Borrowed Light

by Graham Hurley

Genres: Mystery; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries; Crime Fiction

Synopsis

'There is no one writing better police procedurals today.' Daily Telegraph Four charred bodies. One killer. A race against time... DI Joe Faraday is convalescing after a serious injury - but four deaths in a suspicious fire drag him back to work before he's truly fit. His partner, meanwhile, wants to adopt a child who was badly burned in the hellhole of Gaza. Both privately and professionally, Faraday is under threat. Ex-cop Paul Winter is still drug lord Bazza Mackenzie's trusted lieutenant. But his growing doubts about his new life deepen when Bazza orders him to retrieve a stash of missing cocaine ... whatever the cost. Two investigations: one official, one definitely not. And three very different men who must confront a disaster of someone else's making. Why readers love Graham Hurley: 'There is no one writing better police procedurals today.' Daily Telegraph 'Well-written and plotted, utterly convincing and really exciting... Excellent ' Daily Mail 'One of the great talents of British police procedurals... every book he delivers is better than the last' Independent on Sunday Fans of Ian Rankin, Peter James and Peter Robinson will love Graham Hurley: Faraday and Winter 1. Turnstone 2. The Take 3. Angels Passing 4. Deadlight 5. Cut to Black 6. Blood and Honey 7. One Under 8. The Price of Darkness 9. No Lovelier Death 10. Beyond Reach 11. Borrowed Light 12. Happy Days Jimmy Suttle 1. Western Approaches 2. Touching Distance 3. Sins of the Father 4. The Order of Things * Each Graham Hurley novel can be read as a standalone or in series order *

Release date: November 25, 2010

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 352

Sample

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.’


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.’


Ahmed was Mackenzie’s local agent, a smooth trilingual twenty-something with tailored white robes, wire-framed glasses and an Australian air hostess girlfriend.


‘I can’t, Baz.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’s gone too.’

‘Legged it?’

‘Probably.’

‘How come?’

‘He went into liquidation last week. Like I said, it’s not something you want to hang about for.’

‘Shit.’

‘Exactly.’

There was a long pause. In the background Winter could hear the opening music to Match of the Day. Saturday night, he thought grimly. And me stranded in fucking Do-Buy.


Mackenzie came back on the line, suddenly businesslike.

‘You’re right, mush, we have to liquidate. Find yourself an attorney,
a real-estate agent, any fucking monkey. Get those apartments sold on. Whatever it takes, mush. Whatever you can screw out
of these people. You got that?’


‘Yeah. One problem. Did I mention the building itself?’

‘No.’

‘It doesn’t exist, Baz. They never even started it.’

Faraday went to his GP the morning after he arrived back in the UK and handed over his medical file from the hospital in El
Arish. The GP studied the X-rays, took his blood pressure, shone a light in his eyes and asked a series of questions to establish
that he could still add up, still tell the time, still function. Faraday passed each of these tests with flying colours and
when the GP offered to refer him to a consultant for a further check-up he declined. He could do with a bit of time off, he
said, to get his mental bearings, then he’d be back to work. The doctor returned to the file and muttered something about
seat belts before typing an entry into his PC. A sick note would be in the post by close of play. In the meantime Faraday
was to go easy on the booze and take painkillers if the shoulder or the ribs got troublesome. Ten days’ rest, the doctor said,
would do him the world of good.


And so Faraday retreated to the Bargemaster’s House on the city’s eastern shore, shutting the door against the world and putting
another call through to Gabrielle. He’d already talked to her, after he’d got in from the airport yesterday. She’d been vague
about the details but it seemed she’d made contact with some Palestinian charity in her home town of Chartres. They had links
to Saudi Arabia. There was a definite possibility Gulf money could fund Leila’s casevac flight and medical care in the UK.
There might even be enough to pay for a translator to be with her full time. The fighting in Gaza had stopped now, she said,
but the ambulances were still arriving from Rafah. More casualties, many of them kids.


‘So how’s Leila?’

‘Still sick. But not so bad as before.’

‘And the burns?’

‘Horrible. Her back, her chest, most of all her hands.’

The doctors, Gabrielle explained, had been studying the few scraps of paperwork that had come with the child. The little girl,
it seemed, had been living near the refugee camp at Jabaliya. Blast from an Israeli mortar shell had knocked her over, and after that it had rained white phosphorus. Bits of burning phosphorus had set her
T-shirt alight. She’d tried to tear it off. Hence the damage to her torso and hands. This stuff burned and burned, deep, deep
wounds. And it was poisonous too, damaging her liver and kidneys.


