The Labyrinth of Osiris (42 page)

Ben-Roi finished the sentence. Baum smirked, as if he’d somehow scored a point.

‘Namir turned it up. Good detective, Amos.
Thorough
.’

He let that hang a moment, then pushed on.

‘Courtesy of Kleinberg, Petrossian got sent back to Armenia in disgrace, had to spend three years atoning for his sins doing outreach work in the arse-end of nowhere. Lost any chance he might ever have had of making Patriarch. Which to my thinking gives him a pretty damned good motive.’

‘Thirty-five years after the event!’ Ben-Roi was shaking his head. ‘Come on, Baum, even by your standards it’s thin. It’s thin as cat’s piss.’

‘Piece by piece, Ben-Roi. That’s how it works. Piece by piece, building up the case. And let me give you another piece. Petrossian lied about where he was the night of the murder.’

Ben-Roi opened his mouth, then shut it again. This sounded more damning. Baum saw that he had him on the back foot and his smirk widened.

‘He says he was in his private apartments when Kleinberg was killed. Thanks to some sterling work by your little gayboy friend, we know those apartments have a private street door. And we’ve now got footage of Petrossian going walkabout in the Armenian Quarter when he claims to have been tucked up in bed.’

Ben-Roi ought to have thumped him for the gayboy comment, but for the moment let it go.

‘What footage? There aren’t any cameras in the Armenian Quarter.’

‘No
police
cameras. But that store on the corner of Ararat and St James, Sammy’s, they’ve got a security video above the door. Namir took a look at it on the off-chance. Like I say, good detective Namir. Thorough. And what do you think he found? Crystal-clear images of your sweet little archbishop marching down Ararat at 6.04 p.m. on the night of the murder, and back up it again at 8.46. Which puts him bang in the frame, Ben-Roi. Right slap-bang in the middle of it.’

He was on a roll now, enjoying himself.

‘We’ve got dodgy character, clear motive, false alibi.’ He counted them off on his fingers. Soft, dumpling fingers that had never once come close to anything approaching hard work. ‘And in case there’s still any doubt in your mind, we’ve also got a confession.’

Again Ben-Roi’s mouth opened, again it shut without anything coming out. Baum gave a satisfied nod, aware that he had the upper hand now. Lifting a sheet of paper from the desk, he read from it. Slowly, savouring the words.

‘Her death’s on my conscience. It’s me who’s culpable. It’s me who killed her.’

He looked up at Ben-Roi, then read it through again, driving the point home.

‘Obviously I’m missing some hidden meaning here, but for the life of me I can’t see what it is. Perhaps you can help me out.’

The sarcasm was heavy, taunting.

‘He said this to you?’

‘To one of the other archbishops. One of Namir’s informers overheard it, passed it on.’

‘So not a formal confession at all.’

Baum didn’t answer that, just sat back and folded his arms, swivelling on his executive chair. He was in the driving seat now and knew it.

‘This so pisses you off, doesn’t it?’

Ben-Roi didn’t say anything, just glared at him.

‘
So
pisses you off. The great
balash
, winner of three citations for excellence in police work. Always gets to the bottom of a case. And this time round you’re out on the sidelines. Someone else has solved it and all your sorry little leads turn out to have been just so much shit in the pan. God, that must pain you.’

‘What pains me,’ snapped Ben-Roi, ‘is that you’ve fucked off the entire Armenian community and damned nearly started a riot for a case that any half-competent defence attorney’s going to tear to shreds the moment he gets his hands on it. It’s all circumstantial, Baum – you’ve got nothing, nothing that ties Petrossian directly to the crime.’

Baum stopped swivelling and leant forward over the desk.

‘We’ll get it, Detective. Trust me, we’ll get it. Petrossian’s our man, and if he didn’t strangle her himself, he sure as hell knows who did. Forensics are working his apartments as we speak. Me and Namir are about to go in and put the screws on him. And you –’ he jabbed a finger belligerently – ‘I want you down at your desk filling in the blanks.’

‘I’m sitting in on the interview.’

‘You can sit on my fucking face!’ cried Baum, pausing fractionally as he realized the insult didn’t work the way he intended before launching in again.

‘You’ve always been an uppity cunt, Ben-Roi, and I’m not standing for it any more. This is our line of inquiry, and you’re going to stick to it. Understand? Or so help me God I’ll have you busted straight down to
shoter
and stuck out doing guard duty on the most god-forsaken settlement I can find. Now get downstairs and get on it. That’s a direct order.’

