Free Death of a Raven by Margaret Duffy

a guest at the house, and then the whole damn fool lot got drunk and decided to do something about it. You have my apologies.” He didn’t sound sorry.
    Patrick took the drinks from McAlister, placed one on a table and succeeded in getting Mark to swallow most of the other. He choked and leaned back with a groan, his head on Patrick’s shoulder. Quite naturally Patrick’s arm went round his back, keeping him in a secure upright position.
    Hartland said, “If you know who they are, then why ask?”
    “Checking on the level of co-operation,” he was told.
    Mark sat up with another groan and put his head in his hands.
    “If you throw up again in here you can pack your bags forever,” Emma said, tight-lipped.
    “Beer and a Chinese take-away is a dreadful combination,” Patrick observed, placing a metal waste paper bin at Mark’s feet and tapping him on the arm to draw his attention to it.
    I smiled behind my hand. Even after all this time, familiar as I am with his methods, I find myself in awe of Patrick’s gift of handling people. I had no doubt that had Mark displayed any lesser degree of co-operation, either by making a rude remark or refusing to reply because of his nausea, he would have received a box around the ears that would have guaranteed his vomiting on to the carpet. Now, Patrick would draw his gun rather than permit anyone to lay hands on his charge. Recognise and acknowledge his authority and you come under the aegis of Patrick Gillard. It is like joining a select club.
    Margaret’s voice broke into my thoughts. “I can’t understand why he knocks around with such a rough bunch.”
    “They take him fishing,” said Emma, not for the first time.
    I looked at Mark, the educated son of a wealthy influential family, and then across to Hartland who had a boat but would concern himself more with stocking the bar than providing fishing tackle. I had seen pictures of the Dancing Sprite and could not imagine that bait and fish scales would ever be permitted to sully its gleaming decks whereas it was easy to picture a young Mark in the Gaspereau brothers’ fishing boat, a lobster pot at his back, a tin of beer within reach, enjoying long, lazy, sun-soaked afternoons a million miles from his studies or his parents’ social graces. In exchange for a few dollars to buy the beer, and the chance to chip away at Mark’s middle-class good manners, the three Maritimers would tolerate his company.
    But would they risk beating up his father’s gardener? The answer to this surely, was that drunk they would do anything.
    “I’m sorry,” Mark said to the floor.
    “That’s not good enough,” Emma snapped.
    I was thinking that their son’s lapse had definitely brought out the worst in his parents when Emma spoke directly to me, unrecognisable as the pleasant woman who had met me at the airport.
    “You’re not saying much. I suppose what happened over the stable started off as a furtive amatory frolic.”
    I felt like being immensely rude to her but, since coarse quotes always find their way into the media, refrained. “No,” I said with a smile. “He and I have never felt the need to play at being furtive,” Make of that what you will, I thought. Perhaps it was sufficiently obtuse to make you forget to be beastly to your son for a while.
    Mark gazed somewhat fearfully at Patrick but before he could speak was pulled to his feet.
    “There’s nothing for which you have to apologise. My reaction would have been precisely the same if I’d found you lying on top of Ingrid. Go to bed.”
    Whereupon someone shrieked with laughter. I’m afraid that person was me.
    Mark wanly wished everyone goodnight and went from the room. I was inwardly promising him explanations and apologies when it occurred to me that they might be unnecessary. Mark’s sports car had been parked by the fishermen’s pick-up in a position that suggested he had arrived first. Had he come to warn Patrick, terrified of the trouble he had