Borrowed Light
| Borrowed Light | |
| Faraday & Winter [11] | |
| Hurley, Graham | |
| Hachette UK (2010) | |
| Tags: | Crime & mystery |
The new Faraday and Winter novel takes DI Faraday to the very edge. A car accident during a holiday in the Middle East lands Faraday in a hospital packed with the maimed from Gaza, where he embarks on a wild scheme to adopt a horribly burned Palestinian girl. Back in England crimelord Bazza McKenzie is watching his empire fall apart under the pressures of the biggest recession in 70 years. Desperate times call for
desperate measures and soon ex-cop Winter is in the thick of it as Bazza runs out of options.
Fiction
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
REAPER
THE DEVIL’S BREATH
THUNDER IN THE BLOOD
SABBATHMAN
THE PERFECT SOLDIER
HEAVEN’S LIGHT
NOCTURNE
PERMISSIBLE LIMITS
THE CHOP
THE GHOSTS OF 2012
Detective Inspector Joe Faraday Investigations
TURNSTONE
THE TAKE
ANGELS PASSING
DEADLIGHT
CUT TO BLACK
BLOOD AND HONEY
ONE UNDER
THE PRICE OF DARKNESS
NO LOVELIER DEATH
BEYOND REACH
Non-Fiction
LUCKY BREAK?
AIRSHOW
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by Orion Books.
This eBook first published in 2010 by Orion Books.
Copyright © Graham Hurley 2010
The moral right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-409-10791-0
This eBook produced by Jouve, France.
Orion Books
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London
WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
To memories of Kibbutz Shamir
1966–1968
But then? No then …
Description of a Struggle
, Franz Kafka
SINAI, EGYPT: MONDAY, 12 JANUARY 2009.
01.17
Faraday was asleep when he went through the windscreen. He heard neither the warning klaxon from the oncoming truck, nor the
shriek of the tyres as Hanif stamped on the brakes, nor the Arabic oath so abruptly smothered by the final collision with
a roadside tree.
As the Peugeot settled in the dust, Gabrielle tried to reach forward from the back. Hanif, like Faraday, hadn’t bothered with
a seat belt. His chest crushed by the steering wheel, he was limp within seconds, expiring with a barely audible sigh which
Gabrielle later chose to interpret as surprise. The blaze of the truck’s headlights. The split-second swerve that avoided
a head-on collision. The gnarled stump of the acacia briefly caught in the headlights. And then darkness again.
Fighting to make sense of what had just happened, Gabrielle was aware of the receding thunder of the truck. She could taste
blood in her mouth. She felt herself beginning to shake. She called Faraday’s name. Then she too lost consciousness.
The lost hours that followed took them to a hospital beside the Mediterranean at El Arish. Faraday’s first clue, his eyes
still closed, his breathing laboured, was the shouts of men running in the corridor outside the ward. For a moment he was
back in the Bargemaster’s House, unable to account for people yelling in Arabic on their way to his bathroom, then he drifted
away again, awaking some time later to see a bearded face above a white jacket bending over him. English this time, lightly
accented.
‘Mr Faraday? You can hear me?’
Faraday nodded. More or less everything hurt. His head was bursting. For some reason he could barely swallow. He tried to
speak, tried to struggle upright. Failed on both counts.
‘You’re in hospital, Mr Faraday. You understand me? Hospital?’
Faraday closed his eyes. Opened them again. Hanif. The driver. He’d borrowed Hanif’s cap. It had been night, dark. He was
tired.
He’d tried to sleep, the cap pulled down over his face. It was a baseball cap. He remembered the taxi bumping along and the
murmur of Gabrielle’s voice as she chatted to Hanif and the smell of the cap, sweet with hair lotion, not unpleasant. So where
was Hanif? And where, in God’s name, was Gabrielle?
‘You’ve been in an accident, Mr Faraday. Your lady too.’
The alarm in Faraday’s face sparked a reassuring smile. He felt a hand cover his.
‘Your lady is OK. Not so bad. Soon you will see her.’
Faraday withdrew his hand. He wanted to touch his own face, reacquaint himself with its familiar features, find out what had
happened. He too wore a beard. So where had it gone?
‘You’re in a special unit, Mr Faraday. You understand?’ The doctor tapped his own skull, pulled a face. ‘We must do some tests,
get you better. Rest now. Be still. Your lady is OK.’
Faraday’s fingers were still exploring the heavy swathe of bandage around his head. Blood had dried and crusted on his temples.
When he tried to answer, when he tried to do anything, he felt a stabbing pain in his chest.
The doctor told him once again to relax. Two of his ribs had been broken. There was a little damage to his shoulder. But on
the whole he’d been very, very lucky.
Faraday was thinking of the baseball cap again. He shut his eyes, trying to visualise what it had looked like, trying to bridge
the gap between the moment he must have drifted off to sleep and this bright place of pain with the splashes of sunshine on
the wall.
