Intrusion

15. The Stornoway Run

Hugh cycled to work as usual, in a cheerful mood. Last night the hot rush of his anger and protectiveness had turned Hope on, and she’d dragged him off to bed almost before he was ready, and they’d had hotter sex than they’d had for a while. Every so often his mind went back to it with a reminiscent smile.

The weather was sunny and not too warm. The leaves and grass along his route had a gloss to their green. As he whizzed along Camden’s back streets and canal banks and along the edge of Regent’s Park he sometimes glimpsed the whole scene as a vast, broken woodland, the forest of London. It was like when as a lad he’d seen from the hilltop how the landscape of Lewis wasn’t moor and field and bog with outcrops of rock, but a gnarly mass of rock with a thin overlay of peaty soil. The vision of the city as a forest uplifted him. It was almost utopian, and within it he felt the bike’s smooth engineered wooden frame and handlebars as an extension of himself.

On top of that elation, he was cheerful because the Ealing job was about to finish. The timing had worked out well, right to the half-day – he only had a morning’s work left. Ashid still had work to do, and Hugh had a waiting list of clients for renovation work, so he could easily have stuck around, just up the street. But at noon today he’d get his cash in hand, and tell Ashid he was taking a short holiday.

He also felt cheerful about leaving London for Lewis. The reason was one he could have done without. But if you looked at it the right way, it appeared positive. He didn’t care what Hope decided. He just wanted her to make her own decision, without social services and the Health Centre breathing down her neck. He’d never understood her objection to the fix. It annoyed him sometimes. That, he now realised, was one reason why he felt so cheerful. One way or another the matter was going to be resolved.

‘You see the future,’ Hope had told him, in a mutually exhausted moment last night. Then she’d explained. Tachyons and rhodopsin, good grief. Just as well she hadn’t brought that up in her latest confrontation with Fiona Donnelly! A gene for hallucinations – now that would have convinced Donnelly to back off! Aye, right. Even if there was anything to it, there was no way he was seeing the future. What sort of future had barbarians in it? If he was seeing anything real, it was people from the Dark Ages. Far more likely he was… maybe not seeing things – meaning, seeing not things but figments – he was convinced there was something objective behind it, though not necessarily what he saw. Which, to any outside observer, meant hallucinations. He was glad Hope had more sense than that science girl, Geena. Strange woman. There had been something odd about her intensity. Something she wasn’t letting on. She hadn’t told him why she was so interested. That query had been diverted by the stuff about police stops, at the end. More emotional than you’d expect.

Hugh made the connection with what Hope had told him about what Fiona had said so abruptly that he almost lost control of the bike. Geena had recently been questioned about Naxals. Of course, of course! And it hadn’t been one of the usual stops, the ones that she and Ashid had shared a nervous laugh about. She’d probably been hauled into the back of a van. She might even have been tortured. No wonder she was upset!

No wonder, also, that she had such a strong interest in their case. It went beyond the kind of curiosity that made sense for someone in her academic field – well beyond. Hugh thought he could understand why. For her it would be a kind of revenge on the state. A revenge of the weak, underhand and indirect, and therefore all the more dangerous and unpredictable.

That meant he had to be wary. For one thing, Geena might be using him, though he couldn’t see how. She might have been radicalised by her experience, and actually become a Naxal sympathiser herself. It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing had happened, not by a long chalk. For another, the state’s surveillance system might be even more sensitised to her than Fiona Donnelly’s demonstration had suggested.

Hugh already had a travel plan. It had come to him the moment he’d decided they had to leave. Now he had to complicate it a little.

At noon Hugh pocketed a few thousand pounds from the house developer, said goodbye to Ashid and wheeled his bike up the road towards Ealing Broadway. He selected a quiet alley between two boarded-up houses, took out his phone and called his father.

‘Oh, hello, Usdean,’ his father said. He sounded as if he was chewing something, then swallowing. Probably caught having his lunch. He was obviously outdoors. Hugh could hear the wind past the mike. ‘How’s things?’

