Last time I saw him I kissed him, slapped him, then went catatonic. No wonder he’s looking a bit confused, crouching down beside me and stroking my hair. Uurrrgh, it really is stuck to my face, isn’t it? Wonder what with? No, best not wonder.
And then a snapping, zipping sound as life reasserts. Normality is restored and I sit up.
“Thank Christ.” Ash, smeared along the chesterfield, lit a joint and passed it to Jazz. “Thought I was going to have to rattle a gin bottle to get you awake.”
“Why are you all here?” I yawned and went to run a hand through my hair and then remembered that most of it was stuck to my chin. “What’s happening?”
“We’re waiting for you to tell us, darling,” Ash drawled.
“We were worried.” Katie bent down to come into view. My eyes still weren’t too clever at rotating in their sockets. “You’ve been down for days.”
“You were worried, you mean. I said she’d be fine. Men come, men go.”
“Well, you’d know, Ash.” Katie examined her nails.
“Quelle fucking drag.”
She was restraining herself from hitting him now. “And stop being camp, it’s not impressing anyone.”
“Cal.” I moved so that I could see him. He was perched on the arm of the sofa next to me, still stroking my hair. “What’s going on?”
“We want to know what you want us to do.” He was looking at me out of Sandman’s eyes, bright, sharp and concentrated. So I knew he wasn’t only meaning those there present, but the team as well.
“Okay,” I said slowly. Everyone looked at everyone else. It was clear they expected me to prevaricate, possibly even expected a few moments of insanity. But they forgot, I’d had two days lying on this sofa, thinking. “No one tells Luke anything, right? As far as he’s concerned I’ve had the flu. I need more time to think.” My heart was still, despite everything, wondering if, at the bottom of all this, there might not be a good old-fashioned love story. Luke, seeing me again, falling for me, not able to confess that he was now a penniless, attached man and concocting an involved fantasy simply to gain the object of his heart’s desire. Could it be? “Maybe he wanted to impress me.”
“Surely honesty would impress you more.” Cal said, and I wondered if he was really thinking about his own secrets. Maybe regretting telling me.
“How could he be honest and still keep me? I need to know.”
“We’ll all do what we can, Willow, but none of us want to see you get hurt.” Katie handed the joint back to Jazz. “Or, any more hurt than you already are.”
“But it can’t be about the money,” I burst out. “That’s what you’re all thinking, isn’t it? That Luke’s been using me to get money. I keep telling you that he didn’t know!”
“Maybe it is just coincidence.” I felt a sudden rush of gratitude for Katie. “He can’t have known about the inheritance, so…”
“Exactly.” I made a kissing face at her.
“So maybe he is just a bastard, two-timing you with someone else.”
Two-timing. Sounds rather picturesque really, doesn’t it? Makes me think of antique clocks, the ones with the seasons painted round the faces and the big keys to wind them, or an old music-hall dance done by girls in frilly crinolines with parasols. I couldn’t associate the phrase with Luke in any shape or form. Particularly now, sitting side-by-side on an overstuffed sofa in the Blue Monkey bar, polished little cocktails in front of us, poring over a menu and laughing (me, rather overheartily) at a group of drunken twentysomethings falling off their chairs at the table opposite.
“So?”
“Mmmm?”
“Willow.” He took the menu from my hands and laid it down on the sofa. “You’re hardly here at all, are you? Sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.”
How could he be a liar? His behaviour was so normal. “You wanted to talk? You said when you rang, something was bothering you?”
Yes, it had been less of a phone call and more of a controlled blurt, I’m afraid. I’d wanted to admit everything, acknowledge that I’d checked up on him, but couldn’t without bringing Cal and his team into things, and I couldn’t do that because I’d promised Cal not to say anything. So I’d ended up saying that we needed to talk and leaving it at that. Trouble was, now I had to think of something to talk about, without giving away my uncertainty.
“I’m not sure that getting married would be such a good thing.”
