Badge of Loyalty #1
Summary:Mike Angells is an openly gay CID inspector based in North East England. There are three men in his life: Raith Balan, Phil Roberts and Ross Whitburn. Mike is particularly close to Ross.
Following a routine but significant investigation into thefts of farm machinery, Mike investigates the suspicious death of a footballer. The suspect’s father threatens to expose a crime Ross committed many years earlier, unless Mike withholds evidence that would incriminate his son. Mike must choose which badge he is loyal to—the one he was given when he joined the Force or the tattoo he wears that symbolises polyamory. His decision leads to a brutal conclusion when two men who bear grudges, an ex-con and Balan’s ex-lover, combine to exact revenge.
Interspersed with Mike’s story are comments made by Raith, Phil and Ross about Mike, each other, and the nature of their polyamorous relationship. It works for them, but, as Phil explains, they work at it.
Neither full-on erotica nor hard-boiled crime, and with many light moments, this is a story about love, hatred, and the price which is paid for loyalty.
**Warning: Adult Content**
Summary:
A bittersweet story with two interwoven themes: a crime and mystery involving trafficking and a look at the workings of a polyamorous relationship.
A young Syrian needing treatment at Warbridge Hospital is seen by Phil Roberts, one quarter of a gay polyamorous quad living in north east England. The men in the doctor’s life are ex-cop, Mike Angells, gallery proprietor, Ross Whitmore and ceramist and artist, Raith Balan.
Phil is troubled. Is his patient in the UK legally? Who has caused his injuries? Is trafficking involved? As the foursome struggle to find out, hampered by the fact that Mike is no longer a detective, cracks begin to appear in their relationship. Can four men be equals? Is their lifestyle viable? Meanwhile, there are cracks of a different sort to deal with—and the job of doing so seems to fall exclusively on Mike’s broad shoulders.
A young Syrian needing treatment at Warbridge Hospital is seen by Phil Roberts, one quarter of a gay polyamorous quad living in north east England. The men in the doctor’s life are ex-cop, Mike Angells, gallery proprietor, Ross Whitmore and ceramist and artist, Raith Balan.
Phil is troubled. Is his patient in the UK legally? Who has caused his injuries? Is trafficking involved? As the foursome struggle to find out, hampered by the fact that Mike is no longer a detective, cracks begin to appear in their relationship. Can four men be equals? Is their lifestyle viable? Meanwhile, there are cracks of a different sort to deal with—and the job of doing so seems to fall exclusively on Mike’s broad shoulders.
Ace in the Picture #3
Summary:An art fraud, a polyamorous suspect, an asexual detective…
Polyamory and asexuality meet in this third tale about a north-east England quad.
The police suspect Raith Balan of faking a painting. So do money-launderers who sink profits into art. Mike, Ross and Phil, the three men in Raith’s life, must prove his innocence. They’re hampered by their certainty that a member of the Fraud Squad is corrupt.
The senior investigating officer is Detective Sergeant Nick Seabrooke. He knows he is asexual, but is he aromantic too? As Raith’s lovers struggle to keep Raith safe and find the fraudster, the sergeant struggles to understand why the quad is often in his thoughts.
Badge of Loyalty #1
CHAPTER 1
Phil
There's an Irish song about an angel that loved a human. I don't know anything about the deity the angel worked for, other than it was a bloody cruel one. It stripped the angel of its wings. I like to think that they were rainbow coloured.
The problem was, the angel wasn't meant to love the clay. What happens, though, when the clay loves the angel? That song is still playing.
The painting I'm looking at isn't a typical Raith Balan. It's a scene in a leafy garden. As such, it's markedly different from the wild waterfalls Raith paints for his own satisfaction and from the erotic ceramics that he sculpts primarily for the pleasure of others.
There are four men seated round a pub-style table, a parasol advertising lager unsuccessfully staving off the heat; all four men look hot. Raith himself sits on the left. He's leaning forward, talking urgently with animation. Obviously, one can't infer that from the painting. Though Raith's work is admirable — or so they tell me, anyway — he hasn't managed to make it speak yet, other than to the emotions, of course! But I know, because I'm the figure on the right holding a half-empty bottle of brown ale. Probably brown ale. Raith remembers the details of that day in the garden with greater clarity than I do. But then, Raith can recall most things he sees, and his hand can reproduce exactly what is held in his memory.
