over the train. The man got on carrying a bird cage with a mynah in it. He walked through carriages, glancing at other passengers. There were no seats left and he sat on the floor. He was wearing a sarong, sandals, a Galle Road T-shirt. It was a slow train, travelling through rock passes, then emerging into sudden vistas. He knew that a mile or so before they got to Kurunegala there would be a tunnel and the train would curve into the dark claustrophobia of it. A few windows would remain open—they needed fresh air, though it meant the noise would be terrible. Once past the tunnel, back into sunlight, they would be getting ready to disembark.
He stood just as the train went into darkness. For a few moments there was the faint muddy light of the bulbs and then they went out. He could hear the bird talking. Three minutes of darkness.
The man moved quickly to where he remembered the government official was, beside the aisle. In the darkness he yanked him forward by his hair and wrapped the chain around his neck and began strangling him. He counted the seconds to himself in the darkness. When the man’s weight fell against him he still didn’t trust him, didn’t release his hold on the chain.
He had a minute left. He stood and lifted the man into his arms. Keeping him upright, he steered him towards the open window. The yellow lights flickered on for a second. He might have been a tableau in somebody’s dream.
He jerked the official off the ground and pushed him through the opening. The buffet of wind outside flung the head and shoulders backwards. He pushed him farther and then let go and the man disappeared into the noise of the tunnel.
While Anil was working with the forensic team in Guatemala, she’d flown into Miami to meet Cullis. She arrived exhausted, her face and body drawn out. Dysentery, hepatitis, dengue fever, they were all going around. She and her team were eating in the villages where they were exhuming bodies; they had to eat the food they were given because it was the only way the villages could participate—by cooking for them. ‘You pray for beans,’ she murmured to Cullis, removing the work clothes she still had on—she had rushed to catch the last plane out—then climbing into her first hotel bath in months. ‘You avoid the seviche. If you have to eat it you throw up somewhere privately, as quick as you can.’ She stretched out in the miracle of a foam bath, a tired smile towards him, glad to have reached him. He knew that exhausted and focussed look, the drawl of her slurring voice as she told her stories.
‘I never actually dug before. I’m usually just in the labs. But we were doing exhumations in the field. Manuel, he gave me a brush and a chopstick and said break up the ground and brush it away. We got five skeletons the first day.’
He was on the edge of the tub watching her, closed eyes, away from the world. She’d cut her hair short. She was much thinner. He could see she had fallen even more in love with her work. Tired out but also refreshed by it.
She leaned forward and pulled the plug out, lay back again to feel the water disappear around her. Then she stood on the tiles, her body passive as he pressed the towel against her dark shoulders.
‘I know the name of several bones in Spanish,’ she boasted. ‘I know some Spanish. Omóplato is this. Shoulder blade. Maxilar—your upper jaw bone. Occipital—the bone at the back of the skull.’ She was slurring words, as if counting backwards with anaesthetic in her. ‘You’ve got a mixed bag of characters working on those sites. Big-shot pathologists from the States who can’t reach for salt without grabbing a woman’s breast. And Manuel. He is part of that community, so he has less protection than the others like us. He told me once, When I’ve been digging and I’m tired and don’t want to do any more, I think how it could be me in the grave I’m working on. I wouldn’t want someone to stop digging for me. . . . I always think of that when I want to quit. I’m sleepy, Cullis. Can hardly talk. Read me something.’
‘I’ve written a piece on Norwegian snakes.’
‘No.’
‘A poem, then.’
‘Yes. Always.’
But Anil was already asleep, with a smile on her face.