Blue On Blue

by Dal Maclean

  “I’m so glad you could come. I know you must be very busy!”

  Will gave her a flat look, which had no effect at all. She was unstoppable; a hide like a rhino with tunnel vision. But at least she’d be buying him good food. The last thing Will had eaten had been a couple of bites of pizza the night before. Before Ken Schuler’s video arrived.

  The service in the restaurant was discreet and fast, and they ordered quickly. But Will felt edgy and jittery, aware of the time this was wasting when he could be . . . what? Digging round a case he wasn’t supposed to touch? Obsessing about the imminent loss of the love of his life?

  Catherine gestured to her phone as the waiter laid down a plate of exotic-looking bread and two minute portions of butter.

  “Three people arrested and charged as a result of the show!” Catherine gloated when the waiter departed.

  Media and Communications, Will thought sourly. But he confirmed that it was true.

  “That’s so wonderful,” Catherine waved a fork at him. “And it makes this all the more important.”

  Will buttered some bread and declined to ask. Let her work for it.

  “Look darling, I have a little proposition for you,” Catherine began as the waiter reappeared with their starters. Will tucked in at once. Better eat as much as he could before the conversation reached a juddering halt.

  “You got us the best social media engagement figures since Jamie was on last,” Catherine went on. “In fact, you topped them! Well, to be fair, you and Em together topped them.”

  Will knew what was coming. He took another bite of his starter. It was some sort of crab concoction and it tasted superb. Maybe he could finish it before he had to walk out.

  “The chemistry between you two really fascinated people.”

  Will didn’t roll his eyes only because the crab was so good and he almost felt sorry for her. She was so fired up, so determined she’d get her own way, but she may as well have stayed at home. Or the office. Wherever she spent her Saturdays.

  “There wasn’t any chemistry. It’s in people’s minds.”

  “But that doesn’t matter! It doesn’t have to be real to engage viewers. If they want to want to ship you two together, if they see a frisson there, that’s one of the best drivers of audience interest in any genre. And God knows, we can use all the help we can get.”

  Will sighed and ate some more crab. Ship them?

  “Think of it like acting,” Catherine urged. “Actors play a role!”

  “Think of what like acting?” he asked. He shoveled more crab onto his fork. Time to cut to the chase. “It’s very unlikely I’ll end up back on the program, Catherine. South Ken’s had its turn. And even if we somehow end up on again, Jamie’s back next week. He can do it.”

  “You’ll be back on if I have anything to do with it. We want to try you out on a new feature. You’ll explain an aspect of detective work every week. To Emily.”

  Will’s fork paused. “Every week?”

  “And if it works out, we could expand the role to copresenting. You could have a whole new career!”

  The crab dropped off his fork to plop sadly onto his plate. “I don’t want a new career, and definitely not on TV.”

  Point blank refusal didn’t even slow her down.

  “You’ve just had proof of how useful the program is in fighting crime. You could do far more good this way!”

  “I’m not disagreeing that it’s helpful to us.” And suddenly Will just felt furiously impatient at having to have this conversation at all. They were talking two different languages. “But it’s meant to be a program about real-life crime isn’t it? With real-life victims? Not Love Island.”

  “And we won’t catch any real-life criminals if no one watches it,” Catherine countered. “The worthier it is, the smaller the audience and the more unengaged people are. Look, Em’s got this job because she’s building up a fanbase, and she can pull them in to watch! And the reason she has more fans than a lot of other presenters who’ve been around far longer, is because she’s very beautiful, and people like looking at her. Yes, it’s all shallow as hell, but sexing it up . . . that’s how the world works.”

  Will looked away. It was how Tom’s world worked certainly. A world of appearances and illusion. But Will didn’t have to participate.

  “That may all be true,” he said. He put down his fork with an air of finality. “But I’m a copper. That’s what I want to do. It’s a very flattering offer,” he went on scattering the few crumbs of diplomacy he could be bothered to muster. “But I don’t want to talk about being a detective—I prefer being one.”

