Free Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues by Alex Beecroft Page B

for them, tainted as they were by the pieces of silver with which he’d bought them. He felt as hunted and as defenceless as he’d been in the police station the day they’d arrested him. They’d put him in the cells to wait for Tom to arrive with the bail money, and he’d seen how easily he could end up spending years in this place where an ability to talk fast was always going to lose out to the clenched fist. If he was honest, that experience had scared the shit out of him, and he couldn’t face it again. Even the thought that tonight Michael might be looking in at the book club made him queasy with guilt.
    Stopping outside the shop to adjust the awning over his table of charity books ( Take and donate as it pleases you. If you have no money, take anyway. ) to make sure they were out of the rain, his gaze was caught by the wet cobbles, by the long street of receding shop fronts, now populated only by one other human being bundled into a dark coat and disguised under a yellow umbrella. It was a moment where everything stopped. Everything stopped and waited for him to reach his decision.
    “Never again,” he said, inviting the rain as a witness. “That was it. That was the last time. You hear me, rain? This time I really mean it.”
    He thought perhaps something had heard. The weight eased a little off his chest. The clouds chose that moment to part, and the street glittered as though diamonds had been spilled underfoot. At the touch of sunlight on his face, he breathed in, and something released in him. Who would have thought he’d been carrying that reservation all these years without even knowing it? That little hidden place that said, “I know we’ve gone straight, but perhaps . . . If the reason is good enough. If it seems like fun . . . we might go back. We don’t want to be boring, after all.”
    And now it was gone. Five years later, and he’d finally accepted this was the right move.
    He found himself smiling as he walked in the door. All of his leather chairs, armchairs, and window seats were occupied. Kevin took his feet off the desk abruptly at his presence but failed to look convincingly guilty. And it was Friday, a busy time, but he’d just had a revelation, and he deserved to celebrate that. He put the pastries down on the desk and gave Kevin a smile that made the boy side-eye him in return.
    “Sweets for the sweet. My boy, how do you fancy holding down the fort here while I give myself a well-earned holiday?”
    “Do I get paid for doing your job as well as mine?”
    “I suppose you do.”
    “Then have a great time.”

    Boatbuilding plans and a house with a narrowboat at the bottom of the garden. Finn walked along the towpath, looking up at the expensive grey stone houses that lined the river. A less self-aware man might have tried to pretend he was not hoping to accidentally bump into the object of his interest, but Finn was not that man. It was ridiculous to have to wait the many hours until this evening when a little application of reason and effort could engineer a meeting earlier.
    He clambered over Petty Curie lock, its great black wooden levers jutting out into the path in the shut position, as a blue-painted canal boat with a willow-pattern theme began to float up to the higher level. A charmless concrete arch of a bridge spanned the river here, and when he stood on it, he could see a neat little marina on the left-hand side, a rotting barge in a rusty crane, and beyond that a faded red narrowboat veiled under willows at the end of a garden. Glimpses of a house were all solemn stone walls and wrought iron, but he spared it scarcely a glance, because there was a figure by the river’s edge, clearing junk out of the narrowboat, and there was his quarry, as large as life and twice as handsome.
    Finn strolled down from the centre of the bridge and stood on the same side of the canal as Michael, thinking. If he was a cop on active duty, merely lying to pique Finn’s interest, then he