The Lords' Day (retail) Read Online Free PDF Page A

prey from a distance.
    Harry had money, too, handed down from a father whose own inheritance had been blown away by the misguidance and complacency of the grandfather. What hadn’t been lost in the Great
Depression had been siphoned off by death duties, so Harry’s father had gone out and rebuilt the whole shooting match again from scratch, taking particular pleasure in doing unto others in
the City what had been done to his own father. It had left him with an unreasoning fear of the gene pool, that his own father’s weaknesses might be handed down to his son. From his earliest
days, therefore, Harry had been pushed – through an English prep school, followed by an international elysee in Switzerland and interspersed with any number of exotic escapades in the company
of his father’s inter national business colleagues and occasional mistresses. Before the age of sixteen he had surfed at Malibu, sailed off Dubai, learned to scuba in Borneo and lost his
virginity to a considerably older woman in Hong Kong – and owed it all to his father’s arrangements. Yet it was entirely through his own efforts that he got a place at Cambridge. But
the day Harry ripped open his acceptance letter, his father announced he was stopping his allowance; Harry would stand on his own feet, or not at all. Brutal. It was the father’s own theory
of natural selection. Lucky, then, that Harry had won himself a scholarship, and made up the rest by sneaking off to do double shifts at weekends at McDonald’s. He had bumped into Julia one
brilliant summer’s day, on the riverbank, nearly sending her flying and catching her only in the nick of time. After that, she had rarely left his arms.
    Harry always made waves, wherever he went. It was in the nature of the beast. But he never knew when to pick his battles. Perhaps this was the reason he had gone into the Army – that, and
the fact that Julia was an Army brat. Yet he had a habit of making his superiors uncomfortable. He would fight his commanding officers with as much tenacity as he set about the Iraqi Republican
Guard, so they kept moving him on, while his talent kept moving him up. Life Guards, the Airborne Brigade, and eventually the SAS where they turned Harry into one of the most effective killing
machines anywhere in the Army. The consummate warrior. That was why they sent him behind the lines during the first Gulf War, into a conflict where radios didn’t work, rifles didn’t
fire, resupply rendezvous were missed and patrols inevitably got lost. It came close to being a fiasco. Some men came out of the desert and wrote books about their experiences; Harry went straight
to his CO and had another blazing row. After that, his days were numbered. He was farmed out to the Staff College at Camberley and eventually sentenced to a spell at the Ministry of Defence, but
word had got round. Harry was his own man. In military language, that meant he was disloyal. Not one of us.
    Shortly after, Harry’s life had taken a decisive turn when his father died. His heart had stopped while he was riding a mistress forty years his junior. He’d been warned by his
doctor that such distractions could lead to unwholesome consequences but, like Harry, he was his own man. ‘Who the hell wants to die with his boots and breeches on?’ he was alleged to
have replied. And the father who had cast out Harry at eighteen without a penny left him the lot, a thoroughly immodest fortune that gave him an independence of action matching that of his mind. It
made Harry totally unfit for further duty in the army, a conclusion shared by his superiors, so he quit and went into politics, became a Member of Parliament. At first Harry had flourished, made
his mark, climbed through the ranks until he had made it all the way to the Home Office as Minister of State. He had become a man who in some observers’ eyes was most likely to succeed, yet
because of that, in the eyes of others he was a threat, and the