Kathmandu Read online

  Luke Richardson

  Kathmandu

  Some people go missing, others choose not to come back

  Copyright © 2019 by Luke Richardson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Luke Richardson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  First edition

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Dedication

  The Music of the City (Tau’s Story)

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  Book reviews

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 1

  Sundown in Kathmandu. A blinding orange sun sinks through a fragmented wall of clouds. Shafts of haggard, uncompromising light signal the falling blanket of dusk. Behind the sprawling city the silver backs of the Himalayas stand resolute.

  The clang and yammer of daytime production mutes as merchants, makers and menders pack away the tools of their trade and head inside. A welder, a bicycle repairman, a tyre salesman. Their work for the day complete and their concern for the hunger of their families met. In the upstairs windows, lights begin to blaze and the smell of oil, paint and rubber are replaced with spice and onions.

  Two young men make their way through a backstreet. Kathmandu is a warren of them, allowing people to scuttle unseen. Concrete structures stand tall on both sides, leaving a narrow, dusty path. The going is difficult. They know it’ll be worth it.

  Turning left at a crossroads, they head down a passage thinner than the one before, forcing the travellers into single-file. They walk in silence. The man in front lights a cigarette; it flares in the shadows. The sky is a strip of dirty orange – a constant glowing reminder of human creation.

  The residents are used to these people, a rabble of them have passed through their city, their homes, their restaurants, for as long as anyone can remember. For some, it’s the beginning of a journey – perhaps Pokhara, or Everest. For others it’s the end, a final stop before the road becomes impassable, inconvenient or uncomfortable and the flight home beckons.

  The two men walk towards the end of the passage, a dead end. The concrete wall of a building. Its ugly construction is bulky and mysterious in the darkness, its pipes and wires bulging like veins across skin.

  They know what they are looking for. They need to look for the light. You need to look for the light.

  A bare bulb, encircled by insects, hangs above a door swinging on its wire. It’s the only thing which separates the door the men are seeking from any other.

  The last fruit on a dying tree – a forgotten tree, a forbidden tree.

  Soon darkness will embody the sky, though not the city. Residents keep their lights burning, believing that with darkness comes trouble, trouble they could no better see than understand, trouble they should have forgotten long ago.

  The door opens before they reach it. A man with an oily smile stands in the gloom. He nods as they enter. They’ve been here before. He shows them to a table in the dark room, the restaurant. It’s kept dark on purpose.

  “You want the lamb, we have the lamb again,” he says when they’re seated on small chairs not designed for the height of western tourists. The young men nod, order, and resume their conversation.

  They’re travelling on tomorrow, heading out into the mountains, hiking somewhere. The waiter can’t work out where, even in the quiet of the empty room.

  The other pair of customers shuffle their chairs and leave.

  The waiter places bottled beers on the table – neither of the young men look up. He hangs back in the shadows, listening.

  “Looking forward to leaving this city…” one says to the other.

  “Yeah, it’s not been…”

  From the scraps of conversations, the waiter makes a decision.

  “There’s so many other places…”

  “We’re getting out tomorrow…”

  The oily grin runs across his face as he clicks a switch on the wall. The light outside – look for the light, the forbidden fruit – dies into darkness.

  Chapter 2

  It was raining in Brighton. It was always raining in Brighton. Water lashed from the ocean, whipping the buildings which stood dull in the winter morning. The city seemed never-ending, running into a grainy horizon before becoming cliffs and beaches.

  Leo ran every morning and sometimes in the evening, too. He pushed himself until his legs pumped acid and his breath ached in his gut. He needed to sweat. Needed to feel the pain to feel alive.

  Today was like no other – run, work, continue his search.

 
As he sped down Grand Avenue towards the sea, picking up speed with the descending road, Leo thought about Mya. He had worked out, sometime ago, that on average she swam through his mind about four times per waking hour. Whether that was a memory of them together, the nausea of her going missing, or his want to find her again.

  He had been looking for nearly two years. Every night sitting at his computer and scrolling through possible leads. Sorting those that could be her from those that definitely weren’t. Pictures, social media posts, articles, videos. Leo analysed anything which might lead to her, or might give an explanation about where she was.

