TWELVE
Aubrey pushed his lunch around 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 get us to 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 beyond grey , 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.
The house itself was visible at some distance beyond a varied patchwork of gardens, some formal, some half-wild. He set off down a twisting path, the trickling sound of a fountain growing louder until he reached it. He looked at it for a moment, the statue in the middle that of a slender, half-naked woman, his thoughts going, predictably, to Evie in bed that morning.
Why was he here? Seeking her out? The look she’d given him when he protested he had no choice but to do the very thing she despised told him everything he needed to know. Her absence at lunch confirmed it. He kicked his toe against the low stone wall of the fountain, deliberating whether there was any point going forwards, when an awful screech sounded sharp and loud behind him and made him jump out of his skin.
He spun around and found an enormous peacock regarding him balefully, its black beady eye seeming to know all about its murdered compatriots.
“Oh, fuck off,” Aubrey told it. The bird ignored him.
He turned at the sound of laughter and found Hugo Blackton walking towards him, a spade balanced cheerfully over one shoulder.
“Yes, shove off, Lionel,” Hugo said happily to the peacock, which ignored him, too. Then, somewhat cryptically as far as Aubrey was concerned: “If you need a gift, Ford, stick to flowers, chocolate. Turns out peacocks are a complete pain in the arse.”
“I’ll bear that in mind. Hello, Hugo. How are you?”
The tall, dark-haired man grinned. “I’m all good, Aubrey.”
They’d met a few times, briefly, Hugo sometimes appearing on nights out with Roscoe—or he had, when he lived in London. Aubrey hadn’t seen him in over a year. He knew too little of him to have much of an opinion. But the fact he looked like Evie was distinctly annoying.
Hugo smiled. “Coming up to the house? I can’t believe you walked all this way to see me. But I also can’t believe you walked all this way to see my sister. People normally run in the opposite direction.”
“Just stretching my legs,” said Aubrey as they set off away from the fountain and through a maze-like garden of low green hedges.
Aubrey asked Hugo a few questions, then spent the rest of the time listening to Hugo chatting about things he had no intention of remembering, from the trials of box moth caterpillars to closing the garden to visitors at the end of the summer season.
They climbed some steps to a patio terrace. Evie was there drinking tea with the woman he’d met that morning in the company of the donkeys.
“Look who I found: Aubrey Ford,” Hugo announced. “Aubrey, Amy. Have you met? You already know my twisted sister.”
Amy said hello, giving him a considering look.
“Evie,” continued Hugo, “I was just telling Aubrey that you’d give him a tour of the house.” Which was completely untrue, the man had said nothing like it.
Still on the fence about Hugo up until this point, Aubrey decided immediately to hate him.
“You know the place as well as any of us,” Hugo added. “Show Ford around. After Conyers, I suspect he’s desperate to see even more paintings of depressed horses.”
Evie seemed to share Aubrey’s opinion of her brother. She scowled. “They’re mostly just bored, the horses,” she said to Hugo, not looking anywhere near Aubrey. “Except that one in the music room. That one’s demonic.”
“See? You’re the perfect guide,” Hugo said.
“No. I’m… I should get going anyway.” She stood up, still not looking at him.
So bloody childish. She was going to pretend he didn’t exist, was she?
“I’d like to see it,” Aubrey said. “This demonic horse.”
She finally looked in his direction, face blank. “Really?”
“More than anything.”
“It’ll give you nightmares.”
“Then maybe I’ll end up sleepwalking again.”
She flushed, Hugo and Amy looking between them as though this was the best TV show ever made. He could have done without the audience. They’d only go and intervene when he tried to shake some sense into the woman.
“Shall we?” He gestured to the innards of the house, a beautiful room visible through the open patio doors.
Evie grumbled something that sounded like, “Talk about demonic,” but got to her feet and stalked into the house. Aubrey followed, pretending not to hear Hugo’s jaunty call of “Good luck!”