In the Palace of the Khans (25 page)

“Oh yes, of course. ‘The just, the merciful,' isn't it?”

“You do it, then, Nidzhell?”

“Do my best. I'll need to think what to say. Rahdan's getting a bit of air into the back for you, and he'll want to top up the petrol and stuff. I'll go ahead and try and work something out. Somebody'd better keep an eye out down the pass as long as possible.”

“OK. I do that till you send Lisa and Natalie back. Then I come help Rahdan lifting bodies.”

He walked slowly along the road trying to remember that what had happened at Uncle Ted's funeral. Usually he tried not to think about it. His godfather Ted Finching was the first ambassador his father had served under. Typical of his father to pick someone like that, and to insist on their coming home for the funeral when he'd been killed in a motorway pile-up, and on Nigel going to it with them. He'd been only seven, and he couldn't remember anything much about the church service, except that it had been boring. But he'd remember the bit at the graveside all his life.

Lady Finching had Alzheimer's and hadn't a clue what was going on. As she stood by the open grave, a tall pale, bewildered old woman all in black, she kept looking over her shoulder to see where Uncle Ted had got to, while her son beside her tried to calm her down. Then, as the first handful of soil rattled onto the lid of the coffin—“Earth to earth, dust to dust, and the spirit …”—understanding had suddenly broken through and she'd started to scream and pulled herself away from her son and thrown herself down into the grave. Somehow she hadn't hurt herself, but had clawed herself upright and then just stood there, clinging onto the edge of the grave, screaming. He never saw how they got her out because he'd started screaming too and his mother had taken him away and hugged him close and explained about Alzheimer's and stuff to him until he'd calmed down. That was how he'd always remembered it. It was what everyone else had seen. But now …

He stopped in his tracks. He'd reached the top of the pass. Ahead of him the foothills stretched away, ridge beyond ridge. He saw none of that. Two scenes filled his mind, two images that were somehow the same image. Only yesterday he'd seen the shattered body of the President on the stairs of the great hall rear itself up out of the pit of death in a last desperate gesture to the one person he'd loved. And long before, in an English churchyard, he'd seen the smashed body of Uncle Ted claw its way out of a hole in the ground, the grey, distorted face, the wide mouth screaming.

That was where the nightmares began.

“Earth to earth, dust to dust …”

Over and over his lips repeated the words, laying the ghosts, thinning the nightmares until they faded into the warm hill air and he woke from his trance and walked on.

The good place Janey had talked about was a little way up the stream, where a couple of boulders had embedded themselves parallel to a huge sheer-sided slab of rock, leaving a narrow strip of clear ground between them. The girls were fetching loose rocks brought down by the stream and piling them into the gap between the boulders. Nigel sent Natalie and Lisa back to keep watch and did what he could one-handed until Janey and Rahdan arrived with the truck.

“Good,” said Taeela. “I will take Halli and Sulva to look for flowers, so they do not watch while you carry their mum and dad up. You make them look nice, then you wave to me. Rahdan will say prayers for them, and then we cover them over.”

“He doesn't want to. He says he isn't religious, but I guess he's afraid of messing up in front of everybody. Janey asked me, but you'll have to translate. I think they'd like that anyway. Do you know all their names? I'll just say ‘father,' ‘mother' and so on and you can put the names in.”

“Yes, this is better. I'll tell them who you are, Nigel. They'll like that.”

They used the tarpaulin to bring the bodies up from the van, Rahdan taking the weight of the head and shoulders and Janey the lighter end, with Nigel, still one-handed, taking a corner beside her. They'd been shot in the back of the head, so there wasn't a lot of blood, but it was gruesome all the same. They looked so dead.

They spread one side of the tarpaulin out between the wall and the slab, laid the bodies on it and folded the other half beside them. While Janey cleaned their faces and tidied them as best she could Nigel checked the position of Mecca with his compass, then used a screwdriver from his knife to loosen a patch of soil beside the grave. When the others were ready he climbed onto the slab and waved to Taeela to bring the girls back.

