Stockholm Syndrome [01] - Stockholm Syndrome (14 page)

"I know you're awake," he says without turning round. "You've stopped snoring."

"Piss off. I don't snore."

"You fucking do."

Lindsay finds the other half of his pyjamas in the jumble of clothes scattering the carpet and pulls the trousers on. When he goes out onto the balcony and slides his arms around Valentine's waist and kisses him good morning on the back of his neck, he's tickled on the nose by bits of hair tumbling out the elastic band where the kid's twisted it into a messy knot.

"I fucking don't. Morning."

"Good morning, starshine." Valentine looks back over his shoulder, the bare one, and twists a bit to put his half-burned cigarette in Lindsay's mouth. "I owe you one. Well-" His lips move silently as he counts the stubbed-out ends on the wall next to him "-okay, four."

"I'm sure we can think of some arrangement for payback."

"You slag, I knew you were gonna say that." He turns back to the sea and doesn't speak again for a while. "Hey, Lindsay?"

"What?"

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"Are there really puffins on Puffin Island?"

"I don't know. Maybe there used to be."

"Puffins are wicked. We should go over and kidnap one, keep him as a pet. I'm sorry I'm a brat," he adds, without a pause, without changing his tone.

"You're not at all sorry. You thrive on infuriating me."

"Well. I dunno. Yeah. I can't help it, you go all butch and commanding.

Gives me the judders."

"You're an idiot as well as a brat. Get off the wall, you're making me nervous."

He swings his legs over and hops down without argument. "You ain't telling me you're scared of heights." He tugs on Lindsay's hand, leads him back into the bedroom and onto the bed, and Lindsay leans over to put his cigarette out in the ashtray before he answers.

"No. I'm scared of you falling off and denting the Jag."

He butts at the pillows with his elbows and the back of his head until they're comfortable. The kid's beside him, on his front with his bare feet kicking up girlishly behind him. More hair's coming loose from the rubber band, falling round his face. Lindsay reaches out to stroke it back, tuck it behind his ear, but the strands aren't long enough to stay. He doesn't stop trying.

"Told you," Valentine says, smiling with his eyes closed. "Slave for life, you play with my hair."

"Yeah." He gives up eventually, and when Valentine frowns he moves his fingers over his face instead, smoothing it back into a smile. "So, listen.

Yesterday."

"Mmm." It's a non-committal sort of 'mmm'.

"You still want to kill your parents?"

"Fucking right I do." He finally opens his eyes, and props his chin on one hand so he can look at Lindsay, walking the fingers of the other idly up and

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down his chest. "Buuut we probably shouldn't."

"You think?"

Valentine ignores the amusement in his voice. His walking fingers dance up Lindsay's neck and onto his face, over his lips and scratching through the three days of stubble.

"Sorry," Lindsay says.

"What for?"

"Couldn't be arsed shaving."

"I don't mind. I like it." He leans in to press his lips against Lindsay's jaw. It must prickle, but he does it anyway. "It's like you're all gone to pot when I ain't around. Anyway," he goes on, with his customary topic-seesawing, "I texted. I was gonna phone, but you were sleeping. And I don't wanna talk to them, anyway. I said that, I said I never wanna talk to them again in my life, or see them, and I don't want money off them or my things or nothing, it's just... it's
it
, you know? It's done. Fuck 'em."

Lindsay's never seen him so open before, all quiet and honest like this.

He catches the kid's fingers where they're creeping through the hair behind his ear, and brings them back to his mouth so he can kiss all the knuckles in turn.

"That's a lot of texting."

"Yeah, I'm out of credit, you'll have to buy me more." He's not quite meeting Lindsay's eyes, he seems embarrassed. "Everything, really, you know? I ain't got nothing. My car, I stuffed it full of clothes and CDs, but apart from that, nothing. No money or nothing. I can work for you, I ain't gonna be a sponger like
them
, but-"

"Philip."

"Don't call me that, it's
his
name."

"Well, I'm not calling you
darling
. I'm not a darling kind of man."

"Don't call me nothing, then. Just talk. Say oi when you need my 113

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attention. It's fine."

