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commend it. Whatever he did must be by stealth. It might be possible to find a vantage point from which to aim an arrow or hurl a dagger but the chances of even wounding him, let alone of killing him outright, were slender. Jahangir had made it absolutely clear that he wanted Sher Afghan dead.
    But on a clear day when the rains seemed finally to be easing and there was a new freshness in the air, the solution came to Bartholomew. It was so obvious and simple – though not without danger to himself – that he grinned as he wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

    Two weeks later, towards eleven o’clock in the evening – an hour before the caravanserai’s gates would be locked for the night – Bartholomew slipped out of his room, giving a parting kick to the sweat-stained straw-filled mattress on which he’d spent so many uncomfortable nights. Beneath his dark robe, his sword in its scabbard was suspended from a steel chain round his waist as were his two daggers, the Turkish blade on his right side and the Persian weapon on his left. He had cut slits in the coarse cloth of his robe to ensure he could reach for them quickly.
    Bartholomew swiftly crossed the caravanserai’s courtyard andwent out through its arched entrance past the sleeping gatekeeper who was supposed to keep watch for late arrivals seeking a bed for the night for themselves and stabling for their animals. Once outside he glanced swiftly around him to make sure he was alone. Then he set off through the quiet, narrow streets. He’d walked this precise route many times and knew exactly where it was taking him as he headed across the parade ground and past the barracks towards the north of the city. Reaching a small Hindu temple where tapers burned in a brass pot before the image of an elephant god, Bartholomew turned down an alley where the overhanging upper storeys of the houses were so close they almost touched. He caught the soft sound of a woman singing from one house and the crying of a baby from another. Here and there the orange light of oil lamps flickered through the carved wooden
jalis
covering the windows.
    Suddenly Bartholomew’s foot caught something soft. It was a dog whose reproachful whimper followed him as he continued his leisurely progress. There was no need to hurry and anyway a man in a hurry always attracted more attention. The alley was broadening out, and as it curved round to the left it gave on to a large square. Bartholomew had seen it at every time of day and night. He knew how many neem trees shaded the stallholders peddling their wares in the heat of the day, how many other streets and alleys led into it and how many men would be guarding the tall house directly opposite him at the far end of the square. Pulling his hood still lower over his face, Bartholomew peered cautiously round the corner into the square. The new moon was shedding hardly any radiance but the glow from braziers burning on either side of the house’s metal-bound gates showed that– just as on other nights – four guards were on duty. It also showed that a green banner was flapping from a gilded pole above the gates – the sign, as he had discovered from Hassan Ali, that the commander was at home. All seemed very quiet. Had any sort of party or feast been in progress he would have had to postpone his plan . . .
    Having seen what he wanted, Bartholomew drew back into the shadows of the alley and, turning, began to retrace his steps. After a hundred paces or so he came to a small street branching off to the left. In the daytime it was full of vegetable sellers raucously pressing their own wares on passers-by and deriding their competitors’ produce, but now it was silent and empty. Bartholomew walked along it, the leaves of rotting vegetables slippery beneath his feet and the air reeking of their decomposition, but his mind was on other things. This street curved round behind the square. In a few hundred yards it would pass close to the western