‘Does she have a family, this little girl?’

‘All killed. Every one.’

‘Every one?’ Faraday didn’t believe it.



‘Personne ne le sait. Gaza was on fire. Just like Leila.’


‘And is that her real name?’

‘Ca personne ne le sait.’


Nobody knows. The conversation had come to an end at this point, Gabrielle breaking off to take an important incoming call.
She’d promised to phone back as soon as she could, but so far nothing. Now, nearly a day later, Faraday tried her number again.


No answer.

The following afternoon Winter arrived at Gatwick from Dubai. Bazza Mackenzie’s son-in-law Stuart Norcliffe was in the arrivals
hall to meet him. Norcliffe was a big man, prone to comfort eating, and lately the extra weight he carried was beginning to
show.


His Mercedes S-Class was in the short-stay car park. Winter settled into the tan leather, adjusted the seat. The interior
of the car, brand new, smelled of Dubai.


‘Baz sends his apologies. He’d have come himself but he got nailed for another interview.’

‘With?’

‘Some freelance. Claims to be doing a piece for the Guardian.’


‘What’s he after?’

‘She. The usual, I imagine. Baz thinks it’s a laugh. Checked the woman out on Facebook. I gather he liked what he saw.’

Winter returned the smile. His employer’s taste in newspapers seldom extended beyond the sports pages of the Sun, though lately Winter had noticed copies of the Financial Times lying on the kitchen table in Sandown Road.


‘Shouldn’t someone be holding his hand? Keeping him out of trouble? Some of these people are brighter than they look.’

‘My thoughts entirely. Marie’s worried sick. I don’t think she’s got over Christmas yet.’

‘Yeah? You’re telling me all that came as a surprise?’


‘So she says.’

‘She’s playing games, Stu. She sussed him from the start. She knew he was serious all along. She told me so back in May.’

Winter remembered the conversation word for word, a lunchtime meal in a Southsea brasserie the day Pompey returned from Wembley
with the FA Cup. The news that her husband had political ambitions came hand in hand with Marie’s realisation that Ezzie,
her daughter, was having an affair. The events that followed, in Stu’s phrase, had stretched the family to breaking point,
and even now the cracks still showed.


‘So he’s going ahead with this interview?’ Winter wanted to know more.

‘Big time. He’s invited this woman down for lunch at the hotel. Full look-at-me treatment. You know how subtle he can be.’

Winter laughed. Bazza’s pride and joy was a hotel on the seafront, the Royal Trafalgar. Its recent elevation to four-star
status had prompted a celebratory knees-up that had lasted until dawn. For Baz, the fourth star was the clinching evidence
that ten busy years in the cocaine trade could buy you anything – even the launch of a campaign to install himself as the
city’s first elected mayor, announced at a gleeful press conference two days before Christmas.


‘The Guardian eat people like Baz for breakfast. Someone should have told him that.’


‘I did.’

‘And?’

‘He says he can handle it, told me to fuck off. So . . .’ Stu flashed the car ahead and accelerated onto the M23 ‘. . . here
I am.’


Winter settled down for the journey south. When Stu wanted the full debrief on Dubai, he obliged. As far as he was concerned,
the family business was three quarters of a million quid in the hole. As Stu, above all, would know.


Norcliffe winced. ‘It gets worse,’ he said. ‘I’ve just done an audit on the rest of the portfolio. France is horrible, the
UK’s collapsing, those new places in Montenegro are still half built, and Spain’s a basket case. Rely on the Arabs to make
the thing come good, as Baz seems to have done, and you’re looking at meltdown.’


Until recently Stu had been running a successful hedge fund. Premises in Mayfair, multi-billion-dollar turnover, black Porsche
Carrera, the lot. The fact that he’d sold out for a decent price only weeks before Lehman went bust told Winter he knew a
thing or two about the workings of big business. Putting your trust in the markets, like putting your trust in marriage, could
take you to a very ugly place.


‘So how bad is it?’

‘You want the truth?’

‘That’s a silly fucking question.’

‘OK, here’s the way it is . . .’

At moments of stress, or high excitement, Stu affected an American accent. Winter had often wondered whether it was a defence
mechanism, a form of temporary disguise, trying to kid himself he was someone else.


