After Brock Read Online Free PDF Page A

Nat? I mean “Heading for the Heights” is not exactly a normal way of telling a father, or anybody else for the matter, where you’re off to. Wouldn’t you agree?’
    Nat refuses to agree – or disagree. Yes, he’s smart, this toe-rag, this prick, but maybe (he can only hope) not as smart as he thinks, or indeed seems, at this moment.
    â€˜Anyway your note gives the police a high old time, to coin an apt phrase.’ And still he doesn’t like bullies. ‘Up they all go, members of the force and their helpers. To all those obvious heights near Lydcastle: The Long Mynd, Corndon, The Stiperstones. No trace of you there. Funny, that?’
    Nat doesn’t want to be assaulted by the beams from this guy’s eyes any longer. So determinedly he screws his own tight shut.
    But Luke isn’t deterred by this childish response.
    â€˜Attention moves to take in The Clees, and The Strettons, even The Wrekin. Yes, Nat, you’ll always, to the end of your days, be able to say you had the cops going all round the Wrekin .’ He doesn’t just smile here but actually laughs, and appears to have the nerve to think Nat’ll laugh too. (As if his thoughts ran in this kind of way. This journo is judging others by himself, which, in his pathetic case, is a bad thing to do.) ‘And then everybody was beginning to think. Well, if the boy isn’t in the vicinity of Lydcastle, then mightn’t “heights” apply to Snowdonia? Not too far away for a lively adventurous lad… By now operations must be costing police and tax-payers a pretty packet, I’d say. But then they shouldn’t be thinking of anything so sordid as costs in a matter of life and death, should they…?’
    â€˜For Christ’s sake!’ For halfway through this q-and-a exchange – which has in truth degenerated into an ‘a’s session on the part of the questioner himself – Pete Kempsey, who was listening at the base of the stairs, has walked up them again to hear what his visitor’s saying, and what Nat, as it were, is not. But this last comment about police expenditure (something which has been tormenting him these last days) has brought him to the closed door. And hearing the compound word ‘life-and-death’ is just too fucking much. He must put a stop to it.
    The sound of his approach has made Nat open his eyes on the world again all right. There’s his dad in the doorway, all red in the face, puffed and obviously furious. And to be reckoned with.
    Nat feels a rush not just of gratitude but of respect for him.
    â€˜For Christ’s sake,’ Pete goes again, ‘lay off him, Luke. I won’t have my boy given any more of this. He’s not well, for a start. Can’t you see that, you dickhead?’
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    His interrogator, he’s glad to see, wasn’t expecting an eavesdropper, which was a bit dim of him. (This is his dad’s house, after all.) Got carried away by his own sadism. And now he does seem (grat-ifyingly) embarrassed at being caught out, like those blokes guilty of Special Rendition who’ve argued they didn’t know what they were doing. Another thing – he clearly hasn’t expected sloppy-seeming Pete Kempsey to speak as a man of moral authority.
    Pete hasn’t finished. ‘Print what you like, Luke, in that arsewipe you write for,’ he goes, ‘we can both stand it. The important thing is that Nat is safe and sound and here. With me. Alive. Compared with that, I don’t give a toss!’
    But Luke Fleming is far less disconcerted than Nat hoped.
    â€˜Agreed, agreed,’ he says, ‘I’m human, aren’t I?’ (‘And what does that say in your favour?’ Nat mutters to himself, for his thinking on this very subject has undergone a significant change up on the Berwyn Heights.) ‘But every one of us, Pete, has a duty to be truthful. Otherwise