The Labyrinth of Osiris (14 page)

One such graffito was right there beside his head: a trio of cartouches – Horemheb, Ramesses I, Seti I – scored into the yellow limestone by someone styling himself ‘The scribe of Amun, Pay, son of Ipu’. A circled number accompanied them – 817a – left by Czech Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý, who had recorded the inscriptions back in the 1950s.

Khalifa had often wondered about this son of Ipu. Who was he? What sort of person? Had he had brothers and sisters? A wife and children? Grandchildren? Had he been happy or sad? Strong or weak? Healthy or sick? Lived long or died young? So many questions. So much lost. An entire life reduced to nothing more than a few scratch marks on a limestone rock face.

It was something that had struck him more and more of late – the transience of things. The meaninglessness. Once Pay had been a living, breathing human being, just like him. His life had been a story, full of drama and emotion and relationships and change. He had been a baby, and then a boy, and then a man, and then, maybe, a husband and father. He had been so much. His story had been so rich. And then, suddenly, the story was over, and all that was left was this tiny fragment scored into the rock. Fragments, that’s all that was ever left. And however many fragments you gathered, however many words and sentences and paragraphs, you could never know the whole story. Never fully know that person. Certainly never bring them back. They were gone and that was it.

Taking a drag on his cigarette, he pulled out his wallet. There was a plastic pocket inside, and inside the pocket a photo: Khalifa, his wife Zenab, and their three children: Batah, Ali, little Yusuf – Team Khalifa as they jokingly called themselves. It had been taken at this very spot a couple of years back – they had all bundled together and Khalifa had held the camera out in front of them, which explained why the angle was slightly askew. They were all laughing, particularly Khalifa, who had Ali on his lap and was only just managing to keep his balance. A second after the shutter clicked he had slipped, and he and Ali had gone sliding down the scree slope beneath the seat, which had made them laugh even more.

There’d been so much laughter.

He gazed at the picture. Then, touching it to his lips, he put it away, sat back and stared out at the barren vistas all around.

J
ERUSALEM

When Ben-Roi got back to Kishle, Dov Zisky was sitting in the office bent over a desk like some sort of
Talmid hakham
. Yoni Zelba and Shimon Lutzisch had both gone out so it was just the two of them.

‘Any progress?’ he asked, throwing off his jacket and sitting down at his own desk.

‘Not really,’ replied Zisky. ‘Six across is a bugger.’

Ben-Roi opened his mouth, about to ask why the fuck the boy was doing crosswords when they had a murder to solve. Then, realizing it was a joke, he gave an amused grunt. The kid might sound like Dana International, but fair play to him, at least he had a sense of humour. You needed that in the Israel Police Force. Without a sense of humour you ended up a grumbling, embittered bore like Amos Namir. And that wasn’t a good place to be.

‘So where are we at?’

Zisky swung round in his chair and opened his moleskin notebook.

‘I’ve tracked down the victim’s mobile account. She’s with Pelephone. They’re doing a breakdown of all her calls over the last six months. Same with her Bezeq landline and Gmail account. Everyone’s shutting down for
Shabbat
so it’s not going to be till Sunday at the earliest.’

Ben-Roi grumbled, but didn’t push the matter. It was how things worked in this part of the world – even murder investigations took a day of rest.

‘What about the compound?’ he asked, eyes running over the headlines of the
Yedioth Ahronoth
he’d bought on the way back from Kleinberg’s flat: government corruption scandal, peace talks deadlock, Hapo-el Tel-Aviv hammered in the Champions League. Same old, same old. ‘Anything useful from there?’

‘Not much,’ said Zisky. ‘The duty concierge from last night couldn’t really add anything to the statement he’s already given. The victim came through the gate about seven p.m. He thinks someone may have come in behind her, but he was on the phone to his wife so he wasn’t really paying attention. He certainly can’t give any sort of description. Hopefully we’ll get something more detailed from the compound cameras.’

‘Hopefully,’ said Ben-Roi.

‘He did mention he’d seen her before.’

Ben-Roi looked up.

‘So did several other people. Seems she’s been visiting the compound quite a lot over the last two or three weeks.’

Ben-Roi folded the paper and sat back, interested. ‘Tell me more.’

