Arabesk (14 page)

One button fastened the band of her cheap chinos and the fly was a simple nylon zip, nothing fancy or expensive like tiny straps, toggles or invisible velcro. Katia couldn’t afford designer clothes, even if they’d been available in whichever unpronounceable city it was she came from.

Terrified she’d say no, ZeeZee began to ease the zip, as if undoing it extra slowly meant she might not notice. Then he popped the single button at her waist. When she still didn’t protest, he let his fingertips creep gently down her abdomen, reaching for the waistband of her knickers. What he found was tight body hair, then dampness and finally heat.

Katia wore nothing underneath, not even a basic thong…

She wouldn’t look at him when the cabin lights came up. Her jeans were already buttoned and zipped, her T-shirt smoothed down. She’d rearranged both herself about an hour earlier, just before she drifted into sleep.

ZeeZee was more relieved than hurt by her sudden distance and put the earbead he’d borrowed politely but silently into her hand. Despite himself, he was grinning as he left the Boeing.

He was fifteen. He’d never yet kissed a girl—but he’d had one tighten frantically around his fingers and then, when her gasps were safely swallowed, push her hand back into the waistband of his trousers to squeeze until her wrist was sticky with his release.

Seattle was definitely the right place for him to be.

6th July

“Guard the door for me,” Felix told Raf, resting his
Speed Graphic on Lady Nafisa’s desk and pulling a foil packet from his hip pocket. Ripping open the foil, he pulled out what looked like a large condom, shaking it between first finger and thumb until a tissue-thin glove was revealed.

“Surgical,” Felix told Raf, ripping open a second packet. “Nanopore latex, anti-static. I get them from the hospital. The standard-issue stuff round here is crap.” Felix shrugged. “I could always change manufacturers, but they’re probably paying kickback to the Khedive’s second cousin…”

“What am I guarding against this time?” Raf asked as he watched the fat man struggle to force his thick fingers into the tight gloves.

“The coroner,” said Felix cryptically and knelt beside the seated body. With his fingers out straight, he ran his right hand over Nafisa, never quite letting his fingertips get close enough to touch either flesh or clothes. It was as if he was feeling for something that wasn’t there.

Taking his tiny maglite, the fat man swept its beam across Nafisa’s skin as she sat in the chair. “No fibres, no animal hair…” He was talking to his watch, to Raf and to the weird back-up device in the room outside, but mostly he was talking to himself. Getting himself ready for the bit the coroner wouldn’t like.

The leather case Felix took from his pocket contained a Saez scalpel, the old-fashioned titanium-edged kind, a handful of glass thermometers, tiny combs, surgical swabs and glass holding tubes that could freeze themselves. He only planned to use the first two.

Lifting the edge of Lady Nafisa’s skirt, Felix checked the dark bruises on her buttocks and lower thigh.

“Obvious lividity…”

He pushed the bruising and watched the skin go pale beneath his fingers as the blood that gravity had pooled in the tissue moved aside. Within another couple of hours that would be fixed in place.

“…lividity still blanches.” That confirmed his time frame.

All he needed now, for thoroughness, was a core temperature reading. The simplest way of getting that was use a rectal thermometer, but Felix knew better than to even consider the idea. Instead he reached for his Saez scalpel, moved the skirt higher still and punched his scalpel through the skin of Nafisa’s abdomen. Extracting the blade, Felix took a surgical thermometer and worked it deep into the tiny wound. Ninety seconds later he broke the red tag off the top of the thermometer to fix the temperature and withdrew the sliver of glass and silicon, dropping it into an evidence bag, which he initialled.

A human body lost roughly one-point-five degrees an hour, depending on surrounding temperature. The reading was within the limits he’d expect.

“Initialling postM wound…”

Using his pen, Felix drew a circle around the wound on Lady Nafisa’s abdomen, signed his initials and added the date and time. The coroner-magistrate would have a fit about it, there’d be another strong memo to the Minister mentioning desecration of the dead and Felix would get told not to do it again.

Again.

To which he’d reply, as he always did, that if he wasn’t allowed to use the orifices that Allah provided, then he’d have to make his own. As yet Madame Mila hadn’t come up with an answer that… Mind you, she hadn’t forgiven him either.