Ross is seated between us, worry adding to his thirty-something years. You can see the concern in the knit of his eyebrows and in the tightness of the muscles in his neck and bare arms. Concern for the fourth man, whose face Raith has never painted. Mike Angells, the man all three of us love and who, somehow, manages to love all three of us. Raith and I both know that we aren't the ones he'd risk his life for, though. If only Ross had had a different surname, not one named after a town in northeast England. Whitburn-Howe. That's Ross's surname. He usually only uses the 'Whitburn', and that was the part that caused us so much trouble. Within bell-ringing distance of Sunderland, and it rang one bell too many for our comfort.
* * *
"Anybody we know being reinflicted on society this week, Ron?" asked Superintendent Flaxby.
"One we might want to keep an eye on, yes," Detective Chief Inspector Fortune replied. "Remember seven years ago, that shooting at Merton's warehouse on Cantrill Industrial Estate?"
"I certainly do. The Babcock brothers. Angells' case."
"That's the one. Luke Babcock got sent down for ten years, along with his brother, but he's being let out early. The brother's got another year to do."
The super nodded. "I'll worry more this time next year when the two of them are running round loose again," he said phlegmatically.
"One for the inspector to lose a bit of sleep about, I'd have thought, though," said the DCI.
Flaxby could almost hear the glee in the chief inspector's voice as he offered his news. Luke Babcock had always maintained that he was merely a bystander, innocently caught up in a vicious attack on a warehouse security guard. According to his lawyer, he'd even tried to stop the attack. The judge had had none of it. Angells' case was technically sound and the evidence was watertight, so Babcock had been led away swearing not-so-sweet revenge.
"Does he know?" asked Flaxby.
"Not yet. I was going to tell him when he came in."
I bet you were, thought Flaxby.
"I need to see him anyway. I'll tell him myself," he said aloud, adding, too quietly for Fortune to hear him, "I'm not giving you the pleasure, you jealous sod."
The first thing Flaxby did when he got into his office was telephone the governor at Blay Fenn Prison. Ten minutes later, he felt fairly reassured. If Babcock did have thoughts of retribution, he hadn't been voicing them recently. But then, you never knew, and for that very reason, you couldn't allow yourself to worry much. For Angells' sake, though, he'd have liked to have had the bastard watched for a week and, hopefully, seen him off his turf; but cuts were cuts, and he didn't have the officers to sort out the urgent tasks clogging up his in-tray, his desk, his chairs, his room ... let alone the non-essential ones.
It would probably be all right. The badge was a great protector. Anyway, there were more pressing things to think about. So he left a message on Inspector Angells' desk. See me when you get in.
Mike Angells, pronounced with a hard 'g' like go and get. Not that hard 'g's meant anything to Raith, who habitually addressed most folk as 'babe' and, knowing an angel when he saw one, preferred to call all five foot eleven of Mike his 'Angel Baby'. At work, his nicknames were less flattering. As long as the super was out of earshot, Ron Fortune called him 'Angela'. Mike always ignored the provocation — a wise move, as Detective Chief Inspector Fortune was his immediate superior in the Tees, Tyne and Wear CID.
Fortune and Angells disliked and distrusted each other, but while Mike had the self-discipline, respectfulness and courtesy to subjugate personal dislike to professionalism, Fortune had no such scruples.
Suspicious of those he still referred to as poofs and queers, and most definitely not the face of modern policing, he envied his younger colleague's standing with the super. Fortune was furious to think that, with the upper echelons bending over backwards to nail their rainbow colours to the mast, kowtowing to the law if not to the zeitgeist, he would find his path to superintendent blocked, whereas 'a fucking sodomite like Angela' would doubtless make it sooner or later. Probably sooner: he was rising steadily. So Fortune made sure that, if he had to be ordered around by a fucking fairy in the future, he'd order the slack-arse around now.
Flaxby knew all this, and would have liked to have Fortune transferred, but in a shrinking force, with recruitment at an all-time low and experienced cops retiring early, he needed all the skill and knowledge he could get to keep his Warbridge division running smoothly. So, he deflected the slings and arrows whenever he was able to, and it was he, not Fortune, who requested Angells' presence on that particular morning.
