by Val McDermid
She knew beyond the shadow of a doubt what she had longed for as soon as midnight struck. The mellow taste of good malt soaked up by shortbread, oatcakes, and caboc. The hysterical, ordered chaos of “Strip the Willow.” The sound of accordion, bass, and drums. The voice of her father singing “The Road And the Miles To Dundee.” The contented smile of her mother as she listened. The welcoming warmth in Cordelia’s deep, gray eyes. For too long, Lindsay thought sadly, she’d been looking into brown eyes. At the time, she had forced the thoughts away, telling herself she was maudlin and sentimental. Back at the van, a final tumbler of fiery grappa had brought a welcome oblivion.
But this morning, as she jogged back along the beach, she forced herself to examine her life in the hungover light of day. She’d left Britain in a state of panic, and all her actions since then had been governed by the lurking fear that she might lose her liberty or even her life. When she’d been unwillingly caught up in a murder investigation at a women’s peace camp, she’d had no idea what she’d uncover. The last thing she’d expected was to find herself embroiled in the cover-up of a spy scandal.
The knowledge she’d ended up with was the sort of thing it was only safe to know if you were inside the charmed circle of the secret society. For her, a dedicated anti-establishment journalist, it had nearly sealed her death warrant. So she’d fled, but had refused to keep silent. After her story had been published by a German magazine, she knew she couldn’t go home till long after the dust had settled. And that had meant not only leaving Cordelia behind, but keeping her in ignorance of her whereabouts. She had left a long letter to explain her absence, and she’d sent a card to Cordelia to reassure her that she was alive and well, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to reveal where she was. The card had been mailed in a sealed envelope to an old friend in New York, with instructions to address it to Cordelia care of her literary agent and to post it on to London from there. A more direct route might have brought the full weight of the Special Branch down on Cordelia. She’d even been afraid to phone in case the line was tapped and they could trace the call.
While she was still a marked woman as far as the British security services were concerned, Lindsay wasn’t prepared to do anything that might expose Cordelia to more trouble than she’d already been through on her account. And that meant not giving her any information that might provide them with a reason to lean on her. If her lover had known where to find her, she’d have been out on the next plane, no doubt with a team of heavies on her trail. The irony of keeping silent was that she now had no way of knowing if the heat had died down. Maybe she’d been wrong not to trust Cordelia to act responsibly, but the fear had gnawed too deep into Lindsay for her to feel able to take even the smallest chance.
But she couldn’t run forever. Minding an Italian campsite wasn’t part of her life-plan, in so far as she had one. It was time to face up to the truth. She had been in hiding for long enough. Some of the questions she had been trying to answer were resolved. Others never would be, she suspected. But at least she had the strength now to face the consequences she had run away to avoid. The time had come for Lindsay Gordon to go home.
The confirmation of that decision came only two days later on her weekly trip into Venice. As usual, she caught the early steamer from Punta Sabbione and huddled against the window in the saloon as the boat chugged across the Venetian lagoon. Half an hour later, she was walking down the wide quay of the Riva Schiavoni, past the Bridge of Sighs and the Doge’s Palace, and into the Piazza San Marco, the domes of the basilica lost in the January mist that swirled around the sinking city. Lindsay had never particularly cared for the huge square. As a tourist attraction, it lived up to its promise, but precisely because it was a tourist attraction, it repelled her. It was never free from the souvenir vendors, the gaping crowds, and the hordes of pigeons, encouraged by the food the tourists bought from the stall holders. The white smears of their droppings were everywhere, ruining the vista that Napoleon had called “the finest drawing room in Europe.”
