MICHAEL JOSEPH

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India | New Zealand | South Africa

Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

First published in Holland by A. W. Bruna Uitgevers, 2013, then Luitingh Sijthoff, 2016

First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph, 2017

Copyright © Walter Lucius, 2016

The moral right of the author and translators has been asserted

Epigraph credit: Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll, 1871

Cover image © Kirill Voronstrov

ISBN: 978-1-405-92133-6

For Nicole – Her name embodies love

Part One

DANCER

1

She could see her reflection in the lens of the digital camcorder. Standing behind it was the bald man with the vulture eyes who looked like a condor. He’d flung her into the boot of the armoured Falcon four-wheel drive and driven into central Moscow. Once there, he dragged her down long, empty corridors, like a hunk of meat. The few words he bothered to utter were in English, with that thick Slavic accent so typical of Russians. He spoke gruffly, barking commands. His movements were hurried and stiff, mirroring the cold-blooded expression on his face. The only sign of weakness was his panting. Every so often he sucked on an inhaler.

In a tiled room with blacked-out windows, he’d tied her to a chair in front of the camcorder. A man dressed in camouflage gear entered. He was holding a Kalashnikov and wearing two ammunition belts as well as a holster containing a powerful gun. From the way he talked to the condor, she figured the two must know each other well.

A woman in a black robe and a scarf wrapped tightly around her head was filming everything on her mobile. With her pale skin and blue eyes, she looked quite striking. The man in the fatigues barked something at her, after which she disappeared and reappeared again seconds later, shoving a girl of barely twenty ahead of her. He took the girl and forced her to kneel down beside the condor, who switched the camcorder on and, without looking at the girl, casually pressed the barrel of his Zastava against her temple.

The girl begged for her life. Her mutterings in Russian sounded like a whispered prayer. The condor took no notice of her. He had only eyes for the woman tied to the chair opposite him. His tattooed finger pointed to the lens.

‘Look at this!’

Farah Hafez raised her head and stared into the camcorder’s reflective black hole.

‘Now say what I want you to say, bitch. And do it convincingly. You can save this girl’s life.’

‘What do you want me to say?’ Farah murmured.

‘Repeat after me.’ Farah listened to the words he’d prepared for her, words that were not hers, words that would never even occur to her. She moved her lips in an effort to repeat them. The girl mustn’t die.

Her vocal cords barely vibrated, and the lines came out as little more than a sigh. The condor cocked his Zastava. The camcorder’s red light flickered. The girl flinched.

That’s when the words came. Unexpected and forceful. Like vomit.

‘I, Farah Hafez, support the jihad against President Potanin’s criminal regime.’

The condor smiled coldly and pulled the trigger anyway.

The Zastava’s dry click betrayed an absent bullet. When the girl fainted, the pungent stench of urine filled the air.

Farah swore at the man, yelled at him in Dari that his mother was worse than a whore – she’d done it with dogs and he was the spawn of that coupling.

The condor charged at her like he’d lost control. Despite being tied up, she kicked him as hard as she could in the shin. When she tried to avoid his next charge, she fell over, chair and all. Undeterred, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, still bound to the chair, out of the room and down a corridor to an auditorium, where a large group of young men and women had been herded together and were being held at gunpoint by a woman in black.

He retied her so tightly she could barely breathe, stuffed a piece of cloth into her mouth and taped her lips shut. Then he picked up a small, flat metallic box, connected to a laptop with wires, and strapped it to her chest.

He stood before her, sweating profusely and sucking hard on his inhaler.

‘You’re going to go out with a bang, you bitch.’ Somehow he reminded her of a giant bubble about to burst. He marched away.

He was making his way among the trees so quickly that he’d already stumbled twice. It was dark. He’d lost his sandals and was now running barefoot. The fallen branches cut the soles of his feet but he barely noticed the pain. And although he kept stubbing his toes on roots, that didn’t bother him either. He’d never run this fast in his life.

He’d only just broken into a sprint, but already felt himself slowly lifting off the ground. He was floating, with branches sweeping past his face and lacerating his body. When a dangling earring got caught on a branch and was ripped from his earlobe, he felt no pain. The euphoria of the escape made him numb to pain, made him stronger, made him faster.

Everything in him was instinctively geared towards running. Every breath, every heartbeat, every movement served his flight. The direction didn’t matter. Running, that’s what it was about. As long, as fast and as far as possible.

He’d tried before, but he’d been caught. The injuries caused by the beating had kept him awake for weeks. Yet it didn’t stop him from trying again. The man with the long black hair had planted a kiss on his glowing cheek, pressed his large hand against his back and yelled an order in an incomprehensible language.

He’d started running when he heard the shots. If he kept running he’d be safe. He ran towards the light that appeared behind the trees. All he heard now was his own breathing, his heartbeat. He wanted to embrace the rapidly approaching light as though it were salvation.

The light hit him with a dull thud.

