Bale located the defective shutter – the defective shutter that was always to be found in old houses if you had the patience to look for it. He levered the shutter gently open. Then he inserted his knife into the warped sash of the window frame and seesawed it from side to side. The window opened with a noise like the riffling of a deck of cards.
Bale paused, listening. The house was as silent as the grave. Bale allowed his eyes to focus in the gloom. When he could see again, he checked out the room. The place stank of dried rodent corpses and the accumulated dust of years of benign neglect.
He moved to the hallway and then down towards the kitchen. It had been there that he had seen the oil lamps and the candles burning. Strange that there were no voices. In Bale’s experience, people nearly always talked in abandoned houses – it was a means of keeping the ghouls at bay. Of pricking the silence.
He reached the kitchen door and glanced inside. Nothing. He twitched one nostril. Soup. He could smell soup. So the girl was here, at the very least. Was she outside, perhaps, using nature’s closet? In which case he had been very lucky indeed not to run into her and risk losing her in the dark.
Or perhaps she had heard him? Warned Sabir? And they were lying in wait for him somewhere in the house. Bale smiled. That would make things a little more amusing. Give things a little more edge.
‘Your soup’s boiling over.’ His voice echoed through the house as through a cathedral.
Had there been a rustling in the far corner of the salon? Over there behind the bergere sofa? Where the tired old curtains hung down? Bale picked up one of a pair of bronze knickknacks and lobbed it at the front door. The clatter it made seemed obscenely loud in the sound-dampened room.
A figure darted from behind the sofa and began levering wildly at the shutters. Bale picked up the second bronze statuette and flung it at the figure. There was a cry and the figure fell.
Bale stayed where he was – listening – breathing only through his mouth. Had anyone else made a sound? Or had there only ever been that single person in the house? The girl – he sensed now that it had been the girl.
He walked back into the kitchen and fetched the oil lamp. Holding it out ahead of him, he walked over to the main shuttered window. The girl was curled up on the floor. Had he killed her? That would be inconvenient. He had certainly thrown the bronze statuette as hard as he had been able. But it might have been Sabir. He couldn’t afford to take any chances at this late stage in the game.
As he reached down for her, the girl slithered away from his grasp and ran wildly down the corridor.
Had she heard him breaking in? Was she heading for the back window? Bale ran in the opposite direction to the one she had taken. He threw himself through the front door and then curved left around the house.
He slowed down as he approached the window. Yes. There was her foot. Now she was pulling herself through.
Bale lifted her bodily out of the window and dropped her on the ground. He cuffed her once around the head and she lay still. Bale straightened up and listened. Nothing. No other sound. She had been the only one in the house.
Reaching down, he felt through her clothes and up between her legs for a knife or other concealed weapon. When he was sure that she was unarmed, he lifted her up like a sack of grain, draped her around his shoulders and headed back towards the salon.