Backstory Page 25

  Winter would naturally be tasked to sort all out all this aggravation, only too aware that Bazza would only tell him what he needed to know - yet more proof that he was flying blind in ever-worsening weather.

  Now, draining the last of the coffee, Winter was still brooding on this latest development. The last couple of years had taught him never to expect the whole story from Bazza. The key to his world was power, keeping the upper hand, and the currency he dealt in was information. He gave it to you in tiny parcels, carefully weighed, forever keeping the tally in his head. Who knew what. Who’d said what to whom. Who owed him. Who didn’t. Winter, who’d always had a very similar MO, had been amused at first. It had felt like a game and there’d been days when he’d definitely stolen an advantage or two. But lately, this last year especially, he’d begun to tire of watching his back, of interpreting and re-interpreting the most casual asides, of studying the man’s body language for clues to the real story. Wearing a blindfold, as he’d once told Bazza, does nothing for your sense of humour nor for your self-respect. And so here he was, stumbling around in the dark again, while his boss laid plans to take over the whole fucking city.

  Was it really worth it? Sweeping up after a bloke who simply refused to establish any sensible ground rules? Who vested so much faith in his own judgement? Who appeared to believe that no Pompey door could resist the weight of his shoulder?

  In truth, he didn’t know. He’d got used to the money and the lifestyle, and in the shape of Marie and maybe even Stu Norcliffe, he’d found real friendship. But all of us, he told himself, are tiny whirling fragments in the teeming chaos of Bazza’s busy little brain and there was something slightly Roman in the realisation that he might face the down-turned thumb at any moment. The prospect of that kind of endgame, the pitted brick wall at the end of the cul-de-sac, was beginning to haunt him. If not Bazza, he thought, then someone else might be in charge of the firing squad. Maybe Willard. Maybe Faraday. Maybe, God help him, Jimmy Suttle.

  With Winter off and running, and Faraday trying to get on top of a complex and challenging investigation, the time had come to find out a little more about burns surgery. Decades back, in the wake of my drugs horror movie, Better Dead?, I, my first wife Jane, and a couple of friends, John East and Ian Dillow, had set up a charity we called Project Icarus. Icarus was framed to bring folk down to earth about a variety of self-inflicted home goals including the damage inflicted by drug addiction, booze, and smoking. These films did OK, sometimes better than OK. At the same time I was making broadcast documentaries for ITV and one of these took me to a Salisbury-based plastic surgeon called Jim Laing, an immensely charismatic Scot who quickly became a good friend. One consequence of Life By Misadventure, the documentary we made together, was an agreement to make another film, targetted on young mums with small kids. The result was Scald, which was adopted nationwide by organisations in the pediatric community.

  Jim sadly died from a brain tumour but his son, Hamish, followed in his footsteps and I knew that by 2009 he’d become a leading voice in his field. Ten minutes on the internet told me he was now a consultant surgeon at the Welsh Centre for Burns and Plastic Surgery. Who better to tell me what might lie in wait for the tiny figure still recovering in El Arish?

  Hamie couldn’t have been more helpful. We caught up by e-mail and he gave me an introduction to a fellow consultant, Eunen Tiernan, who ran the Salisbury Burns Unit where I’d first met Jim Laing.

  We talked on the phone and I drove over to Salisbury. Eunen turned out to be a slim, soft-spoken Irishman with a quiet self-deprecatory wit. I’d already pinged him Leila’s story on e-mail and he described exactly what would happen once she’d been medivac’d out of El Arish. Leila, he said, would look like a little Egyptian mummy when she first arrived. Scalding lumps of white phosphorous would have burned through layers of tissue to the bare bone and the bandages which covered her torso would be oozing fluid. There’d be a smell, too, the stench of rotting meat, and the little girl would be crying in her pain and bewilderment. Faces she didn’t know. A language she didn’t understand. And the guarantee of days of pain yet to come.

