*
The cottage lay tucked into a fold of hillside beyond the big new houses and I walked up rather than risk a rutted farm track that would have torn the bottom out of a Challenger tank never mind an ageing Ford Capri. Walking gave me the chance to fix the topography of the place in my mind, the way we used to do before an operation in Armagh or on East Falkland, and it wasn’t long before I realised its significance.
Torn curtains covered the two windows at the front of the white-walled, single-storey building and I knew that from behind them at least one pair of eyes followed my progress towards the door with its peeling, once-red paint. I prayed it would be more than one pair, truly I did.
My knock echoed through the cottage and I stood back and waited for it to be answered. By now it was mid-afternoon and the walk had raised a sweat that showed my age and questioned my decision never to go anywhere near one of those fancy new gyms everyone else seems to be a member of. A blackbird’s exuberant song erupted from a nearby holly bush and I almost missed the sound of approaching footsteps. The door opened with an audible crack to reveal a skinny young man with tousled, dirty-blond hair, red-rimmed eyes and haggard features. In the hallway behind him I could see a double-barrelled shotgun leaning against the wall and I wondered if he’d been tempted to pick it up, but looking into his eyes decided not. At least not to threaten me.
‘Donnie McLeod?’ I took the flicker of expression in the otherwise dead eyes as confirmation. ‘My name’s Glen Savage. Gurya Ali’s father has asked me to help find her. Is she here?’
He swayed and for a second I thought he was going to collapse. At first I was reminded of the vulnerability of a baby rabbit, but he gathered himself and I saw the same inner strength in him that must have attracted Gurya. ‘No,’ he croaked. ‘She’s no’ here. She’s no’ anywhere. Ah’ve looked everywhere for her . . .’
Donnie must have been around nineteen or twenty and gave the impression he hadn’t slept or eaten for a week – in fact since Gurya Ali had vanished. I could draw one of two conclusions from that, but that was for another time. ‘You going to let me in?’
He blinked two or three times before he nodded and stepped back. I brushed past him and picked up the shotgun, snapping it open to reveal a pair of birdshot cartridges and quickly ejected them to clatter on the stone flagstones.
‘Ah . . .’
‘I’m not the cops, son,’ I said, walking through into what must have passed as the living room. I’ve been in better furnished cells. Still holding the shotgun, I gingerly took a seat on a lumpy, cloth-covered mass that might once have been graced by the title sofa. ‘But if you don’t level with me you’ll be wishing I was. When was the last time you saw Gurya?’
‘She . . . Ah . . .’ He closed his eyes. Gemma had called him a loser and you could see why. One of the local farmers paid him cash to keep down his plague of rabbits and let him crash in this dump. She had also said he cared for the girl. But I needed to know what he knew and I didn’t have time for subtlety.
‘For fuck’s sake, are you too dim to string two fuckin’ words together. What did she see in the likes of you?’
That made him angry, which is what I’d intended. The tired eyes flared defiantly. ‘She loved me.’
‘Bollocks. She was going to dump you. She was going to university, where were you going?’
‘We had plans.’ He shook his head. He didn’t believe it himself. ‘No, you’re right. It wasn’t going anywhere. It would have had tae finish soon. But …’
I’d never heard so much torment expressed so eloquently in a single word. A love lost forever. The fantasy life they’d woven together never to be lived. I tried to picture them in this squalid room but my mind wasn’t up to it. Assad Ali had convinced himself he had Gurya under his control. She’d paid him back in spades.
‘When was the last time you saw her?’ I repeated, more gently this time.
‘She was here last Friday, after teatime.’
‘This was where she came when she was out walking?’ The cottage backed onto the same hill you could see from Assad Ali’s drawing room. It would have taken her maybe half an hour to reach it, twenty minutes if she hurried.
He nodded. ‘She was going to come and see me on Sunday, but she didn’t show up. Ah thought maybe she’d dinged me right enough, or maybe that bastard had twigged.’
‘That bastard?’
‘Her faither. He was a right shit.’
‘Was?’
He shrugged. ‘Is, then.’
‘So what happened to her? Where’s Gurya now?’
