That Summer He Died by Emlyn Rees Read Free Book Online Page B

What was he going to do with Alan’s house?
    The options were limited. He wasn’t going to live there. And he didn’t want to keep it on as a holiday home. He’d rather go sightseeing in Afghanistan. So that left two choices: either flog it or rent it out. From the description he’d been given it seemed neither option was going to be simple to carry out.
    The house was a dump. The outbuildings, too. Even the kids who’d found Alan had concluded that. Hardly the ideal pad for a tourist family to rent for a break, then. That left flogging it. James couldn’t exactly see an estate agent begging for the opportunity, but at the same time he couldn’t see them turning it down either. It would be a hassle, but they’d shift it in time. The right upwardly mobile family or opportunistic builder would come along and see its potential, just as Alan and Monique had done all those years before. And James wasn’t in a rush. He hadn’t given a damn about either it or Alan when he’d woken up this morning, so why should he let it bother him now?
    Hadn’t given a damn about Alan. . .
    That would be nice. To get rid of his memory, just like the house. Hand both over to some wide-boy estate agent and tell him to sort it out. Then things could go back to how they’d been yesterday. That would be nice, all right, to disassociate himself from what had happened, rarely think about Alan at all. But ‘nice’ didn’t work that way. ‘Nice’ was what you got when you’d fulfilled your responsibilities to someone. It was what you got in bucket-loads when you knew you’d done your bit and weren’t to blame.
    But James
was
to blame. Same as with Dan. OK, so he hadn’t squeezed the trigger on Alan, hadn’t wielded the axe on Daniel Thompson, but he could have prevented those things from happening, couldn’t he? Couldn’t he?
    James tried to picture Alan in his final moments, peering through the gloom of the barn. No James there. No one. Just Alan and the gun. Just him and the cold metal solution. No one there to tell him that things didn’t have to end this way, that things never had to end this way. Then he tried to picture Dan, on top of that cliff, a psycho pounding after him, hounding him down and splashing his blood up into the winds.
    James could have changed that, too. He could have altered history in a million ways, said something to Dan back then when he’d been eighteen that might have sent him on a different path, kept him clear of the one running along that clifftop less than two weeks ago. If he’d stayed in touch, maybe Dan would have chosen that weekend to leave Grancombe for a stopover in LA. If they’d become firm friends after James’s summer in Grancombe, maybe Dan might have seen that there were other horizons to explore than the one seen from the beaches there, and left them behind and moved to London.
    Maybe. There were maybe millions of ways James could have made a difference. But he’d ignored them all. He’d taken the easy route, done the coward’s shuffle, shifted into reverse and backed off, kept on shuffling till Alan and Dan had disappeared from sight.
    He’d done it because things had been easier that way. Easier for him. Only easy – he started the walk down Piccadilly towards Soho – wasn’t always as easy as it sounded. Sometimes easy turned difficult. Sometimes easy turned out to be the hardest thing in the world.
    *
    Norm wasn’t in when James got to the office, just after four. Still out at lunch, according to Marcus. Still on the piss, in other words. James fixed himself a coffee out of habit more than the need for stimulation (he’d had more than enough of that already today), then sat at his desk and checked his email, sorting out the junk and the jokes from the messages from various contacts and sources.
    Tomorrow. He’d deal with them all then. Complications and leads were the last thing he needed right now. He flipped open his laptop and booted it up, accessed the Headley