Felix shrugged. Kids weren't his area and the idea wouldn't have occurred to him. True enough, he had a daughter in Santa Fé. Only Trudi lived with her girlfriend, three tabby cats and a gun under her pillow; and the last time he'd seen his kid she'd probably been younger than the one sitting by the fountain playing with the tape.
These days his daughter had cropped hair, a razor-wire tattoo that wound up her arm from elbow to shoulder and nipples pierced with silver spikes, one tiny spike going across and the other down ... He knew about those because her last but one Christmas card had a picture of her and Barbara on the front, taken at a Gay Pride barbecue in San Francisco. They were stripped to the waist and holding bottles of Bud. Only the bottles were closer to their button-flied groins than they were to their mouths and Barbara had pierced nipples too, linked together by a chain.
Trudi looked hot and tired, so he'd written back saying he hoped she was taking vitamins and that if she had to go out like that in public he hoped she was wearing lots of sun cream. That earned him a postcard of a tram. Only three scrawled lines on the back but one of them was her new e-address. They wrote to each other now, not often but a couple of brief paragraphs once every few months. And she sent him more photographs of herself, fully clothed this time, with one of the cats sitting on her lap.
There'd been a time of no photographs at all, when Trudi was in her early teens and her mother was going through a religious phase, if that was what you could call moving state and announcing to her new neighbours that no, she wasn't divorced, her husband was dead. It had taken the ghost cancelling her alimony for five months to start the pictures flowing again. Before they did, he got a stiff letter from her attorney to which he'd had his own reply in Arabic. The photographs had restarted pretty soon after that.
'It would be best ...'
'No,' said Raf. Not waiting for Felix to finish the sentence. There were a number of reasons why he didn't want to leave the crime scene and go back to his office, only one of which he could tell Felix.
'I can't just leave Hani.'
That, at least, was true. Without Lady Nafisa the girl was a scrawny nothing. She wasn't pretty, she was way too young to be married off and, anyway, the kid was without a dowry. She had to be: Islamic law said girls couldn't inherit in their own right. So unless Lady Nafisa had left everything to a favourite charity someone other then Hani was going to inherit and the chances were it was him. And that wasn't what Raf wanted either.
A murder, money, the recent appearance of an unknown heir. Arrange into a winning combination ...
Before the murder, RenSchmiss was just one middle-aged woman's obsession. Now it would be debated in drawing rooms and cafes across North Africa.
If the fat man wanted to keep talking about Thiergarten killers, that was fine with Raf but he knew what conclusion most people would draw from the evidence. And that was before he factored the press into account. The press were there to service the newsfeeds, which meant pictures, syndicated to local feeds all round the world, including Seattle.
Raf sighed.
The beard, hair and any thought of polarized contacts would have to go and the shades make a long-term reappearance. It was just a pity he didn't have time for a completely new face to go with his new name and nationality.
'I'll stay ...' He held up one hand, stopping Felix in his tracks. 'Lady Nafisa was my aunt ...' He was about to say something crass, like duty demands it, when the fat man's mobile started beeping.
It kept beeping while Felix searched his trouser pockets and finally tracked the watch down to his jacket, which was upstairs in the qaa, slung over a silver chair.
'What?' Felix demanded. He made no attempt to keep the irritation out of his voice.
The Minister was on the other end again. Raf knew that from the way the Chief of Detectives suddenly straightened up, pausing mid-stride. One hand came up to smooth his hair, thick fingers once again slicking sweat across his scalp.
'Yes, sir. I'm glad your wife got home safely. I sent one of my best men with her ..." If the Minister noticed the criticism implicit in the fat man's words it didn't stop his list of questions.
'Exactly when did it happen?' Ripping aside the tape that closed off the study door, Felix walked over to the dead woman's desk and half closed her paper, making sure the sticky pages didn't actually touch. It was the midday edition. 'So far all I can say is that it happened after twelve noon,' said Felix. 'Yes,' he said, 'I can state that categorically.' Felix listened to the next request and instinctively shook his head, sending sweat trickling down the bridge of his nose.
'No, Your Excellency. I don't think we should turn the site investigation over to Madame Mila.'
'Yes, I know the General is ...'
'No, I'm not ...'
'If I can just ...'
'Yes, he's still here ...'
It was a one-way conversation after that, Felix's protests fading into silence, broken only towards the end when he nodded abruptly.
'Whatever you want, sir ..." Felix tapped a button to end the call, scowled balefully at his watch and stabbed a switch that put it back on standby.
'You should have got out when you had the chance,' he told Raf. 'The Minister wants you as my official witness.'
'Which means what?' Raf asked, pushing back his own hair. The wind that seeped in through the smashed mashrabiya was hot and sticky, and Nafisa's precious air-conditioning unit would probably have been reaching meltdown, if someone hadn't already ripped its thermostat from the wall, leaving wires trailing.
It might have been Raf's imagination but he was sure her body had already begun to smell.
'What does it mean? It means you stand in that doorway and watch me commit professional suicide. You don't come in the room, you don't interfere and you definitely don't talk while I'm working. Understand?'
No, he didn't. 'What am I witnessing?' Raf demanded.
'Me. While I do this.'
On the marble table where Lady Nafisa had given her lunch for the parents of Zara bint-Hamzah, Felix dumped a battered leather case with reinforced corners and a webbing strap to hold the top tight shut. The words on the strap read Property of the LAPD — do not remove without authorization. Yanking off the strap, Felix waved his hand in front of something that might have been a human head, had it not been made of clear perspex and filled with jumbled electronics. Chunks of crystal memory had been crudely glued to the back.
Its eyes briefly lit red.
'Meet Dr Dee,' said Felix. From the other side of the case Felix pulled a battered camera, a Speed Graphic digiLux so old it had a separate flash unit and came minus a removable memory dump, which was where Dr Dee came in ...
'First off, I'm going to sweep the scene, do crime-scene shots, then body shots. And finally I'm going to examine the body ... Your job is to see I don't plant or remove evidence and that I don't molest or defile the woman's corpse. You got any problems with that?'
Silence.
'Good, then let's get started ...' Felix slid out his hip flask, flipped its lid and downed the flask in one. 'Beats holding your nose or saying prayers every time,' he added sourly, noting Raf's undisguised shock.
Only when Felix was certain that the tiles directly in front of him were clear of clues did he lie flat and sweep the floor with the beam of a tiny maglite. Two blouse buttons showed up immediately, both near the wall. Other than that, there was only debris from the mashrabiya. Lady Nafisa had been as fanatical about outer cleanliness as she had been about the inner kind.