Head-Hunting

2

Head-Hunting

    Max had about a month’s grace after that warning phone call from Ran, and then Hill Tarlington contacted him. YDI were the people he worked for, and up until today Max had been under the impression that they specialised in a line of luxury country hotels that didn’t know what the expression “eco-friendly” was. Let alone the expression “environment.” Moyra, in fact, had spent an extravagant week not long since at the Cottesford Manor Park Royal, where YDI had ripped out a golf course and turned it into a lake, thus being enabled to offer the clients lovely punt rides amidst the irises and bulrushes in the intervals of wallowing in the hydrotherapy, saunas, scented mud treatments, lavender wraps, et al. in the bathhouse that was the dump’s huge selling-point. Idiots with deep wallets came from all over Europe—not to mention the ones that came all the way from America, Japan or China—expressly to wallow in it. But apparently the firm was now expanding into ecolodges. Extremely up-market ones. Starting with a couple in Australia and New Zealand.

    Max passed his hand through his curls. “Look, Tarlington, I had a suspicion this was in the pipeline, and as it was initially one of my mother’s daft ideas, possibly not unconnected with her desire to see her grandchildren at my knee, I’d better point out right now that I’m not interested!”

    Tarlington had struck him as quite a decent chap, not the sort to be impressed by lavender wraps, mud baths or eco-anything. He wasn’t on YDI’s personnel side: in fact he was one of their senior project managers, so why the Hell he’d been deputed to head-hunt him, it was possibly better not to ask. Not entirely to his surprise the fellow now returned drily: “I won’t ask how designing ecolodges for us will spontaneously generate grandchildren at the knee—besides, they’re all like that! But I will say that I was under the impression that it was initially one of my boss’s daft ideas. –Sir Maurice Bishop,” he explained.

    “Mummy’s met him,” replied Max grimly. “And she’s known your Uncle Hubert for years.”

    “Uh-huh. Well, I’ve been deputed to tell you that YDI will be very happy to offer you a free trip to Australia to inspect the progress of our Queensland ecolodge. Lovely holiday in the sun? Sun, sand, banana plantations, bikinis?” he offered, raising his eyebrows at him.

    “I had a lovely holiday in the sun of the West Indies not two months since!” replied Max with considerable feeling.

    “Yeah. The weather’s foul, though,” returned Tarlington without emphasis.

    “I’m very busy,” replied Max, frowning.

    To this Hill Tarlington replied on a cautious note: “The ecolodge in Queensland is pretty silly, and the conditions are nothing like those in New Zealand, which seems to be the next one Maurice wants to see up and running, but would it hurt to look?”

    “New Zealand’s the next one?”

    “Uh-huh,” he agreed neutrally.

    “Then this is bloody Moyra’s bloody daft idea! Look, Tarlington, I’m sorry, but I’ve never had the slightest desire to design ecolodges or, indeed, non-eco holiday houses for the rich and thick, Moyra’s alternative suggestion! She’s got a cousin out there with a family of girls, and she seems to have got it fixed in her head that one of them—make that any one of them, she doesn’t seem to care which—would be just right for yours truly.”

    “Right: the knee. Well, don’t reject the idea out of hand on the strength of it, will you? YDI’s not a bad firm to work for, the Japanese parent company pretty much lets us do our own thing, and there are opportunities for advancement. And plenty of flexibility, or I wouldn’t be sitting here with you today,” he ended on a wry note.

    “Oh?” replied Max cautiously, hoping the chap hadn’t spotted that he’d been wondering about that.

    He shrugged a little, and gave him his card, noting: “I admit I wasn’t able to stop them printing all that crap on that, but the ‘Executive Project Manager, Development,’ bit is me.”

    Max raised his eyebrows. He’d been under the impression the fellow’s background was in paint guns on the Yorkshire moors. The letters “QGM” and, good grief, “MC” on his card would seem to indicate otherwise. Though admittedly they were sitting in the Army and Navy as they spoke. After a moment he said: “So you’ve done an M.B.A.—and this’d be a project management diploma, I presume?”

    “Yes. Nothing whatsoever to do with head-hunting executive personnel, and in fact most of my job consists of getting out on the sites, but Maurice informed me that you and I spoke the same language.” He eyed him drily. “And he did suggest this as the venue—yes.”