There was a knock on Flaxby's office door, and Angells pushed the door open.
"You wanted me, sir?"
"Come in. Sit down, man."
Flaxby waited until Angells had deposited the pile of paperwork that took up both available chairs onto just one of them.
"Do you want me to take some of this stuff off you, sir?" he asked, sitting down.
"You mean you've nothing better to do, Mike?" Flaxby said, smiling.
"Wouldn't go as far as that. If it helps, though."
"No, but thanks. Something's come up. Mike, what's the word on the street about these farm machinery thefts?"
"Not being funny, sir, but would that be on the street in general, or are you specifyin' my Street and gossip at the Tunhope Arms?"
The stretch of narrow, winding road that ran from Tunhope on the 689 through to Tunhead at the head of Tun Beck was called 'The Street', and the Arms was the only pub for miles. Thus it was the inspector's local, if a local can be three miles away from home as the crow flies and ten if you stick to poorly maintained tarmac.
"Your Street. Much being said?"
"I'd say the farmers are worried, sir. We've had nuthin' taken up the Tun yet, but the farms to the east of ours have been hit and that's gettin' too close for comfort."
"What sort of stuff's going?"
"Old stuff, as far as I know. The only kind of machinery these hill farmers have. They can't afford all the new gear. If the goods are endin' up abroad, which is what the thinkin' is, the thieves want the old stuff. Mechanics not electronics. Things you can fix with a screwdriver and a bit of gaffer tape, not a load of fancy engine management linked to a computer. There's quads gone too, though," he added. "At least three that I know of, and that hits these farmers really hard."
"What's security like?" the super inquired.
"Well, non-existent usually," the inspector replied. "There's all this advice goin' around from us and from the insurance companies — perimeter fencin', CCTV, security lightin' — but it costs an arm and a leg. Mostly, the farms rely on their dogs and geese to tell 'em if sumthin's up. And they daren't take their guns to anyone now. Not that I'd be wantin' them to do that, mind."
"So what's the feeling in the pub?" asked Flaxby.
"Oh, you know how it is, sir. City lowlife. Boro, Sunderland ... Newcastle maybe."
"You think so too?"
"Maybe. I'd like to know a bit more first," said Angells with his characteristic caution when faced with a lack of evidence. "It just doesn't sound like opportunists to me. It's not exactly the same as nippin' in and nippin' off with the family jewels while the owner's havin' a night out at the Metro, is it?"
He was referring to the Metro Centre — a large leisure complex on the outskirts of Gateshead. It was a lengthy drive from the becks on the Wear but there wasn't anywhere as large and as exciting that lay closer.
"You've got to know how to drive a tractor, and they don't exactly do the ton on the motorway, do they?" Angells added. "That's if they are driven away. From what I've heard, they just seem to vanish."
"OK, Mike," said Flaxby. "This farm thing has fallen into our lap. Don't want it — got a hundred other things to do — but there it is. The chief con and I went to a big meeting about these thefts yesterday, and she's come back full of ideas. Seems like you're one of 'em. She wants to see you, so ... off you go upstairs."
"Now?"
"Right now."
Angells rose, but as he went to open the door, Flaxby called him back.
"Look, son," he said. "One more thing. Luke Babcock's out this week. I'm not expecting any problem — talk is easy, action's a hell of a lot harder — but, just in case, keep my personal number on your speed dial. One word — Babcock — and I'll get onto it and track you. OK?"
"OK, sir. No worries. Thank you."
"Oh, and you might as well take that pile of stuff with you, seeing as you offered!" Flaxby said lightly. "Computers seem to generate paperwork, not cut it down."
Angells smiled and returned for an armful of files before going out of the room and shutting the door behind him. He wasn't fooled by the super's parting levity though. First he checked he had Flaxby's number on his phone, and then he went to the chief constable's office.
* * *
Mike Angells, Raith's Angel Baby, was no sour, dour, angst-ridden misery! He'd got into all the normal childhood scrapes, spent the usual number of hours in A&E with a frantic mum as medics checked limbs damaged in climbs and tumbles, pubbed, clubbed and danced the night away, and had never had to come 'out', having never made much of an issue of being 'in'. He'd known he preferred Sam Mitford's company to that of any other kid in his class and when, mid-teens, he started to see that their mutual fondness went deeper than the need for a mate to kick a ball around with for an hour after tea, he accepted the realisation with the same good-humoured shrug of his shoulders as he accepted most other things. Most things — for, when he was eighteen years old, six months off his A levels, his father died and he got his first inkling of something Raith had known for years, that life wasn't always fair.
