Keystone (28 page)

“And accepting
that she did steal the books, and that she did run away randomly, isn’t it
convenient that she is then robbed herself, and a body is found clutching pages
torn from those very books during the struggle?” He stopped suddenly. “I’m
sorry, George, I’m getting carried away. This isn’t what you need hear.”

George,
however, continued where his friend had left off. “It does sound a bit
convenient, doesn’t it? And Kamal seemed only too eager to take it all for face
value; he didn’t seem interested in there being any alternative explanation.”

“And then
there is the strangest fact of all,” Ben said, encouraged by George’s
involvement in the debate.

“What?” he
asked.

“That the
Professor had to speak to Gail in person urgently, and that this Spanish guy,
Martín, also needed to speak to her in person. It seems to me this guy was
right, and that lots of people wanted to talk to Gail.” He looked at George.
“He thinks that she was abducted, tells the policeman, and then all of a sudden
they find her body, with evidence to prove she murdered the Professor. There
are maybe thirty
million
people in
Cairo, George. Hundreds of people go missing every day, and no-one even
notices. Most bodies aren’t even found. And yet Gail’s turns up so easily?”

They sat
contemplating the facts for about five minutes before Ben broke the silence
with a curt laugh. “I can’t believe you punched a policeman. And a Captain at
that!”

“It was
something about the look on his face: so bloody satisfied, so content that he’d
rounded up his case.” George explained. “I just couldn’t help myself. I’ve
never even hit anyone before!”

Ben shook his
head as he tried to imagine the scene in the morgue. “So, what did he do?”

“Nothing.”

“Surely you
got fined, at least, for hitting a police officer? I would imagine that, given
your circumstances, and the fact that you are foreign, a simple fine would be
enough. Don’t tell me you got more than that?”

“Nothing at
all,” George said quietly. “Not even a mention. I didn’t even apologise when I
next spoke to him. He was so smug and disrespectful; it’s lucky I guess that I
only punched him once.”

Ben looked at
his friend in utter astonishment. “George, I have worked with the police. I
have many friends who are still in the police. In Egypt you don’t simply punch
a policeman and walk away. It doesn’t matter if your whole family has just been
murdered. It just doesn’t happen.”

“Well,” George
shrugged, “it did.”

“Then that is,
you could say, the
clincher
. The only
possible explanation for Kamal not charging you for your offence is that he
would rather take that than have more enquiries into the case. He was probably
relieved that it was all over; he had Gail’s body, and he closed his case. Your
punch was like a full stop and he left it at that.”

George dried
the last of his tears from his face. He felt a new emotion rising in the pit of
his stomach; he felt the unmistakable heat of anger rising; anger that there
may have been more to the story than he had already been told; anger at Kamal
for not doing his job properly, or for doing it
too well
. Mostly, he felt angry with himself for not questioning it
more, for letting Kamal get away with this. For failing Gail.

Ben looked at
him, his face grim. “Don’t worry, George. I’ll join you and Martín for lunch,
but before that, I am going to make a call.”

Gail eyed this new man
suspiciously as he entered the room. With his bald head, neatly-trimmed facial
hair and thin-rimmed glasses, he looked every bit the James Bond villain. All
he needed, she thought, was a white cat to complete the image.

So you’re Patterson
.

He arrived at
the foot of her bed and looked down at what she could only assume was her
chart. From the way she was feeling, she guessed the arrow was pointing up: she
was now able to move her head from side to side, even though the restraints
stopped her from lifting it. He met her gaze briefly before pulling a chair up
and sitting down beside the bed. He
was
within spitting distance.

She spat.

Without a
word, he wiped his face with a towel taken from the bedside-cabinet, before
cleaning his glasses methodically. Replacing them on his nose, he pulled a
notepad out of his lab-coat pocket and jotted a few lines down.

Gail laughed
out loud. “
Subject spits
!” she
mocked.

He turned the
notebook round and showed her what he had written.

Don’t say anything. I’m sorry for
all this. I’m going to do my best to get you out
of here
.

She looked
into his eyes and recognised genuine remorse. Though her blood continued to
simmer nonetheless, she bit her tongue. There were so many words she had been
playing with in her mind; snappy retorts, sarcastic comments, obscenities. Time
had been against her in that respect. Had Patterson walked in an hour or two
earlier, while the rage was still burning behind her teeth, he would have been
confronted by a verbal barrage as soon as he had entered the room. But through
the time lying restrained on her bed, she had whittled away the options,
removed all the obscenities and sarcasm. Eliminated dark humour. She was a
prisoner, held against her will and drugged-up to boot. There was only one
thing she wanted to say.