1

Farah Hafez carefully placed her necklace with the silver-plated pendant beside her three silver rings and the black leather cuff. She looked into the bright-blue eyes of her naked reflection in the mirror and caressed the many tiny scars on her arms, breasts and belly. She’d scored them into her caramel-coloured body herself, back when it dawned on her that there could be no love without pain.

Time to get ready: sweep up her jet-black hair falling well below the shoulder in a cascade of curls and pull it into a tight topknot. Put on those loose-fitting, black satin trousers and fasten them around the hips. Place her arms into the wide sleeves of the jacket and then tie the red satin sash around it, so both ends fell across her left hip.

Farah took another look at herself standing there in her martial arts outfit. There may have been only an ultra-thin layer of fabric between her and the outside world, but she’d erected an imaginary suit of armour around herself. An invisible, yet impenetrable coat of mail. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and tried to ignore the cheering of the audience that carried in irregular waves from inside the old theatre via the catacombs into her dressing room.

She bent her knees slightly and began the warm-up exercises she once learnt from her father. Soon all she heard was her own breathing. She was five years old again, standing in the walled garden at the back of her parental home, under the old apple tree in Wazir-Akbar-Khan, Kabul’s affluent neighbourhood. Next to her father in his crisp white shirt and handmade linen trousers. He was counting out loud in what was to her an incomprehensible language, which he’d learnt from his Indonesian nanny as a little boy, ‘Satu, dua, tiga …’

Now Farah was whispering those very same words in a dressing room in Carré, an age-old brick circus building on wooden piles in Amsterdam. The same words after each exhalation, ‘Satu, dua, tiga.’

Just then the door swung open, revealing the silhouette of her coach. The deep voice of the emcee announcing the fight blasted in. She walked through the narrow corridors to the main auditorium, catching snippets of the introduction.

‘Farah Hafez! An avenging angel with the body and power of an oriental tiger!’

Oriental? She’d been in the Netherlands since the age of nine. And though she obviously had an Afghan heart, she considered herself to be a Dutch woman in every other respect.

Blinking, she stepped into the bright glare of the spotlight, and climbed the steps to the ring. Her opponent in the other corner, a white-haired Russian woman, looked like a vulture. Cold and ruthless. Farah failed to detect any signs of respect in her. She felt a stab of confusion. She was doing this gala because she loved this martial art with all her heart. Besides journalism, it was the mainstay of her life. Pencak Silat, the noble art of war from the Indonesian archipelago. Her father had taught her, and for that reason alone she’d continue to practice it for the rest of her life. It was a lasting bond. But it was also a way of life: an ongoing mental and spiritual challenge focused on the positive and humane.

She closed her eyes and returned, one last time, to the silence in which she’d done her warm-up. Her father reappeared by her side. Back from the dead. He spoke with the calm voice of a spirit who’d left all cares behind.

‘Do you remember what you were doing when you first felt the fear?’

She remembered.

‘You need to feel the fear to go through it.’

She took up her starting position, only inches from her opponent. Her right hand open and held up as if about to hit an imaginary wall. The Russian woman formed her mirror image. Farah felt the electric charge when their palms all but touched. She knew that strength alone wouldn’t get her anywhere with this woman. She had to be quick and agile too.

When the referee yelled the starting signal, she reacted a split second too late. The Russian grabbed her left arm and pushed her back with all her might. The fear instantly paralyzed her. She had two opponents now: her assailant and herself. She ought to be like bamboo, bending and bouncing back hard, not like a tight string, snapping at the slightest touch. She had to focus. Breathe. Think.

Out of the corner of her left eye, Farah saw a punch coming her way. She blocked it and put her opponent in an arm lock. Tugging and pulling at each other, they spun around on the mat. All of a sudden, the Russian reached for Farah’s head and began yanking at her hair. With tears of pain squirting out of her eyes, Farah kicked the Russian woman in the back with her right shin and made a scissoring motion that enabled her to throw her opponent on to her back and then clasped the woman’s outstretched hand to her chest. The Russian was now lying underneath her, caught in an arm lock.

Suddenly she felt a searing pain in her left calf. Her opponent had sunk her teeth into it. The pain rushed through Farah’s body, but instead of letting go she pulled even harder on the arm, so the hold tightened.

There they lay for a while, the Russian caught in an arm lock with Farah firmly on top of her, both screaming with pain, until the referee slapped their taut bodies with the flat of his hand.

‘Berhenti, berhenti!’ Stop, stop!

She released the hold, rose unsteadily to her feet and after brushing a hand across her calf noticed the smears of blood on her palm. As she stared into the Russian’s squinting eyes she suddenly felt an overwhelming force take hold of her. These were the moments she feared most. Something or someone took possession of her and made her do things that were beyond her control.

Before she knew it, Farah had thrown a right uppercut at her opponent’s chin. She pounded the woman’s ribs with her left hand and then with a right kick sent her flying backwards across the mat. The Russian went down like a rag doll.

