Girling used the key Sharifa had given him and let the door swing open. He stepped just inside and looked slowly around him.
It was as he remembered it, a large, airy, open-plan affair, filled with functional furniture. Its plainness contrasted with the beautiful collection of water-colours and prints that Stansell had garnered from all corners of the Middle East. To Girling’s left was the sitting-room. Beyond that, the balcony overlooking the front of the block and the back street below. Before him was the dining-room that Stansell used as an office, and to his right the long corridor, off which were three bedrooms, kitchen, and bathroom.
Stansell’s desk rested against the opposite wall. Its surface was covered still with forensic powder. The Mukhabarat’s investigators had long gone, but the powder was everywhere. Girling shook his head. As if terrorists were worried about fucking fingerprints.
Girling lingered in front of the photo-frames documenting Stansell’s career. There were old pictures of Stansell with Sadat, Gaddafi, Shamir, and Arafat, plus some he hadn’t seen before, including one of the two of them lifting their Stella bottles at the bar of the Metropolitan, Old Mansour the waiter looking on benignly. Girling picked it up and blew the forensic dust from the frame. Stansell’s eyes appeared strikingly blue in the light of the camera flash. The crow’s feet that creased their edges gave him a scholarly look. He had a full beard greying at the chin. For his age, he was a good-looking man. Girling knew that Stansell, half a head taller than Girling’s six foot as they stood beside the bar, would not have succumbed without a hell of a fight the night the Angels came for him, however much drink he’d had inside him.
The picture had been taken the day his job offer came through from Dispatches. Mona had been dead six, maybe seven months. Much of the intervening period had been a blur. But the offer had been a big step towards his recovery. And like so much of his gradual recuperation, it had been brought about by Stansell. A week later Girling had passed by his parents-in-law in Medinat-Al-Sahafeen, picked up his baby daughter and boarded the plane for the UK, a new career, and a new life. That had been the theory, anyhow.
Girling replaced the photo, knowing that, sooner rather than later, he would have to see Mona’s parents. It was not a meeting he relished. For as long as he and Mona had been married, they had never accepted him. And in the three years he had been back in England he had not communicated, except to send them a picture of their granddaughter each Christmas.
Girling started with the bathroom. He checked the tiles, inside the toilet cistern, and behind the panels lining the bath, but found nothing. Next he moved into the kitchen. He flicked on the light and heard the scuttle of cockroaches pelting for the shadows. Like all kitchens in Egypt, Stansell’s was dark, functional, and devoid of comforts; a place for storing and preparing food, nothing more. He inspected the fridge and the freezer, opening cartons and packets for anything that was not supposed to be there.
When the heat became intolerable, Girling moved to the window and heaved it open. A fire escape led down to the ground. The building was like a bad tooth, scrubbed clean on the outside, but decaying in parts that the eye could not normally see. There was rubbish everywhere and its smell rose to meet him. He shut the window and suffered the heat. At the back of his mind, Girling wondered why Stansell’s abductors had gone to the trouble of kicking in the front door when they could have entered so easily from the back.
It was late afternoon by the time he finished searching the bedrooms and moved on to the dining-room. The desk seemed the most obvious place to start, but it was also where the police had spent the most time, judging from the dust. Girling turned instead to the shelves on the opposite wall where Stansell kept his books. There were hundreds of them. Each would have to be searched. He only wished he knew what he was looking for.
He spotted the missing volume of Dispatches leaning against a collection of books on the lower shelf. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Tucked away at the back was a Cairo street map. Girling opened it up and laid it on the dining-room table. It was marked in two places, both in the same black ink. A nearby street called Ibn Zanki had been under-lined and the number ‘22’ written beside it. Girling made a note of the address in his pocket-book. And a large black arrow had been etched from Ibn Zanki across town and into the heart of the City of the Dead.
Girling refolded the map and put it back inside the binder. Was this what Sharifa had seen him scribbling on in the office? Underneath the note he had made of the address, Girling wrote down City of the Dead, and below that, binder.
It took until dusk to go through the other books. And all for nothing. His head throbbed and print swam before his eyes.
It was tempting just to ignore the desk, or come back to it the following day. Sleep beckoned, but Girling shook himself awake. He turned on the Angle-poise lamp and inclined it so that it shone directly
into the well of the desk. Straight ahead were drawers and pigeonholes. He peered inside the latter. There were electricity and phone bills, a receipt from an electrical shop at the bottom of the street, an empty cigarette packet — the Mukhabarat had probably helped themselves — and a photograph. Girling held the picture under the lamp. The colours had faded so much that for a moment he thought it was black and white. Stansell was on the left of the picture, beardless, slim and handsome, cigarette dangling raffishly from his mouth. A woman, blonde hair stiff with lacquer, stood beside him. His ex-wife? Maybe.
He removed each of the four drawers in turn, emptied them and examined the contents.
One item, a letter, made him stop abruptly when he saw the name of the addressee. He pulled the letter from the envelope. Stansell’s spidery writing sprawled across five pages. He read the first page and a few lines into the next, then refolded it and put it back, not quite sure what to make of it all, except that he felt grubby and intrusive. There were things in this room that he was never meant to know about. He was glad he had almost finished.
Before returning all the other things he rapped his knuckles over the desk, satisfying himself that there was no hollow space.
Girling collapsed, exhausted, into one of the arm-chairs. The police had everything. For all his caution, Stansell had as good as given the tools of his profession to Al-Qadi on a plate. As he stared at the photo of Stansell, relaxed and smiling at the bar of the Metropolitan Club, Girling was overcome by a mixture of disillusionment and depression.
CHAPTER 10
Schlitz was the information officer at the US Embassy. He had an office on the second floor that rivalled Stamen’s for chaos. A steady breeze from the air-conditioning unit ruffled the papers on his desk. Rather than clear them away, Schlitz anchored them with ashtrays, a photo-frame, some books, an assortment of pens, anything solid that came to hand.
The man chain-smoked worse than an Egyptian, which accounted for the gravelly resonance behind his deep, slow Southern drawl. Schlitz offered beer, but Girling stuck to coffee. It was not yet nine o’clock.
‘Sure you won’t change your mind?’ Schlitz asked, pointing to the small fridge behind his desk.
Girling held up a hand. ‘No, thanks. Really.’ He was sitting directly across the desk from the American.
Schlitz chuckled. ‘And you say you’re a colleague of Stansell’s?’
‘I’m still acclimatizing,’ Girling said lamely.