“Let. Me. Go.”

Patterson nodded.
After a brief pause, he leant forward and carefully unbuckled her head
restraint. One by one he continued to remove the straps that held her down,
until she was free.

As the final
strap fell clear, Gail fancied she was floating above the bed, as if the will
she had been held against was stronger than gravity itself. She felt her body
moving up, and wondered at how easily she could lift herself, before realising
that Patterson was using the controls of the hospital bed. She was now fully
upright, and the sudden return of gravity to her stomach awoke a feeling she
had not experienced for an age.

“You must be
hungry,” he guessed.

She hesitated
slightly before nodding. She thought of flight, but she was barely dressed and
didn’t even know what was out there. There would be, she hoped, better
opportunities. And anyway, Patterson appeared to be on her side; maybe she had
been wrong about him.

He started to
leave, but she called out to him.

“Where’s
Mamdouh? Where’s the Professor?” Her last memory: a knock at the door, Mamdouh
had just told her his story, and then she remembered nothing, except for a
series of strange and extremely vivid nightmares. “Is he here too?”

Patterson
stopped dead, but didn’t turn to look back. He stood there for what seemed like
an age. “Professor Mamdouh was an old friend of mine.”

“
Was
?”

“I understand
that there was unfortunately an accident, and he didn’t make it.”

She froze.
“What?”

He tried to
explain what had happened, though in truth he barely understood it himself. All
he could think was that rather than being collateral damage, the Professor had
been silenced.
Seth Mallus finishing off
the cover-up he started ten years ago
, he thought. Halfway through his
explanations, the
Wizard of Oz
man
came back, holding a tray of food.

Dr Patterson
thanked him and put the food on a table next to the bed. She barely looked at
it, or the other man.

“Mamdouh’s
dead and I’m being held prisoner because of that book?” Gail asked, angrily.

He looked at
her apologetically. “I’m as upset as you are about what happened to him, Dr
Turner. And please, call me Henry.”

It didn’t
matter how nice he was trying to come across, she refused. “I’m being as civil
as I can. For all I know you’re only being nice to me so that I’ll cooperate
more readily.”

“I had no idea
you would be forced to come here, and I have no intention of helping anyone
force
you to cooperate,” he said. “But
you’re right, I do need your help, and even if I had wanted to force you to
come
here, I would want you from now on
to cooperate of your own free will.”

“What kind of
psychological battle are you playing with me?” she exclaimed. “Abducting me,
drugging me, then pretending that somehow you’re not at all involved in
anything that’s happened to me? Are you the
Good
Cop
?”

He motioned
for her to talk less loudly.

“And who the
hell
is the
Bad Cop
?”

“You’ll find
out in a moment, we’re going to see him after you’ve finished eating.”

She looked
down at the tray; roast meat and vegetables and some kind of fluorescent
dessert. She pushed the table away and it glided softly on its wheels to the
foot of her bed

“I’ve finished
eating,” she glared defiantly.

  
Henry Patterson liked Gail Turner; it was
something about her defiance. It was ironic that he be attracted to a woman for
her attitude, when it was exactly that trait that would make most men think
twice.

And attracted
he was, from her long dark hair and full lips down to her cute southern English
accent that made her pronounce all of her Ts perfectly. He had been smitten
before they had met, too, having done a fair bit of research on her profile
online since Mallus had advised she would be joining him.

So when he had
seen her restrained and drugged in the facility in which he worked, an urge to
protect her had overwhelmed him, and even made him have a direct confrontation
with Mallus, something he would have been far more cautious about had he been
in complete control of his emotions.

It was towards
Seth Mallus’ office that they now walked. Somehow, despite the fact that he was
walking ahead of her, Gail was setting the pace and they moved briskly down the
long bleach white corridor. They walked in silence, mainly because Gail didn’t
seem to want to talk to him, but also because he didn’t know what to say to her
anyway.

He stopped in front
of an inauspicious door set flush with the wall. She positioned herself so that
she was standing next to him in front of the door. He caught the look in her
eyes, decided against saying anything, then knocked.

“Come in,”
came the muffled reply from within.

He let Gail
enter, though he somehow felt that even if he had moved first she would still
have entered before him.

“Ah! Dr Gail
Turner!” he heard Mallus say with glee.

“
Ah! Dr Gail Turner
my arse,” she
exclaimed angrily. “Where the hell am I, who the bloody hell are you and what
the bloody hell do you want with me?”

Henry
Patterson couldn’t resist a wry smile as he closed the door behind them, if not
for the vehemence of her assault on the mighty Mallus, then purely for the way
that she pronounced
arse
.

