The Labyrinth of Osiris (35 page)

‘Pinsker’s fall wasn’t an accident.’

Sadeq gave another slow handclap. Ben-Roi’s query, it seemed, was turning out to be rather less routine than either of them had expected.

‘There was nothing about this in your report,’ said Khalifa.

‘In the circumstances I thought it better to keep the narrative simple.’

‘But a man had been murdered.’

‘That’s one way of looking at it.’

‘There’s another way?’

‘There’s always another way of looking at things, Inspector. If there’s one lesson I learnt in forty years on the force, it’s that nothing is ever clear-cut.’

He took another sip of his tea, eyes locked on Khalifa as if daring him to pursue the point. Khalifa had dealt with people like Sadeq before – had been dealing with them his whole career – and knew there were times to push, times to keep quiet. This was a time to keep quiet. For a moment they sat in silence, Khalifa shuffling his feet, Sadeq sipping his tea. Then, with a nod, the former chief drained his glass and put it down.

‘Personal interest, you say?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Sure?’ He fixed Khalifa with a hard stare.

‘Sure.’

‘In that case I see no reason to keep you in the dark. It was a long time ago, after all. And in its own way justice
was
served.’

He indicated the plastic bag at Khalifa’s feet.

‘I’m assuming that’s the file on Pinsker’s disappearance?’

Khalifa acknowledged that it was. Sadeq motioned for him to pass it across.

‘We ID’d Pinsker’s body pretty quickly,’ he said, sliding his spectacles back on and leafing through the folder’s contents. ‘He wasn’t carrying any personal documents, but people don’t easily forget a face like that. There were a good few
Qurnawis
who still remembered him, even after forty years. Once we had a name, it was a simple matter to dig out the case notes relating to his disappearance. And once we’d dug out the case notes, it didn’t take long to get to the bottom of things.’

He removed a sheet from the file, held it out. It was the statement from the man who claimed to have seen a drunken Pinsker walking up into the Theban hills. Mohammed el-Badri of Shaykh Abd al-Qurna.

‘I knew the el-Badris,’ said Sadeq. ‘Bad lot, troublemakers. Old Mohammed was still around, we pulled him in, put the screws on him. He was tough, but spilled eventually. They always do.’

He slid the sheet back into the folder.

‘Turns out Pinsker raped their sister. Girl called Iman. Blind, not even twenty. Dragged her down to the river, battered her, took his pleasure. She struggled, apparently, tried to fight him off, but he was too strong. I wouldn’t trust the el-Badris as far as I could spit them, but Mohammed had an eyewitness to corroborate the story. Local guy, respectable. He’d been a kid at the time, was out fishing the night it happened, heard the girl crying, saw the whole thing. He told the el-Badris about it, Mohammed and his two brothers . . . well, this was 1931, people hadn’t forgotten Danishaway. And you know what the
fellaheen
are like. Proud. Do things their own way.’

He removed his spectacles, folded them, placed them on the coffee table beside his empty glass.

‘I disapprove of vigilante justice,’ he said. ‘If it had happened on my watch I might have dealt with it differently, but this was forty years after the event. Two of the three brothers were dead, Mohammed was into his seventies and not long off dying, Pinsker had no living relatives, or at least none that we could find. It served nobody’s purposes to start opening up old wounds. It was bad enough the girl had been violated. Why go reminding the whole world of her shame? Better just to let things lie. I had the old man beaten to teach him a lesson, and left it at that. Case closed. Which is how it’s going to stay.’

He contemplated the folder, then snapped it shut and held it out.

‘I trust that clarifies things.’

Khalifa leant across and took the file. He felt curiously unmoved by the story. The rape was obviously shocking – the girl had been the same age as his own daughter Batah. And blind to boot. But of Pinsker’s fate . . . A year ago he would have been horrified by what had happened to him. Lynch mobs, people taking the law into their own hands – these were things from which he’d always instinctively recoiled, however grotesque the crime. These days his moral compass seemed less fixed. The man had died a terrible death, but then he’d done a terrible thing. Like Sadeq said, it wasn’t clear-cut. Nothing was clear-cut any more. There was no certainty about anything, no black and white. Life had become . . . impenetrably grey.