Bob Angells had worked in the stone industry, a quarryman loading the local 'marble' into trucks and sometimes driving the lorries himself. One November afternoon, after three days solid rain, the stretch of road he was driving over subsided, and he was buried under twelve tons of limestone.
With three younger sisters and a younger brother, an elderly grandparent living in the house as well, and bread to be put on the table....
"It doesn't brook no argument," Mike had told his mum. "There's still work over Kielder way. Not on the reservoir itself. They're buildin' this tunnel to transfer water through to Frosterley so that the towns on the Wear don't go short in the summer. I can get there on Dad's bike. I'm quittin' school."
And so, for the next two years, he developed his social skills and his muscles on a construction site, travelling the only way a carless youngster in a bus-free world could: on two wheels, his two powered by a 600cc engine. Whenever he had a day off, he rode to Durham, to the hall of residence where Sam was living while he studied archaeology, and they'd spend their free hours exploring the hills and the coast and the country pubs before finding somewhere quiet and secluded where, for an hour or two, they lay closeted in each other's arms. No two ways about it: the two men were in love, and they were still in love, four years later, when Sam died too.
Waiting for Mike to bring the bike round in the car park of Emelda's, a gay nightclub close to the Metro Centre. Ploughed into by the drunk driver of a Merc, and dead on arrival at the hospital three-quarters of an hour later. So Sam had been buried in the little churchyard in the village where he had been christened twenty-five years earlier, and Mike applied himself to work with a single-mindedness that left as little room as possible for thinking about loss and what might have been. Fortunately, the job he was in by then didn't leave much time over for thinking.
The Kielder Project over, he'd joined the police and done his two-year probation. He'd proved his competence, completed a stint of 'ordinary' police work and then moved to the RPU, the Road Policing Unit, patrolling the busy north-east section of the M1/A1 on a big, hefty looking BMW R1200, twice the size of his own crimson Yamaha. But when government cutbacks affected policing, as well as other local public services, the RPU was scaled down and, thinking ahead, Mike had applied to CID, been interviewed, been accepted and found he had the money to go where he wanted. The problem was that the person he wanted to go where he wanted with was lying in Tunhead graveyard.
Polyamory on Trial #2
Chapter 1
Among the lorries that rolled off the gangplanks at Hartlepool docks were two belonging to Colporth International. The vehicles looked identical, except for the colour of their cabs. The first was green; the second was red.
Border Force was acting on a tip-off. Two officers pulled the green cab over. The co-driver of the red lorry opened his window, made sympathetic noises and promised to wait a few miles further on at a lay-by on the A689, the trunk road that led through Durham and Warbridge and on to the rest of the region.
By the time the officers realised that their informant was either colour-blind or had been handed false information, the red cab’s driver had made his deliveries, and six young men and women, who had started their journey many months before and many miles away, stretched their cramped muscles on English soil and looked forward to a better life than the one they’d left behind.
The red cab made its way through the Warbridge one-way system, passing a cafe where two men were sitting near the window drinking coffee. One man looked to be in his thirties, the other in his mid-fifties. They idly watched the red cab’s passage over the old stone bridge that spanned the River Wear.
“So I’ve been back workin’ for two or three weeks, sir,” the younger man said.
“You don’t have to call me ‘sir’ now, you know, Mike. I’m not your CID super anymore.”
“I know, sir, but old habits die hard, as they say.”
A person who overheard their conversation would be forgiven for thinking that their working relationship had changed due to the elder man’s retirement. In fact, it was Mike Angells, the younger of the two, who’d left the Force. He hadn’t had a choice: he’d had to resign.
“Anyway,” said Mike, “it’s good to get back to doin’ sumthin’, even if it is just for a couple of hours a day. They’re treatin’ me like some sort of unpaid servant at home! Raith especially—Phil and Ross aren’t quite as bad. I’m doin’ everythin’ from hangin’ out their washin’ to plasterin’ over the cracks in the walls. I’m goin’ bloody mental!”
