Driftwood (15 page)

“It's all right. It'll be all right, if you just let me help you. Where is he now?”

“He's on duty. Where else would he be? Tom, I can't do this. And—I don't know what
you're
trying to do. Rob fucks me over, but I need him.” He went a shade paler and swung round to face the sink. “Has that occurred to you? I
need
him, even—even more than I need you.”

Tom took a step towards him. Pain was lancing through him. He put a hand on Flynn's shoulder, feeling it shudder with a hard-repressed dry heave. “Flynn. All right. Forget it. Just…how badly are you hurt? I can ignore everything else, but not that. I—I'm a doctor.”

“I've got my own doctor!” It was a desperate snarl. Flynn straightened up violently, pushing him aside. “I'm not your responsibility. Not your business. Nor is Rob. For both our sakes…” he backed up unsteadily, and did not look at Tom again until he was at the door, “…leave me alone. It's over. Let me go.”

Tom left the pub calmly, dry-eyed. He got into the Rover and started her up with steady hands. Down the street, he could hear the roar of the little MX5, getting booted to high speeds as Flynn took her out of the 30 zone. Tom wanted to call him back, to tell him to be careful.

He was careful himself, driving home. He had good reason. He was going to have to choose, very soon, between two distinct courses of action. He could walk into the Penzance police HQ, find the officer in charge of the boat-crash investigation and tell him that, on slender evidence, he thought their missing sixth man was Robert Tremaine—that, further, he believed Tremaine capable of deliberately downing an RNAS helicopter, capable of doing it again. If it had been Tremaine in the side ward last night, he would have a distinctive head injury. Tom could do this. He could probably throw enough suspicion on Tremaine to ground him at least.

Ruin his career, and shatter Flynn, perhaps beyond healing. Tom's other choice was to shut the fuck up and watch from a distance. If Tremaine hadn't sabotaged the Portsmouth helicopter, he had seen its destruction, and Flynn's, at close quarters. He was the only witness. He had seen to the repairs, put Flynn back together as nearly as he could in his own image. Right or wrong, Tom knew that, to all intents and purposes, Tremaine owned him. Loss of that ownership, that domination, might set Flynn free. Or cut through his strings like a scythe.

Whichever Tom chose, it would wait until morning. It would have to. Beneath all this concern for the greater human good, his own grief and loss were yawning like a pit.

When the hell had he fallen in love?

Another vehicle was parked on the turf outside the watchtower. Tom watched it with a sinking sense of disbelief. Apart from Flynn—and, of course, Tremaine—he had received no social calls since moving in. It was not a place where people dropped by. He didn't even recognise the rusty Ford hatchback. Didn't much care. Whoever it was, to Tom, they were simply an obstacle between him and the pit, where he did not want to fall but was losing the strength to hold on.

He got out of the Rover, and Victor Travers unfolded his bulk from behind the wheel of the other car, waving. “Tom,” he called. “Sorry to disturb you out here. I know you don't like visitors.”

God, when had he given that impression? It was true enough—or had been—but how had he made his aversion so plain? A notice tin-tacked to the tree on Sankerris village green? He made his way over to Victor, out of habit running through the visual checks he would have begun had his old friend just entered the surgery. No tremor, no weight loss. In fact, he looked as if he'd glued a little on, his huge frame less gaunt in its flesh. His colour was good. Tom realised he did know the Ford estate, after all. Vic's dad had driven it around Porth Harbour for years, usually with ladders and pots of creosote hanging out the back. It was just that he hadn't seen it in three years. Because Vic, having had the living crap land-mined out of him twice behind the wheel of an armoured truck, had not been able to drive.

Despite himself, Tom smiled. “Hi, Vic. You okay? Prescription run out?”

A shadow touched Victor's grin. “Don't blame you for thinking that. Been a right millstone round your neck since we got home, haven't I? No, I… The missus sent me out to see you were okay, actually. She said you looked like grim death this morning in surgery.”

“In surgery? I don't think I saw her.”

“Maybe not. But you did a nice job of fixing her ingrown toenail anyway.”

