Our companions exchanged a look, and separated again, Ali towards the barn, Mahmoud into the shed. It proved to hold only an assortment of farm equipment, but we heard a shout from the barn, and when we got there, Ali had lit a paraffin lamp and was kneeling next to a man who had spilt more blood across the earthen floor than I would have imagined possible. A dagger very like that in Ali’s belt jutted from the man’s chest. The theatrical sight of the curved hilt and the copious blood nearly shocked a gust of laughter out of me, so closely did it resemble the corpse in some stage melodrama, but the urge to giggle passed in an instant and another reaction took over.
A bare two weeks earlier, Holmes and I had been bombed, hunted down, chased through London, and finally shot at while standing in an office of New Scotland Yard; a sniper’s bullet had exploded the window beside me, missing me by inches. I thought I had left behind the blinding terror of the exploding window and the hard slap of lead on brick, but I had not; now I plunged straight back into the dry-mouthed, heart-pounding state as if no time at all had intervened between that attack and this one.
“Oh, God, Holmes, she’s here,” I found myself saying with a whimper. “She’s here waiting for us, she must have known where we were going. Someone in Mycroft’s group has been bought. We have to get out of here, Holmes, we can’t trust these men, we can’t trust anyone, we—”
He caught me and shook me, hard. “Russell! Use your brain. It is not us. She could have had us any time in the last day. This is not about us, Russell. Think.”
I stared at him, and the panic retreated, my vision slowly cleared. I swallowed, nodded, and Holmes released me.
Still, two men were dead, and this one would be soon. If it wasn’t to do with us, what was it?
Mahmoud had bent over the dying man, so close his beard brushed the man’s shoulder, and was speaking forcibly into his ear. “Yitzak,” he said, over and over again until the still figure stirred slightly and the blue eyelids flickered.
“Yitzak, who did this?” It took me a moment to register that he was speaking in Hebrew.
“Mahmoud?” the flaccid lips breathed. The embroidered skullcap the man wore was dislodged by his faint movement. It tipped and dropped away to the earthen floor, revealing thinning hair, a circle of pale scalp, and a clotted head wound.
“We are here, Yitzak. Who did this?”
“Ruth?”
“Ruth and the children are not back yet. The carriage is not in the barn. Your family is safe. Who was it, Yitzak?”
“Man. Saw him. With. The
“The
“Two. Not his. I—” Yitzak coughed wetly and groaned, and that was all he told us. Ten minutes later his breathing ceased. Mahmoud stood up, looked at the drying blood on his hands, and went outside. While Holmes moved in a circle around the body, examining the scuffed ground, I stood and listened to the sound of a hand pump and the splash of water. When Mahmoud came back into the barn, the entire front of his dark garment was wet. He picked up the lantern from the floor, and inclined his head towards the door, a clear gesture that we should leave. Ali protested in Arabic, something about Ruth and the children seeing this.
“We must not bury him,” Mahmoud told his brother. “We must go.”
“We cannot—” Ali began.
Mahmoud moved slightly, a matter of drawing himself up, and Ali stopped immediately. Mahmoud’s face was dark with rage, not at Ali but at what Ali was forcing upon him. I took an involuntary step back, and hoped fervently that I would never have that look directed against me. “You will go and tell the neighbours,” Mahmoud said forcibly. “We will meet you on the road.
Ali glanced at us and nodded, but before he could turn away, Holmes spoke for the first time.
“Why did the killer leave his knife?”
Mahmoud stood with the lantern in his hand and looked at Holmes; neither he nor Ali showed any reaction.
“The knife,” Holmes repeated. “This man was knocked unconscious, dragged here, dramatically arranged in the doorway by two men wearing boots and robes rather than trousers, and stabbed with that knife. His position shouts out ‘murder most foul.’ Of Jew by Arab. The shocking effect was deliberate.”
Ali turned to leave, but Mahmoud stopped him with a gesture, and went back over to examine the body more carefully. The three men studied the scuffed boots, the head wound, the pitiful skullcap, the marks on the floor, and above all the ornate dagger that had slowly taken the farmer’s life. After a couple of minutes, Mahmoud rose. “We cannot bury him,” he repeated.
“I agree,” said Holmes. “It would raise an even worse uproar than this would. But given an hour or two, we could transform murder into an unfortunate accident. And if the two hired men might simply disappear for a while… ?”
Mahmoud reached up to rub at his beard, and his fingertips travelled briefly down the scar. He nodded thoughtfully. “ ‘Allah is the best of tricksters.’ Yes. Better for all. But quickly.”
“It might also be best to remove your possessions from the vicinity. It is one thing for unburdened men to slip into the groves, were a stranger to come upon the farm; quite another to make an escape encumbered with mules and household goods.”
I could see where this was going, but truth to tell, I had no wish to assist in the doctoring of the site. I did not even want to think about what they would have to do to disarm the effects of this death. Oh, I protested, of course, but in the end I gave in gracefully to the combined demands of the three men that I take the laden mules and get them out of the area. I do not think I fooled Holmes, but I protested.
We loaded the animals, tied them so I could control all three with one lead, and Ali gave me instructions that a child could have followed, on how to reach a hidden place where I might wait until they joined me. He repeated the directions three times, until I turned on my heel and walked away with all the Hazr worldly possessions trailing behind.
After my proud little gesture, I was greatly relieved when I succeeded in finding the place without mishap. I had envisioned dawn breaking with me still stumbling about the countryside, trying to explain myself in yet more stumbling Arabic, but I found it, the ruins of a burnt-out and long-abandoned caravanserai—roofless, overgrown, and no doubt infested with snakes, scorpions, and other happy creatures. I hobbled the mules, found a smooth boulder to perch on, drew my feet up under the hem of my skirts, and gave my soul over to patience.
And to thought. The shakiness that had overtaken me on seeing the dead man was beginning to fade, but I still felt queasy, and my mind skittered nervously away from speculations concerning what my companions were doing. I firmly directed my thoughts to the question of what threat might be felt both by a family of Jewish immigrants and by a pair of wandering Arabs, and meditated upon the possible relationship between two Palestinian Arabs and a family of Jewish settlers. What was I not seeing here?
And what, indeed, was I doing here?
It was not a long wait, as waits for Holmes tended to go, but it seemed considerably more than two hours before one of the drowsing mules twitched up its ears and a low whistle came out of the night. This was followed by the sound of three men moving quickly; in less time than it takes to describe, we had become four men (to all appearances) and three pack mules, still travelling quickly.
There are no true mountains in Palestine, not by European standards and certainly not within a days walk of Jaffa, but I could have sworn that our two guides had imported some for the occasion. We scrambled up and down precipitous if unseen hillsides, obliging me to cling to the pack ropes and let my surefooted animal lead me in the darkness, abandoning all pretence of my being in charge of it. At some hour well before dawn, we quit the hills and took to a dusty road for a few miles. Finally we stopped. Ali pressed cold food into our hands, we swallowed mouthfuls of musty water directly from a skin, and then we curled up on the hard ground and lay motionless as stones until the sun was well up in the sky.
I woke to the sound of argument, unmistakable if unintelligible. I started to sit up, and sank back immediately, wondering if I had been beaten while I slept. Not a part of me did not hurt. I then remembered Yitzak, and blood, and I redoubled my efforts to become upright.
The name Jaffa—or Yafo—seemed to be central to the argument. Working from that clue, I decided that our
