The Labyrinth of Osiris (15 page)

Tory MP Tristan Beak took his shot, bunkering five metres short of the green. The quartet of players then set off down the fairway, pulling their trolleys behind them. As well as Montgomery and Beak there was Sir Harry Shore, a senior member of the judiciary, and Brian Cahill, a crude but spectacularly wealthy Australian hedge-fund manager. Gas leak or no gas leak, Sir Charles Montgomery still moved in the highest circles.

They covered thirty metres, then Shore, who was slightly ahead, slowed and raised his arm.

‘What’s that idiot doing?’ he asked, pointing.

The green backed on to woodland. A figure – from this distance it was hard to tell if it was a man or woman – had emerged from the wall of trees and rhododendron bushes and was now standing on the green beside the flag. They seemed to be holding some sort of sign or placard.

‘Get off,’ shouted Shore. ‘Away with you. This hole’s in play!’

The figure didn’t move, just lifted the sign or placard or whatever it was up into the air. There was something written on it, although it was too far to see precisely what. Another figure – this one definitely a woman – pushed out of the woods. She seemed to have a placard as well.

‘Clear off!’ shouted Montgomery, waving an arm. ‘This is a private—!’

His mobile went off. Still gesticulating, he pulled the phone from his plaid golfing trousers and held it to his ear, too distracted to check the incoming number.

‘Yes,’ he snapped.

‘Charles Montgomery?’

The voice was a man’s. Unfamiliar.

‘Yes.’

‘
Sir
Charles Montgomery?’

‘Yes, yes. Who is this?’

Two more figures had now appeared on the green. And there seemed to be more coming. A whole crowd of them.

‘Fuck off!’ bellowed Tristan Beak MP. ‘You’ll damage the grass.’

‘Do you have access to the internet, Sir Charles?’

‘What? Who is this? How did you get this—’

‘Because if you do, there’s a website you really should check out. It’s called www.thenemesisagenda.org.’

The man gave the address slowly, spelling it out.

‘There are some lovely pictures of you,’ he added. ‘And lots of details about your company’s work in Gujarat.’

Montgomery’s face had already assumed a reddish tinge. Now it darkened towards purple.

‘Who the hell is this?’ he shouted. ‘What do you want? I’m in the middle of a golf course.’

‘I know you are,’ said the voice. ‘I’m looking right at you. Nice trousers, you sick fucking baby-killer.’

The line went dead. At the same moment the crowd on the green, which now numbered upwards of twenty people, with more coming – men and women, old and young – started chanting, their voices carrying across the otherwise sedate expanse of Wetterdean Grange Private Members Golf Club:

‘Gujarat! Gujarat! Gujarat!’

They started moving towards the four golfers, the slogans on their placards gradually coming into focus: ‘BABY-KILLER’, ‘JUSTICE FOR THE CHILDREN’, ‘WWW.THENEMESISAGENDA.ORG’, ‘HAPPY RETIREMENT, SIR CHARLES’.

Montgomery hesitated, his broad, meaty face registering both abject fury and growing alarm. Then, turning, he started back towards the clubhouse as fast as his legs would carry him, his colleagues trailing in his wake.

‘Gujarat! Gujarat! Gujarat!’

Suddenly his comfortable retirement was looking rather less assured.

J
ERUSALEM

As Friday afternoon progresses and
Shabbat
draws in, the streets of Jerusalem steadily empty. By late afternoon the centre of the city is all but deserted.

The same, in microcosm, happened in the David Police Station. When Ben-Roi dropped into Leah Shalev’s office just after 5.30, they were the only two people left in the Kishle Investigations Department.

Shalev made them both coffee and Ben-Roi ran through the day’s developments: the
Ha’aretz
threats, the missing notebooks, Kleinberg’s visits to the Armenian compound, the El-Al flight to Egypt. And, also, the
vosgi
thing, which for no reason he could put his finger on, he sensed was important.

Shalev listened in silence, sipping from her Maccabi Tel-Aviv basketball mug, her lipstick, as it always did, leaving a red smudge around the rim. On-duty officers weren’t supposed to wear make-up, but Leah Shalev bucked the rules. Lipstick, nail varnish, eyeshadow – Ben-Roi had never been able to work out if she did it simply because she wanted to look good, or to wind up the likes of Baum and Dorfmann, who didn’t think women had any place in Investigations. If it was the former, she didn’t quite pull it off. If the latter, it more than had the desired effect.