"Oi."

"What?"

"Shut up, alright? We've got money. Some of it's yours anyway, I suppose, my share of the ransom money."

Valentine smiles radiantly, and darts forward to kiss him. It's clumsy, they crash noses, then Valentine's giggling against his mouth.

"Do you think they'll try to find you?"

"Dunno. I said I'm living with my boyfriend and he's well tough, he'll cut them up if they try anything on, so..."

"I'm thirty-four years old. Don't call me your
boyfriend
, it's so juvenile."

He feels awkward and stupid and anachronistically breathless, like he felt after his first kiss behind the gym block at school as a gangly spotty teenager.

"So what are you?"

"I don't know. Why does it need a name? You're here, I'm here. Just leave it."

"Alright." Valentine starts shuffling around, climbing on top of him, straddling his thighs and working on unpicking the knot in the drawstring of Lindsay's pyjama trousers when he pulls the bow the wrong way and gets it all in a mess. "So now what do we do?"

"We get up. We have breakfast. We-"

"
Not
the answer I wanted."

"Well, naturally, that first,
then
breakfast."

"Better." He makes a little noise of triumph when he figures out the knot, then he's up off the bed and pulling on Lindsay's hand again. "Come on, come and have a shower with me. I ain't done it in the shower before, I bet it's well awkward, it'll be a laugh."

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Lindsay just looks at him, this kid with his long hair all falling down out of its twisted-up ponytail and the smudgy leftovers of yesterday's make-up and blue nailpaint starting to chip off at the edges, and he wonders what the fuck he could have done in a past life for this one to end up in such a state.

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C H A P T E R 9

Lindsay sits at the kitchen table for a long time, chain-smoking and drinking tea and waiting, just waiting. He can't concentrate on reading the paper, he just waits. It's quiet for once because Valentine's upstairs sulking – Lindsay laughed at the ragged old toy monkey he brought back from his parents' house with his carful of clothes, and the kid took offence so deeply that Lindsay thought he was joking and laughed even more, which only made it worse. It's amazing how much he managed to cram into the old Mini; it took forever to lug it all upstairs, and now the kid's taken on the task of rearranging the bedroom so he can fit all his junk in with Lindsay's. He was whingeing earlier about how they need to go and buy a bigger wardrobe and lots more coathangers, but he shut up when Lindsay told him to and just got on with his job while Lindsay wandered around downstairs, smoking and waiting and-

"
Lindsay
!" Valentine screeches from up in the bedroom. Lindsay blows out his last lungful of smoke and goes to put the kettle back on as Valentine thunders downstairs and flies into the kitchen to grab at his arm.

"Get off me. What?"

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"Cop car's just turned up the drive."

He can see it out the kitchen window now, winding up the steep road towards the house. "Yeah. It's the chief constable."

"The
what
? Oh shit, fuck hell
shit
, what are we gonna do?"

"You're going back upstairs. I'm making him a cup of tea and having a chat."

"But..." The panic in his face fades to confusion. "What?"

"I phoned him."

The kid suddenly looks like he's about to cry. "What did you do that for?"

"Because it's time to sort this mess out."

"How's it gonna sort things out if you're handing yourself in?"

"I'm not. Just trust me. It'll be okay."

"We'll get in trouble."

"No we won't."

"Yeah we will. Even if you don't admit to nothing you're still gonna be a suspect for kidnapping me and then they'll find out about the robbery and all the other stuff and you'll get done for it and they'll make me go back to London and I ain't going. They ain't making me go back. They can't, I'm nineteen, I'm a grown-up, ain't nobody's business where I go. I'll shoot myself first, they'll have to take me back in a fucking hearse."

"
Calm down
," Lindsay says, almost shouting over Valentine's panicky flood of words. He grabs the kid's arms just below his shoulders and shakes him sharply. "Listen to me. I want you to go back upstairs. Don't come down until I tell you to. Nobody's making you go anywhere. Nobody's getting in trouble for anything. I know what I'm doing. I'll sort it."

The siren isn't on, but the silence when the car engine stops outside somehow seems very loud.