‘Maybe he sent her away.’
‘To Pakistan?’ I shook my head. ‘He told her he’d never force her to go.’
He snorted derisively. ‘Aye, that’s what he telt you.’
‘Maybe you killed her. Maybe you blew her away with this,’ I held up the shotgun, ‘and buried her somewhere up on the hill.’
‘Listen, pal.’ He came towards me shaking with rage, and I got ready to block the punch, but he only put his face in mine so I could smell the sourness of his breath and the stink of his unwashed clothes. ‘Since Ah found out she was missing, I’ve been up and doon that road twenty or thirty times. Ah’ve looked in every ditch and every bog, doon the river and in the woods. If you’d come tae that door ten minutes later maybe Ah widnae hae been here, eh?’ he said, eyeing the shotgun.
Like I said, some people can lie and some can’t. For the moment I was prepared to believe Donnie McLeod. ‘So where is Gurya now?’ I asked again. ‘What happened to her?’
He looked up at me and wordlessly shook his head.
On my way out I took the shotgun by the barrels and smashed it against the wall until the firing mechanism came to pieces.
CHAPTER 6
‘Are you looking for something?’ The words were polite enough but the tone was a mixture of suspicious, surly and aggressive, which was quite an achievement in one sentence. He would be in his early thirties, with a head as bald as a carefully polished cannonball, close-set, narrow eyes and a face that looked as if it had been carved from concrete by a blindfolded sculptor. You’ve seen them on the rugby field; the guys who use their skulls as battering rams. The scaffolding around the old church rattled as he dropped nimbly down the ladder and landed in front of me, a big mallet hammer held casually in one hand and a cold chisel in the other. Not threatening exactly, but ready.
I smiled, partly because I knew it would confuse him and partly because I thought it was funny that somebody I’d never met before wanted to challenge me just because I was six inches taller and looked just as tough. Sometimes your path crosses with people you’ll never get on with. This was one of those times. It happened a lot in the Army, where, rank aside, everyone had to have their place in the pecking order. Pissing contests. Top dog was usually decided in the boxing ring or during unarmed combat, but occasionally behind the barrack blocks. Glen Savage never lost a pissing contest.
The dust-coated boiler suit he wore was stretched tight across his shoulders and unbuttoned to show his hairy chest. He had forearms like hams and about twenty years on me. I still thought I could handle him.
‘Don’t let Pete bother you.’ A new voice came from my left. ‘We’ve had some tools stolen lately. Now he thinks he’s the guard dog. Pit bull, eh, Pete?’
Pete gave me a nasty little smile that said we still had some issues to work out, but he relaxed and so did I.
The newcomer stooped to emerge from the low door of the old church. ‘What can we do to help you, Mr . . .’
‘Savage. Glen Savage.’
Pete snorted. My name clearly meant something to him. Something, but not something good.
‘Mr Savage,’ the second man said slowly, and I could see his mind working behind his eyes. A thoughtful man, tall and rangy in a raggedy knitted jumper and worn jeans, I liked the way he’d used humour to defuse the awkward stand-off. He looked a little older than Pete, but it was difficult to tell because of the thick dark hair
that flopped untidily across his forehead. I tried to place his accent, which was Borders, though not too broad, but only came up with places he wasn’t from: Hawick, Selkirk or Galashiels. ‘You’ll be here about the wee lassie, then?’ he said.
I nodded, glad I didn’t have to explain. ‘I just wondered if you were working last Saturday and if you’d seen anything.’
He shook his head. ‘We were working all right, but we packed up around two. I told the police when they were round on Monday morning. She came over a couple of times to look at the chapel.’ He indicated the squat building behind him. ‘We’re doing a bit of repair work and she was interested in the story of the place.’
‘Twelfth-century, probably rebuilt in the sixteenth,’ Pete interrupted, surprising me with his knowledge and willingness to impart it.
The tall man grinned. ‘Aye, Pete’s the history buff. And a dab hand if you need a sandstone corbel in a hurry.’
I nodded my thanks and handed him one of my cards. ‘Well, if you do think of anything, give me a call . . .’ I realised I didn’t know his name.
