Road Kill

Twenty

When I opened my eyes the following morning, it was to find Sean lying on his side facing me, arm bent, head propped on his hand.

“Hi,” he said quietly, giving me one of those slow-release smiles.

“Hi yourself,” I said, feeling my breath hitch, my heart stutter. I stretched, hiding a yawn together with my self-consciousness behind my hand. “What is it with you and watching me sleep?”

He laughed, little more than a bubble of amusement, and reached to smooth a tangle of hair out of my eyes, using that distraction to neatly dodge the question. “You’re very peaceful when you sleep.”

“Not always,” I said. I paused. “And neither are you.”

The smile faded and Sean rolled away onto his back. The light filtering through the thin curtains touched on the healed scar at his shoulder and just for a moment I wished all his injuries had been merely physical. Instead, the one that had hurt him the most was the savage blow to his psyche and, as I well knew, treating those wounds could be a much more hit-and-miss affair.

“Ah,” he said. “I wondered what had brought you all the way over here from your own bed.”

“You don’t remember?”

He shook his head, frowning. “Nothing specific,” he said. “I never do unless something wakes me in the thick of it, so to speak.”

I passed over the admission of frequency. For the moment. “And then?”

He shrugged and it was my turn to rise up and lean over him. “Talk to me, Sean.”

A long sigh, a slow letting of breath. “Yes, I have nightmares,” he said at last, closing his eyes briefly. “Gut-wrenching vicious bloody nightmares.”

“The same one, or different?”

“Variations on a theme usually,” he said, using that flat emotionless voice I’d heard from him so many times before. “I’m either watching people die and doing nothing, or I’m killing them myself.”

“Who?”

He opened his eyes and flicked them sideways to meet mine. I saw him calculate whether to tell me the truth or just a version of it. Finally, he said frankly, “People I know. People I . . . feel strongly about. People I was in the army with, my friends, my family. The number of times I’ve slit my father’s throat in my sleep, the old bastard. Trouble is, I slit my mother’s alongside him without distinction. And then . . . there’s you.”

I laid a hand on his chest and told myself it was purely for balance. Under my palm his skin was taut and hot, a slightly elevated heartrate the only trace of his distress.

I stayed quiet, let him find his own way. “It’s like something’s trying to tell me that I’m only going to end up hurting you, Charlie,” he said then. “And not just you, but anyone I care for. It . . . worries me, sometimes.”

That was a dramatic understatement, I knew, but getting this kind of confession out of him at all was an achievement so I let it pass.

“Dreams are just a way of coping with the dross that’s going round in our heads,” I said at last. “I have them, too, y’know? I get to relive what happened to me in glorious Technicolor – the four of them, the dark, the cold. And it’s so powerful I can’t shake the reality of it. I can wake up freezing in the middle of a heatwave. And sometimes, yes, there are weird twists.” I hesitated, but he was being brutally honest, so why shouldn’t I? “Sometimes the only face I can see is yours.”

He winced. “Christ,” he murmured. “I’m not surprised you knocked me flat on my back the other night. I guess I was lucky you didn’t kill me.” He brushed a fingertip across the mark on his cheekbone and allowed his lips to twitch in bitter self-contempt. “God knows, I showed you enough ways to go about it.”

“Yes, but it does not have to be this way,” I said, angry with the effort of trying to keep the anguish out of my voice. “We can do something about it if we want to.” His eyes were on mine again, black like sorrow, and I couldn’t read a glimmer of his thoughts beyond them. “All we have to do is want to enough.”

“Oh, trust me, I want to,” he said with quiet feeling. I caught the gleam in his eye only a fraction before he reared up and tumbled me back onto the pillows. He swooped for the hollow of my neck like a vampire, muttering almost to himself, “Of that you can be quite certain.”

My hands clutched convulsively at the bedclothes while he feasted at the jagged pulse that raged beneath the scar at my throat, robbing me of breath along with logical thought and any willpower I might have once possessed. Flames ignited like arson along every nerve-ending until they threatened to engulf me totally.

