Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller (24 page)

It wasn’t to be. I had an unexpected window into his life when I wandered into Waterstones, the book store, and was casually browsing through books I could rarely afford, when my eyes settled on the section where they displayed their signed copies. I felt sure I must have done a double take when I noticed the name Maxwell Stone splashed in gold across a line of books. I approached the shelf, lifted one of the novels off and opened it. There on the title page was his unmistakable signature. I uttered a gasp that caused a woman to look anxiously in my direction. Turning to the back flap of the dust jacket Max’s sullen face greeted me once again, this time from a studio portrait that enhanced his already good looks. Actually, I smiled broadly. He had changed so much, and yet he had changed not at all. It was still the same boy who nearly beat my brains out all those years ago. And it was Connie, too, who stared out of those eyes at me, and it was probably Connie that teased out the smile.

I took the book to the cash desk. “Oh,” said the cashier, her eyes widening, “you’ve missed him by a day. He was in here only yesterday signing copies.”

I felt both a sense of disappointment and relief. “I knew him,” I blurted out.

“Really?” she returned, a spark of interest in her voice. “He’s so lovely,” she admitted. “A real looker. Quiet, for all that. But yes, he’s a dish all right. Much better in real life than he appears on his photo.”

“I went to school with him.”

“Really?”

I felt myself fluffing out like a prize turkey because I’d managed to snare her attention. She was attractive, in a plain sort of way. Young, too. “We were – we are best friends,” I said matter-of-factly. “He once stayed with us, at our house. My house now, actually.”

She touched a colleague on the back and he turned around. “This gentleman knows Maxwell Stone. They’re friends.”

The middle-aged man eyed me warily, and I was very conscious of him taking in my lacklustre appearance. I was beginning to wish I’d put on a pair of shoes instead of grubby trainers. “
This
Maxwell Stone?” he said, pointing to the book.

“They’re friends,” the woman spoke for me. “What’s he like? I mean really like? How does he come up with the ideas for his books – they’re ever so good.”

Books? More than one? I hadn’t realised. “I’ve no idea really,” I admitted, shrugging an apology. “I haven’t seen him in quite a while.” I saw disappointment cloud her face and interest draining away as if a plug had been pulled. The sight of the man’s back indicated without a doubt he’d lost interest too. It was a case of ‘
I knew him when…
’ they’d heard it all before, no doubt, countless times. Fame squeezes out past acquaintances and hangers-on like nothing else. “We were best friends,” I reiterated helplessly, but the man’s back remained fixed, his head turning to flash me a brief, stale smile. He began serving someone else. The woman took my money and slipped my book into a carrier bag along with the receipt, sliding it towards me and offering me one of those porcelain doll expressions. I bristled at her sudden withdrawal of interest in me. “He’s a bit of a bastard, you know,” I said, taking up my carrier bag. “In fact he’s a lot of a bastard.” Her smile remained unwavering. “A bit potty too,” I said with a finger to my temple. “What’s more he’s terrible at maths!” I said, walking from the counter, embarrassed at myself even as I left the store, all too aware of my cheeks starting to smart. I threw the carrier bag and book into the first bin I came across.

Why, why, why?
The word ran through my mind like acid. Why him, of all people? Why was it never me? What had he done to deserve all that attention, and likewise what heinous sin had I committed that condemned me to my malodorous bog of despair and hopelessness?

But all the same, something drew me back to the bin and I dug out the carrier bag, which had already acquired a veneer of something pink and sticky. I attracted the attention of passers-by who no doubt thought me a city tramp.

“What the hell are you staring at?” I snarled at an elderly couple whose joint expressions exuded pure contempt. I tossed the soiled carrier bag into the bin and clutched the book to my chest. “This is Maxwell Stone, this is!” I called, stabbing a thumb at the book. “I know him!” They hurried on their way. I could read their minds: the city was full of them, tramps high on some illegal substance or other…

I laughed inwardly at their preconceptions. “He’s gotta be stinking rich, you know!” I called after them, seeing their steps liven up a little. “And I’m the one that’s bloody poor! How’s that for irony, eh?”

I sat down on a nearby bench, which had, curiously, emptied of people at the sound of my raised voice. “I’m not a tramp,” I muttered beneath my breath. “I’m not a bloody tramp.” And I sat as alone on that bench in the middle of a teeming city as I did on the beach on Eilean Mor.

Apart from seeing Max’s novels appearing regularly in the bookstores, averaging one a year, I never came any closer to actually seeing him. We inhabited different planets. For all intents and purposes our lives had made different creatures out of us. I resolved eventually to wipe him from my system, my consciousness, and just at the point when I might have succeeded, an exorcism many years in the performing, I received the letter.

