Chapter Seven: Vortex

Tom lay on his side in the round upper room, looking at the vacant half of the bed beside him. He was awake but not restless. The sea music that always resonated here was quiet tonight.

If he put out a hand, he could almost imagine a trace of body warmth in the sheets. He had thought Flynn was going to come back with him, after their walk and lunch up at the Mermaid in Zennor. The little green Mazda had turned out to be his, so low in Tom’s rearview she sometimes disappeared as he led the way along the snaking cliff-top road. They had sat outside, the tables round them too crowded now for anything other than general conversation, but even that had felt good. A taste of ordinary life. Flynn’s foot had rested lightly against his.

There had been a moment in the sunny car park afterward, when many things had seemed to hang in the balance. Then Flynn’s eyes had darkened with an anxiety Tom would not have added to for the world, and he had risked both their reputations, pulling Flynn into the shelter of the Land Rover to kiss him. “It’s all right,” Tom had told him again, the reassurance formless but broad, and he had watched with a weird, painful clutch at his heart while Flynn drove away.

He allowed himself to imagine how it might have been, otherwise. Flynn was not hard to conjure. Tom could feel the shape of him inside, a vivid memory. Even the slight soreness was a source of pleasure. Alone, he blushed and felt a smile crease his mouth at the sensation of having been richly and memorably ploughed… They would have come back here, and straight upstairs this time. If Flynn was healed, he would have tumbled him straight down onto the bedspread and… And that brought Tom too close to thoughts of pain, injury, Robert bloody Tremaine, who, away on leave or not, could make Flynn twitch with nerves whenever anyone of similar build and colouring had come near their table at the Mermaid, so he reversed it, let the fantasy meet the physical echo, the velvety stretch inside him.

Unexpectedly, some inner wall fell. Before Flynn, it was David who had fucked him last. Lieutenant David Reay, assistant army medical officer, on the 28^th of January three years gone, in a bunk room in Camp Bastion. These details, which rushed over Tom in an unstoppable dam-burst of memory, should have paralysed him. Balled him up hopelessly in the bed, snatching at the duvet to drag over his head and obliterate him, and then, when they became unbearable, send him stumbling downstairs to tear open a bottle. He had got round all this recently by ceasing to think of David at all, and he had called this avoidance a form of adaptation, healing.

Not Flynn on top of him, opening him with gentle, unsteady fingers, pushing inside. David. David had been so pent-up it hadn’t lasted long. Tom had felt the frantic thrusting and rush of his coming before he was even properly engaged, and then the poor sod had been so mortified, sitting hunched on the edge of the bunk with his head in his hands. Tom had teased him, gently, and persuaded him back for another go, and things had been better after that. For one night, most of which Tom had spent with one eye fixed on the bunk-room door. David had waited for him for three years, and Tom had not given him so much as his full attention.

Falling walls. Pain swept through Tom, and he turned his inner vision back to Flynn, whose arrival in his life, whose touch and voice, had brought them down and yet somehow made the consequences bearable. Because Tom was holding on. He was remembering. Flynn became David, then himself again, and merged, and Tom placed a chilled, sweat-damped hand on his own cock and caressed himself to hardness and sudden orgasm, tearing and sweet, way too soon. He could taste blood from his own bitten lip, blood and salt from his tears. Sleep instantly seized him. He heard a voice—David’s, Flynn’s, he did not know. It said—that old lie, but Tom was floating painlessly in the truth of it—it’s all right, love.

The phone rang two hours later, jolting him out of his sleep’s deepest cycle. Moaning, he got his head up out of the pillows and shoved onto one elbow, mouth dry, heart thumping. Penzance Casualty on the caller ID. He grabbed for the receiver. “God almighty. What?”

“Tom, it’s Mike. I’m sorry. We’ve had some kind of boat wreck—gunshot wounds, near-drownings. Looks like a couple of drug-running gangs had a set-to. And a pileup on the A30. Can you possibly…?”

Tom was already out of bed, reaching for the shirt he’d left crumpled on the floor in Flynn’s honour. His supper dishes were unwashed downstairs, as well. It had been a day of freedom. “I’ll be there,” he said, and hung up. Peaceful bloody Cornwall, he thought, distractedly, grabbing jeans and car keys, running for the stairs.

An ex-army doctor was a blessing to an overstretched rural casualty department, and Tom was sure of a fervent welcome on nights like this. The casualty consultant, Mike Findlay, grabbed him by the arm as soon as he appeared in the chaotic assessment unit and pointed him straight at the car-crash victims. Nature and experience had combined in Tom to make him a kindly, absolutely dispassionate force for good, and he dealt with broken children, blood and horror much better than some of Mike’s full-time casualty staff. Tonight, if Mike had been looking, he might have seen an unprecedented tremor in his swiftly working hands, might have noticed that, for once, he was pale—but there was no time for observation, for anything other than the frantic dash from trolley to incoming trolley.

The pile-up had happened just after the arrival of six bits of human wreckage from some kind of boat collision off Morvanna point. Two separate small craft had been involved, the violence of the impact suggesting to observers—a handful of shocked night fishermen on the pier—that it had been deliberate. Shots had been fired. Officers from the armed-response unit in Exeter were waiting in the hospital corridors until they could question the survivors.

No one had deliberately prioritised the pileup over what was probably fallout from a trafficking war. Neither Findlay nor Tom would have allowed it, any more than Tom had ever succumbed to pressure from his army superiors to deal with non-urgent Allied troops before critically injured Afghanis. It was simply that the crash victims were greater in number and more inclined to die, and by the time the casualty staff had stemmed some of this tide, the men from the boat collision had been set up in a side ward, under the care of stressed nurses and anyone else who could be called in from their off duty. When the worst of the crisis in the main wards had passed, Tom went through to see what he could do to help.

