The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (13 page)

CHAPTER 18

6th July

The crime perimeter was secure, no press were present
and a junior detective was out on the sidewalk, trying to determine the perpetrator’s entry and exit routes. So far without success. Lady Jalila had gone and Felix was busy trying to persuade Raf to do the same.

Below them, guarding the bottom of the
qaa
steps was a tall young man with the flawless skin of a Nubian and the upset eyes of a recruit not yet grown used to death. The young uniformed officer had given a length of tape to Hani, who was twisting it endlessly so that sunlight caught a holostrip of lettering which read
EIPD—do not cross.
And as she flipped the tape back and forwards, making it sparkle in the hot sun, the child looked almost happy.

Felix shrugged. Kids weren’t his area and the idea wouldn’t have occurred to him. True enough, he had a daughter in Santa Fe. Only Trudi lived with her girlfriend, three tabby cats and a gun under her pillow; and the last time he’d seen his kid she’d probably been younger than the one sitting by the fountain playing with the tape.

These days his daughter had cropped hair, a razor-wire tattoo that wound up her arm from elbow to shoulder and nipples pierced with silver spikes, one tiny spike going across and the other down… He knew about those because her last but one Christmas card had a picture of her and Barbara on the front, taken at a Gay Pride barbecue in San Francisco. They were stripped to the waist and holding bottles of Bud. Only the bottles were closer to their button-flied groins than they were to their mouths and Barbara had pierced nipples too, linked together by a chain.

Trudi looked hot and tired, so he’d written back saying he hoped she was taking vitamins and that if she had to go out like that in public he hoped she was wearing lots of sun cream. That earned him a postcard of a tram. Only three scrawled lines on the back but one of them was her new e-address. They wrote to each other now, not often but a couple of brief paragraphs once every few months. And she sent him more photographs of herself, fully clothed this time, with one of the cats sitting on her lap.

There’d been a time of no photographs at all, when Trudi was in her early teens and her mother was going through a religious phase, if that was what you could call moving state and announcing to her new neighbours that no, she wasn’t divorced, her husband was dead. It had taken the ghost cancelling her alimony for five months to start the pictures flowing again. Before they did, he got a stiff letter from her attorney to which he’d had his own reply in Arabic. The photographs had restarted pretty soon after that.

“It would be best…”

“No,” said Raf. Not waiting for Felix to finish the sentence. There were a number of reasons why he didn’t want to leave the crime scene and go back to his office, only one of which he could tell Felix.

“I can’t just leave Hani.”

That, at least, was true. Without Lady Nafisa the girl was a scrawny nothing. She wasn’t pretty, she was way too young to be married off and, anyway, the kid was without a dowry. She had to be: Islamic law said girls couldn’t inherit in their own right. So unless Lady Nafisa had left everything to a favourite charity someone other then Hani was going to inherit and the chances were it was him. And that wasn’t what Raf wanted either.

A murder, money, the recent appearance of an unknown heir. Arrange into a winning combination…

Before the murder,
RenSchmiss
was just one middle-aged woman’s obsession. Now it would be debated in drawing rooms and cafés across North Africa.

If the fat man wanted to keep talking about
Thiergarten
killers, that was fine with Raf but he knew what conclusion most people would draw from the evidence. And that was before he factored the press into account. The press were there to service the newsfeeds, which meant pictures, syndicated to local feeds all round the world, including Seattle.

Raf sighed.

The beard, hair and any thought of polarized contacts would have to go and the shades make a long-term reappearance. It was just a pity he didn’t have time for a completely new face to go with his new name and nationality.

“I’ll stay…” He held up one hand, stopping Felix in his tracks. “Lady Nafisa was my aunt…” He was about to say something crass, like
duty demands it,
when the fat man’s mobile started beeping.

It kept beeping while Felix searched his trouser pockets and finally tracked the watch down to his jacket, which was upstairs in the
qaa,
slung over a silver chair.

“What?” Felix demanded. He made no attempt to keep the irritation out of his voice.

