‘Ef bar he,’ Angela muttered to herself, as she read the last paragraph again. It seemed to strike a chord somewhere in her memory, but for the moment she just couldn’t pin it down.
She quickly typed a reply to Ali Mohammed, telling him that she would be interested in reading the complete text of the parchment if and when he was able to decipher it, and assuring him that she would investigate the information he had already given her. She sent the email, closed the laptop and walked briskly to her kitchen. She pulled open the freezer and selected a frozen lasagne. When she was by herself, she never bothered cooking, relying mostly on ready meals of one sort or another.
She decided that she’d eat dinner, then spend some time researching the words Ali Mohammed had seen on the parchment.
But that plan was immediately shelved when Chris Bronson, her ex-husband and best friend, called and asked if she’d like to go out for a bite to eat.
It wasn’t a difficult decision for her to make.
22
‘You seem miles away tonight,’ Chris Bronson said, about three hours later, as he and Angela sat in a quiet corner of an Italian restaurant on the eastern outskirts of Ealing, two coffee cups on the table between them.
Angela was fiddling with the wrapped sugar cubes that had come with the coffee, piling them one on top of the other and then knocking over the small stack with a flick of her elegant forefinger. She paused in her repetitive construction and demolition operation and looked at him.
‘Oh, it’s nothing of any importance. I’ve had an email from a man I’ve worked with in the past, out in Cairo. He’s apparently been given an old piece of parchment to work on — he’s an ancient document specialist — and he’s asked me if a couple of the names in the text mean anything to me.’
‘And do they?’
Angela shook her head in mild irritation.
‘That’s the trouble. One of them is quite obvious — it’s just the old name of a town in Judaea — but the other one is only a partial name, just the middle section, and I’m quite sure I’ve seen or heard it before, but I just can’t think where. It’s not important, or at least I don’t think it is, but it’s just a kind of niggle, you know? Like an itch you can’t scratch.’
‘I’m sure it’ll come to you.’
‘It probably will,’ she replied, ‘and probably at about three in the morning.’
Bronson nodded, then lifted his hands into the air and tried to get the waiter’s attention. The waiter, who had studiously ignored them for most of the meal, finally noticed and disappeared behind the bar, eventually returning with the bill.
It had been raining earlier that evening, but when they stepped out of the restaurant onto the pavement, the slabs were already dry and, despite the illumination provided by the street lamps, a few stars were clearly visible above them.
‘I suppose you were expecting to stay the night?’ Angela asked, as they walked the few hundred yards back from the restaurant to the apartment block where she lived.
Despite their divorce of a few years earlier, Bronson and Angela had remained good friends, sharing holidays and other exploits, occasionally even sharing a bed. Despite this, Angela still insisted she was not ready to have another go at their marriage — indeed at any marriage — though Bronson himself would like nothing better. While this arrangement occasionally caused heartache on both sides, it seemed to be the one that worked best for them both.
‘I’d like to,’ he replied quietly. ‘I’m not working for the next few days,’ he added. ‘I just finished my part of a major investigation, so I’m due some leave.’
‘How nice. You can have a lie-in, then, while I brave the rigours of the District Line to central London,’ Angela said, rather waspishly for her. ‘Unlike you, I have a proper job to go to, with proper working hours, Monday to Friday, nine to five. That kind of thing.’
‘I think being a police officer does count as a “proper job” these days,’ Bronson replied mildly. ‘But I’ll get up at the same time as you do and then we can ride the Tube together. There’s some stuff I need to do at my house tomorrow morning, so I can go on from there straight to Tunbridge Wells.’
Angela nodded, but didn’t reply.
‘Is everything OK?’ Bronson asked.
‘Not entirely, no,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps next time you’re pretending to be a gentleman you can escort me to a decent restaurant, one where the waitresses aren’t all tarts.’
‘What?’ Bronson felt entirely confused.
‘I noticed you looking at that waitress, the one with the bum.’
Bronson coloured slightly.
‘I like to look,’ he protested, ‘but I never touch. And so what if she’s got a nice bum?’
‘Well, when you’re with me, Chris, I prefer it if you don’t look, OK? It doesn’t make me feel good about myself when the man I’m sharing a meal with spends most of his time looking at everyone but me.’
Bronson was silent for a moment, conscious that he’d severely ruffled Angela’s feathers, and without even being aware of it. No different to normal, then. And now she was looking at him with a peculiar intensity in her stare that was a good enough warning to concede the point.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again. I didn’t even know I was doing it.’
Angela dropped her gaze after a moment, then she shook her head.
‘God,’ she muttered. ‘I’m sorry too. I’m a bit oversensitive at the moment. Work is really boring, I can’t find the answer to the question Ali Mohammed asked, and to see you drooling over that dyed-blonde bimbo in a third-rate restaurant was almost the last straw.’
She fell silent for a few seconds, then looked up at him.
‘I will admit one thing, though.’
‘What?’
‘She had got a nice bum. You were right about that.’
‘Yours is better,’ Bronson said immediately.
‘Well, in that case …’ Angela unlocked her door and led the way inside.
23
News, especially bad news, travels quickly in Cairo, and rumours of the torture and killing of a local trader were already sweeping through the souk.
Mahmoud Kassim had a cleaner-cum-housekeeper who visited his property every day, and her echoing screams when she walked into his bedroom had alerted almost everybody in the street. The Egyptian police were already investigating the murder, and had several firm leads, according to the gossip in the coffee houses.
Abdul frankly doubted that, because he had been very careful to ensure he had left no physical traces of his presence anywhere in the property, apart from the dead body. But the uproar over the killing was unwelcome to him and to his employer.
‘You should have disposed of the body, you fool.’
Abdul was not used to being spoken to like that, and immediately his temper flared.
‘I couldn’t dispose of the body. Walking through the streets of Cairo carrying a corpse would have been far more dangerous than leaving him where he died. It’s just unfortunate that this cleaning woman went into the house and found him so quickly.’
‘The word “unfortunate” doesn’t even begin to cover it. You do realize it’s possible that this other dealer, this man Husani, will now be on his guard?’
Abdul shook his head and walked a little further down the deserted alley, holding his mobile phone to his ear.