Tom shook his head. Yes. He remembered a human foot, some swelling, inflammation, the few strokes it took with a pair of nail shears to put it right. They didn't have their own chiropodist in Sankerris—he got the odd job like that. A human foot attached to a leg, attached to a familiar woman in a bright floral dress, looking at him in concern. “Sorry. Yes, I did see her. I was miles away.”

“Is something the matter, Tom? Florrie says you got into a punch-up with one of the lads from the airbase the other week.”

God, not you too.
“Florrie says too much,” he said grimly, and then regretted it. “Sorry, Vic. Bad day. You want to come in and talk?”

Vic looked down at Tom from the foot of height he had on him. His expression was thoughtful. “No. I think I've pretty much talked you to death over the last few years, haven't I? And I know you have bad days.” He reached out, put a large hand on Tom's shoulder and awkwardly squeezed it. “Just wanted to see you were all right. Come down and have dinner with me and Florrie some night, okay?”

Tom watched him depart. It struck him that both he and Victor had been chasing mirages out there in the Middle East. Vic had wanted excitement, adventure, and he himself…

Opening the door to the tower, distractedly greeting Belle, Tom tried to remember what he had joined up for. Just to bring the benefit of his medical skills to the front line? Hardly, although he had wanted to change things, make something out there better. He had been lonely—looking for just the kind of comradeship which had two minutes ago presented itself to him outside his own front door. Which had doubtless been here all the time, if he'd been brave enough to look. But he hadn't been brave. He'd been shy, too chained up even to accept the bright and unreserved love David Reay had laid in his lap.

Shy, stupid, blind. Sure of his own sexuality, too scared to take it with him into the army. Even if he was inclined to damn poor Flynn for cowardice, who was he to talk? He didn't have a leg to stand on.

And now Vic was gone, Belle fed and given her hour's runaround on the cliff tops. Tom looked around his home, which, for once during his occupation of it, could really use a cleanup. The undone dishes, the sheets he hadn't been able to bring himself to change since Flynn's brief visitation to his solitary bed, the books and newspapers scattered round the living room—all these had been his friends before, or handholds at least, when he was trying to stay out of the pit.

Locking the back and front doors behind him, securing his prison, Tom admitted to himself that he wasn't trying at all. He sat on the sofa, and after a minute picked up the receiver of the phone. He was aware that he was struggling not to ball up, to wrap his arms around himself, and stopped it. It was cold in here, that was all. He dialled the number of the locum doctor he shared with the surgeries in Newlyn and St. Just. Yes, she was available to cover for him tomorrow. That was good, Tom told her, absently pushing Belle away as she poked an anxious, food-speckled nose beneath his arm. He'd been called away unexpectedly—it would only be the one day.

And surely Flynn should be safe for that amount of time, shouldn't he? Until Tom emerged? He and Tremaine didn't fly together anymore, were in different branches of the service. No, he should be fine. Locked into a barrack room, beaten up and fucked raw, which was what he appeared to want. Fine…

The Stoli Elit was better chilled. Tom reckoned, if he gave it half an hour, he could almost disguise this oncoming bender from himself as a few pleasant drinks. The first part of it, anyway. And he was not so desperate, was he, that he couldn't put the bottle in the fridge and wait for thirty bloody minutes? He stood in the kitchen, rolling the bottle, with its bright contents and shining silver label, between his palms.

Rage shook him. No, he couldn't bloody wait. He was an addict, same as any bored housewife he tried to wean off sedatives or any junkie kid on the Penzance estates. An addict, a drunk, without even that last shred of self-control he could use to hide from his own shame. Without warning, the muscles in his arms and shoulders tensed—the same involuntary spasm that had pitched Rob Tremaine off his back and onto the cobbles at the Fox—and he found himself smashing the bottle down on the edge of the sink.

It did not so much break as explode. Tom stood at the end of his action, staring dully at the floor. He tried to be so gentle, didn't he? A doctor. But he didn't know his own strength. Given opportunity, motive, he could be just as much of a ham-fisted brute as Tremaine. If the bastard were here now, he would show him. Pull him off Flynn. Slam him down among the shards and batter him to death and beyond, rather than ever let him lay a hand on Flynn again.