    “Is that so? Then perhaps you won’t mind my mentioning that my Uncle Hugh informed me that Maurice Bishop is a damned parvenu. I do admit Hugh lives in the nineteenth century—the early nineteenth century, I’ve heard him say the same thing of H.R.H.—” He stopped: Tarlington had collapsed in splutters.

    “Of course: dashed Hanoverians!” he gasped. “How is General Throgmorton?” he added weakly, mopping his eyes.

    Uncle Hugh’s retirement was nothing that could be called peaceful. “Horribly in the pink and throwing his energies—in the intervals of looking for better setter stock to revitalize WW-Red Kennels and driving my Aunt Penny, who’s nominally in charge of it, to distraction—throwing his energies into The Wenderholme Stud. Not the breeding side, thank God: the manager’s a very good chap and fortunately firm-minded enough to stand up to even Uncle Hugh; but promotion and so forth. Jaunts with visiting Arabs, trips to inspect Kentucky blue grass, that sort of stuff.”

    Tarlington just nodded, a fair indicator he had heard of the Throgmorton family and its varied interests. Max was a direct descendant of a long line of Throgmortons who owned Wenderholme, a delightful country house designed by Mr Adam. Wenderholme was one of the show-places of England, house and grounds open to the public every weekend and public holiday except Christmas and at other times by appointment. Or if you were interested in red setters and contacted WW-Red Kennels, any time you cared to drive up to the old stables in daylight hours. Or if you wanted organic vegetables in reasonably large but not huge quantities, any time you cared to drive up to the back door in daylight hours and speak to a representative of WWOrganics, whether you were a wholesaler, a retailer or just a private person. Ditto catering: Wenderholme Catering offered delightful home-catered gourmet meals, with special rates for banquets and weddings. And, of course, for those in another income bracket entirely, The Wenderholme Stud had been breeding Derby winners since 1801, and operating as a private limited company since 1935. Not all of the persons involved in these various enterprises were Throgmortons or of Throgmorton descent, but sufficient, and there was certainly Throgmorton money in all of them. Max himself was the son of a younger brother who had nothing to do with the family enterprises, but many members of the family were involved, one way or another, in one or more of them.

    “Never been interested in going into one of the family businesses, yourself?” Tarlington then asked him with a smile.

    “No, nor the forces: I’ve always wanted to design buildings.” His eyes twinkled. “Uncle Hugh gave me a set of mediaeval soldiers when I was about eight, complete with a detailed layout for Agincourt, and was terribly peeved when I built a mediaeval castle and merely used ’em to man the walls!”

    “Serve him right! Well, the offer’s open, Max. I admit Maurice was expecting you to leap at it, or at least giving a very convincing facsimile of doing so, but up his.” He rubbed his jaw. “Uh—most of our architectural staff handle the conversion projects for YDI’s Park Royal line of country hotels, but the ecolodge job, I have to admit, is the plum job in that department. It’s not serious stuff along the lines of what you’ve been doing, but—well, my feeling is that it’d be fun.” He shrugged a little. “Depends what you want, of course. Fun designs, good deal of globe-trotting, terrific lot of variation, and, if I’ve got half a handle on the ecolodge bit, which I may well not have, quite a challenge in terms of the materials and techniques one’s allowed to use.”

    “Allowed to?” echoed Max slowly.

    “Mm. Oh, not us, no! YDI wouldn’t know the despoliation of the environment unless it stood up and bit them—or alternatively, unless the head of our legal division stood up and shouted at Maurice, a contingency which has once or twice occurred!” he admitted with a grin. “No, Maurice has latched onto a website which awards, er, the eco-equivalent of hotel stars, depending on one’s use of eco-friendly materials and respect for the environment, kind of thing.”

    “I’ve heard of it. Green leaves?”

    He agreed, once again sounding distinctly neutral, that it was green leaves, all right. So if he could work for YDI, not to mention for Sir Maurice Bishop, without being taken in by it all, it didn’t sound too bad, did it? And possibly there would be prospects for promotion, though this would presumably only be promotion in the direction of designing hotels—or conversions. The Cottesford Manor Park Royal was one of those: Moyra’s claim was that the hotel had kept most of the house’s original furniture and that she had slept in a genuine Regency bed. With a genuine 21st-century inner-sprung mattress on it—yeah. The idea of doing conversions didn’t appeal at all, but… At the moment Max wasn’t a partner in his firm, and there were several disadvantages in working for them, which he had now had more than time enough to discover, but the work itself was interesting—much more so than designing potty ecolodges could possibly be, of course! No, the whole idea was daft.

