He rolled his head to regard Ben, surprised. ‘I’ve told you, we always got on famously.’ He added swiftly, ‘It was one night, Ben. I promise you.’
‘What am I going to do if Sarah wants to leave?’
Aleksey closed his eyes. ‘I know.’ He could feel the waves of confusion and guilt rolling off Ben. And it didn’t help that he knew with complete certainty that if he opened his eyes Ben would be twisting the Best Daddy in the World bracelet around and around on his wrist.
* * *
Chapter Twelve
The next day, Aleksey went to the garden early to tell Harry they were leaving. He found two of the raised beds already cleared and dug over and the old man sitting on an upturned bucket, faithfully working on a pair of rusty secateurs with a sharpening stone. Snodgrass ran over to him, which was a first. Such enthusiasm for his presence could have just been a memory of digestive biscuits, but it got him a pat anyway.
They chatted for a while. Harry promised to make his first report in a week’s time. They shook hands, and that was that.
As he exited the walled area, Aleksey felt a deep sense of satisfaction in his decision to install the old man on his island. Living things needed strong, courageous hearts at their core.
Until he remembered the moron. Despite their slightly morbid bet over the sea stack, which would force Ben’s friend to not comment one way or another on Harry’s fate, he realised Squeezy had only acquiesced to this wager because Harry had supposedly been nothing more than a stranger he disliked.
But Harry was not a stranger. He was, in fact, the landmine about to go off under all the cretin’s pretences. Fragmentation was an extremely painful experience to endure—Aleksey knew this only too well. It was entirely possible that Michael Heathcote might decide he’d rather move on and retain his current persona intact than have this seismic shift forced upon him.
And Aleksey would regret that if it happened. Despite their almost constant bickering, Ben loved the moron for some bizarre reason Aleksey had never understood.Hecouldn’t stand the obnoxious fool, obviously.
It was a dilemma and the main reason why he had not yet told Ben about the situation.
Ben had the boat packed up and was waiting for him on the dock.
Aleksey climbed on board and Ben threw off the lines then jumped down alongside him. Aleksey let Ben do the piloting as usual. He sat at the stern, trailing one hand in the crystal clear water of the bay. He wanted to tell Ben, he really did. He could not even blame Ben for the anger he would probably feel on discovering, once again, that people he trusted were deceiving him. The moron had accused Harry of being the liar, the deceiver, but had not apparently seen the irony in that accusation. Ben would not like discovering that Michael Heathcote was an impostor.
‘What’s wrong?’
Aleksey jerked back from his reverie at Ben’s question. ‘I was wondering where we need to go to organise the electricity, that’s all.’ He came to stand alongside Ben. ‘But we’ll eat first.’
Ben nodded, although Aleksey had a suspicion that once more Ben knew he was being distracted.
When they docked and had returned the boat safely to the hire company, something of a novelty for them, they hefted their bags and headed into the small town centre. They got a few curious glances, which was not a novelty, but both recognised that these were now slightly more wary than admiring looks. Duffels slung over shoulders, salt-encrusted hair, a week’s growth of beards, wrinkled, unwashed clothing, scars and attitude, they more resembled survivors of a particularly unpleasant lifeboat encounter with a whale than playboy billionaires. Which suited them both just fine, Aleksey suspected. He glanced amused at Ben and got a sideward private smirk back.
Heading to the restaurant to make good on his offer to feed Ben, they passed the bookshop once more, and this time it was open. He nudged Ben and then turned to enter. A predicable tinkling bell announced their arrival, and a woman looked up from the counter. Since his conversation with Harry, Aleksey agreed that if he wanted to find Billy, he should discover more about the history of the lighthouse, and if possible find the retired lighthouse keepers themselves. It seemed something, as Lord of Light Island, he should know anyway.
They’d been in the bookshop many times before, but had only ever seen a young man working in there. Ben had got to know him fairly well, as they had apparently bonded over a love of high-performance engines. Which was a shame for a boy brought up on Scilly, Ben had later commented to him—a place where clearly motorbikes and cars were something you could only dream of owning. Ben had probably broken the boy’s heart when, buying the latest copies ofRiderandTopGearone day (the only things Ben had really read other than zombie books untilhisrecent intervention), Ben had told the lad some salient speed facts about his Ducati Monster Diesel and their Mercedes GL-Class off-roader in obsidian black with a V-8 engine. Spanner, as the boy was nicknamed by his friends (possibly ironically, as his opportunity to wield one of those was probably limited to the occasional boat engine he was called upon to fix), was welcome, in Aleksey’s opinion, to bond with Ben over anythingmechanicalhe wished. He acknowledged thathewas a poor recipient of Ben’s enthusiasms for engines of all sorts. As long as one got him from A to B and he looked good in it, he didn’t care what was under the bonnet.
But now Arthur claimed the young man had left and the owner was subsequently taking a more active role in the business, and that she, being an author of many of the books sold about Scilly, was the one they needed to speak with about local history.
As usual, they both had to duck under the lintel as they came into the shop. Ben headed immediately to the children’s books to browse for his new Molly-library, and Aleksey went towards the woman. She folded her arms and asked neutrally, ‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes, I hope so. I am looking for some information. The man in the museum, Arthur, suggested I ask you, given your local knowledge.’
There seemed to be a long and unnecessary amount of calculation going on behind her eyes at this simple introduction, but eventually she asked cautiously, ‘You off one of them boats?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘You a deckhand off one of them big trawlers docked last night? Foreign by the sounds of it.’
‘Isn’t everyone foreign in Cornwall?’
That actually got a tiny lip quirk. ‘What you be looking to know then?’
This seemed a very fortuitous exchange to Aleksey, as he’d wondered how he could enquire about the lighthouse without giving away his particular interest in it as the new owner of Light Island. Now, she’d inadvertently given him the perfect cover he needed. ‘We sailed in yesterday past some of the western islands, and one of them had a…sorry, I do not know the word in English.’ He turned to Ben and said to him in Danish, ‘She thinks we are from a foreign fishing boat. I wish to continue this mistake. Say something back to me.’
‘You’re an idiot?’
