There was a shop selling colourful veils and gowns next to the tailor’s. She stopped inside and bought an abaya, a dark cloak which was worn over the clothing and obscured its wearer from the top of the head to the ground. The synthetic fibre was lightened with colourful embroidery and handfuls of sequins. Beatrix was not interested in its decorative effect. It offered anonymity, and that was a gift that she suspected might be useful before she was through.

She saw the Freelander. Faulkner pulled out of the frenetic traffic and parked alongside.

“Get what you needed?”

She nodded, dumped the bag in the back and climbed up into the front.

“Want to have a look around town?”

She nodded, then sat back and looked out of the windows as Faulkner drove them out of the city. Basra’s buildings reminded her of the old Soviet style of architecture, with boxy and uninspiring construction arranged in careful order. The Russians had pumped money into the country in the seventies, and this was their lasting legacy. The buildings could have been in Finland or Warsaw, save that the plain concrete walls were stained a dirty yellow by years of exposure to the sand and the dust. A few apartment blocks were enlivened by touches designed to elicit local custom, some of them even sporting Assyrian-style bas-relief etched onto the walls. But most were utilitarian and functional, with rusting air-conditioning units breaking up the straight lines.

The streets were busy with life. Taxis nudged and edged into the never-ending flow of traffic, their orange bonnets and boots dinged and dented from numerous collisions. Youngsters hauled wonky carts that were piled high with sacks of grain. A donkey staggered beneath the weight of the baskets of coke that had been balanced across his back. They saw a flock of sheep grazing on the sun-blasted grass of a roundabout, oblivious to the clatter of traffic that circulated around them.

“Let’s go out to the oilfield,” she said.

Authorisation was needed to get out to the oilfields to the southwest of the city. There had been numerous attacks on the facility by insurgents, and now that Manage Risk were engaged in providing security, it was vice tight. Faulkner had arranged the fake clearance; the papers were made out in Beatrix’s name. The documents had been slid into in a plastic sleeve and placed on the dash.

They were halfway to the oilfield’s administrative buildings in Energy City when they passed a large armoured vehicle parked at the side of the road. They were twenty feet beyond it when Beatrix heard the throaty roar of its big three-hundred-horsepower diesel engine turning over. She watched in the mirror as it rolled onto the road and started after them. There was a sign on the front, in both English and Arabic, that threatened “lethal force” if traffic got too close or didn’t move out of the way. It sounded its horn, and the soldier in the roof turret waved for them to pull over.