No need to hustle for business over at the mosque. Scooters and cars kept arriving, and plenty more came on foot. I let my gaze wander to the left, to a shack with a blue plastic tarpaulin over a scaffolding frame as an awning, surrounded by scooters and motorbikes in various stages of cannibalization or repair.

It was the entrance to the left of the workshop that I was most interested in. A neon sign with Chinese lettering was set into the road close by. I didn't have a clue what it was advertising, but it lit up the doorway beautifully.

Five minutes went by before the target appeared. He was wearing a clean white shirt over grey tracksuit bottoms and flip-flops. He turned to his left, and walked along the cracked, greasy pavement past the workshop. I leant closer to Suzy and tapped the table lightly. 'There's our boy.'

Smiling at me, she closed the guidebook and put it into her bag. The Indian girl must have taken this as a sign we were leaving, and immediately came over and asked if we wanted more drinks. Suzy nodded. 'Two more, the same.'

The target was in his late forties, Indian, Pakistani, maybe even Bangladeshi. He climbed gingerly over the metre-high spiky fence that divided the motorbike graveyard from the mosque. His short black gleaming hair was neatly combed back and kept in place by gel or tonic. We both watched as he removed his shoes, headed for the taps, then disappeared inside with the rest.

The drinks arrived and Suzy paid the girl, letting her keep the pound's worth of change. Her face said we'd just made her day, but Suzy wasn't being generous. We didn't want her having to come back to us when we needed to leave in a hurry.

A couple of backpackers, gap-year age, came and sat down at a nearby table and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu as they checked out their red, peeling skin. Their conversation was drowned as the call to prayer wailed out from the loudspeakers in the tower, even bringing the organist to a standstill.



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