I sat down beside it again. I put my hand on its chest, and, as the sun rose further, the morning seemed to draw the gold from the mouflon’s body and eyes.
Then I saw it. I saw the gold evaporate and merge with the air and rise into the sky. I saw the gold rise from its body like light, like one might imagine a soul leaving a body. The gold became part of the sunrise before me. The fur on its underbelly was pure white now, its body and face a soft chestnut-grey. Its beautiful curved horns were an off-white that reminded me of stone.
My hand shook on its chest. My breath shook with more tears, a fierce sadness that was tearing itself upwards from deep inside me.
Seraphim remained silent behind me.
‘Did you see that?’ I asked.
‘See what?’
‘The gold, the way it left its body; the way it dissipated into the sky.’
He didn’t respond immediately, and after a few deep breaths he said, ‘You haven’t been right since Nisha left.’
‘She hasn’t left. You’re an asshole, you know.’
I faced him again and I remembered everything that Nisha had wanted from me, the things she had said, the way she had cried over the photograph she had seen of me as a boy. You were just so beautiful and so sweet. Had those been her words?
‘Seraphim, I’m out,’ I said. ‘From now on, you leave me alone. You don’t have to pay me for this hunt or the last one, for that matter. I want nothing more to do with any of this. You can burn everything I own for all I care, but if anyone gets hurt, I swear I will kill you.’
The caged birds were still singing their hearts out.
The sun rose higher still. Time seemed to be moving faster. How long did we stand there staring at each other?
‘What will you do for money?’ was all he said.
I didn’t bother replying.
*
The iPad rang at 5 a.m. I was wide awake. My arm had been stitched and bandaged and I had said nothing to the doctors about what had happened.
When I answered the phone, both Kumari and Nisha’s mother stared back at me.
‘What happened to your arm, Mr Yiannis?’
‘I fell over, Kumari. Don’t worry, it’s nothing.’
She squinted her eyes at me. She wasn’t convinced.
The old woman began to speak to me in Sinhalese. Her face was as smooth as a stone, her large eyes fixed on me. Her fingers opened and closed as she spoke. ‘You tell me!’ she said finally, in English. Then she nudged Kumari.
‘My grandmother is very worried,’ Kumari said. ‘She want to know where my amma is. She says that never has she not called her beloved daughter and beloved mother. She is asking what have you done with her?’
I realised my hands were shaking as I held the tablet.
I was silent for a while and they both waited. The old lady with the smooth face had her hand on Kumari’s shoulder. She gripped it tightly.
The young girl glared at me from beneath a newly cut fringe.
‘Kumari.’ I took a deep breath. ‘Kumari, I’m sorry. Please tell your grandmother that I don’t know where your mother is. She went out one night, nearly three weeks ago, and she hasn’t come back.’
The girl paused for a moment and opened her mouth to say something to me, but then changed her mind and turned to her grandmother to translate.
The old woman was besides herself. She began to cry and speak so fast that the young girl waved her hands before her grandmother’s eyes to stop her, to make her see her perhaps. The old woman continued to speak, breathless now, and Kumari, above her grandmother’s voice, began to translate: ‘She is asking where is she? Why would she leave? Why would she not come back? Did something happen?’
‘I don’t know, Kumari,’ I said. ‘But we are doing everything we can to find her. You must know and understand this. Everything.’ My voice broke on the last word.
‘She wants more information, Mr Yiannis. She says that what you have told us is not enough. She needs to know more.’
‘All I know and all I can tell you is that four other women, all of them foreign maids, and their two children, have also gone missing.’
Kumari translated for her grandmother, and the old woman began to speak faster. There were questions I could tell, so many questions, but the young girl turned to face me now with a solemnity and sudden seriousness that reminded me of her mother.
‘Mr Yiannis,’ she said, softly, ‘why didn’t you tell me this? You knew for a long time, yes?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Why did you not tell me?’