did kill him. If I hadn’t killed him, he would have killed me. Where I come from that’s called justifiable homicide, Mademoiselle de Bale.’
‘My name is Lamia, not Mademoiselle de Bale. And believe me, Mr Sabir, I don’t blame you in any way at all for killing my stepbrother. He was a rabid dog. And I hated him for it.’
Sabir felt as if he were floundering in an unfamiliar ocean, far out of his depth, in a rapidly encroaching riptide. ‘I’m sorry. Really sorry that it had to end that way.’
‘I am not.’
Sabir stared desperately at Calque. He no longer had the remotest idea what was expected of him. Or why Calque had brought him into this mess.
‘Your dream. You were telling us of your dream, Sabir.’
Sabir tried to gather himself together. ‘Yes. Yes I was.’ The words came out explosively, like a sneeze. ‘Ever since I was in the cellar. Or in the cesspit rather. Ever since I thought that I would suffocate to death, in other words, I have been having these dreams. Well, they’re nightmares, really. In which I’m quite literally torn apart.’ Sabir’s voice trailed off. He was making no sense and he knew it. ‘And then my head is eaten by a snake. Then I become the snake.’ He had begun to sweat. ‘It’s crazy. I really can’t describe it. But I have them pretty much every night. They’re so bad I can’t sleep. That’s how come your twin brothers didn’t get me when they broke into my house last night. I get claustrophobic – so most every night I check out of the main house and go over to sleep in the summer house. It’s open out there. I can see the sky. I can breathe.’
‘You mean they entered the house when you were already outside? In the garden hut?’
‘Yes. Crazy, isn’t it? I even left the back door unlocked. Later, when they switched on a light, thinking I wasn’t anywhere about, I managed to get the drop on them with my father’s empty shotgun.’
‘You managed to get the drop on them? With an empty shotgun?’ Calque seemed to be having difficulty conjuring up a sufficiently lurid image of the event. ‘You held up the de Bale twins with an empty shotgun?’
‘You see, no one can tell whether a shotgun is empty or not. It’s not like a revolver, where you can see the shells. Or lack of them.’
‘I understand the constitution of a shotgun, Sabir.’
‘Well, anyway, as part of this dream I see a woman. She has her back to me. You’ve got to imagine that I’m the snake by now, and I’m approaching her. My mouth is hanging open. I’m going to take this woman’s head in my mouth, just like the snake did with me. Then at the very last moment the woman turns around. And she has your face, Mademoiselle de Bale.’
‘You mean exactly? With my birthmark? With my blemish?’
‘Yes. She has a blemish, if that’s what you want to call it, just like yours. At first I thought it was blood. All along, really, I’ve thought it was blood.’
‘And now you realize it isn’t?’
‘Yes. Now I realize it isn’t.’ Sabir looked down. He understood only too well how badly he had hurt the woman. That he had damaged her in some invisible way. In his head, though, he was still torn between his horror that she was Achor Bale’s sister, and his fascination that she seemed to have rejected the de Bale camp and joined the side of the angels – e.g. him and Calque.
‘And what happens to this woman who looks so much like me? In your dream, I mean.’
Sabir closed his eyes. Then he opened them again and stared directly at Lamia. ‘She opens her mouth – wider even than the snake was able to open its mouth – and she swallows me whole.’
10
‘Saudi Arabia? You can’t be serious?’
Sabir threw himself back in his chair. ‘You bet I’m serious. I’ve looked into this every which way there is to look, and the quatrain seems to point directly there.’
‘Would you be prepared to share your logic with us?’ Twice, now, Calque had reached for his cigarettes, and then replaced them in his pocket after reproving glances from the inn staff.
Sabir glanced at Lamia.
She caught the glance, and made as if to stand up. ‘Would you rather I left the room? I can fully understand if you still don’t feel, despite Captain Calque’s assurances, that I am an entirely trustworthy companion.’
Sabir waved her back down again. ‘Stay right where you are.’ He caught Calque’s eye and shrugged. ‘There’s no way you could possibly know this, but before I got the drop on your brothers, I listened in on their private conversation. A full couple of minutes of it. And together with what they told me later, it soon became clear to me that they think you betrayed them, Mademoiselle de Bale. In fact they think that – via our friend Calque here – you warned me directly about their coming. And that, to put it mildly, they don’t like you for it.’
‘But she did.’ Calque squirmed forward in his seat. ‘That’s exactly what she did do. She told me of her brothers’ mission. In good time for me to warn you. If ever you’d bothered to pick up your phone, that is, or taken an interest in your messages.’
‘ Touche, Captain.’
‘And I’ve not told you how I found her yet. What her family were about to do to her.’
‘You don’t need to. Her brothers’ words were good enough for me. You can’t fake attitudes like that. Mademoiselle de Bale is welcome to sit in on our conversation if she wants to.’ Sabir was aware that part of him was endeavouring, via a studied politeness, to compensate the woman for his blundering faux pas about her face and the disturbing content of his dream. Another part of him recognized that Calque had obviously committed himself to her in some way – heck, didn’t he have an errant daughter hidden away somewhere? Maybe she reminded him of her? – and that he still owed Calque.
‘Why did you let the twins get away? They were in your house illegally. Why didn’t you simply call the police?’
Sabir shook his head. ‘They were playing with me. They knew I wouldn’t shoot. They brazened it out, making it clear there’d been no breaking and entering of any sort. That I didn’t have a leg to stand on in terms of the cops. Then, when they’d worked out to their satisfaction how I’d managed to avoid their little trap, they left.’
‘You let them leave? Just like that?’
‘What was I going to do, Calque? Toss the shotgun at them? If you ask me, they’re holding fire until they can corner me somewhere private and wring out everything I know. When I haven’t got a shotgun in my hand, maybe.’ Sabir shrugged. ‘Things might pan out a little differently that time.’
11
‘Sabir was warned, Madame. I’m certain of it. The American knew we were coming. He was hiding outside the house with a shotgun. When we switched on the lights, thinking he was no longer there, he knew exactly where to find us.’
‘You think Lamia warned him? Through Calque?’
‘I’m convinced of it.’
‘Why didn’t he involve the police, then?’
‘He was scared to, Madame. We had entered his house through an open door – he slipped up on that one. Given that fact, and the existing relationship between our two families, he would have been hard put to accuse us of robbery. I think we can call this first round something of a stalemate.’
‘What are you going to do now, Abiger?’
‘We’ve flushed him out, Madame. He will go on the run now. We must follow him.’
‘Have you tagged his car?’
‘Impossible, Madame. He has it sealed up tight. And the garage is alarmed. When he leaves, he will leave fast.’
‘And Lamia?’
