After Brock (32 page)

‘Izzie was too frightened of what we might discover on the Berwyns to go into the police helicopter, and that's the first time in all the years I've known her that I've seen her show fear. Anyway there was barely room for a fourth person in so small a space on such a ghastly journey. When I say “ghastly” I mean from the point of view of my spirits, my appalling fears. Remember I am someone who knows what it's like to have close ones, dear ones, taken from me. In another frame of mind it would have been a journey of great beauty, one never to forget, flying above the heather-covered Berwyns on a sunny September morning, able to see all the contours of the mountains below.

‘We went up in a Eurocopter EC 135T fitted with a day camera with a zoom lens, and the guy beside me, Islwyn, was in charge of the map reading. And I remember thinking “I know many a lad in Lydcastle who'd give his eye-teeth (and perhaps more) to be in this helicopter. But me, I can't properly see for the dread throbbing behind my eyeballs, and the whirr of the machine is almost drowned out by the loudness of my own fast-beating heart. If we discover Nat dead down there, well, then,
I
will die too. I shan't think even about poor Izzie or the kite stock or any unpaid bills or my pals in Lydcastle, or any other hopes I've been daft enough to harbour these last years. I'll force myself out of the aircraft, so I'm dashed to pieces by whatever rocks catch me. And good riddance, I would say…'

‘Dad!' Nat can't help himself crying out, and as for Luke: ‘When I first made a journey in a Eurocopter, I was like a kid, over the moon. Except literally, of course! I thought well, now I'd really fucking arrived as a full-blooded investigative journalist. But if we'd all been searching for our Jared…' It doesn't stand thinking about.

‘Over and over those peaks, round and round the massif we circled until I thought I would go stark staring crazy. I could not have believed so many gulleys cut their way into the slopes, nor how many outcrops of rock obscure exactly the natural aperture the crew thought we had to peer down into. We flew over not just Cadair Berwyn and Cadair Bronwen, but over their rivals, Moely-Henfaes and Moel Fferna. Until we passed over Pen-plaenau. And there we saw…'

But he can't continue. Anyway both his listeners know what they saw. On Pen-plaenau both the police team and the father were rewarded with the sight of Nathaniel Robin Kempsey standing on a slope, looking up towards them, perfectly alive, and – with the pilot's eminently reliable expertise and patience – perfectly rescuable.

Pete, to his own dismay, is not merely weeping now but sobbing, a kid's sobbing, his head resting against hands held up as if in prayer, sobbing to the point of breathlessness, as he has never done during the past days of either loss or discovery, as he never did even after learning that all his family save one had been killed.

Luke says, with a tender gruffness he doesn't know himself capable of: ‘This has been a rough ride for you, Pete! A good part of the morning's already gone. Why don't we get some lunch?'

Pete, trying to compose himself and sound ordinary, says: ‘Why not?'

‘No! Not yet!' Nat's voice is so loud and urgent it startles both Pete and Luke, ‘not till… Dad, please leave the room. I want to have time with Luke Fleming.'

Pete is wiping his tear-spattered face, and trying to recover his normal breathing rhythm back. Old Nat has been right about him all along; he truly is out of condition, a man shouldn't get as short-of-breath as this when only in his early fifties. He feels he must resemble some clumsy dog who's tumbled in a cold pool by mistake on a country walk, and is now sorry for himself. ‘I dunno if I
should
do what you're suggesting,' he says.

‘Dad, please!'

‘He'll be okay with me, Pete, I promise,' says Luke Fleming. Where's the Reuters' wonder now, where the methods of the 87th Precinct in those American detective stories he devoured once in a holiday guesthouse in Rhyl?

