"I'm off the case," Katie said, "why would I want to do that?" It was a real question.
"Because I want to hire you," said Professor Mayer. "To work with me on what comes next."
"And what does?"
Petra Mayer shrugged. "Good question," she said. "Read the file and we'll begin to work it out."
On 15 August 1977 Marzaq al-Turq, known also as Moz, was charged with the rape and murder of a girl whose age was put as between thirteen and sixteen, with a coroner's side note in French that a history of malnutrition would have put her age in the latter bracket. There was no mention in the brief and almost insultingly dismissive report that anorexia would have achieved the same, this not being a problem commonly facing the poor of Marrakech in the late 1970s.
The girl was described as half and half, with neither half being specified. She was not pregnant at the time of her death and her heart, lungs, liver and kidneys were in excellent condition. Her last meal had been vegetables, bread and water. There were no traces of alcohol, hashish or any other drug in her blood.
A long list of injuries matched those in the photograph; that is, all those injuries which could be seen in the original photograph were listed, although there were many more on the list which were not visible.
"Why only one crime scene?"
"I'm sorry?" Professor Mayer glanced up.
"Only one crime-scene shot," said Katie Petrov. "Where are the others?"
The Professor smiled sadly. "This was Marrakech, 1977. The miracle is that there are any at all." She thought about that, dragging on the last of her cigarette before stubbing it out in a saucer now filled to overflowing with splayed and twisted filters that looked like nothing so much as extracted bullets.
"In fact," said Professor Mayer, "the real question is why did somebody bother to take this photograph at all?"
"And you know the answer..." It was not quite a question.
"Read the file," Professor Mayer said, sitting back.
A sworn statement from an officer in the Marrakchi police stated that Marzaq al-Turq was the only suspect for the murder of Malika, daughter of Corporal Sidi ould Kasim, sometime informant and agent provocateur. The suspect lived in ould Kasim's house, in a room directly above the girl's, and a search of that room had revealed that a hole in the floor allowed the occupant to spy on the room below.
A trawl of the Mellah by the police had revealed no clue to the suspect's current whereabouts and extensive questioning of his known associates had produced so little information about the suspect's recent activities that this was suspicious in itself. Katie Petrov read this twice, to make sure she understood what was being said.
On the basis of the statement a warrant for the boy's arrest on sight had been issued by the Marrakchi police and then allowed to gather dust. Both the arrest warrant and the sworn statement were signed by a Major Abbas.
"What do you think?"
"The interest is in the gaps," said Katie Petrov. "If I got sent this back home I'd have returned it and demanded sight of the real thing. And I'd refuse to start work until the real thing arrived."
Professor Mayer nodded. "That's what I've done," she said. "Although I'm not sure how much we'll get."
Flicking through the three photographs, Katie forced herself to glance again at the final one. There existed crime-scene shots of Texas lynchings that showed less tissue damage.
"Check the file again," suggested Petra Mayer.
Three photographs, an arrest warrant, a sworn statement, a tatty strip of fingerprints lifted from a pocket knife found at the crime scene, a crudely drawn map of the wasteland marking where the girl's body was found and a report from the coroner.
"What am I missing?" Katie Petrov asked.
"These," Professor Mayer said, tossing across a cromalin of a second set of fingerprints, each one neatly positioned in a different-coloured box. The cromalin was new and still smelt of chemicals. The fingerprints came from the police HQ in Amsterdam and the name scrawled at the top of the original sheet was Jake Razor.
"Don't tell me..."
Katie held up the strip of fingerprints lifted from the crime scene in Marrakech and compared them to prints on the page in front of her. She didn't really need to be told what she would find. The American minimum for matching points was ten, the European standard was set at sixteen.
To Katie's gaze it looked like the match between Prisoner Zero's prints, those taken from the Marrakchi knife and the prints for Jake Razor from the Amsterdam drug clinic had at least eighteen points of similarity, maybe more.
"Still think he's sane?" Professor Mayer asked.
CHAPTER 37
Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20 [The Future]
The jets came in low over the water, three in all. Each one as flat as a manta ray and utterly silent, their uncloaking timed for when the already sinking yacht reached midway along the gorge.
So far as Tris could tell all three were completely transparent, as if made from glass or carved from ice, and they materialized just as the shell of All Tomorrow's Parties finally tipped on its side, expelling Tris from her doorway in a massive fart of bubbles and river water.
Sweeping low, the jets banked hard and came back on themselves, targeting the river where the yacht had been. And suddenly there was no water and no river and no yacht, just emptiness, which filled as the river roared back in.
Either the jets really didn't see Tris or they didn't care. Or else, Tris told herself, as the current carried her rapidly downstream towards some rocks, they simply weren't looking for a girl with a blue marble in her mouth and pockets full of water.
The jacket was a classic, expensive probably, with an inner lining that clung to her body no matter how oversized the garment looked on the outside and a waist buckle that was busy trying to do itself up. Unfortunately the wrists were still significantly too big for her and the pockets seemed to be expanding to make space for more water.
Tris reached for the buckle.
Once she'd extracted the marble from her mouth and finished coughing up river, she had another go. Only this time, Tris took a hurried breath before dunking herself and tugged hard at the buckle. When the buckle refused to budge, Tris tried pulling the jacket over her head, which would have worked if only the lining didn't keep shaping itself around her to provide warmth. She was being killed by the thing's blind and stupid kindness.
"Shit...
"Prick...
"Pudenda..."
The one advantage, probably the only advantage, to being alone in the middle of nowhere was that her grandmother wasn't around to slap her if she swore. Which was just as well, as Tris was rapidly reaching levels of vocabulary even Doc Joyce didn't know she possessed.
"Fuck this," Tris said. And she yanked at the buckle so hard it made her knuckles almost pop with the effort.
"About time."
Quite how Tris made it over the rocks unscathed she didn't know until later, when she rolled herself onto a gravel bank under the gaze of broken grey cliffs and realized she hadn't made it through unscathed at all. One shoulder was a mess of bruises and her left heel had been sliced near the arch, cut open by a stone. Bleached skin gaped on both sides of the cut.
Staring too hard at the wound made Tris feel sick so she stopped looking, pulled herself completely out of the water and sat with her back to the cliff. It was time to work out where she was and relate that to where she should be, which was infiltrating the Forbidden City with the express purpose of killing the Chuang Tzu.
The gravel where Tris sat was built up on the quiet side of the river, while on the other bubbling foam scoured against a rock wall. This was the way it worked, Tris realized, looking upriver towards a different bend and at another bend beyond that, tracking the course she'd taken. The river roared into the bends and threw up gravel on the quiet side, reversing sides when the gorge curved a different way.