Hunted Read Free

pined for those selfish little moments, just him and a smoke, gazing out at some horizon, with the rest of his life put on hold.
    ‘Do you miss it?’ she said.
    ‘No.’
    He lied for her benefit. Quitting was something she’d instigated, something they’d done together, and which had survived the many months and miles they’d spent apart since. It was a part of him, he knew, that she felt still belonged to her.
    They stopped at a heavy steel gate set into a razor-wired security fence. Tall pine trees reared up either side, blocking out the bright moonlight. No matter. Danny had returned here so many times after dark – either wired with insomnia, or trying to run off some bad dream – that manipulating the gate’s heavy lock mechanism was now something he could manage by touch alone.
    A row of barges waited on the other side of the gate, moored alongside the fat black stripe of Regent’s Canal. Most of the vessels were permanent residences, festooned with bicycles, deckchairs and hanging baskets. Lights glowed behind their steamed-up portholes. Snatches of TV shows and muffled conversations drifted out as Danny and Anna-Maria walked past.
    Danny’s boat was the last in line. Its steel-plate hull was painted black and its name, Pogonsi , was stencilled in looping gilt letters on its stern. Even though it was officially registered to a Swiss holding company, the twenty-metre converted coal barge actually belonged to him.
    It was one of his homes from home. He’d inherited it from Tony Strinatti, an old friend and comrade, now dead.
    Danny stepped on to the small aft deck. He helped Anna-Maria aboard and unlocked the hatch. They climbed down the worn wooden steps into the main cabin. He’d put fresh linen on the bed and flowers in the tall cut-glass vase on the mahogany galley table. Not because he’d known she’d be coming back, not for sure. But because he’d seen enough bad things in his time to indulge himself whenever he could with life’s little luxuries.
    He took down a half-finished bottle of Jack Daniel’s from on top of the fridge. Her favourite. He no longer drank. He’d had to stop. If he hadn’t, he doubted he’d still be here now.
    ‘You want one?’ he said.
    ‘I want you …’
    He smiled, feeling the skin on his cheeks prickle, seeing her smiling too, no doubt enjoying this effect she had. Shaking his head, he turned to the fridge and took out a bottle of Coke.
    He fixed her a JD, with Coke, lemon and ice, in a tall glass. Then he poured a straight Coke for himself, draining half of it in a single gulp. He was still jetlagged. Needed a pick-me-up. His journey to England had been the usual cramp-inducing, twenty-three-hour nightmare via JFK from his main home on the United States Virgin Island of Saint Croix.
    As he drank, he watched Anna-Maria walk slowly round the room, trailing her fingers over the shelves that covered every inch of the boat’s wall space. They were mostly crammed with old CDs and vinyls. Townes van Zandt and Dylan albums. Songs with stories to tell. The kind that took you out of yourself and into another man’s life.
    ‘It’s good to be back,’ she said, handing Danny a Shawn Mullins album, the same one he’d played her three years ago when he’d first brought her here.
    He put the CD on the old stack system he’d never quite got round to replacing, lit an oil lamp and switched off the harsh electrics overhead. He noticed Anna-Maria studying him in the flickering golden light and wondered what was going on in her mind.
    Sometimes he couldn’t work it out at all, what an urban sophisticate like her could see in a guy like him. She normally looked like she’d just stepped out of a Chanel advert, him from a down-at-heel West Coast bar.
    Back on Saint Croix, he normally wore faded T-shirts and ripped surf shorts, and kept his jaw fuzzy with a lazy half-beard, while his shaggy dark hair hung down past the nape of his neck.
    But he’d got himself smartened up for