Authors: Val McDermid
Gabriel Abbott’s place was on the bar stool nearest the corner. Hazeldean’s was one of the fixed points in his universe, a reliable anchor when he felt he was navigating
turbulent waters. To an outsider, it might seem that there was little in Gabriel’s existence to justify that sense of instability. After all, he didn’t have a job to worry about. He had a comfortable home, the rent taken care of without any effort on his part. He’d had some gnawing concerns about recent government policies that might affect his benefits, but he really didn’t think anyone could argue that he was well enough to be in work.
The reasons that made him unemployable were the same ones that filled him with a sense of turmoil. However hard he tried to appear calm and normal, he knew people thought him eccentric and strange. He couldn’t help his enthusiasms getting the better of him and making him garrulous and excitable. It was when he didn’t keep his mind busy with his interests that the trouble started for Gabriel. That was when the paranoia started to creep in, eating away at his peace of mind, robbing him of sleep, pushing him back to that terrible pitch of anxiety where he thought his head would explode with its overload of conspiracies and fear. He felt like a piece of paper torn up and scattered to the four winds.
It always ended the same way. He’d surrender himself to the medical profession again. A hospital bed. Drugs. Talking therapies of one sort or another. And they’d help him gather himself together again. He’d re-emerge into the world, fragile but recognisably himself. Till the next time.
He knew he didn’t look threatening. His untidy mop of black hair and his wardrobe of charity shop tweed jackets, shirts and trousers – never jeans – gave him the slightly dishevelled air that people imagined absent-minded academics to affect. Often, when he was sitting looking out over Loch Leven or walking from his cottage into town along the waterside path, strangers would strike up a conversation. And within minutes, his tongue would run away with itself and he’d be off on one of the obsessions that had filled his head
for years, obsessions that had helped him to build an extraordinary network of contacts in a dozen countries. He could see the appalled expressions on the faces of those unsuspecting strangers as they tried to figure out how to escape a lecture on the resistance movements of Myanmar or the internal politics of North Korea.
But in Hazeldean’s, they were used to him. He went there most evenings, walking the couple of miles along the lochside path in all weathers. He’d arrive around nine and have two pints of whatever was the guest beer of the week. He’d exchange a few words about the weather with Jock the barman or Lyn the barmaid. If Gregor Mutch was in, they’d talk politics. If Dougie Malone was there, he’d join in. They both indulged his fascination with the history and geopolitics of South East Asia but they knew him sufficiently well to say when enough was enough and, although it was hard for Gabriel to switch off, he mostly managed it.
That Sunday night, though, Gabriel was troubled. Gregor was in, his bulk perched on the neighbouring bar stool like a turnip on a toothpick, and Gabriel started even before his first pint was put in front of him.
‘I’m worried,’ he said. ‘Very worried.’ Jock set his drink in front of him and he took a long swallow.
‘How’s that?’ Gregor asked warily.
‘You remember me telling you about Saw Chit? My friend in Myanmar? The one who’s been trying to document corruption in the political movements there?’
Gregor grunted noncommittally. Gabriel wasn’t put off. If Gregor wanted him to shut up, he’d tell him. ‘Well, I had an email from him last week, saying he’d uncovered some very important material relating to some very powerful figures who have made a big deal about being incorruptible. Apparently, Saw Chit has proof that they’ve been dealing in black market rubies—’
‘Black
market rubies?’ Now he had Gregor’s attention. ‘What do you mean, black market rubies?’
‘Most of the big-name jewellery companies like Tiffany and Cartier and Bulgari won’t use rubies from Myanmar because of the absolutely deplorable conditions in the mines. It’s virtual slavery, and they’ve never heard of health and safety. But nevertheless there’s a huge market for high-quality gems. So there are always black marketeers who provide rubies with a false provenance. The whole supply chain is breaking the law, and the people at the very top turning a blind eye are the very ones who shout loudest about defeating the smugglers.’
‘And your pal is going to name and shame them?’
‘So he said in this email. But he’s afraid, obviously. And with good reason. He doesn’t know who to trust, who might betray him for their own advantage. You know how it is. So he’s made a copy of his evidence and posted it to me because he can trust me, he says. I thought he was overreacting, I’ll be honest. And then tonight, just before I came out, I had an email from his brother.’