The Minister was on the other end again. Raf knew that from the way the Chief of Detectives suddenly straightened up, pausing mid-stride. One hand came up to smooth his hair, thick fingers once again slicking sweat across his scalp.

“Yes, sir. I’m glad your wife got home safely. I sent one of my best men with her…” If the Minister noticed the criticism implicit in the fat man’s words it didn’t stop his list of questions.

“Exactly when did it happen?”
Ripping aside the tape that closed off the study door, Felix walked over to the dead woman’s desk and half closed her paper, making sure the sticky pages didn’t actually touch. It was the midday edition. “So far all I can say is that it happened after twelve noon,” said Felix. “Yes,” he said, “I
can
state that categorically.” Felix listened to the next request and instinctively shook his head, sending sweat trickling down the bridge of his nose.

“No, Your Excellency. I don’t think we should turn the site investigation over to Madame Mila.”

“Yes, I know the General is…”

“No, I’m not…”

“If I can just…”

“Yes, he’s still here…”

It was a one-way conversation after that, Felix’s protests fading into silence, broken only towards the end when he nodded abruptly.

“Whatever you want, sir…” Felix tapped a button to end the call, scowled balefully at his watch and stabbed a switch that put it back on standby.

“You should have got out when you had the chance,” he told Raf. “The Minister wants you as my official witness.”

“Which means what?” Raf asked, pushing back his own hair. The wind that seeped in through the smashed mashrabiya was hot and sticky, and Nafisa’s precious air-conditioning unit would probably have been reaching meltdown, if someone hadn’t already ripped its thermostat from the wall, leaving wires trailing.

It might have been Raf’s imagination but he was sure her body had already begun to smell.

“What does it mean? It means you stand in that doorway and watch me commit professional suicide. You don’t come in the room, you don’t interfere and you definitely don’t talk while I’m working. Understand?”

No, he didn’t. “What am I witnessing?” Raf demanded.

“Me. While I do this.”

On the marble table where Lady Nafisa had given her lunch for the parents of Zara bint-Hamzah, Felix dumped a battered leather case with reinforced corners and a webbing strap to hold the top tight shut. The words on the strap read
Property of the LAPD—do not remove without authorization.
Yanking off the strap, Felix waved his hand in front of something that might have been a human head, had it not been made of clear perspex and filled with jumbled electronics. Chunks of crystal memory had been crudely glued to the back.

Its eyes briefly lit red.

“Meet Dr Dee,” said Felix. From the other side of the case Felix pulled a battered camera, a Speed Graphic digiLux so old it had a separate flash unit and came minus a removable memory dump, which was where Dr Dee came in…

“First off, I’m going to sweep the scene, do crime-scene shots, then body shots. And finally I’m going to examine the body… Your job is to see I don’t plant or remove evidence and that I don’t molest or defile the woman’s corpse. You got any problems with that?”

Silence.

“Good, then let’s get started…” Felix slid out his hip flask, flipped its lid and downed the flask in one. “Beats holding your nose or saying prayers every time,” he added sourly, noting Raf’s undisguised shock.

Only when Felix was certain that the tiles directly in front of him were clear of clues did he lie flat and sweep the floor with the beam of a tiny maglite. Two blouse buttons showed up immediately, both near the wall. Other than that, there was only debris from the mashrabiya. Lady Nafisa had been as fanatical about outer cleanliness as she had been about the inner kind.

“Why aren’t I surprised?” Felix asked, but he was talking to himself. Lifting both buttons using tweezers, he dropped them straight into separate evidence bags, carefully dating and labelling each bag.

It took him no more than fifteen minutes to take positioning shots, with another ten for body shots and five for close-ups of the wound itself. In that time he stopped twice to drink from a second flask and when that ran out he calmly switched to a third and used that instead.

Perspiration rolled from the fat man’s face as he worked, and the air around him stank of whisky and sour sweat. But never once did he stumble or even look drunk. He just snapped off each shot, checked the quality on the little screen at the back of the Speed Graphic and moved on, looking for the next angle, his next shot. He had a professional’s tolerance for the drug of his choice. Raf had seen it before, up close and way too personal, every single day of the year he had spent in New York with his mother.