  “Will—”

  “I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted trip.”

  Catherine stared at him, nostrils flaring with frustration, but her phone rang before she could regroup.

  She clicked her tongue and muttered, “I have to take this.” When she answered the call, though, she barely got a word out. Instead she listened silently as a faint tinny voice ranted at her on the other end. Her expression was stoic, but she soon closed her eyes as if whatever she was hearing had become unbearable.

  It was only then that Will became aware that someone was standing beside their table.

  He looked up. Emily Dalton grinned down at him.

  “I was passing by and I saw you in the window,” she said.

  She looked totally different from the two previous times he’d seen her—younger, fresher and sweeter in her off-work Saturday clothes—blue denim pedal pushers, a tight T-shirt and a short cardigan. It was a styishly casual look though probably expensive, showing off her slim, taut figure, her long legs and large breasts.

  Will stood to say hello, but though Emily went through the standard air-kiss greeting, she didn’t touch him. He found he appreciated the consideration.

  “Em, darling!” Catherine closed her call and stood to hug her. “What a wonderful surprise! Have a seat!” Emily obligingly sat in the third chair that Will hadn’t registered until then. In front of a third- place setting, which should also have rung alarm bells when he saw it. “I have to go,” Catherine announced. “The diving feature’s fallen apart. And Matt’s melting down to Prue about not getting enough time to camera.” Catherine stood and picked up a coat from her chair and then a bag from the floor. “You must represent the program for me,” she said to Emily, then reached across the table and touched Will’s arm. “Will, I’m so sorry. You’ll stay and let Em get something to eat with you, won’t you? Order something darlings! Put it on the program tab! ”

  She was heading for the exit before Will could get a word in. She was good. He’d give her that.

  He should just . . . follow her out. Tell Emily he was too busy to stay and eat. But since he’d only been halfway through lunch with Catherine when Emily arrived, he couldn’t find it in himself to be that openly rude. Though they both deserved it.

  He’d been maneuvered into lunch with Emily. Tricked into it, in fact.

  His skin heated with mortification and annoyance, but he did his best not to show his irritation as Emily ordered a main course and a glass of red wine, and Will’s starter was cleared away.

  Emily’s chair was perpendicular to his. It felt uncomfortably intimate.

  “So,” Will said when the waiter had left. “You shouldn’t have wasted your day off.”

  Emily’s huge, chocolate brown eyes widened. In the bright daylight from the window, her blond hair shone almost platinum and her milky skin was flawless. He couldn’t even see a pore on it, like a doll’s skin or a child’s.

  “Busted,” she said and grinned. “I can see why you’re a detective.” She had dimples, and her teeth were very white and even. “Catherine wanted to soften you up first and she thought you’d run a mile if you knew I’d be here, given . . . .” She waggled her eyebrows. “Twitter.”

  He didn’t want to respond to her friendly charm. “So, if she thought that, why would you go along with it?”

  She looked rueful. “I’m sorry; I
shouldn’t have. She wore me down. She thinks you fancy me, so I can persuade you.” She said it as if she were breaking bad news quickly.

  Well, Will had guessed that. But hearing it out loud was more embarrassing than he’d expected. And setting her right was going to be worse.

  “I’m with someone,” he said. The words were out before he remembered, with the lurching drop of loss, that it might not be true tomorrow.

  Emily’s mouth pursed with amusement and her dimples flashed and he felt immediately ridiculous.

  “So am I,” she said, as if she were confiding a secret.

  Will lost the last of his patience. He fucking hated being patronized and he was past the edge of his tolerance.

  “I’m not an adolescent,” he said. “I’m not dazzled by the idea of celebrity, and it doesn’t matter who asks the question. The answer’s still ‘no.’”

  The waiter chose that moment to arrive with both main courses and Emily’s glass of wine.

  Will sat, jaw clenched, and let the man fuss around them. He just wanted this over. When the waiter left, Emily took a sip of wine, eyes lowered.

