We left the small port under the engine, but once we were clear, Conrad went on to wind power. It was a nice night for a sail, less humid on the Med than it had been on land. We headed away from shore until the lowest of the lights of Menton started to disappear below the horizon, when our skipper deemed we had gone far enough.
Duncan Culshaw didn’t have a coffin, or even a shroud, just the boat’s massive anchor and a few other heavy weights that we had found on board. Liam had never met the man alive, so he said a couple of words as we tipped him over the side. ‘So long, mate.’
He’ll be well into the aquatic food chain by now.
Conrad and I shared a bottle of red on the way back. Liam stuck to fizzy water; not even a nautical burial could shake his resolve.
Conrad was on his second glass when he glanced towards the horizon. ‘It’s funny how life works out, isn’t it?’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Bloody hilarious,’ I snorted.
‘No, seriously,’ he insisted. ‘I had a plan for dealing with Culshaw and that was it, what we’ve just done, only my version was that I was going to persuade him to come night fishing for real, go as far out as we went, then tip him over the side. He couldn’t swim a stroke; never left the shallow end of the pool. I was going to give it ten minutes then make a distress call to the marine patrol. They’d have found him floating somewhere, and a neat line would have been drawn under him.’
‘Couldn’t we still do that?’ Liam asked.
He shook his head. ‘Hardly. We’d have a tough job explaining why three of us couldn’t have managed to save him. Also, the cops would wonder why he didn’t come to the surface. But we couldn’t have that happen, could we, not with that fucking great hole in his leg.’
As he spoke, my mind went back a few days, to the evening when we’d found out about Susie and Duncan being married. ‘Friday, in my house,’ I said to him, ‘that tune you started whistling, when we were having a drink and talking about it; I know what it was now. It was “Sailing”, wasn’t it?’
He grinned, but said nothing.
As we neared port, and the lights grew brighter and Conrad had to concentrate on steering, I leaned against Liam. ‘What happens next?’ he asked.
‘You mean apart from me fucking your brains out when we get home?’
‘Yeah,’ he murmured. ‘I was thinking a little beyond that.’
‘As far as the company’s concerned, that will be sold; Buddy Beaujean’s the likely buyer. He says he wants to expand his involvement in Britain and Europe. Obviously I have to talk to the kids about it, but I’ll try to persuade them that they need to make lives for themselves and that it would only be an encumbrance to them.’
‘That makes sense,’ he agreed. ‘Now go further still.’
I knew what he meant, and I had an answer ready, one that had been forming since Susie’s death, and maybe even before. ‘Janet and wee Jonathan have no one,’ I said. ‘No blood relatives other than Mac Blackstone, who’s an old man, and Oz’s sister Ellen, who’s a great woman but who hated their mother, and couldn’t hide it from them forever. They’re orphans, Liam. Worse, they’re rich orphans, and at least one of them is bound to be traumatised by what happened tonight. So what do you think happens next?’
‘You’ll adopt them,’ he murmured.
‘Absolutely. It’s only right that they’re brought up with their half-brother.’ I paused. ‘And that would be a hell of a lot for a lifelong bachelor to take on, more than I could ever ask.’
‘Will you live here?’
‘Hell no! With the memories of tonight, and Oz haunting the bloody place? No, it gets sold, and the two Js move to St Martí. They’ll be fine with that. They like it there. I’ll try and persuade Conrad and Audrey to come with us. If I can, we’ll buy them a house near mine.’
He nodded. ‘Sounds good,’ he agreed. ‘So why are you freezing me out?’
‘I’m not,’ I protested. ‘I just assumed …’
He kissed me. ‘Assume nothing about me, lover,’ he whispered, ‘other than the best.’
‘In that case,’ I sighed, with a smile, ‘let’s just try it on for a while and see if it fits.’
Eighteen
That night, when, finally, I fell asleep, I had the strangest dream.
We were still full of light, Liam and I, when Conrad parked in the garage beneath the house. The two of us climbed the single stair that led to the hall and stepped out.
Audrey was there, and still she looked anxious, even more than she had a few hours before, if that was possible. ‘It’s okay,’ I reassured her. ‘Deed done, everything fixed.’
‘No,’ she whispered. Her eyes flickered to her right. I looked over her shoulder and saw a figure, a tall male figure, the garden lights lending him an aura as he stood in the doorway that led to the deck around the pool, silhouetted against the night sky.
I moved towards him, frowning. He couldn’t be the police, surely.
Then he stepped into the light; and his aura seemed to come with him.
He wasn’t the police.
He was wearing jeans and cowboy boots, and a check shirt with no sleeves, so that you could see every one of the hard muscles on his arms. In a pose-down with this guy, Liam was a loser.
We moved closer to each other. His skin was tanned, but not like that of a northern European on holiday; instead, like that of a man who lived and worked under a harder sun.
He didn’t look like Keanu Reeves any more, that was for sure. His hair was mostly grey, military-style, in what they call a buzz cut, as neatly trimmed as the beard that defined his features. His nose was a little broader than I remembered Keanu’s having been, his cheekbones a little higher, his eyebrows a shade further apart.
Then he spoke, in an accent that might well have been Scottish in origin but which had become imbued with other influences, mostly west coast American.
‘Okay,’ he growled, ‘where is the bastard who’s trying to cheat my kids?’
And that’s when I fainted in my dream, and in the same moment sprang into full wakefulness, my eyes searching the room in vain then filling with tears as I realised that however good, and true and loyal the sleeping man beside me might prove to be, he would always take second place to a ghost, one that would never let me alone.