Arabesk (50 page)

“Demanding what?”

The man on screen took a deep breath and slowly released it. “That doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll need to see the note.”

“It no longer exists,” said Hamzah, staring out at Raf. “I burned it…”

“So what do you want?” Raf asked tightly. “Since you obviously don’t consider you need police help to get Avatar back…”

“I want you to come out to the villa and take a look at something my gardener’s just found…” With that, Hamzah fumbled at his end of the connection and the screen in the haremlek went dead.

Even ripped open and with her feet washed by the waves, the girl might have shown signs of lividity had she been dead for much longer than a few hours. As it was, the skin was waxy and slightly warm, but gravity hadn’t pooled blood along the underside of her legs. Both rigor and early, nonfixed lividity had yet to occur.

That gave Raf his time frame.

The killer had opened the blonde girl from pubis to sternum, then slashed again, straight across her rib cage, the cuts forming a cross. Smaller incisions, made at right angles, acted as stops to the cross. Her heart was missing, which was often the case in crimes of
mutilé,
so were both her lungs, and the killer had cut the initials
H.Q.
into her wrist.

Not a single print could be taken from her pale skin. Whoever had wielded the blade had worn surgical gloves, and from the cleanness of the incisions Raf put odds on her killer using a scalpel or filleting knife.

Mind you, since what little Raf knew of forensics came from reading notebooks left by Felix Abrinsky, the previous Chief, and since the fat man’s notes were often impossible to decipher, Raf fully accepted that the sooner he brought in professionals the better.

“Sir, you might want to take a look at this…” The young policewoman carrying a camera kept her voice level, almost businesslike. Raf hadn’t met her before but she looked about twelve and wore a black
hijab,
the traditional headscarf, checked along its edge in the blue and white of the WPF.

Her boss, Madame Mila, coroner-magistrate for women and head of the WPF, had obviously already warned her in general against talking to other departments, and against talking to the Chief of Detectives in particular.

Raf’s way round this prohibition had been to point out the obvious.

“Touristica,”
he’d announced on seeing the body, mere seconds after arriving on Hamzah’s beach. It didn’t matter what gender tourists were, they still came under the
poliz touristica,
who reported to uniform; uniform automatically reported all unsolved serious to Raf.

“How do you know, sir?” Stuck between a rock and the proverbial, Raf thought, looking at her heavy face. Upset Madame Mila or upset Iskandryia’s new Chief of Detectives.

“What’s your name?”

“Leila, Your Excellency.”

“Take a look at her breasts.”

The young woman blushed but did what she was told. The breasts in question were small and pale brown.

“What do you see?”

Leila stayed silent, staring desperately.

“It’s okay,” said Raf, “take a look at her…lower half.” The dead girl was completely naked, draped backwards across a rocky outcrop on Hamzah’s beach. Her feet were underwater, the rest of her was beginning to mottle in the early-morning light.

“What do you see?”

The police officer peered closely, looking for abrasions or thumb marks, something to say the woman had first been raped, but her flesh was unbruised and nothing obvious sprang to mind.

“She…has a tan line round her hips?”

Raf nodded and Leila almost sighed aloud with relief.

“What else?”

“That’s the only tan line.”

“Neatly done.” Raf flicked on his Seiko and hot-keyed Champollion Precinct. Not bothering to announce himself, he rattled off time, place and crime code. “The first official on the scene was Officer…” He glanced quickly at Leila.

“Durrell.”

“Officer Durrell from the Women’s Police Force who recognized immediately, from the tan mark of a bikini bottom and a corresponding lack of a tan mark for the breasts, that the victim had to be a tourist. Accordingly the crime scene was handed over to me as the most senior detective present.”

Mind you, thought Raf, Officer Durrell was more impressed with his abilities than she need be. This was the second mutilated body to be found in a week. And since the first one was now on her way back to Austin in an icebox and the second was also blonde, young and obviously Western, it was difficult not to assume a pattern, albeit slightly unprofessional; since, having only two cases, the most Raf should be positing was a basic similarity.

Unfortunately, the police didn’t know if the first victim had been raped. The pathologist had apparently forgotten to check.

