That night, the dreams started.
Her as she had been in the newspaper cutting: young and wild and free, her hair long enough to fall in dark rivers over her naked shoulders, delicate roses twisted into a crown over her brow, and a wry, knowing smile on her lips. He watched the play of moonlight and shadows that dappled her bare skin, and felt a surge of desire like a swelling tide.
But when he took a step, she darted away, dancing across the bare ground between the trees, trailing ringing laughter in her wake. He followed, he always followed. She kept ahead of him, slipping in and out of shadows, tantalisingly out of reach, until finally he burst out into a clearing, and the sudden carnage before him stopped him in his tracks.
The stag was still alive, wounded at her feet, kicking up blood and dirt in spraying arcs as it struggled to rise, bellowing with wild, incarnate rage as he stepped closer, towards her. Sometimes it managed to get to its feet, stagger and lurch towards him and then collapse, its life finally spent. Sometimes he just stood and watched as the light slowly dimmed in its mad, rolling eyes, as it lay panting in the dirt until one ragged breath was its last. But every time it was over, every time he moved to touch her, and he stretched out his hand towards her pale body, he saw the darkness smeared across his palms, that his hands were filled with blood.
However it happened, he woke up sweating, exhausted and painfully aroused. If he was lucky, it was really morning, and if he wasn't, he could watch the pink tinge of the dawn from his window as the small hours crept by, tossing and turning amongst the damp and twisted sheets, sick with guilt and lust.
He didn't need a psychiatrist to tell him that he had a problem, but standing in the cold shower at three o'clock in the morning again, rinsing off the sweat, and trying to drive the turgid swell of blood from between his legs, he pressed his face to the cool, slick tiles and finally admitted that he wanted her.
They'd hammered in the last nail just as the sun touched the roofline, and the baking heat of another glorious July afternoon finally began to dissipate into a cooler and more tolerable evening. Standing back to admire the fruits of their labours, Riley had suggested they take some time to enjoy it before his mother got in with fairy lights, and, he shuddered as he said it, cushions.
MacTavish watched him haul two weatherbeaten sun loungers up from the patio, and dump them in the shade of the little veranda. He thought Riley looked better: he'd accumulated an extra millimeter of fat in his days of rest, and it had softened the skeletal gauntness of his face. The sickly, sallow tinge had faded too, but the dark hollows around his eyes remained.
He don't sleep much, is that normal?
In the hours they'd worked in the punishing heat, he'd been working on casually bringing it up, but each time he had a possible opening, each time he thought he had mustered enough courage, he faltered, letting the moment slip away. He was bracing himself to launch into the silence one more time, and finally broach the subject, when the girls erupted onto the patio in a cacophony of shrieking hysterics. Donna Riley kicked open the gate that had swung shut behind them, and wobbled through, hands around a stack of pizza boxes, her complaints just audible over the storm of noise.
Riley levered himself off the weather lounger with a grunt, and stretched, groaning with the effort. MacTavish watched him set off down the garden at a stiff hobble, cheerfully retrieve a few untouched boxes from the scrabbling hands of the mob and thrust a bunch of screwed up ten-pound notes into his mother's hands before beating a hasty retreat. This far away, MacTavish couldn't hear the exchange between them, but when she shielded her eyes and stared up the garden, he gave her a tired wave, which she returned with gusto.
The rest of the gang turned briefly to regard them with quiet, curious indifference, and then, with stifled giggles (which he irritatedly suspected he might be the subject of), return to the more pressing matter of stuffing their faces. He noticed Jade at the centre of the bunch, an unexpected stillness in the skirmish, glaring at him with the same accusing stare until finally, someone nudged her back into the fray.
He realised something that had been bothering him. "What do you do with all those birds you cop off with if you've got family at home?"
Riley dropped a pizza box on the ground beside him, and shrugged. "Head back to theirs, mostly. Otherwise, if you don't enjoy working outdoors, why're you even in the army?" he winked lasciviously and MacTavish rolled his eyes. "But… yeah" he continued "I don't exactly want to be bringing people round here and have them interrogated over breakfast and it's not really fair on Jade. Might do if it ever got serious, I suppose."
MacTavish considered the reaction that he'd got from Jade when he'd turned up, and felt sorry for whatever poor woman Riley eventually felt was worth bringing home.
Riley gestured with a pizza crust, waggling it pointedly in MacTavish's direction "You should make the most of it: independent man, your own place. Get your hole in peace and quiet whilst you can."
