Smokeheads Read Online Free PDF

had to admit. In contrast, Roddy was all cock and balls, ploughing his way through the female population of Scotland, it seemed. Ethan had been like Adam at uni, never getting anywhere, but that changed when Debs took him on and quickly moulded him into typical husband material. As for Luke, he never mentioned women, and there was something in that silence which meant the rest of them never asked. Adam couldn’t remember him with a girlfriend since uni, but then he spent all his time these days at his remote farmhouse-cum-studio, doing soundtrack work for television and film, or creating that strange chilled-out electronica of his.
    He was the enigma of the group, the one who never really talked about his life. Once or twice Adam had spotted the name Luke Young in the end credits of television shows, original score or sound editor, and wondered how he’d made the leap into that from his maths degree. They’d all wound up doing something pretty removed from their official qualification, but Luke’s career as musician and composer was the furthest out there.
    Adam had only ever been to his house a few times, a secluded sprawl of old buildings along a farm track outside Pencaitland. Luke had bought the place, gutted it and transformed it into a studio, using the insurance money he received when his mum and dad died. His parents had been poor and his childhood was much more deprived than the other three, brought up in a poky flat in Tranent as opposed to their smarter houses in Gullane, Haddington and North Berwick – all the more affluent enclaves of East Lothian. But when Mr and Mrs Young were hit by a drunk driver and killed on the way back from the social club one night not long after Luke’s graduation, it emerged they’d had a healthy life-insurance policy stashed away, enough to pay off their mortgage and leave Luke with a big lump sum.
    After the painful process of clearing out and selling his folks’ house, he went travelling on his own for a year, trekking round the snowy expanses of the Arctic countries, across Greenland and the northern reaches of Canada, long visits to Iceland and the Faroes, even spending some time on the Svalbard archipelago. Not that Adam and the rest got much out of him about his travels except for the odd postcard. He returned with a noticeable sense of peace over what had happened to his family and a metal plate in the back of his skull thanks to a snowmobile accident in a Swedish blizzard. That’s when the beanie hats started, to cover the extensive scarring to his crown, along with a steady grass habit to combat the occasional migraines. He was quieter and more reserved than he’d been before, but also more comfortable with his new place in the world.
    He’d thrown himself into the studio project, transforming it from derelict outhouses to high-tech operation in eighteen months, and had split the time since then between making his own music and building up a reputation for atmospheric soundscapes perfect for edgy dramas and documentaries.
    Adam envied the way Luke never got worked up about anything, the way he seemed so assured, confident and happy about everything in his life. He looked at him now, content to sit there tapping along to a song in his head. He noticed the lazy left eye, and underneath the scruffy beard he could make out the pale curve of scar tissue on his chin, the result of a drunken accident with a pint glass years ago that none of them could remember properly.
    Luke was his own boss and earned a living doing something he loved. That was what Adam wanted. Luke had partly been the inspiration for Adam’s big idea, the real reason they were on Islay this weekend. He’d planned to spring it on the rest of them tomorrow, but he was suddenly itching to talk about it now.
    ‘Luke, you know when you built your studio?’
    Luke nodded, though maybe he was just nodding to the sounds in his head.
    ‘Was it a nightmare? I mean logistically?’
    Luke played with a leather