Page 2 of August’s Thief

CHAPTER 2

Counting down the days to retirement, a bored desk copper led me to the holding pen. I heard my perfect match while I was signing a form and paying his fine, way before I clapped eyes on him. Yelling at chatterbox speed with a voice like incoming artillery. “And then I said to him, what you arresting me for? Cuteness? ’Cos I’ve also got a set of guns and a six-pack if you wanna see ’em.” A round of guffaws interrupted the flow. “So, then the copper said, ‘shut the fuck up,’ or he was gonna leave the cuffs on. ‘Yes please,’ I said, ‘or maybe you could swap them for that pink furry pair sticking out your back pocket?’ Lad blushed the colour of your sweater, mate. I reckon he was only about nineteen. And then I said, ‘do you want me to put my ’ands where you can hold?—’”

“Hey, Dawson,” my companion butted in. “Pipe down. The cavalry’s arrived. You’re going home—give the rest of us a bit of peace.”

Another couple of guffaws. We rounded a corner to find two raggedly dressed blokes, of the kind seeking somewhere warm for the night, lounging on the cold floor of the holding cell. A third, very blond and slight of build, stood with his back to us, waving his arms like he was conducting an orchestra. Dawson. My perfect match . He spun around, my view of him obscured by the burly copper lumbering ahead of me.

“What, has my knight in shining armour finally come to get me out of here?”

Hefting a huge set of keys from his uniform pocket, the copper snorted. “More like that geezer from The Phantom of the Opera . But he’s paid up, and he’s taking you home. Thank fuck.” He turned to me. “When you get sick of him, mate, do us all a favour and don’t bring him back.”

Dawson sniggered. “As if I’d let him.” He patted one of his cellmates on the shoulder. “Laters, Pete. See ya, Derek. And remember: deny, deny, deny, all right?”

And then, before I knew it, I was back behind the wheel of my car, with the addition of a nosy, talkative, criminal passenger.

“Who the fuck are you, then? You’d better not be a psycho ’cos I’ve got things I need to do. People to see, places to be. Know what I mean?”

“I’m…erm.” God, it sounded ridiculous. I pushed on. “Er… CUPID sent me? The dating app? We had a date tonight?”

“Shit, yeah, did we? Fuck.” Dawson slapped his palm against his head. “Completely forgot. Sorry about that. As you can see, something came up. Can we go to Tesco instead?”

My life hadn’t veered out of its lane so much as hit a road bump and bounced into a totally foreign traffic system, one possibly belonging in an alternative universe. This whirlwind, now opening the glove box and sliding the car seat back and forth like he’d never sat on a bloody adjustable seat, was supposed to be my perfect match?

“Nice set of wheels, mate.” His blush-pink painted nails tapped approvingly on the Porsche dashboard. “Is it nicked?”

“No!” Flicking a switch, I fired up the engine, pressing my foot on the accelerator and applying much more throttle than necessary to reverse out of a police station car park. Like a kid in a sweet shop and wiggling in his seat, my companion fiddled with the air con. A jet of hot air blasted the both of us. Dawson beamed with delight.

“How old are you?” I asked as we entered the stream of traffic edging towards the centre of town.

“Twenty-six.”

My arse. “How old are you really?”

“Twenty-three,” he admitted and threw me a cheeky wink. “In six months from now. So, Tesco supermarket, yeah? I need some gear. Go left up here for a couple of miles and then third off the roundabout. Can’t miss it. It’s got a massive blue-and-red sign.”

“I know what Tesco looks like.”

He laughed. “Just checking, mate. What with you being so posh and everything. Unless it’s fake posh.” He frowned. “I told CUPID I didn’t want posh. How posh are you?”

No point lying, he’d been eyeing up my Patek Philippe since we set off. “Fairly,” I confessed.

“Do you know Prince Harry?”

“Um… yes? Although we’re not close. He’s my ah… second cousin.” A nugget of information I rarely shared, but the surprise it rendered tended to afford me a second to catch my breath. I pointed to my face. “I don’t often get invited to the family photo shoots, though.”

“Can’t think why,” Dawson responded with a chuckle. “Some of them royals look like the back-end of a horse. You wouldn’t stand out in a line-up, that’s for sure. Are you loaded?”

“Um… yes? I guess?”

He nodded as if expecting as much. “Cool beans. In that case, I’ll let CUPID off for sending someone posh. Anyhow, thanks for picking me up.”

“And paying your fine,” I pointed out.

Another laugh. “Yeah, cheers. I’d say I’ll pay you back, but then I’d be lying. I’m skint. I never pay the fines. Which means I do fuck loads of community service. Me getting arrested does the council a huge favour. You won’t find a scrap of litter in Bethnal Green. What’s your name, then? I’m Dawson.”