She heard someone calling her name from very far away. She looked over her shoulder. Her coach had jumped into the ring behind her. She could see the panic in his eyes. When she turned around again she saw the referee and the attendant kneeling down by the Russian’s body, lying motionless on the floor.

It was dead silent in the hall.

2

The ambulance’s bright-blue flashing light reflected almost fluorescent against the raindrops hitting the windscreen. Although the wipers were going like mad, visibility on the unlit wooded road was poor. But Danielle Bernson had complete trust in her driver who was in constant contact with police central dispatch. It wasn’t clear where the victim would be lying.

The accident involved a child. The caller hadn’t indicated much more. In the side-mirror Danielle saw a police car’s emergency light rapidly approaching. When she glanced up again she shrieked. A pitiful heap of flesh was lying motionless on the road barely fifty yards in front of them. The driver, pumping his brakes to slow down, stopped the Mobile Medical Team ambulance alongside the body, diagonally blocking the lane. Grabbing her blue case and the resuscitation bag, Danielle jumped out of the vehicle into the rain.

It was a girl. She was lying face down on the wet tarmac. Her head was sideways, smashed against the ground. Her right arm was bent at an unnatural angle. Her left arm was limp and her right leg was twisted bizarrely, as if it wanted nothing more to do with the rest of her body.

Danielle knelt and together with the driver carefully lifted the girl’s head and neck and slowly turned her over. She supported the neck with a brace. Judging from the child’s dark-brown skin and jet-black hair she could have been Middle Eastern. Her eyes were darkly lined with kohl and greasy crimson lipstick was smudged around her mouth. She was dressed in a purple embroidered robe as if she’d just attended some kind of traditional festival. And she was hung with ornaments: in her ears, around her neck and wrists, even her ankles. Jewellery with small silvery bells that tinkled faintly with the slightest movement.

The girl’s eyes were shut. The only sign of life her distressed breathing. Danielle brushed a sticky lock of hair, clotted with blood, away from the head wound and began giving her oxygen.

Behind them a police car skilfully manoeuvred via the road’s right lane and then, a good distance away and with its emergency light flashing, blocked the road. Meanwhile Danielle heard brakes screech to a halt behind the ambulance. A car door opened and was slammed shut again, followed by rapid footsteps. Seconds later a somewhat older Moroccan-looking man squatted down across from her.

‘Give me room to work,’ she said irritably. When she glanced up, she saw the look of disgust on the man’s face.

‘Detective Marouan Diba,’ he stated without making eye contact. ‘Any witnesses?’

‘Nobody. She was lying here alone.’

A second detective had opened an umbrella above Danielle and was holding a torch to assist her.

The girl’s lips were turning blue. Danielle grabbed her stethoscope and listened to both sides of her chest. On the right side she heard the faint sound of breathing; on the left side she heard nothing.

‘Collapsed lung with tension pneumothorax.’

She knew the child was at death’s door. No doubt a number of her ribs were broken from the impact of the collision and the pressure building up in the chest cavity made it hard for the heart to circulate her blood. Danielle took her thickest infusion needle out of the case, located the space between the girl’s second and third ribs, slid the catheter over the needle into the chest cavity, then carefully removed the needle. She heard a hissing sound as the air in the lung decompressed. It sounded like a balloon deflating.

The detective muttered a curse, though it was obviously as a form of release. Danielle continued to ignore him.

‘It must have been a serious blow to the head. She probably hit the windscreen first and then the tarmac,’ Danielle said. ‘In the best-case scenario, she’s got a severe concussion.’

‘And in the worst case?’ the detective asked.

‘Internal bleeding,’ she answered as she checked the girl’s breathing again and then instructed her assistant to prepare a drip. She examined the strange position of the left leg. She now saw a piece of bone jutting out of the thigh and noticed that the leg was starting to swell.

She carefully felt the girl’s pelvis and was disturbed by what she found.

‘There’s a good chance her pelvis is fractured, meaning she could bleed to death internally.’

She removed a pair of scissors from her kit and began cutting away the girl’s clothing so she could better evaluate the injury. Right away she saw that the girl wasn’t wearing underwear.

And that she was a he.

The detective cursed again. He rose and walked away. Danielle took the pelvic sling from her assistant and together they stabilized the boy’s hips.

‘Bore needle,’ she shouted.

Danielle had to drill into the boy’s right shinbone to insert the needle. Fortunately, he groaned in reaction. That meant his brain was still functioning, but Danielle knew time was running out. She attached the drip and covered the leg wound with sterile gauze. Next, with the help of her driver and her assistant, she cautiously rolled the boy on to the yellow spinal board. She placed two blocks around his head to immobilize him.

‘At three,’ she called and began to count.

The detectives helped lift the board into the ambulance. Danielle leapt in beside the injured boy, the doors were slammed shut, and the driver contacted the hospital to provide their ETA. As the ambulance sped out of the Amsterdamse Bos along the woodland road, Danielle realized she wasn’t prepared to part with this child until she was sure he was out of danger.

