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his sister bruised and weeping in the hall; upstairs, in her bedroom, his mother wailed like a brand-new widow. He begged Huma to tell him what had happened, and when she replied that their father, returning from his brutal business trip, had once again noticed a glint of silver between boat and quay, had once again scooped up the errant relic, and was consequently in a rage to end all rages, having beaten the truth out of her – then Atta buried his face in his hands and sobbed out his opinion, which was that the hair was persecuting them, and had come back to finish the job.
    It was Huma’s turn to think of a way out of their troubles.
    While her arms turned black and blue and great stains spread across her forehead, she hugged her brother and whispered to him that she was determined to get rid of the hair at all costs – she repeated this last phrase several times.
    ‘The hair’, she then declared, ‘was stolen from the mosque; so it can be stolen from this house. But it must be a genuine robbery, carried out by a bona-fide thief, not by one of us who are under the hair’s thrall – by a thief so desperate that he fears neither capture nor curses.’
    Unfortunately, she added, the theft would be ten times harder to pull off now that their father, knowing that there had already been one attempt on the relic, was certainly on his guard.
    ‘Can you do it?’
    Huma, in a room lit by candle and storm-lantern, ended her account with one further question: ‘What assurances can you give that the job holds no terrors for you still?’
    The criminal, spitting, stated that he was not in the habit of providing references, as a cook might, or a gardener, but he was not alarmed so easily, certainly not by any children’s djinni of a curse. Huma had to be content with this boast, and proceeded to describe the details of the proposed burglary.
    ‘Since my brother’s failure to return the hair to the mosque, my father has taken to sleeping with his precious treasure under his pillow. However, he sleeps alone, and very energetically; only enter his room without waking him, and he will certainly have tossed and turned quite enough to make the theft a simple matter. When you have the vial, come to my room,’ and here she handed Sheikh Sín a plan of her home, ‘and I will hand over all the jewellery owned by my mother andmyself. You will find … it is worth … that is, you will be able to get a fortune for it …’
    It was evident that her self-control was weakening and that she was on the point of physical collapse.
    ‘Tonight,’ she burst out finally. ‘You must come tonight!’
    No sooner had she left the room than the old criminal’s body was convulsed by a fit of coughing: he spat blood into an old vanaspati can. The great Sheikh, the ‘Thief of Thieves’, had become a sick man, and every day the time drew nearer when some young pretender to his power would stick a dagger in his stomach. A lifelong addiction to gambling had left him almost as poor as he had been when, decades ago, he had started out in this line of work as a mere pickpocket’s apprentice; so in the extraordinary commission he had accepted from the moneylender’s daughter he saw his opportunity of amassing enough wealth at a stroke to leave the valley for ever, and acquire the luxury of a respectable death which would leave his stomach intact.
    As for the Prophet’s hair, well, neither he nor his blind wife had ever had much to say for prophets – that was one thing they had in common with the moneylender’s thunderstruck clan.
    It would not do, however, to reveal the nature of this, his last crime, to his four sons. To his consternation, they had all grown up to be hopelessly devout men, who even spoke of making the pilgrimage to Mecca some day. ‘Absurd!’ their father would laugh at them. ‘Just tell me how you will go?’ For, with a parent’s absolutist love, he had made sure they were all provided with a lifelong source of high