He shuffled the folders on his lap, his thoughts turning to how, if at all, any of this related to a woman getting strangled in a church in Al-Quds. He could see no obvious link: two murders, eighty years apart, different nationalities, different countries.

‘There was no suggestion of a religious element to the killing, was there?’ he asked, fumbling for a connection. ‘Pinsker being Jewish and all.’

Sadeq eyed him. ‘A girl was beaten, raped, very nearly killed. A
blind
girl. I would have thought that was enough of a motive without bringing religion into it. And anyway, this was before the
naqba
. We didn’t mind Jews so much in those days.’

There was a click as the front door opened again, accompanied by a rustle of shopping bags. Sadeq glanced up, then at his watch. He clearly believed they’d covered everything that needed to be covered and it was now time to bring the discussion to a close.

‘You don’t know what happened to Pinsker’s personal belongings, do you?’ asked Khalifa, trying to scrape whatever he could before he was shown the door.

Sadeq gave an impatient grunt. ‘As far as I recall everything we found in the tomb was buried with Pinsker up in Cairo. There wasn’t much. Just his clothes and that mask thing.’

‘No documents of any sort? Papers? Letters?’

The older man’s fingers started drumming on the scarab-shaped arm-ends. Whatever tether he’d granted Khalifa was fast starting to strain.

‘No documents,’ he replied curtly. ‘Now if you don’t mind . . .’

‘And his things from 1931? You’ve no idea what happened to those?’

Sadeq’s fingers ceased drumming, curled tightly round the scarabs.

‘I have no idea at all. Dumped in the Nile, for all I know. It was eighty years ago and it’s not relevant.’

‘More tea?’ His wife’s voice echoed from the kitchen.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ called Sadeq. ‘We were just finishing. Weren’t we?’

It was a statement rather than a question. End of tether. Khalifa nodded, thanked the old man for his time and, returning the folders to the plastic bag, stood. Sadeq led him out into the hallway.

‘For personal interest you seem to be taking this thing very seriously, Inspector,’ he said as they reached the front door. ‘I’ve no objection to officers using their initiative, but initiative needs to be deployed
advisedly
. Maybe I’ll have a chat with Hassani. Get him to give you some proper work.’

He opened the door and Khalifa went out on to the landing. He’d overstepped the mark, he could feel it, shouldn’t chance things any further. People like Sadeq could turn unpleasant. Very unpleasant.

‘One last question.’

Sadeq glared.

‘In the 1931 folder there was a letter, from Howard Carter, the archaeologist. Apparently on the night of his murder Pinsker told Carter he’d found something. Some object or place that was “miles long”. Does that mean anything to you?’

He fully expected the old man to lose his temper. He didn’t. Instead, unexpectedly, he reached out and laid a hand on Khalifa’s shoulder.

‘I heard about your tragedy, Inspector. Please accept my sincere condolences. I do hope your family are well. And
remain
well.’

The way he said it sounded more like a warning than a good wish.

‘And to answer your question, the Carter letter means nothing whatsoever to me. Now if you don’t mind, it’s time for my lunch. Have a safe journey home. We won’t be seeing each other again.’

He squeezed Khalifa’s shoulder, the fingers really digging in, then, with a nod, stepped back and slammed the door in his face. From within the flat came a muted crackle as another fly grilled itself against the electric insect-killer.

T
EL
-A
VIV

Ben-Roi made two quick detours before heading down to Abu Kabir for his interview with über-pimp Genady Kremenko.

The first was to the Hofesh Shelter in Petah Tikvah, to drop off the playthings he’d purchased from the Jerusalem Toys R Us. He didn’t make a big deal of it, just left the bags with the gatehouse guard and asked him to make sure they got to the shelter kids. The man wanted to call up to Maya Hillel, but Ben-Roi said he was in a hurry and got on his way. Didn’t want the woman thinking he was trying to impress her. Or, worse, that he was some sort of softie.

The second detour was to central Tel-Aviv to pick up Dov Zisky. He was in town for the weekend staying with friends, and had asked if he could sit in on the interview, which was fine by Ben-Roi, although why the kid would want to waste his day off mixing with a sleazeball like Kremenko was anyone’s guess.

He was waiting outside the Grand Beach Hotel on Nordau, leaning against a lamppost dressed in skinny jeans, tight white T-shirt, sandals and Ray-bans. Ben-Roi pulled into the kerb and threw open the Toyota’s passenger door.

