Page 59 of The Monday Night Heartbreak Club
Now I laughed. I felt the tension in my sewn-up face and didn’t care. ‘You are a very useful person to know, Flynn Mays-Harrison,’ I said, trying not to fall over.
‘Sssshh. Not many people know who I am round here. I’m just the guy with the wine bar, trying to make a living.’
We both sadly rotated and looked at what was left of the wine bar. Scaffolding held up the front, sheets of plywood covered the windows. Careful examples of exquisite interior designers’ best work now hung through gaps in the walls. ‘Oh well.’ Flynn sighed. ‘At least the insurance will pay out.’
Two passing locals, young men whom I’d seen in the wine bar when they’d been scrubbed and sleek, passed us in their work uniforms of overalls and boots. ‘Mornin’!’ they chorused, and then looked back over their shoulders at the wreckage of the bar. ‘That’s rough,’ one said, with Yorkshire understatement.
‘You rebuilding?’ the other asked.
‘I don’t know yet.’ Flynn returned their looks with bland politeness.
‘Not likely to blow up twice though,’ the first passer-by observed. ‘And it’s nice to have somewhere posh to go of an evening.’
With a cheery wave of farewell they continued stomping, heavy-booted, up the hill towards the shops. Flynn sighed heavily.
‘They think it was posh,’ he said. ‘I was trying for ordinary. There’s more money in ordinary.’
I looked up and down the street. It was a narrow, workaday Yorkshire market town: pavement, cobbles and a narrow strip of roadway. Plenty of room for a horse and cart to take the coal from the now-defunct railway station at the bottom of the hill up to the Big Houses at the top, where local landowners who’d rented out their farms had lived in four-storey splendour.
Now these were flats, and even the old manor house that loomed at the top of the town had been subdivided into a terrace of three cottages.
‘I’m not sure we’re ready for posh,’ I said.
Flynn sighed again. ‘We weren’t exactly rammed with trade, were we?’ He held out a hand to me. ‘Ah well. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe I don’t really have a head for business. Perhaps I’m just a born underling.’
‘Flynn!’ I was surprised by his sudden lack of confidence. Flynn always seemed so self-aware, so certain, that this moment of weakness seemed very unlike him. ‘You were doing fine. Until my ex blew the place up, of course.’
We looked again at the tumbled shell of a building. There was a cat sitting up on the scaffolding, washing itself in the spring sunshine, and one of the sheets of hardboard that covered the windows flapped desolately at one corner.
‘Ah, I know. I might be getting a bit tired of being in Dad’s shadow, that’s all,’ Flynn said slowly. ‘I used to think it was great, being a Mays-Harrison. Ready-made empire to inherit, money to bail me out of unsuccessful enterprises…’
I shivered. ‘Don’t talk about bail,’ I said quietly. ‘If Dexter gets out…’
‘You think he will?’ Dark, earnest eyes behind those glasses which reflected the sunlight searched my face,snagging briefly on the pink scar. ‘After everything you’ve given them? Those phones…’
‘When they crack into them, it should put Dexter in the frame for almost every crime committed in Yorkshire for the last ten years,’ I admitted. ‘I know he wrote stuff down – well, notwrotebecause I’m not sure he can write.’
‘Dyslexia?’ Flynn nodded. ‘Like Fraser.’
‘More like, too arrogant to ever go to school. He once told me he’d been involved in crime since he was ten. But he kept stuff. He recorded stuff, he photographed stuff. He always said he was untouchable because of his insurance policy; nobody would dare turn him in because of what he’d got onthem.’
‘And that’s what’s on those phones?’
‘I’m hoping so. If they were decoys, then I am insomuch trouble. But when I think of that film of him standing outside, trying to work out how to get through the security door…’
‘Do you think he’ll know what you’ve done? Will he work it out?’
I shook my head. ‘Dexter thinks women are stupid. All we’re any good for is looking pretty, tottering in high heels and giving blow jobs. Ah well, I’m still tottering. One out of three isn’t bad.’
Flynn smiled now, and it was his old, familiar self-assured and slightly cheeky grin. ‘There’s always Australia,’ he said. ‘If Dexter manages to worm his way out of everything, we could take off over there. Plenty of room to hide in Oz.’
‘But what would we do out there?’ I had to admit it, there was allure to the idea. Big continent, new start, my brother and parents several thousand miles away.
‘Dad’s got loads of businesses. I could go back to the bar in Melbourne. You could…’ Flynn stopped and his eyes slid off my face.
‘Yes, my kangaroo-wrestling career has been rather thwarted,hasn’t it?’ I said, to help him out. ‘And anyway, weren’t you just saying that you didn’t want to work for your dad forever?’
‘Was I?’ He still wore the grin, but it had slipped sideways and now looked a touch more sardonic than was usual from Flynn. ‘Well. Needs must, and all that.’
