Doors Open

Source: www.speakup.com.br

Standard accent: British

Speaker: Mark Worden

Language level: Advanced

READING

DOORS OPEN

And as an accompaniment to that, Ian Rankin reads an excerpt from his latest novel, Doors Open. The setting is Edinburgh and the subject is crime. Without wishing to give the game away, it tells the story of a group of respectable citizens who try and steal valuable works of art from the Scottish National Gallery warehouse. They also encounter a professional criminal. Chib Calloway. Who is described here:

Ian Rankin

(Scottish accent)

So far, it had been another bad day for Chib Calloway. The problem with surveillance was, even if you knew you were being watched, you couldn’t always know who the watchers were. Chib owed a bit of money…all right, a lot of money. He owed other things, too, and had been keeping his head down, answering only one or two of his dozen mobile phones, the ones whose numbers only kith, kin and close associates knew. He’d had two meetings scheduled for lunchtime, but had cancelled both. He’d apologized by phone without bothering to explain why. If it got out that he was being tailed, his reputation would dip further. Instead he’d drunk a couple of cups of coffee at Cento Tre on George Street. it was a pretty upmarket spot – a bank at one time. A lot of Edinburgh’s banks had been turned into bars and restaurants. With cash machines everywhere, banks weren’t needed. The machines had brought with them a variety of scams, of course; card numbers skimmed, the cards themselves cloned, devices attached to the machine which could transfer the necessary information to a microchip….

There were some petrol stations you didn’t dare use. They sold your details on to other people. chib was careful that way. The gangs with the cash machine know-how all seemed to originate overseas – Albania. Croatia, Hungary. When Chib had looked into it as a possible business proposition, he’d been informed that it as something of a closed shop – which rankled especially when the gangs then targeted Edinburgh.