The circular came down from the ministry in a brown internal envelope with four names typed on the front, and three of them had been crossed out.
Officer Ibrahim signed for it at the front desk and carried it down to the records room. In the whole regional bureau, it was the one place where nobody came to talk to him about cars. It had no window, only a steel table and a strip light that ticked. On the table sat the two boxes and the ring binder he had inherited from Captain Qureshi. The ministry had asked him three times to close them. He had not.
"Officers holding files on the summer events are requested to review the attached for similarities and report by Thursday." That was all the covering note said. Underneath it were eleven pages of photocopies, stapled crooked.
They were embassy reports, translated, with the names of the people who gave them blacked out. A stringer for a news agency in the Syrian east. A driver for an aid convoy. A schoolteacher on the Iraqi side of the border who had sent a long voice message to a cousin in Dubai, and the cousin had sent it to a journalist, and the journalist had sent it to somebody in an embassy. Ibrahim read them in the order they were stapled and then read them again in the order of their times.
A man was walking the road between Syria and Iraq.
He had come out on that road at first light that morning. The reports were a few hours old, and Ibrahim had never seen the ministry move so fast. Nobody agreed where. He walked, and people followed him. At first they were a few dozen, then a few hundred, and by midday whole villages, with their goats and their pickups and their grandmothers on mattresses in the backs of trucks. He did not preach, the driver said. He talked to people. He stopped in a village and talked to the men in the square, and when they welcomed him, it rained.
Ibrahim put his finger on that line and kept it there.
The stringer had been more careful. He said a village, its name blacked out on the copy, had been dry for three years. The canal had gone to cracked mud. When it opened its gate to the man and his people, clouds came up from the south-west and it rained for three hours. The next village down the road had heard about him and shut the road with a tractor. When the stringer passed through two hours later, the wells there had dropped so far that the buckets came up with sand in them. The stringer did not say what he thought. He said what the farmers showed him, and he said that the people in the first village were planting.
Two of the reports described the man's face. One said he kept part of it covered with a cloth. The schoolteacher, in the voice message, said something different, and the translator had added a note in the margin: "speaker unclear here, possibly 'one eye'".
Ibrahim looked at the clock on the wall above the door, took his pen, and wrote the time on the back of his hand: 2:15. Qureshi had told him to do that, in the margin of a statement. He had kept doing it without knowing what for.
He rang Ahmed from the desk phone in the corridor, where the signal was better.
The reciter answered on the third ring. Ibrahim told him about the circular, briefly, the way you tell a colleague about a file. He read him the stringer's line about the rain and the tractor and the wells. He heard Ahmed breathing on the other end, steady.
"The face," Ahmed said. "Do any of them describe the eyes?"
"One. The translator isn't sure of the word. One eye, maybe."
"Which one?"
Ibrahim turned the page and found the margin note again. "It doesn't say."
The line was quiet for long enough that Ibrahim looked at the receiver.
"If anyone says which," Ahmed said at last, "write it down exactly. The words they use. Not the translator's."
"Why the eye?"
"Because it will matter which." Another pause. "Officer. I have a case I shouldn't talk about. A child. Last summer, and again since Tuesday, every time the call to prayer sounds she gets up and faces the wall. When I ask her what she's doing, she says she's waiting." He stopped. "At one o'clock today she told me he was on the road now. She's nine. She doesn't watch the news."
Ibrahim found that he had picked up his pen again.
"Which wall?"
"The wrong one."
When he put the phone down, Sergeant Darwish was leaning in the doorway of the duty room with a mug in his hand.
"The deputy director wants you," Darwish said. "Something about a delegation. He said you're the only one who's read the summer file all the way through, so if the ministry sends people to look at this road business, it's you." He sipped. "Congratulations. Bring me back a carpet."
The deputy director was brief. Nothing was decided. Pakistani nationals worked all along that border, labourers from the Gulf who would drive north to see for themselves. If their families started asking questions, the ministry wanted someone on the ground who would not laugh. He did not say it in those words. He said "an officer with relevant experience". He told Ibrahim to keep a bag packed.
Ibrahim went back down to the records room and wrote his report for Thursday. He wrote that the patterns in the attached did not resemble the summer events in any respect he could measure. That was true. Last summer the trouble had come into houses one at a time, from nowhere, and left people emptied. This came down a road in daylight, and people went out to meet it. He wrote that the material should be kept on file. He did not write about the rain, because he did not know which column to put it in.
He wrote until his eyes stung and the strip light was the only thing in the world. When he looked up, the clock said twenty to seven. The afternoon prayer had come and gone without his noticing, as it did most days. His phone had no signal down here. When he reached the stairs it buzzed four times in his pocket, all from his sister, and he did not stop to read them.
He climbed the stairs to the foyer and stopped on the top step.
The foyer was full of light. That was the first thing. It came in through the glass front, white and flat, the light of a summer noon. The shadow of the lemon tree by the gate lay in a small round pool right under its pot, the way it did at one in the afternoon.
The second thing was the noise. The whole evening shift was in the foyer. The attendant was there, and two men from the traffic office next door, all standing round the television on its bracket above the reception desk. Nobody was talking to anybody. Darwish had his phone held up, filming the screen.
On the screen a news channel had put a camera on the seafront at Clifton, pointed out over the water, the way they did at the end of the fasting month for the new moon. The caption across the bottom said the same words in two languages, over and over. A presenter's voice kept saying "the hour of sunset", as if repeating it might help.
The sea was flat and bright. Families stood along the wall in the picture, shading their eyes and looking straight up.
Ibrahim looked down at the back of his hand, where 2:15 had smudged into the skin, and uncapped his pen.
In the corner of the screen the clock said 18:57. Above the water, at the hour it should have touched the sea, the sun stood high and white at the top of the sky, and it was not moving.