Authors: Parker Bilal
‘So, naturally, we ran back to protect our things.’
‘Naturally,’ agreed Makana. ‘And what did you see?’
‘The flames were shooting out of here, up past the windows above.’
‘Worse than the fire was the smoke,’ continued the second man. ‘Those things give off fumes that burn the lungs clean out of your chest.’
‘What did you do?’ Makana asked.
‘What could we do? We ran for buckets and filled them and threw them in.’
‘Someone called the fire brigade, but by the time they got here it was almost over.’
‘And the girl, where was she?’ Okasha asked, deciding it was time to get involved.
‘Upstairs,’ said one of the men. ‘She lived there with her mother.’
‘What are you saying?’ broke in the
bawab
. ‘Her mother died last year. Everyone knows that.’ This provoked more rumblings, agreements, disagreements.
‘That’s where the fire started,
effendi
,’ offered the sergeant. He turned to lead the way down a narrow gap alongside the entrance. It was so narrow Makana’s shoulders brushed against the walls on both sides. At the back a steep, rather unstable staircase rose up the wall. It was made of uneven planks of wood that appeared to have been salvaged from a selection of sources and knocked together by a blind man. The flat was really no more than a single room with a tiny alcove for a bathroom. The floor had been badly weakened by the fire. There were gaps where thin, scarred beams showed through, centuries old. A bed in the corner of the room was covered by a stiff layer of warped black plastic.
‘That’s where it started,’ Okasha pointed as they stepped gingerly around the edges of the room.
‘She was lying in the bed?’
‘That’s where they found her. The mattress was made of some kind of rubber foam. It stuck to her skin. Half of her back came off with it when they tried to get her out.’
Makana looked at the way the middle of the narrow room was charred, almost like a channel leading to the bed.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Okasha, ‘but it’s more common than you think. People decide to kill themselves, but they can’t calculate how much kerosene they need. They tend to use too much rather than too little. The girl lived alone. Her mother died a couple of years ago. We have no idea of the father’s whereabouts. Apparently he lives abroad.’
‘I was thinking that it looks almost as if the fire began over there, away from the bed.’
‘With that kind of material all it takes is a spark,’ said Okasha. ‘The fire downstairs was blazing so hard they couldn’t get near it.’
‘So, she poured a trail of kerosene across the room and then lay down in bed and struck a match and threw it away from her?’
Okasha frowned. ‘Why do you have to twist things around?’
‘I’m just looking at what’s in front of me.’
‘You’re twisting things.’
‘Okay, who got the girl out?’
‘The men we spoke to down below. Someone spotted the smoke. They rushed up and managed to get her out.’
‘And you think they are telling the truth?’
‘They have no reason to lie. They have no interest in any of this.’ Okasha shot Makana a wary look. ‘I understand you’ve been hired to investigate this for anything suspicious, but I’m telling you there’s nothing to find.’
Makana let his gaze wander around the room. It seemed a sad place to end one’s life, especially one so young. His eye was drawn to the streak that seemed to stretch across the room.
‘You have to ask yourself why anyone would want to harm a girl like that,’ Okasha went on.
‘Maybe to cover something up? Did you conduct forensic tests?’
Okasha let out a soft laugh. ‘Where do you think you are?’ He squatted down and indicated the floor with his hand. ‘After she struck the match she must have dropped the jerrycan with the fuel in. The floor is uneven. The can would have rolled towards that side, which is exactly where the fire got more intense.’ He stood up again and brushed off his hands as he stood. ‘Who is it that you’re working for again?’
‘I told you, it’s connected to a client.’
‘An ex-client, I thought you said.’
‘Not exactly,’ said Makana. Ragab had asked that he try to keep his name out of the case so Makana was reluctant to say too much in front of the others who were crowded into the doorway behind them. People talked, and police salaries being what they were it wasn’t hard to imagine one of them being tempted to make a little extra cash by passing the information to a journalist.
‘Fine, you don’t feel like telling me, that’s up to you, but there’s not much else to see here.’
‘What about an autopsy?’
‘An autopsy would only tell us what we already know. Why go to all that expense? With the backlog it could take months.’
As they turned to leave Makana noticed a photograph that had been fixed to the wall beside the door. It hung at a lopsided angle but by some miracle part of it had survived. Protected perhaps by the fact that air would have been sucked in through here during the blaze. Nevertheless, inside the frame the fire had eaten its way across from the bottom right-hand side. Protected by the glass, a corner had escaped damage. Makana rubbed away some of the soot from the cracked glass. The frame came apart in his hands. There were a few chuckles from the policemen standing at the top of the stairs, afraid to step into the room in case the floor gave way. Makana knelt and sifted through the debris until he had the blackened part of the photograph. He held it up to the light.
‘What is that?’ he asked.
Okasha squinted at the picture. ‘It looks like a palm tree,’ he concluded. ‘Nothing too strange about that. There are plenty of them about.’
Makana took a closer look. The picture appeared to be of a flat, open landscape. In the desert somewhere. On one side was what looked like the edge of a big house. An outside staircase. The family home perhaps? It didn’t seem to fit in this place.
‘Maybe somewhere they visited once. Can’t call it evidence. Keep it if you like,’ said Okasha, straightening up. ‘All this is going to be ripped out when they rebuild the place.’
Makana tucked the picture into his pocket and took one last look around the room before following Okasha out. Back down the stairs in the street they waited while the
bawab
shut up the shop and thanked him for his help. Then, when Okasha had dismissed his men, they went in search of coffee which they found in a small place just outside the old city gates at Bab Zuwayla. Okasha sat with his back to the wall as usual, staring out at the street, eyeing everyone who went by with his usual look of suspicion.