Ben hadn’t liked Captain Kamal
from the moment George had described him. It wasn’t because he was a policeman:
some of his best friends were. It was simply a gut feeling that something was
wrong with the situation surrounding Gail’s death and that of the Professor.

Kamal had been
quick to put forward an unquestionable explanation of the events, which made
him suspicious. It also struck him as being odd that he hadn’t heard anything
about Gail’s death in the news. He hadn’t even known that there had been
another death in Professor Mamdouh al-Misri’s murder case!

His first
step, however, was not finding out what was being covered up, it was confirming
for sure that there was a cover up in the first place. He may have had a gut
feeling, but if he was wrong, then he wanted to get that out of the way now so
that he, and in particular George, could mourn in peace.

“
Salaam
,” he said as the phone answered.
“May I speak with Captain Kamal please? It’s Farid Limam, from the British
Embassy.” There was a pause, a brief click and then ringing. He was being put
straight through.

Ben loved his
country. He was extremely proud to be Egyptian and to come from Egypt, with its
vast cultural heritage spanning more than seven thousand years. Coming to his
country was, for many, the trip of a lifetime, and an unattainable dream
holiday to so many more. There were so many reasons to be a proud Egyptian.

But being
Egyptian, Ben was not blind to corruption; for so long it had run so deep it
was next to impossible to eradicate.

For the most
part, he could understand it. Tourism Police, underpaid, looking for extra
money to feed their families by taking people on unofficial ‘tours’ of areas
normally closed to the public; hotels in cahoots with taxi drivers to artificially
increase fares from the airport; tour guides charging a hundred times the going
rate to take tourists to see pyramids, claiming that taxis are simply too
‘dangerous.’

That didn’t
really
harm anyone: people needed to
make a living somehow, and if you’d travelled halfway round the world to see
Egypt, you could probably afford it.

The problem
with corruption was that once you accepted it, there was pretty much no
stopping it. Embezzlement of funds, rigged elections and conflicts of interest
were all commonplace in Egyptian politics.
 
Everyone
had their price.

That fact
notwithstanding, it was no less true that in Egypt bribery and corruption of a
member of the police force, especially a Captain of the Cairo Police
Department, was illegal. Under recent laws aimed at trying to reduce bribery
and corruption, there was technically no cap on what punishment could be
levelled by the State if someone was found guilty. More importantly, while in
the past there was a tendency to focus on all parties involved, which led to
few denouncements, new guidelines were to focus on the corrupt official first
and foremost.

Ben knew this.
Captain Kamal would too.

“
Salaam,”
Kamal answered the phone.

“Captain
Kamal, it’s Farid Limam here, from the British Embassy. I work with the Consul
on legal situations involving British Citizens in Egypt.”

“Yes? How can
I help?” Kamal sounded impatient already.

“I have had
some concerns brought to me from a British Citizen in Cairo currently. His wife
was murdered several days ago, you will certainly remember the case.”

“Gail Turner.”

“Indeed,” Ben
paused briefly and shuffled a pile of letters and utility bills on his coffee
table.
Office paperwork
, he thought
as he flicked through the paper noisily. “There seem to be some irregularities concerning
the findings of your case, for instance –”

“What are you
talking about?” Kamal interrupted. “This was an open and shut case. Mrs Turner
murdered Professor al-Misri, one of Egypt’s pre-eminent Egyptologists. If she
had not been found dead, she would be facing a possible death sentence, British
Citizen or not.”

Ben cleared
his throat. “Forgive me, Captain, but Mr Turner has highlighted to us some
facts that lead us to question this. For instance, she was found in the canals
to the west of the city, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you have
reason to believe that she ran there from the Museum after killing the Professor,
with a clutch of books?”

“Yes. We have
this on CCTV footage.”

“How many
books were stolen, Captain?”

There was a
brief pause. “Eleven. Among them some of the most valuable prints in the
Museum.”

“And how far,
if I may, is the canal her body was found in from the Museum?”

“Roughly two
kilometres.”

“She ran the
whole way? With eleven books in her arms?”

A sigh from
Kamal. “She ran at least several hundred metres. We have this on three
different cameras outside the Museum.”

“Ran?”

“At quite some
speed, in fact.”

“Filmed at
night?”

“It is most
certainly her. The cameras are the highest possible quality with night vision:
they protect the Egyptian Museum, Mr… Limam is it?”

Ben had his
tablet computer open in front of him. “Mr Limam, indeed. Captain Kamal, I do
appreciate your assistance in this. Please appreciate that I have a British
Citizen here who is quite distressed by what has happened.”

