Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

"Mind on other things. You'll have to forgive me."

"I'll think about it," he said.

Diane glanced at the cruiser, and lowered her voice in case Wayne should be able to hear. "Is that Ted Hammond's boy?" she said.

"His name's Wayne. There's another one, an older boy called Shaun. I never met him, he works abroad somewhere. I don't think they ever got along. Wayne's as good as you'll get, though."

"Didn't Ted's wife die young?"

"You heard about that?"

"Talk about gossip around here… you couldn't get the news faster with a satellite dish. I heard stuff about you, too."

"Really?" Pete said, suddenly getting extremely interested. "Like what?"

"I'm not telling you," Diane said.

And then Wayne climbed out onto the cruiser's deck, and they let the subject drop, and Wayne was left standing there glancing from one to the other, damned sure that something was going on, here, and equally damned if he could tell what it was.

Pete gave another look over the Princess, and wondered what Ted would have thought of the berthing arrangements had he been here to see them. It had been such a tight squeeze to get the Princess into the boat house at all, that someone had come up with the bright idea of removing the edge boards from the quay platforms on either side. This had given a couple of extra feet of clearance, but it had also left the steel ends of the support joists exposed. They'd been muffled with rags and pieces of tyre, but it was still a lashup. The Princess deserved better; a high-performance seagoing cruiser, it would be wasted on such a sedate stretch of inland water as the lake beyond the boat house doors. But what could anyone expect? Dizzy Liston had won the cruiser on a bet, or so the story went. It was hardly going to be any great wrench to part with something that had been picked up so casually.

"All okay?" Pete called, and Wayne signalled that it was. So Pete and Diane left the rail and stepped out of the boat house into the mild spring air to wait for him.

"What are they saying about me?" he said, but she stayed tight lipped and shook her head. Probably nothing, he was thinking, she's only winding me up, and the thought that she was gave him a pleasurable kick.

Wayne handed the clipboard to Pete, and then locked the boat house doors behind him.

Pete said, "Any problems?"

"No, massah," Wayne said, and then he turned to Diane. "Will you want us to hang onto the keys?"

"You may as well. No one else ever comes here, and you'll need them before I will."

"Okay," Wayne said, and he stuck the bunch into his jeans pocket.

The beeper alarm on Diane's watch sounded as they were driving back, the signal that it was time for her to go and collect the litterbug Jed from his minder. This meant a quick goodbye at the Hall, and an instant disappearance from Diane. Pete stood with the clipboard under his arm and his hands in his pockets, watching the dust behind her Toyota as she sped off down the service road.

There was no longer any sign of her when, with Wayne once more behind the wheel, the breakdown wagon emerged into the outside world in Diane's wake. Pete had arranged himself in the passenger seat so that he could get his feet up on the dashboard. Wayne said nothing for a while, and Pete allowed his attention to wander down the inventory list; his eyebrows raised at the mention of a waterbed, a hi fi system and a video hookup in the after stateroom. None of these was Marine Projects standard, and he couldn't help wondering what kind of water sports the original owner might have gone in for.

Just before they got to the village, Wayne cracked his silence. Pete had known that it was coming — the only question had been, when?

"She actually fancies you," Wayne said, almost unable to believe it.

"Of course she does," Pete said. "I'm a wonderful specimen of a man."

Wayne glanced at him, less than one hundred per cent certain that he wasn't being sent up.

He said, "She's all right, as well."

No response to this from Pete.

"A bit old, though," Wayne ventured again, and Pete slowly turned to give him a stony look.

"Just drive," he said.

It was dusk when Pete finally made it back up the track to the old wooden cottage. He switched on the Zodiac's headlights, for the shadows. The damaged one was still working, although it was a little way out of alignment. The rest of the afternoon had been more or less normal for the time of year except that Ted had been following Pete around for most of it, trying to pump him for details of what had happened between him and Diane Jackson. He'd been exactly the same once before when he'd found out that Pete had seen Last Tango in Paris ("Yeah, but what did they actually do ?") and now, as then, Pete had taken care to fine-tune Ted's frustration to the point of obsession.

Finally, as Pete had been opening out the canvas deck cover on a relaunched Fairline Fury while Ted paced the dock alongside, he'd looked up at his employer and said, "You really want to know?"

"I really want to know."

So then Pete had told him, truthfully, word-for-word and without any embellishment; about the shotgun, and the pigeons, and the misunderstanding on the stairs. And when he'd finished, Ted had stared at him for a moment in open disbelief.

"Oh, piss off," he'd said finally, which was exactly the reaction that Pete had been expecting.

Now it was getting late.

He pulled in onto the rough ground before the house, switched off the engine, and got out. Sometimes he remembered to lock the car behind him, sometimes he didn't, and sometimes he remembered but couldn't be bothered. In all the time that he'd been living out on the Step Pete had seen only one stranger go by, and that was a hiker who'd stopped to ask the way because he'd been lost. The Zodiac was no big attraction to a thief, anyway. Most of the time he'd nothing more serious to worry about than squirrel shit on the seats if ever he left the windows open.

When he stepped up onto his porch, he saw that the front door was ajar. The windows to either side had been thrown wide as well, and the ends of the tattered old curtains had blown out to hang over the sills. It looked as if somebody had been giving the place a pretty thorough airing, and it wasn't too hard to guess who. He went inside and the kitchen scents hit him then, laying down a trail that drew him across the creaking boards and down the hall.

He paused for long enough to throw his jacket onto one of the hallway hooks, and called out, "It's me."

"Through here," Alina called from the back of the house.

He went through.

The first thing that he noticed was that the lights were out and that she'd set up candles from his emergency supply in one of the kitchen cupboards. They were on the dusty painted dresser, on the shelves, and on a tin tray before a freckled old mirror that had been hanging in the bathroom. The big pine table in the middle of the floor had been set for dinner, and on it stood a bottle of cheap wine from the village store. Pete picked it up, looked at the label, and then set it down again; and as he was doing this, Alina appeared in the doorway.

Her eyes shone in the warm tallow light.

Pete felt a stirring of apprehension then, rising like a deepwater fish to the sunlight; and although he tried not to let it show, Alina seemed to perceive it.

"Wait," she said, moving into the room. "Wait, I know what you're thinking."

"I'm not thinking anything."

She stood before him, looking up into his eyes. "Yes, you are," she said. "Look, I'm not about to invade your life. But I like this place, Peter, I like this valley. Today I got a job."

"What kind of a job?"

"A waitress job." She gestured at the table. "So, don't get the wrong idea about all this… tonight I get to practice on you, so tomorrow I don't look so stupid."