Lindsay much preferred the other Venice, that maze of twisting alleys, canals, and bridges where she could escape the crowds and wander alone, savoring the sights, smells, and sounds of the real life that lurked behind the picture postcard facades. She loved watching the Venetians display the skills that living on the water had forced them to develop. On that particular January morning, after collecting her subscription copy of the Sunday Times from the central post office at the far end of the Piazza San Marco, she made her way through the narrow alleys to a wooden landing stage on the Grand Canal, pausing only to watch a builder with a heavy hod of bricks climbing a ladder precariously balanced in a motor boat. After a few minutes wait, the traghetto, one of the long gondolas that ferry passengers across the canal for a few hundred lire, crossed back to her side and she climbed aboard. The gondolier looked cold and miserable, a sharp contrast to the carefree image he would present to the summer tourists. On the other side of the canal, she plunged into a labyrinth of passages, following a familiar route to a small café near the Frari church.
The man behind the counter greeted Lindsay with a nod as she sat at a small table by the door, and busied himself with the espresso machine. He brought her usual cappuccino over to the table, exchanged a few pleasantries about the New Year, and left her to her paper. Lindsay tore open the wrapper and unfolded the paper. Before she could take in the headlines, her eye was caught by a box on the side of the page trailing the attractions in the rest of the paper. “Cordelia Brown: Booker Prize this time?”
Lindsay’s stomach churned and she reached instinctively for a cigarette. She hardly smoked at all these days, but this wasn’t something she could face nicotine-free. With trembling fingers, she turned to the review section. The whole of the front page was devoted to an interview with her . . . how should she describe Cordelia these days? Her lover? Her former lover? Her lover-in-abeyance?
At first, Lindsay had been too busy covering her tracks and establishing a safe routine to miss Cordelia. Because their relationship had hit a rough patch before Lindsay left, she’d stopped noticing all the ways in which she had relied on Cordelia. Now she was alone in a foreign country, she had begun to realize how much she had depended on her lover. The problems they’d had had all been external—the unpredictable pressures of Lindsay’s job as a national newspaper journalist, the paralyzing writer’s block that had gripped Cordelia. Deep down, Lindsay had slowly come to understand, their relationship had been founded on solid ground. Knowing she had walked away from that because of her stubborn adherence to principle was the hardest thing Lindsay had had to deal with since her arrival in Italy.
But now she’d decided to go home, she also began to see how they could start to rebuild their life together. There was no way she wanted to go back into national newspaper journalism, even supposing anyone would have her. Whatever else she chose to do would provide a more straightforward life. No more shift working, late nights, and unpredictable overnight stays away from home. And, judging by this article that she was deliberately postponing reading, Cordelia had cured her writer’s block.
Lindsay gulped a mouthful of hot coffee and stubbed out her cigarette. Taking a deep breath, she plunged into the words. “Eighteen months ago, Cordelia Brown feared she’d never write another novel,” she read. Too true, Lindsay remembered with a sweet sadness. She had been the one caged in that beautiful London house with Cordelia while she paced the floor restlessly, ranting about her vanished talent. In vain, Lindsay had tried to reassure her, pointing to her successes as a television scriptwriter. “Pap and crap,” Cordelia had spat back at her before storming out of the room to spend yet more hours motionless in front of the blank screen of her word processor.
But something had obviously happened to change all that. And it must have happened fast. For her to have a new book out now, she must have written it in a flurry of energy. It was nine months since Lindsay had left. Making a few quick mental calculations, she worked out
that Cordelia must have written the first draft in the space of eight weeks at the very most. She never managed to work like that when she was with me, Lindsay thought painfully. Lighting another cigarette, she read on.
With four successful novels, a film script, and three television series under her belt, the 36-year-old writer suffered a crippling failure of imagination. “I was in a state of blind panic,” she revealed. “I felt as if I had used myself up.”
Then a friend told her the moving story of a Black South African woman who had died in police custody after battling to uncover the truth about the death of her lover. The tragic events struck a deep chord in Cordelia, who sat down the following day and wrote Ikhaya Lamaqhawe in a record six weeks.
It’s being hailed as her masterpiece, and although the Booker Prize ceremony is still ten months away, book trade insiders consider Ikhaya Lamaqhawe is certain to be a strong contender. A moving tour de force of controlled emotion, the book has astonished the literary world by its penetrating insights into the life of Black people under apartheid.