He found that he was looking around for Flynn. This was the kind of nightmare that would call out the rescue choppers, and the Maritime Security Lynxes too. Unease pulled at him. He had not considered, when opening his fortress, how it would be to have someone in there with him whom he could not protect, someone as vulnerable in his own way as David had been.

“Did the Hawke Lake SAR bring this lot in?” he asked one of the nurses, but the woman shook her head. It had happened so close to shore that the lifeboat and a police launch had gone out to pick up the bits. They’d found assault rifles on board, and a small fortune in cocaine. “Great,” Tom said wryly. “Bet they don’t put that in the Penwith visitors’ guide. Do they need help mopping up?”

“You could relieve Dr. Francis. She’s been on for eighteen hours.”

The man in the first side-ward bed had third-degree burns and a bullet wound to his arm. Either he spoke no English or had found it expedient to forget what he knew. Tom could see the coppers out in the corridor, restlessly pacing up and down. Well, they could wait. Until the man’s fever came down, he was a patient, not a prisoner, no matter what his sins. He did what he could for him and moved on to the next bed.

No one had got round to cleaning this one up. He wasn’t high priority, his injuries not severe, just bashed across the head with a rifle butt in the fight, brought in to sleep it off and be arrested in due course. He looked as if he’d been in oil-slicked water, his hair matted, black stains obscuring his features. He was lying on his side in the ward’s farthest corner. When Tom touched his shoulder, he came round immediately. His eyes flicked wide and fixed themselves on the wall.

To Tom’s surprise, his first emotion was not astonishment or disgust. Christ, that would do it, wouldn’t it? A couple of wrong-side runs like this, with his insider knowledge, would buy plenty of Mercedes trucks, and free exit forever from the Sankerris Bay estate. No, it was pity that went through Tom, a wave of compassion—as well as shame, because had he not too, from boyhood, contributed to the social pressures that would lead a man like this to… “Tremaine,” he whispered. “Are you mixed up in this? For God’s sake, let me help you.”

The grey eyes remained wide and vacant, the profile impassive. Tom drew breath to try again—but the shrill of a flat-lining heart monitor cut through the air from the main ward, the one sound that could have distracted him, and he ran to answer Mike Findlay’s shout.

When he got back, the bed was empty. Only rumpled sheets and oil stains. Tom shook his head. Had he been dreaming? On reflection, it seemed unlikely, didn’t it, Rob Tremaine brought in with a bunch of gun-runners. Still, whatever the situation, he’d lost a patient—his first tonight, somehow. Half-smiling at the idea of losing one like this, Tom checked the toilets at the end of the ward, then went into the corridor where the weary-looking police officers were still waiting. “You brought in six, didn’t you?” he asked.

The Kevlar-clad armed-response captain stopped trying to extract a packet of crisps from the vending machine. “Yeah,” he said. “Why?”

“I’m down to five. Anyone come past you this way?”

“No. Which one’s gone?”

“The head injury. He’s…” Abruptly Tom shut up. He saw again the raw-boned profile, half covered with hair and black grease. God, was he absolutely sure? If not, it was a hell of an accusation to make. It flickered through Tom’s mind that Tremaine might have been undercover, although he did not think Hawke would send one of its pilots on a job like this.

“He’s what?”

“He’s too sick to be running around. I’ll call security.”

“Yeah,” said the officer, grimly, unhitching his radio. “Me too.”

I promised him I wouldn’t turn up outside his barrack door. Tom sat behind the wheel of the Land Rover. His parking place commanded a view up and down the Breagh main street. It was just after three in the afternoon, the time when Flynn would come off a duty shift if he’d been on early. Tom knew he liked to get off the base for a couple of hours a day, and if he did, he had to drive through the village. If not, he thought, gripping the wheel painfully tight, it might come to a barrack-door encounter yet.

Tom was not sure he would have bothered, had it just been drugs and guns. Just, he had said to himself mockingly, trying to get some sleep in that day’s bright dawn, back at the watchtower. But the truth was that he was not much concerned with issues of crime and punishment for their own sake. He was a doctor. His job began where those of the police and firearms units ended. Ultimately it wasn’t his business if Rob Tremaine or anyone else chose to make a few illicit quid by running with the moonrakers. And, as he had realised when talking to the police last night, he hadn’t been absolutely certain, not certain enough to shadow an innocent man’s career.

He supposed he was slow on the uptake. At the best interpretation, he was these days an unsuspicious man, too occupied with getting through his own day-to-day to be curious about anyone else’s. It had taken hours for the fear to hit him. He had been opening up the surgery, had gone so cold that he had dropped the keys and almost set the pharmacy alarm off. Had conducted his appointments in a grey distraction, glad that nothing more complex than a grumbling appendix presented itself. He had listened, diagnosed, dispensed, sent the appendix down to Penzance for assessment, closed shop as soon as he could and driven over to Breagh.

What the hell was he going to say?

A throaty purring preceded the appearance of Flynn’s sea-green Mazda at the top of the high street. For a moment, Tom forgot everything. Flynn looked like a bloody advert—the convertible’s top was down, the sunny breeze catching his hair, glancing off his aviator sunglasses. Tom rolled down the Rover’s window and put out a hand to attract his attention, but there was no need—Flynn had seen him from a hundred yards away, the light show of his recognition once more dazzling to Tom, who could not get used to being greeted with such unhidden pleasure.

Anxiety under it today. For all their short acquaintance, Tom had begun to be able to read him, even at a distance. It matched the dry clutch of fear in his own throat. Flynn pulled the Mazda into the car park outside the Fox, gesturing for Tom to follow him. Well, no help for it. Either Tom spoke to him about this now or not at all, and not at all was suddenly unbearable to him.

