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the good sense not to say it aloud. Instead she said: ‘What arrangements did you have in place should your carer fall sick?’
    ‘Arsinée fall sick?’ Marie said. ‘The very idea.’
    Once again, the captain had the look of a woman choosing not to say aloud something she was thinking. She said: ‘One of the hotel’s employees might be assigned, on a temporary basis. Perhaps from the crèche?’
    ‘Why must you arrest Arsinée?’ pressed Marie.
    ‘It is our experience that when a kidnap has been, uh,’ said Captain Afkhami, straightening herself, ‘performed. That when a kidnap has, has occurred, an insider is often involved.’
    ‘Nonsense,’ said Marie, although the iron certainty had gone from her voice. She looked at Arsinée. The girl had hidden her face completely in her hands.
    ‘Sometimes servants are bribed, or otherwise seduced by the kidnappers. We cannot be sure.’
    And so, without another word from the girl, a uniformed security pesar led her out of the room and away. The shock of the arrest stemmed her sobs; or else she had simply run out of steam as far as crying was concerned. ‘Did you see the way she stopped crying when they arrested her?’ said Marie.
    ‘I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything,’ said George.
    ‘No? She cried and cried, and as soon as they clapped her in irons she stopped.’
    ‘You have had a hard piece of news,’ said Captain Afkhami, waving her one remaining security pesar to the door and nodding her head sagely to the two Westerners. ‘I shall leave you tonight, and, with your permission, meet with you again in the morning.’
    And that was that. The hotel sent a bleary-eyed teenage girl up to look after Ezra, but it took Marie a very long time to surrender the baby. She handed him across, but took instant exception to the way the kid was holding him – ‘Have you never held one before? No, support his head’ – snatching him back. Although he had slept through everything else that had happened that evening, this pass-the-parcel finally woke him up. He hid his eyes in a tangle of fleshy creases, opened his mouth and cried with the immense volume of which babies are capable. This howling took the form of a drawn-out iambic pattern, short inbreath, long yell, short inbreath long yell, and each syllable darkened and reddened the colour of his little scrumpled face. Marie tried jabbing a pacifier in the mouth, and snapped at the girl to make up some milk, and when that didn’t work, she walked him very briskly round and round the room. And when that didn’t work, she ordered George to call for a doctor, since the baby was clearly ill. Finally, in a state of expressive, tearful misery herself (and you know Marie! – she’s not one for tears, she never cries), she handed the baby back to the teenager, who with a little judicious cooing, and cuddling, and the application of the milk-teat, got him to stop crying. Marie, looking more drained than George had ever seen her before, went through and lay down.
    At the end of this prolonged interlude, George’s nerves were scraped raw. On some pretext he slipped out of the room and made his way to the Deluge Bar. There he found Ergaste drinking brandy out of what looked like a one-legged fishbowl. Peter was there too, fiddling with his own ears, drinking from a regular glass some liquor so bright green it looked radioactive.
    ‘Dear fellow,’ said Ergaste. ‘The rumours! You wouldn’t credit them.’
    George filled the two of them in. A waiter brought him a glass of Hyderabad Red wine. The servant was a silent fellow with a young, grave face and hands so much larger than was proportionate to his slender frame that George, for a moment, thought he was wearing some kind of prosthetic giant-hands, like a Freak showman or comedy performer.
    ‘Good grief,’ said Peter, when George had finished.
    ‘Fuck my nostril,’ said Ergaste, with less refinement but with more force. ‘Ransom, I suppose?’
    ‘Apparently not,’