Ikhaya Lamaqhawe—which means Home Of the Heroes—tells the story of Alice Nbala, a teacher in a Black township. Her lover, Joseph Bukolo, is a mildly political student who is caught in a spiral of circumstances that leads to his disappearance. When his horribly mutilated body is found, Alice sets out to discover what happened to him. As she slowly realizes that he has been a victim of the security forces, the net begins to close round her too.
Cordelia, who has never visited South Africa, admitted, “I was terrified that I wouldn’t get it right. I was aware of the sensitivities around this issue, and I didn’t want to be seen as another white liberal trying to hijack a subject I knew nothing about from personal experience. But although I haven’t gone through the traumas myself, I could relate very strongly to the emotions and the responses of the characters. I knew a lot about South Africa from reading and talking to Black people who had escaped from the regime, and I drew heavily on what they’d told me.”
News to me, thought Lindsay self-critically. She couldn’t remember Cordelia ever showing more than the general interest expected of a right-on feminist in the whole issue of racial oppression. Had she really known so little about what was going on in her lover’s mind?
With another deep sigh, she read on.
Not only has Cordelia got it right, she’s won plaudits from a wide spectrum of Black activists and writers, who privately have expressed their astonishment that a white writer could have written so passionate and accurate an exposé of the grim truth of life in the RSA.
Lindsay signaled for another cappuccino and quickly read on to the end of the article. To her relief, there was no mention of her and the spy scandal that had led to her exile. It would have been an obvious point for the interviewer to pick up on, given its tenuous parallels with Cordelia’s plot. Maybe it really had been the nine-day wonder Cordelia had predicted. If that was the case, then there truly was no reason why she shouldn’t go home. Or maybe it was simply that Cordelia had excised her so thoroughly from her life that she had insisted on no mention of Lindsay’s name. After all, what right had Lindsay to assume that Cordelia would want her back?
There was only one way to find out. Lindsay carefully folded up her paper, got to her feet, and took the first step on the road home.
2
Glasgow, Scotland, February 1990
“I always maintained that Glasgow was the only truly European city in Britain,” Lindsay stated smugly as she stared out of the taxi window at the rows of sandblasted tenements glowing yellow in the streetlights. “But I didn’t realize till now how right I was.”
“Listen to it,” muttered her companion. “Nine months in Italy and suddenly she’s an expert on European culture.” Eight years of friendship had given Sophie Hartley the right to snipe at Lindsay’s occasional pomposity and she never hesitated.
“Listen,” Lindsay argued. “Nothing you’ve told me about this wine bar we’re heading for sounds British to me. A place where writers, actors, lawyers, and politicians go to drink good wine, eat serious food, and put the world to rights sounds like café society in Paris or Vienna or Berlin, not bloody Glasgow. I know it’s three years since I lived here, but it seems to me that everything’s changed.”
Sophie smiled. “It’s got yuppified, if that’s what you mean. Every other car a BMW. Don’t forget, it’s the European City of Culture now,” she teased.
“As if I could,” Lindsay replied ironically. “Every corner shop has got posters up advertising some cultural beanfeast. Everything from opera to open days, from puppets to psychodrama. I don’t even recognize the streets any more. Where there used to be nice wee bakeries selling cream donuts and every other sort of cholesterol-packed traditional Scottish goody, there are wholefood cafés. I tell you, Soph, I felt less of a stranger in Venice than I feel in Glasgow these days,” she added with a sigh.
“Well, you shouldn’t have stayed away from us so long, should you?” said Sophie mercilessly, choosing to ignore the fact that she had been Lindsay’s first port of call after her duty visit to her parents in the Highlands.
“I didn’t have much of a choice. I never wanted to be a bloody hero. All I wanted was to be the best journalist I could be.”
