Page 27 of Love and Loathing

Aubrey pushed his luncharound on his plate, no appetite despite the morning outside. He kept seeing eyes. Dead, glazed, animal eyes. And Evie’s eyes that morning. And blood in pathetic fluffy feathers, and the drooling mouths of dogs.

As a city boy, he’d never given much thought to it all before. Meat. Death. It was different seeing the hypnotic swaying of the carcasses in the gamekeeper’s hands as they followed him home over marshy, squelching grass, the earthy, mushroom smell of old mud and decaying leaves mixing with the smoke of the guns, tiny drops of blood on the toe of the gamekeeper’s boot.

That was the aftermath, unnoticed at first, preoccupied as he was with the feel of the gun, the crack and thrill of the shot. That was fun. Exhilarating. He felt shooting was something he could grow to love. But you could do it with clay, couldn’t you? Still handle the weapon, the smooth steel and the walnut stock, still track the speeding flight against the sky, feel the squeeze of the trigger and the obedient, kicking rebound. Without all the eyes.

Aubrey glanced up as George Blackton pushed his plate aside. He’d been trying to speak to the man alone for some time, but he was proving difficult to corner. Probably because he knew exactly what Aubrey was going to say to him.

But Aubrey wasn’t paid to be timid, so he got up when George excused himself, and followed him from the room, not caring that he was probably headed for the sacred privacy of a shit.

“George.”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to discuss our next steps.”

“We’ll do a debrief back in the office. You’re doing a decent job so far. Keep it up.” He turned and started to walk away.

“We really need to talk. Our whole strategy needs rethinking. And you know it.”

George stopped with a sigh. “Very well. Let’s get it over with.” He pushed open the nearest door, and Aubrey followed him through into a long portrait gallery, light falling freely through tall windows, Blacktons looking at him, most of them looking like George.

The man himself looked at Aubrey, expression politely bored.

“I want it to be noted,” Aubrey said, “that I’m uncomfortable with almost everything that was discussed last night.”

“OK. Noted.”

Aubrey gritted his teeth. If he had managed to avoid murdering the daughter so far, he was surely capable of putting up with the father.

“You may not have realised just how close to illegality many of the proposals Liv and Domnall put forward were.” Though he strongly suspected George did in fact know. “It often is a very fine line that we tread, but if we were to act on our client’s wishes in this case, we would almost definitely be pushing that line too far.”

“Almost definitely?”

“We would need to get advice from our inhouse lawyers—”

“So you don’t know for sure?”

“Not from such a brief, initial discussion—”

“Of course they’re probing us, Aubrey. That’s what this entire drawn out courtship period is about. Domnall wants to know our capabilities.”

“What he wants to know is how far we’re willing to bend. George, I strongly believe that the only way Domnall will sign up fully is if he’s sure we’ll get our hands dirty for him. That’s what he’s looking for. That’s why he’s toying with us. He wants us to be so desperate that we’ll agree to anything. And then Liv, and his legal team at HallardPuck, can keep their hands clean—feed him the strategies and getusto implement them.”

George said nothing.

“But you know that, don’t you?” said Aubrey, confirming his suspicions.

“As you say, we often tread a fine line. There’s a lot of room for manoeuvre in the grey areas.”

“This is beyondgrey, George—”

But the man held up a hand, cutting him off.

“We’ll talk about this later. When he’s secure. Before you have time to waste on scruples, Aubrey, first you need to do your job.”

With several hours to kill between lunch and dinner, and Domnall gone for a nap, and the fear of being cornered alone by Liv ever-present, Aubrey headed once more into the fresh air, asking a gardener for directions to Redbridge.

It turned out to be easy to find. A long walk across a well-kept lawn, and then through a blue-painted gate set in a brick wall. He stepped through into the shade of cedar trees, needles dry underfoot.

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