Scrap Metal (35 page)

I stood in the yard, watching the swallows weave quick shadows over the cobbles and walls. I’d known he was okay because the rhythmic song of hammer to metal had rung out from time to time through the afternoon heat, and I’d stayed within earshot. But the last two hours had been silent, and waiting had been hard.

I’d been watching the workshop door, so I jumped when the gate creaked and he emerged from the paddock behind the barn. He looked exhausted but gave me such a sweet smile that my heart contracted and bumped out of beat. The collies glanced at me expectantly. Well, it was worth a try, and Cam looked as if he needed bringing home. I tried a particular whistle. “Go on,
coin mhath
. Fetch Cameron.”

They were superb herding dogs. Not even the leeriest sheep could have minded their light, quick arrival, their subtle placing of themselves, one to the side, one behind, one leading more by suggestion than force. Cam was laughing by the time they’d delivered him up to me, a rich, resentful, despite-himself sound I hadn’t thought to hear again. “Nichol Seacliff, don’t you ever dare get your dogs to round me up again.” He glanced at them. Floss and Gyp, job done, had sat down with dignity, but Vixen was dancing for attention, tail waving. Cautiously Cam scratched her skull. “Hello, then, bonny girl. What have you done to them anyway?”

“We had a talk. Are you okay?”

“Yes. I’ve been working. I had to finish welding outside—it wasn’t going to fit through the workshop door in one piece.”

“Can I see?”

“Yeah, sure. Come on.”

I followed him back through the gate. On the way, I tried another experimental whistle, and the dogs to my astonishment turned as one and trotted off towards their barn. I’d take them out a good feed later and try them with penning the animals we had in the south pasture for tomorrow’s shearing round. I couldn’t imagine the magic would last, but…

I stopped dead, catching my breath. Between the barn and the drystone wall, in a sheltered spot where he had liked to stop and contemplate his kingdom between tasks, there was Harry. If I moved, changed my angle, he would be gone. No ghost this time—only shapes in metal, six or seven of them, angled indescribably to catch his shape and form. Around him, helixing upward in bright reflective strips of aluminium we’d scavenged from the Brodick dump, were his dogs. You would only see it if you came in through this gate, and only the family ever used it. You would have to be a Seacliff.

My throat was knotted painfully. I put out a hand and sought Cam’s. He caught it and came to stand by me, wrapping an arm round my waist. “Can you see?”

“Yes. God, yes. How the hell did you do that?”

“I started it before he died. Then I didn’t dare finish it. I didn’t know what he’d think.”

“He’d have bloody loved it. He…” I paused, imagining his reactions, and I started to laugh. “He’d have been unbearable. In the pub with his mates—
yon lad made a statue of me. Beat that if you can, with your portrait-painting grandson, Angus Brodie.
”

It took Cam a good few seconds to find a smile, and it was full of sorrow when it came. I wasn’t much better off. My eyes were stinging, vision blurring. I took him in my arms when he turned to me, and we clung together.

“I wish he’d seen it, then.”

“Oh, you know this place. Probably he can.”

“Nicky, I feel like I didn’t pay for anything. It was hell—in the courtroom there, saying all that. But I didn’t pay anything, not really. I didn’t make anything right.”

I stroked his hair—beautiful crow’s-feather Celtic hair now, since his pretrial visit to the Lamlash barber’s, where the last of his disguises had been swept up and cast to the wind. “I don’t think it works like that,” I said roughly. “Paying, I mean. How can we? You took McGarva and Baird off the streets for the next old man. Maybe that’s as good as it gets.”

“Shit. I wish it had been better.”

“Maybe it will be. We just live our lives, good ones. Pay that way.”

He leaned into me and sobbed. “Nic, I love you. You saved my fucking soul.”

He was hot and vibrant in my arms. He smelled of his afternoon’s work. This time when grief burned up into passion there was, thank God, no one and nothing to hinder it, no fear to make us run for cover and closed doors. Arms tight round one another’s waists, we stumbled as far as the sunny gap between the barns where we’d set out the first bales to dry. I went down hard, dragging him on top of me. He ripped into my shirt, and I groaned in pleasure as the sunlight hit my skin. We lived half the year in winter darkness here but, God, when summer came, for its brief spell of days, it was perfect.