His eyes didn’t even flicker. “If that’s how you feel, then sure. But, what brought this on? You seemed to be quite happy, last time we spoke.”
“I…I don’t know. Cold feet, I suppose. Things being all right as they are.”
A long arm curled around me. “Whatever you want, that’s fine by me. Honestly, Willow.” He showed no sign of being a man suddenly let off a hook or, conversely, a man suddenly disappointed. But then, if he had married me, he’d have been entitled to half of everything.
“I…I wasn’t sure how you’d react. What with the flat and everything.”
“Ah. The flat.” The arm uncoiled and he picked up his drink, sipped it slowly through the corkscrew straw. I watched in hypnotised fascination as the blue liquid rose and fell through the roller-coaster bends. “There’s a bit of a glitch with the flat. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to worry.”
Over the glass he was watching my face. He thinks I suspect something. “Really?” My heart was thumping. Two-time.
“Yes. I’m really sorry. We’ve got the place, for a while, but someone else put in a higher bid. I kind of misled you. I know how much you loved it and I was kind of hoping that these other people would pull out, or the sale would fall through and we’d get it anyway, so I didn’t say anything.” Another flash from those purple eyes, half-amused, assessing me, watching my reaction. “I didn’t want you to be disappointed.”
I felt relief just for a second. Then I swallowed it before it made me careless. Not just the flat. Everything else. He’s lied about everything else. “Oh, I see. Never mind.” Did I hate him? Love him? Why didn’t I know?
“Are you sure you’re all right? You really do seem very off, tonight.”
God, he was attractive. Almost as though he was trying extra hard, stone-washed jeans tight over firm thighs, blue shirt which echoed his eyes like the sea echoes the sky, hair curling onto his collar in the same fashion it had ten years ago, long, strong fingers closing around mine and the smell of a spicy cologne sharp in my nostrils. “It’s the flu. Still feeling a bit rocky.” Couldn’t I just pretend? For a little while longer?
“Of course.” We chatted, generally, about OC and the baby, my family, the weather, all safe, neutral topics which didn’t make my skin prick with anxiety. We ate, although my appetite was gone. (“The flu, taking a terrible long time to shake off.”) And drove up to a nearby beauty spot to sit and watch the sun go down. Luke was all concern, didn’t press me to have sex, just carried on the gentle conversation. Asked if Clay had decided what to do about his allotment and how sad it was that, if he didn’t buy the land, his inheritance from Ganda would be wiped out, and had I heard any more about Ganda’s road-surfacing invention?
“No. Maybe I ought to chase them up.”
“Good idea. Look, let’s get the picnic rug out of the boot and sit on the grass. It’s a bit soulless, sitting in the car on an evening like this. Reminds me of all those holidaymakers.”
“Yes. That sounds nice.”
“You won’t get too cold? I’ve got a jacket in the back.”
“I’m fine.”
“I’ll get it anyway. Will you fetch the rug?”
He buzzed ope
n the boot and I found the rug, neatly folded in the corner. Lying on top of it was Luke’s laptop, his inseparable companion. I looked at it and had the first faint glimmerings of an idea, one which might not work, or even be of any use, but it was an idea. Mine. My chance.
I did nothing for a while, lay on the rug next to Luke and relaxed as much as I could. It was, I had to admit, easy to relax with Luke. He was Mr. Urbane, with his carefully general remarks about last night’s TV and the beauty of the view spread out before us like a visual episode of The Archers. He made no move to seduce me, apart from taking my hand and holding it while we lay, stroking my palm with his fingers in a way which, had I been feeling a little more sure of him, would have had me writhing in pleasure and begging him to use my body in any way he saw fit.
Finally the sun sank. It had, from my perspective, been taking its own sweet time about it. Night gradually closed down around us, the birds putting up the shutters, the heat draining from the air. I gave a rather over-the-top shiver.
“Would you like my jacket now?” Luke offered.
