Free Half Moon Chambers by Fox Harper Page B

smile. If I wasn't careful, there was a great deal I could find charming about Rowan Clyde. I wanted to ask if he shared my gay man 's perspective on art, and not so I could discuss painting with him. "All right. Coffee would be good. And I couldn't chase you down a fire escape if you did decide to leg it, so I'll have to take that on trust."
    He disappeared through a doorway over - arched by two embracing young gods, and I sat down at the table in the chair he'd indicated.
    Everything in this place was extraordinary. Where I had functional melamine, he had a large bench table that could have come from a junkyard or the British Museum. Its worn surface was a patchwork of different polished stones, some with fossils in them , nautilus shells and the little flowers I'd helped Lily discover were called crinoids. The four chairs around it were in four different styles, but all were painted with twisting vines and jungle blossoms , so similar in style to the murals that they had to be by the same hand. The oculi windows added to the offbeat, slightly under-sea effect. My flat left me exposed to the elements beyond the thinnest shell of concrete and glass, but in here I could lose myself, forget all about the noisy world in the streets below. It was Friday night, almost sundown . Soon the daytime city people would go home , passing on their way to their buses and trains the first wave of incoming party animals, the girls in their microskirts and the lads all tattoos and cropped T-shirts, alcopop running like antifreeze in their veins. I'd used to love the prickling change in the atmosphere. The beginning of a night shift, and trouble almost guaranteed to break out somewhere. Jack and I had thrived on it, waiting in our squad car for the call...
    "Here you go."
    I hid a startled flinch. The process of losing myself had already begun -- I usually avoided mournful comparisons between that time and this.
    "Thanks," I said, taking the nice stoneware mug he handed me. A china one would have burned my fingers . I was indefinably relieved when he sat down opposite me, not close by my side. "This won 't take long. I don't want to keep you from your work ."
    He glanced at the canvas propped up on the far wall. "Oh, that's not urgent. I'm on an apprenticeship programme with the Langring. They give me stuff out of their basement to work on at home -- low-value pieces where it doesn't matter too much if I screw up -- and their senior curator gives me feedback, and lets me loose on the real thing once I've got it right."
    "Do you like it?"
    "Well, it beats the call centres. The pay's barely enough to cover this place and the next stage of my training, but that's okay. I like cold beans , and they lose flavour once they're out of the tin ."
    There went my preconception of the wealthy parents . I didn't usually get that kind of thing wrong . What was it about Rowan Clyde, that I couldn 't reach past his smoke and mirrors? I was allowing the conversation to drift. With an effort I pulled back onto track. "Rowan, I have to ask you to reconsider standing witness in the Goran Maric case ."
    Immediately he tensed. Social call or not, until now he'd seemed open, almost pleased to see me . "I've told you I didn't see anything. I'm not sure ," he said slowly, "which part of that you don't understand ."
    "I understand what you've told me." He'd been right about the coffee -- it was excellent, and I felt almost guilty for enjoying its rich, nuanced flavour while I set about tying him to the rack.
    "Forgive me if haven't been convinced by it. I'm sorry our uniformed officers weren't more subtle about approaching you, but they'd had clear intel from our crime-scene guys that you were in the ground -floor hallway soon after the killings happened . I had a look around down there. If you cross the hall, you can hardly help but see into the basement ."
    "Then why aren't you chasing the other twenty people who must have been through there that night ?"
    "We did. We