Ack-Ack Macaque Read Online Free PDF

time.
    Some people said he hadn’t been the same since that helicopter crash in the Falklands. Perhaps they were right?
    His trousers squeaked as he shifted position on the soft leather seat.
    His SincPhone rang. He pulled it from the inside pocket of his tux and groaned.
    “Hello, mother.”
    From the phone’s tiny screen, Duchess Alyssa’s face glared out at him. She wore a plain navy-blue business suit with a string of pearls, and a slash of red lipstick.
    “Don’t you ‘mother’ me. What’s this I hear about you missing the press conference this afternoon?”
    In the darkness, Merovech shrugged.
    “The Prime Minister was the one giving the speech. I didn’t have anything to say. They just wanted me there to make up the numbers.”
    “Nevertheless, you were supposed to be there. A prince has certain obligations, Merovech. Like it or not, while your father remains in a coma, you are his representative and heir, and it’s time you started to act like it.”
    “I had studying to do.”
    “Nonsense. I expect you were out chasing that little purple-haired floozy again, weren’t you?”
    Merovech bridled, but held his tongue. The truth was, he had been studying but, from long experience, knew he wouldn’t get anywhere by arguing. Once his mother had her mind made up about something, there was little he could do to change it.
    “Look, I really don’t have time for youthful rebellion right now. There’s too much to do. Honestly, Merovech, you’re going to be twenty years old in a few months. When are you going to start facing up to your responsibilities?”
    Merovech lowered his eyes, trying to look contrite.
    “Sorry mother,” he mumbled.
    The Duchess glared at him.
    “Whatever. I’m not prepared to discuss this any further over an unsecured line. I trust you were polite to the Turkish ambassador?”
    “He’s invited me to play golf with him next week.”
    “Very well.” She brought the phone close to her face, so that she seemed to loom out at him in the darkness of the limo. “Now get home, and get to bed. We’ll finish this talk in the morning.”
    She hung up. Merovech held the phone for a few moments and sighed. Then he folded it up, dropped it onto the seat beside him, and went back to watching the streetlights of Paris drift past the smoky window.
    Paris and London were very similar cities. They had the same stores, the same billboards. The same weather. The kids even used the same bilingual slang, or “Franglais” as they called it. Yet despite these superficial similarities, and despite having been born and raised in London, something about the neoclassical streets of the French capital—something he couldn’t quite put his finger on—made him regard the city as his home.
    When the phone beeped again, he winced, expecting another reprimand, but found instead a text message from Julie. For the past three weeks, they’d been seeing each other in secret. The message invited him to meet her in a café on the South Bank, at midnight. He read it twice, and smiled to himself as he slipped the phone back into his pocket.
    Perhaps tonight wouldn’t be a complete waste, after all.
     
     
    H E REACHED THE café half an hour later, wearing an old red hoodie and a pair of battered blue jeans. He had the brim of a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, shading his eyes. He’d read somewhere that ninety per cent of facial recognition depended on the hair and eyes, and he hoped that by keeping the brim of his cap low, he’d remain anonymous. So far, no-one on the rain-soaked streets had paid him the slightest attention, and he wanted it to stay that way.
    The café stood, shouldered between two taller buildings, on a narrow street south of the river, across the water from the flying buttresses and gothic exuberance of Notre Dame, and a few doors down from the famous ‘Singe-Vert’ nightclub, where the Beatles had cut their teeth in the early 1960s, playing a formative two year residency