“I understand,”
Kamal softened slightly. “Is there anything else?”

“Well,
Captain, there is. You see Mr Turner has a problem with your assessment that
Mrs Turner ran nearly two kilometres with eleven books under her arm. I’m
afraid I also find it hard to believe.”

“She can
easily have taken a taxi once out of view of the Museum. Because of the number
of un-licenced vehicles operating in Cairo, as I’m sure you are aware, there is
simply no way of knowing if that occurred.”

“But even,
Captain, several hundred yards seems unlikely.”

Kamal clicked
his tongue. “Now, why exactly would that be unlikely?”

Ben looked at
his tablet computer closely. “Because, Captain, Mrs Turner always travelled by
Taxi, from door to door. She practically never walked on the open streets in her
home town in the United Kingdom, let alone in Cairo.”

“On this
occasion, she did.”

“Captain, I
must insist that this was
not
possible.”

Kamal’s tone
had now changed from mildly annoyed to angry. He wanted this conversation over.
“Listen, Mr Limam, unless you have some kind of proof that I haven’t seen, in
which case I recommend you disclose that information now, you are wasting
Police time. That is, I remind you, also an offence.”

Ben looked up
at George and grinned. They’d discussed at length what Ben would say, and how
he would try to ‘rattle’ the Captain into a reaction. They could claim they had
CCTV footage of their own, or that they had found voicemail recordings that
Gail had left for George while on the run from the Professor’s
real
killers.

In the end,
all of this sounded too complicated; too likely to be brushed aside by Kamal.
He wasn’t going to be caught out by some detail like that without seeing or
hearing the evidence himself. Instead, they had to demonstrate that his only
piece of real evidence, the CCTV footage, was incorrect.

And to do
that, Ben came up with a big, fat, incredible lie, which itself was backed up
by a quick Wikipedia update to Dr Gail Turner’s personal profile article that
Ben and George had just made.

If Kamal was
hiding nothing, the CCTV footage was genuine and Gail had, unbelievable as it
seemed, committed the crimes, then they had lost nothing; Ben had masked his
outgoing number on his mobile phone, which in any event was Pay as you Go and
could easily be thrown away: they would never trace the call to him.

If, however,
Kamal was hiding something and the CCTV footage was in any way fake, then he
was sure to find that out.

“Captain
Kamal, Mrs Turner
could not
have run
from the Museum, for at least a few hundred metres, turned a corner, and
continued to run. With or without the books, it would simply be impossible.”

“I’m getting
tired of this. Explain yourself now, or stop wasting my –”

“Because,” Ben
cut him off, “Mrs Turner suffered from Usher syndrome.”

Kamal said nothing.
Ben looked at George intently and continued. “She was born with the condition,
which also affected her mother. It means that she had hearing problems, and in
the past five years, her sight had deteriorated to the extent that she simply
couldn’t see further than her hand in front of her face. Even then, she
wouldn’t have been able to make out the individual fingers, no matter how
close. Vision, to Mrs Turner, was simply varying shades of light with no
definition whatsoever.”

“It’s entirely
possible she knew the direction of the main road, and ran there,” Kamal
suggested, though he sounded less confident than before. His bullish attitude
had disappeared completely.

“The hearing
problems that come with Usher syndrome affect the inner ear, Captain. Mrs Turner
had severe problems with balance. She would have needed both arms to steady
herself and even then, by Mr Turner’s account, she would not have been able to
negotiate the corridors of the Museum without sometimes touching the walls and
railings. This would have been quite impossible while at the same time carrying
eleven books, no matter how much they meant to her, financially.”

Kamal, again,
was silent.

“Captain? I
recommend that we meet to discuss this. Mr Turner is, as I said, incredibly
distressed. He has sought legal counsel with the Embassy, which we have agreed
to provide.”

“Why didn’t Mr
Turner advise me of Mrs Turner’s condition?” Kamal said quietly.

“Because in
his own words, he didn’t trust you, Captain. From the start you had your own
conclusions regarding this case, and you followed those conclusions through
with complete disregard for anything he said. You made him feel that he was an
inconvenience
to you.” Ben wet his lips
and smiled at George. It had all gone better than he had possibly hoped, and he
was about to deliver what he considered to be his killer line. “Captain, I have
to say that with the evidence I’ve seen, and your behaviour on this call,
I
do not trust you either.”

There was
silence on the other end of the phone.

“Captain Kamal?”

After what
seemed an age, there was the softest of clicks, followed by a dead tone.

Kamal had not
simply been rattled. He had not simply stumbled over a few words. He had been
so completely taken by Ben’s charade that he had
gone
.