Borrowed Light Read online

  Also by Graham Hurley:

  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

  Copyright

  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

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Also by Graham Hurley

  Copyright

  Prelude

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Afterwards

  Acknowledgements

  To memories of Kibbutz Shamir

  1966–1968

  But then? No then …

  Description of a Struggle, Franz Kafka

  Prelude

  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-ray
s 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.’

  Mackenzie wasn’t giving up. He’d invested £750,000 in 10 per cent deposits, buying thirty apartments off-plan in a promising waterside development. Last year’s spreadsheet told him he could sell on for a 20 per cent mark-up after just six months – £1.5 million for doing fuck all.

  ‘Listen, mush. You’re tired. You’ve been talking to the wrong guys. Take a break. Treat yourself to a couple of those nice Russian toms I keep hearing about. Then go and find Ahmed and get the thing properly sorted.’