‘Sandy Armstrong,’ he said, wiping his hand on his jeans and shaking mine. The skin of his palm felt like sandpapered cowhide and he had a grip like an industrial vice.
‘Thanks for your help, Sandy. Pete.’ I nodded.
‘Savage, eh. The psycho man. Falklands hero?’ The smile froze on my face and I wondered idly if I should break Pete’s jaw or his neck. ‘Ah was in the Black Watch. Iraq, 2003. Proper soldiers, fighting a real war. Not just a bunch of dago pansies.’
I knew a couple of dago pansies who would have torn out Pete’s rectum and made him wear it as a hat, but I took a deep breath, the way Aelish says I should, and shooed the old, volcanic Glen Savage away. ‘Good soldiers, the Black Watch. We could’ve done with them when we went down south, instead of all those boneheaded fucking Paras.’
But Pete just wasn’t having it.
‘Working for the Paki in the big hoose now, eh? Pakis are just ragheads without the towels.’
I turned and walked away. Sometimes there just isn’t any point.
CHAPTER 7
I left Assad Ali’s big house with a thousand pound a day retainer – about twice my normal rate – a guarantee of fifty thousand if I got Gurya back in one piece and a niggling feeling I’d missed something.
Aelish was out when I got home, but she’d left a note saying that one of her friends had called to take her into town. I’d brought a few of Gurya’s possessions from Chapel House, just to show Mr Ali he was getting value for money. A toy dog with big shiny button eyes and creamy brown fur worn so threadbare she must have had it since the day she was born. Her favourite jumper, a thick Arran that smelled vaguely of horses and Donnie McLeod’s cottage, not that there was much difference.
When someone’s last breath leaves them, the essence of what they are doesn’t immediately go with it. Call it a spirit, call it a soul, call it what you like, but the imprint of that person remains – a pale shadow, the last residual evidence of a life lived. If you have the gift, it can open the door to a world beyond this world, or maybe a world within this world. It is a world few inhabit for long and most are happy enough to take the next step to whatever comes after. But a few are reluctant to leave it. These are the restless and the unfulfilled, the fearful and the angry. Those whose lives have been cut exasperatingly short by the brutal act of another. In the past, Glen Savage has occasionally been invited as a guest into this world.
I took the toy and the jumper through to the study from which I dispense Savage’s virtual Elixir of Hope. It has all the usual things you’d expect: a computer that doesn’t crash too often, a colour printer-scanner and shelves of books on psychic phenomena, psychology – which is usually more useful – forensics, pathology and criminology. A single picture from my Army days: the hard-eyed Scots Guards sergeant who sailed to the South Atlantic, the half-smile a little too arrogant for his own good, but with a physical presence I still found curiously reassuring. But the single largest item in the room is something you won’t find in most offices. In fact, you won’t find it anywhere.
Over the years I’ve discovered that the possessions of the dead will only give up their secrets if the conditions are right. I also decided I needed a gimmick. That’s when I came up with the Isolation Chamber. It’s a cross between one of those one-man sleeping capsules you get in Kyoto hotels and a completely enclosed sunbed. Aelish describes it as a high-tech coffin.
It can be opened from inside or out, and it had never failed me technically, but I checked the mechanism two or three times, just in case, before I dressed in T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms and lay back in the padded interior. When I was settled, I draped Gurya Ali’s woollen jumper across my body and held her most treasured possession to my chest. The lid of the chamber closed softly over me and I allowed myself to drift towards a place just short of sleep. Solitude, stillness, calm. The chamber provides them all. The only sound was the gentle hiss of the air supply. As the ambient temperature settled to exactly two degrees above that of my body, my conscious self began to fade, to die. Mental effort is pointless. The key is to let that indefinable other sense make the contact. In centuries past, the mystics of every civilisation have sought this nirvana: the bridge between the conscious and the unconscious world, between the living and the dead. To do so they have turned to hallucinogenic drugs and dangerous herbal potions, and subjected themselves to partial suffocation, near drowning and intense pain, sometimes with fatal consequences. In the interests of research I’ve tried them all, but none comes close to the Isolation Chamber.