So Pete leaves the room, shutting the door behind him. He walks down two stairs before returning to the landing and listening outside the door. Nat, preparing himself for the last and worst haul of them all, recites: Light green (turf), dark green (clumps of woodland), light purple, deep purple (all the heathers), brown (bracken), grey (the shale). And it's full sunlight, a splendid midday. Just see the strolling people in the Square below, enjoying it all. And with their dogs with them, including Harvey, my favourite border collie from Bull Street…

   

‘Luke,' begins Nat – best to stick to the first-name approach, ‘I did it all for Dad. You've got to know that from the very start, and keep it in your head all the way through. Now I've heard everything he went through at my age, all those things I truly didn't know about, I can't feel the same about my action – even less so now I've learned how he suffered when I went missing. Which is why I want to get it all off my chest, especially as it seems to have backfired! Otherwise why would you be here, Luke, in my bedroom, come to hear me make a cock-up, to spill beans you've probably already counted up, like a Spanish Inquisitor getting his heretic? But when the idea first came to me – well, it seemed brilliant, I don't mind telling you! A stroke of genius.

‘As I sit here now, it feels not brilliant, just plain stupid! And unmindful of its true effect on other people. The decision of an idiot really – even though I've nearly brought it off! All except one extremely important aspect of my plan, which hasn't – shall we say, materialised at all.'

‘Money?' says Luke, but his grin isn't of his former gloating kind. Is this because, after the dad's breaking down, triumphalism of any kind isn't in order. The boy knows he's been rumbled, but instead of being sorry or angry, is, on the contrary, pretty fucking glad.

‘I've always said, haven't I, I'm a news-freak who's going to be a newshound. I never had any doubt what course I wanted to take at Uni if my A Levels were good enough to get me there: journalism. I'm still headed in that direction. Though the way you press guys have set yourselves at me and baited me, like dogs attacking some shackled bear, has made me more than once, these last days, have second thoughts about joining your pack. Well, it all began, my Big Idea, with my getting excited about the story which broke in mid-July…'

‘Of Jamie Neale. In the Blue Mountains of Australia?' hazards Luke Fleming, though of course it isn't a ‘hazarding' at all. Luke's used up a hell of a lot of brain-power working the whole thing out. And he wouldn't have hurried over here to Lydcastle, ahead of his colleagues and rivals, if he hadn't been sure of his conclusion (though needing help from Nat himself about the stages leading to it). Only when the intriguingly strong parallels between the two boys' adventures came home to him had he appreciated just how right he (and certain others too) had been to have misgivings from the first about Nat Kempsey and the tale he told. The key to it, to its inconsistencies and difficulties, lay, he became convinced, in that other boy's experience. Meeting Joel Easton only vindicated his thoughts.

‘Seemingly it's you not me that should be talking about strokes of genius,' says Nat, at once sorrowfully and admiringly. (Maybe he
will
follow in this guy's footsteps after all?) ‘I must say I've been surprised that nobody yet has asked about that entry in my Journal after my trip to Cornwall. “Hasn't riding the waves taught me that mastery of self is the key to life? And if an idea comes to you, but seems (at times) too hard to execute, then use that mastery to ride on the crest of it, as you would on an Atlantic roller… Never forget the hero of
Sixty Minutes
,' I wrote! Though I guess I should have added “the hero, Jamie Neale, as I see him,” for in my view there's really no good reason whatsoever to doubt the truth of what he told the world, like so many fuckers tried to. And the medicos backed him up a hundred per cent. You seem clued up already about the Jamie Neale/Richard Cass case, Luke, but you can't be as clued up as me; I could get a fucking PhD in the topic, I reckon. (Probably the only one I'm capable of getting!) So I'm going to run it all past you, even if it does mean telling you things you already know. Because unless you're familiar with what I read up and looked up on the web, then you won't fully grasp what I did – and why. I don't know how many times I watched the YouTube of that ABC programme on him. It became a true obsession.

‘Jamie Neale's position seemed uncannily like my own; I thought that even before I decided to take him as a model. Like me he's a Londoner who got his A Levels, like me he comes from what's called a dysfunctional family (his mum and dad weren't together, and he lived with his mum), like me he's keen on those activities like exploring and orienteering, like me he'd time to fill before starting Uni, Bristol in his case. Yes, I know, he went out to Australia during his summer, while me, I only went to Shropshire, plus a few days trying to surf in Cornwall, but… shit, I'm well used to having a less exciting time than most of my contemporaries. It always works out that way. Anyhow Jamie – I think of him like that, like he's a friend – decided, once over in Australia to explore the Blue Mountains. And I must say from the pictures they look fantastic, awesome, I'd give a lot to go there. (Well, maybe after all this to-do, I wouldn't!) But obviously all those peaks and ravines and forest and wildlife appealed to him hugely as they would to me…

