The Outcast by Michael Walters

to do its work? Yes, I assume so. It was bound to be discovered as soon as anyone touched the carpet.”
    â€œAnd what about the body itself?” He knew Solongo well enough to recognise that there was something on her mind.
    â€œI don’t know. Nothing really. I didn’t really look that closely. I—well, I guess I panicked a little bit.” She closed her eyes, as if conjuring the scene up in her mind. “Anything else? Well, I don’t think he was Mongolian, but you probably know that.”
    Doripalam shrugged, reluctant to give out any more information than he had to, even to Solongo. “We’re still waiting for the pathologist for a definitive view,” he said. “But he doesn’t look Mongolian.”
    â€œAnd there was bruising on the face,” she said. “A lot of bruising. As though he’d been beaten or kicked.” She paused. “That’s what—” she stopped again, as if unsure how to continue.
    â€œWhat?” Doripalam could hear the scratch of the uniformed officer’s pen across his pad.
    â€œIt’s probably nothing,” she said. “It’s what comes of being overwhelmed by the Mongol empire twenty-four hours a day.”
    â€œWhat is?”
    â€œWell,” she paused again, and then plunged on, “It’s just that the carpet, the bruising, it reminded me of a story about Hulagu.”
    â€œHulagu?” Doripalam struggled to recall his schoolboy history. “Genghis Khan’s grandson?”
    She smiled. “Well done. Yes, Genghis’s grandson. He led the siege of Baghdad in 1258. They eventually captured and killed the caliph of the city.”
    The story had begun to come back to Doripalam—one of those memorable historical tales that, in his school days, he had never quite managed to position in its authentic context. He knew it had supposedly happened but he had never been quite clear when or why. “But they knew that it was against Mongolian ethics to spill a king’s blood on the ground,” he interrupted.
    She nodded, smiling, as if her husband were a slow student who had managed, against the odds, to come up with the correct answer. “Exactly,” she said. “So they wrapped him in a carpet and trampled him to death.”
    Doripalam stared at her. “You’re not suggesting that—”
    She shrugged. “I’m not suggesting anything. It’s probably just the first symptom of my own impending nervous breakdown. I’m living with this stuff day and night at the moment, so these stories just pop into my head. But even so.”
    â€œGo on,” Doripalam said. It sounded pretty bizarre to him, but the positioning of the body in the carpet was strange enough. And he knew that it never paid to underestimate Solongo’s judgement.
    She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s just that the capture of Baghdad was one of the final stages in our war against the Muslims. Our genocide of the Muslims, some have called it. Ethnic cleansing. A clash of civilisations. Anyway, it just seemed to me that—well, it all has a certain contemporary resonance, don’t you think?”
    An hour later, Doripalam met with Batzorig to compare notes. He had arranged for one of the uniformed team to drive Solongo home, saying that he would follow her as soon as he could. She had given him a look that suggested that the promise sounded as hollow to her as it did to him.
    The two men worked painstakingly through the interview transcripts, but the information remained unhelpfully thin. Most of the volunteers had visited the loading area during the earlier part of the day, but no one could remember who had delivered the carpet. One of the young women interviewed by Batzorig had been sure that she had seen the carpet being off-loaded from a delivery truck during the early part of the morning.
    â€œWhich truck?” he had asked. “Do you remember