At last, when I thought I’d go crazy under him, he came up for air. Both of us were gasping. His mouth traced lazily across my shoulder and my hands came together of their own volition to meet at his spine, delicately sketching the ripple of muscle beneath the skin. I felt him quiver under my touch. So tough, so strong, so vulnerable.

He shifted suddenly, rolling onto his back again and this time taking me with him, hands firm at my waist. I ended up sprawled along the full length of him, leaving me in no doubt just how badly he wanted me. But there was reticence about him, too, a shadow of restraint.

He was holding back to let me make all the running, I realised, doing nothing that was going to trip any alarms. Not this time. I put a fist either side of his shoulders and arched my back so I could look down at his face.

“I never thought of you as the kind of guy who’d lie back and think of England,” I said, and my voice was husky.

Sean laughed softly. “Oh, it’s not England I’m thinking about,” he said. The laughter fell away in the face of his sudden intensity. “It’s you, Charlie. It’s always been you.”

His hands lightly braceleted my wrists, then skimmed upwards to my shoulders and I felt my elbows almost buckle. When those long clever fingers finally brushed across my collarbones and dropped to my breasts, my arms gave out completely. I sagged into him.

Infinitely slowly, he nudged my chin up and kissed me. Something spun and shattered behind my closed eyelids. His hands moved lower down my body, his deft touch causing a trail of devastation.

My illusion of being in control was fragmenting, like the last few seconds before the crash when you still have the faint vain hope that you can ride out of this intact but you’re already beyond redemption. I knew I had only moments of sanity left before little things like consequences wouldn’t matter a damn.

I wrenched my mouth free and heard a mewl of protest that could possibly have been me. Robbed, Sean went for the pulse-point at my neck again and the haze of his breath against the shallow indentation below my ear was almost my undoing.

“Sean,” I managed, even as my vision bulged and distorted. “Wait—”

He gave a low groan of protest but immediately stilled. I didn’t have to ask him twice.

“Erm, you weren’t ever a Boy Scout by any chance, were you?” I asked, pulling back a little and trying to force the shakiness out of my voice.

I saw by the quick flash of his grin that he’d caught on right away, even if he was going to make me work for it. “No, but I got chucked out of the Cubs for fighting when I was seven,” he said lightly. “Does that count?”

“No. Have you got . . .?” I said, annoyed to find myself so tongue-tied. “I mean, I wasn’t expecting—”

He took pity on me. “Inside jacket pocket,” he said, nodding to where his leathers hung on the chair next to the bed. He lifted up and nipped at my lower lip with his teeth. His hands had begun to coast again, making bolder forays that wreaked havoc with my concentration. “You don’t have to be a Boy Scout to be prepared, you know.”

I twisted under his touch, gulping in air like it was my last breath. “So sure of me, were you?”

“Sure? Never,” he said. “Hopeful? Always.”

Sean stretched out for the pocket he’d indicated. I’ve never been so glad to see a condom. He stripped the foil packet open without a fumble but still it was all taking much too long. The need was a brutal chanting in my head now, a roaring in my blood that echoed burning in my belly.

Desperate for relief I scraped against him, growling in sheer frustration, limbs slick with sweat. Then his fingers were grasping my hips to hold me steady, ready, poised, but at the last second he hesitated. I could have wept.

“Christ, I don’t want to hurt you,” he gritted out. “I’m not sure, if we go much further, that I’ll be able to stop.”

“Then don’t,” I said, swept with certainty as my voice cracked. “Don’t stop, I mean. Oh God, please don’t stop.”

And somehow he knew that I was way past the point where I needed gentleness from him. His hands jerked downwards.

I came the instant he was inside me.

There was a moment of suspension, then I was flooded by an overwhelming barrage of sensations, a sweet rush so sharp it could almost have been pain. It surged up through my body and burst out of the top of my head, scattering my brains, exquisite and unbearable.

My last coherent thought was a fierce affirmation. This was right. It was meant to be. Sean and I.