    “I can’t say I found out about the green leaves rubbish for myself,” he said lightly. “One of Mummy’s cousin’s kids spotted what she was up to out in New Zealand and looked up the ecolodge rubbish on the Internet.”

    “I see. Well, as I say, the Queensland project is going ahead. We’re managing it from this end at the moment. When they break ground there’ll be a chap on-site as well, but I’ll be out there every so often just to keep an eye on things. Any time you fancy a trip, just let me know. Well—uh—Easter?”

    “Easter’s out, I’m afraid; it coincides with my Uncle David’s seventy-fifth birthday, this year. The whole family’s expected at Wenderholme.”

    “Of course,” Tarlington agreed nicely. “Um—oh: dunno if this is a consideration, but Maurice told me to tell you that if you prefer it, your base could be our South Pacific office in Auckland.”

    Max stood up. “Oh? I’m reliably informed that along with a mild climate the place features an art gallery, a public library, one small professional theatre company, an occasional touring ballet company if they’re lucky, and very little classical music. Oh, yes: and a University Drama Club which offers an annual outdoor Shakespeare production.”

    “They’re lucky to have the weather for it!” he replied, getting up and holding out his hand. “Don’t hold it against me, will you?”

    “I’ll try not to,” said Max with a wry smile, shaking. “I will ring you if I fancy a trip to the South Seas.”

    “Do that,” he agreed nicely.

    Primrose Vandercamp had been warned—and some of the warnings had been genuinely well-intentioned, too—but nevertheless she had gone ahead and seduced Max Throgmorton away from Angela Coulton-Whassett. Though seducing Max, as their entire circle was aware, wasn’t the problem: hanging onto him for more than the one-night stand was.

    Primmy, however, was even prettier than Angela, and also blonde, but in a softer, rather more buttery—indeed, primrose—style, and had rather better boobs, at least in the estimation of most of the male section of their circle, who considered Angela’s a mere pass in the small and pointy class, but had voted Primmy’s a seven out of ten in the fuller but not pear-shaped stakes. If you discounted Jimmy Whittaker’s vote, that was: he only liked ’em huge, pear-shaped and squashy.

    Primmy was also, at least in her own opinion, quite as well born as Angela, and thus eminently suitable for one of the Throgmortons of Wenderholme. Actually Max’s Uncle Hugh Throgmorton would probably have stigmatised the Vandercamps as parvenus: the first English Vandercamp had been a wealthy Dutch merchant who had come to England in the Prince of Orange’s train for the Victory celebrations after Waterloo and married a well-born but impoverished English lady. Over the following two centuries Vandercamps had gone to the right schools and married into the right families, so most people in her circles would certainly have conceded that Primmy was suitable for Max. Unfortunately for her, she was sublimely unaware that this sort of thing no longer weighed with him—though it once had, back in his early twenties, a period in his life on which he could not now look back without cringing. Even though he did recognise that he’d been too closely under the thumbs of, to name only two, Grandfather and Uncle Hugh.

    Nor had it dawned on Primmy that Max didn’t want a permanent relationship with a blonde nit with no thoughts in her head beyond clothes, make-up, hairdoes, diets, expensive cars and expensive holidays wherever the fashionable were taking their holidays this year. And certainly not with one who didn’t know a thing about pictures, china or silver and who believed that Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John wrote music.

    The fashionable were certainly not taking their holidays this year—or any year—in remote, middle-class, anglicised New Zealand, so Primmy screamed: “What?” as Max suggested it.

    “It’d be different, old man, but would it be supportable?” drawled Jimmy Whittaker.

    “Great skiing.” Max passed him his laptop.

    “In July?” he croaked.

    “It’s the Antipodes, you moron!”

    “Uh—no, old man, I mean, Violet and I went to Saint Moritz at Christmas.”

    “Okay, don’t come,” replied Max blandly.

    “Uh—well, the skiing does look great… The place’ll be full of locals, won’t it?” he said glumly. “And Australians.”

    “Ugh!” cried Primmy with a loud giggle.