Each successful connection leaves me a little more faded, a little closer to those on the other side. By the time I emerged two hours later, I knew I’d failed.
But was it because Gurya Ali was still alive, or because my powers were ebbing along with Aelish’s spirit?
*
‘You look worn out, Glen.’
‘Must be old age and running after you all the time.’
Aelish laughed. We were in the room with the long picture window looking up the Tweed Valley towards Leaderfoot and Melrose, with the shadowy bulk of the Eildon Hills to our left and the big orange glow in the sky that marked the town of Galashiels to the right. If anything, she looked more tired than I did.
Her eyes turned serious. ‘Do you think you can help these people?’ She snuggled in closer and put her head on my shoulder so I could feel the bony outline of her body beneath her nightgown. The movement made me feel a little twinge in the liver that had nothing to do with the malt whisky in my hand. I kid myself morals and scruples are principles that apply only to other people, but honour and integrity were hammered into me in the Army and I can’t seem to shake them off. Anyway, if I didn’t have a conscience, Aelish has one big enough for both of us. Assad Ali’s money had seemed a life-saver, but I knew I couldn’t keep taking it unless I was certain the answer to her question was yes.
‘All I can promise is that I’ll give it my best shot.’
‘That’s good enough for me, Glen.’ She sighed and closed her eyes and I felt her drifting away.
How can one person cause such conflicting feelings? A bottomless, gut-wrenching sadness that’s a black hole at the centre of my being and, at precisely the same time, a joy so unfettered it made my mind whirl.
Aelish MacDonald is my life now. On the night we met on a Hebridean island she claims I barely noticed her. She couldn’t be more wrong. She was one of four Highland dancers entertaining the tourists to the music of a ceilidh band who made up in volume what they lacked in expertise. But there was a mystic quality about her that drew my eyes like iron filings to a magnet. She held her head erect as she danced with her eyes focused on the wall behind me, but as my gaze settled on her their focus changed, and the dark, almost purple irises locked on mine filled with a mocking glint that I realised with shock was a challenge. She told me later she had been watching me all night from behind the curtain where the performe
rs waited, but for me that first moment was like being kicked in the stomach with a steel-toed boot. I was no romantic then; I didn’t believe in love at first sight. I’d been in places in Hong Kong where the tourists don’t visit and where I did things that still make me blush to remember. But from that moment on my eyes never left hers.
It is the way of these things in the Isles that nothing is ever straightforward. When the dance ended I found myself competing for her attentions with two hairy, hulking fishermen who looked as if they had just rowed in on a Viking longship. I’m not sure what the Gaelic is for ‘fuck off’, but that was the message I got from their greeting, and, reluctantly, I readied myself to prove my manhood in a ritual that goes back to Cain and Abel. I look like a dangerous man, more so then than now, and if they had been sober, the brothers McLean might have had second thoughts about taking me on. But the whisky makes a man brave as well as foolish and they just grinned and manoeuvred into position to attack.
Scottish Gaelic can be the most beautiful language in the world; in song it has no equal, evoking the power and the solitude and the grandeur of the sea, and the sound of the wind as it whistles over a trillion grains of sand on a seven-mile beach. But it has another side, too, and I saw two grown men quail as she used it to flay them; pure scorn spat out with the rate of fire of an M60 machine gun. They left us together with the guilty look you get from a dog you’ve just caught eating your dinner, and Aelish smiled sweetly at me. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me to dance?’
She dragged me by the arm towards the small wooden space on the floor and an hour of the most exhausting exercise I’d had since leaving the Army. We whirled and whooped through the Gay Gordons, Dashing White Sergeant, Strip the Willow and a dozen other jigs and reels so energetic I truly thought my leg was going to give way again and put me back in hospital. From beginning to end her stamina never faded and she stared at me with a fierce look of pure, unadulterated joy, her fair, ponytailed hair whipping back and forth behind her. She reminded me of an otter, carving its way through a shallow pool, or a dolphin racing the prow of an ocean-going yacht. An animal in her natural element. All I could do was hang on for grim death during the fast dances, and pray that no one would notice I had two left feet as she guided me through a slow waltz.
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