  “If I tell you I’m actually glad.” She flicked her gaze up at him through thick, sooty lashes. “Will you promise not to tell Catherine?”

  Will allowed his unimpressed glower to speak for him.

  “It’s just that it’s refreshing to meet someone who doesn’t want fame,” she said. “I’m glad you refused. It’s what I suspected . . . what I hoped you’d say.”

  Will’s skeptical expression didn’t alter.

  “You’re a beautiful man,” Emily went on with no embarrassment. “But you seem . . . not unaware of it . . . you know you’re very attractive. More . . . uninterested in it. You don’t flaunt it. That’s unusual.”

  Will waited. And his mind flashed with mortification to his encounter with Eve; how much he’d flaunted it.

  She grinned. “That’s a great interrogation technique. Waiting me out. See how I’m spilling my guts?” She cocked her head and gave a little moue. “Everyone’s in love with attention and celebrity nowadays. My fiancé, for example: he has an ancient title and money. But even he loves it when people recognize me. He loves that I’m famous and that I have fans and social media followers. That thousands of total strangers know me and maybe want me.”

  Despite himself, Will’s interest was piqued.

  “So your fiancé isn’t jealous?” Insecure.

  “God no! Andrew totally gets off on people fancying me.” Emily laughed. “And he knows I’d never embarrass him.”

  Will thought about that.

  The thing that had worried him about Tom’s fame and the many people who wanted him, was that he—Will—couldn’t compete. Correctly, as it had turned out. Probably. Emily’s fiancé was apparently made of sterner stuff. And a lot more money.

  Will asked, “Do you love him?”

  The question surprised her. She picked absently at one of the shabby sticking plasters on her fingers, the only imperfect thing about her.

  “Yes,” she said. “I love him. He’s older than me and . . . I love the sense of stability he has around him. All those centuries of certainty in his family. I was a bit of a daddy’s girl, but Daddy died when I was sixteen. He left lots of money for me to be privately educated, to have a pony. But it didn’t exactly compensate. So, until I was twenty I went completely off the rails. My poor mother! But then I woke up, and I realized I was actually very lucky. So, since I hadn’t wasted my schooling completely, I made a career for myself.” She looked straight at him, her dark eyes sparkling with life and intelligence, startlingly beautiful. “Safety’s important to me. Andrew’s important.”

  To Will, “safety” didn’t sound like much of an incentive to behave. But he was aware that the conversation was the kind of thing you might delve into on a first date, not at what was essentially a business meeting. He was on dangerous ground. He needed to finish his bloody lunch and get out.

  He picked up his fork and began to eat, aware Emily was doing the same.

  “So you have a partner?” Emily asked, after a minute or two.

  Will muttered, “I live with someone.”

  “Lucky girl,” Emily said, with a smile.

  “Man,” he returned.

  At last she looked startled; at last he’d said something she hadn’t predicted. “You’re gay?” She sounded astonished.

  “Bi,” though it felt like ceding ground.

  “Oh.” She gave a relieved laugh. “I couldn’t work out how I’d got it so wrong.”

  He waited.

  “There you go again,” she said with wry amusement. “I meant . . . .” She met his eyes with a powerful mix of frankness and confident expectation. “The way you look at women. Like a man with . . . more than just an aesthetic appreciation.”

  Echoes of Eve fucking Kelly. It made Will respond with defensive impatience, when it should have been water off a duck’s back.

  “Everyone tells me what they think I want. But the thing is, whether I fancy women as well as men, is irrelevant. I can see you’re gorgeous, the way I can see that guy—” He nodded toward a young man standing outside on the pavement, holding a bicycle. “—is hot. But I know from experience that my partner’s the one person I really want.” And how fucking pitiful was that now?

  But Emily smiled. “That’s wonderful,” she said. She put a confiding hand on his forearm. Will leaned closer automatically. “I hyped up my reactions to you on the program . . . .” she confided. “It’s called ‘acting.’”

