Ahmed was four words into the Throne Verse before he knew he had begun it.
He stood in the doorway of the bedroom with the Quran still under his arm and the padlock key still in his hand and recited in Arabic, in the voice he used for a case. By the window, in the tea-coloured light through the curtain, two figures stood side by side. One was an old man in a grey coat, broad in the shoulder, with a face that slid out of Ahmed's attention as soon as he looked away from it. The other was thin and grey and held one shoulder lower than the other, like a man who had carried something heavy on it for a long time. Neither of them belonged in the room. Ahmed had known that in his skin before he saw them. He had known it on the stairs.
"Sheikh," Fatima said from the floor. "Don't. They haven't touched me."
He did not stop. He had not stopped in sixteen years.
The old man in the grey coat looked at him steadily. Nothing in his face changed.
"Finish it, reciter," he said. His voice was low and dry and in no hurry. "We'll wait."
Ahmed finished it, and the words went out into the small room and filled it the way they always filled a room, and he waited for what always came after: the heat, the smell like hot metal, the pressure against his chest, a body on the bed arching. Nothing came. The two by the window stood where they were. The thin one swayed a little and put his hand on the windowsill. The old one did not move at all. The air in the room stayed the air in a room.
Ahmed found he had come to the end of the verse and had nothing in his hands to do next.
He had a framework. Eighteen years of practice rested on it. A jinn is in the body; it should not be; it must leave. He had used it on hundreds of cases and it had held. It had no page for two jinn standing in a room with their hands at their sides, inside no one, asking him to finish.
"We're in no one," the old man said, as if he had heard that thought. "We came to see the room. That's all."
Fatima's mother came up the stairs with a jerrycan of water from the tanker. She stopped in the passage and looked through the bedroom door and put the jerrycan down very slowly on the tiles, and for a moment Ahmed thought she would scream for both of them.
"Make tea," Fatima said, getting up off the floor with the blanket still round her. "Please, Mother. Make tea for everyone."
The kitchen was small enough that four people filled it. The mother stood at the stove with her back to the room and her shoulders up round her ears. Fatima sat on the stool by the fridge, under the card with the estimated hours on it in Ahmed's own handwriting. The two by the window had come into the kitchen through the door like men. The old one had sat down across the table from Ahmed without being asked. The thin one stood behind him with his back against the wall.
The mother set out four glasses of tea on a tin tray, then a fifth, because she had counted wrong, and took the fifth away again.
The old man left his glass where it was put. He did not look at it. Ahmed had seen men do that at a funeral meal, when they wanted to show the house a courtesy and could not eat.
The thin one looked at his glass for a long moment. Then he put out one finger and pushed it, slowly, to the far side of the tray, until it touched the edge, and took his hand back and held it against his chest with the other one.
Nobody said anything about it.
Ahmed watched the thin one's hands. They were shaking. He had seen hands like that on the recovered, in the weeks after, in the people who had been held a long time.
"My name is Soren," said the old man. "I lead the jinn of a place you have no name for. It is a long way from here."
"I don't make agreements with jinn."
"I'm not offering one."
The old man put both his hands flat on the table, as Ahmed did with patients' families when he had something hard to tell them. Ahmed noticed it and did not like that he noticed it.
"More than two years ago, by your counting," Soren said, "you came up those stairs at night and read something out of this woman. You did it well. You did it the way you were taught, and it burned." He did not look away. "His name was Kael. He was of my house. I raised him."
The mother at the stove had stopped moving.
Ahmed held his own glass. It was too hot to hold and he held it anyway. He thought of the drawer in his office, the fourth notebook down, the elastic gone. He had brought that notebook with him every day since Fatima came to his door. He had told himself it was so that he could add to the case. It was in the bag at his feet.
"I read many," he said. It came out in the official voice, the one he used for Officer Ibrahim.
"In that room."
"In that room."
The old man leaned forward. The light from the window lay across the table between them, and his shadow lay on the wall behind him, and the shadow was wrong. It was darker than the light allowed, as if the wall went deeper there. Ahmed looked at it, then back at the man.
"I read his case afterwards," Soren said. "Everything that could be read. I know how he got into that room and who sent him there. I know what was done to him and by whom. I built a judgement on it." He paused. "I was not here. I don't know what he said."
Behind him the thin one had gone very still against the wall. At the stove the mother had turned round with the tea strainer in her hand. Her face was wet, and she said nothing.
"You were here," Soren said. "What did he say at the end?"
Ahmed did not answer at once. He was a careful man, and he had been trained to give a careful answer. He could say, they all say the same things at the end. He could say, it was a standard delay. He had written that, and it had been true of a hundred others. He could say, I don't remember, and it would be nearly true.
He looked at Fatima on her stool, with her hand pressed flat over the scar through the blanket. She was looking at him the way she had looked at him in his office in the long noon, with her dupatta in her fists, waiting to see what he would do with what she had told him. On her third sheet, in his own steady hand, he had written down what she said that day. It sounded like a child at a locked door.
He reached down and took the notebook out of the bag.
It came apart in his hands as it always did now, in two halves, and he laid them on the table between the glasses and turned the pages of the second half without looking at them, because he knew where it was. The date. The address. The eye states in a column. "Claims binding. Claims not its own. Standard delay. Continue." "Burned. Rapid. Host cold, then breathing."
He turned the notebook round on the table so that it faced the old man, and put his finger in the margin beside the last line, where the word ran along the edge of the paper in his own hand, small, without a capital.
"please"