“Toxicology report…” Slamming a sterile plastic reservoir into a syringe, Felix picked a vein in Nafisa’s wrist and drew blood. Circling and initialling the puncture mark. Let them complain about that, too.

The corpse felt warm through the latex of his glove as he lifted a breast to examine the pen buried beneath it. He felt for the edge of her ribcage and then counted up, already knowing what he was going to find.

“Penetrating wound to chest, between third and fourth…” The blow was perfectly placed to puncture her heart. And it was a single stab wound, highly professional. Amateur assassins often missed. Suicides left hesitation cuts, little lacerations and half-hearted weals while they jabbed or slashed at themselves to see how much it was going to hurt.

Yet no defensive wounds were present to indicate that Lady Nafisa had even tried to fight for her life. And this was a woman notorious for fighting for everything she considered her due.

Lifting her right hand to recheck unbroken skin between the woman’s thumb and first finger, Felix almost hissed with irritation. “No defensive cuts to finger web, nor across palm or wrist…” He stopped, turned over the hand to look at her nails. The cuticles were still manicured and immaculate, that morning’s lacquer as dark and glossy as a blood trickle but the nail ends were badly chipped and ripped back, all of them.

If she’d been a girl locked in a cellar to starve to death, then that was what he’d expect her fingers to look like at the end of the first day, before they stopped being something used to scrabble at a locked door and became food instead. And it did happen, even in El Iskandryia—but only among the poor, out in the slums, to daughters and sisters who hadn’t been as careful as their fathers or brothers expected. It didn’t happen to the middle-aged and rich.

Besides, her office wasn’t a cellar and her door had been found open.

Felix shook his head, thought briefly about starting his fourth hip flask, the emergency one, and rejected the idea. Every year new morality laws made his life that much more difficult. It was hard enough being Nasrani in a North African city, even worse to be so obviously fat and pink in a country full of elegant Arabs, rugged Berbers and sophisticated Levantines. And his own Catholicism might now be almost residual, but it still made for difficulties in an Islamic metropolis where a male officer wasn’t supposed to touch a female corpse.

But then, this was a city where the police test for rape in the outer boroughs was to sit the victim on a rough wooden stool to see if she squirmed with pain. If she didn’t, she hadn’t fought back and it wasn’t rape. Most fought back. Many died rather than submit. Not surprising when most
felaheen
still chose to kill their daughters for being disgraced rather than kill the rapist and risk starting a blood feud.

Screw it.
Felix took the swig anyway, aware without looking that the nail of the thumb he used to flip up the top was bitten to the quick, just like all his others. He’d have to go back on the
Sobranie
soon, whatever the medics said about ghostly shadows haunting his lungs. Logical deduction was hard enough without self-inflicted nicotine withdrawal.

So what had he got?

At first glance the attack appeared frenzied. But any attacker in a real frenzy would just have punched the pen straight through whatever clothes Lady Nafisa wore, which meant the open blouse signified something. Unless, of course, what it signified was not frenzy but passion and the stabbing came later, when the widow’s defences were down.

That wasn’t an avenue Nafisa’s cousin Jalila or her husband would want explored with too much thoroughness… Or any thoroughness at all, come to that, Felix decided sourly as he listened to heels that clicked regular as a metronome across the courtyard outside. That would be Lady Jalila’s friend, the new coroner-magistrate.

Felix waited for the sound of her and Hani’s footsteps on the stairs. Then, when they didn’t come, he tuned out the distant chatter of Hani’s voice and went back to examining the body, using his last few seconds of peace to search for anything he might have missed. Something obvious.

There was a tiny stigma right in the centre of her left hand, a dark crater-like indentation that bled slightly along one edge. Significant? Possibly. He grabbed a shot anyway and hurriedly thrust the dead woman’s hand back in her lap where he’d found it. Then Felix smoothed the skirt down round her knees and stepped back. He left the blouse as he’d found it, torn open at the front. He didn’t want anyone saying he’d been messing with the evidence.

“Chief Felix…” The coroner-magistrate’s greeting was borderline polite, but brittle. “No one told me you’d be here.”