“August. August Angel.”

“Ooh, very swanky. Hang a left here. Corners nicely, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t have bought it in green, though. Fuck-off yellow’s the best colour for a Porsche.”

I felt dizzy by the time we arrived at Tesco. And determined not to let disappointment overwhelm me as my passenger leapt out. CUPID had been my last chance saloon. Chalking it up as one of my shortest dates yet, I didn’t notice Dawson open the door on my side until his high tenor lisped in my ear. “Are you coming, Gussie? I thought we were on a date. There’s a nice café out the front, open til nine. They do a lovely coffee and scone for only two quid. We can go there before I do my shopping, if you like. I’ll treat you, seeing as you coughed up for the fine. Unless you’re too posh for Tesco.”

I was not, and had never been, too posh for Tesco. Though I didn’t enjoy supermarkets, preferring to purchase groceries online to avoid the rude stares of random strangers and blunt comments from small children. While Dawson queued at the café counter, I chose a table for two, positioning myself with my worst side next to the window.

“What’s that shit on your face, then?” Dawson asked as he slid into the plastic seat opposite. Seemed I wasn’t going to avoid blunt comments after all. He pushed a mug of something brown and wet across the table, then proceeded to heap sugar into his own. “You can be mother,” he added, pointing to the little jug of milk. Then he began attacking his scone. “Romantic this, innit?”

I poured milk for both of us. “A burn.” In general, I left it at that.

In general, other people also left it at that.

Dawson stirred his coffee. “How?”

“In a car accident when I was a small child.” I stared out across the gloomy car park. “My father was an alcoholic and crashed into a tree. Him and my mother died. I don’t have siblings.”

Dawson’s lips pursed. “They skipped that episode of The Crown , didn’t they?”

I looked back to find his extraordinary eyes examining my burn. His frank gaze travelled from my left temple, where my thick black hair refused to grow over shiny, tight skin, across to my ragged stump of an ear and then down along the line of my cheek and jaw. Except it wasn’t a line, more of a purple treacly slide, disappearing below my collar.

“It makes you look pissed off all the time, where it pulls your mouth down.” He indicated to his own beautifully shaped lower lip, coated with a light sheen of gloss matching his nails.

I am pissed off all the time . “Yes, it does.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Sometimes. In cold weather. Why were you arrested?”

“Shoplifting,” he answered, taking a huge bite of scone. He spoke as he chewed. “From the supermarket. I don’t nick much, just a bit of stuff here and there that takes my fancy.”

Oh joy, I was consuming stolen goods.

“Not Tesco,” he added reassuringly. “Nor Sainsbury’s—I’m banned from Sainsbury’s, actually. Today I was caught in the big Lidl down the road from here. God knows how; they’ve got shite security cameras.”

I frowned. “Don’t the police normally just take a statement after an arrest for petty shoplifting, then send a fine through the post? I thought they were too under-resourced for much more these days?”

“Not when they’ve caught you eight times this year already,” he answered, cheerfully dabbing at crumbs on his plate. His hands were smaller than mine, I noticed, and elegant. “And I might have offered the copper who arrested me a blow job. He didn’t take me up on it,” he asserted as my eyes widened. “His loss.”

Unable to come up with an adequate response, I sipped at my coffee. Not as bad as I’d expected. Dawson eyed my dry-looking scone hungrily. His scrawny frame needed it more than mine, and I indicated he could have it. He watched as I spread jam for him. “You don’t sound like you’re… um… very good at shoplifting,” I ventured.

“I’m amazing at it!” Dawson shook his blond head vigorously. “I nick stuff all the time—not always from Lidl; you have to spread the love around a bit, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

Anxiety flashed across his face. “The copper warned me I might get a custodial sentence this time. Like, two or three weeks or something. Said they’ve brought in a new law to teach repeat offenders a lesson.” He licked jam off the knife. “That would be a fucking disaster. Hopefully, I’ll get away with it.”

In three noisy gulps, he chugged back most of his coffee, his good humour returned. “So, August Angel. Why’s a rich, posh bloke like you on a dating app?”

I spluttered with laughter. “Isn’t it evident? More to the point, why are you on a dating app?”

He grinned at me then, wide and impish. A grin of pure mischief and, for a fleeting second, if my brain could recall the necessary muscle groups, I’d have grinned back. “Saw some bloke logging into it next to me on the Tube. For a laugh, I pinched his access details. I don’t get out much and thought I might score a free dinner or something. Changed his name to mine, blagged the online interview, then had an appointment with that weird bot and everything. Simples. I nearly pissed myself laughing when they said they had the perfect match for me.” Those beguiling eyes latched on to mine; tearing my gaze away was hard.

