Joe Country полностью

They got back into their cars, Frank waiting a moment until the others had headed off down the road. He could do without Anton’s bitching, but it wasn’t like he wasn’t used to it. In his previous life—an independent—he’d worked with the same guys for years, guys whose thinking he’d known as well as his own. That was then. Now, he was hired to do jobs and given the men to go with them; men with military backgrounds for the most part, and prison history often as not; and men like Anton, who’d done covert work too, on the blunter side. Doorkickers, not strategists, but that didn’t stop them thinking they should be the ones giving orders. And sooner or later he’d meet one who’d do more than just shake his tree, but it wasn’t going to be Anton. They both knew that.

Still, it would be best not to turn his back too often. Spooks, when you got down to it, couldn’t be trusted. Frank should know.

He drove slowly down the lane, past fields that were white, and growing whiter.

“There’s stables out back of the Hall,” Lucas had told them. This had been in the shed the night before. Cobwebbed patchy dark, with every movement magnified in the gloom, becoming a nest of spiders, or an inquisitive rat. “I went there for a smoke sometimes.”

“A doobie?”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, if you’re like sixty.”

Sitting on the roof; legs dangling down. Not an approved Health and Safety seating posture, but then again, smoking dope in general didn’t make many H&S lists.

It had been just before New Year; a party at Caerwyss Hall. A corporate event catered by Paul’s Pantry, the outfit run by a friend of Lucas’s mother’s—both women caught the inverted commas round friend. The corporate client was a PR firm called Bullingdon Fopp, whose CEO was one Peter Judd, a bigtime political player once, and still regarded by some as a Lost Leader. Fair enough in Louisa’s view, if where you wanted to be led was a mash-up of The Handmaid’s Tale and It’s a Knockout.

“We were supposed to be off the premises, but I didn’t want to go back to the cottage. There was just mum and Andrew. It was boring.”

This was before the snow rolled in, and the cold was the damp, bronchial kind, where everything seems to be breathing out: plant life, telegraph poles, garden furniture. The moon was a well-kept secret. The single bulb above the door of the kit-room opposite was the only illumination, and it cast everything as an etching from a storybook: all the detail Lucas could see, shapes and curves and corners, became wavy grey lines the harder he looked at them.

That might have been the dope, of course. It was a lot stronger now than when Louisa had last drawn a toke.

He’d been thinking about America, he told them. He wanted to go to America. A road trip. See for real what he’d seen in the movies. But it took money. Everything took money, even uni. And it wasn’t like dope was free.

In the telling he’d forgotten they were there, and had slipped into the cadence of the stoned.

From his vantage point, Lucas had had a clear view of the cobbled yard below. There was a gleaming new Land Rover at one end, its mud splashes looking like decals: an expensive bit of rough. That had been the weekend’s theme, all these rich men pretending they were handy, and even as he’d had the thought he heard voices. A lot of voices.

“So I killed the spliff and moved back. Didn’t want them to see me.”

Because nobody was supposed to be there after dinner. The staff had cleared the dishes; the bottles were lined up on the sideboard. The rich had the run of the property. Whatever games they played, that was their business.

Or pleasure. Whispers in the kitchen suggested girls were bused in after dark.

He said, “I couldn’t see what was going on, but there was a lot of laughing and talking. And then it got lighter. There was a spotlight on the Land Rover roof, and they’d turned it on.”

There’d been the sound of something being dragged across cobbles.

Someone whistled the Lone Ranger tune, and everybody laughed.

“And then it went quiet.”

A tense quiet. The crowd had become an audience.

“And then a whirring noise, and a thunk. And everyone cheered.”

Good shot, sir!

Lucas had crawled to the edge, and looked down. There were maybe ten of them below, all men. And they’d set a target on a tripod at one end of the yard, and someone had fired what looked like a crossbow, and the thunk had been the bolt biting its mark: not a bullseye—anything but—but a solid pounding into the outer red ring.

“Good shot?” Emma wondered aloud.

So Lucas told them who had fired it.

“Oh, sweet Jesus . . .”

Not just a bunch of rich businessmen fooling with dangerous toys when drunk, but a bunch of rich businessmen with a royal playmate. Even this late in history, it changed the settings.

Lucas had said, “They carried on for half an hour or so, and then it got too cold so they went inside.”

“And that was it?”

No. That wasn’t it.