Pashazade

It was the wrong question. But only because ZeeZee couldn't answer it. So Tirìganaq answered it for him. Using the English boy like a puppet.

'Iknow who I am ...' said ZeeZee's voice, 'and I don't give a fuck who you think you are.' Then ZeeZee found himself scrambling off the bed to grab his holster and yank free the Taurus.

When ZeeZee woke up he was standing in an approximation of Wild Boy's usual stance, shoulders relaxed and one hand hanging loose at his side. In the background, on a screen next to the damaged door, the newsfeed kept running unwatched; flickering like a sad ghost at the edge of his vision. It was old footage of Micky O'Brían, back when he could still act.

Wild Boy looked at the gun and smiled. 'You don't have the balls.'

The click of a hammer being thumbed back was ZeeZee's answer. Some of Hu San's people filed their hammers flat to stop the point snagging on clothes. Not ZeeZee. His revolver was factory-perfect. And when ZeeZee had first started working for Five Winds, Wild Boy had delivered a box of fifty bullets. Only seven of them were missing. They were the bullets in his gun.

'Try me,' said ZeeZee, and raised the gun. The Arctic fox's growl behind his eyes was enough to make the world resonate like a struck glass. He could feel Tiriganaq's grin leaching through onto his own face.

'I've got a message,' Wild Boy said. 'Hu San is very disappointed in you. And she thinks you should be disappointed in yourself.' He hooked a long strand of dark hair out of his eyes, concentrated on delivering his message and tried not to worry too much about the weird smile on ZeeZee's face. Then he left.

Chapter Thirty 8th July

Hamzah kept his promise. The builders arrived at five the next morning in a Mack diesel with HZ Industrial logoed down the side. They parked up in the Rue Sherif and aTaureg foreman in a striped jellaba walked round to the back where he hammered on the door until Raf appeared, bleary-eyed and squinting.

Khartoum should have gone but he sat unmoving in one corner of the courtyard, not far from where Hani slept. From what little he'd said, Raf gathered he was terrified the killers might come back.

The young Taureg glanced doubtfully at Raf's tattered dressing gown, which came from an old wardrobe on the second floor and was a testament to the late Lady Nafisa's private frugality. Anyone else would have thrown it in the bin. 'Your Excellency?'

Raf smiled. 'Ashraf al-Mansur,' he agreed. 'Hamzah Effendi sent you?'

'Yes, Your Excellency ...' Shrewd eyes glanced over Raf's shoulder at the madersa's narrow entrance with its porter's bench and traditional blind ending. Getting building supplies in that way would be next to impossible. As for removing the walls of an upstairs office once it had been taken down ...

'Does Your Excellency ...'

'On Rue Sherif,' said Raf. 'Bricked up.'

Five minutes later, the foreman came back with two workmen who looked even younger. Each carried nothing more sophisticated than a crowbar.

Next to arrive were the police. Two officers came at dawn. Stepping over rubble to pass through the freshly opened front door. No one had reported noise or called in with suspicions about a truck parked on Rue Sherif. And they didn't come to check that builders were meant to be ripping out a wall to make space to remove bits of a crime scene. They came for Raf. And it was a measure of Felix's fury that he didn't come himself.

Five minutes after the two officers appeared, Madame Mila arrived in a long blue Mercedes, with tinted windows. The kind of car that screamed important government official. Raf could put the sequence together in his head. Hamzah had turned up at the precinct with his lawyer, quoting Raf as his reason for being there. Hamzah had left the precinct. In a fury, Felix had woken the Minister to get permission to bring in Raf.

The only thing Raf didn't understand was why the Minister had immediately called Madame Mila or what Madame Mila could want from him. It turned out to be his signature.

'Sign here.' The woman thrust out a notepad and a stylus.

Raf glanced at the screen and shook his head. 'Not without knowing what it says ...'

'You can't read?' The woman's voice was incredulous.

'Not Arabic,' said Raf, 'though I can speak it ... How well do you speak English?'

The woman said nothing.

'Well, then...' He reached for the pad and passed it to Hani. 'You tell me,' he said. 'What does it say?'

The girl skimmed the swirls of Arabic, then read them again slowly, her lips twisting as she mouthed the words to herself. 'I don't want this,' she said to Raf, her eyes suddenly enormous with fear.

'Why not?' he demanded. 'What does it say?'

It was Madame Mila who answered. 'An order is being issued for Hani to be made a ward of my office and given into protective custody.'

'An orphanage?'

The coroner-magistrate looked at him as if he was mad. 'Lady Jalila has offered to stand guardian to this child.' She glanced at Hani. 'You are a very lucky young lady.'

'If that's a court order,' Raf said slowly, 'why do you need my signature?'

'A formality,' said the woman.

'And without my signature ... ?'

'The girl will still be taken.'

'Just not yet,' said Raf, nodding to himself. He handed her back the pad. 'I'm afraid I can't sign this ... The child will stay here with her nanny.' He pointed to where Donna hovered in a courtyard doorway, scowling at the noise. The old woman was cook, housekeeper and mopper-up after Ali-Din. Being the child's official nanny should add no extra burden.

'So,' said Raf. 'Am I under arrest?' He fired off his question at the elder of the two police officers. 'Well?'

'Of course not, Your Excellency, but we have been told to bring you in for questioning.'

'In that case,' Raf said. 'I'll be with you as soon as we've all had breakfast.' He paused, to look at their doubtful faces. 'Don't worry,' he said. 'You can get on the blower and tell Felix I'm not going anywhere.'

The meal Donna provided was simple, 'aish shamsi bread warmed on an oil-fired range in the kitchen, which was where they ate. It was served with a thin dribble of sweet butter and a large mug of chocolate dusted with cinnamon. Donna also made chocolate and warm bread for the builders, then carried another tray out to the waiting police car.

'Woman's gone,' Hani told Raf, translating from Donna's Portuguese without missing a bite. The child looked less frightened now that daylight had arrived and she had a plate of warm food in front of her, but she was still obviously worried. 'Do you really have to go?'

Raf nodded.

'But you'll come back?'

'Of course,' Raf said firmly. 'They probably just want to talk about the stuff I did in America.'

'When you were an assassin ... ?'

'I wasn't an assassin.'

Hani actually smiled. A faint flicker as if she was the only one to get the punchline to a particularly obscure joke. 'Of course not,' she said. Grabbing a whole slab of 'aish shamsi, Hani started peeling off strips. 'I'm off to feed Ali-Din,' she announced and slipped from the table. Seconds later, Raf heard Hani's feet clattering on the stairs up to the qaa. It was the first time she'd stepped inside the house since her aunt was murdered.

Raf was distraught, apparently... Having missed out on Tuesday's murder and Wednesday's autopsy plus funeral, Thursday's tabloids had decided to make up for missing time by running the killing, autopsy and funeral as one breathless story, with endless sidebars of comment and very few facts. Actually, it was mostly comment or conjecture, with little blind URLs at the end of each paragraph to remind readers that they could always download more of the same.