The Labyrinth of Osiris (13 page)

‘
Zayn
,’ he repeated.

He spent thirty minutes sniffing around the rest of the room with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and filing cabinets crammed to over-flowing with more papers and cuttings. Then, having barely scratched the surface, he moved into the bedroom. Unmade bed, clothes all over the floor, half a dozen pill bottles on the chest of drawers, a childlike painting of a woman with long blonde hair sellotaped to the wall, watercolour, on pale blue paper.

On the bedside table there were three photographs, all in Perspex holders, the only photos he’d yet seen in the flat. He bent down for a closer look.

One was a group shot of some twenty young women, all smiling broadly at the camera, all dressed in military fatigues and bush hats – presumably doing their national service. Rivka Kleinberg was standing at the left of the group, arm thrown around the shoulder of an attractive woman in sunglasses – a much younger version of Kleinberg, although still recognizable from her heavy-boned frame and curly hair. On the back was a dedication: ‘To darling Rivka – Happy Days!’

Next along was a black-and-white shot of a young man and woman, standing hand in hand with their backs to the sea. There was something dead-eyed about them, haunted – a look he’d seen in many Holocaust survivors. Kleinberg’s parents, he assumed.

The third picture was of a young girl. Only about eight or nine, she was smiling broadly, her auburn hair done up in pigtails, her pale face dotted with freckles. On the back, in neat child’s writing, English rather than Hebrew, was some sort of nonsense rhyme or doggerel:

Sally, Carrie, Mary-Jane,

Lizzy, Anna, what’s in a name?

Hannah, Amber, Stella, Lee,

Keep me hid, let no one see,

Jenny, Penny, Alice, Sue,

But only Rachel’s really true.

Ben-Roi glanced up at the painting on the wall, then back down at the photo. Something about the two images felt distinctly out of place in the flat, not things that fitted with the Rivka Kleinberg he’d been hearing about. Maybe it would be worth looking into them at some point, trying to find out who the girl was. They didn’t seem to have any immediate relevance to the investigation, however, and after gazing at the photo for a while, he resumed his trawl of the apartment.

He got his first break in the kitchen. In the bin. It was a pedal model and, more for the hell of it than because he expected to find anything useful, he dabbed it open with the toe of his trainer. It was three-quarters full of rubbish: Coke cans, an Elite coffee jar, a crumpled Mr Zol carrier bag, empty cat-food tins. And, also, a used Egged bus ticket. So far he’d been careful not to actually touch anything, not wanting to leave prints or physical traces before the forensics guys got here. Curiosity now got the better of him. Pulling the ticket out, he unfolded it. It was dated five days ago, four before Kleinberg’s murder – a return to Mitzpe Ramon, a dead-end town down in the middle of the Negev. Significant? He had no idea, although something told him it was. He stared at the ticket, then folded it and slipped it into his pocket.

He took the spare room last. It gave him the answer to something that had been nagging him since he’d looked round the living room – the absence of notebooks.

Every journalist he’d ever met had notebooks. Not just for immediate use, but old notebooks as well – like detectives, there was always a need to back-check or cross-reference information that had been gathered at an earlier date. Natan Tirat had an apartment full of the things – Ben-Roi remembered him almost breaking up with his wife after she threw a load out during her spring cleaning.

He hadn’t seen a single one in Kleinberg’s work area. Turned out it was because they were all filed in the spare room’s cardboard boxes. Neatly filed, in marked contrast to the chaos that reigned throughout the rest of the flat. Three decades-worth. Her entire career, by the look of it. Hundreds of them, all labelled with the dates of the period covered by the notes inside – in both Hebrew and English, for some reason – all sorted chronologically and boxed up by year so that if you wanted to find, say, the research notes for an article written in April 1999, you would know immediately where to go. Early on she had used all manner of different types of pad – A4, A5, lined, unlined, spiral-bound, stitched. For the last two decades she had favoured the same black A4 book, hard-covered and wide-lined.

