The Bruise_Black Sky (7 page)

Nikolas pushed his chair away and glanced around urgently. “Shut up! They’ll think I’ve touched you or something!”

Miles started to sniff and produced a huge handkerchief. “What do you mean? How can you touch me in the refractory?”

Nikolas began to snigger, which he knew was entirely inappropriate. He checked his watch, thought for a moment or two, and then nodded. “Come. Show me what you have contracted me for, Miles Toogood. This is a matter of honour, no? Between gentlemen?”

Miles brightened. “Oh, yes, like a code of honour. The warriors’ code. Oh! Just like in
Warriors
! Have you read Warriors? It’s brilliant! See, there are these…” Nikolas tuned him out and led the way back to the hire car where Ben and Emilia were waiting for them. He still wasn’t being spoken to so just told them he was going with Miles Toogood, but would be back in a couple of hours—that they needed to take a taxi to the hotel, as he needed the car.

Emilia piped up, “Ben’s meeting his mystery date at lunchtime…” Her grin faltered when neither of them seized on this for an argument. She frowned, glancing between them.

Nikolas hoped Ben would catch his eye, but he didn’t. His gaze was flicking intently through the group of parents. Nikolas realised who he might be searching for and hustled Emilia into a taxi. “Better go, or Ben will miss his lunch appointment.” Ben didn’t appear to be listening. He climbed in next to Emilia and gave the driver the address for the hotel. He didn’t turn around as they drove off.

“Who was that?”

“Emilia.”

“I know who Emilia is. I bought you from her. I meant that man.”

“He’s called Ben.”

“He looks like a movie star.”

“Yes, he does.”

“Is he?”

“No. Shall we go?”

“I’ll be in year
five
next term.”

“Good. Get in the car. We’ll collect your trunk.”

“I’m going to start robotics club and chess then. Do you play chess?”

“Yes. Better than you, I expect. Get in.”

“There’s no
way
you could beat me. No one can.”

“No one has ever beaten me, either, and I’ve played against a grand master. Put your seatbelt on.”

“I don’t believe you. That isn’t possible, or
you’d
be a grand master.”

“It was a secret game. We were the only ones there.”

“Why?”

“He was in prison.”

“You would have had to have been in prison then, too, so I think you’re telling porky pies.”

“What? Telling what?”

“Gosh, your English is very limited, isn’t it? Porky pie means lie.”

“No, it does not! I was taught English by—”

“You can’t get
taught
the colloquial level of a language.
Everyone
knows that. What are you doing?”

“I’m sending a text saying help.”

“That’s not very nice, and you shouldn’t text when you’re driving. It’s against the law.”

“So is infanticide.”

“I do know what that means.”

“I thought you might.”

“Why is your phone stuck with tape?”

“To remind me of something.”

“That you need a new phone?”

“No. Can you please be quiet for a moment?”

“Will. You should say will, not can. Of course, I
can
be quiet. What does that say?”

“It’s in Danish, and you shouldn’t read other people’s texts.”

“No, technically, I believe the etiquette is not to write texts in someone else’s presence, and certainly not when you are driving. Are you Danish?”

“Sometimes.”

That silenced Miles Toogood for a while, enabling Nikolas to finish his text. “I love you,” didn’t take long to say in any language. He tapped his phone, waiting for a reply. Even when Ben wasn’t speaking to him, he got an answer to texts. It was just how there were together.

“Do you like Harry Potter?”

Two hours later and they were at the edge of the Highlands. It was spectacularly beautiful, but Nikolas had seen lots of views in his life. He was more concerned at the silence from his phone. Banging it wouldn’t bring a message, so he tucked it away when Miles Toogood announced, somewhat gloomily, that they were nearly there. They were just approaching a small town, dark granite houses austere even in the June sunshine. Miles directed Nikolas to a small lane leading towards the hills and then a few miles later to a narrower lane still. It reminded Nikolas of finding their house at Horse Tor, but he reckoned he was just being maudlin because Ben wasn’t speaking to him.

