Rentboy by Fyn Alexander Read Free Book Online Page B

felt.
    “I wish you were my boyfriend, Fox.”
    “Yeah, well, I’m not. I’m a whore.”
    That had summed it up.
    After a quick shave, he dressed in his usual corduroy trousers and fastened the buttons on his shirt with its unobtrusive dark green checkers. Compared to Fox he was so damn boring. He always thought when he finally got a boyfriend, it would be a man like himself, an academic who was hopeless in bed and never understood jokes or the finer points of casual discourse. Then there was Fox with his sharp mind and his sexual experience. It would never work. He’d bore the pants off a man like Fox. The only way he got the pants off him now was to pay.
    In the living room he admonished himself loudly, “He’s not your boyfriend. Don’t be such a loser.”
    Staring at his messy desk, he stopped short. He was sure he’d left his laptop there. It was always there. Every day he got home, hung his coat in the cupboard, and put his laptop on the desk with his keys. Was it possible he had thrown the computer in the cupboard? He’d done it a couple of times before, but then he always found his jacket lying on the desk, and the jacket wasn’t there. “Silly sausage, Edward.” His mother always called him that. “It’s been boiling out. You haven’t worn a jacket in a fortnight.”
    Relief together with a slight feeling of panic clutching his belly, Edward opened the coat cupboard. The vacuum cleaner stood on the floor, its hose curled like a snake waiting to slither out. A collection of shoes, all needing a good polishing, were piled up beside it. His old briefcase with the broken buckle that he kept planning to throw out was slumped against the wall.
    No computer. No Fox.
    Edward ran back to his desk and began rummaging around for the memory sticks. Gone as well. “Shit!” he screamed. He never said shit , at least not out loud, but it was the only answer to his utter and complete stupidity. Despite his degree from Oxford and his well-paid job teaching and doing research at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Dr. Edward Atherton was an unmitigated fool. He should have been a court jester, not a scientist. He trusted people he should not trust. He loaned money to Nik who never paid it back. He wanted a prostitute to be his boyfriend. And now he would have to tell his boss that the work his department had secured a huge grant to pursue was out on the street somewhere in the hands of God knew who.
    Tears of frustration rolled down his cheeks, and for a full minute he indulged them. Slowly he pulled himself together. This would not do. He was a grown man, and men didn’t cry. Thank heaven no one had been there to witness his meltdown. In the bathroom he rinsed his face and, briefcase in hand, headed out into the warm, bright morning.
    Half an hour later, his head hanging like an errant schoolboy, Edward stood in front of Dr. Crispin Howard’s desk explaining the loss of his data without actually saying that a rentboy had stolen it. “But it’s all backed up on memory sticks. I haven’t lost anything we can’t retrieve. It’s all in my small safe in the lab.”
    Dr. Howard was a short, stocky, swarthy-skinned man in his early fifties who, despite his physical shortcomings, seemed to think he was God’s own gift to the fairer sex. “Saving your own copies is all well and good, but who the hell has their hands on proprietary information?”
    “I don’t know,” Edward lied. He was not a good liar, and wringing his hands was probably a dead giveaway. He clasped them behind his back. “The laptop must have been stolen to sell.” What else would Fox want his laptop for if not to sell it? “He’ll probably wipe the hard drive. I never save anything important to the hard drive anyway.”
    “What about the external hard drive?”
    Without thinking, Edward began to wring his hands again. “It’s all on memory sticks, and they’re gone too. Anyway, it’s all encrypted. Only an expert could