Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

'Nas?' Lady Jalila used her pet name for Nafisa.

Nothing.

Passing the liwan with its cooling marble slab now dusty and dry, she stepped out into the open courtyard and stopped to breathe deeply. Early July in El Iskandryia was often humid and hot, but nothing like as cruel as that covered garden.

'Nas?'

The silence was complete. Made deeper by the absence of running water in the courtyard in front of her.

Lady Jalila started to climb the gaa steps, hearing her heels ring on the stone slabs. Cousin Nafisa didn't approve of Lady Jalila's kitten heels: they made scars in the marble. At the top of the stairs, she hesitated. To her left was the large tiled expanse of the gaa proper. While straight ahead was the cubicle of Lady Nafisa's office, cool and air-conditioned, created by filling space between arches with sheets of smoked glass.

That was where Lady Jalila went first ...

'I don't care who he's with. Tell him I'm at the al-Mansur madersa and I need to talk to him now.' For once Lady Jalila didn't have to raise her voice. The urgency in her tone was obvious even to his idiot PA and, seconds later, her husband's worried face flashed up on her tiny silver Nokia. As ever, he looked just like a small startled rat.

'What's ...'

'Wait,' said Lady Jalila suddenly, snapping off the camera option on her mobile. Something silver and sickening had just caught her eye. Let him read about it or look at the crime-scene photographs later if he must. Nafisa dead with her blouse ripped open — there were some things she didn't think her husband needed to see.

'Nafisa's been murdered,' said Lady Jalila.

'Nafisa?' His horror was absolute, obvious. There were several things the Minister immediately wanted to say. But he said none of them, contenting himself with a simple 'I'm so sorry.' He glanced beyond the edge of her screen to a group of people she couldn't see and waved his hand, dismissing them. A muted question filtered into her earbead and she heard her husband's grunt of irritation. 'Tomorrow,' he said crossly. 'It can wait.' And then she had his full attention again.

'How did she die?'

'She was stabbed ... with her pen.'

Lady Jalila heard him punch buttons on his desk. 'Don't touch anything.' That was the policeman in him speaking. 'I'll get my best man onto it now.'

'Mushin.'

The anger in her voice stopped him dead.

'You really don't get it, do you?' She didn't care if all his calls were taped or not. Or what his PA thought when the little tramp typed up that day's transcripts. 'Nafisa was stabbed with her pen, understand? She wrote that letter and someone stabbed her.'

He understood now. She could see that from the sudden tightening of his jaw.

'You know who else signed that letter,' said Lady Jalila. 'Don't you?'

He did. He knew only too well.

She had.

'I want you to put Madame Mila on this case,' Lady Jalila said fiercely. 'It's an attack on our values.' By 'our', she meant women's.

The Minister's lips screwed into a tiny moue of irritation but he nodded. Til do it now,' he promised.

'Good,' said Lady Jalila and punched a button on her Nokia, consigning her husband's rat-like feaures to a flicker, then darkness.

It was ZeeZee's childhood therapist who first suggested that, since the small boy had hated his time in Switzerland and New York obviously didn 't suit him, the best answer might be to find him a place at a specialist boarding school in Scotland.

So, four months after he first arrived in New York, the child who would become ZeeZee left again, at the suggestion of a therapist that ZeeZee knew, even then, he didn't need. And the boy knew why he was being sent away too. He kept fusing the man's neural-wave feedback machines ...

The next time ZeeZee arrived in America he was eleven. The Boeing had come in low over Long Island and sank onto the runway at Idlewild in a simulation-perfect landing. It was the first time ZeeZee had ever flown in an Alle Volante. He travelled executive-class with his own tiny room, and though the cubicle walls were veneered from a single peel of Canadian maple and his bed had a frame made from the same extruded magnesium alloy found in Japanese racing bikes, the cubicle was still no bigger than the inside of a small van.

ZeeZee hadn't minded about the size at all. After a term in a dorm with nine other boys — the largest of whom thought Welham sounded enough like wanker to be interchangeable —the privacy and silence of his cabin was enough to make him drunk with the luxury of it all.

There was a stewardess who arrived every time he pushed the button, and who smiled and didn't mind because he was travelling on his own and looked just like she thought English children were meant to look — blond and blue-eyed, the way they did in films.

The fact he wore grey flannel trousers and a cotton shirt with a striped tie helped fix the image in her mind. As did his thick tweed jacket, which he called my coat. His shirt even had links at the cuff made from Thai silver, with tiny dancers embossed on their black domed surface,

The stewardess let the boy be first off the plane, passing him into the care of a second attendant, who smelled strongly of roses and took him straight to baggage reclaim.

'Is that all you've got?' she'd asked, examining the single case he pulled from the executive-class carousel.

He nodded. There was no point telling her the case was almost empty and he'd only brought the thing because leaving it behind would have been rude. The case was a leaving present from his tutor's wife.

'Over there,' he'd said suddenly as they walked into the Arrivals hall. Beyond a vast wall of glass stood a line of white Cadillacs on the slip road outside, their drivers standing by open doors while inside the hall excited families waved frantically. ZeeZee waved back.

'I'll be fine now,' he said firmly and thrust out his hand.

Any fleeting doubt the attendant might have had lost out to the novelty of shaking hands with a serious, immaculately polite eleven-year-old boy. 'If you're sure,' she said.

'Of course.' ZeeZee sketched her the slightest bow.

The woman with the warm scent smiled and shook her own head in disbelief. 'Okay,' she said, 'enjoy your stay.'

'It's not a stay,' ZeeZee said seriously. 'This is where I live now...'

Felix felt like a candle melting.

He was tired, he'd had his holiday cancelled and he'd been at the al-Mansur murder scene just long enough to confirm that a woman was dead, there was a traumatized child sat wide-eyed in one corner of the qaa and the Minister's wife, who'd apparently called in the crime, was missing from the scene itself ... And just when it looked like his afternoon couldn't get worse, some dreadlocked trustafarian in shades and a stupid suit came hammering up the qaa steps, puffing like a lunatic.

'Hold it,' Felix barked.

'I live here,' announced Raf, stopping to glance at the fat man blocking his way. From the rye on the man's breath to his thinning hair gone grey and tied back in a lanky ponytail, the fat man had 'American cop' written all over him. Which was weird, given this was North Africa.

'Prove it ...'

Raf had left his office at a run, over-tipped a cab to jump two lights and pounded straight through Nafìsa's knot garden, leaving shredded shrubs behind him. He'd made it from office to steps in five and a half minutes. Obstruction wasn't what he needed right now. Instead of stopping, he began to squeeze between the fat man and the door frame.