In short, bleak sentences Raf ordered in a scene team and told the handler to notify Madame Mila’s office of the change of responsibility. Only once did Raf’s voice hesitate. Having just ordered that the tourist go to the nearest morgue, as soon as the site was swept and the crime-scene shots completed, Raf had a change of mind.

“No,” he said, “send it to Dr. Kamila…” Kamila didn’t work for his division but she could be persuaded, and she knew what she was doing. She was also a woman. In crimes like this that could count.

“Okay, Dr. Kamila it is. The pickup location? That’s…”

Raf waited for the question, which never came. Instead the handler muttered a hurried Ten4 and broke his connection. Within minutes the fact that a naked tourist had been found butchered in the grounds of Villa Hamzah would be round Police HQ. Within half an hour the outer precincts would know.

The fact Raf had called in the crime would only make the titbit more juicy.

Turning on his heel, Raf stamped through the salt grass, which separated the rocky headland from the villa’s terraces, and entered Hamzah’s study through its garden door, without knocking. There was a conversation that needed to be had and Raf wasn’t looking forward to it.

The industrialist was sitting at his desk, just as Raf expected. And he didn’t even frown when Raf strode in from the garden.

“Where were you two hours ago?” Raf made little attempt to keep the anger out of his voice. This was the man who’d burned the note sent by Avatar’s kidnappers. The man who’d pimped his naked daughter the night Raf walked out of that door, who was now pimping her again to the Khedive.

“Still dining with my wife at Maxim’s.”

With my wife
… Raf looked for the slightest hint of irony in Hamzah’s face but there was nothing. “Can you prove that?”

Hamzah nodded. “I think they’ll remember us,” he said sourly.

“And this was a long-standing arrangement?”

“No,” said Hamzah, looking up. “It was very last-minute. Why?”

“Because there’s a butchered girl in your garden, round about where your daughter usually swims, and your initials are carved into her wrist. So what I want to know is the usual stuff… Who is she/where did she come from/who did it…?”

“And if I tell you I have no idea?”

“No idea,” said Raf as he pulled a square of card from his pocket and tossed the Polaroid onto Hamzah’s desk. “No idea who did this?”

Hamzah Effendi picked up the photograph and began to tremble. The movement started in his fingers and spread like fever until his whole body shook. And his body kept shaking, even after he’d turned the photograph facedown and pushed it away from him.

His body was still shaking when he pushed back his chair to rush to the lavatory. And it was doing the same when he came back after vomiting up his breakfast and what had remained of the previous night’s meal.

“She was facedown,” he said. “When I saw her she was facedown.”

8th October

“Eduardo?”

Eduardo nodded from instinct. It didn’t matter that the person talking was half a city away and Eduardo’s watch wasn’t toggled to visual. He still nodded.

“
Na’am
… This is me.” Eduardo folded his broadsheet and placed it carefully on the table. He would have preferred one of the Arabic-language tabloids but he had his position to consider, so he always downloaded
L’Iskandrian
.

The Frenchman and Frisco were watching him from the corners of their eyes. He knew they’d both decided his watch was a fake and his new job just empty words, but they were wrong. Instinctively, Eduardo straightened in his café chair and ran one hand though his thinning hair, then discreetly rubbed his fingers clean on the side of his black chinos.

He listened in silence, nodding seriously now and then like a man agreeing with a particularly pertinent point. Not everyone had an elegant Silver Seiko that double-encrypted conversation and screened itself from vanP hacking.

“
Na’am,
I understand.” Eduardo did too—really—but just to be sure he asked the man to repeat his instructions more slowly.

Eduardo liked his new job. He even had an office, a third-storey walk-up off Place Orabi, above a haberdasher’s at the back of the bus depot. With the office and watch came new shoes, new trousers and a zip-up leather jacket that looked old and tatty unless you got really close, when it was possible to see that the scuff marks were printed onto the animal hide.

The man who gave Eduardo the jacket had pulled out a gravity knife, dropped its blade and driven it hard into the leather. The sharp point of the blade hardly even left a mark.

