Old Enemies by Michael Dobbs Read Free Book Online Page A

Jones.’
    ‘Someone mentioned . . .’ He found himself reaching for another drink. ‘You have a family.’
    She nodded, sipped, lowered her eyes. She was still elegant, the years had been kind, and if she had put on a few pounds since her early twenties they were spread in superb places. As he looked, and remembered, he found there was too much to say, and so he said nothing. A silence of guilt.
    ‘I never remember you being tongue-tied,’ she teased, softly, trying to break the impasse.
    ‘I’m just not in the mood to stand here and swap small talk.’
    ‘This is Downing Street, what else are we supposed to do?’ A gentle laugh, which died. ‘Or is it me?’
    Harry wasn’t one of those braggarts who claimed never to have crawled away from a place of danger. He could smell the stuff, knew how it lurked like a ruffian on the stairs, waiting to trip you, cast you down, kick the crap out of you and take advantage of any vulnerability. Crawl away? Hell, he knew there were times when the only wise thing to do was to run, to put as much distance between yourself and it as possible. That’s why he’d survived. He swallowed the last of his drink and, without offering a word of apology, turned on his heel and left.

 
CHAPTER FOUR
    In the taxi on the way back from Downing Street, Harry’s mood proved to be as sour as the milk that would be waiting for him back home. Terri could do that for him, curdle the finest day. He told the cabbie to stop and clambered out, intending to walk the last stretch and restock his fridge at his local Asian minimarket, maybe get himself a fresh attitude, too. He felt mean.
    He still had his suitcase but it had wheels and was clattering unsteadily along the pavement when up ahead in the lamplight he saw a group of youths loitering near the shop, blocking the path, deliberately making others walk round them and into the gutter. Five of them, wearing hoodies, smoking, spitting, cursing, scratching spots. A woman with a child’s buggy, the wife of the minimarket owner, was asking them to move to one side. Harry wasn’t close enough to make out her precise words but from the woman’s body language he could see that she was nervous and hesitant, trying to be studiously polite. They looked at her, at the colour of her skin, and too long for comfort at the child, before turning their backs and ignoring her. She lowered her head in submission and began to make the trek into the gutter.
    That was when Harry got involved. He had no trouble in finding justification for barging in, of course, and on another day he would have said he was being chivalrous, but the truth was he was pissed off, stirred up by his encounter with Terri, and wanted to take his dark humour out on somebody. The mop-heads made a convenient target. These kids were feral, the type of wild, unassimilated creatures that nowadays were found in every town and on too many corners. Broken families, of course, that was always the excuse, but so what? His family hadn’t been exactly a festival of fun, either, yet Harry had got over it, hadn’t he?
    Or maybe not. Family was something he’d never done well and sometimes, when night pushed aside the clutter of the day, Harry wondered why he’d never been able to find the right place for a woman in his life. Was that because he had no role model, because his own father had so often been absent, erratic and untrustworthy, an emotional waterhole that had dried up and left those around him gasping? It would all have been so different for Harry, of course, if Julia had lived. She’d been pregnant when she died, carrying their son – Harry always thought it was a boy, didn’t know why, perhaps that was nothing more than male attitude, and Harry possessed more than his fair share of that. Dammit, maybe he was more like his father than he cared to admit. And suddenly Harry realized his own son would have been about the same age as these punks on the pavement.
    The frustration boiled over.