Trowchester Blues 01 - Trowchester Blues by Alex Beecroft

Author:Alex Beecroft [Beecroft, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

A hammering at the door dragged Michael back to consciousness. He wormed a hand out of the sleeping bag and groped for his watch. 7 a.m. And he’d finally crashed at five. The walls still swung around him, pulsing in and out of focus, because he had not yet slept off the drink.

But whoever was at the door did not give a fuck about his hangover or his sleeping habits. They were not going away, and they were not toning it down. “What? Wait!” he growled, unzipping himself and rolling out of the bag onto the still-gritty floor. His stomach lurched as he stood, and his brains swirled in his skull like water around a plughole.

He found the keys inside his shoe and fumbled the deadlock open, twisted the Yale lock, and swung the door ajar. The two policemen on the other side gave him identical stares. He could feel them taking in the scruff of beard, the sweat- and dust-stained T-shirt in which he’d slept, the bleary gaze, the scent of booze, and the bandaged hands. He knew exactly what they were thinking because he would have thought it too.

“Mr. Michael May?” The senior one recovered first, his politeness underlining his disdain. He was a fine figure of a man, well over six feet tall, athletic, with clean-cut features and the kind of polished-silver hair normally reserved for movie actors. He looked down on Michael quite literally as he moved in, trying to force an entrance by mere politeness. “I’m Constable Shipton, this is Constable Lane. May we come in?”

“Sure.” Michael moved away from the door and picked up his trousers from the floor, hastily pulling them on while the police officers sized up the state of his house and drew what were undoubtedly correct conclusions. “What can I do for you?”

He didn’t like this. The police were his people, his clan. They were everything he had aspired to all his life, the family he had chosen. To have them turn up at his house like this—to have them look at him the way they were looking at him now—dropped the floor out of his universe.

I’m on your side. I’m one of you.

“Are you acquainted with a Mr. Fintan Hulme of the Bibliophile Bookshop, 43 High Street?”

Michael swallowed nausea and rage. Sat down on his futon bed, letting them stand over him. It was a mistake, drawing their eyes to the half-empty bottle of whiskey and the tin mug next to it.

Fuck.

“I am.”

“You are in fact Mr. Hulme’s boyfriend.” It wasn’t a question so much as a condemnation. Oh, there was nothing unprofessional in the man’s expression, movie-star perfect as it was, a kind of bland, dispassionate curiosity, but the contempt flowed off him like a liquid and closed over Michael’s bent head.

Was he Finn’s boyfriend? He wasn’t sure. I slept with him once wasn’t going to go down better. “I don’t know,” he admitted, wrong-footed and on the defensive, capable of admiring the officer’s interrogation technique and being appalled by it at the same time.

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