After Brock Read Online Free

reputation – and for good! That’s the difference between an ankle and a reputation, one mends quickly, the other may never mend at all. If this Luke Fleming makes a scandal out of all this, the University of Lincoln could throw you out before it’s even let you in.
    Luke’s telling him, softly, meaningfully, ‘I was in the Berwyns yesterday, Nat. Went and stood right at the foot of Pistyll Rhaeadr. Splendid spectacle! That’s where your great adventure began, isn’t that right?’
    Luke tries not to remember American films of detectives entrapping their victims with casually delivered, seemingly normal remarks. He’s actually never admired these characters, sees them as responsible for that disagreeable feature of US culture, its pervasive admiration of aggression.
    â€˜You know it’s right!’ Nat agrees, ‘you must have read it enough times. I’d gone to look at that splendid spectacle before going up into the mountains. It’s the longest single-drop waterfall in England and Wales, you know.’
    â€˜I might have heard something of the kind. And it was into the pool at the bottom of that huge single-drop that you had the great misfortune to drop your mobile phone. Which you’d had switched off all day anyway; we know that because your dad had tried to call you. That must have been an awful moment for you, seeing your phone go, plop! into that little maelstrom.’
    â€˜Yes, it was awful.’
    â€˜Still – with no mobile at all – you happily set off uphill for a good long mountain walk. Not knowing, obviously, that you’d be having an accident.’
    This sneering tone isn’t right, protests Nat agitatedly to himself, finding Luke’s manner all too reminiscent of just such movies as the journo himself has been trying not to recall. This determination not to take anything he says at face value, this mockery of his Great Adventure that was also his Great Ordeal. He mustn’t just lie back and let it happen. ‘This isn’t fair!’ he says aloud. Humiliating, but there’s a lump in his throat like when you’re about to burst into tears.
    â€˜What isn’t?’
    â€˜You trying to say I never went to Pistyll Rhaeadr.’
    Luke stretches the skin of his cheeks, which only highlights for Nat the fierce sparkle of his bright blue irises. The beams of his eyes are like weapons aimed at him. ‘But I’m not trying to say any such thing!’ he answers, half-offended, half-amused, and obviously trying to deflect Nat’s erupted hostility with facetious-ness. ‘Why would I? I know, Nat, that you stood below Pistyll Rhaeadr on the day of your… well, let’s call it, disappearance , on Monday September 21. Know it as well as I know that I’m Luke William Fleming, contracted to The Marches Now but also a contributor to other papers, including national dailies.’
    He’s trying to impress me, realises Nat. ‘That’s good!’ he says, trying a new tack, ‘always better if the interviewer trusts the interviewee.’
    â€˜Funny responses you have to things, Nat,’ says Luke, ‘aren’t you curious about how I’m so sure you were there then? Late in the afternoon it was, I believe.’
    Well, obviously he’s curious how. But mightn’t this shithead be bluffing?
    â€˜Well, you tell me, Luke!’
    â€˜I met Joel Easton.’
    Nat sees a light of victory in those blue eyes, and triumph in the mouth now smiling more than grinning.
    Joel Easton. Who on earth? The name means nothing to Nat, nothing. ‘Name means nothing to me, fucking nothing!’ he says out loud. He’s beginning to take a full-scale 100-carat dislike to this reporter – and he doesn’t care how many other papers he writes for! Could be Paris-Match and The New York Times for all it matters to him right now. He’s endured more this last week and a