  Will gave a startled snort of laughter.

  “And I admit—it was because I knew how viewers would react to you. The way they do with James Henderson. Catherine’s overbearing, but she’s right. That kind of thing does get viewers involved in a way just reporting crime doesn’t. I was a little worried you might have mistaken what it was from my side.” She smirked and squeezed his arm once before taking her hand away and leaning back. “I’m in the wrong career. I should be on the stage, dahling.”

  Some knot of tension in Will’s chest began to loosen and relax. He smiled back. Relief that they were on the same page after all. Her kindness and friendliness felt like cool water on an open wound.

  He thought he’d hang around for dessert after all.

  14

  James and Ben’s house was in Bedford Park, a part of Chiswick, close to a tube station on the Piccadilly line, which meant Will could go from South Ken tube or Knightsbridge, without changing. But tempting as it was to take the train, he drove instead. He had a lot to mull over and he wanted to be totally alone to do it.

  Ingham. June. What to say to Ben? How to tell him that he knew? And Tom. He tried his best not to think about Tom. What was coming would come.

  The house was large and semidetached, with a red brick front. It was Edwardian and it had a high wooden gate at the side leading to a back garden, like Warren Road. But Warren Road was still up-and-coming. Bedford Park had long since arrived.

  Will knew that with James’s background, he and Ben could have afforded anything they wanted, but instead they’d settled on what they could afford with their pooled resources, without James’s dad buying something for them. They both seemed to love the comparative ordinariness of the house and its suburban setting; the life they were creating together.

  Will had rarely seen two people more obviously besotted. He often wondered if they’d just . . . met and known at once they were meant to be. No drama, no pain—not like him and Tom. Some people were lucky like that. He’d never had the nerve to ask.

  He parked on the street, and went through a small white wooden gate, up a short path, flanked by topiary trees and hedges, to a slate-covered porch. He took a deep bracing breath and rang the doorbell.

  Less than a minute later Ben opened the door. He wore a sleeveless black tank top, revealing the golden skin and lovely musculature of his arms, his sharp collarbones. He looked spectacular.

  It wasn’t Audrey Hepburn, Wil
l thought, with a jolt of shocked nausea. Now he was looking for it, he could see it wasn’t her that Eve had reminded him of so powerfully.

  Ben gave a tense smile.

  He knows. He knows you know who he is.

  “Jo Ingham called,” Ben said. His mouth was still stretched in that meaningless smile, but his voice sounded dead. “Come in, Will.”

  The hallway wasn’t all that different from Will’s house in Leyton. Stripped hardwood floors, white-washed walls. But unlike Warren Road, where the stairs were tucked away round a corner, this house’s staircase was visible and the upper landing flooded the hall with light from a stained glass window.

  “Will?” Ben’s voice was soft. Uncertain.

  Will turned round to face him again.

  Ben was usually sunny, cheerful, the definition of charisma. This was a different man. Will wondered if it was the real man. How much insecurity did Ben’s happy shell hide? How worried must he have been every day since his mother was first caught and sentenced, that people would find out who he was and reject him? And again, since Kelly was propelled back into the headlines in 2016.

  He was waiting for Will to behave differently to him now.

  Will didn’t hesitate. He reached out and hauled Ben into a hug, and after a shocked second Ben hugged him back just as hard. They were of a height, but Ben tucked his head into Will’s neck, his long silky curls tickling Will’s chin. Will knew Ben was strong physically and mentally. He’d gone to train with him once at his boxing gym and watched him take down a savate opponent with ruthless efficiency and cunning. He could feel his impressive musculature. But at that moment, Ben felt vulnerable in his arms.

  “Hey, put him down.”

  Will looked up. James was leaning just outside the lounge door, arms folded. His silver gray eyes looked sad and worried. His mouth though, tilted in a tiny smile and Will knew he’d done the right thing.

  “You’re not tanned,” he said obnoxiously.