"Don't rub it in." MacTavish snapped, peevishly. The thought of going out, getting hammered and fumbling between the sheets with some stranger left him cold in a way that it never had before, but he had the same urges, an itch he couldn't scratch. He had been thinking about it a lot since the first time he'd been round, at the stability of Riley's family life, what it would be like to come home to an occupied flat, and then he'd thought about the other, the feel of a warm, familiar body against his, and every time, he thought about her .
Riley snorted with amusement "Someone not successful in their night time manoeuvres then?"
MacTavish plucked a half-melted ice cube from his drink and flicked it at him in mock annoyance. It bounced off his chest and he yelped, laughing as he knocked it into the grass. "Oh well…" he said "I guess you're not as tight with la duchesse as they say then?"
MacTavish looked up sharply, a ghostly touch of fear on the back of his neck. "What?"
"The duchess. Gaz Bradley's old lady."
MacTavish's stomach knotted. Very slowly, fighting the mix of panic and anger that surged suddenly within him, he sat up, and looked Riley dead in the eye " Who ." he asked, his voice low and dangerous "Is saying that?"
Riley shrugged, unperturbed at the sudden, barely concealed violence in MacTavish's words. He took a long swallow from his glass and then, with a slow movement of his hand, swirled the ice cubes round in the dregs of his lemonade, said "Just something I heard."
MacTavish stared at him, the shock of this accusation crystallising into a cold, indignant fury. He exhaled slowly, counting slowly in his head until he had it under control.
"I watched Gaz Bradley die." He spat, every word annunciated with rage. He looked away, unable to look Riley in the eye as the world lurched, the carefully repressed memories erupting, howling into the present.
He shook himself. "I owe those kids a few minutes of my time as a bare minimum." he said. It came out as a mumble as he fought to keep the rising nausea under control. It took every moment of his mental focus trying to keep the tremor out of his voice.
Liar .
MacTavish saw her in his mind, leaning against the summerhouse wall, a devious smile twisting her lips.
You do feel you owe those kids something, I'll give you that .
He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to use the pain to shove her smooth, seductive voice from his head .
But, Is that really because of what you owe Gaz? She smiled, her expression suddenly coy, Or are you just asking permission for what you want to do to me?
A low, rumbling noise intruded; he jerked his head in irritation and it resolved into speech.
"What?"
"I said I didn't think that was true…" Riley repeated.
"Of course it's not fucking true!" MacTavish hissed.
Riley fumbled about in the box and picked out a slice of pizza, unmoved at MacTavish's infuriated reaction "Yeah, I figure Price would have ripped your balls off already if it were true."
MacTavish snorted. "I don't think there's any love lost between those two."
"Well… yeah, that's my point." said Riley "He had enough suffering through it with Gaz without you starting it up all over again."
MacTavish frowned at him "What are you on about?"
"You know what they're like." said Riley, the words muffled as he chewed. "Posh Ruperts and posh bints go together. Her ladyship slumming it with Gaz just rubbed everyone up the wrong way, even without the awkward family business."
"What family business?"
Riley jerked round "You what ?" He frowned in disbelief "What family business? Are you? Are you serious ? She's a Fairfax ."
MacTavish considered this, but it didn't ring any bells. He shrugged.
Riley sat up, answering MacTavish's bewildered expression with one of baffled incredulity. "Fairfax? Of the Fairfaxes? As in General Lord Sir Robert Fairfax? Director of Special Operations? The big boss?"
" What?" said MacTavish. "Are you saying they're related?"
Riley snorted with disbelief "Uh, yeah? She's his niece."
" Jesus . Are you serious?"
"As cancer. Her Dad's the one that owns Schiltron and a fuck ton of countryside from here to Carlisle."
"Schiltron? As in Schiltron Tactical ? The car guys?"
"Armoured cars, drones, tanks. All that jazz. You must have heard about that? Every time their kit appears someone says something about it."
He had heard that, and he'd raised his own eyebrows in synch with the rest when he learnt that the brother of the DG was supplying the regiment with their pricey kit. If it hadn't been genuinely a clear mile better than anything else on the market, he would have grated under the blatant nepotism, but there was no arguing with the quality.
Not everyone felt the same. Someone had pulled a spread from Hello! magazine: CEO of Schiltron and Duke of Essex, and pinned it up on the mess noticeboard, He'd crowded round with the rest of them, hungry for a peak into the gilt-edge finery of the stately home that their budget effectively paid the upkeep of before someone had pulled it down, fearful of offending the brass. He remembered a middle-aged, thin, balding man in polo gear, and a wife, some continental aristocrat with swept up ebony hair, immaculate in tan cashmere, adorned with diamonds. He tried to imagine Gaz between them, and the image was so absurd that he almost laughed out loud.