  Over the next hour or so, Eunan talked me though a variety of medical procedures. How he’d remove dead and infected tissue. The steps he’d take to preserve as much breast development as possible. How important it was to try and lessen the inevitable contractures that had already turned her tiny hands into claws. The work that Eunan and his team would be doing over the next month or so would largely determine the scope and reach of her life as an adult and I left Eunan’s office with a profound respect for the small miracles he was able to fashion from lives so abruptly wrecked.

  Heidi Lewis was a sister on Eunan’s unit, a tall, attractive career nurse with a mass of wild blond hair and a passion for Chelsea FC. She gave me a tour of the unit and a glimpse of the ways you could try and soften the impacts of a hospital stay on very young children. They had a huge supply of soft toys and shelves of DVDs for the TV but in the end, she said, it came down to close contact. “We’d love her,” she said. “We’d sing songs together, we’d look at fish in the fish tank, we’d do puzzles, and above all we’d make sure we found someone to translate for us.”

  Finding a translator, someone who spoke Arabic, was – on reflection – an obvious move to make but the moment Heidi mentioned it I knew exactly where it would fit in the developing jigsaw of the plot.

  Gabrielle would have found a wealthy donor to fund all the expenses of flying Leila to the UK, and keeping her here in Heidi’s unit. Some of that money would also pay for a professional translator, ideally a woman who knew Gaza well. This woman, a Palestinian, would spend more time with Leila than anyone else, maybe even sleeping in her room, and quickly a bond would thicken between her and the little girl. Gabrielle would be spending as much time as possible with Leila but her lack of Arabic would be a definite handicap. As week followed week, Gabrielle would therefore be aware that Leila – the little girl she wanted to adopt and make her own – was slipping away.

  Here’s the moment Faraday and Gabrielle are reunited at the Salisbury B&B where Gabrielle is staying. She’s been in El Arish with Leila. Faraday has been on the Isle of Wight, trying to make sense of the four charred bodies in the remains of the farmhouse. His attempts to raise Gabrielle on the phone have largely come to nothing.

  Faraday waited. The wind tasted of rain again. Far away, the hoot of an owl.

  The front door opened. Gabrielle was wearing a dressing gown he didn’t recognise. She must have been in Salisbury since getting back from El Arish, he thought.

  “Mind if I come in?”

  He stepped inside without waiting for an answer. She closed the door behind him. No kiss. No hug of welcome.

  “This way, cheri.”

  He followed her up the stairs. There was a smell of furniture polish and cheap air freshener. Cold.

  Her room was tucked away in a kind of annexe. She’d left the door open. The single bed was unmade, light from the corridor throwing soft shadows over the rumpled sheets. Gabrielle’s rucksack lay abandoned on the chair beneath the window. Various bits of clothing were draped over the back of the chair. On the shelf beside the bed, a copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Faraday had found it in a bookshop in Aqaba. She’d nearly got to the end.

  Gabrielle turned the light on and gestured round. She was camping here, she said. She was always apologising to the cleaner for the mess but she hadn’t had time to do anything about it. Most nights, like now, she just wanted to go to bed. Faraday nodded. The message was clear. He was an intruder.

  He sat down on the bed, looked up at her. He wanted to cry. Knew he mustn’t.

  “I’ve missed you.” He said.

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “You know?” He blinked. None of this made sense. The not phoning. The not being there. The not sharing this secret life she’d suddenly decided to make her own.<
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  She sat down beside him. He felt her hand over his. It was the touch of a mother or a nurse, a small obligatory gesture of comfort. He took his hand away. Anything but this, he thought.

  He looked sideways at her, two passengers on a train going nowhere, robbed of conversation, robbed of everything.

  “So what’s happening?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “You know what it is, cheri.”

  “I don’t. I should but I don’t. So why don’t you tell me?”

  He felt a small, hard pebble of anger deep in his belly. He tried to ignore it. Failed completely.