“Don’t be so melodramatic, Lindsay. If those mad bastards in the secret service had really wanted you, they’d have come and got you, wherever you were. Spy scandals are ten a penny these days. A couple of months after you broke the story, your average 007 would have been hard pressed even to remember your name, never mind what lid you had lifted.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Lindsay said gloomily. “You make it all seem worthwhile.”
Sophie laughed. “Come on, Lindsay, you’re still in one piece, and you’ve got the satisfaction of knowing you did the right thing. Stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
Before Lindsay could reply, the cab driver pushed back his glass partition. “Youse gonny sit there blethering all night while the meter runs?” he inquired pleasantly.
“Sorry,” Sophie said, pushing Lindsay out of the cab and paying the driver. Lindsay watched her as she searched her bag for her wallet. Time was being kind to Sophie, she thought. Now she had passed thirty, she seemed to have grown into her bones. In her twenties, her high cheekbones, straight nose, and strong jaw had given her face a raw, unfinished look. But age had softened the impression, producing a striking image of humor and strength of character. Her curly brown hair was shot with gray now, giving an effect that other women paid their hairdressers fortunes for. Tonight, she was wearing a silky cobalt-blue jogging suit under a padded ski jacket, and Lindsay envied her style.
Sophie turned round and caught Lindsay’s scrutiny. One eyebrow twitched upward in amusement. “You look like you’re sizing me up for the kill,” she remarked wryly. “Come on, this is it,” she said, pointing down an alley between the tall, Victorian buildings. A large square sign swinging in the evening air proclaimed “Soutar Johnnie’s” above a painting of a cobbler working at his last. “We’ll have a drink and something to eat here before we meet Helen and Rosalind at the Tron Bar after their Labour Party meeting. Let’s just hope my radiopager doesn’t go off,” she added as she led the way down the alley.
“You’re not on call tonight, are you?” Lindsay asked.
“Technically, no. But if one of my patients goes into labor, they’ll probably call me in. The price of being a specialist.” Sophie was a consultant gynecologist at Stobhill Hospital, where she was in the vanguard of those treating the city’s growing numbers of HIV-positive women, mainly prostitutes and drug addicts.
Sophie pushed open the polished wooden door of the bar and Lindsay followed her in. She stopped on the threshold, taken aback. There had been nowhere quite like this when she had been a struggling freelance journalist in the city, and it was a shock to a system accustomed to the functional, masculine atmosphere of the old-fashioned city-center pubs. The bar was well lit, with square tab
les and comfy looking chairs scattered around. Food was being eaten at several tables, and even at first glance it looked completely different from the old pub staple of pie and peas. And, to Lindsay’s astonishment, quite a few of the patrons appeared to be drinking coffee rather than alcohol. Very Continental, she thought wryly as she followed Sophie to the horseshoe-shaped mahogany bar.
Lindsay joined Sophie and studied the long list of wines scrawled on the blackboard behind the bar. Her astonishment grew as she read it. Not a single Liebfraumilch or Lambrusco to be seen! The wine list was as varied and interesting as the clientele, who ranged from a few long-haired hippies who looked like reluctant refugees from the sixties, to well-barbered young men in double-breasted suits. Sophie meanwhile had caught the attention of the barman, a huge bull of a man with a mop of thick black curls and a black patch over one eye. “Hi, Cosmo,” Sophie said as he approached. “Give us a bottle of the Australian Chardonnay and two glasses, please.”
“Coming up, Sophie,” he replied, opening a tall glass-fronted fridge. “What’s all this, then? Buying classy bottles of wine for strange women? Good gossip! Wait till the Sisters of Treachery get to hear about this!”
Sophie grinned as she paid for the wine and picked it up. “If they do, I’ll know who told them, Cosmo,” she replied. “This is an old friend of mine, Lindsay Gordon. Lindsay, meet Cosmo Mackay. He owns this disreputable dive.”
“Pleased to meet you, Lindsay. Any friend of Sophie’s stands a good chance of becoming one of my best customers. She’s never introduced me to a teetotaller yet! Are you eating tonight, by the way?” he asked.