Page 14 of Last Track

The work no longer felt like either man demonstrating competence. Martin handed over tools without explaining what they were for; Galen accepted correction without needing it softened. The ease between them felt borrowed from people who had known each other for years.

"Ferras and Co still haven't rung," Galen said later, over water. "I'll need to start putting feelers out once Nina's roadworthy. Can't let the whole season go quiet on me."

Martin agreed and did not ask how far those feelers might reach. After one night and almost a week, he told himself, the question would be unreasonable.

Galen came back to the cottage that evening for the guitar, as he'd said he would.

"I'll take it over before supper."

"You can leave it."

Galen looked at him properly this time, as he had that morning, searching for whatever sat underneath the practical offer. "It's no trouble."

"The farmhouse is warm but it's not quiet. You'd only be carrying it back again tomorrow." Martin was already moving the chair by the stove a few inches, clearing the corner beside it of the boots and paperwork that usually lived there. "Heat and damp aren't good for it either way. Better it stays somewhere dry."

That was all true. None of it explained why Martin had already decided exactly where the case should sit.

Galen watched him finish moving the chair and set the case in the space Martin had made. He looked at it for a moment, testing the weight of the invitation before trusting it to hold.

Then he went to find his coat, said something about clean clothes and Jacks's supper, and left for the farmhouse without it.

By evening, Galen's guitar had a place in Martin's cottage.

Martin was considerably less certain what to do about the man.

7

GALEN

By the following week, Galen realised his belongings had ended up sorted between two addresses without his ever consciously deciding it. Clean shirts and his razor lived at the farmhouse, in the room he still, technically, paid nothing for. His guitar lived at the cottage, in the corner Martin had cleared without ever calling it anything. He had somehow acquired a toothbrush in both places, which struck him, when he noticed it, as the single most damning piece of evidence in the whole arrangement. Galen woke most mornings uncertain which bed he'd fallen asleep in until he opened his eyes, and had stopped finding that alarming somewhere around the fourth day, which alarmed him rather more than the sleeping arrangements themselves.

He was crossing the yard for a jumper when his phone rang with a number he hadn't seen in eleven days.

"Ferras and Co."

"Galen." The voice on the other end was brisk, professional, entirely unbothered by history. "Bit of a gap opened up. Dev Okafor's pulled out of the Cotswolds run with three weeks' notice and a bad shoulder. Six venues over ten days: four from his book, plus Stroud and the closing night under your own name. Cirencester would have been yours too, but Priya's taken it. I couldn't hold the date once you went quiet on me for a week."

"Define insulting."

She named a figure that wasn't. "Half up front, rest on completion, same terms as always. You'd be doing us a favour and yourself one at the same time. I mean that about Friday, mind. I haven't got room to eat a second gap this month."

Galen did the sum before he'd finished saying yes. It was good money, steady work, the kind of run that repaired a reputation as efficiently as it repaired a bank balance, and it began precisely when Peter had promised Nina would be fit to drive again.

"I'll need to confirm the van's roadworthy," he said. "Should know by Friday."

"Friday works. Don't make me chase you twice in one month."

He said he wouldn't, and meant it, and stood in the yard for a moment after the call ended feeling the specific vertigo of good news arriving exactly on schedule.

Peter confirmed it that same afternoon, wiping his hands on a rag that had given up being clean sometime around the second Ashcombe visit. The part had come in Tuesday, nothing worse had revealed itself once he was inside her, and barring some final act of spite from a forty-year-old engine, Nina would be roadworthy by Friday or Saturday. The bill, when he named it, was painful in the specific way expected pain always was, survivable rather than surprising. It would eat most of what the Cotswolds run's advance paid him, before he'd played a single note of it.

"She'll outlive both of us," Peter said. "Reluctantly."

Jacks mentioned, without looking up from her ledger, that the top field would want clearing again once Galen was back from wherever he was going. Hazel asked over lunch whether he preferred roast on Sunday or something lighter, then carried on slicing bread before he answered.

Nobody asked if he was coming back. They left the chair pulled out anyway, and Galen found there was nothing in the gesture to push against.

That afternoon he found Martin at the cottage table with the farm accounts spread in front of him, and settled into the chair by the stove with the guitar already in his lap before either of them had said a word about it. He worked through a passage he'd been meaning to finish for a fortnight while Martin turned pages and made the low, dissatisfied sound he made whenever a column refused to balance. Galen had learned that sound the way he'd learned Nina's temperature gauge, a small warning that meant nothing was actually wrong yet. Martin, in turn, had apparently learned the exact bar where Galen's hands still hesitated, because he glanced up at it every time without fail, then back down at his figures as though he hadn't.