    Violet Drake, she of the large, squashy, pear-shaped ones, had been foraging in Max’s kitchen. She came back in with a laden tray, though noting: “There’s nothing to eat in that fridge of yours,” and sat down beside Jimmy on one of the excruciatingly plain white wool sofas that adorned Max’s flat. Jimmy immediately put his arm round her and his hand on one of them.

    “What?” she asked, looking at the laptop.

    Jimmy took a gherkin with his free hand and pointed at the picture of the screen with it. “Skiing in New Zealand. Max fancies spending the summer hols out there: it’ll be their winter, you see,” he explained kindly.

    To everyone’s astonishment Violet replied: “Oh, yes, I’ve heard of that. Queen-something. Willi Duff-Ross has been there. Frightfully flashy, she said it was: rather like the nastiest sort of American hotel. Ghastly helicopter rides over a glacier or something: the frightful man deliberately swooped, poor Willi spewed her heart out.”

    “Uh—nope,” said Jimmy foggily, clicking through the pages Max had saved. “Ruh—Roo— R-something. The hotel seems to be called Chateau Something—um, no, just Chateau, must be a misprint. No Queen anything. –Can this thing connect to the Internet, Max?”

    “No,” said Max through a gherkin and a piece of cheese. He swallowed. “This is my Double Gloucester that you’re wasting on these bloody gherkins,” he said to Violet.

    “There wasn’t anything else,” she replied simply.

    “Have a cracker with it, it’ll be a counterirritant if nothing else,” said Jimmy hospitably. “How did you get these pics, then?”

    “What? For God’s sake! You need to plug the modem in!”

    “All right, do it,” said Jimmy, looking dubiously at an anchovy and deciding against it. He took a crisp and a black olive. “Jesus!” he gasped, swallowing convulsively.

    “Greek, not Spanish,” said Max with considerable satisfaction.

    “Get the fucking modem cord!” he shouted.

    Max shrugged, but did so. After an excursion into the byways of world geography it was eventually discovered that there was skiing—and certainly at least one flashy American-style hotel—at a place called Queenstown in New Zealand but that that was at the other end of the country from the place Max wanted to go.

    After Jimmy had done a lot of squinting and measuring with the thumb and forefinger an inch apart Max was driven to shout: “There IS snow! Why else would they be advertising it on the Internet?”

    “Right, well, next question,” said Jimmy, grinning, and allowing Violet to fill his empty whisky tumbler with some of Max’s quite decent Riesling, “—ta muchly, darling—next question, can we get bookings at this Chateau Something?”

    “The Chateau,” said Max dubiously.

    “Balls, darling!” cried Primmy vividly. “It’s always le Château de something, like those lovely ones Daddy and Mummy and I saw in France that time!”

    “Eat a cracker, it’ll sop up that booze and gherkin,” advised Jimmy heavily. “—Well?”

    “Er, well, probably not,” Max admitted, “but there are some very pleasant-sounding ski lodges we might get into, Jimmy.”

    “Central heating?” replied Jimmy instantly.

    “Er—well, I haven’t checked. There was one that mentioned pot-bellied stoves.”

    “No,” he said flatly.

    “Don’t be so bloody sybaritic!”

    “I’m not being sybaritic; I had a dose of pneumonia at the age of sixteen, as you may not recall, and I’m not up for another. Central heating or nothing.”

    “It does sound very cold,” said Violet, peering at the laptop and shivering.

    “It bloody well is very cold!” Jimmy realized in annoyance. “Oy, Scrooge! Turn your damned central heating up!”

    Sighing, Max got up and adjusted the thermostat on his central heating. “Tell me if you get too warm,” he said, sitting down heavily. “Pass me that wine, thanks, Violet.”

    “There isn’t much left,” she admitted, passing him the bottle.

    Nor there was. With a bitter glare at Jimmy’s bent and oblivious head, Max poured the dregs into his glass. “Look, we’ve found it: give up,” he said with a sigh as Jimmy tapped busily on the laptop.

    “Not that….” he murmured.

    “Jimmy, darling, we don’t want to go to Canada!” said Primmy with a giggle. “It’s full of frightful Canadians!”

    “Not that…” he said vaguely.

    Violet peered at the screen. “Isn’t that a bit off, Jimmy? That might be personal.”

    “What might be personal?” demanded Max dangerously.

    “He’s reading your email.”

    “WHAT?” he shouted.

