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Could he? ZeeZee didn’t find the question odd. But then there was very little in life that he found odd. And it was a good question, even if he didn’t yet know the answer. He’d never killed anything, not a fish from a lake or a sparrow with a BB gun, and yet…

He shrugged.

“No matter.” Hu San, elder sister of the Five Winds Society, pulled a tiny Nokia diary from her blood-splattered jacket and flipped it open. Her conversation was soft, unhurried and authoritative. ZeeZee didn’t understand a word. Just as he didn’t really understand how a middle-aged Chinese woman could manage to vault a counter and unsheathe a sword in less time than it took the Korean to raise his gun.

Stepping round the blood-splattered boy, Hu San walked to the shop door and flipped round a simple sign, from
open
to
closed.
Then she pulled down two bamboo blinds and locked the door. “Shut for stocktaking,” she announced lightly.

7th July

Lady Jalila blinked as the crypt’s darkness gave way to
sudden daylight. Beside her walked Madame Mila, head turned slightly towards the older woman. There was probably only five years’ difference in their ages, but the Minister’s wife had a confidence that came with money, good clothes and power, even if that power was vicarious and by right belonged to her husband.

By contrast, Madame Mila felt ill at ease and bitterly resented the fact. She had intellectual brilliance, striking looks and an unbroken run of victories in court from her recent career as a public prosecutor. What she lacked was connections. Lady Jalila knew that. They talked, or rather the Minister’s wife talked and the younger woman listened intently, occasionally nodding.

Both of them were headed towards where Raf and Hani sat in the shade of their borrowed cork tree, backs pressed hard against another family’s tomb. Reluctantly Raf climbed to his feet and brushed gravel from his suit. Hani clambered up after him.

She didn’t look at her aunt or the coroner-magistrate.

“You have my sympathy,” Lady Jalila told Raf. “And, of course, if there’s anything I or the Minister can do to help…” She smiled, then shrugged as if to stress she wished there was more she could offer. But Raf still caught the point when her eyes slid across to Hani and noticed that the child was clinging to his hand, her fingers glued firmly inside his.

“Thank you,” Raf said politely, nodding first to Lady Jalila and then at the stony-faced woman stood beside her. “I’d better get Hani home…”

“Your Excellency…”

He was the person addressed, Raf realized, turning back. The coroner-magistrate was staring after him, her elegant face at once flawless and utterly cold. Her eyes between darkness and a void.

The woman was attractive and regretted it. Her brittleness a warning at odds with the warmth of a perfume that featured musk mixed with some botanical element so elusive Raf decided it had to be synthetic. Chemical analogues that fell midway between spices and fruit were big business, even in a city that prided itself on having the finest spice markets in North Africa. He’d seen the hoardings on his way through Place Orabi.

“…Yes?” Raf said finally.

“You didn’t know your aunt very well, did you?”

“I hardly knew her at all.” Raf kept his voice cool, matter-of-fact. “Why?”

“Madame Mila was just wondering,” Lady Jalila said.

The younger woman nodded. “She must have been surprised when she first heard from you. Pleased, obviously…”

“She didn’t hear from me,” said Raf. “Until last week I didn’t even know she existed…” And here came today’s understatement. “My father’s family isn’t something my mother talks about…”

“So how did your aunt know where to find you?”

How indeed?

“Good question.” Raf let his gaze flick over Madame Mila, taking in the neat row of tiny plaits, her perfect skin and her scrupulously simple suit, which was immaculately pressed but nothing like as expensive as Lady Nafisa’s outfit or the suit he was wearing. It was a gaze Raf had watched Dr Millbank use at Huntsville to bring unexpectedly difficult inmates into line. And the beauty of it was that its effect was almost subliminal.

“I believe my father keeps an eye on my progress.”

This time when Raf walked away no one called him back.

Felix offered to drive them home from the necropolis. But his
drive home
turned out to be an extended tour of the city that involved a slow crawl along the Corniche, beginning at the crowded summer beaches at Shatby and taking them past the grandeur of the Bibliotheka Iskandryia (where a rose-pink marble façade hid 125 kilometres of carefully ducted optic fibre) round the elegantly curved sweep of Eastern Harbour so Hani could see the fishing boats and horse-drawn caleches and then north along the final stretch of the Corniche towards the new aquarium and out along the harbour spur towards Fort Qaitbey, which had once been the site of the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world.