They found a table in a quiet corner. The Fox was a different place during weekday work hours, Tom observed with relief, hearing the echo of roaring voices and feeling a sting in his healed-over knuckles. Flynn had met him with the reserved affection which was all he would ever be able to show in public, military man to village doctor, in such a community, and Tom found himself wishing them both a thousand miles away, stripped of rank, status, for preference every stitch of clothing, and alone. His heart was racing, his hands unsteady on the glass of orange juice Flynn had brought back from the bar. “Hiya,” Tom greeted him, as calmly as he could. “You all right?”

Flynn sat down opposite him. When he looked up, there was such a mix of yearning and fear in his eyes that Tom almost blew it all by reaching for his hands across the table, under the attentive gaze of the bartender and the dozen or so RNAS regulars scattered around the room. “I’m fine,” he said. “Hear you were busy last night, though.”

“Yes. Couple of boats rammed each other off Morvanna.” He smiled, desperately trying to keep it light. “Bodies all over the place. Police think… Police think it was a couple of rival drug warlords knocking heads.” Tom clenched his hands together on the table. He stared at his own white knuckles for almost ten seconds, then asked hoarsely, “Flynn, love. Is Robert all right?”

“I… What? Yeah, he’s fine. Why would he not be? That is… I dunno. He’s on leave.”

You’re a rotten liar, aren’t you? Tom thought, with a painful surge of affection. He had worked that much out back at the quoit, where Flynn had only got away with his declaration of freedom from Rob Tremaine because they had both so badly wanted it to be true. To have to probe at him, to question, was terrible. “You’ve heard from him?”

“Yes. I mean… Oh Christ.” Flynn picked up his glass—he too was on the orange juice, a tactful gesture which, given his current levels of anxiety, Tom appreciated all the more—sent the top inch of its contents over the brim, and set it back down again. Tom shoved a napkin at him, and together they tried to mop up without attracting too much notice. “All right. He came home early this morning. I wasn’t expecting him. Why?”

“And he was okay?”

“No. He was tired. He looked…” Flynn ran a hand into his hair. “He looked the way you do now. Leave it to me, Tom. I’ll fuck everyone over, every time.”

“Does he ever work undercover? Could you tell me if he did?”

“What? No. I mean—I probably couldn’t, but he doesn’t. Please tell me why you’re asking.”

“Because…” Because if it was just a fling from time to time, a run with the wolves, I might look away. Whatever that makes me. A sideline like that would keep a man in Mercedes trucks, for sure. But private psychiatry, legal fees—the price of a human soul, lock, stock and barrel—that takes more. “Because I need you to tell me what happened the night your helicopter went down off Portsmouth.”

“I did tell you.” Flynn’s voice was strained, barely audible. Tears had sprung to his eyes. “I told you all I remember. Don’t do this. Please.”

“I’d give anything not to have to. Flynn. How did Robert get out of that crash? How could he have?”

Flynn’s chair scraped. Heads turned. Tom, opening up his hands to stare into their palms, did not watch his exit, which was quick and silent. He sat for as long as he could bear to, his drink untouched on the table. Then he got up, put his jacket over his arm, and just as quietly left the bar.

How stupid. His vision was blurring, his chest tight. Pit of his stomach clenching, with grief and a kind of sick rage—if he had to lose this, lose Flynn, why had it had to be by his own hand? Realising that for the first time in his adult life he was on the verge of public tears, he backed up into a shadowy part of the corridor outside the bar. He tried a few deep breaths. Not once, not in all his battles, had he ever been brought this low. Shit, he thought, hot wet salt burning up his throat, and he made his way blindly across the corridor to the toilets.

Empty, thank God. Shuddering, Tom jerked one of the basin’s cold taps onto full and leaned over, splashing handfuls of water into his face. When he straightened up, he could see again. The fittings in the room were basic, unchanged, he reckoned, since the pub first opened in the late seventies to cater to the airbase. In the single mirror screwed to the wall, his image stared back at him, an insignificant ghost—one of thousands that had stood here, drunk or sober, in the thick of life or beached and lost, or simply bored. All meaningless. Tom could hardly assign enough importance to the reflection to wonder at it. Pale skin, dark eyes. Wet fringe plastered down. The whole face a blank, the water on it now nothing worse than clean Cornish tap. Unreadable. He would be all right now, or at least he would be able to get back to the car.

The door creaked. Tom turned from the mirror, ready to make his exit past a stranger, and found himself face-to-face with Flynn. “Oh,” he said, his own voice sounding odd to him, flat and detached. “I’m glad you came back. I—”

“You shouldn’t be,” Flynn interrupted. He was a little out of breath, as if he had come running back from his car. He looked sick, almost ready to pass out. “You shouldn’t be glad to see me. Christ, Tom.” He closed the door behind him, gave the room a cursory glance to check that they were alone, and came up close. He scanned Tom’s face. “I made you cry.”

“No,” Tom whispered. He couldn’t bear for him to think so. He wanted to resist Flynn’s hands on him—the unsteady caress down the side of his face, the touch to his arm—because whatever Flynn had come back to tell him, it wasn’t that he was there to stay. “Ah, Flynn. What is it? Please tell me.”

“I will. That’s why I’m here. I fucked you around. I lied to you about me and Rob. We’re not over.”

“I know.”

“You… When? From the start?” Flynn asked. Tom nodded mutely, and Flynn closed his eyes for a second, losing even more colour. “Why did you let me…do what we did?”

“Same reason you did. I wanted you more than anything. I still do.”

“No. That’s just it. You don’t know me, Tom. You’re right—Rob came back in a fucking state last night. Like a hurricane. He’d been in a fight, and…” He ground to a halt, stripping off his jacket. Tom shuddered and tried to step back, but the marks on Flynn leapt out like a cry—fingerprint bruises up and down his arms, fresh, terrible, purple and dark blue against his tan. “I won’t show you the rest. He came back, and he took it all out on me, just like he stamped his bloody mark on me for a week when you first showed up, like he could read my bloody mind. He did it because he likes it, and because…” Flynn paused, sucked in a breath. “Because I need him to. You don’t understand, Tom. You’re too good, too clean, too decent, to get your head around the kind of sick fuck I am. He beats the crap out of me, screws me until I can’t walk, and sometimes—just sometimes, just for a little bit—I feel better about what I am. What… What I did.”