    “I’m not, you cretin! Well, only enough to see if it really is a New Zealand address. There!” he said, sitting back beaming with his arms crossed. “Done!”

    “WHAT have you done?” shouted Max, bright red.

    “Calm down, old boy,” replied Jimmy in mild surprise. “Just sent an email to this Ran chappie asking him to suss the ski lodges—”

    “She’s NOT a chappie!” he shouted.

    Primmy came to. “What?”

    “Her mother’s Mummy’s cousin, I’ve never even met— Look, it’s none of your business!”

    “If you’ve never met her then why exchange emails?” asked Jimmy, genuinely puzzled.

    “Yes, why?” agreed Violet.

    “BECAUSE!” shouted the driven Max. “I very occasionally send her a note and she very occasionally replies and I DON’T ask her to run cretinous errands for me!” He got up, snatched the laptop off Jimmy and wrenched the modem cord out of it.

    “There weren’t any other addresses with ‘nz’ in them,” he explained, pronouncing it “nizz.”

    “Shut up.”

    His friends looked at him in a baffled way and Violet finally said: “I don’t see why you’re so peeved, Max. I mean, it was bit off, I suppose, but it was quite an innocent enquiry.”

    “I thought she was a chap,” explained Jimmy.

    “Shut up,” he warned.

    “Well—uh—does she live near this Mount Roo place?”

    “NO! She lives in Auckland, and do not measure it with your fingers, please!”

    “I can’t, you’ve got the laptop with the map.”

    Glaring, Max tossed the laptop at him. Jimmy only just managed to catch it before it hit Violet on the head, but he didn’t point this out, he just looked up the map.

    “Oh. Half the country away. No, hang on, there are two islands, aren’t there? Are they both this si— Oh, yes. Well, quarter of the country away. –I say, have they got an M1?”

    “No.”

    “Are you sure, Max?” asked Primmy, coming to peer at the map.

    “Yes. Mummy says the roads are frightful.”

    “The M1 is frightful, darling,” said Primmy, faint but pursuing.

    “Not in that way,” he said with a sigh. “Narrow, winding. Generally bad surfaces, though the main highway, the one that takes the place of an M1, is reasonable, if surfaced in something vile that makes the journey unpleasantly noisy. Reasonable apart from the bits that are being dug up for repairs, that is. Continuously, one gathers.”

    “God,” said Jimmy. “Er—well, how long is it since your ma was out there, Max?”

    Max stared at him. “Approximately three months, to those that can count!”

    “Oh! Is that where she— Right. Bad roads: right. Should one not hire a car, then?”

    “I don’t know; the cousins drove her everywhere,” he said with a sigh.

    “Uh-huh.” Jimmy looked at the map but didn’t say anything.

    “The ski fields sound marvellous and relatively unspoiled, and there is absolutely no risk of meeting any of the frightful crowd we saw in Austria Christmas before last,” said Max heavily. “And the airfares are quite reasonable, and will be more than compensated for by not having to pay the prices we did for that frightful dump we stayed at in Austria!”

    “Yes. Well, I’m up for it, if we can find somewhere with central heating!” said Jimmy cheerfully.

    “Me, too, darling!” agreed Primmy, coming to perch on the arm of Max’s chair. “It’ll be something new for the summer! I’m awfully sick of Spain!”

    “Yes, me, too, and I hate that Greek food they force on one in Corfu. I’ll buy some more thermal underwear,” decided Violet. “I suppose they will have nursery slopes, will they?”

    “Absolutely bound to! And one doesn’t have to ski, one can just slide down the mountain on one’s tin tray!” Jimmy reminded her, laughing, and squeezing the one his hand had got onto again.

    “Ooh, like that weekend in Wales!” she agreed. “Wasn’t that fun?”

    “Yes; not up-market at all,” he said, eyeing Max out of the corner of his eye.

    “No. Very restful, darling,” decided Violet.

    “Restful. Absolutely,” agreed Jimmy, eyeing Max out of the corner of his eye.

    So that was more or less that. “Pig” Bon-Dutton and his latest girlfriend subsequently voted to tack themselves onto the party, but he was all right and the girlfriend was slightly more supportable than the last two or three had been, at least according to Jimmy. And it was two more to share the cost of the ski lodge. The place they eventually got bookings at advertised itself as having central heating, it was relatively near the ski fields, and it was available exclusively to their party for a week. Possibly because no-one else had been up for paying its extortionate rates: well, extortionate compared to the rates of the other ski lodges in the area, long since booked out, but not even dear compared to that dump in Austria. And an all-weather vehicle and two motor-skis were supposed to go along with it.