‘Should …?’ He tried to shape a sentence, failed completely, but when he opened his eyes again the presence beside the
bed had gone.
Then, from somewhere close by, came the cry of a child, plaintive, lost. He listened to it for a long moment, totally bewildered,
then darkness swamped the sunshine and he drifted away.
Over the next couple of days he began to recover. Gabrielle, as promised, came to his bedside. Already walking, her arm in
a sling, one eye blackened, a swelling around her mouth, she brought him fresh orange juice and crumbled biscuits on a paper
plate. He was in a high-dependency unit on the hospital’s top floor. They’d taken away the tube that helped him breathe and
a second set of X-rays had confirmed that the skull fracture was less severe than they’d feared. His broken ribs were already
on the mend and his shoulder, badly dislocated, had been reset. With luck, she said, he would soon be back on his feet again.
Faraday wanted to know more. Where exactly were they? And what had brought them here?
Gabrielle explained about the car crash, about Hanif losing concentration, about the truck that had so nearly wiped them out.
Hanif was dead, she said. His chest crushed against the steering wheel.
Faraday stared at her. They’d been with Hanif for two days. He’d driven them to birding sites high in the mountains. With
his quick intelligence, his grin and his wealth of local knowledge, he’d become a kind of friend.
‘Dead?’ he said blankly.
Gabrielle nodded. There’d be a session with the local police soon. They wanted a witness statement about travelling with Hanif.
But in the meantime there was something else he needed to know.
‘We’re in a place called El Arish. It’s very close to Gaza. You remember Gaza?’
Faraday nodded. They’d come to the Middle East on a midwinter break. The day after they’d landed in Amman the Israelis had
begun to bombard the Gaza Strip. Jordan was full of exiled Palestinians. Wherever they went, it was impossible to avoid Al
Jazeera TV in the cafés, newspapers in the hotels, huge demonstrations on the streets.
‘And?’ Gabrielle had his full attention.
‘A lot of the people wounded come here. Terrible. Just terrible.’
The wards below, she said, were full of casualties from Gaza. Worst of all were the children. Kids.
En petits morceaux.
In bits.
‘There’s a child here …’ she nodded towards the door ‘… in the next room. A girl. Maybe five, maybe six, nobody knows.
They call her Leila. She has burns, chemical burns, here and here.’ Her hands touched her chest, her wrist, her fingers. ‘The
poison makes her very sick.
Phosphore, n’est-ce pas?
The doctors think she may die. Maybe that would be for the best.’
Faraday was doing his best to follow these developments. He hadn’t a clue about
phosphore.
He wanted to change the subject.
‘How about you?’ he said.
Gabrielle shrugged, said she was fine, a little bruised, a little shaken up. Then she checked her watch and glanced again
at the door.
‘They try and wake the little girl every morning.’ She got to her feet. ‘Maybe there’s some way I can help.’
Faraday was nearly two weeks in the hospital at El Arish. Mobile again, waiting for the doctors to tell him he was fit to
travel, he took to wandering the corridors, passing ward after ward, tableau after tableau. Gabrielle was right. The hospital
was slowly filling with seriously wounded from the killing zone that had once been Gaza. Men with no legs, lying inert, their
eyes dead, staring at the ceiling. A woman who’d lost part of her face to a mortar blast, her head
turned away towards the wall. Sitting outside in the winter sunshine, Faraday could hear the roar from the city’s airport
as flights lifted more broken bodies to specialist facilities in Cairo and Saudi Arabia. Back inside the hospital they were
burning incense to mask the stench of rotting flesh.
This, to Faraday, was disturbing enough. Seeing the sheer physical damage inflicted on these people, it was difficult not
to share Gabrielle’s growing sense of outrage. They were defenceless civilians with no greater sin to their names than the
urgent desire for peace and some kind of security. Instead, through no fault of their own, they’d lost everything.
Worse, though, were the moments Faraday paused outside the glassed-in rest room where the orderlies gathered between shifts
to drink mint tea and gaze up at the big wall-mounted screen. The TV was permanently tuned to Al Jazeera and its non-stop
torrent of live pictures from Gaza: wrecked schools, hysterical women, maimed kids sprawled in the dust, men filling ambulances
with yet more bodies. From time to time among this grim carnage a camera would tilt sky-wards to reveal hanging white tendrils
from an airburst artillery shell. This, according to Gabrielle, was white phosphorus, the evil wafers of burning gunk that
had done the child Leila so much damage. She was still alive, just, and one of the reasons Faraday so rarely saw Gabrielle
was the position she’d taken up on a chair beside the child’s bed. This little girl has no one left in the world, she said.
So it has to be me.
