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had earned his name. He stood 6 feet and 3 inches in his stockings but was wearing enormous nail-studded, steel-toed boots. Arms like tree trunks hung from huge shoulders and his head was surmounted by a shock of ginger hair. Two small, pale-lashed eyes stared down balefully at the slight and wiry Indian. It was plain he was not best pleased. He spat on the ground.
    'Well get in the fecking truck,' he said.
    On the journey out to the work site Cameron sat up in the cab which had no partition dividing it from the back of the lorry, where the dozen labourers sat on two wooden benches down the sides. Ram Lai was near the tailboard next to a small, nut-hard man with bright blue eyes, whose name turned out to be Tommy Burns. He seemed friendly.
    'Where are youse from?' he asked with genuine curiosity.
    'India,' said Ram Lai. 'The Punjab.'
    'Well, which?' said Tommy Burns.
    Ram Lai smiled. 'The Punjab is a part of India,' he said.
    Burns thought about this for a while. 'You Protestant or Catholic?' he asked at length.
    'Neither,' said Ram Lai patiently. 'I am a Hindu.'
    'You mean you're not a Christian?' asked Burns in amazement.
    'No. Mine is the Hindu religion.'
    'Hey,' said Burns to the others, 'your man's not a Christian at all.' He was not outraged, just curious, like a small child who has come across a new and intriguing toy.
    Cameron turned from the cab up front. 'Aye,' he snarled, 'a heathen.'
    The smile dropped off Ram Lai's face. He stared at the opposite canvas wall of the truck. By now they were well south of Bangor, clattering down the motorway towards Newtownards. After a while Burns began to introduce him to the others. There was a Craig, a Munroe, a Patterson, a Boyd and two Browns. Ram Lai had been long enough in Belfast to recognize the names as being originally Scottish, the sign of the hard Presbyterians who make up the backbone of the Protestant majority of the Six Counties. The men seemed amiable and nodded back at him.
    'Have you not got a lunch box, laddie?' asked the elderly man called Patterson.
    'No,' said Ram Lai, 'it was too early to ask my landlady to make one up.'
    'You'll need lunch,' said Burns, 'aye, and breakfast. We'll be making tay ourselves on a fire.'
    'I will make sure to buy a box and bring some food tomorrow,' said Ram Lai.
    Burns looked at the Indian's rubber-soled soft boots. 'Have you not done this kind of work before?' he asked.
    Ram Lai shook his head.
    'You'll need a pair of heavy boots. To save your feet, you see.'
    Ram Lai promised he would also buy a pair of heavy ammunition boots from a store if he could find one open late at night. They were through Newtownards and still heading south on the A21 towards the small town of Comber. Craig looked across at him.
    'What's your real job?' he asked.
    'I'm a medical student at the Royal Victoria in Belfast,' said Ram Lai. 'I hope to qualify next year.'
    Tommy Burns was delighted. 'That's near to being a real doctor,' he said. 'Hey, Big Billie, if one of us gets a knock young Ram could take care of it.'
    Big Billie grunted. 'He's not putting a finger on me,' he said.
    That killed further conversation until they arrived at the work site. The driver had pulled northwest out of Comber and two miles up the Dundonald road he bumped down a track to the right until they came to a stop where the trees ended and saw the building to be demolished.
    It was a huge old whiskey distillery, sheer-sided, long derelict. It had been one of two in these parts that had once turned out good Irish whiskey but had gone out of business years before. It stood beside the River Comber, which had once powered its great waterwheel as it flowed down from Dundonald to Comber and on to empty itself in Strangford Lough. The malt had arrived by horse-drawn cart down the track and the barrels of whiskey had left the same way. The sweet water that had powered the machines had also been used in the vats. But the distillery had stood alone, abandoned and empty for years.
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