“My contact was a man named Ahmad, from the VEVAK. What I thought I was getting into was a straightforward decontamination job—clearing up a battlefield from the Iran-Iraq War where there’d been a huge human wave attack, followed by a haunting. And that’s what Ahmad seemed to think, too, when he met me. It was all fairly laid-back at first, until a bunch of Pasdaran special forces troops turned up, led by a lieutenant—that’s the Revolutionary Guard. And they told Ahmad that the real problem was that the governor of Vakilabad prison had been unable to carry out any executions for nearly a month because a Djinn, an evil spirit, had . . . well.” She’s shaking. “I need another nip,” she adds, pulling free and picking up her tumbler again.

“A Djinn?” I ask, then bite my tongue again: it’s not my job to prompt her. She’ll spill when she’s good and ready.

“Well, there was a bit of an argument, and I nearly stamped my foot and told them it was a breach of protocol, but you don’t want to get into a pissing match with the local equivalent of the Waffen-SS. Ahmad said later that he’d had a bad feeling about the assignment from the start, thought it was a whitewash for something, but he didn’t like to say . . . So anyway, they piled us into a couple of Toyotas and drove us from the airport to the prison: a horrible place. It smelled of shit and despair. Once inside we were taken directly to this shed. The death chamber. I was . . . afraid. You know? You can never be quite certain what the revolutionary guards are planning because they are entirely rational, within the constraints of a belief system that is based on crazy and mutually contradictory axioms. But they gave me the VIP treatment, tea and refreshments, and they let me keep my instrument, so . . .

“We got to the death chamber. There were four bodies hanging there, and they were clearly dead, but not in the manner prescribed by law. The execution party had left in a hurry: three of the stools were still upright. The victims were levitating, Bob, hovering just below the beam the ropes were tied to, and their eyes were glowing—you know what I mean? The bioluminescence thing? Luminous worms in the darkness. They were all quite dead, and the smell was atrocious: they’d been floating there for a week, chanting: ‘Aw der hal amedn aset, aw der hal amedn aset.’ Over and over again. Through dead men’s throats.”

She pauses for another suck at the water of life and I follow her example.

“I asked Ahmad. ‘It means, he is coming,’ he explained. Ahmad was clearly just inches away from crapping himself with fear. ‘Now please would you banish the Djinn that is haunting gallows so these fine fellows will let us go?’”