Pointing with one hand and steering with his other, the fat man kept up a running commentary that made up in jokes for what it occasionally lacked in historic accuracy. He didn’t stop or even suggest they stop, except once on the return trip, when he pulled over an ice-cream van and Hani was given her first ice cream.

Heading south down Rue el-Dardaa at the end of Felix’s impromptu tour they hit afternoon traffic. Squat, brightly carapaced VWs, sleek BMWs, the odd Daimler-Benz mixed in with an occasional bulbous-headed Japanese vehicle, apparently designed around some idealized memory of a Koi. By then, the kid was asleep on the back seat, her head against Raf’s side, and Raf was running over his future options and getting nowhere fast.

There’d be a will to be read. Legal requirements to be observed. But he already knew from something the fat man had said that he was the sole heir. The house was his and so, it seemed, was responsibility for Hani.

“Sweet Jeez.” The fat man grabbed a hip flask, gulped and put it back under his seat. “Can’t be doing with this.” He spun the wheel hard and Raf suddenly found himself out of the crawling traffic and cutting the wrong way up a one-way route. The fish van headed in the other direction very sensibly mounted the sidewalk and scraped a wall rather than tangle with Felix.

The fat man was right. The traffic really was tight as a nun’s ass.

“Which reminds me,” said Felix. “You saw who else was there?” He tossed the words over his shoulder.

“No,” said Raf. “Tell me.”

Felix grinned. “Quite pretty, very rich, spent most of her time glaring at you…”

Oh,
her.
“Hamzah’s daughter?”

“Yeah,” said Felix. “I wondered who’d show.” He glanced in his rear-view mirror, catching Raf’s eye. “All respect to your late aunt and everything, but that was the real reason I went. It’s the old dog-to-vomit syndrome. If killers can’t manage a nostalgia trip to the crime scene they sometimes attend the funeral.”

“Zara?”

Felix sighed theatrically, shook his head and flipped his vast car into Rue Kemil, then hung a right into Rue Cif, completely blocking the narrow street as he killed his engine outside the nondescript madersa door. “Not Zara. The man who wasn’t there, her father. We’ve wanted to rattle Hamzah’s cage for months.” Felix grinned. “I’m going to be bringing him in personally first thing tomorrow. See what happens if I poke him with a stick…”

7th July

“We’re here…”

Situated out beyond Glymenapoulo in a formal garden that ran down to a rocky beach, the Villa Hamzah was a bastard cross between the Parthenon and a Sicilian palazzo. Only three storeys high, but each one heavy with grandeur, colonnaded and porticoed like a riotously expensive wedding cake baked in brick and iced with grey stucco.

At its back stood the sea. At its front the Corniche…though an expanse of expensive lawn and a short length of drive kept the villa and road separate. Steps led up to a huge portico that rose two full storeys, with the portico’s flat roof forming the floor of a balcony that jutted from the front of the house as proud and heavy as any conquistador’s chin.

Double columns on either side of the balcony rose higher than the balustraded roof of the house itself, to support a smaller portico decorated at its centre with an Italianate and recent-looking coat of arms.

The windows at ground level were small and rudimentary, in keeping with Iskandryian tradition that put serving quarters on the lowest floor rather than in the attic. It was the windows of the second and third floors that were grand. Each one peering imperiously at the world from under a colonnade that ran round both sides and the rear of the house.

Villa Hamzah was the house of an industrial conquistador. Arrogant and assertive, but also bizarrely beautiful and with proportions so perfect the plans had to have been drawn up using the golden mean. Not at all what Raf was expecting—though he wasn’t too sure what he had been expecting, except that it wasn’t this.

“You want me to wait?”

Raf glanced both ways along the Corniche, seeing cruising cars, noisy groups of expensively dressed teenagers and an endless row of street lights flickering away into the far distance. It was late but there were empty yellow taxis every seventh or eighth vehicle and he was unlikely to be at the villa long enough for the traffic to die away completely.

“No, it’s fine.” Raf peeled off an Iskandryian £10 note and then added £5 as a tip. He could always call the driver back if he needed to, and besides, it was still cheaper than having him wait.

