Free Bloodland: A Novel by Alan Glynn Page A

cold coming on …
    He grunts. Sniffs.
    Jesus, what is he, twelve ?
    He takes another long slurp from the glass and wipes his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket.
    Then he walks across the room, glass in hand, not sure where he’s going exactly. He almost loses his footing at one point, but somehow ends up in the study.
    Standing over his desk.
    He picks up a wad of pages, photocopies from a folder, and looks at them for a while.
    What? Is he kidding? In these memoirs the publishers aren’t going to want him re-hashing some select committee report on quarterly budget estimates – if that’s what this is, he can’t quite focus on it properly – they’re going to want juicy anecdotes, an interesting angle on events, they’re going to want a book people can read .
    He sits down and puts his drink on the desk.
    What he should do is lay everything out straight, shoot from the hip, no pussyfooting around or lilding the gilly. Gilding the lily. He should write a warts-and-all account of what it’s like to hold down the top job – the in-fighting, the petty rivalries, the smoke-filled back rooms, all of that stuff, of which there was plenty, though without the smoke of course, because no one does that anymore.
    He sees the whole thing in a flash – the hardcover edition, press quotes on the back.
    Shocking. Brilliant. Urgent .
    He takes a sip from his drink.
    With blistering honesty and a prose style that wouldn’t be out of place on a Man Booker shortlist, Larry Bolger’s essay on the nature of power will be required reading for generations to come.
    He hits a key on his laptop and the screen lights up. He opens Word.
    He takes another sip from his drink, hesitates. Stares at the blank screen.
    But there’s something he needs to do first.
    He gets up and strides out of the room.
    Where’s his phone?
    He finds it on the table in the kitchen. Scrolls down through the list of names.
    V for Vaughan.
    It’s only when it’s ringing that he realises what time it is. That they’re five hours behind in New York. And probably all still asleep.
    It goes into message. ‘You have reached…’
    He waits for the beep.
    ‘Mr Vaughan? It’s Larry Bolger.’ He pauses. ‘How are you?’ His voice sounds strange, heavy, a bit slurred. It sounds drunk. He sounds drunk. He is drunk. ‘I called you a few months ago, left a message on your machine, but you never got back to me. Why didn’t you get back to me?’ Now he sounds like a fucking teenager. It’s how he feels, though – angry, frustrated, thwarted . ‘I don’t see … I don’t see why you couldn’t have got back to me. A simple phone call. Is it … is it because you’re so fucking high and mighty? Is that it? You’re so important?’ He pauses, possibly for a long time, before eventually saying, ‘ Prick .’
    Then he holds the phone out in front of him and looks at it, a little confused, as though someone has just called him a prick.
    He puts the phone back to his ear and listens for a second. Nothing. He holds it out again and presses End Call.
    Puts it on the table. Furrows his brow.
    Huh.
    He goes back into the living room.
    What was he doing?
    Oh yeah. A drink. He looks over at the cabinet in the corner. He was going to have another drink.
    *   *   *
    As he comes off the roundabout and approaches the entrance to Tara Meadows, Dave Conway can’t believe what he’s seeing. It’s only been three weeks since he last came out here and already it’s as if a ravenous Mother Nature has reclaimed substantial sections of the development for her own.
    He goes through the gates and drives on for a hundred yards or so before pulling up at the kerb. He takes a small torch from the glove compartment, puts it in his pocket and gets out.
    He looks around.
    The perimeter fences are entwined with prickly bushes and briars. Nettles are everywhere and weeds – thick, green, poisonous ones – are growing, it seems, at an alarming rate, rushing up in busy clusters