And to hell with everyone who tried to tell us different.

***

Next thing I knew, someone was hammering at the door to the room. Groggy and disorientated, I had no idea how long we’d laid together.

I felt Sean slide out from under my cheekbone almost before I’d come to. He yanked his T-shirt over his head and pulled on his shorts, checking me briefly over his shoulder as he moved to the door.

I just had time to sit up in bed and clasp the sheets primly around me as he slipped the chain and opened up.

“Wakey wakey, Charlie! Come on, you’ll miss breakfast and—”

William’s voice broke off suddenly as he registered Sean in the doorway. Embarrassingly, the rest of the Devil’s Bridge Club also peered in through the gap. Only Tess was missing – if I had to be thankful for small mercies.

Paxo pushed to the front and led the way into the room, glaring at the obvious signs that Sean and I had shared the same bed. As if that wasn’t confirmation enough, I flushed painfully, feeling the glow of it suffuse my face right up to the roots of my hair.

Paxo’s outraged gaze went from Sean to Jamie and back again. “Jesus H Christ,” he said, his voice cruising with disgust. He jerked his head towards me. “Is there a fucking rota or something for her I don’t know about?”

Sean’s face never changed. He took a step forwards and closed in on Paxo, butting up against him, forcing the smaller man to retreat until he was hard up against the wall to the bathroom. Sean’s shoulders were angled towards me, his body blocking the movement of his hands, but suddenly Paxo’s colour bleached out and his eyes bugged.

“I’ll pretend – for now – that you didn’t say that,” Sean said, his voice soft and pleasant. “But if you’re ever foolish enough to try and repeat it, Martin, we may have to have this little chat again, OK?”

He stepped back and Paxo started to double over very slowly, like a tree falling. He got far enough down to brace his fists on his thighs and stopped like that, fighting tears and asphyxia. He was wearing his bike jeans and the thick leather should have afforded him some protection. But – in this case – nowhere near enough.

The others stood frozen, unsure exactly what it was that they’d just been witness to. Sean turned back to them and smiled.

“If you wouldn’t mind giving us half an hour to get sorted,” he said politely, “we’ll meet you downstairs, OK?”

Dumbly, they nodded, began to file out. William looped an arm round Paxo’s shoulders but Paxo shrugged him off. He straightened with an effort and staggered out, red-faced, coughing. Daz was last to move. His eyes met Sean’s and clashed silently, then slid away.

Sean shut the door firmly behind them. “Not quite the discreet assignation I had in mind,” he said, his expression rueful. “Sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said and was surprised to realise that it didn’t. Not any more. “I assume that Martin is Paxo’s real name?”

He nodded. “Martin Paxton. Manages a bar in Lancaster. Daz – Darren Henderson – runs some kind of craft centre just outside Manchester, and William Lacey works for the ferry company. Madeleine dug out the gen on them and I didn’t think it would do any harm to scare Paxo a little.”

“On top of halfway castrating him, you mean?”

Sean shrugged. “You would have done the same,” he said with the barest hint of a smile. “I just got to him first.”

He moved back across to the bed but as he did so his foot kicked something that was hidden just under the valance. He bent to retrieve it and when he stood he was holding an ornate silver ring between his fingers.

“Yours?”

“Damn,” I said. “It must be one of Tess’s. She was here last night.”

His eyebrows went up. “Wow,” he said. “So Paxo was right about you. Girls as well – I’m impressed.”

“Oh please,” I muttered, trying to keep my face stern and failing miserably.

He snagged a corner of the sheet and whipped it out of my hands, ignoring my yelp of protest. “Come on,” he said, grinning. “Out of bed, you. You can fill me in while you’re in the shower.”

He showered quickly first, then shaved while I showered. I felt surprisingly relaxed amid the unfamiliar domesticity, helped by the fact that we were talking all the while. I ran through the events of the evening before, from the reappearance of the Vauxhall to Tess’s near miss and what both she and Jamie had told me.

