“Did you bring your weird picture?”

“Did I . . . ?” Zara was shocked. “Honey, how did you know about that?”

“It must have been sent to you,” Hani said firmly. “I’ve asked everyone else. The General sent you something from Dante’s Purgatorio. . . A Doré engraving. Am I right?”

Hani pulled a yellowing page from her jeans pocket and smoothed it out on the desk. “He sent this one to Raf. It’s from Inferno.”

The engraving showed the man with his chest sliced open. His hands gripping the edges of the wound, not to close it but to pull it apart. From her other pocket, Hani extracted what looked like a photocopy but was actually a printout of a low-rez scan.

“I couldn’t get the original,” said Hani, “because that’s locked away. But Uncle Ashraf had this copy on computer in an evidence file. When he still had a working computer,” she added thoughtfully.

“It was the General who sent this to my father?”

“That’s Koenig Pasha’s writing,” said Hani, turning over the printout to show Zara the handwriting script on the other side. “So I guess so . . . In Raf’s file it says Effendi asked the General for help.”

“For help!” Zara’s laugh was hollow. “How do we know that’s the General’s writing?”

Hani shrugged. “I had a look at his diary,” she said, pulling a notebook from a desk drawer and handing it to Zara, who shook her head and gave it straight back.

“You read his diary?”

“No. It’s in German,” said Hani. “I don’t know German . . .”

This was where the conversation paused, while Hani kicked off one silver Nike, pulled off the sock underneath and used it as an oven glove to lift the copper jug from the fire. The jug she put on the hearth to cool and the sock got tossed in the fire. It had started to smoulder anyway. When they drank the cocoa, it tasted more of water than chocolate, but neither Zara nor Hani mentioned the fact.

“You got a Doré engraving from the General?”

Zara shook her head, so Hani started again.

“You got an engraving?”

Zara nodded.

“Are you sure the General didn’t give it to you?”

“It was sent by fax,” said Zara, “from the SS Jannah.”

“Jannah,” said Hani. “What does that mean?”

“It means garden,” Zara said, puzzled. Hani had to know that.

“Garden.” Hani wrote the word in pen on a clean piece of paper. “So who do you think sent the picture?” She sounded like Raf at his most serious.

Zara blushed. “I thought it was the Khedive . . . But it could have been Avatar. I let him go in my place.” Which, like Raf at his most serious, couldn’t have been too popular with His Highness.

“Have you got the engraving?”

Zara nodded.

“Can I have a look?” Hani asked, once it became obvious that Zara intended to leave it at that. “It would be useful . . .”

“It’s . . .” Zara hunted for the right word. “Very rude.”

“So’s the angel,” said Hani, nodding to the bare-breasted woman with wings and a discreet drape of cloth across her broad, Victorian hips.

“This is ruder,” Zara said, but she went to get the picture anyway . . .

“Mmm,” said Hani. She did her best to sound grown-up, but the slight widening of her eyes and a growing grin gave away her shock. “She’s a spider.”

“That’s right.”

“A woman spider, bent over backward . . .” Hani flipped to the sheet underneath, nodding to herself; it showed the back, on which the General had written a brief note, plus the word Judecca.

Next Hani rechecked the titles of the books from which the pictures had been ripped.

“Paradiso, Purgatorio, Inferno . . .” The words went down on her sheet of paper one under the other. As an afterthought, Hani numbered them. She’d already found a book called Inferno on the shelves by the door. Sure enough, it had the flyleaf ripped out. Hani was as certain as anything that she’d also find vandalized books called Paradiso and Purgatorio, once she bothered to check.

Only here will you find peace. That was what the General had written on the back of the first picture. Paradise. Only here will you . . . It made sense. Hani copied the words onto her bit of paper and numbered it.

Taking Zara’s spider woman, she turned the weird picture over and wrote down Welcome to limbo. Having numbered this to match Purgatorio, she put At its centre hell is not hot directly underneath and numbered that as well.

Apollyon,Judecca and Cocytus came last.

She thought of drawing different-coloured lines to link the General’s comments to the names of the books, but it didn’t seem necessary. Instead, she drew a big exclamation mark under the list.

“Do you actually know what any of this means?” asked Zara.

“Not yet,” Hani admitted. “But I’ll let you know when I do.” Pushing the paper to one side, Hani scraped back her chair and tiptoed to the door, which she opened a fraction. Sudanese soldiers were coming and going in the hall. Mostly they seemed to be Raf’s guard. “The German’s arriving,” she told Zara. “He looks cross.”

Zara peered over Hani’s shoulder at the young German ambassador. “No,” she said, “what he looks is nervous . . .” Just then, Khartoum came into the hall and bowed to the visitor, ushering him through an open door. “That’s not the audience chamber,” said Zara.

“No,” said Hani, “it’s a waiting room. Now he’ll look cross.”

“Coffee,” Raf suggested and the German youth in front of him winced; as Raf suspected he might. According to his file, the ambassador from Berlin loathed the stuff.

“In Iskandryia it’s traditional,” said Raf.

“Isn’t everything?” The ambassador’s voice was resigned. According to Koenig Pasha’s notes His Excellency Graf von Bismarck was nineteen. He looked younger, fourteen going on twelve, with the faintest trace of a blond moustache and long hair that flopped over one eye. The unflopped eye, startlingly blue, stared nervously at Raf whenever the ambassador thought Raf wasn’t looking.

Iskandryia was one of the most career-destroying posts on offer, particularly for someone who hated intrigue and coffee. And from what Raf could gather, Ernst von Bismarck had taken it only because his other alternative was marriage to some Schleswig-Holstein. It seemed the Graf wasn’t the marrying type.

“If not coffee,” said Raf, voice suddenly sympathetic, “then what?”

“Orange juice . . . If that’s possible.”

A clap of Raf’s hands brought not Khartoum but Hani. She’d changed from jeans into a dress at least one size too big. Unfortunately, she’d retained the silver Nike trainers.

“I’m Hani al-Mansur,” Hani announced, thrusting her hand at the startled ambassador. “He’s my uncle.”

“Where’s . . . ?” Raf began.

“Doing something,” said Hani firmly. “Whatever you want—I’ll get it.”

When the orange juice arrived it came on a tray complete with a silver bowl of pistachios, soft-skinned and bright green on the inside, two small brass pipes and a fingertip of sticky resin.

The German ambassador and Raf waited while Hani withdrew. Only then did Raf notice a note folded neatly on the tray under his glass.

“A sweet child,” said the Graf.

Raf reread Hani’s scrawl, nodded doubtfully and pushed the note deep into his pocket. “Endlessly surprising,” he said and changed the subject. “You demanded a meeting . . . ?”

It seemed preposterous to call what was happening an audience, so Raf didn’t.

“Berlin wants . . .”

“I’m sure it does,” said Raf. “But first explain why your intelligence service has been waging war against Hamzah Effendi.” He stared at the boy, who put down his glass and went deep red.

Personally, Raf lacked the capacity for visible embarrassment, but then he’d had a lung deflated when he was six and a very minor blood-supply nerve to his face snipped where it ran between his second and third ribs. The surgeon went after the nerve through a tiny incision in his armpit.