“Oh, Flynn. Flynn, for God’s sake, listen to me.” Tom heard his voice crack. Flynn’s eyes were fixed on his, their gaze burning and blank and desperate. “You’re not sick. You’re just hurt. And I—I’m starting to think none of what happened that night was your fault.”

“No. Shut up. Whatever you think about Rob, it’s not true. He roughs me up, but he’d never harm anyone else. Christ, he’d never kill anyone.”

“All right. Okay, but just tell me… He’d been in a fight?”

“Yes. He told me all about it. He had some kind of a bust-up with his family, so he came back early, and he got pissed down in Penzance and picked a scrap with a bunch of Royal Marines. Happens all the time—they think SAR is for pansies. He…”

“Flynn.” Tom grabbed him by the arms. He had no interest whatsoever in the Navy’s internecine rivalries, and less in Rob Tremaine’s lies. He saw, with nausea, that his own thumbs fitted exactly into the place where Rob had left bruises, and he transferred his grip to Flynn’s shoulders, caressing. “Right. Listen. Did he have a head wound? Quite bad, at the back of his skull?”

“Oh Christ!” Flynn tore away from him. He fell back a couple of steps, throwing out a hand to steady himself on the edge of a washbasin. “How the fuck should I know? It was dark, and he bust in before I was even awake. He had his cock up my arse before I could get my face out of the pillow. He…” Running out of breath, Flynn emitted a faint sound of pain and disgust, as if the reality of the scene he was describing had only then hit home. He swallowed audibly, a sickened small moan. “Oh. Tom…”

“It’s all right. It’ll be all right, if you just let me help you. Where is he now?”

“He’s on duty. Where else would he be? Tom, I can’t do this. And—I don’t know what you’re trying to do. Rob fucks me over, but I need him.” He went a shade paler and swung round to face the sink. “Has that occurred to you? I need him, even—even more than I need you.”

Tom took a step towards him. Pain was lancing through him. He put a hand on Flynn’s shoulder, feeling it shudder with a hard-repressed dry heave. “Flynn. All right. Forget it. Just…how badly are you hurt? I can ignore everything else, but not that. I—I’m a doctor.”

“I’ve got my own doctor!” It was a desperate snarl. Flynn straightened up violently, pushing him aside. “I’m not your responsibility. Not your business. Nor is Rob. For both our sakes…” he backed up unsteadily, and did not look at Tom again until he was at the door, “…leave me alone. It’s over. Let me go.”

Tom left the pub calmly, dry-eyed. He got into the Rover and started her up with steady hands. Down the street, he could hear the roar of the little MX5, getting booted to high speeds as Flynn took her out of the 30 zone. Tom wanted to call him back, to tell him to be careful.

He was careful himself, driving home. He had good reason. He was going to have to choose, very soon, between two distinct courses of action. He could walk into the Penzance police HQ, find the officer in charge of the boat-crash investigation and tell him that, on slender evidence, he thought their missing sixth man was Robert Tremaine—that, further, he believed Tremaine capable of deliberately downing an RNAS helicopter, capable of doing it again. If it had been Tremaine in the side ward last night, he would have a distinctive head injury. Tom could do this. He could probably throw enough suspicion on Tremaine to ground him at least.

Ruin his career, and shatter Flynn, perhaps beyond healing. Tom’s other choice was to shut the fuck up and watch from a distance. If Tremaine hadn’t sabotaged the Portsmouth helicopter, he had seen its destruction, and Flynn’s, at close quarters. He was the only witness. He had seen to the repairs, put Flynn back together as nearly as he could in his own image. Right or wrong, Tom knew that, to all intents and purposes, Tremaine owned him. Loss of that ownership, that domination, might set Flynn free. Or cut through his strings like a scythe.

Whichever Tom chose, it would wait until morning. It would have to. Beneath all this concern for the greater human good, his own grief and loss were yawning like a pit.

When the hell had he fallen in love?

Another vehicle was parked on the turf outside the watchtower. Tom watched it with a sinking sense of disbelief. Apart from Flynn—and, of course, Tremaine—he had received no social calls since moving in. It was not a place where people dropped by. He didn’t even recognise the rusty Ford hatchback. Didn’t much care. Whoever it was, to Tom, they were simply an obstacle between him and the pit, where he did not want to fall but was losing the strength to hold on.

He got out of the Rover, and Victor Travers unfolded his bulk from behind the wheel of the other car, waving. “Tom,” he called. “Sorry to disturb you out here. I know you don’t like visitors.”

God, when had he given that impression? It was true enough—or had been—but how had he made his aversion so plain? A notice tin-tacked to the tree on Sankerris village green? He made his way over to Victor, out of habit running through the visual checks he would have begun had his old friend just entered the surgery. No tremor, no weight loss. In fact, he looked as if he’d glued a little on, his huge frame less gaunt in its flesh. His colour was good. Tom realised he did know the Ford estate, after all. Vic’s dad had driven it around Porth Harbour for years, usually with ladders and pots of creosote hanging out the back. It was just that he hadn’t seen it in three years. Because Vic, having had the living crap land-mined out of him twice behind the wheel of an armoured truck, had not been able to drive.

Despite himself, Tom smiled. “Hi, Vic. You okay? Prescription run out?”

A shadow touched Victor’s grin. “Don’t blame you for thinking that. Been a right millstone round your neck since we got home, haven’t I? No, I… The missus sent me out to see you were okay, actually. She said you looked like grim death this morning in surgery.”

“In surgery? I don’t think I saw her.”