‘Number one, most of the properties abroad are secured on loans of various kinds, mainly fixed-rate mortgages. As long as
the earnings service the mortgages, no problema. When they don’t, huge fucking problema.’


‘And they don’t?’

‘No way. People are skint. They’re not going on holiday. They can’t stretch to a couple of grand a week for that nice hacienda
by the beach. So the likes of my father-in-law have to start thinking long lets, semi-permanent tenancies, but that’s no answer
either because the hot money, the vacation premium, that’s all gone. Rents just don’t cut it, not the way Baz has structured
the property holdings.’


This was news to Winter. He’d always assumed Bazza had simply swapped hookey cocaine dosh for all those bricks and mortar,
part of the laundering process that had turned him into one of the city’s top businessmen.


Stu shook his head. ‘Not true. I thought exactly what you’ve been thinking, but it turns out the guy’s way over-leveraged.
The money he was making, he could have stayed virtually debt-free. Instead he decided to pile in. Why buy ten properties and
make a decent return when you can borrow someone else’s money and buy a hundred and score yourself a fortune? Works a treat.
Until the bubble goes pop.’


Winter was thinking about the waterside plot of land in Dubai: 750K for thirty apartments that didn’t even exist.

‘So he’s got to start selling? Is that what we’re saying?’

‘It’s way worse than that. Start offloading now and you’re talking fire-sale prices. That won’t begin to repay the loans.
You happen to know the Spanish for “negative equity”? Only it might be wise to learn.’


Winter lapsed into silence. These last few years, after binning the Job and turning his back on CID, he realised that he’d
come to rely on the cocoon that Mackenzie’s many businesses had spun around him. Club-class travel. Decent hotels. A three-week
jaunt through Polynesia as a thank you for sorting out last year’s marital crisis. Only now did he realise that most of these
castles were built on sand.


‘So what do we need?’

‘Working capital.’

‘How much?’

‘A couple of million. And that’s just for starters.’

‘And Baz knows that?’

‘Yes. Which I guess is the worst news of all.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s still telling himself it’s not a problem. And you know why?’ He shot Winter a glance.

‘Because the man has a plan.’

‘You’ve asked?’

‘Of course I’ve asked.’

‘And?’

‘Nothing. Nada. He won’t tell me.’


At the Bargemaster’s House, perched on the edge of the greyness that was Langstone Harbour, Faraday was becoming aware that
his life was slowly slipping out of focus. He was developing an obsession with doors. He needed to close them quietly, deftly,
measuring the exact effort that went into the push, savouring the soft kiss as the door seated into the frame. He tiptoed
from room to room, longing for the coming of dusk, embracing the gathering darkness like a long-lost friend. On wet nights
he cherished the whisper of rain against the French windows and lay for hours on the sofa, listening to the wind, his mind
a total blank.


One morning, with a jolt of surprise, he realised that he was knotting and unknotting his hands in the most unlikely places
– the bathroom, for instance, while he stared uncomprehendingly at the tiny array of waiting toothbrushes. He also started
to talk to himself, recognising the low mumble that dogged him from room to room as his own voice. In his more rational moments
he put most of this down to the accident, inevitable aftershocks from Sinai, but what was more unexpected was a growing sense
of helplessness, of his mind playing tricks beyond his comprehension.


As the days and nights went by, he didn’t seem to be able to rid himself of the same thought, the same memory. It came back
time and time again: a man on a horse he’d glimpsed briefly, in the middle of the night, from the window of the hotel where
he and Gabrielle had been staying in Aqaba, days before the accident. The horse and rider had appeared from nowhere, the clatter
of hooves waking him up. He’d gone to the window and watched the man on the horse careering back and forth across the dusty
parking lot, tugging hard on the reins. The man had looked angry. He’d carried a stick, slashing left and right at the empty
night air. And then he’d disappeared. The breeze from the sea on Faraday’s face had been warm, a kind of balm. But what remained
was the sense of bewilderment. Why the horse? At that time of night? And what was the man doing there, riding from nowhere
to nowhere? So violent? So manic?


This was bizarre enough, a tug on his wrist from which he couldn’t shake himself free. But then, towards the end of his brief
convalescence, he came across notes to himself that he must have left around the house, all of them recent. He couldn’t remember
writing them, nor work out what function they served, but the fact that they were there, that they existed at all, was frankly
weird. They read like the jotti