A letter from Max.

More than that, an invitation to Eilean Mor – wherever or whatever Eilean Mor was.

It had all been arranged, at my convenience, of course; Max would pay for me to travel by train to Inverness where a car had been laid on to take me west all the way to Ullapool; from there a chartered boat would ferry me to the island of Eilean Mor, apparently lying somewhere south west of The Summer Isles, but which did not merit a place on my atlas.

Incredibly he’d done it. Max had finally bought (or rented, leased, whatever) his Scottish island, just as he’d sworn he would as we lay on the grass thirty-odd years before, his magnificent realisation highlighting my own childish ambitions that lay strewn all around me like broken, discarded toys. Some of the old bitterness crept back, but it is fair to say that it was easily swamped by my desire to see him again and I didn’t take the time to ponder over the fact that Max was still embedded as deeply into my psyche as ever he had been.

Thus I found myself on a deserted beach on a seemingly deserted island hundreds of miles from my home and my everyday humdrum existence.

Above the continual mewling of the wind and waves I caught the distant thrum of an engine, first as a kind of vibration in the air, then firmer, thickening and settling into the distinct sound of an approaching vehicle. It broached the hill to my left, a Range Rover that bucked and twisted on the rutted track. It nosed its way gently down the steep incline, the body shell bouncing on the suspension as the car hit the beach. I rose to my feet, standing limply in the buffeting wind, a suitcase in either hand lending me extra ballast against the elements. The Range Rover, green and towering, came to a halt alongside me, pebbles and rocks grating under the tyres. The water-flecked window slid down and a face peered out of the gloom at me.

“Hello, Collie,” it said. “Lucky you weren’t here yesterday, we had a force eleven gale blowing!”

It was the first time in twenty years anyone had called me by that name.

And it was the first time in twenty years I’d seen Max.

*  *  *  *

There was always going to be that part of me that expected the sullen, aggressively suspicious and unpredictable Max that I’d known in my youth. And I’d prepared myself to meet that same Max of old, had steeled my sensibilities to the fact that I might be disenchanted, finding myself somehow thrust back to the very beginning when we were children, having to face all those same frenetic emotions all over again. I guess these thoughts had fixed my own expression into something grim and brumal, in keeping with the elements around me, and the only reply I gave to his greeting was a frown and a grunt.

“You OK, Collie?” Max said, mild concern registering on his shaded countenance.

I went closer to the car, stuck my head through the open window. And at that moment I could have burst into tears. I felt the emotion of the occasion rise from the depths like magma through underground chambers. I coughed to keep it bottled up. “Max!” I said, genuinely pleased to see him. “Max!” I said again.

“So good they named him twice, eh, Collie?” he waved his hand quickly. “Get in! Get in!” I stood there and dumbly lifted my cases. “Throw them in the back. Hell, it’s good to see you again. It’s been
so
long.”

And indeed it had been. Yet the intervening years seemed to be struck away in an instant. Absurdly, I had the image of those woolly mammoths in mind, encased in ice for thousands of years, and when they were chipped free they were as fresh as they were when they’d died. I had that feeling right then. About our friendship. Like I was facing something ancient, that had ceased to exist eons ago, but here it was as good as new now that the permafrost of twenty years had melted away. As if nothing had changed, whereas in reality everything had altered around us. It was a friendship that, like the exhumed mammoths, belonged in another world.

But that didn’t matter to me right then. I was a kid all over again. As Max drove the car back up the track, which grew terrifyingly steeper with every yard, he blabbered on about things long past, digging out choice memories like succulent, fat grapes from a bowl, and handing me them one by one to taste – people, places, those endless scorching summers. I felt my stomach flutter, was aware that in my excitement my hands were shaking and my foot was tapping energetically to an inaudible rhythm.

As he spoke – and he did most of the talking – I took the opportunity to ponder over how time had been kind to him. Max, like me, was heading swiftly towards middle age, but you’d never have guessed it. He still had that head of thick dark hair, though cut short, whereas my own was growing alarmingly thin, at that point where I was faced with that awful decision to either leave my hair longer to brush over the creeping baldness, or deliberately, unashamedly, having it cut so short that it emphasised it and to hell with my vanity. His face was remarkably free of wrinkles, and what he had – as I correctly predicted – only served to emphasise his already good looks. My own pasty skin looked positively anaemic by comparison to his. Scarborough was no replacement for the Bahamas. He’d lost none of his build to middle age either, his frame, if anything, appearing all the better for the extra pounds. I tried to sit up straighter to disguise my ballooning paunch, which pushed insistently at the seatbelt. Ordinarily this would have depressed me; but at that moment they were observations divorced from any real significance. I was too intent on what he had to say, and busy with trying to offer memory grapes of equal, if not better, quality.

