“No.”
“What is your religion?”
“I don’t have one.”
“Who is your God?”
“I have no God.”
“What sort of man has no God? What does he believe in? Why does he live?”
He lives because he is a man.
“You are American?”
“I was born there. My mother is Iraqi.”
“I like George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenegger. How come Americans don’t like football? Everybody in the world likes football.”
“We have our own sort of football.”
The old man grunts, unimpressed. The girl appears on the narrow stairs. Barely sixteen, her face still covered. She feels her way, pressing her palm against the wall. The old man calls her closer. She raises her chin. Her eyes are a dull and sightless white.
“She heard them,” he says.
“What did she hear?”
The girl speaks softly in Arabic. “There was a truck and two cars. Men were arguing.”
“How many men?”
“Seven or eight.”
“What were they saying?”
“Some of them were told to go into the house. They were beating at the door, trying to get out. The other men loaded the truck.”
“Did you hear any names?”
She shakes her head. “They were driving Land Cruisers.”
“How do you know?”
The old man answers for her. “She can recognize different engines.”
“Did they say where they were going?”
She hesitates. The old man barks, “Tell him, wife.”
Not her grandfather!
“I heard them say Al Yarubiyah,” she says.
It’s a crossing on the Syrian border, eighty miles to the west.
“The men in the building were yelling and screaming,” she says, covering her ears. “There was a big noise and then they stopped.”
Luca leaves a bottle of antibiotics on the table and tells the old man how many to take. He steps into the brightness of the afternoon. A dozen men are watching him, their faces wrapped in kaffiyehs. Eyes empty.
Jamal and Abu are waiting at the vehicles. Abu is eating a homemade sandwich of bread and meat. He has a weapon slung across his chest.
“Time to go,” says Jamal, glancing over his shoulder.
They leave the village in a cloud of dust but even before it settles Abu spots a vehicle tracking them, a battered pickup about two hundred yards away, travelling in the same direction, bouncing over ruts.
The driver is dressed all in white. He’s not alone.
Jamal puts his foot down, swerving around potholes, his knuckles white on the wheel.
“How far to the dual carriageway?”
“A mile and a half.”
Luca pulls a Kevlar vest from his bag. “Put this on.”
Jamal shakes his head. “I’m fine. You wear it.”
“We both wear one.”
Jamal takes one hand off the steering wheel and puts it through the sleeve, then the other one.
Reaching beneath the seat, Luca pulls out a machine pistol. He cracks the car door, holding it partially open, keeping his weapon out of sight.
The pickup is still with them, the distance closing.
“They could be farmers,” says Luca, not believing it. He raises the machine pistol and fires a warning shot. The pickup doesn’t slow down or change course.
Ahead, lying discarded beside the road is a hessian sack. Jamal swerves violently, bouncing through a gutter and sending the Skoda rearing like a rodeo bull. At the same moment the sack explodes, blowing out the side windows and lifting the Skoda on to two wheels where it balances for what seems like the longest time, trying to decide whether to roll over or right itself.
Gravity is kind to them. Four wheels kiss the earth. Luca’s ears are ringing. Jamal is yelling.
“He’s coming in! He’s coming in!”
The pickup has closed to within thirty yards. The passenger is firing on them, sending bullets pinging off the side of the Skoda.
Luca leans over the back seat and shoots through the rear window. Ejected cartridges, brass, red-hot, rattle on to the floor. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Abu in the Toyota HiLux, rearing over the dunes and the undulations. He has pointed the vehicle directly at the pickup, closing at speed.
The gunman in the passenger seat recognizes the danger and changes his aim but it’s too late. The force of the collision sends the pickup spearing into an embankment. Its nearside bumper digs into the earth and the entire vehicle lifts off the ground and rolls once… twice… three times in slow motion before exploding. Black smoke rises and billows like a mushroom cloud, perfect in the heat and stillness of the afternoon.
Jamal and Abu pull up at a safe distance.
The cousins look at each other, breathing hard, wordlessly taking stock. Uninjured. Jamal runs his hand along the side of the Skoda, putting his finger through one of the many bullet holes.
“And you laughed at my armor plating,” he says, with a hint of pride.
Abu glances at the burning wreck.
“They will have friends. We cannot stay here.”
14
Holly Knight stares at a spot on the wall, concentrating on a crack in the paintwork because it stops her thinking of Zac. The police took away her clothes for testing. She fought them at first and it took three female officers to undress her. Then she sat in her underwear, refusing to wear the prison overalls.
There was an argument outside her cell.
A man said, “I can’t interview her if she’s half-naked.”
“She won’t get dressed.”
“Get her some proper clothes.”
The voices went away and came back later. A WPC brought a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt and Converse trainers.
“They’re not going to let you go unless you’ve been interviewed. You don’t have to answer the questions, but you have to listen to them.”
Holly could see her point.
Now in the interview room the questions are washing over her like background music in a shopping mall. Threats. Accusations. Abuse.
“When did you last see Zac Osborne?”
She doesn’t answer.
“What happened in the flat?”
Silence.
“Did you see his attacker? What did he look like? Are you deaf? Your boyfriend is dead. He was murdered. You won’t say a word. You’re not crying. You’re not upset. Maybe you don’t care.”
Holly doesn’t react. She only turns her head when someone new enters the room, fixing her eyes on them, committing them to memory. Past experience has impressed upon her the need for silence. She has learned to analyze the consequences of co-operating with the police and has come to the conclusion that the best way to get out of her present circumstances is to say nothing at all so her words can’t be twisted and used against her.
The detective quotes from her file. A history lesson. The foster homes, the past arrests, her alcohol and drug abuse. Her mind slips back over some of these events, but most have been forgotten or blocked out.
She has decided that she does not like DS Thompson, who is no longer polite or respectful. He has an undertaker’s face and dandruff on his shoulders.
In Holly’s experience, people tend to talk at her and not to her. They preach or they browbeat and they hear what they want to hear. But that’s not the reason she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t trust the truth. The truth can be a lethal thing.
Her mother used to work nights as a nurse. Her father, Reece, would go to the pub every evening, dressed in his best jacket, smelling of aftershave, whistling as he walked up the street. He left Holly in charge. Aged seven. Her brother Albie was five, epileptic, small for his age. One night Albie left the taps running when he filled the bath. It overflowed and flooded downstairs, coming through the ceiling in a torrent of plaster and dust.
When their father came home, Holly had tried to clean up but the wet plaster dust was like glue and she couldn’t hide the hole in the ceiling. Albie lay mute and fearful in his bed. His cat was under the covers with him.