‘Well, the guy from last night reckoned she’d been in at least twice before. And there’s another concierge who says he’s clocked her four or five times. There’s also a priest, name of . . .’

He consulted his notebook, trying to find the name. Ben-Roi waved a hand to indicate it didn’t matter.

‘Anyway, he said she’d sat in on a few services, morning and afternoon. He thought she might have been waiting for someone, but none of the people I spoke to could remember seeing her with anyone. The uniforms are still doing door to door – they might come up with something.’

Ben-Roi nodded, drumming his fingers on the desk.

‘I also spoke to Archbishop Petrossian,’ said Zisky.

‘And?’

‘He only gave me fifteen minutes so it wasn’t exactly an in-depth interview. Said he couldn’t believe anyone from his own community would do something like that, but otherwise there wasn’t anything he could tell me.’

‘Did you believe him?’

Zisky shrugged. ‘He was definitely upset by the whole thing. You could see it in his eyes. I got the feeling . . .’

‘He was lying?’

‘More that . . . there was something else going on with him. Something he wasn’t saying. It was nothing definite. Just an intuition.’

A lady’s intuition
, thought Ben-Roi. He kept it to himself.

‘Does he have an alibi?’

‘Said he was in his private apartments all evening. We haven’t found anyone to corroborate that yet.’ He reached up and fiddled with one of the clips keeping his
yarmulke
in place. ‘I could do a bit of digging, if you want. Pull out a bit of background.’

‘Do that. And while you’re at it, see what you can find out about this.’

Ben-Roi fumbled in his pocket and threw the Egged bus ticket he had found in Kleinberg’s flat on to the desk. Zisky came over and picked it up, bringing a vague smell of aftershave with him.

‘Kleinberg used it five days ago,’ said Ben-Roi. ‘To Mitzpe Ramon. I’d be interested to know what our victim was doing out in the middle of the Negev.’

Zisky examined the ticket.

‘Also,’ said Ben-Roi, rather enjoying having someone to dump stuff on, ‘can you find out what this word means?’

He opened his notebook, turned it and, sitting forward, flattened it on the desk, pointing at the word they’d found indented on Kleinberg’s blotter:
Vosgi
. Zisky leant over to look, his cheek almost touching Ben-Roi’s. The smell of aftershave suddenly grew stronger.

‘Sorry, boys, not interrupting anything, am I?’

Uri Pincas had appeared in the doorway. Ben-Roi sat back sharply.

‘Don’t you ever fucking knock, Pincas?’

His colleague smirked and puckered his lips, making the shape of a kiss. Ben-Roi scowled.

‘What do you want?’

‘Just come over to let you know the camera material’s ready. We’re viewing in five minutes. Hopefully that’ll give you both time to . . . you know, freshen up.’

‘
Shak li b’tahat
, Pincas!’ Kiss my arse.

‘I’ll join the queue. See you over in the annexe.’

He winked, puckered another kiss and disappeared into the corridor.

‘And if you’ve finished with my Yahonathan Gatro CD, I’d like it back,’ he called.

‘Prick!’ Ben-Roi bellowed.

If Zisky had picked up on any of this – and it would have been hard not to – he showed no sign of it. He just scribbled
Vosgi
in his notebook and went quietly back to his desk. Ben-Roi wondered if he should say something, but Zisky was already lifting his phone and dialling. Instead he went out and used the toilet, then poured himself a cup of water from the cooler in the corridor. He filled another cup for Zisky and went back into the room.

‘Gold.’

‘Sorry?’

‘
Vosgi
. It means gold. In Armenian. Gold, golden.’

Bloody hell, the kid moved fast. He’d only been out of the room a couple of minutes.

‘Right,’ said Ben-Roi. ‘Thanks.’

Zisky nodded and took the cup of water. ‘Would you mind if I left a bit early?’ he asked. ‘I need to pick up some things for
Shabbat
.’

‘Sure,’ said Ben-Roi. ‘No problem.’

He hovered a moment, then, with a repeated ‘Right’, made for the door.

‘Oh, and sir?’

Ben-Roi swung round.

‘If you’re into Yahonathan Gatro I’ve got all his albums – I’ll happily burn you some copies. I’ve got plenty of Ivri Leder and Judy Garland as well.’

Zisky flashed a smile and turned back to his desk. Despite himself, Ben-Roi smiled too. He was starting to warm to the kid.

