Authors: Parker Bilal
‘It took a little longer than I had hoped,’ she wrote. ‘But I finally managed to get hold of a complete copy of Strangeways’s original report into the disappearance of Alice Markham. It had been carted out to storage facilities in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, I hope it will be of some use in your investigation. I have taken the liberty of making two copies, one for Inspector Okasha, and the other for you.’
The letter went on at some length to explain how Hayden had managed to get hold of the report. Makana flipped through the photocopies impatiently, looking for what he needed. It didn’t take long. Then he sat back and closed his eyes, suddenly exhausted. He should read the whole report carefully, but that could wait twenty minutes or so while he caught up on his sleep. He felt as though he were falling into a bottomless pit as his eyes shut.
When they opened again someone was calling his name. Umm Ali, her nightdress now covered by a more substantial
ibaya,
stood on the path looking fretful. Red and blue lights were reflected against the wall in front of him. She pointed wordlessly.
Wearily, Makana made his way up the path to find Okasha waiting for him. A police car was parked under the eucalyptus tree. It was early evening and the streets were busy with revellers heading for their night’s entertainment. A continuous musical soundtrack of drums, strings and flutes echoed from the open windows of passing cars. In the ghostly orange glow of the streetlights, Okasha was visible, crouched in the passenger seat of the Mercedes, looking through the documents he had found tucked under the sun visor. He didn’t look up when Makana leaned on the open door and lit a cigarette.
‘You’re an interesting man, Makana,’ said the inspector, without lifting his head. ‘I’ve said it before and I shall no doubt say it again. A lot of people in your position would have gone to pieces long ago, but not you.’ Okasha glanced up at him. ‘Nice car. Not really your style though. Where did you say you got it?’
‘I borrowed it.’
‘From a friend, yes, you said. And I told you that you don’t have any friends.’
‘Are you going to tell me what this is all about?’
Okasha dangled an object inside a transparent plastic bag in the air. Makana took it and held it up to the orange light. Inside was a large and somewhat cheap gold watch. He turned it over in his hands.
‘You don’t recognise it?’ Okasha climbed out of the car and tossed the vehicle registration at him. ‘That’s funny, because it belongs to the same man whose car you’ve been driving.’
Makana lifted the bag again. The wristwatch was a copy of a Rolex. Most of the fake gold plating had come off and a patina of rust now decorated the edges. Turning it over, he found a name engraved on the back:
Salim Farag
.
‘Where did you find this?’
‘It was attached to an arm,’ said Okasha. ‘Well, actually it was only part of an arm.’ He indicated his own elbow. ‘It turned up in a net full of fish that was hauled in by a fisherman, working in the timeless way we like to think still exists.’
‘Where was this?’
‘A dump just north of El Gouna. Perhaps you know it? It’s close to Hurghada.’ Okasha scratched the back of his neck. ‘Funny, isn’t it? I mean, if he hadn’t been so fat it would have been lost for ever. And just imagine if the creature that ate the rest of him had swallowed this bit instead.’
Makana recalled the wind blowing off the whitecaps; the fishermen tugging their boat into the beach.
‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘Gouna used to be nothing. A lagoon with a little fishing village. A few houses. No one ever went there before the developers moved in. Now it’s a luxury resort, a little more upmarket than neighbouring Hurghada. Come on!’ Okasha leaned forward and stabbed Makana in the chest with his forefinger. ‘You’re going to tell me this is all a coincidence, right? Vronsky’s resort is at El Gouna. You went to see him, and now you just happen to be driving the car of a man whose arm washed up on a beach without the rest of him attached to it. Tell me it’s not connected. Anybody else would already have arrested you on suspicion of murder.’
‘It sounds like a terrible accident to me.’ Makana handed the watch back.
‘I can see you’re devastated by the news.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t really know the man.’
‘Which brings us back to why you are driving his car.’
‘Farag was in business with Adil Romario.’
Okasha hefted the watch in his left hand. ‘So you went to see Farag, then what?’
‘Then we both went to visit his business associate, Alexei Vronsky.’
‘I warned you about this.’
‘I’m telling you what happened. I left Farag at Vronsky’s place.’
Okasha cast Makana a warning glance. ‘If you’re trying to suggest that our esteemed Russian friend of the state might have something to do with this Farag becoming fish food, you need to think again, my friend.’
The long tendrils of the eucalyptus tree swayed above them in the warm breeze, leaves trailing like slender fingers, tracing patterns in the dust.
‘I borrowed his car to get home. That’s it. I told you, I left him with Vronsky.’
‘And I told you that Vronsky is out of reach. I don’t want to hear about him.’
‘You’re treating this as murder?’
‘And make myself the laughing stock of the entire police force? He was eaten by a shark. I can’t call that anything but an unfortunate accident.’ Okasha hefted the watch in his palm. ‘This could spell a lot of trouble for you, though. You’re driving his car. I could make a case out of that alone.’
‘Why would I kill Farag?’
‘Who knows the mysteries of your life, Makana? Why do you live on a sinking old heap of firewood?’
‘Sounds like stalemate to me,’ said Makana, turning to face the river. Okasha sighed and folded his arms. Both men leaned back against the car, side by side.
‘I’m serious, Vronsky is out of your reach. He’s out of everyone’s reach. He’s a national security asset, I told you that. He has protection in high places.’
‘I gather your raid wasn’t a complete success?’
‘It was a disaster,’ sighed the inspector. ‘They were waiting for us. The place was like a fort. No sign of Bulatt.’
‘But you have evidence he is in the country, right?’
‘Oh, he’s here all right, and we’ll get him. But he was warned we were coming.’ Okasha turned to look Makana in the eye. ‘Nobody knew about the raid. It was top secret.’