There weren't many flowers pick at this time of year, but they'd made two little sheaves of some kind of reed with pretty golden seed-heads. Side by side, kneeling on one of the boulders, the girls leaned over and placed one on each of their parents, then went round and stood at the foot of the grave weeping silently. Janey and Rahdan folded the other half of the tarpaulin over the bodies.

Nigel faced west and counted five.

“In the name of Allah, the just, the merciful,” he said, and waited for Taeela to translate. “We've brought the bodies of—father's name … and mother's—here to bury them. Please look after them, Allah … and take their souls into your paradise … so that their daughters—girls' names now—can meet them there one day …”

He bent, scooped up some of the loosened earth, and sprinkled it over the two bodies. He was so choked he could hardly get the words out.

“Dust to dust … earth to earth … and the spirits to … Allah who gave them.”

He bowed his head, trying to master his tears. He realised he was weeping for Lady Finching as much as he was for the murdered mother and father. It was as if there was one unchanging pool of grief below the scurrying surface of things, and they were all three there.

He moved aside to watch Taeela and the two girls place the first rocks on the tarpaulin. Covering it right over with enough rocks to keep scavengers out was going to take a while.

“I'm not going to be much use here,” he muttered to Janey. “I'd better go back and keep a look-out, and Lisa and Natalie can come and help you. I'll give it half an hour.”

“Your shoulder is bad?”

“Pretty sore. I can't do much with that arm.”

“When you come back I make you a …”

She gestured, not knowing the word.

“A sling. That'd be great.”

CHAPTER 15

It was in fact getting on an hour before they finally left the pass. Nigel watched the last rocks being added to the pile while Janey adjusted his sling, adapted from a headscarf. The sun was well down the western sky, and beneath it the mountains of Dirzhan stretched away into the distance. It wasn't a bad place to be buried, he thought. He fetched the map out of the van and marked the place with a cross, in case there was ever a chance for the children to give their parents a proper Muslim funeral.

They drove on for a while through featureless upland, passed a couple of shabby hamlets and turned west, then down through a series of hairpins into a wooded valley. In the fading light they found a place where they could get off the road far enough to hide the van among the trees.

They shared out the food that Janey had brought, and after they'd eaten she made Nigel strip off his shirt and probed around on his shoulder with firm, efficient fingers.

“Caught you a right wallop, didn't he?” she said. “No wonder you feeling it. Too swoll up for telling if anything's broke. You must be moving it sometimes, little, little. Like this. I bring paracetamol.”

“Oh, that'd be great.”

Sorting himself out to sleep, Nigel found the stuff he'd taken from the two thugs. He gave the fags to Rahdan and showed Taeela the wallets.

“Good,” she said, leafing through them. “The money will be for Halli and Sulva. And I will find who these men are, and the men in their gang, and they will be punished.”

“One day.”

“Yes, Nigel. One day.”

Lisa had managed to sleep a bit in the van, so she kept first watch. Janey and the girls bedded down in the back, Nigel on the bench seat in the cab, and Rahdan on the ground beside it. The paracetamol did its work and he was deep under when Lisa came to wake him.

He sat up, wrapped his blanket round him and gingerly started to ease his shoulder the way Janey had shown him, until a bit of his dream came back to him and he was gazing down into dark, moonlit water. A pale shape wavered up out of the depths, vague at first but then becoming a face, a face with its mouth wide open, Lady Finching's face, screaming. The pool of grief.

He jerked himself fully awake, startled by having dropped off again so instantly, and tried to force his mind to think about stuff that mattered. With a bit of luck they'd reach Sodalka tomorrow, and Taeela would be recognised and they'd be taken to some tribal bigwig. It struck him that as soon as the others found someone to talk to they'd start telling them what had happened by the peach orchard.

Bad idea. It might play OK in Dirzhan if it didn't land Taeela with some sort of blood feud on her hands, but not back home. There'd be headlines you could read across a football pitch.

KILLER PRINCESS!!!

