Borrowed Light (2 page)

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 jottings of a stranger passing by, a voice he couldn’t recognise, and as his grip on reality slackened
he sensed that he was becoming a spectator at the feast of his own undoing. Stuff was happening – puzzling stuff, troubling
stuff – and he hadn’t the first idea what to do about it. Should he return to the doctor and ask for medication, some magic
pill that would bring his world back into focus? Or should he drive over to Major Crime, knock on DCI Parsons’ door and plead
insanity? He simply didn’t know.

Then came the morning when he woke to find blood all over the pillow, Hanif’s blood, still warm from the accident. Propped
on one elbow, aghast, he tried to reach for Gabrielle to tell her what had happened, but Gabrielle wasn’t there. Worse still,
when his gaze returned to the pillow, the blood had gone.

‘Mad,’ he whispered to himself, slipping deeper under the duvet.

The dreams, if dreams they were, got worse. He was back in the hospital in El Arish, trying to explain to an old man with
no head that everything would be OK. Then, inexplicably, he was crouched in a hide beside the Dead Sea, his binos steadied
on the body of a child. A pair of crows stalked around, occasionally pecking at the child’s eyes. Images like these awaited
him night after night. And the best part of a bottle of Côtes-du-Rhône simply made them worse.

Finally, the morning he was due to return to work, his mobile rang. He was groggy, exhausted, wiped out by another night with
his demons. Gabrielle, he thought at once.

‘Boss? Is that you?’ It was D/S Jimmy Suttle. Something horrible had kicked off on the Isle of Wight.