3

Back in the dressing room Farah came to her senses again. As if she’d woken from a nightmare.

She’d looked at her coach with a question in her eyes, and he’d started talking to her. Calmly.

‘It’s not your fault, Farah. I saw what happened. It’s not your fault.’

She realized what must have happened. It had been too much. While she’d managed to stand up to the Russian’s physical powers, she couldn’t fight a force that was so much more intense and treacherous. The Russian woman’s hatred had penetrated her emotional defences, and had sparked an uncontrollable fury in her.

She knew how important it was to check her temper, even in the most difficult situations. Self-control had saved her life on more than one occasion. Yet tonight of all nights she’d lost that control. For only a few seconds, but in those seconds she might have fatally injured another woman.

She rarely lost herself in rage during a fight. It was a lot more common in love, where she’d left a trail of victims. But they always lived to tell the tale – with or without a broken heart – whereas the woman who’d faced her in the ring this evening might not.

She heard the door opening. While the uproar out in the corridor came blasting in and her coach was having a whispered conversation with an official, Farah tried to find the silence inside her head.

She heard her coach approach with a heavy tread, pause right behind her and wait until she was ready to hear the outcome. She could hear him breathing. Tears trickled down her cheeks. Father, where are you? When she’d finally calmed her breathing, she got up, turned around and saw the composure in her coach’s eyes … the reassurance. ‘It’s not too bad.’

Barely fifteen minutes later, Farah eased her black Porsche Carrera into the car park underneath the Waterland Medical Centre. She parked it close to the staircase and quickly ran up to the Emergency Department.

The receptionist looked at her with tired eyes that were devoid of all empathy. Farah told her that she was here for the woman who’d just been brought in with two broken ribs and a concussion.

‘And you are?’

‘The woman who did that to her,’ Farah replied.

The receptionist looked shocked. Just then, a few doctors and nurses stormed into the corridor. They ran past the reception desk in the direction of an ambulance which had just arrived out front with its sirens wailing.

Farah saw a seriously injured girl being wheeled in on a stretcher. The shredded, colourful fabric covering her had once been a traditional robe. The girl was draped in jewellery and little bells that made a sound each time the stretcher shifted. Amidst the apparent chaos of doctors and nurses yelling at each other, Farah was transfixed by the girl’s eyes. They were filled with terror. She also noticed the bluish lips moving slowly and noiselessly, trying to form a word.

Nobody seemed to see or hear this. And even if someone had heard, they probably wouldn’t have understood, because it was said in a language that wasn’t all that common here. But Farah had used that same word in her dressing room earlier in the evening. It had remained unspoken then, merely a thought.

‘Padar.’ Father.

She squeezed past the trauma specialists and bent over the girl on the stretcher. She spoke to her in Dari. ‘Relax, sweetheart. He’ll be here soon.’

The blonde doctor in the orange ambulance uniform looked up in surprise.

‘Are you a relative?’

‘No, but she asked for her father.’

‘It’s not a she. It’s a boy.’

A little boy, in these garments, wearing jewellery and make-up … Farah understood in a flash. It had never occurred to her that this age-old tradition from her native country could crop up in a Western country. But the evidence lay bleeding on the stretcher in front of her.

‘Is there an interpreter?’ Farah asked.

‘We’re trying to contact one,’ the blonde doctor said, raising her arm to stop Farah as the boy was wheeled into the trauma room.

‘I can interpret!’ Farah exclaimed as she watched how the boy was transferred, spinal board and all, to the operating table. She also heard the nervous tone of the consultations. She worked out that the doctor was refusing to surrender the boy to the care of the trauma team. Suddenly the woman gestured to Farah.

‘Ask him who his father is,’ she said as she began to cut the remaining clothes from the boy’s body. Meanwhile two nurses removed all the jewellery and put it in a transparent plastic bag which they tied under the stretcher.

Farah approached the boy. She took him to be seven, eight at most. She began talking to him, softly, telling him that he was safe now, that he had to hang in there. She would stay with him.

When she gently took his hand in hers, the boy clutched her fingers.

‘What’s your name?’

He looked at her, bewildered, as if she came from another planet.

‘Namet chist?’ What’s your name? She held her ear close to his mouth, but amidst the many loud instructions she couldn’t hear, let alone understand his whispers.

She overheard the blonde doctor telephoning to say that a ‘Priority 1’ patient was coming through. At that moment a nurse rushed in, shouting. ‘The surgeon is on his way.’

‘I’m going to operate,’ the doctor said, quite unperturbed, as she inserted a drain into the boy’s chest cavity. Farah nearly passed out at the sight. She turned back to the boy and whispered in his ear.

‘Ma Farah astom, to ki hasti?’ I’m Farah, who are you?

She saw the tears rolling down his cheeks and felt an immense need to give free rein to her own tears, but she held them back and merely whispered some clichés.

‘I’m here. I won’t leave you.’