  Gabrielle had pulled the dressing gown more tightly around her. She looked pale and thin but the bruising from the accident had gone. Leila, she explained, had been back to the operating theatre for another change of dressings. The staff were lovely to her, the doctors too, but they didn’t hide how serious her condition was. Burns were horrible, especially these kinds of burns, and the phosphore had made things worse. The Israelis, she said, were racaille. They’d killed without mercy, without even thinking about it, and the worst of it all were kids like Leila, hundreds of them, marked for life, inside and out.

  “Racaille.” she repeated. “Scum.”

  Faraday felt himself nodding. He’d never seen her like this, so angry, so intense. Maybe this explained a little about the last month or so. What had happened in Gaza had swamped her little boat. She was oblivious to everything else.

  “So what’s going to happen?” He said again. “As far as Leila is concerned?”

  “Sais pas, cheri.” She was staring at her hands. “She has a translator with her, Riham. She talks to Riham a little. Riham says she wants to go home.”

  “Of course. She would.”

  “But to what? Gaza est tout demoli. Wrecked. Her family, too. Morte.”

  Morte. Dead. Gone.

  “All of them?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you know that?”

  Her head came up and she looked at him.

  “You talk to me like a flic,”

  “I am a flic.”

  “Alors.” She shrugged. “So maybe she has an aunt, an uncle, I don’t know. If she gets better…” She shrugged again. “Sais pas…”

  Faraday knew how important it was to keep talking. On the floor, half hidden by a Medicins Sans Frontieres T-shirt, he’d spotted another book. Arabic for Beginners.

  “So what’s the option?” he said quietly. “If she doesn’t go home?”

  Gabrielle shook her head. She didn’t want to answer, didn’t want to think about it. She went to the hospital every day. She was there first thing in the morning to be with Leila when she woke up. In the afternoon, when she slept, she’d take the bus down into Salisbury. She’d found a little delicatessen where she could buy haloumi cheese and sweetmeats and figs, tastes the little girl would recognise, little treats that might help build a bridge between them. The staff had a special fridge to keep stuff like this. Leila liked stories, too.

  “Who reads to her?” Faraday’s gaze had returned to the book on the floor.

  “Riham. You know what Riham means in Arabic, cheri? It means a fine rain that lasts forever. Isn’t that beautiful?” For the first time, she was smiling. Faraday wanted to kiss her. Instead, he took her hand. It was cold, stiff, unresponsive.

  Faraday asked her how long Leila would spend in the unit. Gabrielle frowned. The doctors were saying a month at least, probably longer. It depended on the anti-biotics they were giving her. The burns were badly infected. She was already weak.

  “And afterwards? When she comes out of hospital?”

  Another silence. Then another shake of the head.

  “I don’t know, cheri. You tell me.”

  “Me? Me tell you?”

  “Oui.” She nodded and then summoned a small, brave smile. “She could be ours, cheri. This little girl.”

  I knew these characters – especially Faraday and Winter – well. I’d entrusted countless books, countless plots to their tender care and they’d never let me down. Give Faraday a scene like this, and he practically wrote it himself. My job as the author was to get the incidental details as right as I possibly could.

  Aside from the small print of burns surgery and the long convalescence that followed, I also needed to find out a whole lot more about the distinctive way a fire can destroy a thatched farmhouse, about the kinds of evidence the four charred bodies would present at post-mortem, and about the bureaucratic nightmare that the process of inter-country adoption can so easily become. For each of these challenges I had to lay hands on people who knew this stuff from the inside, who’d built whole careers on their expertise.

  John Ashworth, bless him, convened another brainstorming session at Netley to which he invited a Crime Scene Manager and a fire officer from the Arson Task Force. We spent a very happy (and productive) afternoon exploring every investigative possibility. Some of these lines of enquiry, in plot terms, proved to be dead ends, leading nowhere fictionally useful, but others seeded ideas that bloomed in later chapters. I’d already had a long session with a fireman in Devon, Adge Tilke, and he’d explained the thermal logic that made thatched fires so difficult to fight. Now, driving away from Netley with my notebook full of yet more detail, I felt the quiet warmth that comes from the knowledge that a book will work.

