Last Track (Wrenwood Romance)

1. Galen

GALEN

Nina had opinions about motorway driving, and all of them were bad.

Twenty minutes after they left it behind, she was still expressing them.

Through Nina's broad, flat windscreen, Wrenwood appeared in warm fragments between the hedges: brick roofs, a flash of canal water, smoke lifting from one chimney into the pale afternoon.

Galen's phone, balanced in its holder above the dash, insisted Knightley Moorings was still ahead, though the map had frozen again as the signal weakened on the country road.

The driver's seat spring had been working its way through the upholstery for the better part of a year, and today it had found a new and specific angle of attack, one that made Galen shift his weight every few miles like a man trying to escape his own chair.

"You're doing this on purpose," he told her, and the engine answered with a low, put-upon rattle that he chose to interpret as agreement.

He'd known her long enough to read the rattle.

Two hundred and forty thousand miles, give or take whatever the odometer had stopped showing somewhere outside Carlisle, and a driver learned a van's language the way he learned a bandmate's tells, the little tics that meant pay attention long before anyone said it out loud.

Nina's current tell was a faint hot-metal smell threading in under the dash, patient and unhurried, the automotive equivalent of someone clearing their throat before delivering bad news.

He had ninety minutes until he was due at Knightley Moorings, and considerably less patience than the figure required.

The booking was through Ferras and Co, the agency that had kept him fed for three years running, and Ferras and Co did not forgive a musician who failed to arrive.

This was a private event at Knightley Moorings, hosted by the sort of client who could spend more on a weekend celebration than Galen made in a month, the kind of client who wanted acoustic guitar drifting through a marquee like good weather, unobtrusive, reliable, exactly on time.

Miss it, and it wasn't only tonight's fee that evaporated.

It was whatever reputation he'd built as the man who always showed up.

So he did what he always did, which was keep going and hope the van agreed with the plan.

The temperature needle disagreed first.

It climbed with the calm confidence of something that had made up its mind, and Galen eased off the accelerator.

He was trying to take the load off the engine without surrendering what little speed Nina still had.

He dropped a gear on the next incline to keep the engine from labouring.

Nina had taught him that trick the hard way, somewhere in Wales, several years and one entirely different starter motor ago. The needle kept climbing anyway.

He did the maths he always did in these moments, the specific arithmetic of a working musician with no cushion: how many miles left, how much time, how much could he lose before it actually cost him something.

A few miles. Twenty minutes if the roads stayed clear.

He'd made worse odds work before. He apologised to Nina under his breath and kept going, because stopping had never once been the instinct that got him where he needed to be.

Nina had other ideas. The power went first, a stutter and drop like a singer losing their nerve mid-note, and then the smell thickened, hot oil and scorched dust pushing through the vents, followed by a knocking somewhere under the floor that no amount of talking to her was going to fix.

Galen eased off, coaxed, swore with real affection, tried the two tricks that had worked before and watched them fail to work now, and accepted, with the particular calm of a man who has run out of options, that the decision he'd been refusing to make for the last several miles had just been made for him.

He found the mouth of a farm lane and let the van roll gently onto the verge, cutting the engine before it could do anything more dramatic than it already had. The quiet afterward had a ringing quality. His phone showed one wavering bar and then none at all.

The gig, presumably, was going wherever gigs went when nobody arrived to play them.

He allowed himself one long breath through his nose before he got moving, because there was a version of this afternoon where he sat in a broken-down van feeling sorry for himself, and it wasn't a version that paid rent.

He climbed into the back, checked the guitar was secure in its case and not resting against anything that could shift, wedged a rolled jumper where the strap buckle might otherwise rattle against the bodywork for however many hours this took, and only once all of it was settled did he spare a thought for his own comfort.

The instrument mattered in a way most of his other possessions didn't. The rest of his life was stored in a rented room in Bristol he saw perhaps six weeks a year, mostly for post and laundry and proof that he technically lived somewhere.

The guitar travelled with him. Everything else could stay put.

