Authors: Parker Bilal
Nevertheless, it was Lord Markham who had hired a detective to find Alice when the child went missing. Why? Makana remembered then what Janet Hayden had told him about Liz Markham having a nervous breakdown. Once back in England she was placed in a mental hospital and her father took over the search. That would explain the lack of input from Liz’s side in the earlier days. In any case, Strangeways arrived in Cairo with little to go on. This might have explained why, right from the outset, he assumed that the disappearance of the little girl was driven by political motives. Makana knew what this meant: Strangeways had blindly followed his employer’s assumption that someone had taken advantage of his gullible daughter going where she had no business going. It wasn’t so different from Makana’s own difficulties in taking instruction from Hanafi.
Besides that, Strangeways had arrived in Cairo at a difficult time. President Sadat, a friend of the West, had just been gunned down by his own soldiers. Egypt was lurching towards radical Islamism, fuelled by anti-Western feelings. This fed into the picture Strangeways painted of a country on the brink of anarchy. He saw bearded zealots everywhere, which only added to his sense of discomfort and personal insecurity. It also coloured his perception of the case. In his eyes Alice was the victim of some kind of jihad or holy war. He clearly believed that kidnapping the grandchild of an English lord would be a feather in the cap of any religious fanatic. Makana sighed as he read this. The Englishman had obviously concluded that the girl would never be found alive, although in the report he delivered to Alice’s grandfather this was couched in more diplomatic terms.
Towards the end of the report, though, Strangeways began to hint at an alternative possibility. No ransom demand had been made and nobody had claimed responsibility for the girl vanishing. This led Strangeways to speculate that Alice’s disappearance might have an explanation rooted in her background. He would have known about Liz’s drug habit, and made the implied connection to the underworld. Was it possible, he wondered, that Alice Markham had been kidnapped by her own father?
At this point the photocopied pages ran out. Hayden had scribbled a note on the last page to explain that she would let Makana know as soon as she had something more. ‘It seems entirely possible,’ she went on, ‘that Liz Markham might have crossed the line and made contact with people in the criminal world. Who did she know? Who was Alice Markham’s father?’ The last sentence was heavily underscored.
Makana paused to mull this over. Fair enough, Liz Markham was not the most reliable mother in the world. She had a serious drug problem and was in all likelihood incapable of taking care of herself, let alone a four-year-old child. What if she had simply found herself in deep water, dealing with characters she didn’t really know, in a city she didn’t understand? Had Liz made a mistake on that occasion, one she spent the rest of her life trying to put right? If she suspected who had taken her daughter, then her repeatedly coming back here made sense. But what if she hadn’t come here looking for her daughter at all but for Alice’s father instead?
It was entirely possible that the father, whoever he was, had not known that his brief relationship with the English girl had resulted in a child. Why had Liz Markham come to Cairo with her daughter in the first place? What had she hoped to gain? Makana tried to put himself in her shoes. She had a drug problem and an illegitimate child. Her father had disowned her and cut off her allowance. If she came here, it must have been to seek help. She’d brought the child along to persuade Alice’s father to help her, which meant that he had money. She wouldn’t have come here looking for a waiter or a pool attendant. Whoever Alice’s father was, he would have to have been someone big . . .
‘So where does this leave us?’
Okasha pushed aside the plates and burped quietly. Makana surveyed the havoc he had inflicted on them.
‘It would really help if I could speak to Serrag.’
‘I told you,’ Okasha wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, ‘Serrag is not going to speak to anyone . . . not me, and least of all you . . . about a case that took place so long ago. Why should the disappearance of a girl all those years before lead to the death of her mother now?’ He raised his shoulders in a shrug. ‘It makes no sense.’
‘This is an ongoing investigation,’ Makana reminded him. ‘There are no certainties as yet.’
‘No certainties?’ Okasha queried. ‘You see, that’s the kind of comment you could only hear from a man with no one to answer to. You live outside the law, Makana, but some of us have to account for our actions. And besides, Serrag is no longer regular police. He’s SSI.’
‘There’s something here that we are not seeing. Why would an Englishwoman be tortured and killed in her hotel room? The motive wasn’t sexual, and no money was taken, so what was it about? The answer has to lie in her past.’
‘Agreed, but all this stuff about the child and the father . . . do you really think that’s relevant?’
Makana lit a cigarette and sat back, considering. ‘I don’t know.’
‘You want to hear what I think?’ Okasha picked his teeth with a matchstick. ‘I think you are chasing straws in the wind.’
Then Makana remembered something Gaber had told him earlier.
‘Does the name Daud Bulatt mean anything to you?’
Okasha shrugged his shoulders. ‘I think he was one of the cheap thugs who used to operate around here, back in the old days.’
‘Can you find out?’
‘What for? Look, Makana, I’m going to find the person who murdered that woman, if only to show those arrogant English detectives that we can do our job. But don’t forget that you’re on our side, not theirs.’
Makana stared out through the open door. ‘Alice would be a grown woman by now.’
Okasha’s eyes hardened. ‘She’s dead,’ he said quietly. ‘Face the facts. Look, I know this is difficult for you. I’m telling you this . . . as a friend. You need to leave this case alone. You have to let it go. Sometimes it’s better to let the past lie. You, more than anyone, ought to understand that.’
The two men stared at one another for a moment, then Makana got to his feet.
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘Seven years is long enough to forget anyone.’
‘Come on, don’t do that! Hey, what am I going to do with all this food?’ Okasha cried, as Aswani set down yet another plate piled high with freshly grilled kofta. But when he looked towards the door there was no longer any sign of Makana.
