Ascension Day

bought the drink made it all the worse — it would be like supping with the devil.

He knocked back the last of his first drink, closing his eyes again as he felt it trickle down. In control. Still in control. Then, bringing the tumbler down with a firm slam on the bar counter, he walked out.

3

4 days later

‘So, how was our good friend Truelle?’

‘Not bad, not bad,’ Nel-M said. ‘After he got over the shock of seeing me.’

‘So, no signs of him falling apart?’

‘None that I could see, beyond the normal PMT — post-Malley tension.’ Nel-M chuckled briefly. ‘He claims that he exorcised the demons over Durrant years ago. And apparently he’s also kicked the demon drink. Truelle was reluctant to tell me himself — but I checked back with the barman after he left: it appears he goes in there only twice a week and has just a single Jim Beam each time. And he left the extra drink I bought him.’

‘Impressive. And the gambling?’

‘Unless he’s using a bookie or is into some private games we just don’t know about — looks like he’s clean there too.’

‘Sound almost too good to be true. Two vices overcome.’

The voice at the other end was punctuated by laboured breathing from years of emphysema and, as a chortle was attempted, it lapsed into a small coughing fit.

Adelay Roche, Louisiana’s second richest man, twenty-ninth nationally. He’d earned his main money in petro-chemicals and refining, and his detractors claimed that his emphysema was God’s punishment for poisoning the lungs of millions of others; whereas his supporters said that it was brought on by the death of his beautiful young wife twelve years ago. As many years ago now as the age-gap between them.

VR, Vader-Raider, he was unaffectionately nick-named, homage to his breathing problems and his fierce reputation for corporate raiding. On occasion, he’d ask people what the VR stood for, and, not wishing to upset him, they’d either claim that they didn’t know or, with a tight smile, ‘Perhaps “Very Rich”.’ Roche would nod knowingly. ‘That’s nice.’ He’d long ago heard what the initials stood for, but couldn’t resist watching them shuffle awkwardly around the issue.

‘And what about Raoul Ferrer?’ Roche enquired.

‘I haven’t caught up with him yet. I thought I should speak to you again first.’

‘Yeah, I know. He could be more of a worry. Two money demands now. No knowing when we might get another.’

‘True.’ Nel-M didn’t say any more, just let the steady cadence of Roche’s breathing get there on its own.

‘If that’s going to be an ongoing situation, then we might have to nip it in the bud. Let me know how you read it once you’ve met with him.’

‘Will do.’ As much of a green light as he was going to get from Roche. He might have to nudge that situation along himself.

‘Oh, and there’s a new lawyer been handed Durrant’s final plea at Payne, Beaton amp; Sawyer. Name of Jac McElroy. Doesn’t have too much experience, from what I hear — so looks like end-of-the-line throwing-in-the-towel time. Otherwise they’d have given it to someone with a bit more weight. But warrants watching all the same.’

A small shudder would run through Jac’s body at times; a small electrical surge buzzing through him for no reason, often in the dead of night and just when he was on the verge of sleep, snapping him back awake again.

The same chilling shudder that had run through him when his mother’s voice had lifted from her weary, trembling body into the silent, expectant rooms of the sprawling Rochefort farmhouse they’d called home for the past nineteen years, to tell him that his father was dead. That had been daytime, hot and sunny, though the large house had never felt colder when that news, even though half-expected, dreaded for so long, finally came from the hospital.

And he’d felt that same shudder even more in the following months: at his father’s funeral, when the bank foreclosed and the bailiffs came, with his mother’s muffled sobbing through walls or half-closed doors, or after his father had appeared in a dream, smiling warmly, telling him everything was okay. Lived before I died. Or sometimes for no reason that he could fathom, as if telling him there was something he might have missed. Stay awake for another hour staring at the ceiling and you might just work out what it was. Some magical way of getting your family out of this mess. After all, you’re the man of the house now.

The Rochefort artist’s retreat had been his father’s dream for many a year, long before he finally summoned up the courage to pack in his job at a small design and print company and transplant his family from a cold, grey Glasgow to the sun-dappled vineyards and wheat-fields of the Saintonge. And now the dream had died along with his father, as his father in his fading years knew all too well it would, many saying the money problems had in fact caused his illness: income dwindling, financial problems mounting and banks pressing in pace with the cancer eating him away; a race as to which would hit the tape first.

But it was difficult for Jac to get angry with his father for the financial fall-out after his death because, as his father’s good friend Archie Teale had said, unlike most people he’d actually lived his dream, and Jac’s abiding memory of that period was of an almost idyllic childhood: looking over his father’s shoulder as he’d bring to life with his paintbrush a patchwork quilt of vines, lavender and sunflower fields spread before them; Jac sitting on the hillside by the L-shaped farmhouse, the sun hot on his back, his father in the courtyard below sweeping one arm towards the same patchwork landscape as he instructed a group of eight by their easels — his father living his dream and the rest of the family happily riding along in the wake of that glow; powder-white sand slipping egg-timer slow through Jac’s fingers on an Isle de Rey beach, or chasing small fishes through its shallows, his father telling him if he ran fast enough and scooped down quick enough with his cupped hands, he might finally catch one. But, of course, he was never able to.

Those had been the overriding images in Jac’s mind from those years, rather than remembering his father tired and wasting away, his mother weeping and the court’s gavel and bailiffs’ knocks that had marked their final days in France.

Jac saw his father as some fallen-through-no-fault-of-his-own hero, rather than the failure that others, particularly his aunt, had labelled him.

And so as the months passed the brief shudders in the dead of night became less frequent, then finally one day stopped, and Jac was able to sleep easy.

So when that brief shudder hit Jac again, snapping him awake in the dead of night after he’d visited Larry Durrant for the first time, it caught him unawares.

He stared up at the ceiling long and hard, wondering what it could be: that one vital detail or clue he’d missed reading Durrant’s trial files? A hint at how to handle this fresh problem with the attempted break-out and the injured guards? But all that lifted from the muted streetlight orange-greys on his ceiling was the last image to hit him before he’d awoken: Durrant in his cell, lonely and afraid, sweat beads massed on his forehead with the crippling fear that he was about to die — the antithesis of the cool and distant, guarded front he’d shown to Jac — reaching out to say something, but the words never forming in his mouth.

But with the e-mail that was waiting on Jac’s computer when he switched it on early the next morning, Jac wondered if it was some kind of strange premonition.

Only two lines, his blood ran cold as he read it, a nervous tingle running down his spine.

Looked like he might have a breakthrough with Durrant before he’d hardly started.