Authors: Parker Bilal
Eventually, after much coaxing, Soraya consented to sit down again, but was clearly still seething with anger. Makana wondered how much of her father’s past was known to her.
‘This must be very distressing for you.’
She glanced in his direction briefly, then looked away again. ‘There is a great responsibility that comes with running a company as big as Hanafi Enterprises. Whole families depend on us. We cannot afford to allow something like this to damage our business.’
‘I can’t control what they write in the papers.’
Her eyes were furious as she turned them on him.
‘It’s in your interest to protect our name.’
‘I wasn’t hired to protect your name. I was hired to find Adil.’
This caused her to waver. She gave a terse nod of agreement. ‘What matters is that you find him.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
‘I’m sure a man of your extraordinary abilities will find a way.’ She stood up, calm now, and left the room. It had been, Makana was forced to concede, quite a performance. Gaber’s voice brought him back to the present.
‘Please don’t take it personally. She is upset. We all are.’
Makana watched him smooth back the wavy white hair from his forehead. He preferred Soraya’s sincerity, no matter how fiery, to this coldness.
‘Hanafi told me about his wife and son . . . how they were killed.’
‘He told you about that, did he?’ Gaber’s pale hands rested on the desk top as he sank down slowly into his chair.
‘Does Soraya remember much about it?’
‘She was a very small child at the time. Of course it affected her tremendously, as it did all of us.’
‘But she only knows the official version, that it was a car accident?’
‘She wasn’t there when it happened.’
Makana nodded. ‘The man who did it . . . the one who was trying to kill Hanafi . . . who was he?’
Gaber heaved a deep sigh and reached for the cigarette box. This time he offered them to Makana – expensive English Dunhills. Makana held one under his nose to savour the smell of the tobacco.
‘His name was Daud Bulatt. At one time he was very close to Hanafi.’
‘What happened between them?’
‘Who knows?’ Gaber lifted a gold-plated lighter in the shape of the Sphinx and clicked the tail. He held out the flame to Makana. ‘One day Bulatt decided to go his own way. He led a mutiny against Hanafi, wanted to take over everything. In the ensuing battle, Hanafi’s wife and son were cut down in the street.’ As Gaber fell silent there was only the sound of a lift humming somewhere in the building. Then he stirred and blinked, looking at Makana as if he had only just noticed him standing there.
‘Is this relevant to your enquiry?’
‘Everything is relevant.’
Irritated, Gaber shifted papers around his desk and straightened his tie.
‘What else do you need to know?’
The cigarette tasted foreign and smooth. Yet another reminder that life at these altitudes was different. Makana told himself not to get too used to it.
‘Tell me about the girl, Adil’s mother.’
‘Are you sure this is necessary?’ Gaber’s patience appeared to be running thin.
‘We’re wasting time,’ sighed Makana. ‘Let me tell you what I think happened. Hanafi would have been nearly fifty and she must have been young. How young?’
‘Around sixteen,’ said Gaber tersely.
‘Sixteen. Unmarried. She caught Hanafi’s eye and one day he couldn’t help himself. Nobody could ever refuse Hanafi, right? People were scared of him and he took what he wanted, but he also helped them. Enough to make them turn a blind eye to his bad behaviour. When she became pregnant you stepped in and smoothed everything over. Her parents brought up the child as their own.’
‘That’s more or less how it was.’
‘What happened to the girl?’
‘She killed herself.’ Gaber’s eyes never left Makana. ‘It was all a long time ago.’
Through the glass behind the desk, Makana could see Hanafi and his daughter talking on the other side of the terrace. She seemed to be crying. Hanafi put his arms out to comfort her, but she pulled away and disappeared from sight, leaving the forlorn elderly figure alone with his sphinxes and his golf deck.
‘Now tell me how all this is going to help you to find Adil?’
Makana glanced over at Gaber.
‘That’s the part I haven’t worked out yet,’ he said finally.
An hour later, Makana walked into Aswani’s restaurant. It was early for lunch, but after spending the morning in Hanafi’s world he needed to get back down to earth. It was strange, but nothing improved his mood like that place, gloomy as it invariably was. No customers anywhere to be seen today. The reddish-brown marble pillars that adorned the interior were streaked with white which made it look as though worms were crawling out of them, and there was a dull buzzing of flies over the meat counter which Ali Aswani was busy swabbing down with a rag and a bowl of soapy water.
‘There’s someone waiting for you,’ he said, tipping his head towards the rear of the room.
Makana didn’t spot Okasha until he was almost at the end of it. The inspector was seated discreetly out of sight behind one of the big square pillars. He folded his newspaper as Makana sat down.
‘And they say your crimes never catch up with you,’ he said, tapping the story about Hanafi on the front page.
‘What do you think will happen?’
‘With Hanafi?’ Okasha shrugged. ‘Who cares? He’s nothing but an old-time
bultagi
. There’s a lot on his conscience. How he sleeps at night I’ll never know.’
‘How come he never came to trial?’
‘Because his kind never do. He has people out there doing his dirty work for him, never got his own hands bloody.’
‘And no doubt he pays well to keep his back clean.’
The theme of police corruption was not one that readily brought a smile to Okasha’s lips. On this occasion he managed to limit himself to a blank stare and a shrug. He pushed a large envelope across the table to Makana.
‘What’s this?’
‘Special delivery from London. I don’t know what you did to that woman but she’s worried about you, insisted I made sure you got to read this. So you see? Even I am at the service of the great detective. I am honoured.’
He gave a mock bow as Makana picked up the envelope and Ali came over to set two glasses of tea and a bunch of mint leaves down on the table.
‘Are you eating today?’ Aswani placed a bowl of pickles on the table and dried his big hands on the apron tied around his sizeable girth.
