Radulf, finding nothing more interesting to eat, came to Aleksey’s side, and he began the inevitable rubbing and gentle twisting of ears. It was unconscious almost; he hardly registered he was doing it until the old dog groaned in pleasure.
Squeezy bent to pick up the ball, turning it around in his hands thoughtfully.
Aleksey waited him out. He was good at waiting.
Eventually the younger man came and sat down next to him on the wall. ‘You got summit you wanna say, boss?’
‘What does the professor know about your past?’
‘What business is that of yours?’
Aleksey wobbled his free hand. ‘It affects how I decide to move forwards with my plans—which involve you.’
‘Stop with all the cryptic shit. I’m not Ben.’
Aleksey wasn’t too sure what the moron meant by this last, but he suddenly agreed with the first, and so explained swiftly, ‘I’ve asked Harry to be the caretaker of Light Island when I’m not there, and he has agreed. He’s going to bring the old walled garden back to life. I offered him the cottage, but he’s said he’s happy with the shed. I hope that might change one day. I don’t believe in fate. I believe we make our own destiny in life, but I also believe in the sentimentpay it forwards.’
‘You won your fucking bet. You can do what you like with the old bastard. How does any of this crap affect me?’
He pressed on, ignoring the sudden and distinct chill in the air. ‘I know who Harry is, and I know his history. At first, I couldn’t understand your antipathy to him. You are a complete fuckwit and excessively annoying, but you are usually fairly affable when you’re not killing people, so why the aggression towards a seemingly harmless old man? It was not, as Ben concluded, that you had discovered him to be a fraud—not a veteran. You were working with him, so clearly knew something more than you told Ben. Then you claimed you had not told Ben about this help you were giving Harry because, as you charmingly put it, I always come along too. Well, yes, I suppose I do. And you know how that usually works out for people, don’t you?’
‘You Peyton them and then you kill them.’
Aleksey laughed, and Squeezy actually smiled back before he caught this in a jaw clench of annoyance.
‘Ben recently used that expression. Is that what you three musketeers are calling it now? Peytoning people… Well, there you go. I would have Peyton’d him, and in doing that I would have found you, wouldn’t I? Not Michael Heathcote, but…Michael Staveley-Bathurst.’
Squeezy’s gaze shifted to the tor so Aleksey could not gauge the reception of this assertion.
He continued unconcerned, ‘We cannot escape our genetic inheritance. I saw it when you were both taking the boat out of the bay into the storm—saving my entire family for no other reason than it was the thing that needed to be done. Yes, you stood exactly the same, braced the same way, had the same physical resemblance, but it was more than that—you both did the right thing in the right way at the right time. You were made of the same stuff.’ He started some vigorous scratching of Radulf’s topknot. ‘I have my genetic inheritance, too. I lost my father at seventeen, just as you did. And then I became so like him that when I tried to fight against that legacy it nearly killed me.’
‘And yet, here you are.’
‘And here you are. Twenty years is a long time to lose to bitterness. So, I come back to my original question: how much does the professor know of this? I suspect…nothing? If there were just me to consider, I would tell him myself, because it would be extremely funny to see his reaction and to then see yours. But there’s not just me, there’s—’
‘Diesel.’
Aleksey wrinkled his nose. ‘Yes. Ben. So, there we are. Harry is going to be working for me.’ He glanced across. ‘I suspect I won’t be free of your irritating presence until I have the opportunity to kill you and get away with it, so you will also be working for me. You will both be…’ He paused, wondering how to phrase it. There seemed to be only one way, so admitted it. ‘Part of my new family.’
They both watched PB for a while, not that he was doing anything particularly interesting. Radulf lay down. That needed observing for a while too.
‘I’ll tell him.’
‘Good. Then I can tell Ben.’
‘Nah, I’ll take them both to the pub tonight. Tell them together; then they can sit and gossip about me behind me back.’
‘No change there then.’ Once more they were silent, thinking their own thoughts until Aleksey commented, ‘You’re still a moron, by the way. Marlborough College senior prefect or not.’
‘And you’re still a wassock, fucking road to Damascus conversion or not. You got Diesel fooled, but you don’t impress me.’
Aleksey raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s not what Harry says.’
Squeezy’s head swivelled slowly to regard him. ‘You ever heard the expression sailing close to the wind?’
Aleksey shrugged. ‘I have. Have you heard of pit bulls?’
Squeezy laughed, stood up and stretched, his t-shirt rising over his honed abs. He did a few side twists, either releasing kinks in his spine or teasing him, Aleksey couldn’t decide.