Up ahead, past a stand of trees, he could see the grey shoulder of a farmhouse roof and what might generously be called a signpost. A telephone, he thought.

A mechanic. Someone, anyone, who could tell him how badly he'd just wrecked his own week.

He shrugged his jacket on against the chill coming off the fields and set off up the lane already composing the call to the agency in his head, the version of the apology that sounded like circumstance and not excuse, and he was still refining it when the shouting reached him.

It wasn't panic. It was closer to the specific, furious focus of someone in the middle of losing an argument with several dozen sheep.

Galen stopped at the top of the rise and took the scene in before he did anything as reckless as joining it.

A hurdle had come down somewhere, or a gate had given up its convictions, and the result was a churning, bleating spill of wool moving in three directions at once while one man tried, with visibly fraying patience, to be in all three places simultaneously.

He was broad through the shoulders, dark-haired, entirely too calm for how badly this was going, and clearly the one in charge, if charge was still a word that applied to anything happening in that field.

His years of session work had taught Galen how to enter halfway through, listen for the pattern, and fill whatever space had been left open.

This was louder and woollier than usual, but the principle held.

He watched for three full seconds, found the shape of what was needed, and counted himself in.

"Hold there!" the man barked, not even looking to see who'd arrived, and Galen held there, arms out, driving two escapees back toward the others with nothing more sophisticated than his own body and his jacket, stripped off and flapped out like an awkward matador's cape.

It worked, more or less. He adjusted when the man adjusted, stepped in when a gap opened, said nothing useful and did just what was needed, and somewhere in the scramble and the mud and one deeply undignified sheep that appeared to have opinions of its own about being herded, the two of them fell into something that felt, absurdly, like keeping time together.

By the time the last gate clanged shut, they were both breathing hard, spattered with mud, and one of the field hurdles lay in two pieces near the fence line, snapped clean through for reasons neither of them had time to investigate.

The man turned to look at him properly for the first time, and Galen forgot, entirely and immediately, what he'd been about to say.

He was still catching his breath, hair stuck to his forehead, a graze of dirt along one forearm where he'd shouldered a gate back into place, and none of that explained why Galen's pulse had just done something it had no business doing over a stranger in a field.

It might have been the mouth, still set in the severe line of a man whose sheep had betrayed him.

More likely it was the whole unrehearsed solidity of him, the impression of someone who had never once needed rescuing and would resent the suggestion.

Whatever it was, it landed hard somewhere under Galen's ribs and stayed there.

Galen knew what a beat-too-long look usually meant, because he'd collected the full set over the years.

There was the small-town version, the one that started at his hair and worked down to the tattoos and landed somewhere around a silent verdict about what sort of trouble he represented.

There was the other version too, the one that fixed on his eyes like they were a party trick, something to be admired the way you'd admire a car you had no intention of ever driving.

Neither of those had ever cost him a night's sleep.

Whatever this was, doing something considerably more inconvenient to his chest, wasn't either one.

The man's gaze reached Galen's face and caught there. His expression emptied for half a beat, as though something had interrupted whatever calculation he'd been making, and Galen thought, with the optimism of a man who had just lost an entire evening's income, that it might not be one-sided.

Then the moment closed over, as good moments tended to when there was a farm to run. "Right," the man said, already glancing past him toward the lane. "What are you doing wandering onto my land in the middle of that?"

Galen thought about the ninety minutes he no longer had, the fee he'd almost certainly lost, and the knocking under the floor that had, at some point in the last ten minutes, become the least interesting thing that had happened to him today.

"Broken down," he said. "Just up the lane. You wouldn't happen to know anyone who fixes old Volkswagens?"

"Depends how old."

"Older than you'd like."

That got him something close to a huff, not quite a laugh. "Martin Cattermole."

"Galen Storms."

Martin looked him over again, taking in, Galen suspected, the hair and the mud and the tattoos and whatever conclusions a man drew about someone who introduced himself with a name like that.

"Storms," Martin repeated, in the tone of a man revising his assessment of the afternoon downward. "Of course it is."