‘Oh, fine, fine,’ said Hugh. ‘You and Mam?’

‘Bearing up, bearing up. What brings you to break radio silence?’

‘Och, Dad, it’s only been two weeks since—’

‘Yeah, yeah, just winding you up.’

‘Anyway, seeing as you ask, me and Hope and the boy were thinking of popping up to stay for a bit, if that’s OK.’

‘OK? It’s brilliant! When can we expect you?’

‘Maybe tomorrow or the day after? Thing is, we decided at the last minute, kind of, and just to save a wee bit of dosh on a non-advance fare we thought we’d hook a lift on a—’

‘Oh, sure, the Stornoway run. Give me a minute or ten, and I’ll tab you a code then fix a pick-up. Mid-evening suit you?’

‘Anything after, uh, eight or so.’

‘Aye, fine, no bother at all. Most of the overnight rigs pull out at ten, so you’ve got plenty of time.’

‘Ah, thanks, Dad.’

‘Just give us a bell when you’re on your way.’

‘Will do. See you soon.’

‘If we’re spared.’

And with a dark chuckle at that dour caveat he rang off.

Hugh stuck the phone in his pocket, mounted his bike, rode to the junction and turned left into Ealing Broadway. He rode west, through Hanwell, where he had to dodge goats, children, and driver-controlled motor vehicles, and into Southall, a welcome relief of neatness, colour and neon, its streets purring with bikes and autopilot electrics. The pavements bustled with men in suits or drab cotton salwar kameez, women in bright silk salwar kameez or saris. The only jarring note was the police presence. Hugh could see two foot patrols along the high street at a glance, and he could imagine the drone patrols he couldn’t see overhead. The borough hadn’t suffered the tidal wash of population, in and out, that its neighbours had over the past decades. It had remained a solid, respectable place, its only problem being that most of its population had Indian roots and continuing connections – business, political and personal. This made them doubly suspect: linked with the other side in the Warm War, and at high risk (as the phrase went) of recruitment or radicalisation by the enemy of both sides, the Naxals. The feeling of being watched from above tensed the back of Hugh’s neck.

A flicker of shadow passed over him. He glanced up, and saw a hang-glider about sixty metres overhead, its flight path along the line of the street. It seemed far too low, an emergency landing or a collision with a rooftop inevitable. Hugh glanced in his mirror, stuck out his left arm and pulled in to the side of the road, putting one foot down on the pavement. The hang-glider, now about a hundred metres further on and five metres lower down, wheeled, soared as if on a thermal updraught, and flew back towards him. Nobody else – not even the pair of cops a block away and almost beneath its path – took any notice of it. As it approached, Hugh clearly saw its frame of struts, like the finger bones of a bat, and the pilot’s blue face and fur waistcoat and boots. The eyes were goggled, but Hugh felt their gaze meet his for a split second as the glider passed above him. His head whipped around. The glider banked, vanishing over the rooftops.

Hugh looked around again. No one had noticed, though one or two people on the pavement were giving him puzzled glances. As he checked over his shoulder for traffic before pulling out into the road again, he saw out of the corner of his eye another flying object, this time moving across his line of sight. His gaze locked on to it and he felt his mouth open. Moving through the air, not far above the rooftops, from one side of the street to the other, was a contraption so weird that it was as if his brain was telling him that both it and the hang-glider were definitely hallucinations. It was a small airship, its glistening balloon distended in odd places like some enormous inflated pig’s bladder. The gondola slung beneath it was quite clearly a longboat made from cured animal skins stretched over a wooden frame. Three men, in hooded robes like those of monks, sat one behind the other in it, laboriously propelling it across the sky with long sweeps of what looked like elongated fans mounted on poles, which they moved like oars.