‘You go to
shul
looking like that?’ he asked as Zisky climbed in, bringing with him a waft of aftershave.

‘Sure I do.’

‘You smell like a rent-boy.’

‘Well, they do say perfume is pleasing to the nose of the Lord.’ He slammed the door and handed Ben-Roi a paper bag. ‘Lunch.’

Ben-Roi sniffed the bag and grinned.

‘And they also say
latkes
are pleasing to the nose of your boss. Good boy.’

He removed one of the patties, bit into it and swung round the corner on to Ha-Yarkon. For a moment they drove in silence, then:

‘You smell a lot of rent-boys, then?’ asked Zisky.

The two men looked at each other and burst out laughing.

Abu Kabir Detention Facility – aka The Jaffa Hilton – was at the south end of town, just round the corner from the National Centre for Forensic Medicine, where Rivka Kleinberg’s body had been autopsied. An imposing three-storey block with grilled windows and a large observation tower in one corner, it was surrounded by a whitewashed perimeter wall topped with chain-link fencing. Some sensitive soul had had the idea of dotting the wall with terracotta sculptures to try to brighten the place up a bit. Waste of time and money, in Ben-Roi’s opinion. A prison was a prison, and short of removing the wall – and the bars and the doors as well – you weren’t ever going to make it feel cheerful.

They parked up in the lot beside the facility’s retractable steel gates and presented themselves at the main security window. The duty guard buzzed them in and put a call over to the main building to announce their arrival. A couple of minutes later another guard appeared and led them through into the compound.

‘Adam Heber not around?’ asked Ben-Roi as they crossed a concrete forecourt, referring to his warder friend.

‘He’s on nights at the moment,’ replied the guard. ‘Sends his best. Says he hopes you have a fun visit.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be thrilling,’ grunted Ben-Roi.

They reached the main prison block and passed out of the sunlight into the gloomy interior. There was paperwork to fill in, after which the warder led them down a corridor, across an internal courtyard shaded by an overhead mesh, and into another wing. There was the sound of radios and chattering voices and, from somewhere above them, the clatter of a tin pot being banged against bars. No people they could see. Like all prisons Ben-Roi had ever been in, he had the unnerving feeling it wasn’t actual humans who were making the noises but rather the building itself.

‘You’re in here,’ said the guard, eventually stopping in front of a door and slotting a key into its lock. ‘I’ll go fetch the prisoner. His solicitor’s already in there.’

He opened the door and stood back, waving them through into the room beyond: lino floor, barred window set high in the wall, wooden table with a water jug, paper cups and ashtray. A tall, middle-aged woman was facing them across the table, smartly dressed, something tight and pinched about her face, as though the features had all been squeezed into too little space. The detectives sat down.

‘It was only supposed to be an informal chat,’ said Ben-Roi as behind them the door closed and the lock clicked. ‘He didn’t need legal counsel.’

‘My client prefers to keep everything above board.’

‘Shame he didn’t do the same with his business dealings.’

The woman tutted and folded her hands. No wedding ring, Ben-Roi noticed. One of those career junkies so focused on getting scumbags like Kremenko off the hook she didn’t have time for a family. That or a dyke. Either way, he didn’t like her. Didn’t like any of her sort. Arrogant, slippery types who went home each day glad in the knowledge they’d made the police look like idiots and helped another paedo back on to the streets. Stupid bitch.

‘I trust we can keep this civil,’ she said. ‘It’s my daughter’s birthday and I’d like to get home in a reasonably good mood.’

OK, wrong on that score.

‘So here are the ground rules,’ continued the woman. ‘My client has agreed to answer whatever questions you have, and to offer whatever help he can in your investigation. In return, we would ask you to limit your questions to the agreed remit and, since Mr Kremenko has not been officially named as a suspect in your case, nor convicted of any other crime, to treat him with respect and courtesy.’

‘Should I change his nappy as well?’

‘Grow up, Detective. And do it quickly or this interview’s stopping right here.’

Fuck you
, he thought.

‘This is?’ She nodded towards Zisky. Ben-Roi made the introductions.

‘The interview request was only for yourself.’

‘He’s just sitting in. I want to show him the ropes. Teach him the importance of respect and courtesy.’