After Brock (3 page)

And I don't like bullies, Luke rebukes himself.

‘But this is in all the papers. Dailies, bi-weeklies, locals, nationals.' The boy's trying out a sick person's voice on me, feels Luke. ‘I've told it all lots of times already.'

‘Well, make this one more then.' And I don't like etc.

Nat gives a sigh which sounds, he knows, a mite self-pitying. ‘I was coming down the mountainside rather too fast, I guess. Pen-plaenau; that's one thousand, seven hundred and seventy-one feet high, and there was once a Roman fort there, which explains some of the narrow furrows your feet keep finding. I tripped over one of those, and went sliding down a mossy boulder. After that I couldn't move much. So when I saw the helicopter all those days later, I found it difficult to stand up and attract its attention, let alone run and wave something at it. I was scared I'd just be left up there…'

Obligingly, as if in co-operation – or would it be corroboration? – Nat's ankle now resumes the throbbing that was so oppressive yesterday and which woke him up in the middle of the night. Maybe his first painkillers, taken with the early-morning mug of tea Dad brought him, are already wearing off? Luke notes this return of pain to the boy. That, at any rate, is genuine, you couldn't fake those involuntary winces. Makes him remember earlier sports injuries of his own, and the hell they used to give him, particularly when he tried to pretend he hadn't got them.

‘So you were in the Berwyns all that time?' he says. ‘Pen-plaenau is in the Berwyns?'

Nat forgets himself. ‘Well, of course it is. Where else could it be? The Kalahari? New York City? The Berwyn Mountains are absolutely where I was. On my own. Where I was found. As the papers say.'

‘So they do!' Luke Fleming is still smiling, ‘where you were
found
. How could I have forgotten! Beautiful neck of the woods, the Berwyns.'

Nat warns himself: This guy is more dangerous that any furrow left by a Roman encampment. Anyway, as a reporter for the local paper, he must know all about Pen-plaenau. It's a Marches peak, and there's been a lot of interest in the place because all the archaeological work had to be carried out so high-up. Pen-plaenau tripped you up and broke your ankle, but, if you're not careful, this idiot's gonna trip you up and break your reputation – and for good! That's the difference between an ankle and a reputation, one mends quickly, the other may never mend at all. If this Luke Fleming makes a scandal out of all this, the University of Lincoln could throw you out before it's even let you in.

Luke's telling him, softly, meaningfully, ‘I was in the Berwyns yesterday, Nat. Went and stood right at the foot of Pistyll Rhaeadr. Splendid spectacle! That's where your great adventure began, isn't that right?'

Luke tries not to remember American films of detectives entrapping their victims with casually delivered, seemingly normal remarks. He's actually never admired these characters, sees them as responsible for that disagreeable feature of US culture, its pervasive admiration of aggression.

‘You know it's right!' Nat agrees, ‘you must have read it enough times. I'd gone to look at that
splendid spectacle
before going up into the mountains. It's the longest single-drop waterfall in England and Wales, you know.'

‘I might have heard something of the kind. And it was into the pool at the bottom of that huge single-drop that you had the great misfortune to drop your mobile phone. Which you'd had switched off all day anyway; we know that because your dad had tried to call you. That must have been an awful moment for you, seeing your phone go, plop! into that little maelstrom.'

‘Yes, it was awful.'

‘Still – with no mobile at all – you happily set off uphill for a good long mountain walk. Not knowing, obviously, that you'd be having an accident.'

This sneering tone isn't right, protests Nat agitatedly to himself, finding Luke's manner all too reminiscent of just such movies as the journo himself has been trying not to recall. This determination not to take anything he says at face value, this mockery of his Great Adventure that was also his Great Ordeal. He mustn't just lie back and let it happen. ‘This isn't fair!' he says aloud. Humiliating, but there's a lump in his throat like when you're about to burst into tears.

‘What isn't?'

‘You trying to say I never went to Pistyll Rhaeadr.'

