1984 was the last time we saw him.’ Misha Gibson’s brows drew down in a defiant scowl.
‘It’s kind of a long time to wait to report someone missing,’ Karen said.
Misha sighed and turned her head so she could look out of the window. ‘We didn’t think he was missing. Not as such.’
‘I’m not with you. What do you mean, “not as such”?’
Misha turned back and met Karen’s steady gaze. ‘You sound like you’re from round here.’
Wondering where this was going, Karen said. ‘I grew up in Methil.’
‘Right. So, no disrespect, but you’re old enough to remember what was going on in 1984.’
‘The miners’ strike?’
Misha nodded. Her chin stayed high, her stare defiant. ‘I grew up in Newton of Wemyss. My dad was a miner. Before the strike, he worked down the Lady Charlotte. You’ll mind what folk used to say round here - that nobody was more militant than the Lady Charlotte pitmen. Even so, there was one night in December, nine months into the strike, when half a dozen of them disappeared. Well, I say disappeared, but everybody knew the truth. That they’d gone to Nottingham to join the blacklegs.’ Her face bunched in a tight frown, as if she was struggling with some physical pain. ‘Five of them, nobody was too surprised that they went scabbing. But according to my mum, everybody was stunned that my dad had joined them. Including her.’ She gave Karen a look of pleading. ‘I was too wee to remember. But everybody says he was a union man through and through. The last guy you’d expect to turn blackleg.’ She shook her head. ‘Still, what else was she supposed to think?’
Karen understood only too well what such a defection must have meant to Misha and her mother. In the radical Fife coalfield, sympathy was reserved for those who toughed it out. Mick Prentice’s action would have granted his family instant pariah status. ‘It can’t have been easy for your mum,’ she said.
‘In one sense, it was dead easy,’ Misha said bitterly. ‘As far as she was concerned, that was it. He was dead to her. She wanted nothing more to do with him. He sent money, but she donated it to the hardship fund. Later, when the strike was over, she handed it over to the Miners’ Welfare. I grew up in a house where my father’s name was never spoken.’
Karen felt a lump in her chest, somewhere between sympathy and pity. ‘He never got in touch?’
‘Just the money. Always in used notes. Always with a Nottingham postmark.’
‘Misha, I don’t want to come across like a bitch here, but it doesn’t sound to me like your dad’s a missing person.’ Karen tried to make her voice as gentle as possible.
‘I didn’t think so either. Till I went looking for him. Take it from me, Inspector. He’s not where he’s supposed to be. He never was. And I need him found.’
The naked desperation in Misha’s voice caught Karen by surprise. To her, that was more interesting than Mick Prentice’s whereabouts. ‘How come?’ she said.
Tuesday 19th June 2007; Edinburgh
It had never occurred to Misha Gibson to count the number of times she’d emerged from the Sick Kids’ with a sense of outrage that the world continued on its way in spite of what was happening inside the hospital behind her. She’d never thought to count because she’d never allowed herself to believe it might be for the last time. Ever since the doctors had explained the reason for Luke’s misshapen thumbs and the scatter of café-au-lait spots across his narrow back, she had nailed herself to the conviction that somehow she would help her son dodge the bullet his genes had aimed at his life expectancy. Now it looked as if that conviction had finally been tested to destruction.
Misha stood uncertain for a moment, resenting the sunshine, wanting weather as bleak as her mood. She wasn’t ready to go home yet. She wanted to scream and throw things and an empty flat would tempt her to lose control and do just that. John wouldn’t be home to hold her or to hold her back; he’d known about her meeting with the consultant so of course work would have thrown up something insurmountable that only he could deal with.
Instead of heading up through Marchmont to their sandstone tenement, Misha cut across the busy road to the Meadows, the green lung of the southern city centre where she loved to walk with Luke. Once, when she’d looked at their street on Google Earth, she’d checked out the Meadows too. From space, it looked like a rugby ball fringed with trees, the criss-cross paths like laces holding the ball together. She’d smiled at the thought of her and Luke scrambling over the surface like ants. Today, there were no smiles to console Misha. Today, she had to face the fact that she might never walk here with Luke again.
She shook her head, trying to dislodge the maudlin thoughts. Coffee, that’s what she needed to gather her thoughts and get things into proportion. A brisk walk across the Meadows, then down to George IV Bridge, where every shop front was a bar, a café or a restaurant these days.
Ten minutes later, Misha was tucked into a corner booth, a comforting mug of latte in front of her. It wasn’t the end of the line. It couldn’t be the end of the line. She wouldn’t let it be the end of the line. There had to be some way to give Luke another chance.
She’d known something was wrong from the first moment she’d held him. Even dazed by drugs and drained by labour, she’d known. John had been in denial, refusing to set any store by their son’s low birth weight and those stumpy little thumbs. But fear had clamped its cold certainty on Misha’s heart. Luke was different. The only question in her mind had been how different.
The sole aspect of the situation that felt remotely like luck was that they were living in Edinburgh, a ten-minute walk from the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, an institution that regularly appeared in the ‘miracle’ stories beloved of the tabloids. It didn’t take long for the specialists at the Sick Kids’ to identify the problem. Nor to explain that there would be no miracles here.
Fanconi Anaemia. If you said it fast, it sounded like an Italian tenor or a Tuscan hill town. But the charming musicality of the words disguised their lethal message. Lurking in the DNA of both Luke’s parents were recessive genes that had combined to create a rare condition that would condemn their son to a short and painful life. At some point between the ages of three and twelve, he was almost certain to develop aplastic anaemia, a breakdown of the bone marrow that would ultimately kill him unless a suitable donor could be found. The stark verdict was that without a successful bone marrow transplant, Luke would be lucky to make it into his twenties.
That information had given her a mission. She soon learned that, without siblings, Luke’s best chance of a viable bone marrow transplant would come from a family member - what the doctors called a mismatched related transplant. At first, this had confused Misha. She’d read about bone marrow transplant registers and assumed their best hope was to find a perfect match there. But according to the consultant, a donation from a mismatched family member who shared some of Luke’s genes had a lower risk of complications than a perfect match from a donor who wasn’t part of their extended kith and kin.
Since then, Misha had been wading through the gene pool on both sides of the family, using persuasion, emotional blackmail and even the offer of reward on distant cousins and elderly aunts. It had taken time, since it had been a solo mission. John had walled himself up behind a barrier of unrealistic optimism. There would be a medical breakthrough in stem cell research. Some doctor somewhere would discover a treatment whose success didn’t rely on shared genes. A perfectly matched donor would turn up on a register somewhere. John collected good stories and happy endings. He trawled the internet for cases that had proved the doctors wrong. He came up with medical miracles and apparently inexplicable cures on a weekly basis. And he drew his hope from this. He couldn’t see the point of Misha’s constant pursuit. He knew somehow it would be all right. His capacity for denial was Olympic.
It made her want to kill him.
Instead, she’d continued to clamber through the branches of their family trees in search of the perfect candidate. She’d come to her final dead