Resolution Way by Carl Neville Read Free Book Online

Expressway, and then tomorrow some dawdling and driving on minor roads the rest of the way. On the journey there, instead of reading he found he was constantly messaging, and even going so far as to send out the first section of the novel he had scanned and had decided in a flash of inspiration to call Eminent Domain to a number of agents. Then he added the first page to his personal website and linked it through some of his other social networks. Momentum is key, he thought as the countryside blurred past and the day darkened and the seat cradled him, reclining and lifting underneath him as he shifted position. Visibility is everything, presence, velocity of presence, that was the essential element, quantity rather than quality of production, a constantly refreshed and reiterated profile, these were what mattered, and if the work was interesting too, all the better. He mustn’t allow himself to get out of the loop again, the next time he was sure would be fatal.
    He spent the night in a hotel that matched his preference and cost profile, and which the car selected for him, guided him to, a night in which it felt more as though he slipped into a trance than slept, a reverie in which, laying on his back on the bed he watched the darkness collected on the ceiling scintillate and sing. Come morning he found himself again in the car and moving forward, relentlessly, effortlessly conquering time and space. M80, A90. The Granite City.
    Robert Gillespie’s house was in the middle of a terraced row in what was evidently the less affluent part of town. Alex knocked on the door, stepped back a few paces and glanced at the upstairs windows. He thought he detected a shape moving behind the net curtain.
    He counted to thirty and then knocked again; the sound of feet on the stairs and a voice, rough, irascible, exactly the kind of voice he had anticipated, shouting out from behind the peeling green door. Coming, alright, hold on.
    The door opened on its chain and a baggy bloodshot eye, a bald head, and a stubbly cheek angled into the space.
    Mr Gillespie? Alex asked, and enjoyed watching the eye narrow in suspicion and mounting panic.
    Who are you?
    Robert Gillespie? He asked again.
    I refer you to my previous question, Gillespie said.
    My name’s Alex Hargreaves. I contacted you about Vernon Crane a few days ago.
    Ah. Fuck’s sake! Get to fuck will you?
    I’d like to ask you, he began, but the door had already banged shut.
    Alex crouched and pushed open the letterbox, and shouted in at Gillespie’s retreating back. Look, do you think I’d have gone to all this trouble and come all this way if this wasn’t something major?
    Gillespie disappeared into the living room. Alex had thought this might happen. Look, he shouted, I have dropped my card through your letterbox, ring me when you’re ready, I am going to be around all day.
    He went back to the car. Robert Gillespie, for all his apparent hostility, would prove to be malleable, manageable. There was the inevitable resistance at first, but eventually he would succumb, as they all would. Alex Hargreaves wouldn’t take no for an answer. And sure enough, 19 minutes later he got a text:
    You can buy me breakfast.
    Breakfast turned out to be three pints of Guinness and a burned lasagne in a pub at the end of Gillespie’s road. First Alex had to wait almost forty minutes out on the street, fiddling with his phone and pacing up and down while Gillespie performed his morning ablutions. When he finally, wordlessly emerged and set off down the road Alex tagged along behind him, determined to control his temper. The pub was called the Dog and Trap and looked to Alex as though it hadn’t been decorated since the early Seventies. They took a seat near the toilets, next to a couple of pensioners that Gillespie nodded to and who responded with a slow, dazed shifting of the head.
    Gillespie drank his first pint at the bar while the second was being poured; Alex had a bottle of water.
    How did