The old flagstones were glimmering like a night sky. Hypnotic. A good idea. The raw ethanol evaporating off the spilled vodka rose into his brain. Shivering, Tom dragged a hand across his eyes and stumbled back into the darkness where the tower's stairs coiled down.

The second and third bottles came easy to his hands. He smashed them one after the other on the edge of the sink, this time feeling a kind of scarlet relief as the flying shards bounced back to slice at his palms and wrists. Blood joined the constellations and the vertiginous mess on the floor. He'd kicked his muddy boots off when he came in—did not notice, going back for a fourth, that he was barefoot, that the glass pierced his soles.

A terrible sound brought him to a halt. It was like a child's wail, except that no human throat could have made it. Tom wheeled round, grabbing at the table to stop himself from falling. For a moment there was nothing but his own fractured breathing and the drip of vodka on the flags—and then he saw his dog huddled against the kitchen's far wall. Trying to press herself through the stonework. Eyes wild, hackles raised… She was keening at him in absolute terror.

Tom let go a breath. “Oh, God. Belle.” He put the fourth bottle down on the table carefully. There was a bloodstained handprint on it, another on the scratched deal table's surface. Choking faintly, Tom glanced at his hands, made a distracted effort to wipe them on the backside of his jeans. “Belle, sweetheart.” He took a step towards her, and she cringed from him.

He didn't know her background, what had happened to her before she had been rescued. The shelter had her history, but Tom hadn't wanted to know, unable at that time to bear the knowledge of further cruelty or pain. Whatever it had been, he knew that he could be kind enough with her, patient and peaceful enough, to make it better. He crouched beside her. He was aware, from a great distance, that he was sobbing, great rough gasps that tore his chest.

“Oh,
Belle.
” When finally she let him touch her, he collapsed against the wall at her side. He drew his knees up, folded his arms across the top of his head. He could not breathe or see. The smell of blood and vodka filled his lungs; the sounds of his own grief flooded his ears. Balled up, clutching blindly at the dog's scruff with one hand, he wept, unable to believe the depth, the age, of the wounds gaping wide in him. What was he becoming? What had he already let himself become? The red tide swept through him, through and through, convulsing him until he began to retch dryly and see stars, and even then there was no stopping it, not for a long time, not until he wore himself out and exhaustion at last came to his rescue. His last awareness was of feeling his limbs go slack, of sliding wearily down onto the ancient chilly bones of the watchtower and closing his eyes.

The cool rush of wind-driven rain on glass brought him round. He opened his eyes and stared for a long time at the kitchen window, where silver-grey streaks were appearing, sudden bright patterns that destroyed themselves and flickered back, an endless repeat that soothed him.

It occurred to him that he was seeing the pane from an odd angle. A slight kilt off landscape, like a badly hung picture. He normally watched it in dignified perpendicular from his breakfast table. When he tried to correct the orientation, he became aware that his neck was hurting. That there was a sting in his hands and arms like the results of his long-ago tussle with a jellyfish off Porth Bay beach. That he was in fact curled up on his kitchen floor, and that things would have been a lot worse had Belle not forgiven him and lain down with her warm bulk between his spine and the wall.

He sat up with a grunt. The hot spell had broken, a silvery rainstorm now dancing round the tower. The shifting light gleamed dully on a thousand bits of broken glass smashed over the kitchen's flagstones. He croaked, “Jesus Christ,” shoving himself upright. He put out a hand to the dog. “Belle. Paw.”

She wasn't hurt, somehow. He checked each one of her feet, spreading the hairy pads. Ordering her to stay, he scrambled up, finding out as he did so that he didn't share Belle's discretion or her tough soles. He'd cut himself to ribbons, left a carnage of foot and handprints everywhere. He made the safest track he could to the little utility room, pulled a broom from it and began a swift, dry-mouthed clear-up, brushing the glass into shimmering heaps. The pain in his feet was extraordinary. He took a clinical interest in it, moving back and forth, back and forth, until every shard was swept up, bagged, wrapped in newspaper so the collection men wouldn't do themselves an injury, and dumped in the outside bin. Then he took the vacuum cleaner round. Powdered glass was worse than fragments; got into dog food and water, swallowed, inhaled…