It was mind-blowingly hot and stuffy in the tiny room, with a faint smell that he hesitated to identify, but he had decided to keep well away from the glitzy air-conditioned tourist and business hotels, which were still busy in spite of the country’s slightly ambivalent relationship with its friends and neighbours internationally. He could stand the heat, he hoped, for the few days he intended to stay, and although there was little chance of his being recognised in the teeming capital of the Pakistani Punjab, he did not want to take the slightest chance. What he was doing, he knew, would infuriate family members even more in Pakistan than at home in Bradfield, and would not enchant his colleagues and superiors in CID, and he did not want to take the slightest risk of anyone reporting back to anyone at all. He did not really know the city at all. He had flown into Allama Iqbal airport often enough on family visits, most recently to Faria and Imran’s wedding, but his father’s custom was to hire a people-carrier at the airport and drive the family immediately out of Lahore, with the children craning through the window to glimpse as many of its famous parks and monuments, and a good proportion of its six million inhabitants, as they could before they headed across the agricultural plains to the family village about one hundred miles away.
