The Diary of Lies

It was a week before the killings at Stag Hall, and the world had been erased.

Edges had disappeared, and the true shape of things had been lost under a fall of heavy winter snow. Now, all was light and shadow. The fields were blank pages, and stark trees held the weight of a cold blossom. The pale hills had dissolved into the sky, which fell to the horizon like a soaked sheet. The landscape was a ghost of itself.

Fisher knew much about this transitory, irredeemable world. But on this morning, in the east of Scotland, at least, its bloody face had been wiped clean, and all was white, unsullied and silent. The snow had fallen and taken sound with it. Even the sea, down there, barely trembling in the harbour, seemed to be asleep. Fisher—just awake, tousle-haired—looked through the caravan window, saw the snow and remembered how as a child he had built a rough igloo in the grounds of the children’s home and crawled inside, revelling in the strange glow of the snow light. Light that was not light. The memory appeared like breath in frosty air, then faded.

He turned from the window. Encased in its frozen new clothing, the caravan clung to the hillside above St. James. Nothing moved in the little fishing village in the East Neuk of Fife.

For the first time since his deployment, Fisher had managed to sleep. A deep, dreamless sleep. A green man under a sea of white. Now he was awake, and he made breakfast. The gas flame shuddered into a crown of blue life. Later, spooning porridge and honey into his mouth, he gazed down to the sea.

He could see the harbour, the high wall, the bristles of unused lobster creels poking through the drifts. The empty quayside was ringed with snow-capped orange buoys. The boats were out. Lights glimmered in the snaking rows of cottages, in the café, in the village pub, in the single store which stood at the foot of the steep, slippery, cobbled descent to the harbour. Ledges and roofs, submerged. The paths between, disappeared. The main road, gone.

Fisher looked closer. A solitary old man stood on the seawall, like a nail on a fence. A gull dove past him.

Somewhere out on that misty horizon was the north coast of East Lothian, the grey lump of the Bass Rock and, further along the coast, the capital city, Edinburgh. The city would be deep in snow too, Fisher thought. The roads impassable, the spires and towers and hills an absurd dream.

He knew he needed to scout again. To find the secret way to the hall. He could not approach it from the road or through its high gates. But a stream ran in a steep culvert through St. James, ending in an estuary west of the harbour. The path upstream led to a gradually deepening valley, which yard by hard yard delved deep into the kingdom’s hills. That was where he needed to go.

Fisher left the caravan. He locked it behind him and tucked a service-issued knife into his back pocket. His boots sank with a clean, squeaking crunch into the fresh snow as he left the campsite.

Through the sleeping village, his breath in clouds about him, Fisher crept. The gabled roofs were uneven, mismatched, the guttering toothed with icicles. The air was sharp with frost and the salt of the sea.

He pulled up the deep hood of his waterproof. As he walked on, he measured distance and time and the details of the village—its layout, its backroads, its lanes and dead ends. He heard children’s voices, raised like bells against the hush of the muffled land. Somewhere in the village, an old, cruel man slept, oblivious. That was all to come. He moved on.

Rain began to fall in light sheets. The huge sky shifted, and the sun suddenly broke through. His boots were clogged with chunks of snow by the time he reached the river path. It was higher land here, and he looked back at St. James and the caravan site at its edge, perched on the low cliffs. He could see three tubby fishing boats returning to harbour and, further out, an oil platform like a fossil spider, spiked and black in the deeper waters.

He walked now on older paths. The Kingdom of Fife was ancient. The stream here had spent immemorial time cutting through rock to find its course. It ran down hard and clear, whitening with grinning teeth over boulders and pooling wide and deep where the valley evened. The snow was sparser in the woods—caught in gnarled branches, melted by the river, hanging in surreal globs from fern stands.

Fisher tramped on. He reached the falls. The trees here were tall, leaning inwards, draping their snow-lined branches over the rumble of the water as it fell five metres down over a rock face into a deep pool. The stone was weathered and smooth, shaped like an amphitheatre, its seats empty. He wondered if it had been mined or quarried in years past—it seemed too theatrical for it to be natural.

Crouching, he swung a bag from his shoulder and took out a flask and a bar of chocolate. He stopped for a while. Snow was hard going. He knew that well from the Brecon Beacons. From the Carpathians.

He found a slippery path up the side of the tumbling falls. With cold hands he grabbed and pulled himself up along a curl of iron root, then walked on, up the densely wooded valley, beneath the close-set conspiracy of trunks.

Up along the ridge, he could suddenly see the horizon he sought: a line of fencing that skimmed the border of the valley. He cut upwards to the fencing, which looked freshly cut, recently wired. He edged along its length. He could hear the river murmuring below.

He walked another mile until there, off to one side, deep in a bare fold of land, he saw the sharp burst of electric lights. This was the place. He knew it was not on any map; it was a new build on an old plot. A road to it had been laid, boundaries built, gates erected. He crouched in the trees.

Built in dark stone and slate, the building was elegant, modern, with high walls, arched windows and a vast lawn. There was a four-storey central chamber with a pitched roof. Several outbuildings stretched along a paved drive, flanked by lines of saplings.

He moved closer and brought out his binoculars, which he rested on a fence post. In the outbuildings, there was machinery. A garage housed several large black cars. Smoke drifted up from the chimney of a kitchen block. Through the glasses twitching in his hand, he saw, strewn around the courtyard, shrink-wrapped containers and piles of boxed supplies under weighted blue tarpaulins. The house itself was dark, apart from one window glittering with artificial light. A figure moved behind it.

This was Stag Hall. Here the dragon gathered its strength and flexed its cold metal scales. Here, the old warrior would come for his final battle.


