Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues (3 page)

She flinched, and he wished he hadn’t said anything. This whole talking-about-your-feelings lark was fine when your feelings were fit to be seen, but it just spread the shit around when they weren’t.

“We,” Jenny said. “
We
are the structure that stands against all of that, Michael. You, me, the unit, the CID, all the button mob on the beat. We’re here to stop it. And we did, today. We stopped him.”

“Too late for Stacey, though.” May’s turn to hide his face so she wouldn’t see him fight off tears. He fixed his gaze on black-painted railings rather than see wheelie bins just like the ones under which he’d lain wondering if he was going to be shot. He wouldn’t have to imagine the light flooding in from the sash windows they passed, that were the same ubiquitous pattern as the ones in the house where he’d found that little corpse. “I can’t look at these streets and not think of going down into every basement, finding it flooded with blood. The whole fucking city’s just floating on blood.”

Jenny took his elbow again, but she was quiet until they turned onto Westbourne Grove. The shopping centre’s cupola was lit up magenta pink against London’s orange night sky. Golden palm trees outside Khan’s gleamed with familiar welcome.

“Maybe this is a good thing, then,” she said gently. “I don’t want you to go, but it sounds like you really need to get away.”

Inside, Tahir showed them to their usual table, but maybe he recognised when a man was so bowed with shame he could barely stand up, because he forwent his usual banter in favour of turning up with two whiskeys and a basket of bread, then leaving them so May could pull himself together in peace.

What kind of a man was he, that he could believe in this so much and still find himself unable to do it? Maybe his father had been right all along; he was useless and just too stupid to realise it until now. He was a mummy’s boy, a cringing little crybaby who would never amount to anything. Well, that had turned out to be true, hadn’t it? And perhaps he could live with that part, if only the anger would go away, the terrible werewolf anger that was his father’s true legacy. Could he be turning into the bastard? This explosion of fury, could it be some kind of late-onset psychosis that would eat him out from within, leave him bitter and cruel, delighted by his loved ones’ fear? He’d rather slit his wrists right now than let that happen.

He sipped the drink, the burn and buzz setting a thin film of gold between him and the darkness. The bread seemed to solidify him, and he remembered he had not eaten today, too rushed for breakfast, too broken for lunch.

Sighing, he looked up into Smith’s smile as she nodded Tahir back over and ordered for him. There was a finality in her gaze he didn’t want to think about. “So what are you going to do now?”

May got the pieces of himself together enough to smile up at Tahir. Another person he was going to miss, another regret. They could have got closer if he’d taken the time.

“Is it a funeral?” Tahir asked and put his hand down tentatively on May’s shoulder. He was a beautiful guy, with his black curling hair and his strong brows and eyes dark as polished obsidian. He’d made a couple of passes at May since his divorce, which May had rebuffed because the force was old-fashioned about queers and he was married to his work.

Wrong choices everywhere. He reached up and covered Tahir’s long hand with his own squarer paw. Too beautiful a boy for a forty-year-old failure like him anyway. The guy deserved better. “Kind of,” he said, distracted and regretful at the way Tahir’s fingers tightened on the sore muscles. “Funeral for my career. I’m leaving the force, leaving London.” He indicated a spare seat. “You want to sit down?”

“You wait until now to ask me?” Tahir took his hand back. There was a brief moment of indecision, and then May could practically see him make the decision to disengage. He was very gentle about it, though. “But I mustn’t.” He nodded at the rest of the room, where the tables had begun to fill up. “My father will have my guts if I sit and chat during the dinner rush.”

He patted May’s shoulder again, maybe consolingly, certainly in farewell. “We should have seized the day sooner. But I hope it goes well, your new life.”

May watched him leave with the sense that everything was being cut away. A new life, eh? But he didn’t want to have to let go of the old.

“So.” Jenny applied herself to tearing her naan into orderly rectangles, eating first the curved pieces around the edges that disrupted its neat lines. For the first time that day, there was something resembling her normal liveliness in her eyes. “You didn’t shut him down this time. That’s interesting.”

May relaxed minutely. If she was teasing him, then one thing at least was still all right. “Just leave it.”

“I’m having new thoughts about why your wife left you.” She shuffled to one side to let Tahir put down rice, balti, and a bottle of Tiger beer.

“Yeah, bringing that up is guaranteed to raise my mood.” May smiled back, because oddly enough it was true. The shit in his life was hard enough without having to go home to arguments and recriminations and guilt. At least he was alone now, where he could drink himself into a stupor and pass out on the couch with no one there to tell him how pathetic he was.

“That’s what I thought,” she said, and partitioned her food into two careful camps, curry on one side of the plate, rice the other, a perfect straight line where they touched. “You know, I always thought she was a terrible bitch. But it can’t have been much fun being some dour copper’s full-time beard.”

He wasn’t sure how they’d got to this of all subjects. He’d been so careful on the job, never a one-night stand, never a lingering glance, just “unhappily married straight guy” leading to “divorced and bitter.” It wasn’t even that he expected her to be biphobic, just that the days when it wasn’t safe for people to know he was bi were not exactly long ago. “You knew?”

She waved a naan soldier at him in triumph. “Not until right then. You walked straight into that one.” She had relaxed enough to slump against the back of her seat, cross her legs, and rest her cowboy-booted foot against the pillar of the table. He recognised the pose. Tea-break time. Watercooler moment. Shooting the shit.

“Seriously. I can see why you haven’t told anyone before, but—like Tahir says—you have a new life now. You could find someone, settle down. You know? Actually have a chance to be happy. It could be great. Anyone in mind?”

“Are you joking? In my state? What if they got on my wick and I punched them? I’m not . . . really not fit to be with myself at the moment, let alone someone else.”

