The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (50 page)

He lived for hawks, grew generation after generation of saline-resistant grasses in a biodome on the edge of Chott el Jerid, Tunisia’s salt-crusted inland sea, and had once hired a Soviet cryptographer and one of Caltech’s most brilliant geneticists to extract meaning from the randomness of junk DNA.

Political decisions the Emir made after consulting the heavens. Not listening to a pet astrologer, though that would have been bad enough, but asking questions of the constellations themselves. And when he spoke, in public or private, reports had it that he spoke only in complex couplets, perfectly cadenced and delivered after long thought.

Among the Berber tribes, who still traversed the empty sands and rock seas with little care for international borders, he was regarded as North Africa’s sole sane ruler. It was a minority opinion and one with which it was obvious Major Halim didn’t agree.

“So tell me,” said Raf, “who am I?”

The major looked at the young princeling in the black leather coat, the dark glasses and black gloves whose pale hair blew in the slight night breeze. “The son of the Emir of Tunis,” he said without hesitation.

Raf nodded and offered his hand. This time they shook.

“Very touching,” said Zara. “Now if you’ve both finished with the male-bonding shit, perhaps Major Halim could escort me home. Of course,” she added crossly, “if this wasn’t El Isk I could get myself home. Since I’m perfectly capable of walking, chewing gum and looking where I’m going at the same time. But since this
is
Iskandryia and any woman alone at night is
obviously
a prostitute…”

Raf grinned. Then smiled some more at Major Halim’s discomfort. “This is nothing,” he said, “you wait until you know her better and she gets really cross.”

“Better…?”
The major executed a tiny bow in Zara’s direction. “Much as I’d welcome the chance to get to know Miss Quitrimala better, I’m afraid that’s impossible.” His tone was genuinely regretful.

“Don’t tell me,” said Zara, “you couldn’t cope with a third mistress.”

“It’s not that,” the major said, looking shocked. “I’m leaving for Berlin next week, on secondment to the
Thiergarten.
After that, if everything goes smoothly, I hope to become Iskandryia’s attaché to Stambul.” For a moment, admitting this, the major seemed almost bashful. But Zara was too cross to notice.

“Then what,” she asked furiously, “was gate-crashing my supper about? All that sucking up to my mother. And the crap about me needing air and taking a walk…”

“This is difficult,” said the major and glanced at Raf. When it became obvious that Raf refused to take his cue to withdraw, Major Halim sighed. “The Khedive intends to take a holiday… Well deserved obviously.”

Zara opened her mouth to speak, then closed it again. A sudden tension locked her shoulders, which refused to budge, even when she twisted her head from side to side. Zara had a nasty idea she knew exactly what was about to come next.

“His Highness was wondering if…”

“Have you talked to my parents about this?”

“Of course,” the major said nervously. “Your father said it was your decision where you took your holidays and with whom. Which was not, to be honest, the reaction I was expecting. Your mother thinks it’s an excellent idea.”

I bet she does, thought Zara. Somewhere in her mother’s finely gradated misunderstanding of Iskandryian society, the woman undoubtedly believed that being mother to the Khedive’s mistress was even better than having a bey in the family.

Zara had been spot on about her mother’s desperation that she take this walk, totally wrong about the motives. “It’s not going to happen,” she said calmly.

So calmly that even the major could hear her keep the anger in check.

“Tell the boy I’m not interested. Just that, nothing else. Don’t make it polite, don’t give my apologies or regrets because I’m not sending them…”

“You misunderstand,” the major said carefully. “You misunderstand completely. The Khedive’s intentions are entirely
honourable.
” He stumbled over the word, not certain how much he could actually say. In his own mind, before supper, when he’d been running through how to approach the coming evening, he’d seen them both taking a moonlit stroll through the terraces of the Palace Ras el-Tin while he proffered the Khedive’s invitation and she accepted gratefully.

“He doesn’t want to get me into bed?”

The major’s lips twisted. “Let me repeat myself. His intentions are strictly legitimate.”