Chapter 1

Go to the CIVIC GALLERY LONDON. Ask for HONEYSUCKLE. There is a message from MORIAH.

Shona Sandison, freelance journalist, just wanted to win. She knew none of it really mattered; not now, not in a year’s time, not in geological time. But she still wanted her name to be called.

The UK Media Awards ceremony was building to a noisy climax. All evening, praise had been given, awards handed out and free alcohol dispensed. Spotlights swooped around the ballroom of the New Headland Hotel, a refurbished town house which sat with recycled elegance in the thrumming heart of London. Most of the gathered herd of journalists, editors, sponsors and spongers were drunk or high, or hurtling towards a state beyond. There was a constant buzz of gossip and congratulation, of rumour and self-praise, of irony and flattery. The crowd was not only in the ballroom. It spilled out into the foyer bar, where editors held court amidst sozzled retainers and snickering juniors—young journalists leaning into the huddle, older hands looking for a way out.

Shona, far from her Edinburgh home, was neither drunk nor high. As she waited for her category to be announced, she sat in silence, ignoring her untouched “deluxe” chicken supreme, a slab of foul rubber under a paltry slime, and watched the loose-tied blaring men at the bar and the red-faced sportswriters stumbling to the toilets, again, to snort chalk-cut cocaine. She asked herself: After tonight, what next? She wondered what her next significant story might be. It could be contained in this message from Moriah. He or they had led her here, after all. But who or what was Honeysuckle?

The hubbub was grating. But at least she was among people she knew: the dead-eyed news editors, exhausted reporters, frazzled correspondents, clueless executives looking for sex, sponsors hoping for access and PR flacks angling for relevance. It was a rippling cacophonous sea of rented dinner jackets and iridescent gowns.

Shona was dressed in black, in a borrowed trouser suit that would have been perfect for a funeral. She did not have a posh frock and she did not want one. She had ironed her one white cotton shirt; her father would have been proud. And, of course, her walking stick was jet black. It was in keeping.

She closed the message on her phone. She had received it a week ago in the encrypted email account she used for tip-offs. And her question would be answered soon enough.

She looked around the room and gripped the handle of her stick. The flashing lights, the shouting, the sheer racket of it all—she wanted to leave. She wanted to run away, out into the dark, unreal streets of London, and head for home. But the huge blue screen above the stage read: uk media awards scoop of the year. It was the next, and last, category. Hers. After all, she reminded herself, scanning the room, she was the best—screw all these fraudsters and halfwits, all these chancers.

Then something caught her eye. A man in a smart tuxedo was waving at her from a table twenty feet away. He was saying something. She acknowledged him with a nod.

“Pal, I can’t hear a word you’re saying,” she said, her voice dissolving into the wall of sound. She did not bother to shout. No one would hear her. But the shouting man was insistent. He pointed a finger, as if to say: I need to speak to you.

At Shona’s table, Ranald Zawadzki, the editor of the freelance investigations team to which she belonged, the Buried Lede, was holding court. A woman in a bespangled green dress was drooping at his shoulder, and several young men in various stages of drunkenness were hanging on his every word. Ranald—frenetic from his own surreptitious snorts of coke—was in his element. A drunken lord amongst his rapt retainers.

The shouting man had left his seat and was now pushing past people towards the empty seat beside Shona. A small attending cloud of antiperspirant came with him. He sat down, legs wide apart, and held out a slightly shaking hand. His shirt bulged. She could see hair and a soft belly.

“Good evening, Shona Sandison. I was just trying to tell you,” he bellowed in a rich Home Counties accent, “that you must be favourite for the title. Scooper of the year. How lovely to meet you. Big fan of your work.”

His face was deep pink and featureless, eyes the colour of belly button fluff. His hair was black, slicked back to his scalp. “Proctor, Reece Proctor,” he said, smiling to display cosmetically perfected teeth, white like the keys of an electric keyboard.

“Hi,” she said, shaking his wet hand briefly. She looked to the stage. The shortlist had been flashed up. There she was: Shona Sandison—Brexit Act Revealed—BBC/Sunday Courier/Buried Lede. The other candidates came from established print titles. One had a story on human trafficking in East Anglia; another, money laundering in London’s property market. There was an investigation into the infiltration of local government by organised crime in the North of England and one on the pollution of England’s rivers and beaches by privatised water companies. Frontline tales, she thought, from the disintegration of a failed state.

Beside her name was an old portrait, from around 2012, of Shona grimly smiling beneath savagely asymmetric hair. The state of me, she thought.

Proctor yelled again: “Tough shortlist, but I think you might have pipped the others. Yours was an interesting story. Very interesting.”

Shona reached for her Jack Daniel’s and took a hearty swig. The ice had melted; the liquor was diluted and warm. “Yep, so good they even printed it,” she said.

“How did you get down to London from Scotland?” he said.

She noticed again that his accent was full English: pink, comfortable, fatty. Yet there was something in its plummy tone that was not quite right. Almost as if he was putting it on or at least mildly upgrading it. The way he pronounced “down” had a vein of the North running through it.

“I found a train going south and jumped on,” she said quietly.

She found his advances confusing and uncomfortable. It was more than enough for her to be here, in this frantic and noisy place, with an appointment the next day with a contact she did not know.

She did not want to speak to this new man, with his assuredness and his direct intention, when she was feeling both more fragile than she had felt for a while, and more determined to carry on with the only life she knew, as a journalist. He wanted to give her something, but he also wanted something from her. That was usually the way. She was not sure she had the energy to undergo the transaction.