“Mesh,” he told Eduardo, “ultrafine, from spiders that shit steel.” Eduardo didn’t know whether the man was making fun of him or not. All the same, Eduardo liked what he now did. Which was mostly sit in cafés and talk politics, something he wasn’t sure he really understood. Listening to the counterarguments, Eduardo had discovered a talent for separating half-truth from mere wish. A cast-iron, built-in bullshit detector, the man called it, speaking as if such a machine might actually exist.

Eduardo imagined it as small, with cogwheels that whirred and narrow brass pipes that grew hot from circulating water. When Eduardo was a child he lived in a small burg in Namibia and the local train, to Windhoek and back, had run on coal and wood, dried dung too when the shortages began, though dung didn’t work that well.

“Mmm…” Eduardo said, nodding. “Sure thing.” He tossed a handful of silver onto the table. Time to go. His watch didn’t need him to shut down the connection, because it did that for itself. It did other things too, like bring him the latest football results and forecast that it was going to rain.

“Things to do,” he said to Frisco, speaking Ladino. “Deals to make.” Iskandryia was a city with a number of languages that might claim to be the lingua franca, of which Spanish Hebrew was just one. The other man nodded. Frisco had told Eduardo his real name but Eduardo kept forgetting, though he remembered that the man claimed his forefathers were
moriscos,
expelled from Spain.

When Eduardo started coming to the café, he and Frisco had played a few games of chess but now the old man made excuses not to play, probably because Eduardo kept losing.

Inside Eduardo’s office the air was cool, which was a miracle given his desk fan had fused and the October sun beat direct on an outside wall; but the walls were thick, built decades before from limestone blocks stolen from a Coptic church three streets away. And anyway, closed shutters kept out much of the brightness. There was also an air-conditioning unit attached to one wall, a brown box that stuck its metal arse out into the street, as if threatening to shit on pedestrians beneath. Unfortunately that had been broken ever since someone hid a wank mag up the air outlet. When Eduardo first took the box apart to see if anything obvious was broken, he’d been left with frayed wires, rusting iron pipes and mildewed, disintegrating pictures of pale nipples and shaven pudenda.

So he’d put the casing back together and pushed the mags back where he found them, and now tiny mushrooms grew in clusters on the grey carpet, right below where the unit dripped water.

A Sony Eon3 sat on an otherwise clear desk. A simple Luxor terminal, he’d chosen it at random in a souk at the back of Rue Faransa. Glued to its side was an anonymizer, which had been given him by the man. On the ’mizer was a label,
PROPERTY OF EL ISKANDRYIA POLICE DEPARTMENT
:
NOT TO BE REMOVED FROM CHAMPOLLION PRECINCT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES
.

Punching a key, Eduardo started random number software and waited. Without him having to ask, the terminal popped up a comms screen and Eduardo keyed in the number he’d just been given. Then he did what the man had told him to do.

Eduardo didn’t know that he was being rerouted or that, at the receiving end, his call was logged as having come direct from Fez; all Eduardo knew was that a tiny icon on the screen’s task bar lit green and a connection got made.

The person who picked up at the other end said nothing to introduce himself, which was fine, because that was what Eduardo had been told to expect.

“I’m taking the contract.”

“Who gave you the details?” The voice was gruff.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“What guarantees do I have that the job will be done?”

“None.”

“By the day after tomorrow or the line of credit closes.”

“Tomorrow night,” said Eduardo and broke the connection.

9th October

“Don’t you like pastries?” Hani sounded puzzled instead of
angry. She’d been ploughing her way through a dozen
basbousa,
stuffing them into her mouth with sticky fingers at the start, then eating more slowly and finally nibbling, mouselike around the edge, once she realized Raf wasn’t going to tell her to stop.

Her lunchtime vitamin stood untouched by her plate.

“What?”

Raf glanced up to find dark eyes staring at him from a pinched face. He tried to make sure he and Hani ate together at weekends, while Donna bustled around in the background, banging together pans and clattering knives into a double stone sink, each side large enough to be a horse trough.

The kitchen took up most of the ground floor of the al-Mansur madersa. Outside was a tiled courtyard with a fountain and beyond that a stone garden house, then a walled garden, roofed over with glass.