Ben-Roi stared at him, making no effort to disguise his loathing, then turned for the door. When he reached it, he swung round.

‘You know what all this reminds me of?’

Baum’s eyebrows lifted.

‘The omelettes I cooked this morning.’

Baum looked confused.

‘Egg,’ explained Ben-Roi. ‘A great big bubbling heap of egg. And it’s heading straight for your face,
sir
. You’ve got the wrong man and if I were you I’d have a towel ready because when all this shakes down, you’re going to have a hell of a lot of mess to clear up.’

He stepped out of the door, stepped straight back in again.

‘And just for the record, you ever speak about my partner like that again and I’ll deck you. Same goes for Leah Shalev.
Maniak
.’

He was halfway down the stairs before Baum could think of any suitable response.

L
UXOR

The
Eye of Horus
docked midway through the afternoon, one of a convoy of cruisers that had come up from Aswan and manoeuvred themselves into the shore like a troupe of synchronized swimmers, lashing up three-abreast.

Khalifa was standing on the quayside waiting. The moment the gangplanks were lowered, he climbed aboard and went in search of Dr Digby Girling, the man Mary Dufresne had suggested might know something about the mysterious Samuel Pinsker. He eventually tracked him down in a lounge at the bow of the cruiser, delivering a talk on ancient Egyptian cosmetics to a group of middle-aged women. Khalifa hovered at the back of the room until the lecture was finished and the audience had started to disperse, then went forward, introduced himself and explained why he was there.

‘A detective!’ boomed Girling, his voice a fruity bellow. ‘How wonderfully intriguing! Has a crime been committed?’

In a manner of speaking, allowed Khalifa. He couldn’t go into details.

‘Of course not, of course not. Mum’s the word!’

The Englishman gave his nose a conspiratorial tap. Mary Dufresne had likened him to a balloon. To Khalifa he looked more like a pear. An over-ripe pear done up in a white linen suit, bow tie and sandals.

‘Should we talk here?’ he asked. ‘Or would you prefer to repair to the poop?’

Wherever he was most comfortable, said Khalifa.

‘Poop it is then. They’ve got Intermediate Belly-dancing in twenty minutes and I wouldn’t want us to be disturbed. A real-life detective! Gosh, I feel like I’m in an episode of
Morse
!’

He gathered up his lecture notes, plonked a large straw sunhat on his head and, with a flamboyant wave to what was left of his audience, set off across the room.

‘Don’t forget tonight, Dr Digby!’ one of the women called.

‘I shall be a veritable Solomon,’ cried Girling. ‘Fair, but very,
very
firm!’

Another theatrical flourish and they were out of the lounge and heading up a set of carpeted stairs, the women’s giggles echoing behind them.

‘Sunday night Mummy competition,’ explained the Englishman as they climbed. ‘Thirty inebriated divorcees parading around swathed in rolls of lavatory tissue. And to me falls the honour of choosing the victor. Oh the shame of it!’

He gave a sorrowful shake of the head and continued to the top of the stairs and out on to the ship’s upper deck. There was a small pool at one end, surrounded by bathers on sunloungers. At the other was an awning with beneath it a cluster of plastic chairs. The cruiser was moored in the outermost row of boats, and for a moment the Englishman’s gaze lingered dreamily on the distant hazy humpback of the Theban massif. Then, with a clap of the hands, he took them over to the awning, lowered himself into a chair and waved Khalifa into the one beside him.’

‘So, Inspector,’ he said. ‘Samuel Pinsker. I do hope I can be of some assistance.’

He wasn’t the only one. After an interminable station meeting in which Chief Hassani had banged on for an hour and a half about the forthcoming Valley of the Kings museum inauguration – now just four days away – Khalifa had spent what was left of the morning following up the detailed case notes Ben-Roi had sent over. A call to the Rosetta hotel where Rivka Kleinberg had booked a room had revealed nothing beyond what they’d already told Ben-Roi’s people. Serious Crime in Alexandria knew of no link between Rosetta and sex-trafficking, computer hacking or indeed any other form of organized crime other than the occasional case of illegal lobster fishing. Barren’s Saharan gas field tender, if it came off, would, according to a contact of Khalifa’s on
Al-Masry al-Youm
, be one of the biggest deals the Egyptian government had ever done with a foreign firm. Again, though, there was no obvious tie-in with a murder in Jerusalem. In short, he’d added precisely zilch to what the Israelis already knew. If he was going to help Ben-Roi with his case – and the more he’d delved into it, the more Khalifa had felt impelled to help – it was all down to finding out why Rivka Kleinberg had been interested in Samuel Pinsker. And finding that out, it seemed, was all down to this meeting with Digby Girling. So, yes, there was a lot riding on the conversation.