‘Don’t tell me, let me guess,’ Gregor said. ‘Your pal’s been killed?’
Gabriel frowned. ‘No, not that. Actually, probably worse than that. No, he’s disappeared. His house has been trashed and he’s missing. Nobody saw anything or heard anything, which is frankly incredible. But if I lived there, I’d make a point of selective deafness and blindness.’ Gabriel had never been further east than a holiday in Crete, but his imagination was more than adequate to the task of picturing life in the countries he’d made his life’s study.
‘So why’s his brother got in touch with you?’
‘He was hoping Saw Chit had managed to escape. To get away before whoever smashed up his house got to him. He thought if Saw Chit had made it, he would have contacted me. Because naturally he’d want someone outside the
country to know what had happened. I probably need to speak to a journalist. There’s someone at the
Guardian
I’ve talked to before. Or maybe our MP? Or should I wait for the mail? What do you think?’
Gregor drained his pint. ‘I think you’ve maybe been reading too many of those John le Carré novels, Gabe. Do you not think somebody might be jerking your chain?’
Genuinely puzzled by what seemed to him to be a bizarre conjecture, Gabriel shook his head. ‘Why would anyone do that? Besides, I’ve been friends with Saw Chit for years.’
‘But you’ve never met him.’
Gabriel grabbed a handful of his hair. ‘You don’t have to meet someone to know them.’ He took a breath and gathered himself, laying his hands flat on the bar. ‘Why would he make up something like this?’
‘I don’t know. But if what you say is true, why is he sending the stuff to a guy on the dole in a wee Scottish town instead of 10 Downing Street?’
Gabriel smiled. ‘Because he doesn’t know the Prime Minister. He knows
me
.’
Gregor clapped him on the back. ‘Right enough, Gabe. Better wait till you get the post, though. So tell me, did you see Donald Trump’s latest?’
And that, Gabriel knew, was the kind way of shifting him off his personal soapbox. He bit back all the things he wanted to tell Gregor about illegal ruby smuggling and tried to concentrate on the three-ring circus that was American politics. He’d made the right noises in the right places, he thought, finishing his second pint and rising to leave.
Outside, the air was cool and the sky was clear. It was a fine night for a walk. Not that the weather made much difference to him. He needed the fixed mark of Hazeldean’s and the only way for him to get there and back was on foot. He’d never driven and he couldn’t afford taxis. Gabriel stood in the
Kirkgate, gazing up at the stars, trying to quiet the cacophony in his head. Saw Chit and Myanmar was bad enough, never mind the other thing. That business that had come at him out of nowhere and set everything in his world spinning like the plates in a circus show. All he thought he knew had been called into question. If the answers he found were the wrong ones, it could go very badly for him, and that was a terrifying thought.
He remembered once seeing a machine that tumbled dull rocks till they became polished gemstones. The inside of his head felt like that tonight. Lots of jumbled thoughts banging into each other, confused and indistinguishable one from the other. He knew from past experience that the walk wouldn’t turn those thoughts into sense. But perhaps sleep might help. Sometimes it did.
As long as his thoughts didn’t spiral out of control between here and home.
S
he
walked. Whenever sleep slipped from her grasp, she walked. It occurred to her that her life had come to resemble the first draft of an advertising script for Guinness or Stella Artois. ‘She walks. That’s what she does.’ Except that there was no brightly lit pub full of cheery faces waiting to greet her at the end of her wanderings.
Often at the end of the day, she knew there was no point in stripping to the skin and sliding between cool sheets. She would only lie stiff as a corpse, thoughts of murder running in her head, frantic hamsters on a wheel.
Sometimes, if she was tired enough, sleep would creep up on her and pin her to the bed like a wrestler faster and stronger than she was. But it never lasted long. As soon as exhaustion relaxed its hold on her, she’d surface again, eyes gritty and swollen, mouth dry and tasting of death.