CHAPTER 19

Seattle

Hitting America aged fifteen was different. So different
as to be unforgettable in a life where everything was unforgettable. No flight attendant held his hand on the trip out and he travelled regular, legs cramped into a tiny gap between the edge of his seat and the sloped chair-back of the passenger in front.

Next to him sat a black-eyed girl wired into a Sony Dance-Master, the thud of
Hold Me Down
hissing from earbeads as her long fingers danced over the touchpad of a Nintendo to an entirely different beat. She smelled of toothpaste and a cheap powdery scent. Beyond her was a window seat, empty except for a Tibetan bag with an untouched magazine poking out of the top.

ZeeZee desperately wanted to ask if she’d mind if he took the window seat but didn’t know the words… It wasn’t that she didn’t speak English. She did. Confidence was his problem. His school outside Edinburgh was strictly single-sex. Which meant tarting the smaller boys was a regular pastime for most of his year: talking to girls wasn’t.

PanAmerican called the seats regular but most of the regular passengers were further forward, drinking free vodka shots and eating complimentary cashews while watching Hollywood’s finest on the screen in the wall of their bunks.

The seats at the rear of the Boeing were for students, casual workers, girls hoping to find work as nannies: the kind of people who didn’t travel often, bought their own tickets and couldn’t believe just how few US dollars they got in exchange at the bureau de change. Not that ZeeZee had forked out for his own seat.

Providence had paid for it.

Providence in the form of a man in the Lyons Coffee Lounge at Heathrow who walked away from his table and forgot a leather pouch he’d put on the chair beside him. Until then ZeeZee had been running away to Paris to find bar work. By the time the man hurried back to where he’d been sitting. ZeeZee’s plans had changed and Seattle was on the cards, almost literally.

While the man filled out a form to reclaim his pouch from Lost Property, where ZeeZee had left it, ZeeZee was off buying dollars from a FirstVirtual auto-teller in Arrivals, using a deposit card he’d extracted. Selling half those dollars back to a different machine in Departures took him a minute and gave ZeeZee enough paper money to buy a cheap, one-way ticket to Seattle-Tacoma. He had to show the girl at PanAmerican his permanent US visa. But once she’d swiped his passport through a reader and the visa came up valid she was all smiles, even when he bought the cheapest stand-by she had.

The deposit card he flushed away in a men’s room on the way to his gate. Some kind of warped morality made him buy a cut-price ticket. And it was only after take off that he realized the owner would just claim a full card against insurance and ZeeZee could have travelled first if he wanted.

“You wanna borrow this?” The girl was holding out her magazine, one hissing earbead carefully cupped in her hand where she’d half unplugged herself from the music. He didn’t recognize the accent.

“Hold Me Down,”
ZeeZee said, nodding at the bead, “the ice-hot FP remix…”

She looked at him then. Glanced, without realizing it, at his white shirt and grey trousers. He’d ditched the jacket and striped tie but nothing could make what he was wearing anything other than what it was, half a school uniform.

He didn’t mention that he only recognized the mix because some jerk in his common room had downloaded the
Belize Sleez
compilation and had played it to death.

“End of term?” she asked.

ZeeZee shook his head. “Just had enough.” He took the offered magazine and was surprised she didn’t immediately pull away when his fingers accidentally brushed her hand.

“What about you?” ZeeZee tried to make it sound like he always talked to strange girls on planes.

She smiled and named some city he didn’t recognize, except to realize it was probably in the neutrality corridor between the Soviets and the Berlin alliance. “I’ve got a student visa,” she added, “but I intend to find work in Seattle. You don’t know anywhere?”

He didn’t, but she still told him her name and lent him a spare set of earbeads, toggling the DanceMaster onto split so they both got the full mix. Twenty minutes later, when the lights dimmed and an attendant came round with covers and all the couchettes tipped back, ZeeZee and Katia ended up under the same blanket.