There was potentially useful information here, no question, but it was going to take a lot of work to prise it out. Not just because there were so many of the things, but because all the writing in them was in shorthand. It would have to be done, but for the moment what was troubling Ben-Roi was not so much what was here as what wasn’t. Search as he did, he couldn’t find any notepads or books covering the last three months. He flicked through every box, and re-examined the living room and bedroom, but there was nothing. It was as if her journalistic life had come to an abrupt halt twelve weeks ago.

His mentor, old Commander Levi, the one who had come up with the chain analogy to describe the building of an investigation, had bequeathed another gem of policing wisdom to Ben-Roi: the ‘bellyaches’. The bellyaches were the feeling you got when something wasn’t quite right about a case, didn’t fit with the overall narrative of the crime. A garrotted corpse in the middle of cathedral wasn’t right, of course, but the bellyaches weren’t about crimes per se. They were about anomalies within crimes. And the absence of notebooks was an anomaly.

As with the missing laptop, there were possible explanations. His gut instinct, though, was that the notebooks had been taken by Kleinberg’s killer. And that was a bellyache, a serious bellyache, because a killer who stole shorthand notebooks fitted a wholly different pattern to one who garrotted a woman and stole her wallet, keys, mobile and laptop. It was a disconnect. It just didn’t mesh. He leant against the window frame and stared out over the rooftops, thinking. He was still there fifteen minutes later when the forensics team pitched up.

He hung around for another half hour, wandering through the flat while the CITs got down to business in the living room. He didn’t find anything obviously useful and eventually he left them to it and headed for the front door. He was already out on the landing when one of the forensics – a girl – called after him:

‘I don’t know if this is anything.’

He backtracked. She was standing in front of Kleinberg’s desk, pointing down at the leather-backed blotter. When Ben-Roi had gone over the desk before, the blotter had been all but buried in papers, but these had now been cleared aside.

At first he couldn’t see what she was pointing at – apart from a couple of biro marks and a smudge of black ink, the blotter was blank. Only when he bent down and examined it more closely did he see faint traces of lettering indented into the soft white paper, echoes of things Kleinberg must have been writing on a separate sheet. Most of the words were too faint and overwritten to make out clearly. One, however, was more deeply indented than the others, rendering it easier to decipher. Repeated over and over again, it appeared in at least eight different places across the blotter:
Vosgi
.

‘It’s like she was really pressing the pen down,’ said the girl. ‘You know, like when you’ve got something on your mind, when it’s really bugging you.’

Vosgi
.

‘Mean anything to you?’ asked Ben-Roi.

She shook her head. ‘You?’

Ben-Roi shook his. It certainly wasn’t Hebrew. Pulling out his notebook, he wrote the word down. He stared at it a moment. Then, with a shrug, pocketed the book and made for the front door.

‘And see if you can find a home for the cat,’ he called over his shoulder.

L
UXOR

Khalifa only knew three rich people.

One was a childhood friend who had made good in the dotcom industry; one a millionaire American novelist with whom he had struck up a loose friendship after she had visited Luxor to research a detective series based on the Luxor Police (ludicrous idea). The third was his brother-in-law Hosni.

Walking back through the centre of town after his meeting with Demiana Barakat, he stepped into an internet café and composed e-mails to the first two, explaining his friend’s funding problems and asking if there was any way they could help. He didn’t feel comfortable doing it – he was a proud man and it wasn’t in his nature to ask for assistance, especially financial assistance. He couldn’t get the image of the hunchbacked boy out of his head, however, and felt he had to do something.

Hosni he didn’t bother with. Vice-President of the largest edible oils company in Egypt, his brother-in-law was widely known to be tighter than the masonry joins of the Great Pyramid.

He sent the mails, left the café and wandered down on to the Corniche el-Nil, trying to decide if he should head over to the new police station in El-Awamaia – a swish new building to which they’d all relocated after the old station had been demolished – or simply go home.

