at home.
Corrupt. The word hung in the air between them as they stared at each other, bewildered, their hearts raw with hurt, and far too young to make sense of what was happening.
‘You mean me!’ she cried then. ‘Well, if I’m corrupt, you’re the corrupter! I hate you!’ She whirled and ran back into the house and up to her room.
She locked her bedroom door, and buried her head under the duvet, trying to drown out the sound of pebbles hitting her window during the night, the whispered pleadings at her door.
She did not come down again until after breakfast the next morning, just in time to say a cool goodbye to Salah, with all the others, before her father took him to the ferry. As he got into the car he looked at her with the reproach of a dying stag who cannot understand what has motivated his killer.
Salah never came to the island again.
Chapter Four
THE palace clung to a rocky slope above the winding river and the city between, brooding over the scene like a dream of white, terra cotta and blue. From the plane, in all the glory of its dome and its arched terraces, the palace had looked like something out of a fairy tale, but approached from below it had the air of a fortress.
It was some time before she understood that they were approaching it. They drove through the centre of the city, past the bustle of a market, through a small herd of reluctant goats driven by a grinning urchin, then along wide streets bordered on two sides with high white walls topped with greenery. So entranced was she with the unfamiliar sights that it was only after they left these walls behind that she realized there was only the palace ahead.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, when the answer was already obvious.
The car stopped at a gate and the chauffeur exchanged words through the window with an armed guard.
Salah put the papers away, snapped the briefcase shut and set it aside. After a moment, as if at a thought, he reached out and spun the locks. She felt it like a slap.
‘You can never be too sure,’ she said sarcastically. ‘But really, the state secrets of little Barakat are safe from me.’
He looked at her with a black gaze that revealed nothing.
‘What is this place, Salah?’
‘It is Prince Omar’s palace.’
‘Am I staying here?’
‘What else? Should I put you up in a hotel? Do you think I forget what I owe your family?’
‘Won’t I be meeting your family?’
They moved up the incline, past an unmanned sentry post, then under a broad archway and into a courtyard where there were several parked vehicles.
‘Except for my father, who is at the dig, my family go to the mountains in summer. The heat is bad for my mother’s health. Only the poor remain in the city in summer, and they move down by the river.’
His eyes were hard. She remembered the very different look in his eyes the last time they had met, on the morning that he left the island for the last time.
Never got over her? On the contrary, the boy who had loved her had disappeared. He was changed out of all recognition. You had a lucky escape! she told herself.
Her heart, contrarily, mourned a loss.
‘So why are you still in the city?’
He lifted one corner of his mouth and looked at her as if she were being naive.
‘You stayed in the city to meet me? Why? What do you want?’
‘Not what I want, Desi. What you want.’
He opened his door as two servants appeared through a doorway. The men seized her bags from the trunk and disappeared. The chauffeur opened her door. The heat slapped her again as she got out.
‘What has it got to do with me?’
‘I will be your guide to my father’s dig. Did you not expect it?’
Of course Salah will be your guide. The entire plan depended on this, and yet, somehow…not until this moment had Desi really believed that it was going to happen. That she’d be travelling across the desert for hours with only Salah for company…
Her eyes hurt as she gazed at him, as if they were letting in too much sun.
‘Well, I’m sorry. Your father said a guide. I didn’t expect…’
‘No?’ His manifest disbelief infuriated her, even though he was right.
‘I’m sorry, but this is the only time I’ve got. It’s when I normally go to the island.’
The word was electric between them.
‘And the case is so urgent,’ he said.
There was no answer she could make to that, without looking even more of a selfish idiot. She turned her head to escape his cynic’s gaze, and a panel of exquisite, ancient tilework met her eyes.
She had stayed in some pretty fabulous places in her time: a hot modelling career opened a lot of doors. But not so far an active royal palace. Never a place with such an aura of power, past and present.
‘Will I get to meet them?’ she asked. She knew that Prince Omar and Princess Jana had children of their own, as well as two daughters from Omar’s first marriage.
Salah led her under a worn, intricately arabesqued stone archway onto a tiled path.
‘They go to Lake Parvaneh in summer. Princess Jana asked me to assure you of your welcome here, and apologizes for her absence.’
He opened a door and ushered her along a path bordering a formal garden and thence into an internal courtyard so entrancing Desi stopped short and gasped.
Columns, floor, stairs and walls were covered with beautiful, intricately patterned mosaic tiling. A perfectly still reflecting pool in the centre reflected greenery and sunlight and the balcony above, with a mirror’s clarity and water’s depth. Cloisters ran around the walls on all sides; an ancient tree rose up in one corner, its gnarled branches and thick leaves shading the space from the morning sun. More tumbled greenery cascaded down from the balcony, or entwined the tall columns and latticework.
It was compellingly beautiful, deeply restful. The temperature seemed to have dropped by at least ten degrees. Desi heaved a sigh of sheer wonder.
‘Isn’t it spectacular!’
‘It is more beautiful in spring, with the flowers,’ said Salah and, pausing under the archway, he threw a switch.
She heard a rumble, a groan, as if some great underground creature had been disturbed in its rest, and then the perfect reflection in the water shimmered and was lost as fountains leapt up into the air from the centre of the pool.
The fine spray