He was grinning as he said this, his grey-green eyes—which Raith, tetrachromat though he was, had found near-impossible to replicate in paint—full of laughter again, thank goodness.
Mike, Ross, Raith and Phil: four men who shared everything, including their home and each other. Mike and Ross had long lived in ‘Cromarty’, a tiny terraced house in Tunhead, a hamlet in the Durham hills, and now they were converting the equally tiny house next door so that all four of them could comfortably live together.
“So, regarding all this renovating and rebuilding, what exactly is the plan?” Superintendent Flaxby asked.
“Eventually, to knock all the party walls down so that Cromarty’s big enough for the four of us. We’ve made a start on it. Or, rather, I’ve made a start on it. Means we can have a livin’ room we can stretch our legs out in, for one thing.”
“I was surprised Phil moved from Warbridge. I thought he liked being near the hospital,” said Flaxby.
“Well he always said he wouldn’t move, but he’s really fond of Raith now. Also, I think he’d’ve moved out to Tunhead years ago, but he kept his place on so’s I’d have sumwhere to stay in winter when the journey home from work’d get too icy. Bad enough on the six-eight-nine. On that lane up to Tunhead, bloody suicidal. Now I’ve left the Force though…” Mike shrugged, and Flaxby diplomatically changed the subject.
Mike Angells had been a respected CID inspector until, around a year before, he’d left his job in circumstances that were only known to half a dozen people. Clive Flaxby was one. He’d been Mike’s superintendent at Tees, Tyne and Wear’s divisional HQ in Warbridge, County Durham. Flaxby knew all about the men in Mike’s relationships, too.
“It’s crazy really,” mused Mike. “Never thought I’d be a landlord. Yet here I am: one-quarter owner of a dozen little houses, a whole little hamlet at the head of a beck. I mean, when me dad died, I quit school to keep a roof over our own heads—me mam, me gran, me brother and me sisters—and now… I could give ’em a house each.”
“There’s landlords and landlords, Mike. You know that.”
“Aye, I do that, and I know what I’d do to the bastards involved in some of those rackets if I got my hands on them.”
Had the two men known it, some of those involved had—just minutes ago—almost been within their grasp.
* * * * * *
Mike
So people want to know about livin’ polyam, do they? And the other three have decided that, since I only work a few hours a week and all I have to do all day is tickle me toes in the beck behind the house, I can pontificate about our lifestyle and what it’s got to do with this rebuildin’. The sods. They seem to forget that I’m the one who’s doin’ all the work round here, makin’ two houses into one just so’s Raith doesn’t have to get his hair wet when he sweeps in, stickin’ chilli flakes in everythin’. I know it rains a lot in County Durham, but if he made a bloody effort and ran the twenty yards from his studio to our front door, he wouldn’t have to moan about catchin’ pneumonia. He can be a real wimp when he wants.
It’s not just about him though. From a poly point of view, it made sense to knock the houses through. Ross and I have lived in Cromarty for several years now, though we only started calling it Cromarty after he moved in. It was ‘Number 1, The Street, Tunhead’ till then. We’ve never been to Ross and Cromarty—the real Ross and Cromarty in Scotland, that is. Then, after we’d bought up all the other houses in Tunhead and Ross had started up BOTWAC (nuthin’ to do with BDSM, though we get lots of enquiries from people who think it is—it’s the Beck on the Wear Arts Centre), Raith came and set up his studio in the old quarry storehouse. Tunhead was built as homes for quarry workers, but obviously there’s no quarryin’ here now. Raith was always over in our house. He said it’s ’cos he loved our company so much, but we think it was just to get out of the bombsite that’s his own place. There, you’d either fall flyin’ on water that’s spilt on the floor, or you’d cough your guts up on the clay dust that gets everywhere. So he was always here, with his little pot of bloody chilli flakes. And then, of course, Phil was in Warbridge. He wanted to be handy for Warbridge General and for the uni in Durham, because he works at both, but—especially recently—he started spendin’ more of his free time in Tunhead.