“I’ll take your card.”

“Yes, Your Excellency.” The cabbie pulled a crumpled rectangle from his pocket and handed it to Raf, who immediately scanned both sides to check that a number was given in numerals he could understand. It was.

The wrought-iron gates were already open. And there was no sentry box, bulletproof or otherwise for a smartly uniformed guard, which surprised Raf even more. Flipping off his shades, Raf adjusted his eyes and ran the spectrum from infraR to ultraV, but got nothing unusual. So far as he could see, security was completely lacking. No linked web of laser sensors, no bank of infrared cameras, not even a single starlight CCTV mounted on one of the huge pillars.

Hamzah was either very trusting or his reputation was all the protection he needed. Which wasn’t as unlikely as it sounded. Three years back, while Raf was in Huntsville, a Seattle street kid on Honda blades had put a cheap Taiwanese rip-off Colt against Hu San’s head and taken her bag. From start to finish the heist took less than thirty seconds and no one got hurt. Fifteen minutes later the kid turned himself and the bag in at the precinct on 4th Street and made a straight-to-video confession.

Hu San still had his legs broken, but cleanly, and the blue shirt who took the contract doped the kid up with ketamine before he began.

Gravel crunched under foot as Raf walked to the front door and knocked hard. “I’d like to see Hamzah Effendi,” Raf said to a sudden gap, which would have been backlit if the Russian bodyguard standing in the way of the hall light hadn’t taken up the whole doorway. Raf kept his voice bored, like a man who knew he would be seen.

“I see,” said the bodyguard. “Is he expecting Your Excellency?” It was obvious he already knew the answer.

“No,” said Raf. “But tell him Ashraf Bey would like a word.”

The Russian grinned, the first sign that he had more than iced water in his veins. Until then the man hadn’t recognized Raf, not minus dreads and beard. “Right,” he said. “I’ll just see if the Boss is in…”

Stepping inside the door now being held open, Raf waited politely next to a portrait of Hamzah so new Raf could smell paint drying while the big man walked solidly away across a vast chessboard of a hall paved in white and black marble.

“Ashraf!”

Raf opened his ears a little wider, jacked up his hearing or whatever he was meant to call what happened when he turned the volume up in his head. The outrage was Madame Rahina’s and he heard Hamzah’s answering growl, but not Zara… Voices blossomed into a brief argument that many would have missed. But Raf followed it just as he followed the Doppler effect of footsteps approaching down a corridor.

The man approaching stank of cigars and Guerlain aftershave, too much of it. His brogues had hand-sewn leather soles that creaked on the tiles. In the painting, he wore impossibly shiny black boots and stood against a balustrade, the background behind him an out-of-focus blur of green and blue. A gold Rolex was recognizable on one wrist. The little finger of his left hand sported a red-stoned, high-domed signet that could have been mistaken for a graduation ring. He wore a frock coat that reached the top of his boots and carried a rolled blueprint, signifying his profession. On his head was the red-tasselled tarbush of an effendi.

“Karl Johann,” announced a deep voice behind him. “He was due to paint a Vanderbilt but I made it worth his while…”

“It’s good,” said Raf.

“Given what I paid him it should be.” The industrialist glanced round his hall, checking it really was empty. Or maybe he was listening to the sound of breaking glass echoing up a corridor. If so, he seemed resigned to the damage.

“My wife wants you killed,” he said. “Or maybe your balls removed.” Hamzah shrugged. “I’ve explained you don’t do that to beys. Not openly, anyway, unless you’re very stupid. But that’s not the reason I refused her demand…” Shrewd eyes watched Raf and when Raf didn’t ask
What is?
the man nodded slightly, as if he expected no less.

“My daughter told me about the tram.”

What tram?
Raf almost asked. But he kept his mouth shut and after a second the man twisted his heavy lips into a slight smile.

“Discreet, aren’t you? Well, it probably goes with the job.”

Which didn’t answer the question.

Through the haze of that morning’s funeral and yesterday’s murder appeared the chill ghost of a memory. Zara with the flowers. Zara vomiting neatly onto a rocking wooden floor, the worried black kid with the nose piercings who’d reached for her hand, then noticed Raf’s open gaze.
That tram.