Luke stretches the skin of his cheeks, which only highlights for Nat the fierce sparkle of his bright blue irises. The beams of his eyes are like weapons aimed at him. ‘But I'm not trying to say any such thing!' he answers, half-offended, half-amused, and obviously trying to deflect Nat's erupted hostility with facetious-ness. ‘Why would I? I
know,
Nat, that you stood below Pistyll Rhaeadr on the day of your… well, let's call it,
disappearance
, on Monday September 21. Know it as well as I know that I'm Luke William Fleming, contracted to
The Marches Now
but also a contributor to other papers, including national dailies.'

He's trying to impress me, realises Nat. ‘That's good!' he says, trying a new tack, ‘always better if the interviewer trusts the interviewee.'

‘Funny responses you have to things, Nat,' says Luke, ‘aren't you curious about
how
I'm so sure you were there then? Late in the afternoon it was, I believe.'

Well, obviously he's curious how. But mightn't this shithead be bluffing?

‘Well, you tell me, Luke!'

‘I met Joel Easton.'

Nat sees a light of victory in those blue eyes, and triumph in the mouth now smiling more than grinning.

Joel Easton. Who on earth? The name means nothing to Nat, nothing. ‘Name means nothing to me, fucking nothing!' he says out loud. He's beginning to take a full-scale 100-carat dislike to this reporter – and he doesn't care how many other papers he writes for! Could be
Paris-Match
and
The New York Times
for all it matters to him right now. He's endured more this last week and a half than many people go through in a whole lifetime, and hasn't Dr Warne told him to go gently with everything, however ‘normal' he might be feeling?

‘Joel Easton? Don't know him!'

‘I think you
would
know him, Nat. If you were to see him!'

‘How's that then, Luke?'

Fear's licking him now with its long, rough, stinking tongue. As it's done several times these last few days, face to face with nasty-minded, insensitive, pitiless hacks, of which this one sitting on
his
chair by
his
bed in
his
room is the worst. Does he really want to go to Uni to learn their skills?

‘Because it was Joel you gave that package to on the Monday afternoon. You asked him if he would be so kind as to post it for you next day,' says Luke Fleming, ‘you know the item I'm talking about? The jiffy bag you addressed to The Manager, The Cooperative Food Store, 59-63 Church Street, Lydcastle, Shropshire.'

His experiences out in the wilds, all the wind and sun, have left Nat with quite a tan. So hopefully his blushes won't show up like they normally would. Because he
is
blushing! What a strangely instantaneous response a blush is! Why can't a human have better control over the process? There is surely no equivalent in the animal kingdom.

He thought he'd taken care of absolutely everything.

Of absolutely fucking everything!

Think of what he was thoughtful enough to do…

Obviously Nat hadn't wanted any guy he entrusted the parcel with to know his name or where he came from. Therefore he couldn't put his dad's name on it, or that of the kite shop either. So he fixed on, as addressee, the manager of the Lydcastle store where Pete Kempsey was best known, being a hundred per cent sure, once that lady had opened it, and seen its contents, she'd take it straight up to him at High Flyers. As indeed she did!

So his helper was called Joel, was he? Name suits him, he thinks. Back he comes into his life, if only in the form of a memory flash.

He himself was standing on the metal bridge close by the little hostel-cum-cafe, Tan-y-pistyll. He had just thrown his mobile phone (item number one of his plan) down into the river which the waters of the great fall form after their descent from the rock plateau. And nobody had seen him do this. He let himself enjoy for a few moments the flying spray on his head and shoulders. And then he noted this guy roughly his age, perhaps a year or two older, coming onto the little bridge from the lower reaches of the Afon Rhaeadr valley. He had a dog with him on a long leash, the sort Nat liked best, a Border Collie, after so many centuries indige-nous to the region. Black and white, but with tan on the legs and paws. Nat stretched out a hand and started to make a fuss of him. The owner was pleased at this, adapted his stance to suit Nat's attentions, and told him the dog's name was Mister. ‘This valley's one of Mister's very favourite walks. We live just the Oswestry side of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, we do, and we often get in the car and go for a good long walk out here.' Nat took to him, not least for talking about the collie and himself as ‘we', and thought, ‘He's just the reliable sort of guy I'm looking for.'