Hugh watched it out of sight, shook his head as if to clear it, blinked, then cycled on until he spotted an electronics shop. He pulled over, locked the bike to a lamp post and went in. A bright, cluttered cave, most of whose customers at this time of day were smartly uniformed schoolchildren on their lunch hour. Hugh bought the cheapest and most breakable (in every sense) computer he could find, and made a point of paying by cash. Ten minutes later he sat down in a café with a tall glass of lassi and a bowl of saag paneer, for which he paid by cash, and used the new computer to check out flights east. After a good quarter-hour of poking around, he made a provisional booking for three seats on a flight the following morning from Gatwick to Prague, putting down a non-returnable deposit of two hundred pounds from his bank account.

As he stood up and shifted the empty glass and bowl on to a tray, the edge of the tray nudged the computer off the table. When he picked it up, the screen was cracked, the resolution clouded.

He muttered under his breath, laid the broken device on the tray, and returned the tray to the counter.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as he handed it across, with an indicative downward glance. ‘Could you dispose of the computer for me? Piece of junk.’

‘No problem,’ said the guy behind the counter. He took the computer off the tray, placed it under the counter, and put the tray with the dishes on the rack behind him. ‘I’ll recycle it later. Have a nice day!’

‘You too. And thanks. Good afternoon,’ said Hugh, and left.

He unlocked the bike, wheeled it across the street, mounted and set off for home. As he rode, he wondered if he’d done enough. If he was under heavy surveillance – no. But otherwise, if it was all still being neural-networked by the bots, one travel plan would be flagged as real, and one as a laughably obvious diversion. The trouble was, he had no idea which.

It was a summer evening like one of those Auden had imagined for after the revolution, with light traffic and loud sound systems standing in for the bicycle races and exploding poets. Hope walked along East West Road with her guitar in its case slung from her shoulder. A big backpack, with smaller bags stacked perilously on top, was strapped to a collapsible two-wheeled trolley, which she trundled in front of her. Hugh, with a frame rucksack on his back, led the way. Nick, with Max on his shoulders and carrying a token knapsack, scampered alongside him.

The lowering sun was getting in her eyes a bit, so she had her glasses on. Local situation reports, summarised from police radio chatter, social and mass media, and radio-station call-ins, scrolled in the bottom left-hand corner of her shaded vision. Nothing much was happening: a traffic snarl-up at Highbury Fields, a street scuffle out in Muswell Hill. In the bottom right corner a black app, patched from Hugh’s phone, traced the slow progress of the truck on which Hugh had hooked a lift. Right now, it was negotiating the one-way system at King’s Cross. With Holloway Road about ten minutes’ walk away, they were in good time to meet it.

The trolley wheels juddered and bumped on the uneven pavement, each jolt giving Hope a split-second advance warning of where to place her heel, and each lurch making her grab for one of the upper bags. It didn’t seem right that at this time in history, cracked and tilted flagstones should be a nuisance, but icy winters and rainy summers did their work regardless: freezing and erosion, two of the implacable processes that James Hutton had, with a wild surmise that had led him to search for and find the rocks that demonstrated it, held to account for the whole history of the Earth. No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end…

A bag slithered. Hope caught it and stopped to sling it and another two awkwardly on her shoulders, and pressed on with a surer step. She must, she thought, look a bit oppressed, trudging along like this behind the men of the house. In this instance she preferred walking behind, because it let her keep an eye on them.

Minute yellow flowers drifted down from a tree she passed under, around which a peculiar smell, like honeysuckle but with a sharper, almost aniseed note, hung like a vapour. The flowers, or perhaps floating seeds, looked like tiny cogwheels. It bothered her that she didn’t know enough to identify them as natural or synthetic. If for any reason she never returned from this flight, or holiday, or adventure, she would always regret not having done more with the back garden. She’d planted a few rose bushes and a clump of sunflowers, but most of her effort in the garden had been a holding action against its return to the Thames Basin’s local version of the climax community, slightly contaminated by stray syn bio weeds.