‘Thoughts?’ she asked when he’d finished going through it all.

Ben-Roi shrugged. ‘Botched robbery. Lone psycho. Mafia hit. Personal grudge. Combination of any of the above. Take your pick. They’re all in the frame.’

‘Which would you go for?’

It was a game they often played at the beginning of an investigation, Shalev daring him to stick his neck out and make a call. Usually he was happy to oblige. With this case, even at such an early stage, there already seemed to be so many permutations and contradictions he was reluctant to be drawn.

‘Come on, Arieh,’ she said, sensing his reticence. ‘Take a punt.’

‘It’s tied up with her journalism,’ he said after a pause, not entirely answering the question. ‘I’d lay odds on that. Given that her notebooks for the last three months seem to be missing, I’d guess it’s something to do with a piece she’d been working on recently.’

‘Unless our man’s trying to muddy the waters,’ said Shalev. ‘Throw us off the scent.’

Ben-Roi acknowledged it was a fair point.

‘What about her editor?’ Shalev asked.

‘Still hasn’t come back to me. I’ve left four messages.’

‘Only four? Not like you to be so restrained.’

‘Not like you to make such good coffee.’

They both smiled. Despite his initial suspicion of her, he’d grown to like Leah Shalev. A lot. And not just because she was good at her job. She was one of the few people in the force he’d actually consider calling a friend.

‘Any news from the autopsy?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘I spoke to Schmelling just before you came in. They found a hair on the victim’s clothes which they’ve sent off for DNA analysis, see if they can match it to anything we’ve got on the database. And there was definitely no sexual interference. Apart from that and an estimated time of death between seven and nine p.m. – which we already knew from the camera footage – nothing. Oh yes, she had piles. The worst case Schmelling has ever seen, apparently.’

‘Nice. Forensics?’

She threw up her hands to indicate ‘Nothing’.

‘Neighbours?’

‘So far we’ve only managed to interview five of the flats – everyone else is out.’

‘And?’

Up went the hands again. ‘It’s a craptangle,’ she said. ‘No question about it. A real craptangle.’

Like Ben-Roi with his bellyaches, Leah Shalev had her own unique policing idiom. She glanced at her watch, then finished her coffee and stood.

‘I’ve got to get going. Craptangle or no craptangle, the Shalev household still has to eat.’ She started gathering up her stuff.

‘Kids OK?’ asked Ben-Roi, also standing.

‘Fine, although Deborah isn’t speaking to me. A slight contre temps about her choice of boyfriend.’

Ben-Roi smiled. He had it all to look forward to. ‘Benny?’

‘Good. He’s got a show over in Ein Karem and there’s talk of him exhibiting in the US.’

In contrast to his wife’s line of work, Benny Shalev was an artist. A well-respected one. Their marriage was one of the few police relationships Ben-Roi knew of that had managed to withstand the stresses of one partner being in the force. Leah and Benny Shalev were about as solid as it was possible to get. Although he would never have admitted it, even to himself, whenever he saw them together Ben-Roi felt a certain wistfulness, a regret for what might have been. Sometimes he really did miss Sarah. A lot of the time. Most of the time.

‘You with Sarah for
Shabbat
?’ asked Shalev, as if reading his thoughts.

‘She’s at her folks.’

‘You want to come to ours? You’re welcome.’

‘Thanks, Leah, but I’m promised elsewhere.’

‘Sure?’

‘Sure.’

They left the office and went out into the yard at the back of the station. Shalev’s Skoda Octavia was parked at the far end, beside the horse exercise enclosure. Ben-Roi walked her over to it.

‘I want to keep Namir on the olds and colds,’ she said as they went, reverting to case talk. ‘And also the Armenian angle. Pincas can follow up the Russian and Hebron settler threats, see if he can make any links. He speaks Russian, and I know he’s running at least one settler informer.’

‘Me?’ asked Ben-Roi.

He put on a camp voice, imitating Dov Zisky’s question from the morning briefing. Shalev shot him a withering look.

‘Stay on Kleinberg. I want to know what she was writing about, who she was pissing off, why she was on her way to Egypt and why she was visiting the Armenian compound so often.’

They reached the car and Shalev clicked it open.

‘How’s it going with Zisky, by the way?’ she asked.

‘Great. We’re moving in together next week.’

‘
Mazel tov
.’