  Back in Devon I had a meet with Debbie Cook, the pathologist. I’d already shared the plot with her by e-mail and we’d agreed to meet at a rather upmarket café at a shopping complex called Darts Farm, near Topsham. The place was packed and Debbie had arrived with a stack of extremely graphic post-mortem photos which she spread across our table.

  Over tea and chocolate sponge, she showed me how an intense fire can lock your forearms the way a boxer does, the so-called “pugilistic attitude”, and looking at her photos of charred bodies I was reminded of a little girl Heidi had shown me in the Burns Unit, her fingers similarly contracted. By now, Debbie was describing the post-mortem procedure, the way she had to slice through to the back of the trachea, looking for soot below the level of the vocal chords. Should she find it, she’d regard the dark tell-tale trace as evidence that the person had been alive when the fire started.

  “Here…” she produced another photo, “…this is what I mean.”

  It was at this point that an elderly couple at the next table decided to bale out. The woman, far too nosy for her own good, had finally twigged that she was stealing a look at human flesh and bone. Her husband helped her to the door.

  By now, unusually, I’d started writing the first draft. I’d acquired a stack of research about the impact of the Israeli bombardments on civilians in Gaza, plus a book about the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The latter, Witness in Palestine, was the work of a young American, herself Jewish, who had lived and worked amongst the Palestinians for eight long months. Her name was Anna Baltzer and by chance we’d run into her in Jordan. She had the relentless focus which generates certain kinds of rage, and her book was an eye opener. There was no way I could offer anything remotely similar but the knowledge of where this book had come from never left me. Some acts are beyond both comprehension and forgiveness. The destruction of Gaza in January 2009 was one of them.

  But Borrowed Light, as I was now determined to call it, belonged to Faraday and Winter. My challenge, in designing the plot, was to put both of them under immense pressure and then stand well back to see how they coped. Here’s Winter exploring the ruins of Monkswell Farm some weeks after the fire. It’s nearly midnight and he’s still trying to figure out what happened to all that cocaine.

  Winter was still gazing at the hole. He could hear the soft moan of the wind in the trees. After a moment or two he turned back towards the house. Before he left he couldn’t resist a look inside. He switched on the torch again and headed for what must have been the back door. The door
itself had been torn off its hinges and tossed to one side, presumably by the firemen. Winter stepped inside the thick cob walls. Above his head, through a lattice of charred beams, he could see a star or two. The smell was stronger here, the smell that reminded him of the bin liner he’d collected from the old lady, and underfoot he could feel the greasiness of the sodden ash.

  The beam of the torch settled on a pile of rubble that must once have been a kitchen. He recognised the bones of a fridge. An Aga. A circuit board that might have belonged to a telly. The torch found the gleam of a bottle, then another, then a third, and Winter tried to imagine what kind of life Holman must have lived here. The booze, in the end, had done for him. And now this was all that remained.

  Winter shivered, all too aware that his own life was close to a disaster of this magnitude. Not because he’d necked too much Stella or hooked up with an Estonian tom, but because he’d let the likes of Bazza Mackenzie get into his head.

  As a working cop, he’d always known that a decent criminal was always ahead of the game. With half a brain and access to the right advice, you’d be stupid not to make decent money. That’s the way it worked. That’s the way society was set up. You filled the courts with infant shoplifters and drugged-up inbreds, hit the right performance targets and took promotion with a smile on your face. Pretty soon you were fluent in bollock-speak and counting the weeks until you hit your thirty and could cash in that big fat pension. That’s what the blokes were doing more and more. That’s what got them through.

  But Winter hadn’t done that at all. No. Winter had been stitched up by the likes of Willard and Parsons and hung out to dry on a u/c operation that had nearly got him killed. Therapy had arrived in the shape of Bazza Mackenzie. With him had come good money and a few laughs. Bazza had trusted him. They’d all trusted him, the whole family. His name was dog wank among the people he’d left behind, but Winter hadn’t cared a toss. He was cruising. He was at 30,000 feet. He had money, respect, a nice car. He even had stolen shares in Misty Gallagher.