“Maybe not. But you did a nice job of fixing her ingrown toenail anyway.”

Tom shook his head. Yes. He remembered a human foot, some swelling, inflammation, the few strokes it took with a pair of nail shears to put it right. They didn’t have their own chiropodist in Sankerris—he got the odd job like that. A human foot attached to a leg, attached to a familiar woman in a bright floral dress, looking at him in concern. “Sorry. Yes, I did see her. I was miles away.”

“Is something the matter, Tom? Florrie says you got into a punch-up with one of the lads from the airbase the other week.”

God, not you too. “Florrie says too much,” he said grimly, and then regretted it. “Sorry, Vic. Bad day. You want to come in and talk?”

Vic looked down at Tom from the foot of height he had on him. His expression was thoughtful. “No. I think I’ve pretty much talked you to death over the last few years, haven’t I? And I know you have bad days.” He reached out, put a large hand on Tom’s shoulder and awkwardly squeezed it. “Just wanted to see you were all right. Come down and have dinner with me and Florrie some night, okay?”

Tom watched him depart. It struck him that both he and Victor had been chasing mirages out there in the Middle East. Vic had wanted excitement, adventure, and he himself…

Opening the door to the tower, distractedly greeting Belle, Tom tried to remember what he had joined up for. Just to bring the benefit of his medical skills to the front line? Hardly, although he had wanted to change things, make something out there better. He had been lonely—looking for just the kind of comradeship which had two minutes ago presented itself to him outside his own front door. Which had doubtless been here all the time, if he’d been brave enough to look. But he hadn’t been brave. He’d been shy, too chained up even to accept the bright and unreserved love David Reay had laid in his lap.

Shy, stupid, blind. Sure of his own sexuality, too scared to take it with him into the army. Even if he was inclined to damn poor Flynn for cowardice, who was he to talk? He didn’t have a leg to stand on.

And now Vic was gone, Belle fed and given her hour’s runaround on the cliff tops. Tom looked around his home, which, for once during his occupation of it, could really use a cleanup. The undone dishes, the sheets he hadn’t been able to bring himself to change since Flynn’s brief visitation to his solitary bed, the books and newspapers scattered round the living room—all these had been his friends before, or handholds at least, when he was trying to stay out of the pit.

Locking the back and front doors behind him, securing his prison, Tom admitted to himself that he wasn’t trying at all. He sat on the sofa, and after a minute picked up the receiver of the phone. He was aware that he was struggling not to ball up, to wrap his arms around himself, and stopped it. It was cold in here, that was all. He dialled the number of the locum doctor he shared with the surgeries in Newlyn and St. Just. Yes, she was available to cover for him tomorrow. That was good, Tom told her, absently pushing Belle away as she poked an anxious, food-speckled nose beneath his arm. He’d been called away unexpectedly—it would only be the one day.

And surely Flynn should be safe for that amount of time, shouldn’t he? Until Tom emerged? He and Tremaine didn’t fly together anymore, were in different branches of the service. No, he should be fine. Locked into a barrack room, beaten up and fucked raw, which was what he appeared to want. Fine…

The Stoli Elit was better chilled. Tom reckoned, if he gave it half an hour, he could almost disguise this oncoming bender from himself as a few pleasant drinks. The first part of it, anyway. And he was not so desperate, was he, that he couldn’t put the bottle in the fridge and wait for thirty bloody minutes? He stood in the kitchen, rolling the bottle, with its bright contents and shining silver label, between his palms.

Rage shook him. No, he couldn’t bloody wait. He was an addict, same as any bored housewife he tried to wean off sedatives or any junkie kid on the Penzance estates. An addict, a drunk, without even that last shred of self-control he could use to hide from his own shame. Without warning, the muscles in his arms and shoulders tensed—the same involuntary spasm that had pitched Rob Tremaine off his back and onto the cobbles at the Fox—and he found himself smashing the bottle down on the edge of the sink.

It did not so much break as explode. Tom stood at the end of his action, staring dully at the floor. He tried to be so gentle, didn’t he? A doctor. But he didn’t know his own strength. Given opportunity, motive, he could be just as much of a ham-fisted brute as Tremaine. If the bastard were here now, he would show him. Pull him off Flynn. Slam him down among the shards and batter him to death and beyond, rather than ever let him lay a hand on Flynn again.

The old flagstones were glimmering like a night sky. Hypnotic. A good idea. The raw ethanol evaporating off the spilled vodka rose into his brain. Shivering, Tom dragged a hand across his eyes and stumbled back into the darkness where the tower’s stairs coiled down.

The second and third bottles came easy to his hands. He smashed them one after the other on the edge of the sink, this time feeling a kind of scarlet relief as the flying shards bounced back to slice at his palms and wrists. Blood joined the constellations and the vertiginous mess on the floor. He’d kicked his muddy boots off when he came in—did not notice, going back for a fourth, that he was barefoot, that the glass pierced his soles.

A terrible sound brought him to a halt. It was like a child’s wail, except that no human throat could have made it. Tom wheeled round, grabbing at the table to stop himself from falling. For a moment there was nothing but his own fractured breathing and the drip of vodka on the flags—and then he saw his dog huddled against the kitchen’s far wall. Trying to press herself through the stonework. Eyes wild, hackles raised… She was keening at him in absolute terror.

Tom let go a breath. “Oh, God. Belle.” He put the fourth bottle down on the table carefully. There was a bloodstained handprint on it, another on the scratched deal table’s surface. Choking faintly, Tom glanced at his hands, made a distracted effort to wipe them on the backside of his jeans. “Belle, sweetheart.” He took a step towards her, and she cringed from him.

He didn’t know her background, what had happened to her before she had been rescued. The shelter had her history, but Tom hadn’t wanted to know, unable at that time to bear the knowledge of further cruelty or pain. Whatever it had been, he knew that he could be kind enough with her, patient and peaceful enough, to make it better. He crouched beside her. He was aware, from a great distance, that he was sobbing, great rough gasps that tore his chest.

