Every evening, at eight o’clock, Mungo Alason would get out of bed in his flat in Whisper Hill and have a shower. He would then walk through to the kitchen and from the yellow cabinet take a bowl and a packet of cornflakes and sit down to eat. It was silent, but for the rumble of his fridge that he had long intended to replace. He was forty-one and some variation of this had been his life for twenty years. It never occurred to Mungo that he deserved better or that he could have more. This was so normal to him and any change in routine would have been frightening. Having finished eating, he washed the bowl and spoon and returned them to their places before he left the flat and went down the stairs to Garbh Street. It wasn’t an attractive place, the tall and ugly flats on either side of the narrow road, and it wasn’t a fun four-minute walk to Three O’clock Station, but he was so used to it in the dark and rain that he barely looked up as he went, automatically sidestepping people on the crowded streets around the station building. They were all coming in and out of the main doors, the large front all lit up, but Mungo was going in a different way, as ever. He hardly needed to break stride, taking his security card from his pocket and swiping it into the slot on the door and quickly punching in his passcode as he put the card back in his pocket with his free hand. The red light on the panel turned green and he pulled the door open and entered. He was in the back corridor and made his way along to the changing room, opening his locker and putting on his overalls with the Duff Shipping Company logo on the breast like a football shirt. A second man walked into the room, older and smaller than Mungo. “All right, Mungo?” he said as he began to open his own locker and pull on the overall that exactly matched Mungo’s in everything but size. That was the other driver, there were always two of them for security reasons, and they would exchange no more than a handful of words in the next eight and a half hours, provided nothing went wrong. Mungo went out of the changing room and along a corridor, using his card again to get out onto the platform and along to the train. It was platform number seven, right at the back and only ever used for the freight trains that Mungo drove. The company manager was already walking along the platform with clipboard in hand, marking something on every page of the wad he had, each page representing the cargo of each car. There were eight and Mungo could see that two were the red tanks that meant chemicals; they would have been collected at the docks and taken here. The manager met him by the engine and flipped to the last page for Mungo to sign, which he did. “Good night and good luck,” the manager said as he always did, probably thinking it was clever, and walked away. Mungo went up into the cab and made a few checks before he stepped back onto the platform. “Here,” a voice said quietly behind him, and Mungo turned expecting to find the other driver. Instead there was a man in his thirties, dressed like a station cleaner but with the look of someone who had never suffered manual labor in his life. He was holding out a small but thick envelope for Mungo to take. “What?” Mungo said. “Take it,” the man told him, “give it to their guy at the other end, he’ll be in the staff toilet, he’ll give you your five grand. Take it.” He pressed the envelope into Mungo’s hand and made off down the platform. Mungo stood and looked down at what he’d been given. The man had spoken as though Mungo was supposed to expect this, but it had never happened before, there had been no warning. It felt light and insubstantial. It wasn’t drugs because surely an envelope full wasn’t worth this much effort or five thousand pounds of anyone’s money, and it was too flat to be the precious stones they said passed through the docks routinely. It was something someone wanted to sneak out of Challaid by unpredictable means, and he couldn’t imagine what that might be. He heard the thick security door to the platform open and, without thinking, stuffed the envelope inside his overalls and began to climb back into the cabin as the other driver emerged to join him. Could it have been for the other driver the man had the envelope? As he stepped into the cabin beside Mungo his companion looked his usual self, not like someone expecting a delivery that hadn’t arrived. “Right, we got clearance, call it in and let’s go. Sooner we go the sooner we get back,” the man said, all the conversation they would have in the loud cab. The other driver started them up while Mungo radioed in to get final permission to depart, and they pulled slowly away from the freight platform, past the passenger platforms and out from under the protection of Three O’clock Station, the lights of the built-up area around the station puncturing the view ahead. Mungo sat on his too-narrow seat with the envelope pressed against his chest, feeling it when he moved, wondering what he had done. He should have refused to