He found Angelo in the narrow laundry room, ironing shirts, and said he knew Angelo hadn’t taken the watch. He said the job was Angelo’s as long as he wanted it, and he was deeply sorry for what had happened. Angelo set the iron upright with his good hand and straightened a collar, holding the shirt down with the severed wrist he kept pinned in his sleeve.

“God caught up with me,” Angelo said. “I stole more than three times before I stopped.”

Miles left the room, moved and disturbed. He couldn’t go back to England, with the English girl needing him and Angelo needing the job. Saudi Arabia was his country now, and he felt at once mired in it and dispossessed. He was given an interview with the girl, after many requests, and they sat in a visiting room in the station where she was held. As soon as they were alone, she shoved off the black veil that covered her head and throat. The room was clean and cool, with pale blue walls, and she was unshowered but pretty: she had a heart-shaped little gamine’s face.

“I’m trying to get you back to England,” he said. “It would help if you presented yourself better.” He didn’t know how else to say this. There had been one television interview, and she had come off apathetic and cruel.

The girl laughed, and looked down at the dirty floor-length smock she wore. “How would I do that?” she asked. “Do you know what it’s like in here?”

“Do they abuse you?”

“They know they can’t,” she said. “Because of you. So they just talk about it, but they talk about it all the time.”

“Don’t you want to go home to your family?”

She laughed again, a short, dry cough. “They’d lock me up for good there,” she said. “They’d have to.”

“Better than having your head chopped off.”

The girl looked at him, blank-eyed, as if he’d switched to a language she didn’t know.

“Isn’t it?” he prompted.

“What?” she said. She was a Geordie girl and it came out “wot.”

“Better,” he said, but she had withdrawn into the silent trance for which she had become known by the Saudi authorities. It seemed to be triggered by threats. Miles wondered if he could get her declared unfit to stand trial, based on her trances, but the distinction wouldn’t matter here.

Before he left the room, she stopped him. “My father worked in Kenya before,” she said. “D’you know what the pidgin name for a solar eclipse is?”

“What?” He was disturbed by how much it sounded like “wot.”

“‘Hurricane lamp belong Jesus gone bugger-up,’” she said.

He shook his head with surprise. “Is that a joke?”

“It’s real,” she said. “I keep thinking about it. That’s what my life feels like here.”