“Oh, Belle.” When finally she let him touch her, he collapsed against the wall at her side. He drew his knees up, folded his arms across the top of his head. He could not breathe or see. The smell of blood and vodka filled his lungs; the sounds of his own grief flooded his ears. Balled up, clutching blindly at the dog’s scruff with one hand, he wept, unable to believe the depth, the age, of the wounds gaping wide in him. What was he becoming? What had he already let himself become? The red tide swept through him, through and through, convulsing him until he began to retch dryly and see stars, and even then there was no stopping it, not for a long time, not until he wore himself out and exhaustion at last came to his rescue. His last awareness was of feeling his limbs go slack, of sliding wearily down onto the ancient chilly bones of the watchtower and closing his eyes.

The cool rush of wind-driven rain on glass brought him round. He opened his eyes and stared for a long time at the kitchen window, where silver-grey streaks were appearing, sudden bright patterns that destroyed themselves and flickered back, an endless repeat that soothed him.

It occurred to him that he was seeing the pane from an odd angle. A slight kilt off landscape, like a badly hung picture. He normally watched it in dignified perpendicular from his breakfast table. When he tried to correct the orientation, he became aware that his neck was hurting. That there was a sting in his hands and arms like the results of his long-ago tussle with a jellyfish off Porth Bay beach. That he was in fact curled up on his kitchen floor, and that things would have been a lot worse had Belle not forgiven him and lain down with her warm bulk between his spine and the wall.

He sat up with a grunt. The hot spell had broken, a silvery rainstorm now dancing round the tower. The shifting light gleamed dully on a thousand bits of broken glass smashed over the kitchen’s flagstones. He croaked, “Jesus Christ,” shoving himself upright. He put out a hand to the dog. “Belle. Paw.”

She wasn’t hurt, somehow. He checked each one of her feet, spreading the hairy pads. Ordering her to stay, he scrambled up, finding out as he did so that he didn’t share Belle’s discretion or her tough soles. He’d cut himself to ribbons, left a carnage of foot and handprints everywhere. He made the safest track he could to the little utility room, pulled a broom from it and began a swift, dry-mouthed clear-up, brushing the glass into shimmering heaps. The pain in his feet was extraordinary. He took a clinical interest in it, moving back and forth, back and forth, until every shard was swept up, bagged, wrapped in newspaper so the collection men wouldn’t do themselves an injury, and dumped in the outside bin. Then he took the vacuum cleaner round. Powdered glass was worse than fragments; got into dog food and water, swallowed, inhaled…

This much accomplished, he sank onto one of the kitchen chairs. He stretched out a hand in a gesture which meant Belle could move, and felt a surge of guilty relief when she came to him without hesitation. In her canine mind, then, everything forgiven and forgotten. She was just hungry, waving her tail in long slow arcs, all sorrows passed.

In some strange way, Tom’s were gone from him too. He fed her, then limped upstairs and stood for a long time in the shower. He hadn’t switched the tank on last night, and the water flowed cold, but he barely noticed. He dressed, paused for long enough to disinfect and plaster the worst of the cuts on his feet and his hands, then went out into the rain-washed morning. The wind was fresh, rich, full of salt. Opening the Land Rover’s door, he stood for a moment, letting the air’s damp turbulence rock him.

He was here. He was glad he’d booked the locum, but he was here, on his feet in the morning light, not dragging himself off the sofa with the black jaws of his hangover sunk deep inside him. Not crawling out of the pit.

Getting into the truck, he started her up and headed for the road. The rain increased, and he switched on her lights, watched the sweep of the windscreen wipers with a kind of peaceful satisfaction. Clear, he was clear. His mind stretched out like the headlamps, finding the path ahead. He knew, after years of one drink won’t hurt and I can deal with it, that he was and always would be an addict, and that his only salvation—not his cure, never that—lay in absolute sobriety. He knew that he was locked in mourning for one lover, that his efforts to accept another, with this grief unaddressed in his heart, had been hopeless from the beginning.

He knew that he’d lost Flynn. Turning onto the lonely stretch that would take him past Lanyon on the road to the Hawke Lake base, Tom took firm hold of the wheel against the wind’s buffeting, set a straight course. He’d lost Flynn, but, God, Flynn didn’t have to be lost, not to the whole world, not to everything a man like that could have and do if he could be set free. Taking Tremaine from him, turning him in, was not the answer, even if Tom had been sure of his facts, and as time had gone by he was becoming increasingly uncertain. All he could do was tell Flynn what he thought, what he feared, and leave it up to him.

The quoit this morning had hidden itself entirely. Tom shook his head, trying to squint through the veils of the rain. No, there it was—crouching low, looking ready to run. He remembered hot light and warm hands on his bare skin, guiding his movements, opening him up. Pain went through him with a clarity that snatched his breath. God, not much hope for him in a bottle now anyway, was there? He’d drunk because he couldn’t feel, and the numbness of a skinful was preferable to that dead zone inside. It was all restored to him, the full bloody human birthright—from the stinging ache in his cuts to the tearing, oddly physical sensation of loss in his heart. The piercing joy that lit him up in spite of everything, when he thought of Flynn.

Headlights in the road ahead. Couldn’t be, Tom thought calmly, beginning to brake anyway. Too close, too fast, and on the wrong side. He started to pull over. The road curved round to the right here—not much escape for him, and the Rover’s tyres were already bouncing and slipping on mud, but plenty of room on the far verge when the other driver saw him. There was a blind crest ahead. Tom, out of evasive manoeuvres, braced and hoped.

His serenity never wavered. He was thinking of Flynn when the vast truck roared over the crest, full beams blazing, all the way over on the left. Still somehow he was lit up inside, hauling the wheel round in the movement that would smash him into the wall.