They arrived at a huge, dense, green wall—a row of leylandlii about thirty feet high. Nikolas parked the car where indicated, and Miles clambered with difficulty out of the front seat and went through a small opening in the hedge. Nikolas followed, jiggling his phone thoughtfully again and not concentrating too—

He couldn’t see the screen any longer. He looked up.

The green barrier stretched thirty feet in one direction, turned and ran forty feet or so at right angles, turned again, and then again, and thus formed a rectangle. A green box. It was like being under the sea with a glimpse up to sky and air above. Right in the middle of this undersea world was a small bungalow.

Nikolas stepped back out through the arch and into sunshine then returned into the enclosure. It was unsettling. Miles was hammering on the door shouting, “It’s me!”

The door opened and a frail-looking woman put her arms as far around Miles as they would reach. They stood that way for some time until Miles thought to introduce Nikolas. It was clearly taxing even his proven powers of speech. In the end, Nikolas took mercy on all three of them, introduced himself and explained he was a parent of a fellow pupil at the school, had seen that Miles had no transport to get home and had offered to drive him.

The elderly lady gave him a very swift going over, head to toe. “Thank you. That’s terribly kind of you. I had booked a taxi, of course, but this was so kind. Would you like to come in?”

Nikolas nodded. Miles went in before him, and they sat down in the sitting room. Or at least, Nikolas assumed it was the sitting room. He couldn’t actually see anything and thought about putting his phone torch on, until he remembered that, as with his camera, it was broken.

Lots of things were broken at the moment.

He had a brief shudder of uncharacteristic uncertainty and was very glad when the elderly lady put a light on and offered him some tea.

She walked very slowly and very upright towards the door, but Nikolas knew without a doubt had he not been there she would have been using the walking frame he could see in the corner.

When she’d disappeared into the gloom, Nikolas turned to Miles.

Miles just opened his arms in a helpless gesture then slumped. “I don’t remember a time when it wasn’t like this but…” He struggled to his feet and handed Nikolas a picture from the sideboard. A family posed for the photograph in front of the bungalow. Mrs Toogood he recognised, younger and not apparently infirm, with clearly the same upright look. There was a young man and woman and a baby. “That’s me.”

“Which one?”

Miles leant over Nikolas’s shoulder to point out the baby. He didn’t appear to have any sense of humour at all.

The most remarkable thing about the scene was that there were no trees. The bungalow was situated on a sweeping hillside with views to all sides down across the loch and to mountains in the distance. It was very pretty indeed.

“Here we are then.” Mrs Toogood had a little tray on wheels in front of her, which she pushed, inch by agonised inch, towards them. Nikolas immediately made to get up, but the merest touch on his shoulder held him down. The old lady was proud and her grandson knew it.

Eventually, tea was poured, and Nikolas had accepted a large piece of homemade shortbread. He didn’t eat carbs (particularly refined sugar), as he’d told the boy, but manners always outweighed personal preferences. Besides, it reminded him of Ben. Sitting in the gloom, in the depressing atmosphere, he felt like thinking about Ben. And that he wasn’t speaking to him.

Nikolas tactfully drew the old lady’s attention to the photo, and her smile was very sad. “That’s my daughter, Morag, and her husband, James. Miles’s parents. They were killed the day after that picture was taken. Car crash.”

“I’m sorry. Things have changed in seven years.”

She could take that to mean the boy and chat about her grandson, or she could admit the elephant in the room—that it was pitch dark even at midday in June.

She nodded. “We—my husband and I—owned the Manse, and when Morag got married we had this bungalow built in the grounds, and she and James moved into the big house. It was lovely. We could walk up the hill and visit. The house is…well, it’s gone now, of course. They’ve built a new one…Very modern, I suppose.” She sipped her tea, far away in memories. “He’s gone to Ibiza for two weeks. It’s been quite peaceful.”

“The trees?”

“Oh, yes, well, when Morag died, I had to sell the big house. I couldn’t keep it on. Then, of course, it wasn’t so convenient for the new owner when he built his new house on the site having this little bungalow here, right in his view, so to speak. He planted the trees. When was it, darling? Oh, you were too little to remember. Seven years ago? It’s astonishing how they grow, isn’t it?”

“This is not—you don’t own the land around the house?”

