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It was a short drive to the cottage. Given their vehicle, they could have gone off-road, but this was illegal on Dartmoor, so they went via the lanes they knew very well. The cottage was nearly complete. Most of the work Aleksey had commissioned was technically illegal too, astechnicallyyou weren’t supposed to alter properties in the National Park, but Aleksey had friends in high places and enemies now married to them who wanted their wives to remain in their lofty positions, and he wasn’t averse to blackmail. The ways things were currently looking inThe Family, it was going to be Queen Phillipa sooner than anyone had anticipated. Aleksey grinned a small feral smile at all the opportunities this elevation might afford him.
He wasn’t the only one who felt guilty about certain events that had occurred in the bottom of a Dartmoor mine shaft. Phillipa could afford to be generous, but the Duchy Estate apparently couldn’t. They still owed him, and he was determined to make them pay. One way or another.
‘What?’
‘I was just thinking what a nice day it is. Mind that pothole.’
‘We could have brought the convertible.’
‘Ah, but in this vehicle we have enabled the arthritic drool machine to accompany us.’
Radulf wheezed his agreement to this disparagement and thumped his tail on the back seat, until, with an air of excited anticipation, he scrabbled to his feet and stuck his head out of the window, just as Tim and Squeezy’s place came into view.
‘How does he do that? I still don’t get it.’
Aleksey cast his mind back to the conversation with his tiny ghost whisperer the previous day—the sensible part about Radulf’s assertion he could see very well, before the little idiot, like her father, had derailed him with complete and utter nonsense. ‘Scent.’
Ben raised his eyebrows and nodded, apparently agreeing to this pronouncement.
Tim came out to meet them as they pulled into the yard. They had plans to turn this into a proper driveway and build a garage, but as yet it remained a place of ancient cobbles and drainage channels. ‘You drove?’
The professor of the patently bloody obvious apparently realised this wasn’t the most tactful thing he could have welcomed them with, and gave Ben a small grimace of apology behind Aleksey’s back. Clearly, Aleksey couldn’t actually see this, but he knew it was happening.
Attention.
It was a pisser.
He gave Tim a beaming smile which he knew would unnerve Ben’s friend for hours and walked very carefully into the house.
Squeezy was sitting in the glass-extension kitchen they had built at the back of the cottage, on the south, sunny side. He had his feet up on the table and appeared to be studying his laptop with great concentration. He suddenly shouted, ‘Objection! Hearsay!’ just as Aleksey came in, and Aleksey could have crowed in delightyou toobut amended this to, ‘Lie down,’ to the dogs. They ignored him, so he sat down himself, as the other man closed his screen.
‘Morning, boss. Up an’ about then?’
Was the inanity catching?
Squeezy apparently saw something of Aleksey’s thoughts and improved his greeting by adding, ‘Looking good. Strong.’
Pleased, Aleksey flicked a finger towards the kettle. Squeezy huffed but rose to make the required tea, glancing back through the living room to the courtyard. ‘Where are the gay boys?’
‘Admiring the—’ He forgot the word in English, but as with Molly, wasn’t going to risk the level of derision he’d receive if he got it wrong, so finished lamely, ‘Work you have done on the exterior walls.’ Seemed safe.
Squeezy made four mugs and brought them over with a box of biscuits. Aleksey eyed it, his mind fluttering with contradictory desires.
Squeezy swore as he sat down and helped himself to a handful. ‘It’s not that he doesn’t want you to fucking eat—course he does. He just doesn’t want you tochange. If you start fucking eating, in his weird Diesel-brain he’ll think you’re dying or leaving him, or, hell, not even fucking you but some facsimile doppelganger-you. Have a fucking biscuit if you fucking want one. I told you: twenty pounds under weight still.’
Yesss.
He chose a small one, unable to silence one voice to assuage another. It was very hard being in pain! And nagged all day long! And sticking to certain promises. And, well, obviously, guilty. His lifelong aversion to food had withered under this onslaught. Chocolate, he had recently discovered, cheered most things up quite considerably.
Which thought made him ask cautiously, but deceptively casually, ‘What do you know about Oxycodone?’
Squeezy flicked his gaze up from squishing his teabag with the back of a spoon. He leaned back in his chair. ‘Pain is our pleasure, agony our dream.’
‘What?’ Sometimes, the thought that he paid this man really annoyed him.
‘'S what’s written above the gym at the academy. The posh place for the nobs. Used to be your motto, if I remember correctly.’
Aleksey considered rising to this, but was too weary to make the effort. ‘Oxycodone?’