She dropped her bag into the back seat, climbed in and slammed the door. Away to their left a Polaris Ranger ATV chugged into the yard, the only vehicle capable of negotiating the steep, stepped streets of the Old City. Shalev waited for it to park up, then started the engine.

‘You’re off tomorrow, right?’

Ben-Roi nodded. ‘Decorating at Sarah’s,’ he said. ‘If you want I could—’

‘I want you to do your decorating. Although if it’s anything like your police work I dread to think what it’ll look like. See you Sunday.’

She flicked a salute, put the car in gear and idled towards the station entrance tunnel. Halfway across the yard she stopped and lowered the electric window. Ben-Roi came up to her. She was staring face forward, hands grasped around the wheel.

‘I can’t explain it, Arieh,’ she said, her tone suddenly serious. Thoughtful. ‘But I’ve got a bad feeling about this case. Have had from the start.’

‘That’ll be because a woman got garrotted in the middle of a cathedral.’

She didn’t smile. ‘It just feels like it’s going to lead somewhere . . .’

‘Bad?’

She shifted her eyes to meet his. ‘Be careful, Arieh. Be careful and keep me informed. OK?’

In five years of working together, Leah Shalev had never spoken to him like this. Ben-Roi found it curiously unsettling.

‘OK?’ she repeated.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘OK.’

She nodded, wished him
Gut Shabbas
and drove off out of the station. It started drizzling again.

L
UXOR

‘Daddy, we’re watching Merry Poppings!’

Khalifa had barely opened the front door of their apartment when his youngest son Yusuf came bursting out of the living room and leapt into his arms. The boy gave him a fierce hug, kissed him on the lips, then wriggled free and charged off back down the corridor. Khalifa smiled, shook his head and closed the door. For a moment he stood there, the bunch of lilies he’d bought on the way back from the Qurn dangling in his hand, his eyes roving around as if to reassure himself this was definitely where he lived. Then, with a sigh, he went after the boy.

They’d been in the apartment six months. When his old block had been demolished, all the other residents had been relocated to a hideous concrete development ten kilometres out of town, up near the Nile road bridge. In an uncharacteristic show of helpfulness, his boss Chief Hassani had pulled some strings and got the Khalifas a place in El-Awamaia, just round the corner from the new police station.

It was larger than their old flat, and more convenient for work, and had a mosque and school right on the doorstep. It was even fitted with air-conditioning, a source of endless fascination to Yusuf, who was forever turning the system up to full blast and then building camps in which to shelter from the cold.

Despite the added amenities, Khalifa had never warmed to the place. And not just because of Yusuf’s air-conditioning experiments. Even after all these months he still felt like a stranger in his own home.

Partly it was the neighbours. There was a nice old lady who lived on the floor below, and the family in the adjoining apartment were decent enough even if they did insist on having their TV on full volume 24/7. But there was none of the closeness there had been in the old block, none of the sense of community that comes with living in a place for sixteen years. In the old apartment they had belonged. Here they didn’t. Every time he came home Khalifa was struck by the same sense of isolation. Of having got off the bus at the wrong stop.

Worse than that was the soullessness of the place. There were no memories or connections here. No feelings. Nothing to anchor them. Losing their old apartment had been like losing a swathe of their past. Even with all their stuff in it the new flat felt . . . empty.

Furniture you could bring with you. Associations, he had discovered, were strictly non-transferable.

He popped his head round the door of his oldest son Ali’s room, as he always did when he came in, then continued into the kitchen, where his daughter Batah was preparing dinner.

‘Good day?’ he asked, wrapping his arms around her and kissing her forehead.

‘Wonderful,’ she replied, returning the embrace. ‘Auntie Sama was here.’

‘That must have been exciting.’

‘It certainly was. She told us all about the shopping trip Uncle Hosni’s just taken her on to Dubai.
All
about it.’

The sarcasm was subtle, but unmistakable. Khalifa smiled and flicked her nose. She was seventeen now, and so like Zenab when she’d been younger. In looks – slim, long dark hair, huge eyes – but also in her sense of humour.

‘How is she?’ he asked.

‘OK. She’s watching . . .’

Batah dipped her head towards the far end of the flat. Khalifa nodded, kissed her again and headed down the corridor into the living room where Zenab was curled on the couch with Yusuf in her arms. They were watching Ali’s
Mary Poppins
DVD, humming along to the rousing strains of ‘Let’s Go Fly a Kite’. Or, as the Egyptian subtitles rendered it: ‘We’re sending our kite into the sky.’