“No, it’s all right. We really ought to be getting home. I’ve told them I’ll be back at work tomorrow and I still need a lot of sleep. Recuperation, you see.” As I spoke, I got to my feet. Luke duly followed, and I folded the rug over my arm. “I’ll put this away.”
Again Luke popped the boot for me. This time, whilst he was putting the jacket into the car, I managed to shuffle his laptop onto the rubber edge of the boot, balancing it against me while I put the rug into the recess.
“Ready?” Luke came behind the car and I pretended to jump.
“Oh, you startled me! Oh, bugger!” As I’d hoped, the laptop had fallen with a rather nasty cracking sound, onto the stony ground underneath the boot. “God, I’m sorry, Luke. Is it all right?”
Luke, a little grim-faced, retrieved the machine. “Fuck. Looks like the battery might be damaged. Shit, these things cost an arm and a leg to fix.”
“I’m really sorry.” Contrition came easily to me. I was always sorry for something.
“Ah, not your fault really. Stupid place to keep a laptop, but I like to have it on me.”
We surveyed the dented black casing for a moment. “Expensive to fix, you said?”
Luke’s head came up. “Fairly. More ready cash than I was looking to lay out right now, why?”
He’d bitten. I was almost ashamed of myself. “Well, you remember Cal? The guy who owns the farm up on the moors? He fixed my laptop. He’s absolutely brilliant. I’ll pay, of course. It’s my fault it’s broken. But he doesn’t charge too much.”
Luke thought for a moment. “If you’re sure. And he’s good, you say?”
“Fantastic.” But I wasn’t necessarily thinking of his winning ways with a computer.
“Here you are then. Could you get it back as soon as possible? Only I need it, for business.”
Yeah, sure you do.
Chapter Twenty-three
The following evening I went round to Cal’s flat and caught him leaving for the farm. “I need a favour.”
“Oh?” He stuck his head out through the window of the Metro. “You’d better jump in then and tell me about it on the way. It’s good timing, actually. I need to shift that bloody goat again.”
“Why don’t you employ someone to do it?”
“Because I’ve got you, and you need a favour.” I climbed into the Metro and sat on a pile of magazines. Cal looked at me sideways. “So. How are you?”
I had the lie lined up on my lips ready. The “oh, I’m fine” that was working so well for Katie, but once his cool gaze landed on me, the lie failed. “Pretty shitty, actually.”
“Uh-huh? Feel like talking about it?”
“I’m angry, Cal.” Until now I hadn’t even been sure how I felt, but now I knew. “I’m angry that I’ve been duped and that I fell for it. I should have known.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“Why ‘should’ you have known? Did he approach you wearing an I’m-a-fraud badge and covered in lipstick marks?”
I laughed. “Of course not.”
“Well then. Stop beating yourself up about it. He’s clever, he’s good looking and he thinks on his feet. There’s no way you could have sussed him.”
“Maybe, but I still should have known. Good-looking men don’t exactly fall for me, you know.”
“Perhaps they do, but you’re so worried about throwing up on them that you step over and make a beeline for the boring ones. Now, what’s this favour you need?”
“It’s this.” I held up Luke’s laptop. “I want you to hack it for me.”
“Ssshhhhh. Willow!”
“Who’s going to overhear—a traffic warden hell-bent on industrial espionage?”
“Even so. Whose is it? His?”
I smiled. “Hack it and you’ll find out.”
Cal rubbed a hand over his unshaven cheeks and then grinned. “Go on then, I could do with the practice. Been a long time since I had a personal. What are we looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Even better, a full-file job. It’ll be just like old times.”
“I don’t want to know what you used to get up to.”
Again the sideways look. “Ah, you do really. You want to know everything about me. And even if you don’t, I’m going to tell you anyway.”
“Shut up and drive.”
The white house had a kind of dejected air about it when we arrived, like a puppy tied to railings. The fields looked unkempt and there was a corner of guttering coming away from one edge of the roof. Cal sighed as we went into the kitchen, and opened the windows to let out the overcooked air. “It’s going to kill me to sell, but… Since Great-Aunt Mary died, there’s so much stuff I can’t do around the place.”
