followed by a compact thud and a crack. Then silence. A long silence, which was broken by that whimpering in the room.
'Abdullah?' said Falcon.
'I'm here,' he said. 'On the landing. She cut me with a knife. I can't let go of it, I'm bleeding too much.'
'Where's the light?'
'You'll have to find a candle or a lamp.'
Women's voices raised down below. They'd found the body. Abdullah yelled some Arabic out of the window. Uncertain light and footsteps came up the stairs. A lamp came into the room. Falcon turned to look at the corner where the whimpering was coming from. There was a child's cot with bars around it. Behind the bars he could see a child's back completely still. Falcon stumbled through the furniture in the room. At the foot of the cot, curled in a tight ball was a small, black, trembling dog. Next to it was Dario, inanimate. There was a strong smell of faeces and urine. The boy was naked. In the hopeless light he could not tell whether the mad crone had killed the boy out of spite, as Yacoub said she might. After that night with the Russians outside Seville, he could barely bring himself to do it, but he reached out a hand, touched the small naked shoulder, let his hand slip into the crook of the neck and felt the pulse ticking under the warm skin.
32
There was no lingering on that hot night in Fes.
The women in the Diouri household did not seem unduly troubled by the death of Barakat's mother, they were far more concerned about the injury to Abdullah and confounded by the presence of a child and a small dog in the house. When Abdullah told them he'd been knifed by the mad woman, and they found the bloody blade still in the woman's hand, they were appalled. Falcon looked at the wound. It was a deep cut in the shoulder muscle and, although bloody, the blade had not severed anything serious. The women brought alcohol and bandages. He dressed the wound, but said it would need stitches. Given the circumstances, he told Abdullah, this would best be done in Ceuta. Yousra and Leila would stay in Fes.
They were led to the car through the back streets of the medina. Consuelo would not let Falcon carry the boy. She was frightened by Dario's total lack of animation, but encouraged by the steadiness of his pulse. They left for Ceuta at 9.30 p.m. On the way Falcon called Alfonso, the concierge, at the Hotel Puerta de Africa and told him they would be arriving at about 1 a.m. Moroccan time at the border and would need help to get through. Abdullah had changed out of his bloody clothes and back into mourning. He had his ID card, but had left his passport in Rabat. Consuelo had had the foresight to bring Dario's documents. Falcon also told Alfonso they'd need a doctor on arrival at the hotel and a couple of rooms for what was left of the night.
At the border they were walked through to the Spanish side, with no official inspection. A taxi was waiting. Dario had still not stirred. He had the distressing feel of a large ragdoll. The doctor was waiting at the hotel and they went straight up to the room. Abdullah insisted that Dario was seen to first. The doctor lifted Dario's eyelids, shone his torch into the pupils. He listened to the heart and lungs. He minutely inspected the boy's body and found needle punctures in the crooks of his elbows. He declared there was nothing wrong with him apart from having been heavily sedated.
He took one look at Abdullah's wound and said he'd have to come with him to his surgery and have it properly cleaned and stitched. Falcon and Consuelo washed Dario in the bath and put him to bed. They slept with the boy in between them and were woken just before midday by his crying. He had no recollection of what had happened to him. Although he vaguely remembered being taken away from the Sevilla FC shop, he could not recollect how it had happened or who had done it.
It was decided that Abdullah would travel with them and stay in Seville with Falcon until the Barakat murder and the death of the mother had been dealt with by the authorities. They took a cab to the hydrofoil and were across the straits by 3.30 p.m. They drove back to Seville, where Falcon left Consuelo and Dario in Santa Clara with her sister and the boys, Ricardo and Matias. He and Abdullah went to the Jefatura, where he gave Barakat's DNA swab to Jorge in the forensics lab and asked him to check it against samples on the Jefatura's database.
'You know Comisario Elvira is looking for you,' said Jorge.
'He's always looking for me. I'm going home to bed,' said Falcon. 'You haven't seen me.'
He and Abdullah went home. Encarnacion fed them. Falcon turned off all his mobiles and disconnected his phone. He slept the rest of the afternoon and whole night without waking.
In the morning he inspected Abdullah's wound and redressed it. He took a slow breakfast out in the patio, staring at the marble flagstones. At midday he called Jorge and asked if he'd run the DNA test.
'There was a match to Raul Jimenez,' said Jorge. 'The DNA you gave me would probably have belonged to his son. Does that help you?'
'Interesting.'
'You might also be interested to know that your squad are on a high. Last night they arrested two building inspectors in Torremolinos, who they'd identified from those Lukyanov disks. They've already charged them with conspiring to cause an explosion,' said Jorge. 'This morning they picked up the owner of a small hotel in Almeria, who also happened to be an electrician and was trained by the army in the use of explosives. He'll be arriving in Seville this afternoon. Ramirez has been trying to call you and Comisario Elvira is still very eager to know where you are. I've said nothing.'
Falcon hung up, called Consuelo. Dario was playing with his brothers and some friends in the pool.
'He seems untouched by it all,' she said, amazed. 'I was going to get Alicia to talk to him, but I'm not sure whether it will just make him unhappy.'
'See what Alicia says. You don't have to rush,' said Falcon.
He told her about the DNA match from Barakat to Raul. Consuelo couldn't understand how Raul Jimenez, her ex-husband, came to be Mustafa Barakat's father.
'The reason Raul suddenly had to leave Morocco back in the fifties was because he'd made the twelve-year-old daughter of Abdullah Diouri Senior pregnant. Diouri Senior had demanded that Raul marry the girl to preserve the family honour. Raul couldn't because he was already married, so he fled. Diouri took revenge by kidnapping Raul's youngest son, Arturo. And for whatever reason – guilt, or because he loved him – Diouri gave Arturo the same status as his own sons with his family name. So Arturo Jimenez became Yacoub Diouri.
'But because Diouri's twelve-year-old daughter had brought shame on to the family, her son by Raul was not allowed to bear the family name. However Diouri Senior didn't totally reject him. The close ties between the Diouris and the Barakats meant that the boy was introduced into that family to become Mustafa Barakat.'
'That sort of knowledge in the wrong mind could breed a special kind of hatred,' said Consuelo.
'And how do you think Mustafa Barakat would feel about Yacoub Diouri?'
'Imagine the bitterness that poor girl must have felt at her own rejection for being defiled by Raul, only to have to witness Yacoub's smooth integration into the Diouri family while her own son is kicked out.'
'Profile of a terrorist?'
Consuelo invited Javier to dinner that night, asked him to bring Abdullah. Falcon drove out to the prison in Alcala de Guadaira. He'd called ahead so Calderon was already waiting for him in a visiting room. He wasn't smoking. He had his hands clasped in front of him on the table to stop them from fidgeting. He still looked haggard, but not as reduced as he had been when Falcon had last seen him. The supreme self-confidence had not been recovered, but he seemed more solid.
'You've heard,' said Falcon.
'My lawyer came to see me yesterday,' said Calderon, nodding. 'I'm still going to face assault charges, but…'
He trailed off, looked up at the high barred window.
'You're going to get your life back.'
'In the end,' he said. 'But it'll be a different one. I'm going to see to that.'
'How's it been going with Alicia Aguado?'
'Hard,' said Calderon, leaning back, hooking his hands around his knee. 'I spend a lot of my day thinking about myself, and not much of it is good. You know, Alicia told me in our last session that it was rare for a male patient to