In the end he did neither. His boss, Chief Inspector Abdul ibn-Hassani, was scheduled to give one of his interminable ‘modernizing’ lectures that afternoon – ‘New Egypt, new Luxor, new station, new force!’ as he was wont to put it – which frankly Khalifa could do without. Back home, Zenab’s sister Sama – Hosni’s wife – had flown in from Cairo for the day, and the prospect of listening to her nattering about make-up and shopping and the latest high-society gossip was even less inviting than one of the chief’s homilies.

Instead he hopped on a motorboat over the Nile, took a service taxi up to Deir el-Medina and climbed to his ‘thinking seat’ in the cliffs around the midriff of the Qurn.

It was where he always came when he wanted to be on his own, completely on his own, just him and his thoughts, away from everyone and everything. A rock ledge at the base of a shallow cleft, about halfway up the mountain, it afforded spectacular views out across the Valley of the Kings and away northwards into the distance where Nile, farmland and desert gradually merged into a dull featureless haze. He’d discovered it years ago, when he’d first arrived in Luxor, and had been coming up here on and off ever since, especially these last months, when he had felt in particular need of the calm and solitude it provided.

It was a strenuous climb, doubly so in the afternoon heat, and he was breathing heavily by the time he eventually reached the seat. Scrambling up the dusty scree slope at its foot, he swung himself on to the ledge and settled back into the shade of the cleft, folding his arms and gazing out, heart thudding.

Things were changing on this side of the Nile too, just as they were back in Luxor town. Not as fast, perhaps, or as dramatically, but changing nonetheless. The ramshackle mud-brick dwellings of Old Qurna, which used to cluster like a fungus around the foothills of the Theban massif, had all been bulldozed, their inhabitants moved out to a characterless housing estate up north at El-Tarif (he could just make it out in the distance – tightly regimented rows of apartment blocks, more like military barracks than homes). The massif itself, which not so very long ago had looked pretty much exactly as it must have done in pharaonic times, was now dotted with a collection of ugly concrete guard posts, complete with generators and radio masts and floodlights. Down below, bang in the middle of the Valley of the Kings, the finishing touches were being put to a huge new museum and visitor centre. Funded by some American multinational and two years in the building, it was due to open in a couple of weeks, which had got Chief Hassani into a right flap – apparently half the government were coming down for the inauguration ceremony.

Everything Khalifa knew, all the familiar places and views and points of reference, were morphing into something different. And he was morphing with them. Could feel it. The Yusuf Khalifa who sixteen years ago had laughed with carefree delight when he first discovered the seat, was not the Yusuf Khalifa who was sitting up here now.

Everyone changes with time, of course, but there is an essence that remains the same. A bedrock. Khalifa felt as if his bedrock had shifted and cracked. There were moments these days when he barely recognized himself. The dark moods, the sudden, in explicable flares of anger, the corroding sense of powerlessness and frustration and guilt.

He never used to be like this. In the past, whatever hardships life had thrown his way – and there had been plenty of them – he had always got on with things, refused to allow the unfairness of the world to unbalance him. But these days . . . Their demolished home, the Attias’ poisoned well, Demiana’s funding, the little boy on the motorbike: things he would once have coped with emotionally, life’s everyday cruelties, now seemed to drive ever deeper splits into his already broken foundations. Everything was falling apart. More than once he’d wondered if it was why he’d started coming up here so frequently. Not for the peace and the silence and the head space, but for the simple relief of feeling something solid around him.

He unscrewed the top of the Baraka water bottle he’d bought on the way over and took a swig, then lit a cigarette and nestled himself back even further into the shade of the cleft. In front of him and slightly to the left he could just make out the mud-brick remains on top of the Hill of Thoth; to his right lay the tumbled ruins of the ‘way station’, where the ancient tomb-workers had stopped off on their daily walk to and from the Valley of the Kings. A sort of ancient clocking-in post. The rock faces around here were covered with the workers’ graffiti, dozens upon dozens of inscriptions marking a brief, fleeting moment in lives that had been every bit as real as his own and were now completely lost to history.