Chapter 10

Marilyn got up, added a log to the fire and sat back down, watching the smoke from Jay’s pipe drift towards the chimney and mingle with that from the flames in a comfortable silence. She assumed it was comfortable, at any rate; she must be mad, but she felt comfortable. She had no idea what he was thinking.

Eventually she plucked up the courage to ask him how someone living in hedgerows and barns, scraping a living from street entertainment and odd-jobbing, had enough money to be offering her a loan. She immediately regretted being so direct, but he smiled as if being offended wasn’t an option.

‘Zora was beautiful,’ he said, in the same once-upon-a-time tone that had won her over yesterday, ‘but in trouble. She was living in a remote house on the fringe of a war zone. She’d left the relative security of the city and gone to live in her family’s crumbling house in the area where she felt she belonged. She’d taken in refugees who’d fled from villages disrupted by the conflict. And the local militia leader was her lover. This man was strong but cruel, respected and feared.

‘Our heroine held a small fortune abroad – part inheritance, part savings smuggled out – and wanted it to help them rebuild their lives when the war was over. Her man, cold, battle-hardened, found out about it and wanted to use it there and then, not only to get supplies to help make sure they won the war, but to avenge his people by causing as much death and destruction as possible.’

He leaned forward and prodded the fire with the poker, sending a dramatic shower of sparks spiralling up the chimney.

‘So, while her lover was away fighting, she confided in a young soldier she’d grown fond of. He’d been injured and was still too unwell to fight, but recovered enough to travel. She knew her lover, the militia leader, would eventually bully her into handing the money over and asked this young man to take it away, to keep it safe in a new account until things had settled down. There would be risks and she told him how much he could keep for himself as his reward. They both knew the dangers she was facing, too, and she told him that if she died he was to keep it all. She didn’t want it to be used for evil.’

He glanced at her as if to check she was still with him.

‘I knew that man, once. That was how I came to be custodian of a substantial sum of money. She died, tragically, shortly after her young friend left, and the money became his in accordance with her wishes. He bought a house but couldn’t bear to keep it so he made me custodian; eventually signed it over to me and said I could do what I liked with it. I lived there briefly, but it didn’t seem right, somehow. For reasons of my own I took to the road after a couple of years, putting the house to let with an agent. There was enough profit from the rent to pay back what I’d always considered to be more an unofficial loan than a windfall. Once I’d done so, with a respectable amount of interest, I contacted her family and handed the money over to them. But the house is still there, rent still coming in – and now I’ve found a good home for the surplus.’

He looked at her.

‘That’s…a great story.’

‘But.’ His eyes twinkled in the firelight. ‘You don’t believe I have a house in Hampshire, do you?’

She laughed. ‘Whether I do or not, it’s not the house that’s the problem.’

‘Good. Because it’s true. You can’t argue with bricks and mortar. I could take you there now.’

She sipped her drink. ‘It’s the gorgeous wealthy heiress leaving her fortune to a hapless young soldier that’s a touch less credible.’

‘When you put it like that…’

‘So?’ She waited, but Jay simply smiled, drew on his pipe, exhaled luxuriously.

‘All right,’ she said, ‘let’s say I ask no questions and take it on trust that you’ve got a house. What’s the real reason you come to be wandering the country apparently aimlessly, and how do you really make your living?’

‘The second part first: it’s as you’ve seen. Straight up. I don’t earn much but I don’t need much. And, whether or not you choose to believe me, since last year I’ve been getting a reasonable income from the house.’

‘What happened last year?’

‘Like I said, I’d finally saved up enough to find our heroine’s family and give them their small fortune.’ She couldn’t help shaking her head. ‘Believe what you will. Truth can be stranger than fiction. What is true is that I’ve finished paying off what I borrowed to buy the house, so the income’s mine now, see? Well, yours for a while, if you’ll accept it.’

‘I’ll accept it when I know the truth about where it’s come from. So, back to the first part of my question – how come you’re on the road if you’ve got a perfectly good house?’

‘Tenancy agreements. You get a long-term tenant in, it’s a pig of a job getting them out.’ He grinned in a way that suggested he knew she felt like shaking him. ‘OK, OK. Not merely tenants – lifestyle decision, pure and simple. Well, if I’m honest, not entirely my own. My late father sowed the seeds.’

‘You’re going to tell me you’ve got Romany blood.’

He picked up his wine glass and studied it as if it were a crystal ball.