‘Jamie checked into a youth hostel at Katoomba on July (see how every single detail's stuck in my head, Luke!). He was meant to go on a tour of the Jenolan Caves on July 4, but he didn't turn up, and the folk connected with the National Park hikes were worried. Especially when they found he'd left his mobile phone and personal papers behind in the hostel. A little later a couple came forward who'd definitely seen Jamie on July 3, on a lonely outcrop of rock, about to take a track even further into the wild. So now everyone knew the last date he'd been seen alive, and that it had been in inhospitable country. They searched and searched, and his dad came out from England, the dad he'd never lived with! Bush-parties went out on foot, four hundred volunteers in all, and police helicopters, which took his dad on board, flew over enormous swathes of the National Park. But they didn't find him! He must have perished, they thought.

‘Even his father – name of Richard Cass – came to believe he was dead, and that there'd be no point in any more costly investigations. He got a memorial-stone designed for the boy, and then prepared to fly back to the UK from Sydney. But on the very day of his departure – July 15 – in stumbles Jamie on some Blue Mountains campers, actually only four kilometres from the hostel where he'd been last seen. The campers made him welcome and took him to the police and safety – and to all sorts of official and medical inspec-tions. He'd been missing twelve whole days. Without a compass he'd lost his bearings completely, and had not known which direction to take in such vast, totally unfamiliar territory.

‘And then all the questions started in earnest. Did Jamie really got lost? Or was he pulling some kind of stunt? How could a boy, and a stranger to Australia into the bargain – it was mid-winter there, remember, with tough conditions in the Blue Mountains – possibly survive so long in that wilderness? What did he eat? Where did he sleep? The doctors who examined him all agreed he was suffering from dehydration and exposure, as well, naturally, from fatigue, and none of them has expressed any disbelief. Loads of other folk have, though. His father was furious with his accusers and sort of drove them away from bothering his son in his hospital bed. But before long things got bad between the two of them. Quite nasty, in fact. I hope they've made it up since though…'

‘Money,' says Luke again, and this time it isn't an interrogative nor does he give any kind of smile.

‘Dead right,' says Nat, wondering if staring this man with the vivid blue eyes hard in the face might be a good tactic, showing his own fearlessness. For he has now reached the crucial part, that which could get him into truly serious trouble. ‘Money.
Sixty
Minutes
, a major Australian TV show did a feature on Jamie, for which he was paid £98,000. Agents started making a beeline for him, and even from his convalescent bed Jamie chose the best for himself. A celebrity agency reckoned his story could be worth some £500,000. His dad thought part of any money made should go to the search-and-rescue teams and also to himself, as someone intimately involved. Jamie had a different opinion here.

Perhaps he's changed his mind since.

‘But in the case of me and my dad, it's the father who never thinks realistically and creatively about money, and his inexperienced son who does – on his behalf. Always preferring to stock art-kites instead of the power-jobs, the sporting kind, where the money is! Often turning down – or as good as – or as bad as – guys with proper disposable money because he prefers to have another sort of customer, who share his Green Wave ideas. Who doesn't check the invoices with thorough regularity, or service his website, keeping it always up-to-date and interesting the way a business man these days should.'

His pulse has accelerated, and he can feel himself sweating anew. Luke Fleming sees this, and with an irrepressible rush of fellow-feeling with the boy, says: ‘I get the picture! Got it a while ago! But let me say before you go on – I've done a little research of my own, and my own dad runs a shop too, as it happens, selling plants and flowers. Pete may be guilty of all the deficien-cies you say, and this is no fun time for any of us. But I doubt there's need for quite all your worries about High Flyers. He's done okay up to now, hasn't he? Held his head way above water, and all that… But I can see how and why you wanted to help him; you've got a different approach to what a business should do from his… You wanted to be the Jamie Neale who actually gave the money to your dad. Who'd insist on larger sums than the media first offered, but for his sake, not out of any greed of your own. And you'd launch High Flyers into its greatest days of security and prosperity yet.'