The Ghost Runner (9 page)

‘Ragab doesn’t strike me as the type.’

‘They never do. They all seem like nice, decent people.’ Zahra came to a halt. ‘Thank you for this, for listening. Most of the time I manage fine, but once in a while I lose my balance.’

‘You don’t have to apologise.’

‘I wouldn’t if I didn’t feel I wanted to.’

With that she walked away without another word. As he watched her go, Makana realised that she had somehow raised more questions than she had answered.

Chapter Seven

Musab Khayr was the missing piece in the puzzle. According to Magdy Ragab, he was still in Denmark, the country which had granted him political asylum. Ragab claimed to have lost contact with him over the years and indeed had no way to inform him that his daughter had died, assuming he even cared about a child he had made no effort to see for so many years. Then again, Makana thought to himself, perhaps there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for that. Did he ever stop caring about his own daughter? Wasn’t that what she would have concluded after all these years? Why hasn’t my father tried to find me? It was an uncomfortable thought and one which dislodged Makana’s mind from the track it had been on.

As he crossed the square in front of the Husseini mosque the following morning, Makana wondered if Musab could be as hard hearted as Ragab made out? Had something turned him against his wife and child? Perhaps he had changed. Who doesn’t? Could he really claim he was the same person he had been when he first arrived in this city, lost and bewildered, trying to find a foothold to restart his life when the last thing he felt he deserved was to go on living? Musab had been in prison, and a lot of things could happen to a man in prison. The brief time Makana had been incarcerated all those years ago remained with him as a vivid memory. It crept up on him in unsuspecting moments. Enclosed spaces. The sound of a door closing. He avoided using lifts whenever possible. It woke him in the middle of the night leaving him drenched in sweat and kicking out, convinced that darkness was closing over him like a grave.

Aswani’s was almost deserted save for the flies that buzzed furiously inside the glass-fronted cabinets, dizzy over the feast of raw meat on display. Aswani’s face was the usual rumpled map, puffed up and sprinkled with a generous handful of grey bristles.

‘Are you paying for him?’

‘Where is he?’

Aswani nodded across the room. ‘He’s already eaten two bowls of humous.’

Sami was seated half concealed behind one of the ugly red pillars that jutted out like unwanted furniture at various points around the room.

‘Ah, there you are.’ Sami licked his fingers before extending a hand which Makana managed to avoid taking as he pulled out a chair and sat down. Unperturbed, Sami made some pretence of tidying up the debris strewn across the table: napkins, empty plates, scraps of bread. ‘I ordered lamb. He has some chops which look excellent, worth waiting for.’

‘Are you sure you’ll have any appetite left?’

‘I’m sorry, I missed breakfast this morning.’ Sami grinned, restoring a certain boyishness to his face. ‘You know how married life can be.’

Sami Barakat was the source of most of Makana’s information when he needed research doing. As a journalist, he had access to more archives and resources than Makana could ever reach. In addition, he had the private numbers of high-ranking army officials, ministerial assistants, press officers at a dozen embassies, as well as a field of colleagues who had their own networks. Sami’s help had often proved invaluable.

‘How is Rania?’

‘She’s fine, spends all her time on the internet. I tease her that she has more friends in New York and LA these days than in Cairo.’

Makana leaned back against the wall and lit a cigarette. The smoke wafted upwards to be gently swept in circles by the overhead fan. A gnarled old man, all bones and missing teeth, paused in the doorway and clicked a set of castanets together, improvised from a couple of shoe-polish tins. It was a half-hearted effort. He looked like he had barely the strength to stand, let alone get on his knees and shine a pair of shoes. He stared at the interior for a while, as if imagining another life for himself, or perhaps remembering a previous one, before wandering off.

‘What have you got for me?’

Sami reached into his satchel and produced an untidy folder. As he spread out his papers, Makana felt a twinge of guilt at seeing the vivid scars on the backs of both of Sami’s hands, the result of having four-inch nails driven through them a few months ago, while helping on another case. He had regained most of the mobility in his fingers but, as his awkward movements showed, not all.