The inspector yawned and rubbed his expanding belly. ‘I have to watch what I eat. I’m getting out of shape. How about you?’
Makana shrugged.‘The usual.’
Okasha clicked his tongue in annoyance. ‘I give in. Bring me some of your kofta, Ali, but only half a kilo.’
Aswani twirled the ends of his moustache. ‘You’re a growing lad, you need your strength.’
‘Okay, make it a kilo. You’ll see me into the grave, I swear.’ Okasha waved him away and leaned his elbows on the table. ‘So, what does she say?’
Makana flipped the open seal on the envelope as he glanced at Okasha.
‘You didn’t even take a quick look?’
Okasha rubbed his broad chin. ‘I can’t read English to save my life.’
The envelope contained a sheaf of paper, which turned out to be a long letter from Hayden summing up the preliminary results of her investigation into Liz Markham’s death. The letter was officially addressed to Okasha, but a yellow note stuck to the front page was for Makana:
The detective hired by Lord Markham to find his granddaughter is named Richard Strangeways. Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate a complete copy of his report. I spoke to him by telephone but he is getting on in years and his memory is not what it was. He cannot recall the name of Alice Markham’s father, which unfortunately is not included in the pages I have photocopied for you. We are working on getting hold of a complete copy but this is complicated by the fact that the agency has moved several times over the intervening years and no one knows where everything is stored. Strangeways is pretty sure that the father of the child was Egyptian and that this was the reason for Liz Markham’s visit to Cairo in
1981
. I will get in touch again as soon as I manage to get hold of a full copy. I am sure that Inspector Okasha is grateful for all the help you can give him on the case, and of course I would greatly appreciate it if you could keep me informed of your findings.
Best wishes,
Janet Hayden
‘You seem to enjoy better cooperation with Scotland Yard than I do,’ sighed Okasha, leaning back to run a quick, wary glance around the room. Makana instinctively did the same, his eye catching a shadow flitting past the open doorway.
‘It’s not Scotland Yard. She’s with Special Branch.’
‘Forgive me.’
Makana’s tea cooled as he skimmed quickly through Hayden’s report of her interview with Strangeways before turning to the first photocopied page and beginning to read.
Richard Strangeways had arrived in Cairo on
18
January
1982
, almost two months after Alice disappeared. He stayed in the Al Hassanain Hotel, the same place where Liz and Alice had stayed, and where, some seventeen years later, Liz had been murdered. Strangeways questioned the manager, the desk staff, cleaners, cooks and waiters . . . anyone he could lay his hands on. It was not a happy place, he decided. The staff were poorly paid and there was much resentment towards management, which suggested to him they might have been susceptible to bribes; certainly they’d had no trouble taking his money.
Makana wondered how many of them had been interviewed by the police at the time. From the report it was fairly plain that Strangeways did not enjoy being in Cairo. He didn’t seem to like Egyptians much either, but that was perhaps understandable considering the lack of cooperation he received from the police, who hadn’t taken to him. Easy to see why. An Englishman, not even a regular police officer, flies in to start poking around, claiming that he has the blessing of an English aristocrat on his enquiries. Makana could see how that would have gone down. Strangeways had drawn a similar conclusion: ‘They still bear grudges against us. Over Suez, the bad old days when Britannia ruled the waves, and God knows what else.’
Hayden had noted against this on the report the fact that she suspected some personal conflict had arisen between Strangeways and the Cairo police. They seemed to have taken the disappearance of Alice Markham as a slur on their professional ability, something they preferred to cover up as quickly as possible rather than seriously try to solve. The man in charge of the investigation was particularly obstructive. He was named as Inspector Serrag. The same man Makana had picked out in the photograph with Gaber and Adil Romario.
‘Did you know all this?’ Makana asked. Okasha pursed his mouth as if he had just bitten into a lime. He nodded. ‘I tried to raise it with him, but you know how it is. You don’t just speak to someone like Colonel Serrag. You put word around and wait to see if he comes back to you.’ Okasha bit into an olive and shrugged. ‘He didn’t come back.’
The food arrived and while Okasha immediately set to work on it, Makana hunched forward, completely absorbed in speculation. A faint nagging told him this was wrong, that he ought to be putting all his energy into Adil Romario’s disappearance, but he couldn’t shake off the conviction that there was a connection between that and Liz Markham’s death.
Strangeways had once had a good, analytical mind. It came through in his work, in his descriptions of people and the possible links between them. But he’d clearly been out of his depth in Cairo. The language he used became more dense, abstract even, like a man caught up in an obsession. He was convinced that he’d found himself in the midst of a conspiracy, that the people who met him with smiles and polite apologies were hiding something. The area around the bazaar was ruled by ruffians, mobsters who ran protection rackets, all of whom were, in Strangeways’s opinion, in league with the police. The Englishman did not hide his annoyance at the investigating officers’ lack of cooperation. He went on at length about waiting in vain at division headquarters for a chance to speak to Inspector Serrag. The Egyptians were making him suffer because they were embarrassed by the case and resented being questioned about it by their former colonial rulers.
Besides the copy of the partial report, Hayden had also provided some more detail about Liz Markham’s background. Born into a wealthy family, she had rebelled at an early age. Her father had inherited his title and the young Elizabeth apparently never came to terms with her privilege. The drug addiction began early on and led to her expulsion from a long list of expensive schools in England. She was then sent abroad, to France and Spain. She had run away on several occasions. It was on one of these excursions that she had landed up in Egypt and met the man who became Alice’s father. When Liz arrived back in England, pregnant, her father disowned her and threw her out of the house. Strong-headed and determined, Liz Markham had decided to go ahead and have the child on her own. Again, probably in express defiance of her father’s wishes.