Standing next to the diminutive officer, he couldn’t help thinking that he looked like a much reduced version of Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther films. The fact that his accent was not dissimilar didn’t help. Had the whole situation not been so serious and the man so unpleasant, George would have found him more than a bit comical.
“My wife has disappeared in your country, how could I not come here to help you find her?” he asked. “Speaking of which, are you any closer to finding her?”
“We will let you know as soon as we find her, Mr Turner. In the meantime, I suggest that you return to your hotel where we can easily find you, should that be necessary.”
The Englishman left, albeit reluctantly, and Captain Kamal shook his head in disapproval. Police matters were not to be meddled with by members of the public, he firmly believed. Particularly not this police matter.
Why this Englishwoman was so important, he had no idea, but now he had a murder scene and an irate husband to deal with, it seemed that this was all going to be more trouble that it was worth.
A routine murder such as this would be over quickly enough. It was a high profile case, thanks to the murder-victim himself being such a high-profile member of the academic community, but that did not detract from his ultimate goal. Kamal was a focussed and experienced policeman, and he already had three of the four pieces of his murder puzzle handed to him on a plate.
The first piece was the victim: Professor Mamdouh al-Misri, of the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. An Egyptologist with a keen interest in Amarna texts, he had been the General Director of the Museum for nearly four years.
The second piece of the puzzle was the weapon: the sharp corner of the General Director’s solid mahogany desk had broken the man’s skull at his left temporal bone as he had fallen. This caused an internal haemorrhage that had placed pressure on his brain and killed him within minutes, the autopsy report told him.
The third piece was the motive: a collection of extremely rare texts, dating from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were conspicuous by their absence from the General Director’s office. On the black market, they would in total fetch upwards of three million dollars, and he had been reliably informed by other employees at the museum that there would be no lack of willing bidders.
Which left him with one final piece to find: the murderer.
There were three ways this could end. She could turn herself in, or be found by the police on the streets. He knew that wasn’t going to happen, of course. Or she may never be found, instead disappearing into the ether, never to be seen again. In a city of thirty million people, who would question such an outcome?
But no, now Kamal had met the husband he knew that it wouldn’t end that way. He knew people, and he had seen the look in the Englishman’s eyes: he wouldn’t let this go. If she wasn’t found, he would be a thorn in his side.
Which only left one possible outcome: Cairo was a heaving great overweight animal of a city; and overweight animals can have very dirty underbellies. A pretty woman, alone on the streets late at night, on the run after committing a crime, would be simply asking for trouble.
All he needed was a body.
This is all more trouble than it’s worth, he thought again as he put his phone to his ear and made all the necessary plans.
George almost ripped the pocket of his shirt as he dug frantically for his ringing phone. His heart sank as he saw the number wasn’t Gail’s; it was identified generically as French mobile.
“Yes?” he said impatiently. He’d been running this way and that for hours, desperately trying to get any scrap of information possible that would lead him to Gail.
“Is that Mr Turner?”
A foreign accent, but it didn’t sound French, although George’s knowledge of accents was limited to the same old films from which he had characterised the Egyptian policeman.
“Speaking,” he said.
“My name is Martín Antunez, from the European Space Agency. I need to meet with you urgently,” he continued.
George wasn’t surprised at the name. He had expected another call from him sooner or later. “Hello Mr Antunez,” he said, still struggling with the name, “I’m afraid I don’t know where my wife is. Did you not speak to her last night?”
“No, I’m afraid not, I left a message with a man at the museum.”
“Professor al-Misri? He’s dead.” George added. In his search for Gail he hadn’t spent much time thinking about the Professor, and the fact stumbled out, emotionless.
“I heard that; the police told me this morning,” he replied, slightly taken aback by the Englishman’s bluntness. “Mr Turner, I know that your wife has disappeared, and I believe these circumstances are too coincidental not to be linked.”
“What?” George was exasperated, tired of people trying to get hold of Gail, when all he wanted was to get hold of her himself. The last thing he needed was a riddle.
There was a pause, short enough for George not to have to check his phone’s signal, but too long to be caused simply by the long distance call bouncing into space and back on its way from France.
“Mr Turner, a massive cover-up is underway at the moment, and what is happening on Mars is somehow linked to your wife, and the finds that she made in Egypt. The reason I needed to speak to her was to talk about this and see where it would lead. I am not the only one who believed that your wife has the answers, Mr Turner, and I am sure that she has been taken.”
George bit his bottom lip. “Kidnapped?” The police had said nothing of kidnapping, in fact his impression had been that she was being treated as a suspect rather than as a victim. “Why do you think that? Who would do such a thing?”
“I don’t want to say more over the phone, we have to meet.”
Chapter 43
Café du Corail was a French-style affair that, like many in Cairo, harked of a different era. George imagined that it hadn’t changed in a hundred years, and by the looks of it neither had its clientele.
Whilst a lot of Cairo seemed to be constantly re-modelling itself with building sites that never seemed to end, many of the older areas still remained.
The great marketplace of Khan el-Khalili was one of the most famous; a sprawling, maze-like network of narrow streets, the awnings of open shop-fronts reaching across the cobbled alleyways, drawing in endless streams of lobster-faced tourists with bum-bags. There, the bartering started three times higher than anywhere else, though few were tempted to shop around too much, lest the tour bus leave without them.
Café du Corail was not in Khan el-Khalili. It was on the other side of the busy main street via a dank-looking footbridge, away from the kitsch, in what the tourist-guides referred to as the local market. To say it had a different atmosphere was to take understatement to the extreme. It was practically impossible to walk in el-Khalili without being offered something, or if you were a woman, without being propositioned. Here, in contrast, if you didn’t speak Arabic, or didn’t know exactly what you wanted, it was surprisingly difficult to buy anything at all.
On the subject of price, all that needed to be said was that people bought in the local market, and sold on el-Khalili.
But the biggest difference, and the exact reason why George and Gail liked it so much, was that the local market was, indeed, where you found true Cairenes. El-Khalili had its charm, it was bright and colourful and full of happy smiling people who spoke English, Spanish and a dozen other tourist languages. But here, you were actually in Cairo, not in a tourist-sustained bubble.