9th October
“Don’t you like pastries?” Hani sounded puzzled instead of angry. She’d been ploughing her way through a dozen basbousa, stuffing them into her mouth with sticky fingers at the start, then eating more slowly and finally nibbling, mouselike around the edge, once she realized Raf wasn’t going to tell her to stop.
Her lunchtime vitamin stood untouched by her plate.
“What?”
Raf glanced up to find dark eyes staring at him from a pinched face. He tried to make sure he and Hani ate together at weekends, while Donna bustled around in the background, banging together pans and clattering knives into a double stone sink, each side large enough to be a horse trough.
The kitchen took up most of the ground floor of the al-Mansur madersa. Outside was a tiled courtyard with a fountain and beyond that a stone garden house, then a walled garden, roofed over with glass.
Above the kitchen was the qaa, where important guests were greeted. This had a large marble floor and smaller indoor fountain. The haremlek was a suite of rooms above the qaa and Raf’s floor was at the top, above the haremlek.
The madersa was vast, old and badly in need of repair, but no other room was as large as Donna’s kitchen, which seemed to spread in all directions.
It had taken Raf a while to realize that Donna’s clattering wasn’t irritation at finding him cluttering up her space, which was so big a crowd couldn’t have cluttered it; she objected to his presence for different reasons. People like Hani and His Excellency were meant to eat upstairs, at a marble table in the elegant qaa, waited on by others.
“You’re not listening to me . . .” Hani said crossly.
“I’m sorry . . .” She was right. He wasn’t.
There wasn’t much else Raf could say. But Hani wanted more. Something dismissive of her concern, something adult. He could see that in her eyes, the wish for a fight so that she could stop being worried for him and go back to being angry.
“Look,” he said softly, “let it go, okay?”
By the time the noise of her falling chair had finished echoing round the kitchen, Hani was out of the room and racing up the outside steps to the qaa. Raf listened to her shoes slap the floor overhead, then heard Hani slam a hand against the button for the lift. Seconds later the madersa’s ancient Orvis creaked into action.
Raf put his head in his hands. When he looked up again Donna was sitting on the other side of the table and in front of him was a tiny cup of Turkish coffee. It was the old woman’s cure for everything.
“The child’s young, Your Excellency.”
Raf nodded.
“And she’s scared.”
“That I will send her away?”
Donna shook her head and discreetly rubbed her crucifix. “That you will die.” The old woman’s voice was matter-of-fact. “Since her aunt . . . She dreams all the time. That you die and she be left here alone.” Donna shrugged. “They would not let people like me look after Lady Hana. They would not let me live here . . .”
Only Donna got away with calling the child by her real name. Everyone else had to use Hani. Named for the boy the child resented not being.
“Go to her, Excellency,” said Donna, “and talk.”
“And say what?” His question sounded weak even to him.
The old woman shrugged. “That you will not be going away. That you don’t plan to die.” Her lips twisted into a sour smile at Raf’s expression.
“Well, does Your Excellency?”
Raf shook his head.
“No,” said Donna, crossing herself. “Somehow I didn’t think so.”
“Go away.” Hani didn’t bother looking up from her screen. On the floor beside her chair sat an untouched toy dog, still in its packaging. It was the most expensive model Raf had been able to afford.
“It smells in here,” said Raf.
She did look round at that.
“Old clothes,” he said, gesturing to a bundle on the floor. “Old clothes and misery . . .” Raf pulled back the inner shutter of a mashrabiya and autumn sunlight washed into Hani’s bedroom, through her balcony’s ornately carved screen.
“Now I can’t see my monitor.”
“You can use it later,” Raf said, “but first we need to talk.” He sat on the red-tiled floor, his spine hard against the edge of her metal bed. The springs were rusted and the mattress so old that horsehair poked through holes in its cover. Changing the thing was absolutely out of the question, apparently.
“Sit by me . . .”
Hani sighed and made a great show of turning off her machine, even though they both knew it would have gone to sleep at a simple voice command. Then, surprisingly, she did as he asked and parked herself next to Raf, her own back pressed into the side of the bed. Dust flecks danced in the afternoon sunlight in front of them. Their ersatz randomness actually the result of immutable laws of heat and motion.
“I saw a body yesterday morning.”
Hani grew still.
“It was at Zara’s house. A stranger . . .” Raf added hurriedly.
“You’ve seen bodies before,” Hani said.
He nodded, they both had. Aunts Nafisa and Jalila. Those deaths were one of the things that bound them together.
“When you were an assassin . . .”
“Hani!” They’d been through this before. “I was an attaché . . . Nothing more.”
“Attachés are spies. Spies kill people. Everyone knows that.”
Raf sighed.
“Who was he?” Hani asked.
“She,” Raf corrected. “And we haven’t found out yet.” Obviously enough, he didn’t mention the mutilation, which was actually a cross potent according to the pathologist, who’d looked it up.
Toxicology showed heavy traces of an mdma clone in the victim’s blood and alcohol in her stomach. The girl had been alive and conscious from the start of the attack until near the end. And swabs taken from her oral, anal and vaginal mucosa indicated that she’d first been raped, then cut. So Raf now had a file to read on crosses coupe, which had apparently been the mutilation of choice during something called “the little war.” There was one bite mark, below her right breast, but that was faded and the bruise yellow. So either it happened before she arrived in Isk, it was the result of a casual holiday romance or her boyfriend had come with her but had yet to step forward.
Which, at least, would give Raf one sensible suspect. Provided the boyfriend could be shown to have nerves of steel and a reasonable grasp of anatomy.
“The trouble,” Raf told Hani, “is in realizing when facts aren’t related . . .”
He halted himself there, wondering whether to begin again and decided not to bother with the talking. With luck, sitting next to Hani would be enough, because when he was a child, the point at which adults started in on explanations was the moment he stopped listening.
“Everything is related,” said Hani. And glancing sideways, Raf realized her face was screwed up in thought. “That’s what Khartoum says . . .”
The kid was nine, whipcord thin, with the body of a child younger still and eyes old before their time. Lack of sleep, bad dreams and night sweats, he remembered them all well. Although, these days, if Raf worked at it, he could go for months without recalling them once.
“Maybe he’s right,” said Raf finally. “Maybe everything does connect.”
“You don’t know?” Hani looked interested.
“No.”
“I thought spies knew everything.”
“Not me.” Raf shook his head. “Me, I know nothing, except that I’m not going to send you away, I’m not going to leave you and nobody is going to kill me . . .”
“Aunts Jalila and Nafisa were killed . . .” She waited for Raf to nod, which he did. “But the reason’s a secret . . .”