Her mind returned to what Hutton saw, the slow cycle of erosion and uplift, and she found herself wondering about whether it might be possible to tell if Hugh’s visions showed the past or the future, according to whether or not synthetic biology plants featured in what he saw. It needn’t even be in the landscape, in the visible biota. It could be some scrap or trace in a garment, a tool or a jewel. A whole new discipline rose in Hope’s imagination: psychochronobotany.

She laughed, and hurried on forward to where Nick and Hugh stood at the corner of Holloway Road, waiting to cross, silhouetted against the sunset sky.

The lorry came up Holloway Road, quiet on big fat tyres, a cab up front and a long container trailer behind. When it was about a hundred metres away, Hope watched its icon on her glasses brighten and begin to flash. Hugh stepped forward, waving his phone like a hitch-hiker. The truck slowed, indicated, and pulled in as close to the side of the road as it could get, the cab just beside the waiting family.

Hugh’s thumb twitched on his phone, and the side door of the cab swung open. He scrambled up the ladder, hauling his backpack, then turned around and reached out for Nick as Hope handed him up. Hope passed up her guitar and bags, folded the trolley, and climbed into the cab. Hugh was in the driver’s seat, Nick in the middle, both strapped in. She reached to slam the door, but it swung slowly shut by itself, closing with a muffled thump and a firm snick, like a bank vault.

‘Buckle up, Mum,’ said Nick, as if trying to sound grown-up. His voice piped a little. It wasn’t often he’d even been in a vehicle, other than a bus. Hope tousled his hair and fixed her lap-and-diagonal strap, settled in, and gave the thumbs-up. Hugh grinned, tapped on his phone, and sat back. The indicator light on the dash flashed, the gear changed from neutral to first, the engine rumbled, and the brakes relaxed with a loud hiss. The lorry pulled out and joined the stream of traffic, up the incline and under the bridge.

Hugh sat back, hands clasped behind his head, obviously tempted to put his feet on the dash. Nick’s gaze switched back and forth from the buildings and traffic to the movements of the gear stick and steering wheel.

‘It’s like there’s an invisible man driving,’ he said.

‘Oh, that’s good,’ said Hope. ‘It’s called the automatic driver, or drone driver, and it kind of is like an invisible man, but it’s a program in the lorry’s computer.’

‘I know that,’ said Nick, scornfully. He patted the toy monkey on his lap. ‘I was just explaining to Max. I don’t think Max understands AIs.’

‘Oh, I’m sure he does,’ said Hugh. ‘You just have to explain it to him in very simple terms.’

Which, for the next five kilometres or so, Nick did.

Hope woke from a doze. Black road, white lines, blue signs. Bioluminescent trees lined the motorway, the light they cast easily visible because the lorry’s headlights weren’t on – they didn’t need to be, except when behind a human-driven vehicle, and there were none such in the two lanes reserved for vehicles on autopilot.

‘Where are we?’ she asked, stretching her legs and wiggling her shoulders.

‘Halfway up the M1,’ said Hugh.

‘Nick should be—’

‘He is,’ said Hugh. ‘There’s a wee bunk in the back. He’s even in his PJs.’

‘Good for you. What have you been doing?’

‘Reading. Staring out the window.’

‘Are we going to pull off any time soon? I need a pee.’

‘There’s a perfectly good toilet in the back,’ Hugh pointed out.

When she returned, she took her boots off and tilted her seat back.

‘There’s a coffee machine and everything, a regular wee galley. It’s sort of mad, all the comforts for a driver who nine times out of ten won’t be there.’

Hugh rubbed his eyebrows, yawned. ‘Economies of scale. You couldn’t drive like this in Turkey.’

‘Uh-huh.’

Hope gazed out of the window again. The truck sometimes overtook other vehicles – buses, usually, with a bored driver, there only as reassurance, dozing or reading in the front seat – or was overtaken itself. Looking into the empty cabs as they drew level was a little unnerving, and those which, like theirs, contained people dozing or chatting even more so. There didn’t seem to be any pattern to the overtaking, the slowing and accelerating, but there was a rhythm. The drone-driven vehicles had no speed limit, and generally moved at over a hundred miles an hour, but she always had the feeling there was a safe distance between them – shorter than the human safe distance, because of the machines’ reaction time. At one point they passed through a heavy shower of rain, and the windscreen wipers didn’t come on until Hugh, with an irritated gesture, flicked the lever. Hope found some reassurance in the steady whump.