“You could pay someone to do things like the guttering though.” I looked out of the window to the paddock. “And look after Winnie.”
“I can’t have anyone stomping around. Not with the tech I’ve got going on out in the barn. Too risky. Besides it’s a lonely old house, especially in the winter. I don’t want to be camped out here. Shit, I’ve just thought, you’re not going to want it now, are you? Now that…I mean, sorry, I’ll shut up now.”
My fingers gripped around the edge of the kitchen table and I felt the solidity, the permanence of it, the safe security of the four walls. “I want to live here.” I dug my nails into the wood. “I’ve still got my dreams, Cal. They weren’t all dependent on marrying Luke. With the money from the council I’ll have enough to live on for a while until I get some sort of business up and running, even after I’ve bought the place. So, I’ll be poor, but I’ll have my own roof and my own land and I can always grow food and if the electricity gets cut off, I’ll go to bed early.”
“And the loneliness?”
“I’ll get a cat.”
Cal nodded slowly. “That should deal with the mouse shit in the larder problem. Good call.”
“And besides, you’d still be around, wouldn’t you? With the barn and all.”
Cal turned away from me, fiddling with the Aga plates. “I don’t know. I might have to shift somewhere else. Security.”
The bruise that was my heart gave a little twitch. “Oh,” I said, damply. “Oh.”
“Okay then.” I knew Cal was getting into work mode when he fixed his hair back away from his face like this. “Pass me the laptop. Let me see what I’m doing.”
I handed the case over without speaking. As he took it, our fingers brushed and I felt it, as though he were wearing acid gloves. “I’ll go and see to Winnie then, shall I?”
“Mmm.” I’d lost him. Everything about Cal changed when he had a computer on his mind. Even his face became different, his eyes unblinking, his mouth a tight line of concentration. I watched him for a moment, the way his flexible fingers removed the black casing from the laptop as matter-of-factly as if he were peeling a banana, the shifting of the machine so that his less-strong arm
didn’t take all the weight. There it was again, flittering across the back of my mind, the flash of acknowledgement that he really was a very sexy man—and then he looked up and caught me looking. “Go on. Bugger off and see to that goat.”
He’d seen me watching. Seen the desire and longing spread across my face and dismissed it. I took a deep breath and left the room, holding the feeling until I cleared the yard, when I had to spit it into a gorse bush while Winnie watched and sneered.
But at least her close attention made her easy to catch. I moved her into the field by the house and let her loose. By the time this manoeuvre was completed, and I’d finished the swearing and cussing and my face had returned to a colour not associated with emergency situations, Cal was in the barn with the laptop connected to the big computer.
“Any ideas?” he asked as I poked my head cautiously through the door. “About passwords? Anything he might use? I’ve tried your name and got nothing. Sorry,” he added.
“What about Dee-Dee?” My teeth were so clenched when I said her name that I could hear my jaw cracking.
Cal tapped away at his keyboard. “Hey, yeah. That’s got one file. Hmmm, nothing much there, few letters. What kind of guy types his love letters, hey? Oh. Sorry. Again. Keep forgetting.”
“I don’t care if he’s been writing erotic letters to an entire women’s prison.”
“But there’s nothing in there we could use, it’s all”—his attention passed from me for a second—“pretty hot, actually. Quite heavy. Is he really into all that bondage and repression stuff? Sorry, sorry, any other password potentials?”
I couldn’t think of any.
“I’ll have to bring up the big guns then. He’s working behind a firewall, so I can’t piggyback a virus in to rewrite the passwords. Besides, he’d know then that someone had got at his files. So…” He tapped away. “I’ll run a decryption program. That should break it. He’s not exactly security conscious, our man.”
“I don’t suppose he’s ever thought anyone would want to break in.”
Reversing Over Liberace Page 18