No. A gap about four yards long, where the drystone had crumbled. The Rover shot off the road at fifty. Hit the barbed-wire fence that bridged the gap, which slowed her momentum a little but flipped her, turned her flight into a wild sideways arc. She hit turf and rocks on a diagonal, shattering windscreen and bodywork, rolled once and slammed down onto her driver-side flank.

Not much point in worrying about car wrecks, was there? The thought came to Tom slowly, as if wrapped in clouds. It became tangled up with a raw scent of petrol, a threatening darkness, and almost slipped away, but he snagged it back, interested in this new aspect on an old fear. He’d seen so many crash victims. Wondered how they’d felt—if a crippling terror had entered them, an anticipation so dreadful that impact must have come almost as release. Did he have his answer now? He wasn’t sure of anything anymore, but maybe if you got that much time to think, you’d avoid the bloody crash in the first place. He hadn’t had a second. The period between knowing it would happen and the whole thing being over was…

Nonexistent? One dark flash? His mind, on the run from its prison, tried to give him the right word, but there didn’t seem to be one. He had felt something. A bang, like a roadside device going up, but inside him.

Thinking of these things, struggling to define them, was very tiring. He lay for a while in the rain. The wind was howling in the Rover’s undercarriage, a mournful, familiar sound. He could hear a rhythmic creaking, like the spin of a disengaged tyre. A gentle pattering, cold small feet, on one side of his face, in the open palm of his hand. Flynn, he thought, with utter satisfaction, beginning to fall away.

He must have said it out loud.

“Yes. I’m here. Oh, holy fucking Christ, Tom. Hang on.”

Another cloudy interval. When he surfaced again, it was to full inhabitation of his flesh, and all he could do was fight not to let go, not allow his ragged breathing to turn into the howls of pain and fear that had suddenly surged up inside his chest. The Rover was lying on her side on the moorland turf. He had gone through the windshield and was trapped from the thighs down in her crushed wheel housing. “Oh… God, Flynn…”

“Here, sweetheart. Breathe. Just breathe. Did this thing have no airbag? Weren’t you wearing your belt?”

No, he tried to say to him. No, too old a model. No, for the first time in my last neurotic, triple-checking, terrified three years, I drove off without it. “See,” he managed, smiling faintly. “This is what happens.”

“Too bloody right. Gonna get help for you. Just hang on.” The feel of a warm hand on his hair, brushing broken glass off his face. The click of a mobile being flipped open, then a triple beep, repeated two seconds later. A volley of swearing that almost made him laugh. Navy boys, no matter how civilised, were all the same underneath. “Godforsaken bastard of a country. Can’t get a fucking signal.”

“No. Not here. Go…” Tom’s throat seized, and he clung to Flynn’s hand through a spasm of coughing. “Back to the road. About fifty yards south. Parking bay. There’s… There’s a clear patch.”

He was gone. Tom listened to the fading pounding of his footsteps on the turf, and wished he could see him. A lovely sight, he’d be willing to bet, that light-made frame at full pelt. The vision deflected his thoughts for a moment. Then he was cold and alone. Shock began to hit him. He felt the first jolts of his reaction, a convulsive shivering, and fought to stay still, to do all the things he would tell a crash victim to do. Breathe. Don’t struggle. Don’t, for God’s sake, start crying out after your saviour to forget the bloody phone call, to please come back and not let you die here alone.

“All right. They’re coming.”

Tom released a pent-up breath, the one that had been holding back that last plea. The turf had resounded once more to running feet. There were warm hands on him. He swallowed hard, tasting blood. There was Flynn, kneeling on the grass outside the Rover’s wrecked and empty windshield frame. Irrelevantly Tom noticed that he was wearing the grey T-shirt he had given him. That he was soaked to the skin, and fighting not to cry. “It’s okay,” he told him. “Be okay. Do I… Do I get a Sea King, then?”

“For this? You’re joking. Common or garden ambulance, for you. And some firemen with the tin opener.” It was a good effort. Tom heard it—Flynn sounded good. Giving him back at least his own effort at humour. On the blurry edge of his vision, Tom saw him lean to look through to the Rover’s rear, which a glance in the cracked rearview had told him was a mangled hell of torn metal and vinyl. “Oh, God. Not Belle.”

“No,” Tom said. “No, she’s at home.” Now that he thought about it, there was something he needed to tell Flynn, wasn’t there, about Sea Kings. It was why he’d been on the road in the first place. Something important…

“Tom. Tom! Wake up. You do not bloody drift off, you hear me?”

Struggling back at the harsh command, Tom became aware that Flynn was reaching past him to drag through from the back the tartan rug he carried for Belle. The one Tom had given him, he now remembered irrelevantly, to wrap around himself a million years ago at Porth beach. Flynn had been cold then, hadn’t he? Bleeding as Tom was now, from dozens of places where his shirt was ripped and blossoming red in the rain. Tom felt barriers of perception and identity slide. His blood, or Flynn’s? Flynn was bruised, he knew that much. Terrible livid thumbprints on his arms.

Covering his shoulders with the rug, Flynn said suddenly, as if following Tom’s thoughts, “Tell me Rob did not do this to you.”

“What?” The question called him back from a great and increasing distance. He was stupid, he supposed. It hadn’t occurred to him. Wasn’t occurring now. “No. Of course not. Wasn’t his truck. Listen. I’m sorry, Flynn. What I said to you about him… Didn’t mean to hurt you.” That was it, though. Something about Tremaine, and the Sea Kings. Don’t fly with him. He had to say it, but the shuddering was boiling up in him again, his body’s hopeless reflex to tear itself out of the trap. “Flynn, don’t—”

“No. Stay still.” Flynn crouched low, reached over the wheel arch and grabbed him. “Got to stay still. Come on, Doc, you know this stuff. Ssh.” Tom wondered if his face was intact. He hoped so. Flynn was kissing blood and rainwater off it, holding him down. “I’ve got you. Keep still.” He stroked his hair, and Tom used a last access of strength to reach up for him. “That’s it. Hang on to me.”

