The Solitary Man by Stephen Leather

be ebbing out of her. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hair was dull and lifeless, hanging in uncombed strands around her sunken cheeks. Her son's arrest seemed to have hit her even harder than the death of her husband, five years earlier.
    'It won't be long now, Tess. Mr McCormack said it's being taken care of, they're going to get Ray out.'
    For the first time she looked at him. 'I want my boy back,' she said, her voice a cracked whisper.
    'He's coming, Tess,' promised Dunne.
    'I want my boy back,' she repeated, as if she hadn't heard him.
    THE OLD WOMAN HELD the egg-shaped poppy pod between the first finger and thumb of her left hand and collected the congealed sap with her metal scraper. The scraper was the size of a small saucer with a crescent cut out of it, blackened from years of use. The old woman had been given the scraper when s she was a child, when she'd worked the poppy fields of northern * Thailand, long before she'd crossed the border into Burma with her family, chased out by the Thai army.
    It was the second time the poppy field had been harvested. It was a good crop, one of the best she'd ever seen. It had rained only twice during the cold season and the plants were healthy and tall, with many of them producing five flowers. She scraped carefully and methodically, but quickly, her fingers nimble despite her years. There were three parallel lines of brown sap, and close by them were three scars where the pod had been cut the previous week. Each poppy pod could be cut three, maybe four times over a period of six weeks. Then she and the rest of the workers would collect the biggest and best of the pods to get seeds for next year's crop.
    The work was repetitive, but the old woman was lucky: she was small and the poppy pods came up to her chest so she could harvest the pea-sized balls of sticky latex without bending. She and the six other women working the field had to be finished before midday. In the morning the sap was moist and easily scraped. By early afternoon it would set and the work would be that much harder, so the opium collectors had gone into the field at first light and would be finished before the sun was high overhead.
    The old woman wiped her resinous scrapings into the small brass cup hanging around her neck. The cup was old, too, older than the woman herself. It had belonged to her mother and she'd been given it on her twelfth birthday, the year she'd married.
    She moved on to the next plant. The old woman preferred collecting sap to making the incisions on the poppy pods. The pods had to be cut from midday onwards, when the sun was at its hottest, so that the heat would force out the milky white sap. It was unbearably hot in the fields in the afternoon, even with a wide-brimmed straw hat, and the sun was merciless on any uncovered skin. The old woman's skin had long ago turned to the colour and texture of leather, but she still burned if she didn't take care.
    The cutting was done with a three-bladed knife, and the making of the parallel incisions was the most skilful of the jobs involved in the opium harvest. Too deep and the sap would drip to the ground and be wasted; too shallow and not enough would trickle out. The cutting required more concentration than the collecting of the sap, and any lapse could result in sliced fingers. The old woman's fingers were crisscrossed with thin white scars.
    Another reason the old woman preferred collecting the opium to making the incisions was that workers had to walk backwards when they were cutting so that they didn't smear the opium on their clothes as they moved through the field. It was slow, hard work, but it had to be done. She'd been working in opium fields for almost sixty years and had never complained. The opium paid for her food, her clothes, and had allowed her to raise a family.
    She looked across at her grand-daughter who was using a small oblong scraper to collect sap from the plant next to hers. The old woman smiled down at