*

Pincas and Nava Schwartz had put together a 17-minute DVD featuring all the relevant footage they could come up with from the night of Kleinberg’s murder, both from police cameras and those in the Armenian compound.

They viewed it in a glass-walled side-room off the station’s main camera control centre. Everyone from the morning’s case briefing was there bar Zisky, whose place was taken by Chief Superintendent Yitzhak Baum. Baum always sat in on the camera viewings. More often than not they threw up the clue that helped crack the investigation, and he liked to be in on the glory.

Today he was disappointed. They all were.

Police cameras were able to track Kleinberg from the moment she alighted from a bus just outside the Jaffa Gate through to the tunnel in the middle of Armenian Orthodox Patriarchate Road. The CCTV in the Armenian compound then picked her up as she came through the compound’s front gate and followed her through to the cathedral entrance.

All the way, the same figure was walking about 30 metres behind her. He entered the cathedral just after her, and emerged thirty-six minutes later. He then retraced his steps through the Old City and disappeared along the Jaffa Road.

That it was the killer no one was in any doubt. Unfortunately he was swathed in a hooded coat against the rain, and even with enhancement and close-ups, his face remained resolutely hidden. He had been on the bus with Kleinberg, was of medium build and had deliberately followed her through the Old City into the cathedral – that was about as much as they got. They couldn’t even be certain if it was a he.

They watched the footage through three times, the mood in the room increasingly deflated, and were just starting on a fourth viewing when Ben-Roi’s mobile went off.

El-Al. They’d gone through their records and found a match.

On the night of her death, Rivka Kleinberg had been booked on the 11 p.m. flight to Alexandria in Egypt.

B
UCKINGHAMSHIRE
, E
NGLAND

‘Personally I’d go for a five.’

Sir Charles Montgomery smiled. A sly, patronizing smile – not quite wide enough to appear rude, but more than sufficient to show that not only did he disagree, but that he was right to disagree. He took a nip from his hip flask and slid a Callaway Graphite 6 Iron from his golfing bag.

‘It can be so difficult to judge accurately,’ he said, his tone indicating that he thought quite the opposite. ‘You never really know till you’ve made the shot.’

He took a couple of practice swings, eyeing the green 140 yards away, the smoothness of his action belying his sixty-eight years. Then, planting his white-and-tan Footjoy Classics a metre apart, he let fly, shielding his eyes as he tracked the ball’s trajectory. It seemed to hang in the air for an age before eventually it descended and plopped on to the incline at the rear of the green. It sat a moment, then, slowly, rolled back towards the flag, stopping about two metres away. Montgomery gave a satisfied nod and slid the iron back into its slot, acknowledging the ‘bravos’ of his fellow players.

‘Breeze must have given it an extra push,’ he said with glaringly false modesty.

He was having a good round. An excellent round. Just as he was having a good retirement. An excellent retirement.

A couple of years back, what with all the unpleasantness on the subcontinent, things hadn’t been looking quite so rosy. Corroded blanketing valve, faulty monitoring system, hydrogen sulphide cloud, thousands of blistered wog-wallahs. For a while it had looked like it was going to cause as much of a stink as Bhopal and the Trafigura thing, which wouldn’t have been at all good for the company. Or for him personally, given that it had been his decision as CEO to delay installing the up-to-date safety systems that had long been standard in their plants in Europe and the US.

No, it hadn’t looked good at all. For a few months he’d really sweated, especially when reports started coming through of miscarriages and birth defects, babies born blind and malformed and retarded. Blind, retarded babies, especially Third World ones, never played well in the press.

Fortunately, the situation had resolved itself to everyone’s satisfaction. Sizeable payments to various government bigwigs had smoothed things at the Indian end, while a truly wonderful firm of City lawyers had employed all manner of clever legal ruses to keep the thing out of the British papers. They hadn’t even had to compensate the victims, although for appearance’s sake they’d made modest donations to some local charities. Very modest donations.

When he’d retired last year Charles Montgomery had done so with a generous pension package and a Knighthood of the Realm for services to industry. After cashing in his share options, he’d even made it on to the
Sunday Times
Rich List, albeit towards the lower end of richness. Life was good. And when life was good, so was his game. His handicap had improved no end these last few months. Which was rather more than could be said for those Indian babies.