She dozed. After a while, a shift in the engine’s note and a sway to the side woke her up, as the lorry pulled off for a service area. It rolled, with perfect timing, into a vacant slot by a row of fuel pumps. The moment the engine stopped, she heard clangs and bumps from behind, followed by the throb of the pump and the sound of flowing liquid. The same process was being carried out on the trucks in front, the hoses and nozzles moving like hand-puppet snakes.

As the lorry pulled out and before it headed for the exit ramp, Hugh waved his phone.

‘Want to stop for a bit, stretch your legs?’

Hope grimaced. ‘Kind of, but I’d rather not disturb Nick. Besides, I just wouldn’t feel safe, I’d be nervous of the lorry going off without us.’

‘Couldn’t happen,’ said Hugh.

‘You know how it is.’

‘Yeah.’

Back on the motorway, Hope put her glasses on and, feeling like she was being just a bit obsessive-compulsive, checked in to the house wifi. Everything seemed to be in order: burglar alarm armed, the deadbolts in place, blinds down for the night, cameras all showing empty rooms. The bathroom light went on, then off, which startled her for a moment but made sense as part of the programme to make the flat look occupied. Her vision flitted from camera to camera like a ghost. The tap in the kitchen sink was dripping. She could see each drop gather, glistening in a stray street-light gleam past the edge of the front blinds, and after a second or two plop into the sink, then the next would begin to form. Drip, drip, drip.

She blinked hard and shook her head at that. She could hear the drips. Now that she noticed, she could hear sounds from all over the house and outside – boards creaking, cars passing, a dog barking. All very faint in the earpieces, and she might not have noticed them above the motorway noise and the truck’s engine note, if it hadn’t been for that drip.

Hugh was gazing out of the window, watching the traffic and the road as intently as if he were actually driving. Hope found herself hesitating to break his concentration, then shook off the illusion.

‘Hugh?’

‘Yes?’ He didn’t look bothered at all. Maybe he’d just been bored.

‘Do the house cameras record sound?’

‘What? I’m not sure. Never bothered to check, actually.’

‘Well, they do.’

‘Oh,’ said Hugh. ‘How did you find out?’

She told him. He fired up his own phone, put in an earpiece and looked at the screen. She could see the dark rooms flick by, one by one.

‘So they do. Hang on.’ He frowned, and poked about on his screen. ‘Oh yes. Here it is. Homebase catalogue.’ Flick, flick, flick of his thumbs. ‘Home security products. Cameras. Got it. Oh yeah, there it is. “Also records sound with piezoelectric module in shaft.” Talk about small print.’

‘Oh well,’ said Hope. ‘So much for putting my hand over my mouth that night.’

‘So that’s why you were doing it? I did wonder.’ He laughed. ‘That wasn’t the only sounds they must have picked up, eh?’

Hope smiled. ‘What can I say?’

‘Look,’ said Hugh, in that irritating male tone of patient explanation, ‘the whole point of having cameras in the house – apart from making burglars wear masks, I guess – is to have a record if you ever get accused of some kind of domestic violence or… you know. Nobody but us can see them without a warrant. If it comes to the cops checking our cameras we’re in the shit anyway. And we’re not.’

‘That’s reassuring.’

Hugh seemed to take this literally. He nodded and went back to gazing at the road.

