LITMIR.BIZ

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she was five or six years old – but then desperation was often the most compelling teacher of foreign languages.

      ‘Who’s your brother?’ Callanach asked.

      ‘Azzat,’ she said quietly. ‘Do you know him?’

      ‘I think he’s looking for you. Are you hungry, Huznia?’ Callanach asked, lowering himself to one knee to get closer to her.

      She frowned. Good girl, Callanach thought. At least she’d been taught to be wary of strangers.

      A pair of boots appeared in his peripheral vision, scruffy, a hole in front of the big toe of one. Callanach took his time turning round to assess their owner. The boy was in his mid-teens, but his eyes were older. He was ready to fight, ready to run, ready to do whatever he had to. His clothes were in the same state as his boots, ragged and ill-fitting. Stolen or hand-me-downs. His face and hands were bruised, and darkened with the sort of dirt you couldn’t really shift without soap. He and his sister were obviously living rough.

      ‘Leave her alone,’ the boy said. His French was fluent, not just the words but the accent, impressive for a second language.

      ‘I’m not going to hurt your sister,’ Callanach told him. ‘I’m not here for you, but I have some questions about the body that was left at the building site. Do you know about that?’

      ‘Huznia, come to me,’ he said.

      Callanach took a few notes from his pocket and held them where the little girl could see them.

      ‘Your sister’s hungry,’ Callanach said. ‘And she needs new clothes. I just want some information.’

      ‘We don’t need your money,’ Azzat said. ‘We’re fine. Now get out of the way and let my sister get by.’

      ‘I’m not going to stop her from getting to you. You have nothing to fear from me. We’re just talking.’

      A police car roared into view. Azzat pushed forward, grabbed his sister by the arm and began pulling her out from between bin bags.

      ‘But I am hungry!’ she whined.

      ‘I’ll get you food,’ Azzat said.

      Callanach stepped aside to let them get past him. ‘Where are you from originally?’ he asked.

      ‘Afghanistan,’ Huznia said. ‘Do you have food in your pockets?’

      Callanach passed her a twenty-euro note, keeping another in his hand but on show. Other police officers were approaching cautiously.

      ‘Do you live near here?’ The two children stared at one another. ‘All right. You don’t have to tell me. Take my card, though. Keep it. I need to find out who brought the body that was found in this building site. Call me if you know anything. Maybe I can help you.’

      ‘You’ll take my sister away from me!’

      ‘Will he?’ Huznia cried.

      ‘No, I won’t. And I won’t let anyone else either. I can see how much you love each other.’ Callanach held a hand up to the approaching officers, keeping them at bay some twenty metres away. ‘Take this money, buy some food and make sure you have somewhere safe to stay. If you get in trouble, call me.’

      Azzat snatched away the cash and the card, shoving them in his pocket as he and his sister began to run.

      ‘Huznia, don’t let him throw my card away,’ Callanach shouted after them.

      The girl looked back, gave a half wave, then they were gone down an alley that was no more than a crack between buildings.

      Callanach supposed he should have called family services and had them taken to a children’s shelter. There was obviously no adult caring for them. They were skinny and unkempt. But there was every chance they’d be separated. It was difficult housing a young girl with a teenage boy. The psychological damage done by separating dependent siblings was enormous. They would get lost inside a system that did its best, but which too often left children sitting in the dirt at the bottom of life’s slide. The truth was that maybe they were happier living rough, but together.

      ‘Why didn’t you bring him in?’ Jean-Paul demanded from behind him. Callanach turned round. His colleague was holding a gauze pad to a bleeding wound on his head, and looking shaken.

      ‘He wouldn’t have told us anything,’ Callanach replied.

      ‘He might have, if he’d thought the alternative was having his sister taken away,’ Jean-Paul said, tossing the gauze into a skip and setting his free hands on his hips.

      ‘I wasn’t prepared to do that.’

      ‘Yeah, well lucky for you, you’re not the person who’s going to have to explain to Malcolm Reilly’s parents how he died. Did you go soft in Scotland?’

      ‘Maybe I just grew up a bit,’ Callanach said quietly, wondering where Ava was at that moment, part of him wishing he could have been with her to give the news to Malcolm Reilly’s family, and the other part equally glad he wasn’t.

       Chapter Seven

      Bart woke up feeling sick, rolling dramatically to his left and smashing his face against the wall. Metal screeched and the world shifted around him, tilting forwards then back, until he lurched for the ring in the centre of the floor and held tight. The feeling of movement wasn’t new. His world had been unstable since he’d first awoken, but this was something different. Almost – although he told himself it was the lack of fresh water and decent food making him delusional – like flying.

      The box he was trapped in shifted again, and this time there was a different noise. Whistling, a gust, then a spinning turn. He gripped his stomach, wishing it would stop. It was a desperate thing to have become resigned to dying alone in what amounted to little more than a cell. The air stank from the bucket he’d had no choice but to fill, avoiding the overflow where it had tipped twice during the journey. Despite turning off the electric lamp for increasingly lengthy periods whenever his sanity could stand it, the battery was fading now. Alone in the dark, cold and starving, at least fear had deserted him too. There was nothing with him in the dark that could hurt him more than his own imagination, and he had conquered that. For the briefest of periods he had managed to meditate, sitting upright, blanket wrapped around his stiff body, breathing in a rhythm with his heartbeat, imagining sitting on a beach at sunset, listening to the waves. Just the waves. Letting nothing else in. It was a neat trick when you learned to do it well. Having an ex-girlfriend who’d been training to become a yoga instructor had helped. The effects just didn’t last very long.

      His ribcage protested as a huge crash beneath his prone body reverberated through him. Bart realised the sensation of flying hadn’t been a product of his nutritionally starved mind. Whatever container he was in had been moving through the air. No more, though. All movement, the sense of rocking, had ceased. New noises invaded his space, muffled and distant, but there were definitely voices blended in with the mechanical din beyond his walls.

      Bart stood up, listened, strode towards a wall and took a deep breath. Hammering on the wall he began to shout. He bolstered the noise of his fists with one foot. When that was bloody and raw, he used a knee instead. Nothing. No response. Letting his fists rest – by now his hands resembled a cage fighter’s – he took the strain with his forehead. Unfamiliar with the art of giving a Glaswegian kiss, Bart didn’t let himself be deterred. He headbutted the wall as if his life depended on it, mainly because by then he’d realised that it did. He would die inside that box if something didn’t happen soon. Slamming his forehead into the wall three, four, five times, he went reeling backwards, losing his balance and ending up back on the floor. On his knees, he went for the wall again. The electric lantern finally gave up the ghost. In the perfect dark he hammered, shouting, yelling, screaming, until his voice was nothing more than a whisper. Then an engine started up and everything started moving again. Bart lay down and let defeat shrivel him into

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