Free Cold in the Earth by Aline Templeton

attempts to keep him at a safe psychological distance had been so ineffective; she couldn’t read him and it piqued her professional pride. He must have been in his thirties yet his behaviour was almost childlike. Was that calculated, an act put on for his own purposes, or was it really some curious kind of naïvety?
    There was money there, or at least there had been at one time, but somehow Laura suspected he wasn’t making it himself. A spoiled child, perhaps, who had never seen the need to grow up? The manner of his apology, as if his charm could broker forgiveness for any misdemeanour, suggested he’d been accustomed to indulgence.
    But she hadn’t been charmed, had she? He’d left her feeling uneasy, so it hadn’t worked. Perhaps it never did; perhaps he was just a poor little rich kid with hang-ups that condemned him to go on repeating the mistakes of the past. She’d met a lot of those, become almost a connoisseur of the variety of fronts which could be constructed to suggest a non-existent confidence – one of which, of course, was undermining the confidence of the other person.
    That made some sort of sense: after all, she’d been considering how to shield herself too. At least it was a working hypothesis.
    Like a karate expert making use of his opponent’s body weight, she turned his own technique of surprise against him when he returned. ‘The Minotaur,’ she said without preamble as Max sat down again. ‘Tell me about the Minotaur.’
    She could be confident, this time, that his response wasn’t calculated. It was ludicrously transparent: his face darkened, his mouth became a thin line and his hands clenched involuntarily into fists.
    ‘Jake Mason. My father – he’s a bastard.’
    How many times had Laura heard this tone of raw anger – even this phrase – during therapy? It had been her practice to say nothing in response, only to look an enquiry and she did that now.
    As if she had opened a sluice gate, the disjointed story came pouring out. His affectations of speech vanished as he painted an emotional picture of a tyrant, a darkly powerful man with a towering temper, obsessive about the bulls he bred and his own money and importance, indifferent to the feelings of his wife and son.
    ‘He – he drove her away, my mother.’ Max’s voice was thick with rage and hatred. ‘She just vanished one day, when I was seventeen. I’ve never heard from her since. And he did the same to Di too, when I was eighteen. When she left I walked out and I’ve never spoken to him since.’
    Laura drew a shaky breath. ‘How – how did my sister come into all this?’
    The waiter brought the food. Max had ordered a beef stew which he ate absent-mindedly as he talked. Laura toyed with her salad, too tense to eat more than a few mouthfuls as she listened.
    They’d met, apparently, at the Sanfermines Festival in Pamplona the summer before Dizzy vanished, at the famous running of the bulls when the half-dozen selected for bullfights that night are loosed into barricaded streets leading to the bullring; young men historically display their courage by running with the dangerous, volatile creatures.
    Max’s eyes were dreamy as he talked. ‘Di was amazing. Braver than most of the men – braver than me or my father, come to that, for all he always talked big. She actually touched one of the bulls, do you know that? It’s the craziest thing you can do. People die that way. I can still see her – the white shirt with the red scarf and the red sash round her waist, blonde hair flying . . .’
    Laura’s eyes prickled with tears. Dizzy had told her about it when she came home, talked of the strange madness that seized you, the terror, the absolute joy.
    Max was going on. ‘They fire a rocket, you know, when the first bull leaves the corral, then another when the last one goes. If there’s a long gap it’s a danger signal – probably means one’s got left behind the herd and it’ll be panicky, getting