Scotland is both a passage through which Sarah Trafford and Michael Downey continue their escape and a remote landscape of hidden government history. The country’s blue sky and continuing war broadcasts offer no clean break from the crisis behind them; farther north, a deserted island becomes the setting for Howard’s discovery of a body.

Crossing into Scotland

Sarah experiences the border as an invisible transfer: one moment the pair are driving along the same road, and the next they are doing so in another country. Scotland changes the map around them, but not the war news crackling over the radio. Gaps in the roadside let sudden winds buffet the car, making Sarah’s heart leap against her ribs; the physical jolt gives the crossing a force that its unmarked boundary lacks.

Their direction is clearer than their destination. When Sarah asks where they should go, Michael answers that they must continue north. They have maps, but Sarah doubts whether a map can do more than describe the territory in which they are lost. The route remains an escape without a reliably knowable end: certainty about where it leads might itself bring their journey to a halt.

The road north

The journey through Scotland includes a stop at a lay-by where a van sells sweet tea and toilets are the other main attraction. There Sarah notices a blue Citroën 2CV for sale, though she pays little attention to the car’s age and paperwork. Michael buys it while she is away. The purchase gives their flight a new vehicle, acquired almost incidentally amid the practical pauses of travel.

That night Sarah sleeps curled on the car’s back seat, while Michael beds down outside on hard ground. Her dream repeats the road at a steady forty miles an hour, circling the same barn and houses as if on a ring road that leads nowhere. She can only keep moving through the dream; even that futile circuit, she reflects, must eventually lead somewhere. The repeated landscape makes the uncertainty of their northward escape part of the journey’s form, not merely a question of navigation.

The island and its hidden history

Farther north, Michael identifies an island off the coast from the village of Barragan on a map and believes he has located it. Scotland’s remoteness here is not simply scenic: the island belongs to a concealed government history. The Department inherited it years earlier, and Howard privately worries that an auditor might question why the Ministry for Urban Development owns a deserted Scottish island.

Howard recalls another government-owned island several miles away, used to test an anthrax bomb during the war and still unsafe to visit. He considers the island he has reached safe because no testing took place there, but the thought breaks off when he finds a body. Kneeling beside it, he sees a muscular man whose body is largely intact, though the back of the head has been smeared with what appears to be its recent contents. Scotland’s isolated island setting thus brings the consequences of state secrecy into immediate view: a place treated as a quiet government acquisition becomes the scene of a death.