‘Have you found out anything more about him?’ the doctor asked.

‘Not yet. By the way, where did you find him?’

‘In the woods, the Amsterdamse Bos. A hit-and-run.’ Farah picked up on the anger in her terse answer. The doctor immediately turned back to the nursing staff. ‘Listen, everyone. We’ve got an open-book fracture and a femur fracture. Most likely internal bleeding in the abdomen and possibly in the skull as well. The boy’s going to the OR. The fractures need to be stabilized or else he’ll bleed to death. Then we’re sending him for a CT scan. Is that clear?’

The boy was wheeled out of the trauma room. Farah walked beside him, still holding his hand. The doctor approached her as the lift doors opened.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked once they were in the lift.

‘Farah.’

‘Listen, Farah, you can’t go into the OR.’

‘I wasn’t planning to.’

‘But please leave your name and number at the desk.’

‘I’ll keep in touch,’ Farah said. ‘Who do I ask for if I want to speak to you?’

‘For Danielle. Danielle Bernson.’

The boy groaned. Farah stroked his hair while keeping hold of his hand. ‘You’re going to go to sleep soon,’ she whispered. ‘Then all the pain will be gone. And when you wake up, I’ll be here again.’

He looked at her with something like resignation.

The lift doors slid open. They walked through an empty corridor and stopped in front of OR 12.

‘Here we are,’ Danielle said.

Farah held her head very close to that of the boy.

‘The doctor’s going to look after you now. I’ll be here, waiting for you. All right?’

She caught a glint of mild despair in his eyes. Farah pressed a kiss on his cheek and gently released his hand.

‘Thank you, Farah,’ Danielle said as she wheeled the boy in.

Farah barely heard her. Once the boy had disappeared behind the slamming doors, all she could hear was the violent pounding of her own heart. She paced up and down the empty corridor for a while before coming to a decision.

4

At the exit for the woods, Farah slammed on the brakes and swerved off the A9. While carefully negotiating the bends in the increasingly ill-lit road, she realized she was doing something she’d long ago decided never to do again: she was acting on impulse.

What had drawn her to this place? The boy’s eyes? His terror? Or was it his despair, which in that single whispered word had sounded like an echo from her past?

She slowed to a halt and parked the car by the side of the road with the engine idling. Her pulse was racing. She closed her eyes and tried to regulate her breathing.

‘Padar.’

Farah had often heard the Dari word for father in her thoughts, in the silence that accompanies the dead. This evening the boy and his whispering had suddenly broken that long-standing silence. She had a suspicion that something had happened here this evening that was to have a far greater impact on her life than she could foresee. The thought scared her, but she was determined to trust her intuition this time around. Strangely enough, the decision to retrace the boy’s route caused her pulse to gradually slow.

She saw emergency lights approaching from behind and refracting sharp blue lines among the trees. Soon afterwards, the shiny red metal of a fire engine whizzed past with clanging sirens. Without hesitation, she accelerated and pursued the fire engine. She stepped on her brakes when it turned left on to a narrow path. From there she could see flames shooting up into the sky, some hundred yards into the woods. A crash, at such a remote location? Unlikely. She decided not to check it out, but to keep going along the paved road. A couple of minutes later she was proven right. Two forensics officers were crouching down on the road, going about their business in the light of some big work lamps.

Farah got out of her car and paused in front of the red-and-white tape stretched across the road. That’s when she realized that she wasn’t dressed for the occasion. Not in the slightest. Her clothes had been chosen for tonight’s festive closing gala: leather sandals with block heels under black trousers, loosely rolled up to just above the ankle. She’d left the second-hand, glossy black Versace jacket on the back seat. In her fitted, metallic shirt and with her tousled hair she looked like a dazed fashion model who’d been abandoned by the rest of the crew halfway through a shoot.

A little unnerved, she watched as one of the officers highlighted skid marks some thirty yards further up on her side of the road. The tracks swerved to the right, off into the verge. A few yards away, still in the right lane, someone had used white chalk to trace the contours of a small body in a bizarre pose.

The skid marks were probably from the car that had hit the boy. Farah saw there was quite a distance between the spot where the boy had been lying and where the marks shot off into the verge. It suggested that the boy had been hit so hard he’d been thrown some distance by the impact. The other option was that the car had actually tried to avoid the boy and had not hit him: the driver had slammed on the brakes, yanked on the wheel and come to a halt against a tree. In that case the boy hadn’t been standing there – he’d already been lying there.

In the left lane, level with the chalk drawing, Farah saw the second forensic scientist working on another set of skid marks. She slipped under the tape and walked towards him. He was young and completely focused on the wet tarmac, so it took him a while to notice her. He looked up in surprise.

‘I’m sorry to bother you. I live nearby,’ Farah said in her friendliest voice. ‘Do you have any idea what happened here?’

The young officer glanced at her and then pointed at something behind her. ‘Is that yours?’