‘You told me.’
‘But you didn’t tell anyone else, right?’
‘What do you think?’
The air went out of Okasha’s lungs like a slow puncture as he turned away. ‘Sixteen civilians dead, twenty-seven wounded. It was a massacre. Serrag’s men just let loose like there was no tomorrow. We lost two of our own.’
‘Another great victory for the state.’
Okasha thumped the side of the Mercedes with the palm of his hand, so hard that the driver who was dozing in the squad car jumped.
‘I don’t need lessons in morality from you, Makana.’
‘You know you’re never going to win the war this way, don’t you?’
‘
Ya salaam!
Now you’re going to lecture me about how to win the war against the fanatics.’ Okasha thrust his face towards Makana’s. ‘The last I heard, you came running to us for help.’
‘For every one of those killed, you create ten more jihadists.’
The two men stared at one another, realising perhaps for the first time that they were set on different courses, as if facing one another from the decks of two ships that had just veered apart, avoiding collision, watching the gulf widen between them.
‘Maybe I should do what they keep saying and send you back,’ said Okasha finally.
‘Every man has to know his own limits.’
The policeman levelled a finger at him. ‘You’ve been spending too much time up in that fancy apartment of Hanafi’s. Don’t forget that when this is all over and done with, you’ll have to come back down here and live among the rest of us.’
‘Did you read Hayden’s report?’
‘No.’ Okasha kicked the dust with the heel of his boot, looking for all the world like a little boy who hadn’t done his homework. ‘I haven’t got the time to read a report about the disappearance of a girl twenty years ago.’
‘If you had you would know that Alice Markham was Bulatt’s daughter.’
The expression on Okasha’s face turned from rage to incredulity. He straightened up.
‘His daughter?’
‘The young man Liz Markham met when she originally came here on holiday was Daud Bulatt. He was hanging around the hotels, looking for foreign girls in need of hashish. He is the one she came looking for five years later with their little girl.’
‘So who took her?’
‘Hanafi’s young wife and son had just been gunned down by Bulatt’s thugs. Who do you think took her?’
‘Hanafi killed her?’ Okasha thumped a fist against the side of the car. ‘But there’s no evidence. Nothing to prove it.’
‘Would you act on it if there was?’
Okasha’s eyes swivelled round to fix on Makana. If there was ever a moment when the two men might have come to blows, thought Makana, this was it. But Okasha simply shook his head, then turned and walked away. ‘You’re like a drowning man,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘clinging to the wreckage. Only pride prevents you from taking the hand that’s reaching down to save you.’
Makana watched him go. He was thinking it would be a shame to make an enemy of this man. After a time he realised Umm Ali was calling to him. In the distance the telephone was ringing.
The stadium was floodlit. From high up in the office building it reminded Makana of a cemetery. Instead of tombs, of course, it had statues of Hanafi, resplendent in the dark, their golden visages gleaming in the harsh glare. It seemed a fitting monument to the great man himself. A symbol of the heights to which he had lifted himself, and of the absurdity of his desire to rule the world, building his empire literally in the sand. Off in the distance the skyline was split by the rigid angularity of Kheops’ pyramid, lit up itself against the ripped net of stars by white beams that raked the sky like luminous trees swaying in a storm.
Soraya Hanafi was a whisper, a sliver of a shadow, over by the window. The conference room where they had first met was unlit but the glow that filtered in from outside was bright enough to see by. She turned to face him as he stepped over to the window alongside her.
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘It looks like a temple.’ Makana nodded down at the half-finished stadium. ‘Something a pharaoh might have been proud of.’
Something about her had changed, almost as if she was dissolving into the shadows around her. Her hair was loose and unkempt, curling around her face as she seemed to sway in the shifting light.
‘I’m sorry to ask you to come out here so late.’
‘Why are you still here?’
‘Oh, I was working, and suddenly none of it made sense any more. Don’t you ever get that feeling?’
Makana glanced at her. ‘I have bad days.’ He was aware that she was staring at him intently. When his eyes mets hers she turned away, looking back out at the stadium and the darkness beyond.
‘You would be able to see the stars if all those lights didn’t block them out. Doesn’t that sum up the foolishness of man?’
‘To obliterate the very heavens your towers are meant to reach?’
‘Yes, something like that.’ The planes of her soft, unblemished face caught the light in a way that gave her the regal air of a Nefertiti – wife of the heretic Akhenaten.
‘You told me once about an Englishwoman who was murdered . . .’
‘Elizabeth Markham.’
‘She came here to look for her daughter, isn’t that correct? Did you ever find out what happened to her . . . the little girl, I mean?’
‘Everything points to her having been killed.’
‘Why would anyone kill a little girl?’
‘Revenge. An eye for an eye. That kind of thing. She was caught between two very dangerous men.’
‘One of them was my father, wasn’t he?’
Makana hesitated for a second. ‘Your father did a lot of bad things in the old days.’
‘It’s all right,’ Soraya said, her face breaking into an uneven smile. ‘I am no longer a child. I think I am finally beginning to see my father clearly for the first time.’
Makana had debated with himself how much to tell her. What proof did he have that Hanafi had killed Alice Markham? None. He suspected that little Alice had been a casualty in the war between Bulatt and Hanafi, but he knew nothing for certain. What he did need, however, was for Soraya to see things clearly, to see her father as he really was.
‘I wanted to speak to you because I feel that perhaps I am the cause of all this. Of Adil’s disappearance.’
‘What makes you say that?’
She began to speak and then stopped herself, turning away instead.
‘What happened to that girl, by the way, the actress?’
‘Mimi? I’m not sure. I hope she went to Beirut.’