Makana knew Okasha was right. He was mixing things up in his head and was in danger of being swept away by his own theorising. Still, he could not help it. Thoughts of his own daughter and where she might have been now had she lived were never going to leave him. Was there really any purpose in going after Liz Markham’s daughter? Was his intuition right? Could there be a connection between Liz Markham’s death and Hanafi’s past, or was that just wishful thinking on his part?
Having just read Strangeways’s report, Makana looked at the bazaar around him in a different way. He imagined how it might have appeared to Liz Markham, scared and alone, with a little child in tow. The memory of Alice Markham was now written into these narrow streets, the cluttered shop windows, the glittering rows of gold and semi-precious stone, the tiny statuettes of goddesses and fiends, idols of another age. All around him was the intricate interplay of colour and inlay, angle and curve, shadow and light. Somewhere in the middle of all this a little girl had fallen through a hole in the world and vanished without trace. Who was he searching for among the stern faces of Horus and Osiris, all staring out at him from eternity? Was it Alice he hoped to find, or his own daughter Nasra?
Makana knew he needed someone who remembered the old days. Someone who had been around here back then. If Serrag was not going to cooperate, maybe he could find someone else who would. It took him only a few minutes to get back to the arch in the old city wall where the vendors had set out their collected piles of junk, their voices ringing back and forth across the narrow alley to the people brushing by. It was a relief to step out of the bustle and turn down the alley towards the dusty old antiquities shop. The area around it was deserted. Hardly anyone seemed to venture into that corner of the bazaar. The wizened old man in the dark glasses was exactly where Makana had left him. He sat, one leg crossed over the other, a cigarette smouldering between his skeletal fingers.
‘Who are you looking for this time?’
‘Do I have to be looking for someone?’ asked Makana.
‘Only you can answer that question,’ said the man, getting slowly to his feet and motioning for Makana to follow.
The shop was even more cluttered than he had imagined the first time he’d peered in through the doorway. There were objects hanging from the beams and walls, as well as taking up every available surface. It was impossible to move in there without hitting something. Makana wondered why anyone would keep a shop full of useless, outdated objects. They seemed to have no possible value in today’s world, and in such quantity served only to prevent anyone from actually getting into the place. And from what he recalled from his last visit, even if they tried the old man was liable to chase them out.
‘Will you drink coffee?’ The man’s voice echoed faintly from far inside the interior of the shop. He had disappeared from sight. Makana followed the sound to the far end of the room where he found a few steps leading down to a low doorway. Ducking through, he found another staircase with a workshop at the foot of it. The dust appeared to stop at the threshold. Inside it was dark and cool and spotlessly clean. Long and with a low vaulted ceiling, the room stretched ahead of him to wide doors at the far end, which opened on to a small, sunlit yard with a palm tree in the middle of it. The yard appeared to be dotted with wooden bird cages and the air was filled with song.
The wall on one side was lined with bookshelves. Opposite this a workbench ran the entire length of the room. There were strip lights suspended from the ceiling and an array of tools displayed on a rack on the wall. Makana saw pots of ink and stacks of various types of paper. He realised he was looking at a forger’s workshop. There was a work light fixed above a huge magnifying glass on a stand. Over this, on the wall, was a papyrus painting – a copy of an illustration from the
Book of the Dead
. At the centre of the picture a large set of scales was depicted. Beside them a strange beast stood in attendance. It had the jaws of a crocodile and the body of a lion. Makana reached the yard as the old man placed a brass pot on a simple gas burner.
‘This is from the Yemen, it’s the best coffee there is. Bilquis, the Queen of Sheba, used to drink this.’
Marvelling at the way a tiny enclave of tranquillity had been created in the centre of the city, Makana moved around the yard, leaning closer to examine the birds in the cages. They were some kind of exotic species he had never seen before.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘In this place? Oh, longer than I can remember. I’ve seen people born, grow up to become fathers and die. Then I’ve seen their sons become fathers.’
‘Then you must have heard most of what goes on around here.’
‘There are things that I hear.’ The old man’s eyes glinted behind his dark glasses. ‘And things that I don’t.’ He helped himself to one of Makana’s cigarettes without asking. ‘Why are you so concerned about this English girl who went missing?’
‘Don’t you think it strange? A woman loses her child and then seventeen years later is murdered in the same area?’
‘I’m not sure strange is how I would describe it.’ The old man stared into the brass pot as he gently stirred the bubbling black liquid. A rich, burned aroma filled the air.
‘Then how would you describe it?’
The old man gestured for him to sit down at a small table set beneath the bird cages.
‘I think things happen for a reason. We may not see it at the time. Indeed, it may be many years before the reasons become clear, but there is always a pattern into which these things fit.’
In another time and place, that might have sounded to Makana like the kind of spiritual nonsense in which people applaud themselves for finding comfort, but he found himself listening keenly to what the old man had to say.
‘Something about this story has disturbed you,’ the man observed. ‘Is she related to you?’
‘No.’
‘Then perhaps you lost a child yourself . . . a girl?’
Makana reached over to take back his cigarettes. Silently, the old man watched him for a moment and then lifted his chin ever so slightly, as if he felt his opinion had been borne out. Turning back to the little paraffin burner, he lifted the pot off the flame and poured the rich tar-like coffee into two small white porcelain cups.
‘The path to oneness is full of suffering and pain,’ he said as he placed a cup on the table in front of Makana.
‘I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,’ he replied, mildly irritated.
‘It means that I see what you yourself cannot.’
‘And what might that be?’
The gaunt cheeks hollowed as the old man sucked smoke from the thin, poorly packed cigarette. ‘To understand suffering and pain we must live in the present.’ He exhaled. ‘Between past and future. A Sufi lives in his words, which are secret paths through the world. His knowledge derives not from religious scripture but from the uniqueness of his experience . . . from the present.’