Faraday, in his heart, agreed. He’d glimpsed the tiny pile of bandages that was Leila and he was only too aware of the faces
of the orderlies in the TV room when they noticed him out in the corridor. It was the tiny reproachful shake of the head that
made him feel helpless and somehow complicit. It had been the same in cafés in Jordan and Egypt before the accident. The unvoiced
accusation: you in the West did this,
you
with your American friends,
you
with your stake in Israel,
you
made all this possible.
At moments like these Faraday would beat a slow retreat to his room. His possessions had been returned from the wreckage of
the taxi and he’d sit through the long afternoons sorting through his birding logs. There’d been a ring-necked parakeet glimpsed
near the Old Fort on the seafront at Aqaba and a Barbary falcon a little further south along the coast. Earlier in the trip
Gabrielle had been the first to spot a pair of Sinai rosefinches drinking at a spring near the Royal Tombs in Petra, and later
that same day they’d spent nearly an hour watching a Bonelli’s eagle riding the thermals above the deepest of the wadis. These
were the kind of exotic sightings that he’d dreamed about in the depths of an English winter at the Bargemaster’s House,
but the excitement had gone now, swamped by the human wreckage that surrounded him.
On his last evening at the hospital he packed his rucksack and waited for Gabrielle to appear. She’d been in town, confirming
the flights home, negotiating a decent price for a taxi to Cairo airport. Finally, when she turned up, she appeared to have
no luggage. The flight left late the next day. Still exhausted, Faraday had little taste for sightseeing but wondered whether
they might have time for a detour into downtown Cairo.
Gabrielle seemed surprised. There was something she clearly hadn’t told him.
‘I’m staying over,
chéri
,’
she said. ‘The taxi man will look after you.’
‘Staying over?’
‘
Oui.
The child will need lots of care. I can help there. I know I can.’
Leila, it seemed, was at last out of danger. Gabrielle had been talking to the consultant looking after the little girl, who
spoke French as well as English. He was a nice man,
sympa.
He knew London well, had friends there. He’d done a lot of his training in the UK and had good contacts at the Burns Unit
in Salisbury. At Gabrielle’s prompting he’d been on the phone, looking into the possibility of a surgical bed there for Leila,
even taken a provisional booking on a medical evacuation by air. Around 30 per cent of her body had been burned. She’d need
a series of skin grafts and lots of specialist nursing, but the care in the UK, according to the consultant, was world class.
With luck,
inshallah,
Gabrielle’s
pauvre petite
might have a half-decent future.
Gazing at her, Faraday realised just how cut off, how isolated, he’d become. The accident and its aftermath had locked him
away in a bubble of his own making. How come all this was news to him? How come Gabrielle had never mentioned it before?
‘But who pays for all this? How does it work?’
‘
J’sais pas, chéri
.’
Gabrielle offered him a tired smile. ‘That’s why I have to stay.’
Several hours later, more than a thousand miles to the south-east, Paul Winter was making a difficult phone call. Dubai time,
it was three in the morning.
‘It’s over, Baz. Kaput. Finished. We have to take the hit, move on. It’s the only sane thing to do.’
‘Take the hit? Bollocks. The market’ll turn. It’ll come good. In this game you need patience, my friend. Thank Christ one
of us hasn’t bottled it.’
Winter tried to picture the scene in Craneswater. It would be late evening in the UK. Post-Christmas, Bazza was doubtless
tucked up in his den, scrolling through the spreadsheets on his PC, patrolling the battlements of his commercial empire, doing
his best to ignore the obvious. A glass or two of Black Label often helped.
Winter went through the numbers again, standing by the window, staring out at the long curve of the Corniche. Hotel after
hotel after hotel, most of them unfinished, pools of darkness under the forest of cranes.
‘The market’s collapsed, Baz. The guys in the know out here are talking about a 40 per cent fall in property – and that’s
just the first quarter. Year end, we could be looking at 60 per cent off.’
Mackenzie grunted something that Winter didn’t catch but he knew he was tuning in at last. You didn’t get to a £20 million
fortune without the ability to count.
‘The hotels are dead, Baz. Most of the white guys I’ve met are on their way to the airport.’
He described conversations he’d had with bankers, lawyers, architects, consultant engineers. All of them had spent the last
couple of years with their noses in the Dubai trough, feasting on near-vertical rates of growth. But those days were suddenly
over.
‘Half the construction projects are either on hold or cancelled. Take a stroll round the airport and you’ll find parking lots
full of dumped four-by-fours. These guys are totally maxed out. They leave the keys in the ignition and their credit cards
in the glove box and leg it.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Because they’ve got brains in their heads. If you default here, everything stops. Bank accounts frozen. Assets frozen. Passport
confiscated. House arrest. You end up in court and they’re all speaking Arabic, and before you know it you’re sharing a jail
cell with some drugged-up zombie from fuck knows where. Probably for ever. You wouldn’t know it to look at, but this place
is medieval, Baz. I just hope they’re not listening.’