So there and then he asked him the favour, the wording of which he'd rehearsed so many times, hoping for a break like this. Though reality had exceeded hopes.

‘I've been so stupid and selfish, I promised on my honour to send this parcel off today (it's already got the stamps on it), and then – can you believe it? – I clean forgot. I don't have a car, and anyway it's too late for the post office now, and I'm joining up with a friend in a minute for two nights' camping and trekking in the mountains. On the far side of this waterfall. You couldn't possibly be so good as to…?' Nothing odd or suspicious about all that, was there? Anybody could tell he didn't belong to a terrorist group, or form part of a perversion ring. Certainly the young man with the dog from the Oswestry end of Llanrhaeadr bought the story whole, didn't even blink. Untruths can flow out of someone as easily as (more easily than) perfect truths…

Nat's silence impresses Luke. It speaks the volumes he's been expecting and wanting from him.

I've already wafted my trump card in the boy's face, that journalist thinks, now I have to display it properly. A man has to do what a man has to do.

‘The first Joel knew of your disappearance, Nat, was when he read my own piece last Saturday. As soon as he saw your photo, he knew what he must do, and he did it. He contacted me through the paper. Said he hoped what he had to say might prove helpful. You were still missing then, remember. You weren't found till later that day. Still, what he said set me thinking, even when all the jubilation at your being found was at its strongest. And yesterday morning when I read the other papers, I thought some more. Mean-minded sods those reporters, I'll grant you. Still they made some sound points… I'll pay Mr Easton a little visit, I thought. His home is not exactly the other end of the world from me. I'll see what joy I can get from him.'

Nat still doesn't speak. Judges it best not to.

‘I guess you overestimated our wonderful, unequalled British mail services. Imagined – pardon the pun! – that what you sent would arrive in a
jiffy
! Well, you don't need to be told that it didn't reach the Co-op until Friday, after several days of people going frantic about you. There was a near miss even then, as I understand. Co-op Manager Joanne Gladwyn opened the package all right, but would have thrown the whole thing into the bin for recycling, had she not seen the name inside the notebook. Your name! Then, bless her, she raced up here, to your dad, where the packet and its contents must have come near to giving him – and your mum too, because she was here also – massive heart attacks. Shock and awe on a Quentin Tarantino scale!'

As if Nat hasn't imagined the scene a billion times. As if (worst admission of all) he hadn't taken it into consideration when he planned the whole thing. As if it hadn't nagged at him since –

constantly. What if Dad had had a heart attack, or Mum fallen down into a faint, and hit her head on some hard surface and cracked it open!

Who does this smirking git think he is?

Luke Fleming now leans forward on his chair. Automatically Nat tilts himself away from the man, so sinking his head into the mound of pillows. Spells of dizziness are a major legacy of what he's recently been through. Whether or not he realises Nat is having a mild attack of these, this
Marches Now
writer is pleased to continue his pursuit. His tone is, if anything, lower and, more menacing, while paradoxically more relaxed than ever. ‘So let's recapitulate, shall we, Nat?'

‘If you must!' he mumbles, half into the pillow but still keeping Luke in focus.

‘You leave Lydcastle early Monday September 21, morning after the town's Michaelmas Fair. Your dad's kept his shop open all weekend and till later hours than usual, so he's pretty shattered and is having a bit of a well-deserved lie-in, and might well not open up that morning at all. You leave him a note of what I would call the
cryptic
kind:

  

Dad, Heading for the Heights xx Nat.

  

‘Of course,' Luke's voice has a purring quality now – he's so well pleased with himself he really does suggest to Nat the cat who's swallowed the cream – ‘nobody knew what you could mean by your word “Heights”. Which was, I presume, why you chose it, eh, 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.

‘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?'