He hadn't yet removed his black jacket, which still looked immaculate after hours of questioning: and he'd only just taken off his dark glasses, after Madame Mila finally agreed to lower the brightness of the overhead lights.
It had been hypocritical of the fat man to have put on record at the outset that he hoped the coroner-magistrate knew what she was doing — because he didn't hope that at all. What he actually hoped — very much — was that Madame Mila was making the worst mistake of her short but impressive career.
'Hani heard you shouting at each other.' The sergeant kept his voice reasonable. At Madame Mila's earlier suggestion, he'd tried hectoring but that only made the man in front of him shut down. Emotionally autistic.
'Arguing,' stressed Madame Mila. 'All of last night.' That was the fact to which she kept coming back, time after time. The one fact Raf couldn't deny.
'She wanted me to marry Zara bint-Hamzah,' repeated Raf. 'I refused. She was cross.'
'Oh, she was way more than cross.' As ever, Madame Mila's voice was cutting. 'She threatened to disown you because you betrayed that poor girl. So this morning you went home and stabbed her. Rather than take the risk... That's what happened, wasn't it?'
'No,' said Raf. 'It wasn't
'So how did it happen?' The young police sergeant fired his question, but it might as well have been Coroner Mila speaking. This was definitely her show.
'I was in my office all morning.'
'No,' said the sergeant, looking at a screen, 'we've been over this. You left at 11.30 ...'
'And went straight to Le Trianon,' Raf shrugged. That's the same thing. You can check at Le Trianon.'
'We have. You left your capuccino undrunk and your paper on the table.'
'While I went for a stamp round Place Saad Zaghloul'
'Which was at what time?'
'Noon,' said Raf. 'Maybe later. As I said, I didn't look at my watch.'
Heartbeat, blood pressure and limbic pattern all held steady. Every diode on the Matsui polygraph lit a peaceful green. They might as well have been discussing the weather. Hell. The sergeant sucked at his teeth. The weather might have got more of a limbic reaction out of the man.
The officer glanced bleary-eyed down at his screen. 'According to the maitre d' you were gone for an hour, at least.'
Raf shook his head. 'I got back slightly before that, then waited to catch someone's eye. I wasn't in a hurry ...'
Madame Mila snorted.
'Besides,' said Raf calmly, 'you know there isn't time to walk there and back, from Zagloul to Sherif, inside an hour, never mind murder somebody and fake a break-in. Which I didn't.'
'So you took a taxi,' the sergeant announced tiredly.
'Then where's the driver?'
'We're finding him now.'
'No,' said Raf, looking straight at Madame Mila. 'You're not, because there was no taxi. I went nowhere near the Al-Mansur madersa at lunchtime and I didn't kill my aunt — as that machine has already verified ...' He nodded contemptuously at the primitive polygraph.
Felix pushed himself away from the wall. 'Time to call the Minister,' said the fat man. He was talking both to the coroner-magistrate and to a fish-eye unit she'd placed on the plastic table between Raf and her sergeant. 'You had your eight hours. You blew it ... I'm releasing him.'
He glanced at Raf and grinned.
Raf sat next to Felix, his back to a sea wall, staring inland over the dark expanse of dust and shut-down kiosks that was Place Saad Zaghloul. The café where they'd just bought supper was the only place still serving at two a.m. and Felix had been hungry. In front of him rested a half-full bottle of Algerian marc and a paper plate that had, until recently, been piled with grilled chicken breasts drenched with harissa sauce. It was as near as the fat man could get to a genuine McD chick&chilli burger.
Raf was improving his life with a third styrofoam cup of thick black coffee laced with rum. He didn't think of it as using caffeine to release dopamine in his prefrontal cortex, but he felt the hit all the same. This way he could tell himself the shakes weren't really about having been locked up in a cell.
'You know,' said Felix, 'you could have told me ...'
Just what Raf could have told him the fat man left drifting on the sticky night breeze blowing in from behind then.
'... don't you think?'
Raf said nothing. Instead, he drained his coffee to the dregs, only stopping when his mouth filled with grit from coarse-ground beans. He wasn't going to sleep anyway. The image of Hani's guilt-stricken face was pixel-clear in his brain.
'If you had,' continued Felix, 'I could have got the coroner-magistrate off your case right at the start, before we hit the station. If only I'd known.' The fat man's conversation seemed to be going round in circles. Or maybe that was just the sky.
'Known what?' Raf asked tiredly.
'I made a call to Hamzah Effendi. You know what he told me?'
No, Raf didn't. In fact, he couldn't begin to guess. The last time he and Hamzah had talked, the thickset industrialist had been standing on the upper steps of the qaa and had threatened to have Raf's legs broken for disgracing his daughter.
'He said you were an attache at the Seattle Consulate ... Said I wasn't to mention that he'd told me.'
Raf went very still.
'It's okay,' said Felix as he leant back and drained off a beaker of Algerian rot-gut brandy. 'Look, fuck forbid I should get all touchy-feely. But I've been there ... Smoke, flames, flying rubble. I'm not saying you should talk any about what happened but, all the same, telling me would have spared you that shit with Mila.'
'You think I killed Lady Nafisa?'
'The bloody Thiergarten killed Nafisa.' Felix slapped Raf heavily on the shoulder. 'All the same, until this is over I'm going to have to take that passport from you. And the gun. General's orders'
'Gun ...' Raf looked as shocked as he felt.
'Hani told Madame Mila you sleep with an old revolver by your bed.' Felix smiled sourly. 'Someone should tell that kid to keep her mouth shut... Anyway,' he shrugged, 'drop them both off tomorrow, before the autopsy.'
Tomorrow ... ?'
'This morning, whatever ... All bodies get buried by the following noon, murder victims included. Shari'ah Law.' His tone made it clear exactly what he thought of the Khedive's new deal with the mullahs. 'Five a.m. then,' said Felix. 'Nice and early.' And he pushed himself to his feet, then staggered off across Place Saad Zaghloul without a backward glance.
Chapter Twenty-three
7th July
Felix didn't mention the tattered state of Raf's beard or hair. Most of both were gone, cropped short with kitchen scissors from the madersa. The job wasn't yet finished, but then he'd only had two hours between arriving home and having to leave again, and most of that had been taken up with Hani.
'How's the kid?'
Raf paused, remembering.
At 2.30 a.m. she'd been a shaking little bundle, crouched on the qaa steps with a blanket wrapped round her and Ali-Din clutched tight in her arms like life depended on it. 'She'll survive.'
Felix sucked at his teeth. That bad, eh?'
'Yeah,' said Raf. 'The kid wouldn't sleep in the nursery because Nafisa's room is next door, the kitchens were out because Khartoum sleeps there. And she said she couldn't sleep in my room because it's on the men's floor and she isn't a boy ... So we turned on the fountain, dragged out a carpet and she crashed in the courtyard under a tree.'
Raf didn't mention any Arctic fox he might have left curled up by her head to guard the kid while he was away. Mostly he didn't mention Tiriganaq because he didn't yet know what, if anything, the fox's dawn reappearance meant. Besides, Felix didn't look like someone who'd understand about inner ghosts. Crawling ants and pink elephants were more his style.