So nothing like that had happened by the peach orchard or anywhere else. The van was Rahdan's and they'd hired him to take them to Sodalka. On the way they'd picked up this couple of kids whose parents had been robbed and murdered. Taeela'd have to explain to Rahdan and the kids anyway, so she could make sure they all said the same thing and stuck to it.

That was as far as he got before Lady Finching's screaming face was swimming up towards him out of the darkness again and he woke with a start. It wouldn't be the last time, either, if he stayed in the cab. Blearily he clambered out and started to walk around.

It was a warm, clear night with barely enough breeze to rustle a leaf. He'd have heard a car on the road a mile away. None came. Still, it was best if someone was on the watch. It meant the others could sleep easier.

Time crawled by. He tried to make plans for tomorrow, how he was going to call the embassy again, and what to say. Supposing all went well at Sodalka and Taeela was in safe hands and so on, what next? Try to get some kind of a lift out to Kyrgyzstan, maybe. Or perhaps …

His mind kept straying back into the dream. He lost count how many times he stumbled and almost fell because he'd actually fallen asleep until the stumble woke him. Again and again he flicked on his torch to peer at his watch until at last the second hour was up. He shook Rahdan awake, climbed into the cab, took another paracetamol and was asleep as soon as he lay down. He woke in bright daylight with his arm too stiff and sore to move.

The dawn mist was lifting from the valley when they left, churned up through the usual hairpins to the saddle of a pass, and then down to the main road from Dara Dahn to Podoghal. The refugees were still streaming north, but Nigel signalled to Rahdan to turn the other way and switched on the thugs' mobile. Surprisingly he was getting a signal, so after a couple of miles he told him to pull off the road. While the others took the chance to stretch their legs he crossed the road, climbed out of sight and called the secure number. No piano was playing when at last the answer came.

“Embassy.”

“¿Estoy hablando con el embajador británico en Dirzhan?”

“Habla el embajador Ridgwell.”

“¿No lo molesto en este momento, embajador?”

“That sounds fine, Niggles. If we get interrupted ring off at once and don't use that telephone again.”

“It's a spare mobile, Dad. I'll bash it with a rock as soon as we're done. Is Mum there?”

“Hovering at my elbow. Anything I need to know first?”

“Only I'm way outside Dara Dahn now. We've got transport. Tell Rick Janey and the kids are OK. We're hoping to get somewhere safe this evening. What do you want me to do then? I thought I might be able to get to Kyrgyzstan, if you want me to.”

“Not unless you can fly. If you think you're safe where you are, I'd stay put until the dust settles a bit more. Just don't let anyone think you're representing the British government.”

“Got it, Dad. I'll be careful.”

“Fine. Good luck, Nigel. Here's your mother.”

“Darling? Are you … oh, don't be silly, woman!”

“Hi, Mum. I'm fine. I got a bit if a bang on my shoulder so I've got my arm in a sling, but we don't think anything's broken. Don't worry—it's not a big deal, Mum, compared with a lot of stuff going on.”

“Those horrible men! Doing it in front of our eyes, too! As if they didn't give … you know what!”

“I guess one big monster was better than a lot of little ones, Mum.”

“I don't …”

The piano started to tinkle in the background. In his haste ring off he got tangled with his sling and dropped the mobile, so he stamped on it with all his force and tossed it into a patch of scrub, then walked back down to the road feeling very alone, very vulnerable.

At least he'd got through and talked to them both this time. And if the colonels' security lot were up to locating where he'd called from they'd think he'd been heading north to Podoghal. That was why he'd crossed the road.

They turned west at a small town three or four miles further on, stopping on its outskirts to buy a refill of petrol for six times what it would have cost a week ago. Then on up into the mountains, threading their way through a network of valleys and passes and the occasional ramshackle village, with not a signpost anywhere, no guide but the map and Nigel's compass. Luckily there weren't that many choices and most of them were obvious.

In the late afternoon their road ran along the shore of a small mountain lake dominated by a wonderful wooden building, like a Hollywood palace. There wasn't a sign of life anywhere. He signalled to Rahdan to stop and went round and opened the rear doors.