‘Let’s see. Okay, Magdy Ragab. Interesting case this. Parents were educated, but not particularly wealthy. Father died young. He was a lawyer, as was his uncle Fahmy, who seems to have taken a hand in rearing the boy after his brother died. Uncle Fahmy smoothed the path for young Magdy, who did about average at Cairo University’s Faculty of Law. He graduated but wouldn’t have got far without help.’ Sami looked up and shrugged his shoulders. ‘So far so normal.’

Aswani swaggered over, his wide hips waddling from side to side like heavy sacks on the back of a donkey. Depositing a mound of green salad on a steel platter he mopped the sweat from his brow.

‘I should charge you for holding meetings in here.’

‘What for?’ Makana asked.

‘You’re taking up valuable space,’ he called over his shoulder as he walked away.

‘The man is losing his mind,’ Sami declared.

‘You were telling me about Ragab,’ said Makana, picking at the arugula leaves still dripping beads of water.

‘Okay.’ Sami ruffled through his notes. ‘Ah, yes, here is where it gets interesting. While at university he appears to have become involved with Islamist movements. He attended a number of meetings although it never really went beyond that. He stayed away from the real radicals. Tanzim al-Jihad, and so on.’

‘The ones who assassinated Sadat in eighty-one?’

‘Exactly. Ragab’s sentiments appear to be quite mainstream. Like a lot of people he became more religious as the threat became more serious. He even joined the Muslim Brotherhood for a time and then dropped out. It wasn’t helping his career. In the 1990s, however, he was close to Imam Waheed.’

‘Sheikh Waheed?’

‘The very same,’ smiled Sami. ‘He wasn’t so high profile in those days but he was on his way up, already championing the line that those in government were as good Muslims as anyone.’

Waheed, a popular television preacher, was generally regarded as a government stooge, part of the campaign to try and outflank the Islamist radicals by painting the state as being more Islamic than anyone could wish for.

‘Are you going to tell me what this is all about?’ Sami asked, as the lamb, fresh from the grill, arrived on a metal platter. Makana explained the events of the last couple of days as they ate. Sami chuckled, ‘I’m impressed. Now you are working for the person you were investigating? Chapeau, as the French say. Isn’t there a moral clause against that?’

‘Perhaps there ought to be,’ Makana wondered aloud.

For the next few minutes the case was forgotten as they chewed through the succulent roast meat, stripping the bones with their teeth. Utensils were something of a rarity at Aswani’s place.

‘Ragab is convinced that Karima’s death was not suicide, and I tend to agree.’

‘You have anything to support that?’

‘Not really.’

‘Who would want her dead?’

‘It’s hard to say. A question mark hangs over the father, a man named Musab Khayr.’

‘So we’re talking about some kind of honour slaying?’

Makana glanced up. ‘Do you know much about that?’

‘Just what I hear. We tend to associate it with backward-thinking people who live in the sticks of Upper Egypt, but the truth is it’s much more widespread.’

‘Musab appears to be some sort of hothead. In prison he had a change of heart and turned to religion. According to Ragab he became involved with the jihadist movement.’

‘So he is known to State Security? I’ll get onto it.’ Sami licked the taste of Aswani’s special spices off his fingers – a tangy mix of cumin, chilli, fenugreek and half a dozen other things whose identity he guarded with his life.

‘When he came out he was tied to a plot to kill a government minister. Ragab argued his innocence and managed to get him out of the country. Twelve years ago he was granted political asylum in Europe, which is where he’s been ever since.’

‘And how is he meant to have done this, honour killing by remote?’

‘Maybe he got some of his old cellmates to do him a favour?’

‘It’s all possible.’ Sami leaned back in his chair and reached for a cigarette.