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"Go on," he says, a bit more gently. He turns the kid around, steers him back towards the stairs, and closes the door behind him.

Several cups of tea and cigarettes later, when the car's pulling back off the drive, Lindsay creeps as quietly as he can over to the door and flings it open.

Valentine's doing a bit of creeping of his own, trying to get upstairs without making them creak, and he sits down heavily halfway up when he realises he's been caught. He looks frightened, but more than that he looks furious.

"I thought I told you to go upstairs," Lindsay says calmly. Valentine scrubs his hands against his wet eyes and glares at him.

"Is that how it works? You help the boss copper get off in one way and he helps you get off in another?"

"I didn't-"

"But you did before. I heard you talking."

They've been amicably blackmailing each other for years, ever since Lindsay was seventeen, alone at home when the copper next door came knocking and up for trying anything to get out of being arrested for his clumsy petrol station robbery a few nights before. "First time I ever did anything like that," he muttered after, wiping his mouth on his wrist and staggering up from his knees to stamp out the heavy pins and needles while the chief inspector, as he'd been then, refastened his trousers and asked, "What, armed robbery or
that
?" Both, Lindsay said, and Harvey laughed and said it was obvious. Lindsay never told Harvey's wife anything about what he got up to when he wasn't at home, and sometimes gave Harvey a cut of the winnings, and in return he got rock-solid alibis fabricated when he needed them and even his speeding fines were ignored.

"I've just given him three million pounds," Lindsay says now. He still sounds calm, although he doesn't feel it. Valentine's twisted face and hateful stare makes him want to punch the kid to a pulp. "That's almost twice my share of the ransom money. I've
never
lost money on a scam before. You'd fucking well better calm down and prove you're worth it."

"Oh yeah, I'll prove it," Valentine spits. "I'm the most expensive whore

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you've ever had, you've shelled out for proper quality here." He turns and runs back upstairs. He slams the bedroom door so hard Lindsay half-expects to see it in splinters, but he doesn't bother following the kid up. That's probably what he wants, a good screaming fight. He's not getting it. He can sulk up there with his stupid monkey as long as he likes. Lindsay goes to put the telly on. The living room door won't slam when he shoves it closed, because the carpet's too thick under it. Somehow, nothing in the world has
ever
been as aggravating as a door that won't slam when he wants it to.

A couple of hours pass, and he realises he's getting fidgety, like he was before he jacked in the drugs a few years ago, how restless and frantic he got whenever he needed another hit. There's no way around it; he kind of hates himself for being the one to break first but he
has
to or lose his mind, so he goes upstairs for the fight or the apology or whatever's going to come but Valentine isn't there. He checks every room, upstairs and down – even the airing cupboard, although he feels stupid after. There's no sign of him anywhere. At first he thinks the kid's just being a brat and he'll come back when he's calmed down, but minutes slink by and turn into hours and by the end of the second it's started to rain and he's standing at the patio doors in the living room, chain-smoking again and just watching shadows creep down the hill as the sun begins to set. For a minute he thinks the kid might have run away for real, gone into town on foot then nicked a car or hitched a lift or bought a train ticket, but a quick glance in the bedroom says he can't have done – that revolting old toy monkey is still there, flopped out all spread-eagled on the bedside table because the stuffing's gone out of its joints from where the kid used to carry it around by its limbs, and there's no way he'd have gone for good without taking that with him.

Half an hour later he's pacing the bedroom carpet, still holding the monkey, thinking about cliffs and the crashing sea just below the house, and the caves and loose rocks up the hill. The touristy bits are safe, but the parts off the official tracks are a challenge even for expert climbers, and if the kid's run off and got himself into trouble he's got no chance now. It's happened before, people going missing and their bodies turning up trapped by a rockslide or washed up drowned and bloated on the scruffy little beaches. He wants to go out and look 119

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for him, or call for the rescue services and report him missing, but what if Valentine
wants
that? What if he's nice and warm and safe in one of the cars, listening to music and having a good long sulk and just waiting for Lindsay to come flying out in a panic looking for him? But back on the other hand, what if he
is
actually lost?