take it and then he should have reported it to someone. Having failed to do those things he should have thrown it out of the window when they got clear of the city so he couldn’t be caught with it at the other end. It could have been a trap, a test he had already failed. They took security seriously, the company, their ships bringing cargo in from all over the world as they had done for hundreds of years and shifting them by rail to the central belt, and that included many sensitive items. They moved slowly through Bank and up to Ciad Station, slowing to a halt as they were switched onto the tracks heading south through Gleann Fuilteach and into the mountains. As they crawled forward Mungo leaned a little more on his seat than usual, looking out for anyone in a policeman’s uniform, or the Duff Shipping security officer. No one tried to stop them. The journey was the same as all the others, as it had been since the national rail line came through the mountains to connect with the city in 1907, leaving the lights of Challaid behind and swooping into the dark beauty of the empty Highlands, few named places, nothing touched by man’s spoiling hand for so many miles but the line beneath them. It was four hours and twenty minutes south through the blackest hours of the night and there was nothing but the noise of the train and very occasional radio messages. They reached Glasgow and slowed again, rattling into Queen Street Station and stopping at the given platform, both getting out. Few people were there in the dead hours, and some wore security uniforms, but it was the same collection of sleepy faces that always met them. Mungo signed for them as he always did, confirming the delivery and time, and then told them he needed the toilet. He was pouring with sweat when he went in. There was a man in a suit with stylish hair and a gold watch standing by the sinks, dark eyes and a dimpled chin, showing his too-white teeth when he smiled at Mungo. “You have it?” he asked in what sounded like an English accent. Mungo reached into his overalls and took out the envelope, passing it to the man and looking sideways to the cubicles to make sure no one was there. “Good work, I appreciate it,” the man said, taking another envelope from his pocket and passing it to Mungo. “I’ll see you next month,” the man in the suit said and walked out of the bathroom. Mungo took the new envelope and unzipped his overalls, reaching down to put it into the pocket of his trousers and zipping back up again. He walked back out to join the other driver, nervous again, and they walked together across the station to get into a different cab. There were three cars attached to it and he signed for them. The train they had delivered would be moved out of this station by a driver already getting into it, taken to be unloaded elsewhere. They would return this one in the night with whatever small cargo it carried and be finished with their shift as the sun came back around. They were given clearance to leave, slowly and quietly at this hour as they moved through the edges of the southern city, and it felt excruciating to Mungo. The long journey north in silence, moonlight rolling silver down the sides of the mountains and showing snow on the peaks, sometimes smothered in the clouds and nothing but the blackness, then into Gleann Fuilteach and the lights of Challaid. They switched tracks again at Ciad Station, moving through Cnocaid, Bank, Bakers Moor and Earmam before reaching Whisper Hill, the long straight run north in the dip with the backs of the buildings on either side looking so tall. Back where they had started as they rolled slowly into Three O’clock Station. Mungo signed the return slip and went into the changing room, taking off his overalls and hanging them in his locker. “See you tomorrow,” the other driver said as Mungo left. He used his security card at the door and stepped outside. No alarms went off and no one was waiting to grab him. He walked through the cold hours of early morning, his breath jumping out ahead of him, trying to get away, and he reached Garbh Street and home. His checked shirt was sticking to him and he could smell the sweat as he sat at the kitchen table and carefully cut open the envelope with a knife. There was exactly five thousand pounds inside in fifty crisp one-hundred-pound notes, the roguish face of King Alex looking back at him from every green one. Mungo didn’t know what he’d done and didn’t know what to do with what he’d been given for it, but he knew he’d do it again. A month later the same man handed him another envelope, this time in the corridor just inside the security door. It was the same size and feel as the first, the same reward given by the same man in Glasgow. It happened again the following month, and again after that, and after the eighth month Mungo was no longer nervous about it. He never looked in the envelopes. He was getting sixty thousand pounds a year for almost no extra work, and as long as there were no disasters no one would ever find out.