Zara’s eyes widened. Impossible visions of palaces, sleek yachts, long holidays aboard the SS
Jannah
opened like flowers before her.

“And if I go on this holiday?”

“Then he’ll propose,” said Raf, “won’t he?”

Major Halim looked pained. “You can’t honestly expect me to comment.”

“God.” Raf laughed. “Koenig Pasha must be climbing a wall… Only my cousin could decide he needed to marry a hard-line republican. Not to mention occasional communist.” They had files on Zara too, back at the precinct. Files he could recite from memory.

“Have you spoken to my parents about that bit as well?” Zara asked the major.

Major Halim shook his head. “Only tentatively about the holiday. Enough to make clear that you would be an honoured…”

“Well, don’t,” Zara stressed. “Speak to them, I mean. It’s nothing they need to know.”

“They’re your parents.”

“Talk to either of them about this,” said Zara, “and I guarantee I won’t go.”

“But the Khedive is determined to do this properly. By the book…”

“You do realize,” Zara interrupted crossly, “that if the Prophet had been a woman, there wouldn’t even have been the Book, because no one would have listened, never mind written it down…”

CHAPTER 12

8th October

The first of that Friday’s calls to prayer found Raf
leaning against a seawall, watching smugglers run empty cigarette boats into Western Harbour under protection of both darkness, which came free, and the Commander of Ras el-Tin, whose protection came anything but…

And the Terbana Mosque’s definition of dawn seemed open to debate. The Mufti had defined it as the point not when light first touched the sky but when the absolute utterness of the night first lessened.

Raf thought the man was being unduly optimistic.

Hamzah’s call came four hours later, just as Raf was about to shower away the black dog of his wasted night. Because even blasting his police Honda to Abu Sir and back, fifty klicks along the shore, had done nothing to improve Raf’s mood, even though early mist had hung over the Mariout marshes and the Mediterranean had still worn her night colours.

“For you,” shouted Hani, her call echoing up the lift shaft from the haremlek below. “It’s Effendi.”

Raf had warned Hani not to call Hamzah that, but currently the child was paying zero attention to anything he said.

“Tell him I’ll call back.”

“He says it’s important.”

Sighing, Raf picked up his dressing gown from the floor and pulled on some old leather slippers that Khartoum insisted once belonged to Hani’s grandfather. When Raf made some glib comment about dead men’s shoes, the old porter had pulled deeply on the wrong end of a cigar and nodded like it was obvious.

“This alone is true,” he’d told Raf. “This here, at this time, for this person.” Khartoum had announced it like that was also obvious. Three days later Raf was still puzzling over that one.

“Uncle Raf…” Hani’s voice was tight with exasperation.

“I’m on my way.”

“…You could always get comms installed up there.”

Raf nodded and slid back the metal grille to step into the lift. He could indeed, but he wouldn’t. His floor was the only level of the madersa not fitted with a screen and he liked it that way.

“…or you could try turning on your watch,” added Hani, when he finally reached her floor.

“But then you wouldn’t have an excuse to complain, would you?” Raf said and punched a button to activate a screen. Hani stalked off in silence, chin up and shoulders rigid, and though Raf heard the slam of her bedroom door he didn’t call her back.

Just after their Aunt Nafisa was murdered, Raf had made a promise to Hani not to send her away to school. Keeping his word was proving harder than he’d imagined. Particularly as everyone else seemed to think the girl would be better off living somewhere different, somewhere he wasn’t. Until recently he’d have disagreed.

“Hamzah.”

“Your Excellency.”

“You don’t need to call me…”

“This is official.” The industrialist’s face was tight, with a greyness that suggested acute shock.

“Zara.”

“My daughter is here,” Hamzah said. “And she’s fine. Although for reasons I don’t understand, I gather you met her early this morning.”

“And Avatar?”

The man looked embarrassed. “Avatar’s gone,” he said simply. “Kidnapped…”

“Avatar?”

Raf’s explosion of anger brought Hani out of her room; or maybe it was the way he slammed the wall with the side of his fist. “How do you know?”

“I’ve had a note.”

“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.