When I emerged, it was to find Sean absently turning the ring he’d found over in his fingers, looking at the pretty cut of the stone against the light from the window.

“So we still don’t know why Jamie borrowed the money in the first place,” he said, sounding distracted.

“No,” I said, rubbing a towel vigorously over my hair. Although I kept it roughly in a bob, no longer than my jawline, there wasn’t the time to dry it properly and after a day scrunched under a helmet I knew it was going to be uncontrollable. “But I reckon he might fold if I keep nagging at him. I’ll have another go . . . what is it?”

Sean was holding Tess’s ring up and something in his face had changed.

“What do you make of this?” he asked, throwing it across to me so I had to let go of my towel to catch it. I rolled the ring in my fingers for a moment and shrugged, frowning. “What about it?”

“Unless I’m very much mistaken, that stone is a genuine diamond. A big one.”

“You’re joking!” I said, but knew even as I spoke that he was not. He had no reason to. I looked again, still doubtful. “But it’s huge.”

“Mm,” he said. “Best part of a carat. Beautiful clarity and hardly any occlusions.”

“Occlusions?”

“Flaws. You value diamonds on the four “c’s – carat, cut, clarity and colour. This is hitting all the buttons.”

“And you know this because . . .?”

“I’ve done some work out in Africa and there are a lot of these rocks about. It pays to know what you’re looking at.” He smiled. “Plus, I’ve just spent twenty-four hours with that very chatty and knowledgeable Dutch gemstone courier and I was interested in what he had to say.”

“Tess told me she’d made it herself,” I said, remembering how drunk she’d been. Too drunk, I would have thought, to have lied convincingly.

“She probably did make the setting,” Sean said, peering inside the band. “It’s not a bad effort but there’s no hallmark and it doesn’t do justice to the quality of the stone.”

“How the hell can she afford a diamond this size?” I wondered.

Sean shook his head. “Officially, she can’t,” he said bluntly. “She’s supposed to be a jewellery maker but she just about lives on state benefits more than she works – as far as the taxman is aware, anyway.”

“She had a fistful of rings like this one,” I said slowly. “If they’re all real she must be draped in a fortune. So where’s she getting the money?”

“I think that’s something we need to determine – and sooner rather than later,” he said, his face grim. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve no desire to find out the hard way that the reason I’m along on this jaunt at all is to play minder to a load of drug mules.”

By the time we got downstairs and checked out, the others were all waiting for us – rather pointedly, I thought – in the car park. The sun was already burning brightly and they sat and sweated inside their leathers.

They had unchained the bikes and were sitting on board. Daz even had his Aprilia ticking over. While Sean and I got ourselves strapped down and zipped up and sorted, he blipped the throttle repeatedly. The bike’s exhaust made an impatient gruff bark of sound but I refused to be rushed through my preflight checks. I knew, once we set off, I wasn’t going to get the chance to put right any minor irritations like a rucked-up sleeve or a wayward piece of fringe in my eyes.

I’d been hoping I’d get the opportunity to give Tess her ring back and ask her about it, but she was already mounted up on the back of Daz’s bike, helmet on. If anything, she seemed reluctant to meet my eyes, never mind talk to me, and she certainly didn’t look like someone who’s just lost a massive diamond. I left the ring in my jacket pocket. There’d be time later.

Once we were on the road it was clear that the boys were taking their temper out on their machinery. Daz set off as he meant to go on, with scant regard to Tess clinging on for dear life behind him. Paxo was right up there dicing with him, almost goading him to greater excesses. Every now and again I caught the mutter of cursing over my headset when sheer stomach-churning adrenaline made maintaining radio silence an impossibility.

I tried not to give the FireBlade too much pain until the engine had warmed through. Then I clicked my visor fully closed and dropped everything down a gear.

I shot past Jamie almost at once and ended up hard on William’s heels. The big guy had abandoned his usual laid-back riding style and let the devil take command. He was a natural rider, surprisingly quick for someone whose movements never seemed hurried, and whose natural bulk acted like a permanent drogue chute.

