229 look up from his work, because it seemed to him that the cabin shimmered and dissolved, and then he was standing like a shadow on the wall of the Hyder residence, at night, watching the figure of Bilquis Hyder, veiled as usual in a head-to-toe black burqa, moving towards him down a darkened corridor. As she passed him without glancing in his direction he was appalled to see that her burqa was sodden and dripping with something too thick to be water. The blood, black in the unlit corridor, left a trail down the passage behind her. The vision faded. When Talvar got home he checked things out and discovered that nothing seemed amiss at the Hyder house, Bilquis had not left the premises and everyone was fine, so he put the matter out of his mind and got on with his job. Later he con- fessed to General Raza Hyder, 'It's my mistake. I should have seen at once what was going on; but my thoughts were on other things.' The day after his return from Q. Talvar Ulhaq heard about the four headless bodies, by the purest chance: two of his men were joking about the murders in the FSF canteen, wondering if they could pin the killings on well-known homosexual opposition bosses.