“You’ve done well for yourself,” I said eventually.

He shrugged. “Luck, I guess.”

And here he veered off the track I wished the conversation to follow, redirecting my thoughts to another minor episode from our childhood. We broached the top of a rise and the view that filled the windscreen was phenomenal, sponging anything I had to say completely away. “Stop the car,” I said. “This is beautiful. This is…” I wanted to say heaven, but felt foolish. He braked and I opened the door, the wind tugging forcefully at it as soon as I did so. “Is all this yours, Max?” I asked, in awe. I heard him chuckle as I stepped out onto a cushion of heather.

The Sun was cutting its way through heaving black-bottomed cumulonimbus cloud, bestowing on the entire heavens something of the metallic, the majestic forge of some incredible deity. A solitary gull – or tern, I didn’t know which, I was never very good at such things – sped past against this backdrop, like a blisteringly white spark shot from the furnace that was the Sun. High hills (mountains?), their peaks frosted with snow or ice, which screamed silently of age and strength and immensity, looked as if they were attempting to tear out holes in the tumbling clouds that sent out silvery tendrils to wrap around the summits like misty gauze. Like gods themselves, armour-clad and arranged for war, they stood in an indomitable, unbroken line that tore the horizon into a serrated, grey-blue edge. And below, seemingly spread out across the entire valley floor, was a huge loch, as if the same god that worked the heavenly forge had accidentally spilled a lake of mercury, the loch’s surface agitated and roughened by the ministrations of the never ceasing wind. It was a desolate valley, the loch fringed by cold, grey boulders, weathered smooth, discarded marbles from a god-child’s game, all but treeless, the only plants growing being heather, tangles of gorse and low-growing tufts of shivering greenery. But stunningly beautiful. Beauty, I knew, that could so easily kill. For all its hostility, I was attracted to its ethereal splendour. I had never seen anything like it before. She could kill me, I thought, my eyes taking in the full vista and watering with the wind and cold. I had never before felt so vulnerable, and yet so fully at ease.

“Really? Do you own all this?” I asked.

He nodded. “Get in, it’s bloody freezing.”

“All of it?” I gestured to the hills.

“The whole kit and caboodle.”

“But those hills…”

“It’s only rock when all’s said and done,” he said. “Just a lot of it.”

With some reluctance I returned to the warm shell of the car, just as a pillar of light speared through rents in the clouds, blasting the hillsides in patches of brilliance, the once muted colours springing alive and vibrant from their touch. I had the nagging sense that it was a perverse thing that anyone could actually own this as easily as, say, the way one could own a semi-detached house, or a television. I remained silent as I draped the seatbelt across my chest, uneasy at the sudden realisation of the power of money. Of Max’s power. I mean really grasping it, seeing it so graphically. Somewhere, stashed in an accountant’s filing cabinet was a piece of paper, and on it a typed description of all this beauty that was merely listed as an asset. A possession. Max’s possession. It was humbling, and it was sick. And to top it all, as if he’d stage-managed the entire show, the clouds slammed shut and sealed off the light, plunging the valley into shadow.

“Do you live here all the time?” as the car traversed the edge of the loch.

“Good God, no!” he laughed. “
Nobody
could live here
all
the time. For one I’d get bored out of my skull. No, I get out before winter sets in. Winter’s too long up here, and the summers are pretty short. Even in summer the weather can catch you unawares and have you penned up here for weeks on end. I have a small place in London and in winter I tend to head for France. This place is more an indulgence for certain times of the year.”

“Oh,” I said, shrugging like it really was no big thing.

“I had toyed with the idea of opening it up to tourists. We’ve got a range of cliffs…” he indicated with a loose flick of the hand to his right “…over there, teeming with bird life. Don’t ask me what they are, haven’t got the foggiest, but I’ve been told there are rare seabirds nesting. Then we’ve got seals. And the odd-whale. But shit, I don’t want anyone coming here and cluttering up the place. I like it untouched. Too many people would only sour what we’ve got.”

We’ve
. He’d mentioned ‘we’ a number of times. It hadn’t really occurred to me that someone else shared his island with him. I sort of imagined him being here entirely alone. I was on the verge of asking who the ‘we’ was, but suddenly felt extremely foolish, afraid he’d laugh at me for even harbouring the thought that he’d somehow hole himself up reclusively in the middle of the Atlantic. He used to laugh at me a lot in the past. At my ignorance.