    Once they’d made the booking they got an email with a giant attachment of a full-colour brochure inviting them to join the consortium that owned it—time-share style—but on the whole this wasn’t a Bad Sign, at least according to Jimmy’s friend Malcolm who did something high-powered with venture capital at the merchant bank where Jimmy was employed in a humble capacity. So that was settled.

    Or, as Primmy put it: “Goody-doody! What an a’venture, darlings!”

    As Jimmy noted, she might have managed to grab Max but he’d give them ten to one in fivers she’d never manage to hang onto him. Six month, tops? In fact it wouldn’t be surprising if he’d already dumped her by the time they were due to take off for this Mount Roo place. Which if you worked it out, would be about six months.

    He didn’t speculate in front of the others as to exactly why Max seemed so keen on bloody New Zealand, but he did wonder about it, off and on. And he did say to the chap: “What is the urgent attraction with this New Zealand Mount Roo place?”

    To which Max replied, looking down the straight Throgmorton nose that, according to the distaff side, was one of his greatest assets: “Nothing urgent about it. Or do you call planning one’s hols five or six months in advance urgent?”

    “Have it your own way. It wouldn’t be anything at all to do with this Ran that’s not a chappie, would it?”

    “No!” he snapped.

    Hm. Jimmy eyed him drily but didn’t pursue that one. “Everything okay at work, old man?”

    “Yes. Why wouldn’t it be?” replied Max impatiently, thrusting back the thick, dark brown Throgmorton curls that, according to the distaff side, were another asset. Even in these days of shaven heads or artful bristles, yes. Jimmy himself was middle height, middling to nondescript sort of looks, with hair in the light brown to mid-fawn range. Thinnish, but he wasn’t tempted to shave it, thanks all the same. Time enough to go bald when he was Dad’s age. Pale bluish-greyish eyes—smallish and nondescript. Max’s were large, dark brown and striking, and, in short, the fellow looked like some telly actor that had been in that damned stupid modern version of Pride and Prejudice that had been so unlike the book he remembered from his somewhat ill-spent university days that Jimmy had been driven to re-read it.

    Everything might not be okay at work because Max’s two bosses, who owned the firm, were a pair of humourless pricks with their eyes firmly fixed on the main chance. Got every last ounce of their pound of flesh out of their luckless staff and gave them as little credit as possible for it. So Jimmy replied tranquilly: “Only that your bosses sound like a pair of selfish pricks.”

    Max was seen to gnaw on the lip that Jimmy’s little sister Fenella declared had a “delirious”, unquote, shadow under it. –Looked just like any lip. Bit bowed, actually: namby-pamby. Well, would have been namby-pamby on a fellow that wasn’t six-foot-two with Max’s shoulders.

    “Well, yes, they are,” he admitted.

    “Uh-huh. Given you another design job they’re not gonna let you take credit for, have they?”

    “No,” he replied shortly.

    Jimmy eyed him drily but refrained from repeating the point he’d already put to him more than once: if he really wanted to get his name known in his field, as opposed to thanklessly slaving for someone else’s firm, he’d have to make up his mind to it and start up his own architectural practice. Possibly giving up one or two of the perks he’d enjoyed for most of his adult life in the process: the four-by-four vehicle in addition to the Porsche, the hugely expensive, ultra-tasteful flat with the view of the river that he’d blown most of what his grandfather had left him on, the hampers from Fortnum’s, the vintage champagne, Ascot every year, the holidays abroad, and tra-la-la. Not that it wasn’t a lifestyle to which he, Jimmy, didn’t also aspire, in his humbler way—but he didn’t kid himself he had the talent to make a go of a profession like architecture. But bloody Max did.

    The trouble with bloody Max was, Jimmy concluded, retreating from this encounter with his usual mixture of annoyance at being unable to withstand the fellow’s undoubted charm and irritation at his having all those natural assets that he wasn’t doing anything with—and he didn’t mean the bloody looks in this instance—the trouble with bloody Max was that he’d always had it too easy, all his life. Handed to him on a platter and then some. No incentive to change his ways—you could put it like that, too.

Next chapter:

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