I got hold of his T-shirt, and together we wrestled him out of that, held ourselves apart for long enough to deal with zips and buttons. That would have to do. He sucked at my left nipple till the right one was hard as a pebble for want of attention, then shifted over, making me arch my back and shout. He thudded down beside me on the hay and I fastened a good solid grip on his arse. “Come on, sweetheart. Give it here.”

His breath exploded against my neck. “Oh, God. This is going to be…unceremonious.”

“Yeah. And short.” I dragged him hard against me, and he thrust harder still, ramming his rigid shaft against mine. I cried out again at the relief of it, the hot sacred comfort. We’d shared a bed each night of this endless month and barely touched—not like this, though we’d slept with limbs entwined, shipwrecked sailors clinging to one spar. He grabbed my backside with a strength now more than equal to my own. He sought my mouth. The press of his tongue, deeper with each struggling thrust of our hips, tore a howl out of me that spent itself in soundless vibration halfway down his throat, and I came, whole body convulsing in the savage joy of release. I held tight to our kiss, our cock-to-cock clench. He was there too. He shot against my belly, long spasms racking him, chasing themselves in a tangle with mine to stillness and shuddering conclusion.

He was exhausted. He could barely lift his head—I wedged my shoulder beneath it and caught his fall. “All right. I’ve got you.” His hand drifted up to my face, caressing. I grasped it, turned to kiss the palm. Already he was casting off from shore, one corner of his mouth curling up in a shattered half-smile. His fingers laced into mine, and their grip stayed tight even when the rest of him was warm limp deadweight in my arms.

I woke suddenly, heart jolting. Over the last month I’d learned to sleep lightly. Cam had put most of his enemies out of the frame with his own actions, but Bren McGarva’s grasp had been large, and I wouldn’t normally have let myself pass out so completely in the open air.

Still, Glaswegian hit men didn’t tend to announce themselves with cheerful beeps of their car horn. Cam planted a hand on my chest and pushed himself halfway upright. “Is that someone up by the gate?”

I yawned. Initial fears dismissed, I wanted to drop back into postcoital languor. “I dunno. Ignore them. They’ll go away.”

“Oh, that’s just what they’re not allowed to do.” He made a grab for his T-shirt, gave me a brisk pat on the belly. “Come on, gorgeous. It might be custom.”

I followed him up the track, picking hayseeds out of my hair. Cam and I had taken to putting the odd piece of his work by the roadside, as Harry had suggested, and it hadn’t turned out at all to be a bad idea, although after one near miss we’d had to move them back from the curve and into the gateway. I should have predicted that the jump-out effect of the sculptures’ imagery would be more startling still from a moving car. Now we displayed them at the beginning of a long straight stretch of road, so as to keep potential buyers well clear of oncoming traffic.

The beeping came again, more impatient than cheerful now. I tucked in my shirt and tried to look businesslike. I was acting as Cam’s informal agent in these sales, mostly because his astonishment whenever one happened made his customers doubt their own taste. A sporty BMW was purring in the gateway now, its owner watching us over the top of her sunglasses. An enterprising luxury car rental firm had opened up in Brodick, allowing visitors to tool around in vintage Porsches and suchlike for the day if they wished, but this lady looked like the car was hers.

“Finally,” she called out as we jogged up to the gate, and I was relieved to hear an accent less imposing than her haircut and vehicle. Birmingham, maybe, and not unfriendly. “Don’t you two like the thought of making sales?”

Cam reddened and started to apologise. I laid a hand on the small of his back, which was our signal for him to shut up. “No, we like it a lot,” I said, returning her smile. “We were just busy. Can we help you?”

“You can tell me if I saw a full-blown naked mermaid leap out at me from that tower of abstract bits of scrap. Not that it’s not a nice thing in its own right,” she added to Cam, as if concerned for his feelings. They always knew which of us was the artist. “But there’s something else to it, isn’t there?”

“Well—aye, there is.”

I stepped back. Once he got talking about the work, he was generally fine. I leaned against the gate while he politely asked the lady out of her car and walked with her back and forth along a few yards of the roadside. We got some good reactions. She was trying hard to look less impressed than she was, but the wobble of her high heels at the crucial viewing angles gave her away.

“Very fine,” she said eventually. “Intriguing. What’s your best price?”

