What was this whiteness? Feathers? Swan feathers? What?

Alan walked over and prodded the whiteness with the toe of his shoe. It was hair: human hair maybe. A pile of shaved white human hair. And the blood was spattered luridly across the top, like cherry sauce on lemon sorbet. Like a sheep’s miscarriage in the snow.

‘Errrllllbbbbb!’

The groan was very close now. It was coming from the room next door. Alan fought back his fears one last time and went through the small, low-slung door that led to the next room.

Inside, it was very black, apart from the narrow slant of light thrown by the bulb behind him. The ominous moan reverberated around the room. Fumbling to the side of the door, Alan slapped at the switch and flooded the room with brightness.

In the centre of the room, on the floor, lay a naked old man. His head had been completely shaved. Brutally shaved-judging by the grazes and cuts. Alan realized that that was where the hair must have come from. They had shaved his hair. Whoever they were.

Then the old man moved. His face had been averted from the door, but when the lights came on he turned and looked at Alan. The sight was unnerving. Alan flinched. The terror in the old man’s eyes was unspeakable. Wide and red, his eyes stared out, frenzied with pain.

The earlier drunken-ness had gone: Alan now felt queasily sober. He could see why the man was in agony. His chest was cut with marks, slashed with a knife. A design had been carved into his soft, old, wrinkled white skin.

And why was he groaning so weirdly? So incoherently? The man moaned again. And Alan wobbled with faintness.

The man’s mouth was abrim with blood. Blood oozed from his mouth, as if he had gorged himself on strawberries. Red blood was oiling down from his elderly lips, dripping onto the floor. When he moaned, more blood bubbled and gurgled, splattering his chin with gore.

And there was one final horror.

The man was holding something in his hand. Slowly, he opened the hand, and mutely extended it: as if he was kindly offering something. A gift.

Alan looked down at the extended fingers.

Clutched limply in the hand was a severed human tongue.

Carmel Market was busy. Full of Yemenite spice merchants arguing with Canadian Zionists, Israeli housewives examining lamb ribs, and Syrian Jews setting up racks of CDs by Lebanese torch-singers. The crowds were thronging between the tables of pungent red spices, stacked metal tins of green olive oil and the big liquor stall selling good Golan Heights wine.

Amongst them was Rob Luttrell, making his way to the far end of the market. He wanted a beer at the Bik Bik beer and sausage shop, his favourite spot in Tel Aviv. Rob liked to watch the Israeli celebrities in their paparazzi-fooling sunglasses. A few days back, one particularly cute starlet had actually smiled at him. Maybe she’d guessed he was a journalist.

Rob also liked the Czech beer at the Bik Bik sausage bar: served in plastic steins it went down a treat with those chunks of home-made salami and tiny pitas of spicy kebab.

‘Shalom,’ said Samson, the Turkish sausage man at the Bik Bik. Rob briskly ordered a beer. Then he remembered his manners and said Please and Thanks. He wondered if boredom was getting to him. He’d been back here for six weeks, kicking his heels after six months in Iraq. Was it too long?

Yes, he’d needed the break. Yes, he liked being back in Tel Aviv-he loved the city’s vivacity and drama. And it was generous of his editor in London to give him the time off, to ‘recover’. But now he was ready for action again. Another posting in Baghdad maybe. Or Gaza-things were kicking off there. Things were always kicking off in Gaza.

Rob drank from the plastic pint glass of beer, and then stepped to the front of the open air bar to look out across the corniche at the grey-blue Mediterranean beyond. The beer was cold, golden and good. Rob watched a surfer breasting the waves out to sea.

Would his editor ever call? Rob checked his mobile phone. The digital image of his little daughter stared back. Rob felt a serious pang of guilt. He hadn’t seen her since…when? January, or February? When he was last in London. But what could he do? His ex-wife kept changing her plans, as if she wanted to deny Rob all access. Rob’s yearning to see Lizzie was like a hunger, or a thirst. There was a constant sensation that something-someone-was missing from his life. Sometimes he’d find himself turning to smile at his daughter, and of course she wasn’t there.

Rob returned his empty beercup to the bar. ‘See you tomorrow, Sam. Don’t eat all the kebabs!’

Samson laughed. Rob paid his shekels then headed for the seafront. He ran across the busy lanes of Thursday traffic, hoping not to get killed by the punchy Jewish drivers trying to run each other into the ocean.

The Tel Aviv beach was his favourite place to think. With the skyscrapers behind him and the waves and the warm, bracing wind in front. And now he wanted to think about his wife and child. His ex-wife and five-year-old child.

He had wanted to fly back to London immediately after the newspaper ordered him out of Baghdad. But Sally had suddenly got a new boyfriend and told him she needed ‘space’, so Rob had decided to stay put in Tel Aviv. He didn’t want to be in England if he couldn’t see Lizzie. It was too agonizing.

But whose fault was all this, really? Rob wondered how much of the divorce was his own doing. Yes, she’d had the affairs…but he had been away all that time. But this was his job! He was a foreign correspondent: it was what he’d spent ten years striving for back in London. This was how he earned his money. And now he’d made it in his mid-thirties and he was covering the whole Middle East -and there were more stories than he knew what to do with.

Rob wondered if he should go back to the Bik Bik for another beer. He looked left. The Dan Panorama hotel loomed against the blue sky-a great concrete lump of a hotel with a flashy glass atrium. Behind was the parking area, acres of car lots oddly situated in the middle of town. He remembered the story behind these car parks: when the Arab-Israeli war had broken out in 1948 this had been the main front in the urban conflict between Jewish Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa. Then the Israelis had won and they’d levelled the shell-shocked slums that remained. And now it was just a big car park.

He made a decision. If he couldn’t see Lizzie he could at least earn some money, to keep her fed and secure. So he decided to go straight back to his little flat in Jaffa and do some research. Find some more angles on that Lebanese story. Or trace those Hamas kids that hid out in that church.

Ideas fizzed in Rob’s head as he headed to the curve of the beach, and the ancient harbourfront houses beyond: the port of old Jaffa.

His mobile rang. Rob checked the screen hopefully. It was a British number, but it wasn’t Sally, or Lizzie, or his friends.

It was his editor, in London.

Rob felt the surge of adrenalin. This was it! This was the moment in his job he most loved: the unexpected call from his editor. Go to Baghdad, Go to Cairo, Go to Gaza, Go Risk Your Life. Rob adored this moment. The never knowing where he was going to be. The frightening sense of improvised theatre: as if he existed on live TV. No wonder he couldn’t pin down a relationship. He clicked the phone.

‘Robbie!’

‘Steve?’

‘Wotcher.’

The ultra-Cockney accent of his editor fazed Rob for a second, as it always did. He still had enough of the middle-American in him to presume that editors at The Times always spoke in pukka Oxford English. But his foreign editor spoke like a Tilbury docker-and swore even more. Sometimes Rob wondered if Steve put it on a bit-the Cockney accent-to mark himself out from his plummier Oxbridge peers. Everyone in journalism was so competitive.