“You, it turns out.” Pushing his food aside, his expression turned serious again. He leaned across the table and whispered, “So I’m guessing you must be dodgy too. What have you been done for?”

He raised a smile from me after all. It didn’t happen often; smiling contorted my mouth into an ugly snarl. Dawson didn’t seem fazed, though. “I haven’t been done for anything! I… I—” I trailed off. What did I do ? What defined me ? Moping? Aimlessly meandering around art galleries, alone? Buying paintings very few could afford? Wandering the estate like the ghost of Christmas past? Or hurtling down country lanes in the Porsche late at night, at crazy speeds, half hoping I’d hit a tree like my father before me?

“I manage the family estate,” I said at last, sounding awfully prim. “I inherited it when I turned twenty-one. It has a couple of farms, land, some houses, and… and antiques and things.”

Dawson threw me a wry look. “Cool story, bro, but it needs more dragons. What do you really do?”

Often wish I’d died in the crash too. “Exactly as I said. I… Not much, I’m afraid.”

For once, Dawson was lost for words. Slipping a couple of sugar and ketchup sachets into his pocket, he stood. “I’ll nip around the supermarket for a few things, then meet you back at the car. You can give me a lift home.”

He didn’t take long. The sky had darkened, and rain drizzled down the windscreen by the time Dawson tapped on it. He stashed a couple of bags in the tiny space behind our seats, keeping hold of one. “Bloody hell, it’s cold,” he commented as he climbed into the passenger seat. With a flash of white teeth, he shook his head like a dog, sprinkling droplets of rain over my pristine interior. His thin little T-shirt was wet through.

I reached into the narrow space behind his seat. “Here, I have an old sweater you can borrow.”

“Ta.”

We shared an awkward moment as he inclined his head towards me, indicating I should drop the opening of the sweater over him. “My hands are full,” he explained, rustling the bag. “You need a bigger car, Gussie.”

In the way one would dress a child, I found myself easing the garment over his head, and he stroked the soft wool admiringly. Knitted from light-grey Italian cashmere, the sweater was not old at all. It suited him, although it was way too big. “You can keep it if you like. It doesn’t fit me anymore,” I lied.

As he began issuing directions, he delved into his shopping and retrieved a bag of boiled sweets. Humbugs, by the colour of them, like stripey black-and-white pebbles; I hadn’t tasted a humbug in years. With hardly a pause in his commentary, he popped one into his own mouth, then unwrapped a second and leaned over to me. “Open wide.”

He’d pushed it between my lips before I had the chance to object. “Food of the gods, Gussie,” he declared with a happy moan. “They make your cock hard.”

Oh Lord.

For the rest of the journey, the car was filled with the alternating sounds of Dawson crunching through brittle sweet shells followed by noisy sucking on soft toffee centres. Describing our date as peculiar was the height of understatement. Even more bizarre, I was on the edge of enjoying myself. And rediscovering a love of humbugs.

The trip ended almost too soon, by the crunching of Dawson’s fourth humbug. Under instruction, I pulled up outside a shabby row of shops, all in darkness and one boarded up. “That’s me,” he said, unclipping his seatbelt. “In the flat up there.” He pointed above the betting shop where a thin yellow light shone behind curtained windows. Twisting awkwardly, he hauled his bags through the gap between our seats.

“Do you need a hand with those?”

“Nah, I’m good.” I caught another flash of white in the gloom of the interior. “Bet you haven’t had a date like this before, have you?” He shoved the bags from his lap to his feet. “It isn’t over yet.”

I felt a twinge of alarm. “Isn’t it?”

He chuckled. “Nah, Gussie. We haven’t had a snog yet.”

A bigger man might have struggled to clamber across the gear stick. Not Dawson. Before I knew what was happening, his skinny arse was bouncing around in my lap. Then he stilled. “Can I touch it?” he whispered. Without waiting for an answer, he brought his hand up to my cheek. The tip of his thumb stroked down the melted, roughened contours, his touch as light as a butterfly wing. “Thanks for the date,” he breathed. “And for rescuing me by paying my fine and all. That you did that means a hell of a lot, but just so you know, that’s not why I’m going to kiss you.”

The thumb smoothed over my ragged ear. Maybe he had a deformity fetish—if I’d learned anything from dating apps, it was that there was a kink for everything. “So why do you want to?”

Now his hands were cupping both cheeks, the good and the bad, and he tilted my face up to his. Violet eyes perused mine. “Because you’re kind and nice, August Angel. My imperfect match.” His plump lips curved in a cheeky grin. “And you and your fancy sweater smell fucking divine.”

Then he kissed me, thoroughly, and that lush mouth was everything it promised.