  The way Leo saw it, with the clarity he got from pounding trainers, she was either dead or had chosen to go, chosen to leave and put him through this. Neither option was good, neither brought him solace, but he needed something. Something more than knowing nothing.

  Leo turned onto the seafront. To his right the ocean whipped grey and white, to his left rows of terraced houses looked dreary, bleak and crumbling in the congealing rain. A few cars crawled past, as though still dozy with sleep.

  When Mya first disappeared, friends and family had been supportive, meeting his morose moods with concerned smiles and empathy. Anything you need let us know. That soon changed into offers to help him move on, find someone new. You can’t spend your whole life looking for her. Then, as Leo declined invitations in favour of the search, friends became just irksome distractions, figures hanging unseen on his life’s periphery.

  An hour later, having showered and dressed for work, Leo again left his flat for the short walk to the offices of The Brighton Echo. When Leo had started work at the paper nearly ten years ago, he had been ambitious, keen, and thought it the first step of an exciting career in journalism. A career that would take him to all the places described in the autobiographies he devoured at university. A front seat in the making of history. A noble profession. Holding the state to account.

  Leo couldn’t pin-point exactly when he had stopped feeling that way. But that morning, as he pushed open the steamy door to the newspaper’s office, spreading a pile of junk mail across the carpet, he knew it hadn’t turned out as he had hoped.

  As usual, Leo was the first one in. Making a strong coffee while his computer chugged to life – upgrades had been promised a year ago – he checked the whiteboard for any planned stories. Wyatt case verdict expected was the only thing scrawled in today’s box. The Wyatt case was the trial of a man on the charge of a complex and daring bank robbery. With a final buzz and clunk the computer loaded. Leo sat to begin putting the basics of the article together. He’d leave out Wyatt’s innocence or guilt to be added later.

  “Morning mate, how are ya?” said Mike Grin, the newspaper’s editor and owner, forty-five minutes later. Closing the door behind him, he removed a designer coat which hung awkwardly over a bulbous midriff.

  “Blimey mate, you been sleeping at all?” he said, taking in Leo’s dark eyes and crumpled clothes. “You need to get to bed earlier. You look terrible.”

  “I’m fine, honestly,” Leo replied, looking up from the article taking shape on the screen. Then looking back at it to avoid the editor’s intense grey-eyed stare.

  “Sure. Listen, got a big story for you today,” he said, putting a hand on Leo’s shoulder. “They should be delivering the verdict in the Wyatt case. We all reckon he’s going down for it, but we gotta wait for the decision. Callum’s written the article already, but someone needs to be there to shout as soon as the verdict’s out. Then we’ll run it. We’ve got to beat those bastards at The Voice.” The editor paused as he noticed Leo’s draft on the screen. “I know you wanted to write the piece, but Callum’s already done it. Just need the thumbs up from the courtroom.”

  Younger than Leo and a recent addition to the newspaper’s skeleton staff, Callum Martins routinely got the by-line on most front-page stories. Callum had impressed the editor in his first week by coming up with a photograph of an MP leaving a late-night bar glossy-eyed and arm-in-arm with a young woman. A woman who, as it turned out, was a prostitute. They had run it on the front page and it had been picked up by some of the more salubrious national papers.

  Nodding at the editor, Leo closed his Wyatt story without saving it – who was he to get in the way of the paper’s new star journalist?

  Shuffling back into his damp parka, pulling open the door and stepping out into the drizzling morning to catch the bus, Leo knew it wasn’t the journalism he wanted to be part of, but it was his job, and that counted for something.

  Chapter 3

  In the restaurant, the men eat wordlessly. The lamb is as spectacular as ever. Perfectly spiced, sizzling, succulent and fresh. They abandon cutlery and eat with their hands, grabbing at the meat by its bones, skin and muscle.

  Although meat is served in Kathmandu, it’s not the norm. The pair have been in the city a few days and they’ve seen nothing like the lamb served at the backstreet restaurant.

  “They get it from the mountains,” they’d been told by a guy they’d met on their first afternoon in the city. “It’s the best meat in Kathmandu if you can find the place. The lamb lives up in the mountains where it can eat wild grasses and breathe the fresh air – that’s what makes it so big and strong. Most restaurants here don’t serve it – or save it for their best customers. This place, if you can find it, is amazing.”

