The Noble Path: A relentless standalone thriller from the #1 bestseller by Peter May (electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

Also by Peter May

FICTION

The Lewis Trilogy

The Blackhouse

The Lewis Man

The Chessmen

The China Thrillers

The Firemaker

The Fourth Sacrifice

The Killing Room

Snakehead

The Runner

Chinese Whispers

The Ghost Marriage: A China Novella

The Enzo Files

Extraordinary People

The Critic

Blacklight Blue

Freeze Frame

Blowback

Cast Iron

Stand-alone Novels

The Man With No Face

I’ll Keep You Safe

Entry Island

Runaway

Coffin Road

non-FICTION

Hebrides (with David Wilson)

Copyright

First published in Great Britain in 1992 by Piatkus

This ebook edition first published in 2019 by

an imprint of

Quercus Editions Ltd

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

An Hachette UK company

Copyright © 1992 Peter May

The moral right of Peter May to be

identified as the author of this work has been

asserted in accordance with the Copyright,

Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication

may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical,

including photocopy, recording, or any

information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available

from the British Library.

PB ISBN 978 1 78747 795 7

EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78747 796 4

Ebook by CC Book Production

Cover design © 2019 Headdesign.co.uk

www.riverrunbooks.co.uk

Dedication

For Jancie

Epigraph

‘I did not die, and did not remain alive; now

think for thyself, if thou hast any grain of

ingenuity, what I became, deprived of both

life and death.’

– Dante’s Inferno

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PART TWO

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

PART THREE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

FOREWORD

I first had the idea for The Noble Path in the mid nineteen-eighties. I had wanted to explore the idea that in certain circumstances innocence can be a more corrupting influence than evil – simply because it knows not what it does.

The story itself was a departure from my usual crime/thriller genre, though I suppose it might loosely be described as a thriller. But I see it more as a very human adventure set against the brutal canvas of south-east Asia in the 1970s.

It takes place in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, when the murderous and anarchic regime established by the Khmer Rouge in neighbouring Cambodia systematically annihilated three million people. This was not so much ethnic cleansing, as the eradication of thinking and educated people. The Khmer Rouge saw intelligence, and the expression of ideas, as the biggest threat to their existence.

Rereading the book nearly thirty years later, I note with some sadness that one of its primary themes – a refugee crisis caused by the mass migration of people trying to escape war and poverty – is with us every bit as much now as it was then. Replace the ‘boat people’ of Vietnam with the sub-Saharan Africans dying in their thousands today, as they try to escape war and poverty by crossing the Mediterranean Sea in dangerously flimsy boats.

To facilitate the writing of my story I made a trip to Thailand, but was unable to journey into Cambodia, which was still an unstable and dangerous place. And so most of the research that followed was achieved by tracking down and reading copious numbers of books dealing with the recent history of the region. No internet then, or easy access to video footage.

I was at the time working as a script editor on the Scottish TV soap opera Take The High Road. To write the book I took a two-month sabbatical from the show, bought an old manual typewriter, and drove down to south-west France in my Suzuki Jeep, where I rented a gîte. Every morning I drove into the town of Saint-Céré and established myself in a corner of the Café des Voyageurs, where I wrote around 1,600 words a day using the Pitman’s shorthand I had learned as a journalist. At night I sat alone in my gîte typing up my shorthand, and fighting off the large numbers of brown bugs that somehow managed to crawl in under the door.

At weekends I generally found myself invited to dinner parties hosted by expat Brits and Americans. It was at one of these that I had the great good fortune to meet a lady called Maud Taillard, then in her sixties. Seated next to her at the dinner table, I soon discovered that she had spent several years living in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. There her late husband had been physician to the King, and she told me of their many adventures, including nightly visits to an opium den in the city.

I went on to call on her at her impressive home in the thirteenth-century medieval village of Carennac, where she showed me mementos and photographs of her time in Cambodia.

The daughter of a French father and English mother, Maude became the model for one of the book’s characters, La Mère Grace, the madam of a Bangkok brothel. I was concerned when she read the book that she might take offence. I needn’t have worried, as she proudly told anyone who would listen, ‘That’s me, darling!’

I didn’t finish the book during that time in France, and it wasn’t until I had quit Take The High Road a little over a year later that I had the time to do so.

I have edited the original manuscript very lightly. The biggest change involved cutting much of the sex that I was told at the time was a prerequisite for a bestseller. Reading it all these years later, I revisited the embarrassment I had felt writing those graphic scenes. Times and tastes change, and I think the book is much the better without them.

I am proud and happy to republish it now, nearly thirty years on.

Peter May

FRANCE 2019

PART ONE

PROLOGUE

Cambodia: April 1975

There is a seventeenth-century proverb which says, ‘When war begins hell opens.’ In this once lovely country in the heart of Indochina, hell opened when the war ended.

This, then, was liberation. Sullen youths in black pyjamas and red-chequered scarves cradling AK-47s with all the warmth they could not feel for their fellow human beings. It wasn’t