‘The Carrera?’ Farah asked, turning around. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘Three-point-two litre rear-drive engine, 230 bhp, turbo body, lowered chassis and gas shock absorbers. You don’t just want to drive it, you want to live in it,’ the officer said with the admiring glance of an expert. ‘And I bet it goes from zero to a hundred in less than six seconds.’

‘I’ve never tried,’ Farah said. ‘It’s from 1987, and I take really good care of it.’ Sensing that she’d made it through his initial screening with some success, she decided to press him for more information. She gestured towards the shattered glass of a headlight. ‘How fast was this car going?’

‘My guesstimate: around eighty. Slammed on the brakes. You can tell by those thick marks over here.’ He pointed at the tip of the skid marks, where the tyre print was most clearly visible.

‘The boy was lying over there,’ Farah said, indicating the chalk drawing. ‘Is it possible that he was hit by this car?’ It was out before she realized it and the man in front of her was immediately on his guard.

‘The boy?’

‘I’m a journalist,’ Farah owned up straightaway. ‘I’m trying to find out who’s responsible.’

‘Do you have any ID on you?’ The young officer sounded rather tense all of a sudden. She could tell he was inexperienced and that he was trying to impress her with what little authority he had. Out of the corner of her eye Farah saw the other officer approaching them. She tried again.

‘Look, you’re doing your job and I’m doing mine. Are those marks on the other side of the road from the same car? What do you think?’ The other officer, who was undoubtedly in charge, was only a few yards away now. ‘I mean,’ Farah rephrased her thoughts quickly, ‘was there more than one car involved in this accident?’

‘Ma’am, this is a crime scene. You need to stay behind the tape.’

Looking into the grim face of the second forensics officer, Farah realized she’d run out of credit.

‘Of course, officer. I beg your pardon.’ Feeling her emotions getting the better of her, she quickly turned around. As she walked away, she could hear the two men conferring with each other.

‘Ma’am?’ the officer in charge shouted.

She turned around again and saw him coming towards her.

‘I understand you’re a reporter.’

‘That’s right,’ Farah said. ‘I was at the Emergency Department when they brought him in. And to leave a child for dead, here … well …’

For a moment they stood facing each other in silence.

‘I’m sorry, but we’re not allowed to pass information to the press.’ The officer gave her a conspiratorial smile. ‘But you’re right.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘More than one car was involved.’

‘Thank you,’ she said hoarsely.

‘What for?’

‘For your … help.’

‘We didn’t help anyone, ma’am. There hasn’t been anyone who’s needed it.’ He turned around. ‘Kevin, have you seen anyone around here in the past five minutes who wanted to know anything?’

The younger officer shook his head and smiled.

Farah got into her car, did a U-turn and drove to the spot where she’d seen the fire engine turn into the woodland path. Meanwhile she tried to make sense of what she’d just seen and heard. Skid marks on both sides of the road, from opposite directions. Two cars. At more or less the same time, in the same spot. And what linked them was the boy. Three pieces of what remained, for the time being, a sinister puzzle.

When she got to the woodland path, she looked over and there were those flames again. Could the fire have had anything to do with the accident? She was going on intuition now, and her intuition told her to find out.

5

It felt like driving into a tree-lined inferno. But it wasn’t the fire or chaos that drew her in. More than anything, it was the growing awareness that what had taken place here might have something to do with what had happened to the boy not far from here.

As she approached a police officer who gestured for her to stop, she flashed her press pass from the driver’s side in the hope of being mistaken for a detective, and accelerated without waiting for his response. She pulled up right behind a fire engine, opened her car door and hurried around to the clearing where helmeted firefighters were spraying white layers of foam on to the smouldering shell of a station wagon. Sudden shouting. She realized too late that she’d strayed within the reach of a water cannon used to keep the surrounding trees wet. Before she could jump out of the way, she was blown off her feet by the impact of hundreds of litres of water.

When, dazed and drenched, she tried to scramble up again, a stranger’s hand quickly pulled her to her feet. Still tottering on her heels, she looked straight into the clear brown eyes of a young man with trendy stubble that accentuated the angular jawline of his face.

‘Lost?’ he yelled above the din.

‘More unwanted, I think,’ Farah said, while tugging at her shirt that was now stretched tightly around her body. But tug as she might, the soaked fabric slid right back around her braless breasts. She might as well have been topless.

‘Detective Joshua Calvino. What’s a lady like you doing in a wood like this?’ He said it so mischievously that it made her smile in spite of the circumstances.

‘Okay, detective, here’s the score. I was at the WMC’s Emergency Department when a seriously injured boy was brought in. He’d been hit by a car somewhere in the vicinity. And I wanted to know what had happened.’

‘The boy was hit further up the road. Not here.’

‘Hmm, I know. I’ve already been up there.’

‘Then what are you doing here?’

‘Two cars were involved. I thought maybe one of those cars was torched here.’

He took another good look at her. She could tell he was trying hard not to look at her breasts.

