‘What’s a doctor got to do with it? This is a case of theft, pure and simple.’

‘I rely on his judgement,’ said Ibrahim, ‘so you will be respectful, Ali Gurdu.’

Ibn Shaprut was watching the girl. ‘Your baby is very quiet.’

She smiled thinly. ‘He’s clever. He’s learned not to waste energy crying.’ Her voice was scratchy, like an old woman’s. Her robe was filthy and torn, her eyes huge in a shrunken face, and the baby in her arms was wrapped in rags. She was called Obona. Ibrahim had had to confirm her age, which was sixteen; he had learned that hunger made you look young, even giving some a kind of ethereal beauty, before it turned you very old indeed.

‘You brought him here today,’ said Ibn Shaprut. ‘You have no family who could have taken him?’

‘My parents fled to Granada before the Christian armies came to the walls.’

‘Without you?’

‘They were ashamed of me. My grandmother stayed, though, and helped me. But she died in the spring.’

‘Now you’re alone,’ said Ibrahim.

‘Yes, sir.’

Ali Gurdu clenched a podgy fist. ‘You’ll be offering her a sugared apricot next. Enough of these questions! She’s a thief! That’s what this is all about, never mind her baby and her grandmother. She stole from me!’

Ibrahim glanced at his notes. Ali Gurdu described himself as a food merchant. He was steadily selling off a hoard of dried fruit and salted meat and rice. That wasn’t quite against the law, even at the exorbitant prices he no doubt charged. But Ibrahim thought there was a stink about the man that was more than just a layer of greasy sweat.

‘She came to you as a customer,’ he said. ‘She bought a bit of salted meat.’

‘What meat was that?’ Ibn Shaprut asked the girl.

She shrugged. ‘Rat, I think. Or cat. What else is there?’

The flesh of a rat, which had no doubt gorged itself on the bodies in the communal graves. ‘So you took your bit of rat—’

‘She took two sticks,’ Ali Gurdu insisted. ‘More than she’d paid for.’

‘One wasn’t enough,’ the girl said miserably. ‘The baby - I still feed him.’

‘That is draining for your body,’ Ibn Shaprut said gently. ‘I understand. ’

‘She ran away with the meat she stole.’

‘But you didn’t chase her,’ Ibn Shaprut said. ‘She was only caught because she was unlucky enough to run straight into one of Ibrahim’s bailiffs. If not for that you’d have said nothing about it.’

Ali Gurdu blustered, ‘I was simply slow about it. Shocked. Distressed! I’m not used to such blatant thievery, from a very young girl too. What’s the world coming to?’

Ibrahim raised a hand to silence him. ‘Obona, how did you pay for this meat? Do you have money?’