The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid

labourer but would more accurately be described as a serf. My mother worked part-time in the farm dairy and she was the driving force behind my reaching escape velocity.
I was lucky enough to arrive at University College, London just as the human geography aspect of the discipline was forging new areas of interest. Geography departments had traditionally been overwhelmingly male, but a new wave of feminist academics was infiltrating everywhere. The human geographies of women’s lives were laying claim to our attention, with headline-grabbing movements such as Greenham Common providing fruitful sources of research and published papers. I know this is a statement that may provoke some incredulity, but it was the most exciting time to be a baby geographer.
My PhD supervisor was one of those radical groundbreakers. Melissa Armstrong had returned to London after five years of postgraduate and post-doctoral work in the US, fired up with Marxist and feminist ideology. She hit UCL with all the disruptive energy of a tornado, uprooting existing power structures and shifting the tectonic plates of physical geography to make way for something completely different. Melissa spent as much time with philosophers and social scientists as she did with her departmental colleagues and her energy left her colleagues reeling.
I was one of only two female geography postgrads and we became her wingmen, her disciples and her proselytisers. Our admiration bordered on adulation, especially when she put her politics into practice. In the late 1980s, the dissident philosophical community in Prague issued a clandestine invitation to Western academics they suspected might be sympathetic to their cause. Come and help us subvert the regime by conducting underground seminars, they said.
Melissa became a fellow of St Scholastica’s College, Oxford just in time to join that first wave of collaborationist libertarian academics. She became one of a group who taught in crowded flats and rooms above bars, bringing the same liveliness and imagination to those seminars as she delivered to us back in Oxford. (For I had followed her to Oxford, earning a Junior Research Fellow post at Schollies.) Even though the people they were teaching and inspiring were working long hours as scaffolders and shop assistants, street sweepers and lavatory attendants, they somehow found the energy and passion to respond more enthusiastically than I suspect we ever did.
Melissa made the risky and unnerving journey many times. She smuggled books in her luggage – feminist texts disguised as airport novels – and smuggled out samizdat papers from the people she increasingly came to see as colleagues in Prague and beyond. Eventually the authorities grew suspicious of her repeated visits and after some harrowing encounters with the security police, the Czechoslovakian authorities told her she would be granted no more visas. Melissa was furious and frustrated, but her determination to fight for freedom of speech and of learning burned just as bright in her heart. I remember the evening she found out that she would never be allowed back to work with her unofficial students in Prague again. We were in her office at St Scholastica’s and she opened a bottle of wine with such force that she bent the corkscrew.
‘I’m not giving up,’ she declared, sloshing Soave into a pair of tumblers. ‘They think they can shut us up, but it’s not going to work.’
‘But what can you do if they won’t let you back in?’
Melissa took a long swig from her glass, then let her dark hair fall forward so I couldn’t see her face properly. ‘Some of the others are setting up a foundation to raise money to support the dissident community. They want to try to smuggle people out and support them till they can find university jobs here.’ Then she tossed her hair back, defiance on her face. ‘I don’t think that’s how you change the world.’
‘So what will you do?’
‘I’ll find somewhere else to