“Didn’t they? Then you’ve been talking to the wrong people.” The fat man took his time to straighten up, rolling his heavy shoulders to ease their stiffness. And then, when he could put it off no longer, he turned to face the ebony-skinned woman who stood glaring from the doorway.

Madame Mila, with her hair pulled back, her nails worn short and unvarnished, her black trousers and coat cut from local cotton, not even off the peg but off the shelf from Wal-Mart.

Word was, Madame Mila dressed simply because of her job. Felix’s view was that she’d dress like that no matter what job she did.

“We’ve done everything according to regulations,” said Felix. “His Excellency here is my witness to that…”

The woman raised her eyebrows but didn’t bother to reply. Instead she stepped over to the body and touched her finger to the throat of the stabbed woman, checking that there was no pulse.

“Dead,” she announced. Felix nodded. The official time of death was now, not when Felix estimated she was killed but when the death was formally recorded by a medical officer.

Carefully, Madame Mila closed the open blouse. Then she stooped for the tissue-thin modesty shroud Felix had earlier discarded and spread it over the dead body. Only after that did she turn back to the door, nodding for Felix to follow her.

“Body’s released,” Felix said to his watch. Formalities complete, the corpse could now be removed and the fingerprinting brigade sent in. Felix took a last look round the crime scene, a token glance for anything he might have missed.

“Chief…” The voice was unnecessarily impatient.

“What?” Felix demanded. “What’s your problem this time?”

“The pashazade.”

“Using him as my witness was the Minister’s idea,” said Felix flatly. “You got a problem, take it up with Mushin Bey. Ashraf and I are out of here.”

Madame Mila shook her head. “He goes nowhere,” she said. “At least not with you. As of now, he’s under arrest. Suspicion of murder.” She tightened her grip on the shoulder of the small girl stood beside her. “And this is
my
witness.”

Seattle

Red on white inside, grey on grey without, where the
Pacific beat on jagged rocks and gulls circled like sailors’ souls over a stark concrete bunker that made the work of Mies van der R look soft and fluid.

Micky O’Brian lay inside on a white silk carpet that cost $340 a square yard and could only be ordered over the web from Beijing, cash in advance. Outside, through a long window that ran the length of his precious first-floor art gallery, gunmetal waters could be seen lapping the shore of Puget Sound. Drizzle made the sky as dull as the sea and reduced visibility to a few hundred paces.

The jetty in front of Lodge Concret was bare. A thin strip of factory grating held above the rocking waves by anodized posts. The clinker-built pleasure boat that should have been there was long gone. So was a Matisse nude, a Christo abstract and one of the most important early works of Cézanne still to be in private ownership…
Farmhouse at Auvers
had been painted in 1873, the year after Cézanne moved to Pontoise to be close to Pissarro.

White on red.

Seepage from a bullet hole in the back of Micky O’Brian’s head had formed its own abstract, more Rorschach blot than Rothko. A vivid red splash that would fade to black as blood soaked into silk and eventually dried. There was a message in the colours, and the message was that the man wouldn’t be testifying to anything.

At first glance it looked like Micky was grabbing a nap, half curled on his side in slacks, gold slippers and a Chinese dressing gown with a five-toed Mandarin dragon on the back. But that was only at first glance. His wide-eyed glassy stare told a different story. One that ZeeZee picked up only in fragments, as he checked the long gallery and found it empty of any killer, with its picture lights turned down to “dim” and a still-chilled bottle of Mumm Cordon Rouge open on a side table.

There were macadamia nuts and chilli olives in little bowls alongside the bottle. An open but untouched box of Partegas corona had been placed nearby, along with a neatly rolled spliff placed ostentatiously on a silver ashtray. A very Micky O’Brian touch. The air in the gallery was heavy with scent from a huge vase of black tulips. Debussy drifted from flat wall speakers.
Clair de Lune or
something similar. Something lightweight, in keeping with Micky’s acting abilities.

The visitor Micky O’Brian had been expecting was ZeeZee. But someone else had definitely got here first.

ZeeZee carefully put the fat manila envelope he’d been delivering on the arm of a white leather sofa and considered his options. He could call the police or he could just leave, quietly and quickly. Returning the way he’d come, on the back of his 650cc Suzuki. And why not? He now had no one to meet. No reason for being there.