Like the time he did when he’d told me where babies came from and I rejected the obscene suggestion.

“So where then?” he probed, some devilment in his eyes. I mumbled an embarrassed reply, and he said, “Where?” making the exaggerated motion of cocking an ear.

“A lady’s bottom,” I remarked, suddenly very unconfident in my mother’s assured version of events. “Like going to the toilet,” I said quietly, realising as the words fluttered from my mouth that they sounded absurd, as the idea had from the beginning, but, as with my belief in God, what I’d been reliably informed had to be true, no matter what.

“A lady’s bottom?” he guffawed. “Out of her bum?” He made it sound so crude. He rolled over on to his back and kicked his legs, laughing his shrill little boy laugh. I remember Connie glancing at us from her deckchair, putting the book she was reading into her lap. She smiled at Max. I had visions of Max being squeezed from her bottom. But worst of all was when he got to his feet and ran to her. I saw him talking animatedly, though I couldn’t catch the words, pointing his finger at me, at which point Connie also burst into laughter and put a hand to her mouth. I looked at my feet, my face smarting as Connie clutched Max to her and kissed him fervently on the cheek.

Taking in a huge breath, forcing back the tears of embarrassment, I began to curse my mother for ever telling me such a thing, for opening me up to this kind of mockery. I hated her at that moment, and wished she could be more like Connie, who loved her son so much she grasped him to her as if her life depended on it, who would never tell him such things and cause him such unnecessary discomfort. That was love. What I had, I decided, wasn’t love at all, and that evening when I sat down to tea I silently admonished my mother, sitting quietly as a means of delivering my disapproval of her. She mentioned to dad that she thought I was sickening for something and felt my forehead. I hate you, I thought darkly as I chewed my ham.

“And what of you; what are you doing these days?” Max asked, bringing me out of my thoughts.

I shrugged. “Nothing so grand,” I ventured, hoping that this might satisfy him.

“So what kind of job do you do now?”

I searched for a sign of gloating, but what was there was of my own making. “I work in a supermarket.”

“That’s good. Doing what, exactly?”

“Admin.”

“Of course,” he said, like it was somehow to be expected. “What’s it like?”

“Shit.”

He laughed. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

I laughed with him. “Where’s your mother?” I ventured, quite out of the blue. I don’t know why I said it. I cringed inwardly, but I genuinely wanted to know where her body had been buried. Max’s face straightened and I felt bad about the question. “I’m sorry, it’s just that…”

“She’s where she belongs.”

I left it at that.

The car hit smooth tarmac. As if reading my mind, Max said, “Gonna have the rest of the road done soon, all the way to the jetty. It’s planned for next spring because it’s too late in the year for that kind of work now.”

For perhaps the first time I wondered where this road was actually leading. We were headed further into seeming wilderness; a modern road apparently going nowhere. And then, as we broached another small hill, the house came into full view. Well, I call it a house. A small mansion would be more appropriate. It had been constructed of the same hard grey stone as that which lay strewn around the landscape and the first impression as we approached was of a castle with crenulated walls and turrets across which, in parts, ancient ivy attempted to cling against the yanking of the wind that scoured the valley; I could make out the shapes of gargoyles and intricate stone carvings, buttresses and arched windows, some of which contained stained glass that reflected the feeble Sun like the flashes of gunshots. The building appeared to rise from the earth like a cliff face, shoved up eons ago by a colossal force of nature, and it sat in its landscape looking as natural as the hills that flanked it, or the clouds that looked to sit on its many leaded roofs. Its appearance came as a complete surprise, and my face must have reflected this.

“Like it, huh?” he asked, his eyes searching for my approval. I was reminded of the time he brought out his toy Aston Martin.

I nodded, but could not follow this up with any words that could describe what I was seeing or what I felt. We approached the building, passing through open cast-iron gates topped with naked medieval devils with lolling tongues and bulging eyes, finally pulling up outside huge mock-medieval doors in oak, supported by massive hinges and peppered with iron studs. This in itself looked impregnable. He turned off the engine and I heard the wind tearing around the car, rocking it slightly.

“All from books?” I asked, hardly masking my astonishment.

“Books, mostly, but not all from books. People just don’t want to buy enough of the things these days. No, I have other business interests. Together they produced this. Cool, huh?”

Cool? I shook my head. It sounded as if he’d acquired just another toy. “How on earth did this get here?” I asked. Rain spotted the car’s windows and I could sense the weather about to turn for the worse.