Page 2 of Last Track

"Older than you'd like."

That got him something close to a huff, not quite a laugh. "Martin Cattermole."

"Galen Storms."

Martin looked him over again, taking in, Galen suspected, the hair and the mud and the tattoos and whatever conclusions a man drew about someone who introduced himself with a name like that.

"Storms," Martin repeated, in the tone of a man revising his assessment of the afternoon downward. "Of course it is."

2

MARTIN

Martin had a hurdle to replace, a flock that would be jumpy for the rest of the afternoon, mud to his knees, and a stranger standing in his field whose name he had just been given and immediately regretted asking for. None of that explained why his pulse was behaving as though he had run the fence line twice rather than spent ten minutes shouting at sheep and wrestling a gate back into place.

This was not on the list. The list, as far as Martin had drawn it up over breakfast, had contained a broken hurdle, a vet call about the Suffolk ewe, and possibly enough time before dark to look at the guttering on the lambing shed. Galen Storms had not been on the list. Galen Storms, it now appeared, was going to be Martin's afternoon regardless of what the list said.

Martin had managed Ashcombe's flock for the better part of a decade, long enough that Jacks trusted him with everything except the final decision, and long enough that a stranger appearing mid-crisis in one of his fields should not, by rights, have thrown him this badly.

He made himself look properly, since looking briefly clearly had not worked.

The man was tall enough to look Martin straight in the eye, mud to the knee same as Martin, hair come half loose from wherever it had started and stuck in dark ropes to a jaw that had no business looking that good. There were tattoos up both forearms, visible now that the jacket he had sacrificed to the sheep was slung over one shoulder rather than covering anything useful. And there were the eyes, which Martin had already clocked once and was apparently going to have to keep clocking, an unreasonable, almost artificial blue-green that looked as though it had been chosen off a colour chart rather than occurring in nature.

Beautiful, Martin thought, with real irritation, and tired in a way that had nothing to do with the last ten minutes of sheep.

Of course he was called Galen Storms. Martin was drawn to him anyway, immediately and comprehensively, which felt like the sort of thing his own good sense ought to have vetoed at the door.

"Van's up on the verge," Galen said, nodding vaguely back toward the lane, already moving past the moment the way a man moved past a shop window he could not afford to stop at. "Temperature gauge went, then a knock, then a smell I didn't love. She's not going anywhere under her own power tonight, I don't think."

"She," Martin repeated.

"Nina."

"Of course she has a name."

"After Nina Hagen."

That got him something that was not quite a smile, more the shape a smile made when a man was too busy doing arithmetic to commit to it fully. Martin knew that look. He had worn it himself often enough, standing in a field doing sums that did not come out right no matter how many times he ran them.

"Phone signal's rubbish out here," Martin said, mostly to have something ordinary to say. "Farmhouse has a landline, if you need it."

Galen was already patting his pockets for his phone, one bar flickering in and out as he considered the offer, and Martin watched something shift behind his face. The flirtation, or whatever it had been, folded itself away in favour of a more urgent kind of worry.

"I need it," Galen said. "Booking's at Knightley Moorings. I should already be setting up."

The call was conducted from the farmhouse kitchen with Martin standing close enough to hear Galen's side and doing his best impression of a man who was not listening. Galen's voice on the phone was a different instrument entirely from the one that had been swearing cheerfully at sheep half an hour earlier, level and careful and apologising with the specific fluency of someone who had made this exact call before and hated it every time.

He offered to cover the cost of a replacement out of his own fee. He asked, without much hope in his voice, whether anyone else on the agency's books could cover at short notice. He said "understood" twice in a row when the answer, evidently, was that this might affect future work, and he did not argue either time.

Martin had spent enough of his own life being counted on to hear what Galen did not say.

When the call ended, Galen stood very still for exactly one second, then exhaled through his nose and said, "Right. Recovery, then, if you know anyone who does old Volkswagens without wanting to be the one who has to explain what air-cooled means."

"I might know someone." Martin folded his arms. "You're not going to ask what you owe me for the phone call."

"I was getting to it."

"No, you weren't."