Hope now felt a bit paranoid. She ran a search for any references to herself. None were current. The argument about the implications of the Kasrani case that had started the whole trouble had dropped far down the list of threads on ParentsNet, and only cropped up here and there on legal sites whose jargon she found impenetrable. She wished she had access to her own personal profile. Fiona, as a relevant professional, could look at any time at Hope’s ever-evolving profile, but Hope, as its subject, couldn’t. For sure it would be evolving now: unconventional though their mode of transport was, it wasn’t quite illegal, although no doubt Hugh’s father had cut a few corners setting it up. They hadn’t made any attempt at concealment – for people like themselves, as opposed to professional criminals, spies and the like, such attempts were foredoomed to be worse than useless – so the cameras and face-recognition software and all the rest of the surveillance systems were right now aware, at some level, of their location and destination. Her glasses, and Hugh’s phone, were in themselves quite enough to pinpoint their location to the nearest metre. The only precaution they’d taken was to block calls from Maya or from Geena, to prevent at least these dots being joined to them again. The outstanding question was whether the priority algorithms thought Hope and Hugh’s actions significant enough to call for human attention, and intervention.

Probably not, Hope thought, though she kept a wary eye on police vehicles in the fast lanes until she fell asleep, to dream of shining lines connecting dots.

She woke to dawn, and Scotland. Hugh was in the back. He came through with two paper cups of coffee.

‘Mmm,’ said Hope. ‘Thanks.’

She stared out, bleary-eyed, feeling stiff and sticky. They were just past Berwick-upon-Tweed. Low, rolling hills to the left looked rugged and high after most of England. To the right, she caught glimpses of cliffs and the North Sea. Hugh sipped, while thumbing rapidly on his phone.

‘Done,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Cancelled our flight to Prague.’

‘What?’

‘More than twelve hours’ notice, so I’ve kept the penalty down to the deposit.’

He looked pleased with himself.

‘What flight?’

He hadn’t told her. He did now.

‘I’m not sure how clever that was,’ Hope said. ‘It looks exactly like an attempt at a diversion.’

‘Well, it worked, didn’t it?’ Hugh waved an arm. ‘We’re in Scotland!’

‘Maybe you could ask Nick to repeat that explanation he gave Max last night. About how artificial intelligence works. Because you bloody need it!’

Hugh shrugged. ‘Aw, come on.’

‘How much was the deposit, anyway?’

‘Two hundred quid. Think of it as the fare for this journey, and it’s a saving on the bus or the train.’

‘Think of it any other way, and it’s a waste.’

‘Peace of mind, then. Insurance.’

‘Hmph!’

Hugh leaned over. ‘Come on. Good-morning kiss?’

She had to smile. ‘All right.’

Nick emerged from the back of the cab and climbed on Hope’s lap.

‘I’m hungry, and Max needs recharging.’

‘Good morning to you, too.’

Something between a shrug and a squirm.

‘Ah, come on, let’s sort you out.’

Hope went into the back of the cab and got Nick washed – or wiped, anyway – and into his clothes. While he went into the front to sit in her seat, Hope washed her own face and changed her underwear and pulled on a fresh shirt. Back in the front, sitting in the middle, she even found a way to recharge Max, from a socket marked mysteriously with a symbol for a lit cigarette. After a while, the Firth of Forth swung into view, then disappeared and appeared again, then vanished entirely as they hit the city bypass. Hugh tapped on his phone so that they pulled off just south of the Forth Road Bridge, and rolled into the lorry park of a McDonald’s.

Hugh looked over at Hope.

‘Now… sure you’re not nervous about leaving the cab?’

‘Yes, I am, but I’m a bit more willing to risk it in daylight. It’s not like we’re in the middle of the night and the middle of the motorway. Anyway, hunger rules right now.’

‘Don’t it just.’

They stretched their legs, had McBreakfast, bought drinks and snacks for the rest of the journey, and piled back into the cab, hands overloaded, laughing.

As they crossed the Road Bridge, the biotech towers of Grangemouth glittered to the left, and the Forth Rail Bridge and the vast array of tall windmills decommissioned but not yet dismantled on the horizon beyond it loomed to the right. Nick couldn’t decide what to look at, and compromised by surging from one side of the cab to the other.

‘And what’s that thing out there?’ he asked, pointing across Hugh, to the right, at a derelict platform in the middle of the Firth just beyond the Rail Bridge.