Cam cast a pleading glance at me. I’d tried to get him to cost out his labour hours, to value his products as more than the sum of their parts, but when it came to his own work, my hard-nosed underworld money man was hopeless.

“We could do three hundred,” I said boldly.

Cam’s mouth dropped open, and I tried to indicate to him subtly that he should shut it again. We’d sold a couple of pieces for over a hundred pounds now, and this one was much larger—his best yet, apart from his incredible memorial to Harry. I didn’t think it was such a wild reach.

Maybe I’d been wrong. Our visitor had planted her hands on her hips and was gazing at me in disapproval. I didn’t want to lose Cam the sale. “Or,” I began philosophically, “if you were thinking of paying in cash, I’m sure—”

She flicked out an index finger at me. It was very businesslike. Down in the Midlands she probably had staff who fell silent at that gesture just as promptly as I had done. “Don’t you dare offer me a discount.”

“Er… Don’t you want one?”

“Here’s the first thing nobody tells young entrepreneurs setting up on their own, especially creatives. Punters value your work according to the price you put on it, not their own artistic insights, because nine out of ten of ’em don’t have any. The tenth, like myself, won’t mind stumping up the cash.”

I tried to work this out. “Then…”

“Yes, I’ll give you your three hundred pounds for this piece, Mr…”

“Seacliff. Nichol Seacliff.”

“And the sculptor?”

“Cameron Seacliff.” I’d thought Cameron Vaughn had a great ring for an artist, but his eyes had filled with such pain when I suggested it that I’d thrust the subject aside, kissing my apologies onto his eyelids and mouth.

She shot a glance between the two of us. “Hm. You don’t look like brothers. I’m assuming you’re acting as this young man’s agent, Nichol, or his manager. If I catch you underselling his talent and potential again, I’ll tell my spotter not to bother with the photo shoot or the article in my gallery’s next magazine. As for paying cash—my God, do you think your customers are drug dealers? Get yourself a credit-card facility sorted out. And a website. PayPal.” She reached into the glove box and pulled out an expensive-looking wallet. “Right. My assistant will be by tomorrow to collect, so have it wrapped up and ready. And make some arrangements for delivery, shipping. You can’t expect people to cart off things like this in the backseat of their cars.”

Cam and I watched the BMW roar away. When she had vanished into summer dust, we turned back to the gate and started off together for the house. I bumped my shoulder gently against his. “Sorry I undersold your talent and potential, love.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He pulled the wad of crisp twenties from his pocket and looked at it wonderingly. “She was nice for a drug dealer, wasn’t she? Right—here’s the tax, the bill contribution and a wee bit for the savings jar. Remember to put it all down in the accounts, and I’ll prepare an invoice for the assistant.”

“Thanks,” I said. I was intrigued. This was the first time he hadn’t handed me the whole amount. I liked the idea of him out on a spree, not that Brodick high street offered much scope. “Going to treat yourself, then?”

“In a way. I’ve never seen the Southern Pyrenees. Or the Northern ones, if I’m honest with you. The medieval tower has a balcony, so I’ll sit up there and flirt with the Basque gardener while you’re off discovering his linguistic roots.”

“Did I let you sleep in the sun for too long, you poor…?” I stopped dead in the middle of the lane, remembering a rainy evening in March when I had been asked what I wanted. “What have you done?”

He put his hands on my shoulders. “Now, Nic, don’t make a fuss. Archie said you would. It’s only a fortnight, okay? I reserved it a long time ago, back when you started paying me, and this…” He released me long enough to pat one pocket. “This’ll take care of the balance.”

“But you can’t—”

“I can. I checked with the courts. I can travel abroad, as long as it’s within the EU. In a way, I know I should live on bread and water in the barn for twelve months, but this is for you, so it doesn’t feel so bad.”

“I don’t mean that.” My heart was racing. In a moment I would have to find the words to turn him down, but for now I was just swept away by the gesture. No one had tried anything like it for me in my life. He wanted to take me on holiday. “I can’t let you spend that much money on me. And I can’t leave the farm. And…what has Archie got to do with this?”

“I had to tell him so I could arrange with him and Shona to look after the place.”

“You and Archie have been…chatting?”

“Yeah, a few times. He’s no’ such a pain in the rear now he’s not a copper anymore.”