Also, we have to do a lot of talkin’ to make our foursome work. We need lots of opportunities for discussions. So it made sense to move in together, but Cromarty alone was far too small. One loo. One shower. One bath. A twelve by fourteen foot livin’ room. Four men. And we average out at four big men. Phil and I are average big, Ross is smaller, Raith is larger, and four big men in one tiny terraced house doesn’t go. And I know this sounds daft, but somehow Raith takes up more space than he occupies. We’re tryin’ to train him. And constrain him! “Put your dirty clothes in the laundry basket, Raith. Take your fuckin’ hair out of the plughole in the shower. Up here in the north, we call this a floor mop”—he’s from the Midlands— “use the bloody thing!” He’s gettin’ better, so it isn’t hopeless, and luckily we’re optimists. And patient.
So, and as I was sayin’, when Anna Rowle—that’s the weaver who had the house next door—decided to move back into town, rather than lease the place to sumbody else, we decided to have it ourselves, rebuild and all move in together.
When we’ve finished knockin’… No, when I’ve finished knockin’ the walls through… Honestly, it’s ridiculous. Raith and Phil say sumthin’ about their hands bein’ worth thousands. Ross does the odd bit then races off to the gallery in town, and that leaves me starin’ after ‘em, wonderin’ why I’m left cartin’ barrowloads of bricks and stone and cement around. What was I sayin’ about talkin’ and togetherness? I must be mad. I hear plenty of talkin’, but there isn’t much evidence of the doin’ things together bit! Not that I can see, anyway.
Ace in the Picture #3
Chapter 1
Raith stood in the kitchen in front of the calendar. His gaze shifted from the naked figure depicted on ‘October’ to the highlighted ‘Thursday 12th’ and back again. He pressed a fingertip to his lips, transferred a kiss to the mid-point of the figure’s shoulder blades and ran his finger down the spine—Mike Angells’ spine.
The real-life Mike walked into the room and filled the kettle.
“What are you admirin’?” he asked. “The model or the artist?”
Raith was the artist. “The artist,” he replied. “He’s classy. The model’s okay, I suppose.”
“Cheeky!” Mike admonished.
Changing the subject, Raith asked, “You know what day it is in two days’ time, don’t you?”
“In two days? Well, let’s see… difficult one… It must be Thursday. Aye, that’s right. It was Monday yesterday, so—”
“Stop teasing me! Do you think he’s forgotten?”
‘He’ was Phil Roberts, the man Raith had married 364days earlier.
“Don’t be daft. Of course not. You know Phil. His middle name’s ‘No fuss’.”
“That’s two names.”
“And that’s two cups of coffee. One for you. One for me,” said Mike, handing over a mug.
“None for me?” asked a third man who, yawning, had entered the kitchen. He hugged the two men already there.
“Sorry, Ross,” Mike apologised. “I didn’t make you one. I thought you were still asleep.”
“No. Just dozy,” said Ross sleepily. “I heard Phil’s car. Is it an emergency, Raith?”
“Not exactly,” Raith replied. “He went in early to cover for a colleague.”
Phil had helped to pioneer a form of rectal surgery that used nanocarbon patches to reconstruct torn tissue. He was a respected consultant at the hospital an hour’s drive away in Warbridge, County Durham.
“I’d better get sorted and get out myself,” said Ross. He was, amongst other things, a gallery proprietor in Gateshead, and his journey to work took longer than Phil’s. He yawned again.
“Are you feelin’ okay?” asked Mike, alert to Ross’s tone of voice. “It’s not like you to sound so unenthusiastic about work.” In fact, it wasn’t like Ross to sound unenthusiastic about anything. He was always lively—he personified keenness.
“I’m dead tired cos I didn’t sleep well. I had a strange text late on. You were already asleep. I don’t think you heard the phone buzz. Strange. Unsettling.”
“Oh?”
“How do you mean?” asked Raith. “We’re not going to get involved with more criminal activities, are we? I had enough of crime fighting last time!”
Even though Mike was no longer a detective with the Tees, Tyne and Wear Constabulary, the four of them were involved in a surprising amount of crime fighting. ‘Last time’ had involved an illegal immigrant, and the tensions that had arisen had threatened the survival of the quad.
That’s what they were: a gay, polyamorous quad. They lived in Tunhead, a hamlet in Weardale in the Durham hills. Once, Tunhead had rung to the sound of workers’ hammers hitting stone. In a way it still did: Ross had turned it into an arts centre full of smiths, sculptors and potters who wanted to escape the North East’s towns.