‘It’s a place where they used to fill up the oil tankers,’ said Hugh.

‘What’s oil tankers?’

That explanation kept Nick occupied most of the way to Perth. A junction ahead offered one route to the north, the other to the west. Just before the choice had to be made, Hugh’s hands hesitated over the steering wheel; then he shrugged and sat back. So the vehicle stayed on automatic, all the way up the M90 to Inverness. It took about an hour and a half. A long, slow ascent, it felt like, then a descent so fast it made your ears pop, like in an aeroplane. Along the way, Hope felt almost oppressed by the sheer density of New Trees and other plantations that pressed close to the sides of the motorway, for most of the time masking all the scenery except the windmills. Beyond Pitlochry they were in the Cairngorms National Park, from which synthetic organisms were excluded. Here, the view opened out, and natural trees and heather did losing battle with flash-flood erosion. Snow patches shone on summits and lurked in shadowed corries.

‘I’ve heard it said,’ Hugh told her, looking straight ahead at the road, ‘that up near one of these summits there’s a wee stretch of burn that stays frozen all through the year.’

‘A tiny glacier!’

‘Exactly. And it gets a bit less tiny every year.’

‘That would be big news, if it’s true. So why haven’t I heard?’

Hugh shrugged. ‘It’s a rumour. And the rest of the rumour – wouldn’t you just know it? – is that it’s kept secret. The place is supposed to be in an area of the park that’s strictly off limits, to keep nesting eagles undisturbed or something like that.’

‘That just raises the question of how anyone knows about it at all.’

Hugh tapped the side of his nose. ‘Some park ranger who had a dram too many in a bothan. So the story goes.’

‘And where did you hear it?’

‘Ach, years ago in Aberdeen, drinking with some climbers.’

‘It’s taken you all this time to mention it?’

‘You have a point there,’ said Hugh. ‘To tell you the truth, it was one of those memories you file and forget, if you see what I mean.’

Hope didn’t, but she decided to let the matter drop before Nick got curious.

The motorway gave out on the approach to Inverness, and with it the automation. Normally the lorry would turn off to the Business Park and pick up a new driver at this point, but the codes on Hugh’s phone overrode that. He took the wheel, to Hope’s silent disquietude and Nick’s noisy admiration, as the lorry approached the Kessock Bridge, and another splendidly distracting view on both sides.

Hope relaxed as Hugh drove on, with every appearance of confidence, across the Tore roundabout, turned left outside Dingwall, left again at Garve… She supposed the skill of lorry-driving was like cycling: once learned, never lost. The long road west was four-lane all the way, a smooth ride that Hugh kept below sixty. For some reason he didn’t explain – it could have been arbitrary, a mental coin-toss, or else the outcome of some intuitive summing of the likelihood of any security inspection – he had chosen to head for the Uig, Skye-to-Tarbert, Harris ferry rather than the more obvious Ullapool-to-Stornoway, a shorter drive but a longer voyage. Hope kept Nick entertained by pointing out eagles and buzzards, camera drones and jet fighters, deer herds and wolf packs, through a monotonous succession of glens and moors. After they’d turned left at Strathcarron, the scenery itself held his gaze: the long stretch of the sea-loch above whose southern shore they climbed and descended on switchback braes; the precipitous view over Strome; the bleak moor of Durinish. Then the swoop back to another wide four-lane highway, and the scary climb up and over the Skye Bridge. Across Skye, Nick was kept variously occupied by crisps, the Cuillin and the Quiraing.

On the ferry to Tarbert there was no problem keeping him amused for the hour and a half it took, or afterwards in the slow progress through the huddled port. The boredom and fractiousness only kicked in after the steep ascent to the island’s plateau, a glacier-scored surface reminiscent, as Hugh put it, of space-probe photos of Callisto, but less lively. Nick cheered up as they crossed into the strange synthetic woodlands of Lewis, and on to Stornoway, and the grandparents.