  Later that evening, they’d followed his directions down the passageways, each one smaller than the last. By some luck finding their way to the dark door advertised only by the bare bulb.

  They’d been back three times since, each time greeted by the waiter with the oily smile. Each time ordering the succulent, delicious, Himalayan Lamb.

  From the kitchen door, the waiter stands and watches them. One eats the meat from a long bone, gnawing and tearing at flesh, while the other picks bits from the tray. The way a vulture might eat an abandoned carcass. The waiter’s smile is unchanged, unflinching.

  As the two men finish, he moves over and picks up the trays. The men stretch backwards to rest their full stomachs. Sweat mottles their pink foreheads, one wipes it away with the back of his hand.

  “You want our special smoke?” the waiter says. Their faces are bleached by the light overhead, fingers tinted red from the spices.

  The two men look at each other.

  “We do have an early bus to catch,” one replies.

  “It’s free because you are special customers, coming back again. It’s a family tradition.”

  They exchange smiles. They’re in Kathmandu, how can they refuse?

  The waiter stands a large, ornate shisha pipe on the floor next to them and lights the coals on top. Four hoses curl from the white body on which engraved snakes dance, scales shimmering in the darkness. The waiter draws hard on one of the hoses, liquid gurgles and the red eyes of coal glow ferociously. He pulls again until the smoke comes through thick and white, then he passes the hose to one of the men.

  “With our compliments,” he says, bowing slightly before excusing himself and returning to the shadows. His oily smile remains.

  “Kathmandu isn’t all that bad,” one man says to the other, picking up the pipe and taking a drag.

  “Don’t have too much,” the other replies, “we’re on the 9 A.M. bus tomorrow.”

  It won’t make a difference, the waiter thinks from the shadows.

  Chapter 4

  The Wyatt case was high-profile for Brighton’s Crown Court. A hushed anxiety had settled over the building as Leo passed through the metal detector.

  Climbing the marble stairs, his far too-casual shoes squeaking on the floor, he made a vain attempt to pat down his creased shirt before slipping silently into the crowded press gallery.

  Journalists, most of whom looked as though they had come down from London for the day, readied themselves. Notes were made on courtroom ambience as pens encased in gold and silver slid over pads bound in leather.

  It’s not about the pen, Leo thought, as he pulled a biro
and notepad from his dripping parka. It’s about the words it writes.

  Wyatt had been charged with a brutal and complex robbery last year. Two families had been kidnapped to get codes to a private bank vault very few people knew existed. The robbers, of whom Wyatt was alleged to have been in charge, got away with a vast sum of money. That’s where Wyatt’s luck ended however, being caught some weeks later at a rented cottage with £100,000 hidden under the bed. He claimed he had been asked to meet someone at the cottage to arrange the sale of a car and knew nothing at all about the robbery.

  Leo, having spent the last week researching the case in order to write a well-informed summary for publication after the verdict, knew the facts well. He had looked into Wyatt, his background, the witnesses, the evidence. Everything that the prosecutors were using to secure a conviction. Considering it all, Leo couldn’t help but think Wyatt was innocent. The defending council had alluded to Wyatt’s low IQ and the flamboyant questioning of the prosecutor often left him confused.

  The interesting part, to Leo at least, was that the bank had since left the premises in Brighton and gone to trade elsewhere. He had looked up their new address, but only a PO box and e-mail address were given. Leo wondered whether anything else had been taken that evening. Something private and sensitive that perhaps no one wanted to own up to. Certainly, the initial estimates of money taken were vastly above the £100,000 recovered.

  “You ready to come and work for a proper paper?” whispered one of the men in front of Leo.

  “Yes sir, so ready,” replied the other. It took Leo a moment to recognise the voice, but when he did, it came with a rush of heat and a tightness in his chest.

  “My place is a joke at the moment. No one has any clue what’s going on.”

  Looking up from his pad, with a shortness of breath, Leo recognised the sandy, short-cropped hair of The Echo’s so-called star journalist, Callum Martins.

  The other man nodded in agreement, and Leo recognised him as the editor of their rival, The Voice.

  “The editor has no direction, they’re just writing bullshit local stories. I need to work with some professionals,” Callum said. “Circulation is falling, the place has no money, they’ve started cutting pay. The only people left are the weak ones with nowhere else to go.”