‘I was surprised to get your call. Have you been so busy these last few months you haven’t had time to see old friends?’
‘I’ve been working. Small cases,’ said Makana. It wasn’t much of an explanation.
‘So tell me how you came to be mixed up in all this?’
‘There’s not much to tell really. One client led to another. You know how it is.’
Okasha sighed. ‘You don’t give much away.’
‘The point is that my client doesn’t believe she took her own life, and frankly neither do I.’
‘And this is based on what, your natural intuition? A little bird told you?’
‘We both know how often suicide is used to cover up an honour killing.’
‘Which in this case is impossible because the girl has no other family here.’
‘The father is abroad,’ said Makana. ‘That doesn’t mean he can’t arrange things from there.’
Okasha spluttered into his coffee. ‘You’re not serious, are you?’ He mopped his moustache carefully with a pristine white handkerchief he produced from his tunic. ‘Why? What motive could he possibly have to kill his daughter?’
‘Maybe she wasn’t his daughter.’
‘This is why you won’t tell me the name of your client. Now I get it.’ Okasha studied Makana for a moment. ‘Do you think perhaps you’re taking this thing too personally?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, it sounds to me like your client has a conflict of interests here. Either he does truly believe the girl’s father did it, or . . .’
‘Or what?’
‘Or he’s covering up his own indiscretions. Maybe that’s where you should be looking,’ said Okasha. ‘If you want motives then start with the most obvious. Who would gain from her death? A father who lives in a foreign country, or a wealthy man seeking to protect his reputation? I assume your client is a wealthy man.’
Makana lit a cigarette and stared out at the street. He had difficulty imagining Ragab being capable of murdering anyone. He struck him as the kind who lacked courage in the final instance. Ragab was the kind who was smart enough to always find an easy way out for himself. He didn’t like getting his hands dirty. Everything about him, his elevated view of himself, was a strategy to avoid conflict.
‘If twenty-two years in this job have taught me anything,’ Okasha was saying, ‘it is that people never do anything purely for benevolent reasons. Believe me.’
Makana did believe him, everything pointed to it. Yet there was still an element of doubt that he could not cast aside. Perhaps he wanted to believe that Ragab was acting out of selfless reasons.
‘In any case,’ Okasha went on, ‘honour killings,’ he pursed his lips in distaste, ‘these are not matters to involve yourself in.’
‘The girl had eighty per cent burns. Can you imagine how painful that is? Even if she had survived she would never have lived a normal life.’
‘I understand.’ Okasha ground his teeth together. ‘But that doesn’t change the facts.’
‘You’re not saying you condone it?’ Makana raised his eyebrows.
‘I’m saying this country has some old ways and nothing you and I can do will change that.’
By now they were drawing looks from other people. Okasha glared around the
ahwa
just long enough to make everyone else go back to minding their own business, then he reached for his cup and took a leisurely sip. Holding the cup between thumb and forefinger to sip delicately, managing not to dampen the ends of his moustache. ‘There was a woman at the scene yesterday, talking about the same thing.’
‘What woman?’ Makana recalled the woman who had appeared at the clinic.
‘You know, one of those . . . activist types, works for an organisation, no doubt funded by some well-meaning people in Europe who feel they have a duty to enlighten us with their civilisation and whatever else they can think of.’ Okasha finished his tea. ‘Take the advice of an old friend and walk away from this case. You’re taking it too seriously. It’s affecting your judgement.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my judgement.’
‘This is a bad case. It’s not for you. Not now, not so soon after all this with your daughter.’
Okasha sat back, having said his piece. Makana stubbed out his cigarette and got to his feet. Suddenly he wanted to be away from here, this place, this coffee shop with its noise and chatter, the street with all the chaos and confusion.
‘You know that if there is anything I can do to help, anything at all . . .’ Okasha stood and held out his hand. ‘And no need to thank me for this morning. It makes a change from all of this hysteria about catching Al Qaida operatives. Now we are all part of the War on Terror. What do they think we were doing before?’ Okasha patted Makana on the shoulder as he made to leave. ‘Forget about this girl and get yourself a decent case. You need to work. We all do. It’s the only thing that makes sense in this crazy world.’
For a long time Makana watched him walk away, then he lit another cigarette and turned on his heels and went the other way.
Makana spent the next few hours wandering the area talking to everyone and anyone he came across. It’s not hard to get people to talk. Give them half a chance and most leap at the opportunity to display the breadth of their knowledge. The real problem was always getting to the little details, the things which stuck out and which, hopefully, would eventually illuminate a way forward. Listening was tricky. It was an acquired skill. You had to give people space and time, you had to sift out what was useful from the flood of irrelevant information. You had to sniff out what was true from what was embellishment, exaggeration, fabrication, fantasy, pure lies. In other words, everything had to be tempered by a good pinch of scepticism.
Mother and daughter had set up the shop some twelve years ago, which would have meant around the time Musab came out of prison and went abroad. There was some confusion about where they came from originally. Some said Siwa, others Alexandria. There was nothing unusual about people arriving in the city from one corner of the country or another. Details grew even more sketchy when it came to why Musab went to prison, but what was clear was that he never came back here after that. The stallholders and merchants, the porters and tea boys, all grew vague on the matter. Some said they had heard he had gone abroad, others that he was dead. Nagat had carried on. It was the girl who made the difference, explained one woman: ‘That was the best thing that useless man ever did. He gave her a child and then took himself away. What more could anyone ask for?’ Everyone remembered the girl, from when she was little. They wiped away tears as they recalled how she would run through the streets on errands, never too busy to talk. ‘Everyone loved her.’ When Nagat fell ill everyone rallied around to help out. They had nobody else to depend on. The two women were alone. ‘Around here it’s like one big family. Anyone who has something will give to those who don’t.’