A time passed. At first Tom listened for sirens, then he lost that thread and began to track the rhythmic warmth of Flynn’s breath, coming and going against his cheek. So much had happened, hadn’t it? This man’s irruption into his life, an unexpected daybreak. Then night coming down again, so hard it had almost consumed him. And yet Flynn was here with him. The strangeness of that drifted over Tom’s mind like cobwebs, or the dandelion fluff he could see catching on the wet cotton of Flynn’s T-shirt. “How… How did you find me?”

A quiver of fraught laughter went through Flynn. “Oh, well… Remember how I bumped into you by chance at the quoit the other day? It only took me three goes. I reckoned it was worth another try.”

“Oh great. My beautiful stalker. Did you…?”

“Tom. Hush a minute.”

Tom fell silent. A new tension had seized the lean shoulders he was holding. Tom felt him inhale—took a diagnostic breath himself, of the sharpened petrol tang in the air. “What is it?”

“Not sure. I…” He paused, absolutely still. Listening. And Tom heard it too. A trickling sound, and then a soft and utterly unique thump. “All right. Got to get you out.”

“Thought you said I had to stay still.”

“That was then, sunbeam.”

Tom waited. There was one last moment of uncertainty, terminated by the hiss of spilled fuel igniting. “Oh, you’re kidding. A spark? In this bloody weather?”

“Yeah. Shit out of luck today, aren’t you, Doc? Don’t worry.” Flynn braced his shoulder into the distorted shield frame and got a hand beneath the steering column. “Got to lift this a bit. Can you push?”

His contribution would be token at best, but he appreciated Flynn’s effort to distract him. Then he understood why he had made it. “No. Flynn. Get out.”

“In a minute.”

“No. Now. The tank’s gonna go up.”

“Push up from under the wheel. Come on, Tom.”

I filled her up yesterday. Full load; cost me a fortune. She’ll blow like a culvert bomb. “Flynn, fuck off out of here,” he rasped, trying to shove him away. But he was too weak, the pain occasioned by his movement too unmanning, and he fell back. Something in him still was capable of admiration, of aesthetic response—God, the sight of Flynn, every muscle in his lean tanned arms corded and standing, shoulders straining against the frame… No, don’t die here. You’re too damn lovely.

But he was tough as whipcord too, wasn’t he? Flynn hauled deadweight bodies out of freezing water and into rescue baskets for a living. By contrast with a heaving Atlantic storm, Tom supposed the fire starting up in the back of the truck might not seem to him that much of a threat. He watched him lock a grip beneath the Rover’s crushed dashboard, pulled until Tom thought he could hear ligaments tearing down his spine. Something in the wheel housing cracked. He got an inch, got a couple, and then it would do. Grabbed Tom by the armpits and dragged him out of the wreck.

They ran. Not far, but far enough. Tom knew a moment’s wild elation. He was whole, his legs beneath him numb but working. He was running with Flynn, back on Porth beach, outrunning the ninth wave. Nothing could catch them. When Flynn tackled him to the turf, it felt like brief flight, a cliff dive. He did not see or hear the truck explode, experienced the blast as a jolt through Flynn’s body where it lay over his, a warm unflinching shield.

Days passed in flickering shadows. Their airless antiseptic heat was so familiar to Tom that he did not question it, and simply dreamed himself making his rounds in the ICU, dispassionately looking down on his own bruised flesh laid out on the hospital bed. He borrowed the voices of his colleagues, of Mike Findlay, making diagnosis, trying to reassure the dishevelled young RNAS airman sitting by his bed that he would live. Don’t worry. There was some swelling on his brain, some pressure, but it’s coming down. He’ll wake up soon.

I should never have moved him.

If you hadn’t, he’d be in more bits than that clapped-out truck of his. Is someone looking after his dog?

Yes. Victor Travers collected her and took her home.

You should go and get some rest. He really will be okay. Broken collarbone, bad bruising to his pelvis and legs. God knows how he got away with it. You saved his life.

I’d rather stay here, if I can.

A warm hand, closing around his. It opened a gate, let him back into himself, and he slept.

Many voices. Nearing surface, Tom began to reach for them, but his throat was numb, his limbs drugged and heavy. Some of them surprised him. Vic Travers, his Porth Bay burr breaking up into rough fragments. Then Florence: Now, Victor! You heard what the doctor said. Don’t you go upsetting yourself, or we’ll have you poorly too, and he just got you better, didn’t he?

Mike Findlay, of course, talking to him as if it were an ordinary day, which was the right approach with coma patients. Tom approved, and flickered him a smile which made him exclaim and check the monitors. Did you see that, Lieutenant? Not long now.

Lieutenant… That meant Flynn. Flynn’s voice flowed round him like sunlight. He waited for it, followed it. It rose and fell like the sun, arcing across his day. It told him ordinary things—that it was raining again, that Belle was eating Florence Travers out of house and home. It told him things that made his heart rate pick up, made him struggle to find his way back, striking up through the water. He had not known he could be loved. The warm hand gripped his. His waking skin felt the brush of a kiss to his cheek. Come on, Tom. Please.

The next time he heard the voice, the sunlight was gone from it. It was a flat black snap, a wolf’s growl. Rob, get out. I don’t want you in here.

Why? I’m here for your own good, lover-boy. You miss any more shifts, you’re gonna get busted.

I’m taking leave. Seriously, Rob. I’ll call security.

Nobody has this much leave. And I got you that job. Don’t you dare piss it away.

I know everything you got me. I’ll always be grateful. But you have to let me go.

A silence, deep enough to drown in.

I love him, Rob. You have to let me go.