She wore no bra.
She didn't move and nor did he, seemingly flash-frozen to the spot. Then, infinitely slowly, she moved his hand softly, letting her suddenly erect nipple write a line of fire across his palm.
ZeeZee started to breathe again.
Gently he reached under the cloth of her T-shirt to find a breast that was was full and warm, smooth to the touch. Close to, her long dark hair smelled of resin and oil, unwashed and almost animal.
'God.' ZeeZee sucked in his breath as he found her nipple with his thumb and first finger.
'Softly,' she said over her shoulder and he nodded, even though he knew she couldn't really see him.
Much later, when the Boeing was halfway across the Atlantic and most of the other cabin passengers were sleeping, ZeeZee smoothed his hand back across her hip and ran his fingers gently up that seam. And only the fact she opened her knees slightly told him that she wasn't also asleep.
One button fastened the band of her cheap chinos and the fly was a simple nylon zip, nothing fancy or expensive like tiny straps, toggles or invisible velcro. Katia couldn't afford designer clothes, even if they'd been available in whichever unpronounceable city it was she came from.
Terrified she'd say no, ZeeZee began to ease the zip, as if undoing it extra slowly meant she might not notice. Then he popped the single button at her waist. When she still didn't protest, he let his fingertips creep gently down her abdomen, reaching for the waistband of her knickers. What he found was tight body hair, then dampness and finally heat.
Katia wore nothing underneath, not even a basic thong ...
She wouldn 't look at him when the cabin lights came up. Her jeans were already buttoned and zipped, her T-shirt smoothed down. She'd rearranged both herself about an hour earlier, just before she drifted into sleep.
ZeeZee was more relieved than hurt by her sudden distance and put the earbead he'd borrowed politely but silently into her hand. Despite himself, he was grinning as he left the Boeing.
He was fifteen. He'd never yet kissed a girl — but he'd had one tighten frantically around his fingers and then, when her gasps were safely swallowed, push her hand back into the waistband of his trousers to squeeze until her wrist was sticky with his release.
Seattle was definitely the right place for him to be.
Chapter Twenty
6th July
'Guard the door for me,' Felix told Raf, resting his Speed Graphic on Lady Nafisa's desk and pulling a foil packet from his hip pocket. Ripping open the foil, he pulled out what looked like a large condom, shaking it between first finger and thumb until a tissue-thin glove was revealed.
'Surgical,' Felix told Raf, ripping open a second packet. 'Nanopore latex, anti-static. I get them from the hospital. The standard-issue stuff round here is crap.' Felix shrugged. 'I could always change manufacturers, but they're probably paying kickback to the Khedive's second cousin
'What am I guarding against this time?' Raf asked as he watched the fat man struggle to force his thick fingers into the tight gloves.
The coroner,' said Felix cryptically and knelt beside the seated body. With his fingers out straight, he ran his right hand over Nafisa, never quite letting his fingertips get close enough to touch either flesh or clothes. It was as if he was feeling for something that wasn't there.
Taking his tiny maglite, the fat man swept its beam across Nafisa's skin as she sat in the chair. 'No fibres, no animal hair...' He was talking to his watch, to Raf and to the weird back-up device in the room outside, but mostly he was talking to himself. Getting himself ready for the bit the coroner wouldn't like.
The leather case Felix took from his pocket contained a Saez scalpel, the old-fashioned titanium-edged kind, a handful of glass thermometers, tiny combs, surgical swabs and glass holding tubes that could freeze themselves. He only planned to use the first two.
Lifting the edge of Lady Nafisa's skirt, Felix checked the dark bruises on her buttocks and lower thigh.
'Obvious lividity ...'
He pushed the bruising and watched the skin go pale beneath his fingers as the blood that gravity had pooled in the tissue moved aside. Within another couple of hours that would be fixed in place.
'... lividity still blanches.' That confirmed his time frame.
All he needed now, for thoroughness, was a core temperature reading. The simplest way of getting that was use a rectal thermometer, but Felix knew better than to even consider the idea. Instead he reached for his Saez scalpel, moved the skirt higher still and punched his scalpel through the skin of Nafisa's abdomen. Extracting the blade, Felix took a surgical thermometer and worked it deep into the tiny wound. Ninety seconds later he broke the red tag off the top of the thermometer to fix the temperature and withdrew the sliver of glass and silicon, dropping it into an evidence bag, which he initialled.
A human body lost roughly one-point-fìve degrees an hour, depending on surrounding temperature. The reading was within the limits he'd expect.
'Initialling postM wound ...'
Using his pen, Felix drew a circle around the wound on Lady Nafisa's abdomen, signed his initials and added the date and time. The coroner-magistrate would have a fit about it, there'd be another strong memo to the Minister mentioning desecration of the dead and Felix would get told not to do it again.
Again.
To which he'd reply, as he always did, that if he wasn't allowed to use the orifices that Allah provided, then he'd have to make his own. As yet Madame Mila hadn't come up with an answer that ... Mind you, she hadn't forgiven him either.
'Toxicology report ...' Slamming a sterile plastic reservoir into a syringe, Felix picked a vein in Nafìsa's wrist and drew blood. Circling and initialling the puncture mark. Let them complain about that, too.
The corpse felt warm through the latex of his glove as he lifted a breast to examine the pen buried beneath it. He felt for the edge of her ribcage and then counted up, already knowing what he was going to find.
'Penetrating wound to chest, between third and fourth ..." The blow was perfectly placed to puncture her heart. And it was a single stab wound, highly professional. Amateur assassins often missed. Suicides left hesitation cuts, little lacerations and half-hearted weals while they jabbed or slashed at themselves to see how much it was going to hurt.
Yet no defensive wounds were present to indicate that Lady Nafisa had even tried to fight for her life. And this was a woman notorious for fighting for everything she considered her due. One fact contradicted the other, Felix decided glumly, chewing at the inside of his lip as he always did when conflicting evidence ate away at the insides of his mind.
Lifting her right hand to recheck unbroken skin between the woman's thumb and first finger, Felix almost hissed with irritation. 'No defensive cuts to finger web, nor across palm or wrist ..." He stopped, turned over the hand to look at her nails. The cuticles were still manicured and immaculate, that morning's lacquer as dark and glossy as a blood trickle but the nail ends were badly chipped and ripped back, all of them.
If she'd been a girl locked in a cellar to starve to death, then that was what he'd expect her fingers to look like at the end of the first day, before they stopped being something used to scrabble at a locked door and became food instead. And it did happen, even in El Iskandryia — but only among the poor, out in the slums, to daughters and sisters who hadn't been as careful as their fathers or brothers expected. It didn't happen to the middle-aged and rich.