Rob made his farewells and Christine accompanied him.

Outside, the three chanting men had blown out the candles, packed up the trestle table, and were now starting to walk down the street. One of them looked back at Christine. His expression was inscrutable.

Or maybe, Rob thought, it was just the lack of streetlight making it hard to see what the man was thinking. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked in its own lonely ritual. The moon was high above the nearest minaret. Rob could smell raw sewage.

Threading her arm through his, Christine guided them down the dark little road and out onto a broader, slightly better-lit street. Rob was waiting for her to explain but they continued in silence. Beyond the furthest apartment blocks Rob could just glimpse the desert. Dark and endless, and ancient and dead.

He thought of the pillars of Gobekli, standing naked in the moonlight, somewhere out there: exposed for the first time in ten thousand years; he felt cold for the first time since arriving in Sanliurfa.

The silence had gone on too long. ‘OK,’ he said, unthreading Christine’s arm from his own. ‘What was all that about? The chanting?’ Rob knew he was being fierce, but he was feeling tired, irritable and a touch hungover. ‘Christine. Tell me. You looked like…like you’d seen the Assyrian wind demon.’

It was meant as a joke, to lighten the mood. It didn’t work. Christine frowned. ‘Pulsa Dinura’.

‘What?’

‘That’s what the men were chanting. A prayer.’

‘Pulsa…di…’

‘Nura. Lashes of fire. Aramaic.’

Rob was impressed, again. ‘How do you know?’

‘I speak a little Aramaic.’

They were down on the level of the fishponds. The old mosque was shadowy and unlit. No couples walked the paths. Rob and Christine turned left, heading for his hotel, and her flat just beyond.

‘So they were singing an Aramaic hymn, that’s nice. Busking!’

‘It’s not a hymn. And they weren’t fucking busking.’

Her sudden vehemence surprised him.

‘Sorry Christine…’

‘Pulsa Dinura is an ancient curse. A hex of the desert. Of the Mesopotamian wastes. It’s in some versions of the Talmud, the Jewish holy book, written at the time of the Babylonian Captivity. When the Jews were imprisoned in Iraq. Rob, it’s very evil and it’s very old.’

‘OK…’ He didn’t know how to react. They were nearing his hotel. ‘And what does it do? Pulsa di Nura.’

‘It’s meant to summon the angel of destruction. The whips of flame. They must have been aiming it at Franz. Otherwise why do it under his windows?’

Rob felt the irritation again. ‘So they’re hexing him. So what? Fair enough. Probably he’s not paying them enough shekels. Who cares-it’s just bloody mumbo jumbo! Right?’ Then he remembered the cross around Christine’s neck. Was he somehow insulting her? How religious was she? How superstitious? Rob was firmly atheist. He found religious belief and superstitious irrationality hard to accept and sometimes deeply annoying; yet he loved the Middle East, birthplace of all those irrational faiths and desert creeds. And he rather liked the passions and debates stirred by these faiths. A strange paradox.

Christine was silent. Rob tried again: ‘What does it matter?’

She turned to face him. ‘It matters a lot to some people. In Israel for instance.’

‘Go on.’

‘Pulsa Dinura has been used a few times in recent years, by Jews.’

‘Right…’

‘Some ultra orthodox rabbis, for instance. They summoned the angel of death against Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader, in October 1995.’ She paused. Rob was working out the significance of the date. Christine got there before him: ‘And Rabin was assassinated within the month.’

‘K. An interesting coincidence.’

‘Some more rabbis used Pulsa Dinura against Ariel Sharon, the next prime minister, in 2005. A few months later he fell into a coma, after a brain haemorrhage.’

‘ Sharon was 77. And he was fat.’

She looked directly into Rob’s eyes. ‘Sure. It’s just…coincidence.’

‘Yep. It is.’

They were at the lobby of his hotel. They were nearly arguing. Rob regretted this. He liked Christine. A lot. He didn’t want to offend her. He offered-keenly-to walk the further half a kilometre with her to her apartment block, but she-gently-declined. They looked at each other. Then they hugged briefly. Before she left she said, ‘As you say Robert, it’s just coincidence. But the Kurds believe it works. Lots of people in the Middle East think Pulsa Dinura works. It is infamous. Check it on Google. So if they are using it…what that means is that some people really want Franz Breitner dead.’

With that she turned and walked away.

Rob watched her for a few minutes. Her disappearing figure. Then he shivered again. The night was getting colder as the wind blew in off the desert.

DCI Forrester sat back on the sofa. He was in a cosy sitting room just off Muswell Hill, in suburban north London. He was seeing his therapist.

It was kind of clichéd, he supposed. The policeman with the neuroses, the fucked-up cop. But he didn’t mind. The sessions helped.

‘So how was your week?’ His therapist was sixty-something, Dr Janice Edwards. Posh in a nice way. Forrester liked the fact she was quite old. It meant he could just spill the beans, achieve catharsis, talk without any emotional distraction. And he needed to talk. Even if it cost fifty pounds an hour. Sometimes he talked about his job, sometimes about his wife, and sometimes about other stuff. Darker stuff. Serious stuff. Yet he never really got to the heart of it. His daughter. Maybe one day he would.

‘So,’ Dr Edwards said again, somewhere behind Forrester’s head. ‘Tell me your week…’

Staring at the window, blankly, his hands resting on his stomach, Forrester started telling his therapist about the Craven Street case. The caretaker, the mutilation, the weirdness. ‘We’ve got no witnesses. They got out clean. They used leather gloves but Forensics can’t find any DNA. The knife wound is useless. A standard blade. We didn’t lift a single print.’ He rubbed his head. The therapist murmured interest. He carried on. ‘I did get excited when I found out the cellar they dug up was once…well they found some old bones there years back…but it wasn’t really a lead, it was just a coincidence, I think. But I still have no idea what they were looking for. Maybe it was a prank, just a student prank that went wrong, maybe they were high on drugs…’ Forrester realized he was meandering, but he didn’t especially care. ‘And that’s where I am. I’ve got a guy with no tongue in hospital and the trail has gone cold and…well anyway that’s been my week, a pretty shit week, and that’s all really…you know…’ He tailed off.

Sometimes in therapy this was what happened. You didn’t say much of importance, and then you dried up. But then Forrester felt a surge of grief and anger-from nowhere. Maybe it was the darkness falling outside, maybe it was the quietness in the room. Maybe it was the thought of that poor man beaten and abused. But now he really did want to talk about something much deeper, something much darker. The real stuff. It was time. Maybe it was time to talk about Sarah.

But silence filled the room. Forrester thought about his daughter. He closed his eyes. He lay back. And he thought about Sarah. The trusting blue eyes. Her giddy laughter. Her first words. Apple. App-ull. Their first child. A beautiful daughter. And then…

And then. Sarah. Oh, Sarah.

He rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t talk about it. Not yet. He could think about it: he thought about it all the time. But he couldn’t talk about it. Yet.

She had been seven years old. She’d just gone wandering off in the dark, one winter night. She’d just gone wandering off, out of the door, no one was watching. And then they’d searched and they searched, and the police and the neighbours and everyone searched…