house, and they ignored him as if he were an imbecile and incapable of independent thought. There was nothing he could do but sit and wait.
'It isn't my fault.'
She had come where and when he had told her to come. Farida Yasmin Jones hung her head, pressed her face against her knees. The damp of the evening was in the air. She had driven her car down the narrow lane off the wider, busier road, and after the bend that prevented it being seen from the road she had parked near to the track that led to the tumulus.
'I do not criticize you.'
'You look as though you do when I came with Yusuf there wasn't protection.'
'Perhaps he lived.'
'You said he'd die.'
'Perhaps he lived and talked.'
'Yusuf Khan would never talk.'
'All men say they would never talk, and believe it.'
'You're insulting him.'
'He was stupid, he was like a child. He spoke too much and he could not drive why should I believe he would not talk?'
'You've no right to say he'd talk. What're you going to do?' He had come from Fen Hill and across Fen Covert and he had sat for close to twenty minutes hidden in bushes watching her before he had shown himself. After twenty minutes Vahid Hossein had gone in a wide loop around her to check that she was not followed, was not under surveillance. He had seen the men at the house with the guns. He had no trust in anything he had been told. There had been an Iraqi ruse in the marshland in front of the Shattal-Arab: an ambush would be set by a patrol; they would lie up and their guns would cover a raised pathway through the reed-banks; a cassette recorder would play a conversation, men's voices, in the Farsi tongue; men of the Revolutionary Guards would be drawn towards the voices of their own people. Friends had been killed because they trusted what they heard. He had watched her. She had eaten mint sweets from a packet, and scratched the white skin of her legs above her knees, and looked frightened around her in the quiet. She had rubbed hard against the softness of her breast, as if there was irritation there. She had snapped her fingers together in impatience. All the time he had watched her. He had no trust in her and yet he was yoked to her.
'Think, plan.'
'Think about what? Plan what?'
'Think and plan.'
'Don't you trust me?'
'I have faith only in myself.'
Her face was against the white skin of her legs and her hair cascaded over her knees. He thought that she might be crying.
'I'll do whatever you want.'
'You cannot think for me and you cannot plan for me.'
'Is that because I'm a woman?'
'Because…'
'What is your name?'
'You have no need to know my name. You have no need to know anything of me.'
She gazed into his face and the half-light made shadows at her mouth and her eyes, but the eyes held the brightness of anger.
'Then I'll tell you my name and everything about myself, because that shows you my trust. I take the chance, the trust, that you'll not talk.'
'You believe that? You believe I would-' She mimicked, 'All men say they would never talk, and believe it'.'
His hand went instinctively to her shoulder, caught it, gripped it to the bone.
'You play a trick with me, a trick of words.' I too had felt her body, gazed into her uncovered face. He snatched away his hand and looked at the ground between his damp, muddy boots. He had been wrong: there were no tears in her eyes.
'I trust you,' she said.
'Before I converted, I was Gladys Eva Jones. I come from a town in the middle of England, not much of a place. My father drives a train. He's fat, he's ugly, he likes newspapers with pictures of girls without swimsuit tops, he dislikes me because I'm not a boy. My mother's empty, stupid, and she dislikes me because I'm not married and breeding actually, the married bit might not even matter to her, it's not having kids to push round in a pram that upsets her. They both, equally, dislike me because I was clever enough to go to university. It was the most miserable time of my life, and I'd had some. I was nothing on campus, no friends, lonely as sin. I met Yusuf and through him I went to the mosque of Sheik Amir Muhammad, and I was taken into the true Faith, and became Farida Yasmin and happier than I'd been in my life. I'd found respect… I was asked to drop my Faith, to hide it, to go to the hairdresser and beautify myself. I was told that was the way I could best serve the memory of the Imam. I was trusted. I was sent with Yusuf to identify this man, Perry, at a hospital in the north of England when he was visiting. His father was ill and the doctors thought he might die. His parents didn't know how to call for him because he'd cut all the family links when he changed his name. There was an appeal on the radio for him, using the old name, and it was heard by Perry and by the people at the Iranian embassy, and it said where the hospital was. We went there, Yusuf and I, but it was I who actually went into the ward and asked the nurse which patient was his father. I saw him by the bed. We waited outside and noted the car he was driving, and it was I who walked past it and took down the name of the garage that had sold it. We went to the garage and I chatted up the salespeople, gave them a story I flirted, I did what was disgusting for my Faith and I was given the address of the man who'd bought it. I did all of that because I was trusted. Then I was trusted enough to come down here, to Perry's home, to photograph him and his house. And I was trusted, when Yusuf crashed, to drive south, collect you and bring you here. How much trust do you need?'
He gazed at his boots, at the crossed laces and the mud.
She bored on.
'Is it too difficult for you now?'
'What?'
'Because he is protected, is it too difficult?'
'You believe…' He had never before been interrogated by a woman then lectured, not even as a child by his mother.
'Are you giving up, going home?'
'No… no… no..
She had angered him. She smiled as if his anger pleased her, as if she had finally reached him.
'What are you going to do?'
'Think and plan.'
'It's possible?'
'In God's hands, everything is possible.'
'How can I help?'
He said, 'I need bread and cheese and bottled water, and I need raw minced meat. Please, bring them for me tomorrow.'
'Same time tomorrow bread, cheese, water, minced meat yes.' He pushed himself up. The damp of the ground had seeped through the material of his camouflage trousers, stiffened his hips. He stretched. She reached up with her hand. He hesitated. She challenged him. He took her hand and she used the strength of his grip to pull herself to her feet. The blood flushed in his cheeks. She rubbed the skin at the back of her legs as if to give them warmth. He looked away from her and began to brush the ground on which they had sat with sticks to lift the flattened grass.
'I don't know your name and you don't trust me,' she said softly.
'But you can't do without me, can you?'