By the time we had covered the few miles up the coast to Glenarm I was actually enjoying myself. In my mirrors I kept getting the occasional glimpse of Sean holding station on Jamie’s rear quarter, like he was shepherding him along at a slower pace. And behind them, nothing.

Then, as we passed the road that turns back to Ballymena, a dark grey Vauxhall Vectra flipped out of the junction and fell in behind us.

I saw Sean react, dropping back slightly, coming off his line for corners and allowing the gap between Jamie and the Blackbird to widen. I knew he was putting himself between Jacob’s kid and the threat. He did it immediately, without any hesitation, and suddenly that very fact terrified me.

“Daz,” I said abruptly into my voice-activate mic, “Hey Daz, we’ve got company. That Vauxhall’s back on our tail again.”

“So what?” Daz’s voice came back, tight with concentration and bravado, both at the same time. “Let him follow us if he wants. We’ve got nothing to hide.”

The Vauxhall driver stayed with us, neither closing up nor significantly dropping back, until we turned off onto the steep and twisting coast road at Cushendun. Then he braked hard and pulled over, as though he knew where we were heading. As though he knew he had us cornered.

The thin film of anxiety took the shine off the rest of the ride. I should have been admiring the staggering scenery and the view of the Mull of Kintyre across the flat-calm water of the Irish Sea. Instead I spent too much time watching behind me and got a couple of corners badly wrong. Enough to jerk my heartrate up, to start my hands sweating inside my gloves and to make the FireBlade seem brutishly unwieldy under me.

By the time we turned off into the car park at the Giant’s Causeway I was relieved to be stopping. Daz and Paxo were already off the bikes with their lids on the bars and their leathers open to the breeze coming up off the water, revealing sodden T-shirts underneath.

Paxo dragged on a cigarette like an asthmatic at his inhaler. Tess was sitting on the grass with her legs stretched out in front of her, looking slightly shell-shocked by the experience. Daz looked from one to the other and grinned triumphantly as William and I pulled in alongside him.

“You lot are riding like a bunch of old women,” Daz jeered.

“Old women?” Paxo said, his voice an outraged squawk that made his cigarette jiggle between his lips. “I was right up your arse all the way here, mate.”

“At least the rest of us stand a chance of surviving long enough to get to be old,” William said as he unbuckled his helmet and ducked out of it. His voice was placid but the sweat ran down his temples and beaded across his upper lip.

As I took off my own lid I ran a hand through my hair and realised that my prediction about the state of it had been on the optimistic side. I looked like a wet traveller’s dog and felt worse.

Jamie and Sean were last to arrive. The twisty roads had given Jamie a better chance of keeping his smaller bike close to the pack than long fast straights would have done, but still he looked exhausted. Sean yanked his lid off and, although I could tell by the muscle jumping in his jaw what he thought of the pace Daz was setting, he held his tongue.

“Who’s for an ice cream?” Daz asked brightly. Before anyone could answer, he headed off towards the café. As he walked away from us he was clicking his fingers together nervously, like he was on edge and couldn’t keep them still. I wondered seriously if he was on something.

As though the same thought had occurred to them at the same time, William and Paxo exchanged silent glances and followed Daz to the café. Jamie muttered about finding the loo and went after them.

Sean stripped off the top half of his leathers and leaned against the Blackbird to let the sun and the wind dry him off. He seemed relaxed but he had angled himself, I noticed, so he could keep an eye on the approach road.

I went across and sat beside Tess on the grass, digging in my pocket.

“By the way – I think you dropped this in my room last night,” I said, holding the ring out to her. The diamond sparked and flared in the sunlight.

I was watching her face carefully enough to see the spasm of horror that passed across her features, quickly damped down into something approaching mild relief.

“Oh brilliant, thanks,” she said, taking the ring from me. She dug in the inside pocket of her leathers and produced a clear plastic bag full of her remaining jewellery. I assumed her fingers were still too sore to get the rings back on. Small wonder she had hardly noticed one of them was missing.