MacTavish was about to ask Riley if he was taking the piss, but something about his expression made him think twice. An image popped into his mind and he frowned "Wait... what did that make Gaz?"
"Nothing. It don't work like that. You don't get to be a Lord by marrying a Lady, apparently. And her being kid number four makes her a dead branch of the family anyway" Riley chewed thoughtfully "I'm surprised this is the first you're hearing of it." he said.
"Ach. I don't hold with all that politics." said MacTavish, waving his hand dismissively.
Riley stabbed the air towards him with another slice of pizza, aiming it like a dart "It's not whether you hold with politics mate, it's whether politics holds with you."
"How do you know all this anyway?" MacTavish asked.
Riley picked something out of his glass and flicked it to the ground. "Oh, I heard it at a PTA meeting." He said.
For a moment, this unfamiliar acronym stumped him and then, from long dormant memories the letters resolved into meaning. "Wait. You what ? A PTA meeting? You're in the PTA?"
Riley looked genuinely offended "Can I not take an interest in the business of my child's education?" he said, waspishly, and then his coy smile returned. "You'd be amazed at what you learn. A couple of glasses of wine of a Tuesday poured into them Rupert's wives and all the secrets come spilling out." He winked.
The PTA . MacTavish shook his head. It was no surprise that Riley wasn't in favour with the brass. It was one thing to bring down the tone of the posh school standing outside the gates, but it was clearly a step too far to be schmoozing officers wives under the charitable auspices of planning the school fete, especially if it wasn't just schmoozing.
"And what, exactly , did you learn?"
Riley shrugged dismissively. "Well, someone asked her who the mystery man chucking rugby balls about with her at the under-thirteen meet was, and when she said it was her old man's pal Iain, I just filled in the blanks."
MacTavish felt a chill run through him; his heart suddenly beating too fast and too loud, each pulse of blood pounding in his head. He'd been so caught up in the moment, so anxious about misspeaking and shattering the fragile peace between them that he'd not even considered the implications, the faces in the crowd watching him with interest.
Riley continued. "Secondly, I heard Sundance shooting his mouth off about it up the Lord Hereford the other night."
Realisation hit MacTavish like a slap. "Sundance? That wee rat-faced Geordie cunt! ".
"All right! Keep your hair on!"
"I'm going to break that bastard's face!"
"Well-"
" Bastard ! Is that what he's going around telling everyone? That I'm knocking off Vivianne Bradley?"
"He certainly implied that was the fact. Said you seemed to be… intimately involved."
"That fucking, lying bastard !" Things began to click into place in MacTavish's head "I was chatting to Price the other day when him and big Sammi came over. She came walking up the road and he said something nasty. I told him to shut it." He thought about what Sundance had said in response, and it all made sense.
He remembered something else now, the whole reason he'd been drawn out to Riley's home in the first place: the gossip snowball that had become an avalanche. Price dipping a hobnob into his tea as he spoke. "Sundance saw him picking up some girls outside the supermarket." He'd said, as nonchalantly as if he'd been talking about the weather. "Definitely south of proper he said."
Didn't see fit to fucking mention that one of them's his double and calls him Dad? MacTavish felt another surge of anger. It was one thing to speculate, but another to knowingly withhold information to promote your web of lies.
"That rat bastard's been stirring up shit for too long" MacTavish snarled. "I'm going to punch his fucking face in."
"Exactly." said Riley. He calmly knocked back the last of his lemonade and sat up, wincing. "What I was thinking. Apparently he's a regular up at the Hope and Glory of a Tuesday evening, if you want to tag along when I pay him a visit later"
"What?" He looked Riley up and down, from the sallow, loose skin of his belly, collapsed for lack of the fat beneath, to the gap in his sly grin. "You can't go starting fights in your condition."
" In my condition ?" Riley hooted with laughter. "I'm getting over malaria. I'm not having twins!"
"You can just about keep up knocking nails into a shed!" MacTavish snapped. "He'd snap you like a twig right now."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence! That being the case: you backing me up, or you happy to get you and her ladyship's reputation to dragged through the shit?"
"I'm not backing you up. I'm giving that bastard the doing he deserves."
"That's the right answer!"