“Well, we’re not, are we?” Raith repeated.
“No.”
“Good. Well, my creations won’t create themselves. I’d better get off, too.”
In Raith’s case, ‘getting off’ simply meant walking twenty yards to his studio, a converted storehouse.
“You sure he hasn’t forgotten?” he asked Mike again before he left.
“I’m sure.”
“Okay then.”
“What’s that about?” asked Ross after Raith was gone.
“He’s bothered that Phil’s forgotten their anniversary.”
“He hasn’t.”
“I know he hasn’t. He’s takin’ him off on a trip sumwhere—but you know Raith. He needs everythin’ crystal clear and written in capital letters. And sumtimes, so do I. What was this message about?”
Ross pulled a face and explained. When he’d done so, Mike could understand his concern.
“He wouldn’t be so stupid, Ross… Would he?”
“Not stupid, Mike, but he’s gullible. He doesn’t always think. I just don’t know.”
*****
The message stayed in Ross’s mind during the forty-mile drive to the gallery and he couldn’t forget about it once he was there. Some of Raith’s paintings hung on the gallery walls. They were mainly of Weardale’s waterfalls. After heavy rain, the falls transformed from gentle trickles into rushing, gushing powerful forces of nature that the four men knew could kill. They’d seen them kill.
Raith loved to paint the waterfalls. From a distance, his torrents looked alive. The effect was linked to his use of colour. Raith was a tetrachromat; he could see a host of hues in what, to most people, was a single shade. He painted for himself, though, not for fame or money—he had plenty of both, due to his skill with clay not brushes. Several of his wares were on show at the gallery, most tagged ‘sold’ with a price that would feed and clothe all four men for a long, long time. His sensually erotic sculptures, modelled on Mike and Phil, were always in demand and beautifully, lovingly executed. But today, Ross gave Raith’s erotica a miss. He stared, instead, at the waterfalls.
What might induce Raith to produce a piece of work “with intent to deceive”, as the legal phrase was?
That was what the worrying message had suggested. That Raith’s were the hands and eyes behind a painting that the police were interested in. They thought it was a fake. For the umpteenth time, Ross asked himself why?
Raith didn’t need fame and he didn’t need fortune, but did he need the challenge of outwitting the experts? Of copying another artist’s work so accurately that no one would notice the difference?
Surely not. Momentarily, Ross’s dark mood lifted. The only challenge Raith was likely to rise to was the one of finding ways to spice up the quad’s evening meals. Two nights ago, he’d ‘accidentally’ stumbled near the saucepan with a teaspoon of chilli flakes in his hand.
“Oh, look! They’ve fallen in,”he’d said apologetically.
Ross smiled when he thought about it, but anxiety soon returned. Could Raith be feeling resentment? Sometimes, that was the driving force behind a fraud. Failed artists whose work had been refused once too often. Failed artists who took I’ll show them!literally.
No. All Raith’s resentments were little ones that quickly blew over—feeling nagged for not doing his turn on the house-keeping rota, being yelled at for leaving clay-covered dirty washing on top of the pile of clean laundry. Raith took umbrage easily, but he’d be smiling again within the hour. And anyway, he wasn’t a failed artist. He was a very successful one.
He was a strange mixture though. That complexity was part of his attraction. It was part of what made him Raith. His skill was undeniable, but his mental health was fragile— ‘bloody unhinged’ was how Mike would describe Raith in less charitable moments. He could be unpredictable. He could be very violent. He had another side, though, and it was what Mike and Phil and Ross adored about him. Canny, clued up, an ex-con hard as nails… but at the toss of a coin, as loving, as sweet and as trusting as anyone they had ever met. Mike was as loving, and often as sweet, but trusting? No. Mike was ex-CID. It wasn’t in his nature to be trusting.
Which was why Mike was already making phone calls.
Saturday Series Spotlight
Sunday Safe Word Shelf
Jude Tresswell lives in south-east England but was born and raised in the north, and that’s where her heart is. She is ace, and has been married to the same man for many years. She feels that she understands compromise. She supports Liverpool FC, listens to a lot of blues music and loves to write dialogue.
Badge of Loyalty #1
Polyamory on Trial #2
Ace in the Picture #3