‘Not as far as I know. We moved around a lot, but it was pretty mundane – not caravans but cars and Pickford’s. Dad was ambitious in his own sweet way and thought nothing of upping sticks on a regular basis for new starts and “business opportunities” that became tediously routine in their frequency. It was better when Mum was alive; she stayed put with us more or less every other move, and made him commute. But then…then she died. Car accident.’ He paused and ran a hand through his hair. ‘It…it was about the time my sister went off to college. A few years later, the summer I was seventeen, I spent the holidays abroad with a mate. Dad said I should stay and help him with the business he was trying to get off the ground at the time. I wanted nothing to do with it. So I get home late August and find my key no longer fits the door. He’d left an address, on the other side of the country, and passed on the message through my sister: “If the cocky little bastard wants his independence, he’s welcome to it.” No hard feelings, did I understand; he wasn’t one to shirk on his responsibilities and I was welcome to join him when I was ready.’

He finished his wine and topped up both of their glasses.

‘I never saw him or spoke to him again.’ He said it as if that was an achievement to be proud of. ‘I spent my A Level year dossing on a series of mates’ floors. Mainly Ivan’s. He was…he was my best mate, the one I’d been on holiday with, when it all started.’ He paused, long enough for her to wonder if ‘it all’ was more than merely a restless lifestyle, and whether his friend, whose name he’d pronounced in the foreign way, ee-van, could have anything to do with the mysterious inheritance. He continued before she had chance to ask. ‘I had a tent, of course, and used it whenever the weather was good enough – I’m not one to impose, as I tried to tell you.’ He glanced across the room and she half-expected him to go and get his bag. ‘I suppose you don’t believe any of that either?’

‘It sounds… extreme. Are you implying I shouldn’t believe you?’

‘Up to you. You asked for explanations.’

His manner suggested denial of all responsibility for tall tales and truth-stretching – it was she who’d made him do it.

‘Why won’t you just tell me?’

He shrugged. ‘The way I look at it, if you think a story’s obscure, you should take it as a compliment.’

‘Oh, really?’

‘It means the person telling it is crediting you with enough intelligence to work it out.’ She shook her head. ‘Whatever… I can honestly tell you the money I’m offering you is mine to give. There’s nothing dodgy about it.’

‘And, as an intelligent person, I can take your word about that, can I?’

It came out more harshly than she’d intended. He sat forward, his expression more serious than she’d yet seen it. ‘I’ve told you as much as I tell anyone. More. Just think on this. If I were a scammer, would I be offering to give instead of take? You’ve said yourself you probably won’t be able to pay me for a while – not that I’m complaining. Just saying.’ He got up, crouched by the fire and tapped his pipe into the grate. ‘If it was dirty money I was trying to lose, I’d hardly call repairing a barn in the middle of nowhere a viable money-laundering scheme.’

‘But—’

‘Wouldn’t your average confidence trickster behave in a way…in a way that would actually inspire confidence?’

He sat back down, picked up his wine glass and drank deeply.

‘Jay, I’m sorry if I’ve hurt your feelings. I don’t want to sound ungrateful. But surely you can understand.’

‘Of course I do! I just thought for a while there…oh, never mind what I thought.’

He drained the glass, put it heavily on the table beside him. The silence was now definitely not comfortable. Her head was foggy with questions, with doubts. But she didn’t have the words to put voice to any of them. She felt him watching her, looked across.

‘Penny for them,’ he ventured.

She shook her head. ‘I honestly don’t know what I’m thinking.’

‘My offer still stands – the other one, where I get up this instant, pack my bag, walk away and leave you in peace.’

A gust of wind blew a rattle of rain against the window.

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘It’s the most serious I’ve been all day.’

She believed he meant it, and also knew it was not what she wanted.

‘I’ll get on up to bed; leave you to your thoughts.’

He was on his feet wishing her goodnight, giving her no chance to object. As she listened to his feet on the stairs, the door softly closing, faint rustlings as he prepared his makeshift bed, she wondered whether the spare room had been such a good idea. He could obviously look after himself; she had no reason to feel sorry for him. He’d never once asked her to. But had he been playing her like he played his audiences? Was he doing so now? Perhaps he was right, perhaps she should be asking him to sleep outside. They were supposed to be working on the barn floor the next day, so that would soon be out of the question, but he seemed to enjoy telling her he was fine with his tent.

She remembered his obsession with that hole in the roof he’d spent the afternoon patching up. For a few moments there had been something strange, distracted about his manner when she’d arrived home that morning. As if something had happened while she was away. Staring into the flames, she shook her head. Must have been listening to too many stories.