“Have you heard of the 206?” I asked, and the neurosurgeon tutted and said yes, such a tragic waste. Waste of lives. Waste of dreams. Waste of… everything, really.
“These days, we offer solutions for everything,” she agreed. “Including things that don’t really need fixing.”
That morning, the snow fell harder, and they were delighted at this turn of events, and strapped on their best walking boots and went out, hand in hand, towards the edge of the lake.
I waved them off, and drove on towards Perth.
A month became two.
The press lost interest in the case of the 206, every detail chewed over, every image inflated and analysed.
“Disturbing scenes,” said the report, “do not look if of a gentle disposition” and hello, yes please, here we are looking yum yum yum.
Filipa was confined to a mental institution, then almost immediately freed, then confined again. So were a few other survivors.
“It is clear that these individuals were not in their right mind, when they perpetrated these bloody acts,” said a legal expert, drafted in from the University of Bologna. “The question seems clear — were it not that the 206 had chosen to have their brain chemistry altered. Does this choice render them culpable? This is what the lawyers will be arguing…”
A quick piece of mathematics.
Five lawyers to a legal team, £200 an hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, a year of trial — £2,080,000 per annum in legal costs, if you were lucky. Legend said the defence team for O. J. Simpson were on $20,000 a day.
Average monthly wage in:
• USA $3,263
• Turkey $1,731
• Kazahkstan $753
• India $295
• Pakistan $255
GDPs, according to the International Monetary Fund:
• Gambia: $850,000,000
• Djibouti: $1,457,000,000
• Apple Inc.: $182,795,000,000
Funds donated to combating the Ebola outbreak of 2014 — 15:
• United States: £466,000,000
• World Bank: £248,000,000
• African Development Bank: £91,000,000
• Germany: £81,000,000
• Gates Foundation: £31,000,000
• China: £20,000,000
• Mark Zuckerburg: £16,000,000
I turned on the radio.
“Hey Macarena!”
Drove on, into the night.
Chapter 103
On my third month driving through Scotland, and on my thirteenth stolen car, I caught the ferry from Ullapool to Stornaway, stood on the back deck and smelt spring, salt, petrol fumes and cheap beer, watched the land pull away behind the ship, felt the wind tear at my hair, and it was
good.
No anger, no frustration, merely the open sea.
In Stornoway (population 9,000; football teams Stornoway Athletic vs. Stornoway United, rivals to the crown) I walked the two hundred metres from the ferry port to the first optician, opened the door to the little jangling of a bell, pulled out my crumpled picture of Byron, her spectacles and my police badge and said, “I’m looking for…”
“Mrs MacAuley, aye!”
The optician, a cheerful man with white hairs around his chin and eyebrows that stuck out from his face like two grey umbrellas, sheltering his eyes from rain and sun, stared at me in my silence, eyes wide and face curious, a man not used to strangers, let alone Lothian Police so far from home.
The quiet stretched between us, a long, long while, until at last he blurted, “Are you dead or what?”
“Excuse me one moment,” I said, and walked out of his shop.
I paced round the block, counted to one hundred, then marched back in and tried again, police badge in hand.
“Hello,” I said. “I’m looking for Mrs MacAuley.”
“Aye,” he replied, staring again, friendly, curious, meeting me for the very first time. “She comes in here to get her prescription.”
I held out my police badge. “I’m investigating identity fraud,” I said. “We think Mrs MacAuley might have been a victim.”
“You’re a long way from home.”
“The investigation is large. The thieves have been travelling far. Some of their victims may not even know they’ve been targeted, their details used in crimes.”
“What manner of crimes?”
“Insurance scams, mostly.”
“And you say she might be a victim? Why would anyone want to steal Mrs MacAuley’s identity?” Not denial, not rejection of my premise — merely a man who spent a lot of time alone in a shop, talking to himself, now talking out loud, musing over a dilemma.
“Can you help me find her?” I asked. “Do you know where she lives?”
“Oh sure, I’ve got the address somewhere round here.”
He opened up a screen on a computer, an ancient, chugging thing whose buffer, as you typed, struggled to form words.
“Here — it’s a bit of a drive, you know where you’re going?”
“I can find it.”
“I wouldn’t trust your phone, if that’s what you’re thinking. Don’t have much of a signal out here.”
“I’ve got a map,” I replied, copying down the address. “I’ll be fine.”
“Good luck to you, then.”
“Thank you.”
And there: she was found.
Chapter 104
I drive as one in a dream.
I can’t decide: is this land beautiful, or is it bleak? Is bleak beautiful?
Grey stone juts from the thin green grass, poking into a grey sky.
A withered tree, bent sideways by the wind, sweeps clawed fingertips of black twig out towards a tuft of brown, scratching grass that grows on nothingness.
Pylons runs along the brow of a shallow hill.
The water from a pond, or pool, or from a nameless protuberance of water that changes so often with the seasons that no one has bothered to name it, spills onto the road, flooding it to half the depth of my tyres. I drive through slowly, listening to the sloshing around my wheels, and pick up speed again on the other side, heading towards the beacon of an abandoned croft.
Flatness, greyness, emptiness. Sometimes the land rises sharply, then sinks almost as fast. Most of the time it is washed smooth by water, flecked with salt that has thrown itself inland like Poseidon’s buckets.
Stones fallen from the hills, how did they get there? Sharp teeth of white, like a cathedral cracked by thunder, sitting growing yellow moss, from nowhere, of nowhere.
A cottage in the shape of a beehive, no road to its door, no power to it either, looking down towards a loch, the mouth of the bay where it hits the sea, brown with mud and sand.
Is this place beautiful?
Is it the end of the world?
As night falls, I take refuge in a farmhouse, the number given me by the woman who sold me a meat pie (what kind of meat? — no, forget I asked) from a van parked on the side of the road.
Do you get much custom? I asked.
People come to find me, she replied, as the radio blared behind her.
Do you know where I can stay tonight?
Try the MacKenzies, she replied. They’ve got a spare room.
The room was £10 for the night, and the lady of the farm gave me an extra blanket, “as you’re probably not used to the cold”.
A spider wove patiently in the corner of my room, so used to solitude that it couldn’t process the presence of a human in its den. I ducked under the door of the bathroom, sat on the toilet and stared at a sampler on the wall which declared:
AND THESE SHALL GO AWAY INTO EVERLASTING PUNISHMENT: BUT THE RIGHTEOUS INTO LIFE ETERNAL.