“Oh, no, not now. Just this little bungalow. I should have sold it to him as well, I suppose. He wanted it. But…well, you know how it is.”

Nikolas asked her where she would like her grandson’s trunk put, and on the excuse of fetching it went back out to the car, motioning for Miles to accompany him. They walked around the outside of the box of trees. When they reached the back, Miles puffing already, Nikolas came face-to-face with the “big house”. He supposed, superficially, the situation was the same as theirs in Devon: a contemporary house built on the site of an older property. But that’s where the resemblance ended. This was faux Tudor, faux taste. It was a monstrosity of ostentatious wealth. “What does this man do?”

Miles screwed up his face. “I think he’s an author. Granny said he was a bookmaker. She has very old fashioned expressions sometimes.”

“A bookmaker? I won’t look out for his books in the library.”

“Do you read a lot?”

“Mostly irony. You have apparently not discovered it yet. So, what’s to be done?”

“Is that rhetorical?”

Nikolas laughed. “I’m not sure. What does your grandmother want to happen?”

“Oh, don’t mention it! Please, don’t tell her what I’ve done. She worries enough about me as it is. And now I’ve gone and done this.”

“Do
not
cry again. Warriors, remember?”

Miles pouted glumly. “It’s hard to be a warrior when I see her. It can’t be good to live in the dark, can it?”

“Like being in a gulag?”

The boy nodded, toeing the ground. “I was researching escapes. That’s how I got so interested in them. But reading doesn’t do any good really, does it? None of it’s real. Superheroes don’t exist. This is real life and it’s horrible!” He began to cry once more.

Nikolas watched him for a moment then asked casually, “Do you know how to use a chainsaw?”

§§§

Once they got started, it was relatively easy and immensely good fun. Nikolas bought two chainsaws, once each, and they worked out how to use them together. Nikolas never had any qualms about little boys doing dangerous things. If he’d been given a chainsaw when he was seven, his life might have turned out very differently. The knack was getting the trees to fall the right way, clearly important to the overall operation, and they solved this by lashing each one to the hire car with rope and taking turns to cut or drive. Miles proved very effective at both tasks.

In two hours, they had them all down.

He’d booked a local builder to come and take them away—and give him a quote for something else as well.

The bungalow was suddenly flooded with late afternoon, June sunshine, and the loch sparkled in every window, the glass of which had been kept immaculately clean, despite having only a view of green needles for seven years.

Mrs Toogood had been removed for the whole of the operation on the excuse of Miles needing a huge amount of new uniform, which he later told Nikolas with a blush wasn’t actually an excuse, as all his was now too tight for him. So the grandmother had taken her tiny car and bounced off down the lane, back straight, thinking about socks and blazers, and other such important things.

Nikolas, with Miles stripped to the waist, had got to work.

Once they’d got the chainsaws going, which only Nikolas could do, as it took some considerable pull on the cords, the first tree had been selected for death. One by one, they’d tackled the enemy, giving the green abominations names just before they’d killed them. Some they’d taken the chainsaws to once they were down, just to ensure they were dead. Some they’d beheaded, some they’d dismembered (cut off the branches), and by the time the builder had turned up with his digger and industrial shredder, Nikolas and Miles were drinking tea in the sunshine. Miles, Nikolas noted, immediately put his very baggy T-shirt back on as soon as the other men had arrived.

Nikolas walked the owner of the building company up the hill a little way to discuss his other commission.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ben met with Peter Cameron at a little café in the town.

He was beginning to recover his balance, his perspective on the events at the ball. Nikolas had sent him various texts all morning, messages ranging in tone from telling him he loved him to an obscene gay joke, which Ben had deleted in case anyone read his texts
ever
. It was funny though. He was just missing Nikolas, he guessed. Nikolas was a bit of a force of nature, like air—as Ben had once told him. Not breathing, he missed it.

They sat down and ordered something. Ben hadn’t had breakfast, but for some reason wasn’t hungry, so he just ordered what Peter did and poked it around for a while, Nikolas-style. The tea was welcome though. It gave him something to hold, to bury his face into and avoid catching the other man’s gaze. Whatever this “date” was, it was embarrassing, and he wanted it over.