‘I’m told you’ve done some research on Pinsker,’ he kicked off.

‘For a modest monograph I wrote a few years back,’ confirmed the Englishman. ‘
All The Boy King’s Men – Forgotten Members of the Tutankhamun Excavation Team
. Sold a princely twenty-six copies in the Petrie Museum bookshop. A veritable bestseller by Egyptological standards. Pinsker featured because of his work landscaping the entrance to the tomb. If you please, Salah!’

This to a white-jacketed waiter who was patrolling beside the pool. The man approached and asked what he could get them. Khalifa held up a hand to indicate he didn’t require anything. Girling ordered a Pimm’s.

‘Always pick up a few bottles in duty-free,’ he confided. ‘Ahmed at the bar’s a dab hand at mixing it. Plenty of mint, that’s the secret.’

He winked, whipped out a handkerchief and began patting at his forehead, which in the two minutes they’d been out of the ship’s air-conditioned interior had become drenched in sweat. Khalifa lit a cigarette and was about to pick up the conversation when Girling did the job for him.

‘Interesting chap, our Samuel,’ he said. ‘He only figured briefly in the book, but I ended up doing quite a lot of research on him. Completely forgotten now, of course, but in his time he was quite an important figure. I’ve often thought of knocking my notes up into another book.’

He gave his forehead a final dab, removed his sunhat and began to fan himself with it.

‘He was an engineer by trade. A Mancunian Jewish mining engineer, to be precise, which I can’t imagine is a particularly extensive demographic. Originally came to Egypt to install a winching system in a phosphate mine over near Kharga and ended up staying on, advising some of the archaeological missions in Luxor. It was Pinsker who first realized the importance of properly ventilating the deeper tombs in the valley. If it hadn’t been for him, there’d be no decoration left by now. Not that it would bother that lot too much.’

He tilted his head towards the pool, where two bikini-clad women were sitting on the shoulders of two overweight men, screaming with laughter as they squirted each other with water pistols.

‘The siren call of
Femina britannica
,’ sighed Girling, rolling his eyes and shuffling his chair further round so as to put the pool out of his sightline. Over his shoulder the broad emerald avenue of the Nile glittered in the afternoon sun, and for a brief moment Khalifa found himself staring at a barge ploughing its way upriver over by the western shore, its prow tearing a deep frothing gash through the water. Before he could sink too deep into his reverie, Girling’s voice boomed out again.

‘– in a Manchester slum, you know. Son of an illiterate Yiddish-speaking cobbler. Overcame the most appalling penury and religious discrimination to get himself qualified as an engineer. A quite brilliant man, by all accounts, although a difficult one. Big chip on his shoulder, strong socialist principles, which obviously set him at odds with most of the other colonials out here. He was always getting into scraps with people, was notoriously free with his, you know . . .’

He made a boxing motion with his fists. Khalifa recalled the story Mary Dufresne had told him, about Pinsker attacking a man from Qurna.

‘Yes, there does seem to have been some sort of fracas,’ Girling acknowledged when Khalifa mentioned the incident. ‘I never found out the precise details, just that Pinsker took umbrage at something the man said and beat the living daylights out of him. Caused a lot of bad blood, apparently, although to be fair to Pinsker it was out of character. According to most accounts he was extremely respectful of the native Egyptians. Probably something to do with the old, you know –’ He tipped a hand in front of his mouth as though drinking. ‘That or his face. His appearance was a very touchy subject.’

‘I was going to ask about that,’ said Khalifa. ‘His face was . . . how do you say? . . . a born deformity?’

‘Birth defect?’ Girling shook his head. ‘No, no, the disfigurement came much later. He was actually quite a handsome young man, if the few early photos we’ve got of him are anything to go by. Dark eyes, strong Semitic features. The face was gas.’