She filled her water bottle and rolled out her yoga mat. She saluted the sun and gave herself for half an hour to the rhythm of her breath. When she was done she rolled up her mat and stuffed her sleeping bag into the rucksack. She changed her underwear and socks. She ran a brush through her hair. It was time to stop dwelling in the past. Her son was dead, buried in the graveyard of a Christian convent on the north side of Baghdad. Her husband Bakr was dead, killed in a shoot-out in a Shiite slum in 2003. She had spent two years guarding orchids on a remote Scottish island, living in a kind of limbo. Now Jonah had disappeared, the police were looking for him and it was up to her to find him. She strode down off the hill into the village of Ardfern with the dog at her heels and crossed the square to the public toilets. In one of the stalls she unzipped the lid of her crash-bag and removed the plastic envelope that she had dug up the evening before. Inside it in an ankle wallet there was a thousand pounds and a thousand dollars in cash.