‘You don’t seem like the type who goes wandering around the woods at some ungodly hour just for fun. So what is it?’

‘I’m a journalist,’ Farah said and showed him her ID. Meanwhile they’d reached the clearing where the burnt-out car was, covered in foam. The ground was squelchy and the air thick with greasy smoke. Amidst the chaos of firefighters walking to and fro with their endless hoses, Farah noticed a somewhat older man, who was gesticulating angrily and having a go at their commander.

‘My partner,’ Joshua said, frowning at the scene. ‘He’s getting all worked up because those guys with their extinguishers and waders have probably wiped out all the prints. Most likely destroyed any evidence we might have had.’

‘Any idea what caused the fire?’ Farah asked tentatively.

‘The car was doused in petrol and then … whoosh!’ Joshua simulated striking a match and flinging it away.

The other detective came striding towards them. Farah could tell he appreciated her presence a lot less than his younger colleague.

‘Those guys are bad enough,’ he said, pointing to the firefighters behind him. ‘So the last thing we need here are sightseers.’ He was staring so blatantly at Farah’s breasts as he said this that she took an instant dislike to him.

‘She was at the Emergency Department when they brought in the hit-and-run boy,’ Joshua said. ‘She reckons this fire might have something to do with—’

He didn’t have a chance to finish his sentence because of the sudden consternation among the firefighters grouped around the wrecked station wagon. He rushed over, with Farah hot on his heels. There she saw something she wished she hadn’t seen: two blackened, contorted bodies coated in white foam in the back of the car.

Overcome by the sight and stench of the two charred corpses, she spun around and, clinging to the nearest tree, threw up the contents of her stomach in a couple of convulsive spasms. Even the smell of her own vomit was refreshing compared to the stench of burnt human flesh now stuck in her nose. With a handkerchief pressed to her mouth, she straightened up again.

Joshua Calvino put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I think you’ve seen enough.’ He sounded the way he was meant to sound in a situation like this. Someone with both authority and compassion. Someone she was prepared to listen to.

‘Here you are.’ He handed her a bottle of water which she drained in a couple of big gulps.

‘Thanks.’

‘I need to get on with things. And you’ve got to get out of here. Will you be okay?’

The almost sensual, dazzlingly white smile that accompanied his words was really quite inappropriate under the circumstances, but Joshua Calvino appeared to have the knack of shaking off the gravity of this kind of ghastly situation. Farah was half expecting to hear a backing track, a cue for Joshua to burst into song and for the firefighters to start dancing in the background, like you see in Bollywood films. She watched him as he walked over to the other detective, who was now venting his spleen on the phone.

When, a little later, she carefully manoeuvred her car on to the paved road, she felt dizzy, and, more than anything, intensely sad. That’s why she opted for the fastest route around the Amstelveense Poel, which would lead her straight to the big house with the thatched roof. Across the pond was the home of TV director and documentary filmmaker David van Rhijn, the man she’d been in a relationship with for the past six months. So far, it seemed to be bearing up despite her impulsive nature.

Earlier that evening David had arrived back from India, where he’d been making a documentary about the history of the national railway network that carried some eighteen million passengers every day. She didn’t know if David was jet lagged and hoped he’d still be up. She thought of calling first, but changed her mind. If he was asleep, she didn’t want to wake him. Instead she’d snuggle up to him, wind down after the day’s events and fall asleep.

She thought of everything she’d been through that evening. The fight at Carré, its outcome, the hospital where the boy was brought in, the little help she’d been able to offer, the doctor who’d been so concerned.

All of a sudden she remembered why she’d gone to the hospital in the first place. Her opponent’s injuries. By the time she could see David’s house in the distance she was convinced that chance was a brilliantly orchestrated series of events. And for that reason alone she was desperate to believe in it.

6

David’s house was infused with a spirit of sanctuary and harmony. As she climbed the wide wooden staircase in the dark, Farah remembered the first time she’d wandered around the place, six months ago. She’d felt like Alice in Wonderland.

This was the home base of a globetrotter who was in the habit of bringing back Asian dragons, African gods of thunder and Mexican skeletons along with Buddhas, Russian icons and pictures of American baseball legends.

When Farah and David first met, he was mourning the love of his life whom he’d just lost to pancreatic cancer. Farah was touched by the sincerity with which he told her about his loss and the remorse he felt when, despite the sudden emptiness, he found something of a new meaning in life – in her. Not once did he try to present himself as a victim, to arouse her pity to get her into his empty bed as a consolation prize. He simply told her about his life as it was now. Farah felt pain without pretence, saw grief without shame, mourning without any ulterior motives.

The key to Farah’s unexpected passion for this stocky man with his head of dark curls and his boundless energy had been his melancholic eyes. They gave her a sense of security she hadn’t known since her early years in Kabul. Two days after their first meeting, she turned up at his house overlooking the pond.

