Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

Villa Hamzah was the house of an industrial conquistador. Arrogant and assertive, but also bizarrely beautiful and with proportions so perfect the plans had to have been drawn up using the golden mean. Not at all what Raf was expecting — though he wasn't too sure what he had been expecting, except that it wasn't this.

'You want me to wait?'

Raf glanced both ways along the Corniche, seeing cruising cars, noisy groups of expensively dressed teenagers and an endless row of street lights flickering away into the far distance. It was late but there were empty yellow taxis every seventh or eighth vehicle and he was unlikely to be at the villa long enough for the traffic to die away completely.

'No, it's fine.' Raf peeled off an Iskandryian £10 note and then added £5 as a tip. He could always call the driver back if he needed to, and besides, it was still cheaper than having him wait.

'I'll take your card.'

'Yes, Your Excellency.' The cabbie pulled a crumpled rectangle from his pocket and handed it to Raf, who immediately scanned both sides to check that a number was given in numerals he could understand. It was.

The wrought-iron gates were already open. And there was no sentry box, bulletproof or otherwise for a smartly uniformed guard, which surprised Raf even more. Flipping off his shades, Raf adjusted his eyes and ran the spectrum from infraR to ultraV, but got nothing unusual. So far as he could see, security was completely lacking. No linked web of laser sensors, no bank of infrared cameras, not even a single starlight CCTV mounted on one of the huge pillars.

Hamzah was either very trusting or his reputation was all the protection he needed. Which wasn't as unlikely as it sounded. Three years back, while Raf was in Huntsville, a Seattle street kid on Honda blades had put a cheap Taiwanese rip-off Colt against Hu San's head and taken her bag. From start to finish the heist took less than thirty seconds and no one got hurt. Fifteen minutes later the kid turned himself and the bag in at the precinct on 4th Street and made a straight-to-video confession.

Hu San still had his legs broken, but cleanly, and the blue shirt who took the contract doped the kid up with ketamine before he began.

Gravel crunched under foot as Raf walked to the front door and knocked hard. 'I'd like to see Hamzah Effendi,' Raf said to a sudden gap, which would have been backlit if the Russian bodyguard standing in the way of the hall light hadn't taken up the whole doorway. Raf kept his voice bored, like a man who knew he would be seen.

'I see,' said the bodyguard. 'Is he expecting Your Excellency?' It was obvious he already knew the answer.

'No,' said Raf. 'But tell him Ashraf Bey would like a word.'

The Russian grinned, the first sign that he had more than iced water in his veins. Until then the man hadn't recognized Raf, not minus dreads and beard. 'Right,' he said. 'I'll just see if the Boss is in ...'

Stepping inside the door now being held open, Raf waited politely next to a portrait of Hamzah so new Raf could smell paint drying while the big man walked solidly away across a vast chessboard of a hall paved in white and black marble.

'Ashraf!'

Raf opened his ears a little wider, jacked up his hearing or whatever he was meant to call what happened when he turned the volume up in his head. The outrage was Madame Rahina's and he heard Hamzah's answering growl, but not Zara ... Voices blossomed into a brief argument that many would have missed. But Raf followed it just as he followed the Doppler effect of footsteps approaching down a corridor.

The man approaching stank of cigars and Guerlain aftershave, too much of it. His brogues had hand-sewn leather soles that creaked on the tiles. In the painting, he wore impossibly shiny black boots and stood against a balustrade, the background behind him an out-of-focus blur of green and blue. A gold Rolex was recognizable on one wrist. The little finger of his left hand sported a red-stoned, high-domed signet that could have been mistaken for a graduation ring. He wore a frock coat that reached the top of his boots and carried a rolled blueprint, signifying his profession. On his head was the red-tasselled tarbush of an effendi.

'Karl Johann,' announced a deep voice behind him. 'He was due to paint a Vanderbilt but I made it worth his while ..."

'It's good,' said Raf.

'Given what I paid him it should be.' The industrialist glanced round his hall, checking it really was empty. Or maybe he was listening to the sound of breaking glass echoing up a corridor. If so, he seemed resigned to the damage.

'My wife wants you killed,' he said. 'Or maybe your balls removed.' Hamzah shrugged. 'I've explained you don't do that to beys. Not openly, anyway, unless you're very stupid. But that's not the reason I refused her demand ...' Shrewd eyes watched Raf and when Raf didn't ask What is? the man nodded slightly, as if he expected no less.

'My daughter told me about the tram.'

What tram? Raf almost asked. But he kept his mouth shut and after a second the man twisted his heavy lips into a slight smile.

'Discreet, aren't you? Well, it probably goes with the job.'

Which didn't answer the question.

Through the haze of that morning's funeral and yesterday's murder appeared the chill ghost of a memory. Zara with the flowers. Zara vomiting neatly onto a rocking wooden floor, the worried black kid with the nose piercings who'd reached for her hand, then noticed Raf's open gaze. That tram.

The first time that ever I saw your face ...

'Her mother still believes she spent the evening with a work friend,' said Hamzah. 'The kid works at the library you know ..." Even when facing embarrassment full-on the man couldn't keep his pride in Zara out of his voice, and he was embarrassed. 'Thinks she got shellfish poisoning too. But I know a hangover when I see one and wherever Zara spent the night I'm damn sure she didn't sleep over with ...'

The sentence trailed away as Hamzah forgot how he'd intended it to end. 'Don't entirely blame you,' he said finally, his voice blunt. 'You can have the pick of North Africa. Why go for trouble? But she's a good kid for all that.' He bit on his cigar and then considered the smoke for a minute as it eddied towards the distant ceiling.

'Can't tell her mother why you rejected her, obviously.'

'Wait,' Raf held up his hand. 'That had nothing to do with it,' he said. 'How old is she?'

'Nineteen.'

'Fine,' said Raf. 'I'm twenty-five. I don't intend to get married to some stranger. And nor, I imagine, does she ..."

Hamzah's answer was a laughing bark. That's exactly what her mother's afraid of,' he said.

There wasn't much Raf could say.

'Now,' said Hamzah, 'you didn't come here to discuss my daughter. So what do you want?'

'First off, to ask you a question.'

Then fire away.' The man looked darkly amused.

'Okay,' said Raf, watching a pulse point on Hamzah's temple, the man's mouth, his eyes. 'Did you kill my aunt?'

'No,' said Hamzah. 'I didn't.' His dark pupils remained exactly the same size, neither expanding nor contracting. The corners of his mouth remained firm and the pulsebeat on his temple stayed regular as a metronome. Raf didn't need access to a polygraph to be certain the man hadn't killed Lady Nafìsa.

'Of course,' Hamzah added, 'I could always have hired someone else to do it for me ..."

They sat in a panelled study overlooking the Mediterranean. Waves broke on a headland away to the right, ancient blowholes spewing white plumes high into the air: while on a beach below the window, waves just lapped against the sand and then retreated, soft as a caress.

The coffee they drank was laced with cognac. Raf could taste it on his tongue, though the alcohol wasn't mentioned when a uniformed maid brought in a silver jug on a heavy silver tray. Raf refused the offer of a cigar, waiting while his host bit off the end of a fresh Partegas only to swear when he remembered he was meant to be using a cigar guillotine.