“It’s a lovely ring,” I said, cautious. Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Sean had stilled, listening, even though his attention seemed for all the world to be elsewhere. “It must be worth a bit.”

Tess laughed a little too loudly and for a little too long. “Nah, I told you – I made it myself,” she said. She swung the bag round her finger, casually, so the contents jingled together.

“So, what’s the stone?” I asked, guileless. “It’s a nice looking cut.”

“Mm, I liked it,” she said, still distracted by the way the rings danced in the light. “Shame it’s only paste.”

She looked up as she said it and I knew she’d realised full well that she didn’t have me fooled. And she didn’t care either. She caught my momentarily dumbfounded expression and laughed again.

“What? You never thought this lot was real, did you?” she demanded, shaking the bag and still grinning. “Oh yeah, right – like I’d walk round drippin’ in diamonds! Money comin’ out of my ears, me.”

For what it was worth, I would have pressed her further but the boys reappeared at that point.

“Oh good, ice creams,” she said unnecessarily. “Hey! Mine’s the one with the Flake in it.” She jumped to her feet and trotted over to them, stuffing the bag of rings back into her pocket as she went.

I got to my feet to follow, but Sean caught my arm as I went past and shook his head.

“Let it go, Charlie,” he murmured. “For now. You won’t get anything useful out of her.”

After a moment’s hesitation, I nodded reluctantly, leaned my hip against the FireBlade, and waited for the boys to reach us.

Apart from Daz, they were carrying two ice cream cones each, all of which had chocolate Flakes in that had already semi-melted in the heat. Jamie had given one ice cream to Tess and William passed me another. That left Paxo with the one for Sean, a fact that had him scowling more furiously than usual. He practically handed it over at arm’s length, snatching his fingers back like he was expecting the other man to bite them. Sean just smiled his predator’s smile, unnerving him further, and accepted graciously.

“Come on then,” Daz said, bouncing on his toes. “We’re here to see a bit of culture, so let’s go have a look-see at this causeway.” He picked the Flake out and sucked the ice cream off it. “Any ideas who built it?”

William rolled his eyes. “Nobody built it, you jackass,” he said. His sweat moustache had now been replaced with a vanilla ice cream one but he didn’t seem to care. “It’s made up of basalt. The rock forms that shape naturally, without any interference from anyone else.”

There was a bus ferrying people down the steep incline to the beach but we chose to walk, eating our ice creams as we went. The landscape was alien and deeply strange. A tangled pile of curious hexagonal stones, stacked and jumbled like someone had pushed them off the edge of the cliff above with a JCB and left them where they fell.

We joined the other tourists who were walking and clambering over the rocks. Close up the stones looked a little like interlocking concrete sections. It wouldn’t be hard to be convinced that the whole structure was man-made.

“Breathtaking, isn’t it?” William murmured, staring across the formation.

“Yeah, suppose so,” Paxo said, looking around him with a totally nonplussed expression on his face. He checked his watch. “Now then, where’s this distillery, mate?”

He glanced round automatically for Daz as he spoke, but discovered the other man was standing a little apart from the others, tense, wired. Sean was close to Daz, watching him as though he was about to break.

We converged on the pair of them in time to hear Sean say, “Tell them, Daz. It’s time. Tell them or I will. You can’t go on like this.”

Daz threw him a panicked look but we were too close by then and it was too late to say more if he didn’t want the rest of us to hear it, too.

“Tell us what?” Jamie asked, worried. “What’s going on?”

“Daz has something he needs to tell all of you,” Sean said, stressing the need. Not want, I noted. It was clear that whatever secret Daz had confessed to Sean, the last thing he wanted to do was share it any further.

“What is it?” Paxo demanded. He came forwards, slinging his arm round Daz’s shoulders and giving him a friendly shake, grinning. “Come on, mate! We’re all in this together, aren’t we? You can tell us anything. How bad can it be?”

With a final desperate glance at Sean, Daz swallowed and shrugged helplessly.

“OK,” he said. “You see, guys, the thing is . . . I’m gay.”