‘Ragab’s involvement in the whole business is a little suspect,’ said Makana. ‘He appears to have been close to the family, and to Karima.’

‘Too close?’ Sami raised his eyebrows.

‘Perhaps. The truth is, I don’t know.’

‘If Ragab was involved with the girl in some way, and Musab heard about it . . .’ Sami shrugged. ‘That could be motive enough for him to get some of his mates to burn her house down.’

The word ‘burn’ brought back a vivid memory of the tortured creature on the hospital bed.

‘Possibly, only by all accounts Musab wasn’t close to his daughter. He wasn’t even sure she was his.’

‘Don’t tell me, our helpful lawyer?’

‘Ragab denies it. He says Musab’s wife was pregnant before he went to prison.’

‘But you don’t really trust him.’

‘Not entirely.’ Makana called for tea and reached for Sami’s cigarettes that lay on the table. ‘There is another thing you could do for me. A woman named Zahra Sharif. She works for some kind of women’s group, The Association for the Protection of Egyptian Women’s Rights.’

‘You want to know about her or the organisation?’

‘Both.’

‘Is this business or personal?’

‘Does it make a difference?’

Sami grinned. ‘To me? None at all. I was just thinking it might make a difference to you.’

After lunch Makana walked back over the square and used the footbridge to cross the busy Al Azhar road to reach the imposing high walls of the Ghuriyya complex. Built as a lavish burial place for the sultan, it bore the distinctive striped layers of stone that characterised architecture under the rule of the Mamluks. The sultan had passed through here in a cloud of incense, on his way to meet his fate. Accompanied by an elaborate procession of drummers and horsemen, camels laden with gold, silken banners that fluttered in the wind and elephants which ambled along silently on padded feet, it was a lavish affair. Naturally, someone had to pay for all this entertainment. As they watched him go by, the crowds, discontent and frustrated at the levies being forced on them, would have been muttering rumours of betrayal and treachery. Their wish was granted. The sultan’s army was soundly defeated by the Ottomans in northern Syria. His body was not recovered from the battlefield and so never arrived back at this grand resting place he had so fondly built for himself. And so it stood, as empty as a promise, home for centuries to itinerant traders and wanderers of every kind.

This time Makana threw his net wider, moving through the side streets around the burnt-out shell of the shop. It was a sad sight. The windows of the room upstairs were narrow slits ringed with soot that resembled eyes painted with kohl.

‘Who knows what they were up to, but no one deserves to die like that.’

An old woman with gnarled feet clutching a bunch of turnips paused in front of him and spoke without lifting her head. He watched her shuffle away. A man from another stall offered him a handful of pistachios. ‘There were rumours that the woman had the
’ain
.’ The evil eye. ‘People gave her a wide berth, especially men. You never know what a witch like that can do to a man.’ His eyes skittered away, never meeting Makana’s gaze as he swept at the flies with a sheet of cardboard. In a hot little crease of an alleyway a small man was frying kidneys over a gas flame. ‘They worked hard,’ he said. Beads of sweat fell from his brow into the pan where they hissed against the hot metal. ‘They ran a clean shop, mother and daughter. There wasn’t a word you could say against them. But people like to talk, especially when they think others are doing better than them.’

The sun beat down through gaps in the roofing. It burned the back of Makana’s neck. As he turned his head he caught a glimpse of two men flitting through the bands of shadow and light further down the market. Was it his imagination, or were they following him?

‘Her husband lived abroad. She was well rid of him. He was a real piece of work. Trouble followed him like a rabid dog.’ A man with hennaed whiskers and a grey eye that wandered of its own accord.

‘You knew him?’ Makana asked, intrigued.

‘Musab, oh yes. When they first arrived here, before they had the shop.’

‘Why did they come here?’

‘They said they had family here. I never saw anyone. Personally, I think it wasn’t so much why they came here as what they were running away from. Like I said, trouble stuck to him like shit.’

‘They never talked about that?’