“You wouldn’t do that.” She nudged the balti pan over to his side of the table so that he could eat the quarter of it that she didn’t have space for. “I know you. You’re a lamb in wolf’s clothing—”

“But I don’t trust myself.”

“No.” Her smile turned bitter again. “No, and I guess you don’t want to have to deal with someone else until you at least know where you stand with yourself. Fine, then. No boyfriend just yet. But what
are
you going to do?”

He’d been trying to avoid this realisation from the moment he’d cleared out his desk, but hey, that was cowardly too. He should face the facts as they were. Not facing them would not make them go away.

“My dad left me the house.” A little clench of anxiety, a pain in his chest like a stomach ulcer. “From all accounts it’s a tip.” Brown patterned wallpaper. Brown curtains with great cream-coloured roses on them like moonlight seen through the slats of a trap. “But it’s a waterfront property. There’s a boatyard next door and a narrowboat docked at the end of the garden. I’m going to go there . . .”

Ramming his head back between the bars.

He’s not actually there anymore. And even if he was, it’s been a long time since he could hurt you.

“And I’m going to do it up, see if I can sell it for a profit, buy something else with the money, do the same again. You know? I like making stuff with my hands.”

“You’re good at it too,” she agreed. “Those bookshelves you put in for me? They. Are. Awesome. All my friends think they’re some kind of bespoke designer ware, with that curve. And yes. It’ll do you good to repair things, make ugly stuff beautiful. Come to terms with the past. All that jazz.”

He had the sneaking suspicion that at some point she had stopped talking about shelves and segued seamlessly into suggesting that he could make some peace with his memories, with the old bastard and the place where he grew up. That seemed needlessly optimistic, but he was not going to tell her so now that they’d both crawled their way out of the morass of despair and grief. It was a fake hope, but a fake hope was better than none.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Maybe it’s time to clear out some old stuff and make way for the new. After all, I’m about due for a midlife crisis. I should buy a sports car. Get a tattoo. Drive off and see the world.”

“Have a few one-night stands.” Jenny’s smile made a good attempt at impish. Didn’t quite get there, but he wasn’t going to point out the deficit. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot of good sex to catch up with.”

“Is that you objectifying me now? Is that like one final indignity?”

She made up the shortfall with interest, her smile flicking straight through to delighted laughter. “If only I’d known earlier. You could have been my sassy gay friend.”

That pinged him wrong. He thought of saying,
Listen, I’m not gay, yeah? I’m bi. Different thing.
But that seemed a little harsh and this was a bad time to start an argument. Best to let it pass for now.

“Hey, I still can be your sassy bi friend, I hope.” He reached over the table and took her hand. It turned in his grasp, clasped back, and squeezed.

“Absolutely.” Her smile had an element of apology in it. “You’d better expect me at weekends and Christmases. Holidays too maybe. Where is it you’re from anyway? Is it nice?”

Her enthusiasm was catching. He remembered that he’d liked the town, everywhere that wasn’t his parents’ house at least. “Yes, it’s good. Trowchester. Fourth smallest city in the country. Takes three-quarters of an hour to walk across it by foot from one side to the other, and half of that’s river and floodplain, but it’s got a cathedral and a charter, so it’s a city, officially.”

Tahir rematerialised to clear the empty plates, returned with a platter of halva, cham cham, and rosewater rasgulla, which he put down with an air of apology. “The meal is on the house, of course. Father said if we had known you were going, we would have done something better.”

May bent his head over the sweets while he worked on smoothing out his anguished look, thrown straight back into grief by the kindness. “I didn’t know either,” he managed at last. “It was— It was kind of sudden.”

“But you will come back?”

And that was the killer, wasn’t it? He didn’t know who he was anymore. He couldn’t stand London. He couldn’t stand himself. But he had a hard time believing anything would be better in the place he’d left as soon as it was legal to go. “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to be left of me to come back.”

He should have kept his mouth shut because Jenny’s smile fell off like rotten plaster. “Phone me,” she said. “Whenever. I’m always going to be here. You’re not alone.”

He could have waited, could have clung on until the bitter end, watching daytime TV, or walking aimlessly down the streets where he expected every loose paving slab to tip up and reveal a corpse.

But having made up his mind to leave, he was impatient to get it over with.

He found a leasing company to take responsibility for his flat, put his belongings in storage to be reclaimed or thrown out later when he had the energy to deal with them, and set out ill-advisedly late on Wednesday evening, feeling like Major Tom in the song—high above everything, the world spinning by without him. It was nice of Jenny to say he wasn’t alone, but she was wrong. He was alone, and he was unimportant, and if he died on the motorway on the way to the Midlands, there was no one in his life for the authorities to contact about it.

This realisation gave everything a surreal, disconnected feel. The traffic on the M25, bumper-to-bumper jams, insane drivers, interminable crawling chaos? It was like he wasn’t involved with it at all. Someone else was piloting his body through the turns.

Night fell with a rolling of clouds as if the world had drawn on a blanket, and as he finally freed himself from London’s traffic, the rain began to fall. He reached for a CD, refused to sink to the level of listening to Pink Floyd while depressed, and put on Vangelis instead. It did nothing to counter the sense of being alone in a tiny vehicle while the world did its thing without him, but at least it made him feel like Rick Deckard from
Blade Runner
. Washed up, yes, but unaware that he was about to embark on an adventure that would change his life. If he was going to be a retired and pathetic wreck, he might as well model himself on a retired and pathetic hero.

He’d managed to achieve some kind of Zen acceptance of fate for most of the drive, but when the landscape became familiar, when he started to recognise the hills, know the names on the signposts, everything closed back in.