David was perplexed. He simply couldn’t work out Angus Nairn. He was like no one he had ever met. Angus was still talking.

‘Of course that doesn’t mean God is this nice guy. He ain’t. The universe is fascist. It is a tyranny, a mad dictatorship. Stalin’s Terror. Saddam’s Iraq. It’s all so random and scary. We all lie there at night thinking, when will death come for me? Don’t we? And one by one, we disappear. The Death Gestapo comes, and they drag you away, and you are expertly tortured, with lung cancer, heart failure, Alzheimer’s.’ Angus was talking to himself, almost. ‘And people whisper, they tell each other, “You hear about so-and-so? He’s gone. He’s gone as well. They took him last night…”.’ He shook his head. ‘Alphonse, poor fucking Alphonse…’

The car motored south. Angus was, finally, quite silent.

David thought of his grandfather, and that eagle circling the Arizona sky. The Sonora desert was beautiful, but Angus was right: this desert, the Succulent Karoo, was even more stirring, in a haunted way. The green and yellow bushman’s grass, the pale acacias, the pink acid wastes scarred by long disused railways. It was desolate but transfixing: and the violet and purple mountains, the sudden inselbergs, they floated above the hazy and aethereal sands like a kind of memory; a memory of mountains, in the ghost of a landscape.

He stared and drove, and thought of his grandfather. His grandfather’s strange and guilty shame.

Desolada, desolada, desolada…

Three hours later the sun had gone, and the violet-purples had turned to grainy black, and they were racing, silently and very fast, through the darkness. The true and noble darkness of the desert.

It was cold.

They were quiet and exhausted. Every so often the eyes of a nocturnal animal would catch in the headlights – a bat-eared fox, a desert hare. Then darkness. And then the headlights illuminated a big sign: Sperrgebiet. Diamond Zone 1. Extreme Danger.

‘OK,’ said Angus. ‘Down that dirt road.’

Two hundred metres further, sudden lights blazed. Two armed black men had emerged from a wooden hut, with rifles cocked. They had torches: their faces were grim and determined.

‘Stop!’

Angus leaned out of the car.

‘Solomon. Tilac. It’s me!’

A silence.

‘Angus?’

Now the men were smiling.

‘Angus. You de bloody mad man. We could have shoot you!’

‘Sorry – sorry -’

The guards stepped back. One of them was flamboyantly waving them through.

They sped past; the untarred road was rumbling and rocky. Though it was hard to tell in the silvering darkness, the landscape seemed to have changed. The night air was still cooler. David realized he could smell the sea, salty and pungent.

And there indeed was the ocean, glittering malevolently in the moonlight. The road ran up and over seaside rocks, bare grey rocks. Ahead of them was the twinkle of more lights: the silhouette of structure, a large complex of buildings, bristling with antennae and satellite dishes.

‘Tamara Minehead,’ said Angus. ‘Park here.’

The reaction to their arrival was immediate: several men came straight out, one of them a tall and languid white man, in an intoxicatingly impractical grey flannel suit.

‘Nathan,’ said Angus, very wearily. ‘This is Amy…Myerson and David…Martinez. Friends…those friends of Eloise. Friends, this is Nathan Kellerman.’

Nathan Kellerman stepped closer. He was young and handsome.

‘My God, Angus, what happened to you all? You look terrible.’

‘We’re fine. Just need sleep. Fine.’

‘And Alphonse, where is Alphonse? Everyone else? What the hell happened?’

Angus shrugged; a painful silence enveloped them.

Nathan Kellerman lifted a manicured hand. His tone sharpened. His accent was faintly American.

‘Do you have the blood samples? The last blood samples, Angus!’

‘Yes.’

‘Then -’ David could see Kellerman’s relieved smile, his perfect white teeth. ‘Then all is well. Let’s go inside. Robbie, Anton. Help the good people.’

Slowly they shuffled through the bright modern building: offices, corridors, bedrooms. The cleanliness and modernity made an intense contrast to the privations of the desert. Expensively thin TVs, gleaming white kitchens. Cold steel fridges with glittering test tubes. It was another stunning dislocation, like stumbling on a Venetian palazzo in the jungle.

David and Amy were led to a bedroom. He tried to look calm and normal as they undressed, but some uncrystallized thought was troubling him. Something. Something. What was it?

He looked at his hands. Were they twitching? Maybe there had been some infection. From the body liquor.

He thought of Miguel sniffing the meat. He thought of Amy’s eyes as she looked at him; would she still look at Miguel the same way, sometime? David was bewildered by the absence of Eloise. Amy came close and kissed him.

‘Hey -’

‘Eloise,’ he said. ‘Where is Eloise…?’

‘I know,’ said Amy. ‘I know. But…I am so tired. I can’t even think…Let’s just…Tomorrow…’

Amy was nuzzling close. Scared and close and exhausted. The bedroom looked out onto the sea; a sharp salty breeze was lifting the curtains through the open window. The moon was high. It looked like a white screaming face, the face of someone being tormented.

They lay together in the moonlit bedroom, quite still, for a few moments.

Then they quickly fell asleep.

And he dreamed.

He was eating some meat, chewing on some gristly biltong; the dried meat was really gristly and bony. He was in his grandfather’s hospital room, the desert was blinding outside. Then Granddad reached from his bed and pointed. David turned, with a mouthful of biltong, and he saw a naked girl, standing outside in the desert. And then he saw: she had no hands. And the reason she had no hands was because David was eating her hands. He realized he was eating her hands.

David woke with a jolt of terror; it was the middle of the night, he was staring at the still-screaming silent desert moon, through the square windows, with Amy snoring courteously beside him.

At last he had the truth. David now realized the truth: why he had been thinking about his grandfather. His grandfather’s shame and guilt. The inability to explain, the terrible furtiveness.

He was in the Forbidden Zone in his mind, he had crossed into the Forbidden Land.

Granddad was a Cagot. It was the only explanation that made any sense; that explained it all. Granddad was a Cagot. An untouchable. A pariah. A cannibal of Gascony. The Cagots were indeed cannibals. And David was descended from a Cagot: he was one of them.

Amy snored and turned over; her bare young shoulder was soft in the moonlight. Soft like a succulent peach.

40

Simon was standing at a payphone, by a bunch of exiled smokers just outside Gate A of Lyon Saint Exupéry airport. A watery October sun was rising over the terminals. The first planes were rumbling and ascending into the grey morning air.

The journalist weighed the shining euros in his hand. He’d tried calling Suzie through the night but got no reply. Were they safe? Where was Tim? His heart confessed his guilt – with a nasty stab of pain. He’d got some information out of the monk at Tourette, but was it worth it? What if something had happened? Where was Suzie? She could just be at work. But it was so early. And Conor. What about Conor? Where was his mother-in-law? And Tim?

The questions raked his soul.

There was no one left to call. But he’d also tried his parents, and they too were out -

So he had no choice. He had to try the police. Simon stared down at his euro coins. One, two, three…?

Fumbling with the change, he fed the phone. It rang. And it was answered.

‘DCI Sanderson.’

Simon paused – took a breath of diesely air – and then he gabbled his questions. Tim. Conor. Suzie. Conor. Tim.