But she wasn’t ready to move in with him yet, although David had said he was happy for her to give the ‘whole freaking mess’ a radical overhaul so it would feel like her home too. As long as David was around, it was his domain and she felt comfortable in it. But as soon as he’d gone off on one of his long trips, the big house suddenly felt crushingly empty.

In his absence she also missed the delicious smells emanating from the kitchen, because despite his rugged exterior David was a sophisticated chef. Out of a desire to please Farah he’d immediately started exploring Afghan cuisine and the first evening she came over for dinner he’d served up her favourite dish, qabili palau. But for now she was keeping her flat on Nieuwmarkt, in the centre of Amsterdam.

Tonight, however, she wanted to be with him more than ever. To feel his ample body, his aromatic breath mingling with hers. His huge hands on her. His embrace. Having reached the first floor, she tiptoed into the bedroom where she could hear his soft, irregular snoring. The bedside lamp was still on and reflected in the bottle of Campbeltown malt whisky which sat on the bedside cabinet among the opened New York Times and sections of the Guardian.

She slipped off her rings, removed her bracelet and necklace and undressed as quietly as possible before sneaking into the bathroom where she selected the massage setting of the shower. Under the wide, hot jet she could feel her body starting to relax and the resistance to her pent-up emotions gradually dissolving. She could stand there for ever, with her arms across her chest, her back slightly stooped.

When she turned around, she saw David in the doorway, naked, with dishevelled hair and somewhere between waking and sleeping, leaning against the doorjamb while absent-mindedly scratching his balls with his left hand.

‘I saw this Idols-type show on an Indian TV channel,’ he said between two yawns. ‘It was called Bathroom Singer and the idea was that the candidates were afraid to sing anywhere other than in the bathroom. It was amazing, it really was. They’ve recreated entire bathrooms in the studio and it’s a huge hit.’ He sleepwalked over to her with a growing erection and in an exaggerated, honeyed Indian accent said, ‘So, welcome to the show, Miss Hafez. What will you sing for us tonight?’ He didn’t notice she was crying until he’d come closer.

‘Are these tears of happiness because you won tonight, or are you just happy to see me again?’ he asked with an uncertain smile. He wrapped her in a tight embrace.

Farah snuggled up against his warm, hairy body and burst into tears.

He lifted her out of the shower cubicle, carried her into the bedroom and covered her wet face with tender, comforting kisses. Then he looked at her long and hard. Biding his time.

‘Let’s not talk,’ she whispered. She pushed him away gently and as he landed on his back with a sigh, she bent over him, splattering his hairy chest with drops from her wet hair and kissing him long and deep.

Leaning over him like this turned her on. David’s large hands grabbed hold of her hips as if to pin her even tighter against himself.

‘Harder,’ she begged when he thrust deeper inside her. It felt as if she was lifted by the force of a mountainous wave and suspended above the bed for several seconds, weightless, screaming with relief. Soon after David came inside her with a shudder.

Once she’d softly landed on him again, she could feel her body finally relaxing and her gloominess slowly ebbing away.

She wasn’t sure how long she’d been by David’s side. She felt all clammy. The flashing digits on the alarm clock told her it was five past four. She carefully extricated herself from his embrace and, without a sound, stepped past the swaying net curtains in front of the open window and on to the balcony.

Lost in thought, she stared across the pond. Her whole life, she’d been fascinated with things she didn’t understand. Her first such experience had been the moment when, as a five-year-old looking out of her bedroom window, she’d seen her father doing those slow, unfamiliar punching and kicking movements under the apple tree. As if he was doing a non-existant dance to inaudible chords. The notion that he’d gone mad had briefly crossed her young mind. At the same time she’d been so intrigued by his calm, his strength and his control that she’d carried on watching, open-mouthed.

Afterwards, she’d spied on him from her room every morning and she’d soon discovered that he always followed the same pattern of moves. She began imitating him. Day in, day out. Until, one morning, she summoned up enough courage to go and stand under the apple tree and wait for her father to come out. And when he did, she began the first move, graciously, the way she’d seen him do it. When she was done, he was still standing there. Motionless. She looked at him, ready for any punishment she might get. But instead he folded his hands and, without a word, bowed to her. It was a magical moment she’d never forgotten. It marked the beginning of their soul connection, which transcended his earthly demise four years later.

Now that the wind had turned, the roar of the A9 tore the illusion of natural harmony to shreds. Farah walked back into the room and looked at David, who was fast asleep. She smiled. He’d be capable of vigorous sex even during his REM sleep. But the promise she’d made earlier that evening kept echoing through her mind, ‘Buru khauw sho. Waqte ke bedar shodi mar peshet mebashom.’ Go to sleep now. When you wake up, I’ll be here again.

In the walk-in wardrobe she found a pair of jeans, which she teamed with a plain white silk shirt. As she slipped into a pair of trainers, she took out her mobile phone and called the WMC. The operation was still underway. So far, nobody had inquired about the boy.

She walked back to the bed, leaned over David, pressed a kiss on his sweaty forehead and snuck out of the bedroom.