And so she would walk. Along the breakwater, tall apartment blocks to her left, the choppy waters of the Firth of Forth on her right, the night breeze filling her nostrils with salt and seaweed. Then she’d turn inland, past the twenty-four-hour Asda and across the main drag into the old village
of Newhaven. She’d pick random routes through the huddled streets of fishermen’s cottages, then work her way inland and upwards, always trying to choose streets and alleys and quiet back lanes that she’d never entered before.
That was part of the point. She had chosen to move to Edinburgh precisely because it was unfamiliar. She’d grown up a mere forty-minute train journey away, but the capital had always been exotic. The big city. The place for a special day out. She’d only been familiar with the main streets of the centre until work had started to bring her here from time to time, opening up small windows on disconnected corners. But still, Edinburgh was not a place laden with memories to ambush her in the way that her home town was. Deciding to live here had felt like a project. Learning the city one street at a time might take her mind off the grief and the pain.
So far, she couldn’t claim it had worked. She was slowly beginning to understand that there were some feelings nothing could assuage. Nothing except, possibly, the passage of time. Whether that would work, she couldn’t tell. It was too soon.
And so she walked. She wasn’t the only person out and about in the small hours of an Edinburgh night but most of them were cocooned in cars or night buses. She’d developed a surprising fondness for the night buses. Often she was a long way from home when tiredness finally claimed her. But she’d discovered the impressive bus app for the city. However obscure her location, it plotted a route home for her and, in spite of her initial apprehension, she’d found a rich seam of humanity huddled on the buses. Yes, there were the obnoxious jakies reeking of cheap booze, the zoned-out junkies with blank eyes, but they were outnumbered by others seeking a little late-night camaraderie on their journey. The homeless looking for a bit of light and warmth. The cleaners
finishing late or starting early. The shift workers, sleepy-eyed on minimum wage or less. Different accents and tongues that made her feel as if she’d travelled a lot further from the Western Harbour Breakwater than she actually had.
That night, she was plotting a zigzag course along the edge of Leith when she came across the start of the Restalrig Railway Path. She’d encountered the far end of it once before, when she’d found herself down by the shore in Portobello. The disused railway line had been tarmacked over and turned into an off-road route for cyclists and walkers to cut across the city. Street lamps stretched into the distance, giving a sense of safety to what would otherwise have been a dark and uninviting cutting sliced through some of the poorer areas of the city. She decided to give it a try. Worst-case scenario was that she’d end up in the middle of the night in Porty, reliant on the night buses once again.
She set off, thinking about the hidden ways that snaked through the city. Edinburgh had more than its fair share, from those streets in the Old Town that had simply been buried beneath new rows of houses, to the closes and stairways and ginnels that made a honeycomb of the Old Town. Here, there was no clue to what the path had once been except steep banks of untended undergrowth and the occasional straggly tree trying to make something of itself in unpromising circumstances. Every now and then, a heavy iron bridge crossed the path, carrying a road metres above her head. The stone walls supporting the bridges were covered in graffiti tags, their bright colours muted in the low-level lighting. Not exactly art, Karen thought, but better than nothing.
She rounded a curve and was surprised by the glow of some kind of fire underneath the next bridge. She slowed, taking in what lay ahead of her. A knot of men huddled round low tongues of flame. Overcoats and beanie hats, heavy jackets
and caps with earflaps, shoulders hunched against the night. As she drew nearer, she realised the centre of their attention was what looked like a garden incinerator fuelled by scrap wood. And what she’d taken for beanies were actually kufi prayer hats.
It didn’t occur to her to be nervous of half a dozen men of Middle Eastern appearance gathered round a makeshift fire in the middle of the night. Not in the way she would have been if it had been a bunch of drunks or teens off their heads on glue or drugs. She wasn’t heedless of risk, but she had a good estimation of the air of confidence and competence she exuded. Besides, she reckoned she was pretty good at telling the difference between ‘unusual’ and ‘threatening’. She still held fast to that conviction, in spite of the unlikely event that had robbed her life of its meaning.
As she approached, one of the men spotted her and nudged his neighbour. The word went round the group and the low mutter of conversation ceased. By the time she’d broached the loose circle around the flames, they’d fallen silent, a ring of expressionless faces and blank brown eyes fixed on her. She held her hands out to warm them – who could begrudge her that in the chill of night? – and gave them a nod of acknowledgement.