Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

'I can give him money,' Hamzah said simply. 'A route out of Iskandryia if that will help. But I can't protect him ...' He wanted to say more, to ask obvious questions, but for Zara the only question that mattered was the one she asked.

'Why do the police insist he killed his aunt?'

'Maybe he did,' said Hamzah, chewing the edges off a cube of Turkish Delight. He smiled sadly when Zara handed him her napkin. 'Have you thought of that?'

'He swears he didn't.'

'And you believe him?'

Zara bit her lip and nodded, not trusting herself to speak —which her father found more worrying than anything else.

'Olga.' He punched a button on his desk. 'Tell legal to call me.' Seconds later a screen beeped and the face of a small bald man squinted out at Hamzah. 'Excellency?' The voice was reedy, the accent cut-glass Cairene.

'Beys,' said Hamzah. 'They have complete carte blanche. I'm right, aren't I ... they can't be arrested?'

The elderly lawyer hesitated. 'Up to a point, Excellency ..."

A small smile lit Hamzah's face and he jerked his chin towards the screen to indicate to Zara that she should listen carefully. 'What are the exceptions?'

Two types of murder — of a mullah or a family member — gross blasphemy before two reputable witnesses, and gross outrage of a minor, witnesses ditto.'

'So Ashraf al-Mansur can be arrested?'

'Given that he murdered his aunt, yes ...'

Hamzah held up his hand to still Zara's protest and she suddenly realized she was out of the screen's line of sight. The lawyer couldn't see her and so didn't know she was there.

Thank you.' Hamzah blanked the screen. 'My first question,' he said to Zara, 'is why do they really want Ashraf al-Mansur? And my second is, who exactly is they ... any ideas?'

He sat back in his chair. 'No? Then I suggest you find out or I suggest your friend does ...'

The meeting was over, Zara realized. And what was more staggering than her father treating her as an adult was him treating her as an equal. She'd asked him a question and he'd given her two relevant questions in reply. Either one of which might be the key. Going to America had been a good move, whatever work friends might say. And returning had been the right move too, whatever Zara might sometimes think herself.

'What do I tell your mother about why you're not coming home?' Hamzah's voice was neutral. But his eyes widened as Zara pulled off her silk scarf, to reveal that she wore no shirt beneath her Dior jacket, and began to undo her jacket's black glass buttons. At the last minute, she turned her back on her father and slid the silk jacket down over her shoulders, revealing the marks.

'Tell her what you like.'

Ten minutes after Zara left her father's office and headed on foot towards the General's mansion, Hani crawled out of her bed, looked round and went to shake Raf. 'Zara's gone,' she said.

'Has she?' Raf sat up, groaned and slid his legs over the edge of the couch. He did his best to sound unconcerned but he needn't have bothered. Hani was too busy pointing at his feet.

'You're wearing shoes,' she said.

Yeah, he was. Both of them fully dressed was one of Zara's conditions for sharing the VSV 's narrow bed, though even being dressed wouldn't make a difference if Hani told someone he and Zara had shared a mattress. Zara was under twenty-one and behaviour likely to corrupt a minor would be the least of it.

'After I went to sleep,' asked Hani, 'did you argue?'

'No,' said Raf, 'we talked.' And got nowhere, he added silently. At least he didn't think they'd got anywhere. It was hard to remember with his mind full of Zara's breasts and the taste of her in his mouth. Maybe she'd believed Nafisa's death really wasn't his responsibility. Maybe not. He'd try to work it out when his hangover took a holiday.

Where Zara had gone was solved by a brisk call from Hamzah. 'Zara dropped by,' he said, sounding amused. 'She said I should give you this.' Hamzah reeled off a string of numbers that became letters towards the end. 'Your aunt's bank details,' he added, seeing the blank look on Raf's face, 'From when I paid Nafisa's commission ...'

'Where's Zara now?'

'I don't know,' said Hamzah, 'not officially. But unofficially I gather she's headed in the direction of Shallalat Gardens and the General's house.' He clicked his fingers and the screen went blank.

Raf groaned. 'Coffee,' he begged Hani.

'Tastes horrible,' she replied. But she went hunting all the same until she found tins of cappuccino stacked in a locker at the stern. Peeling back the lid on a tin, Hani took a mouthful and spat it at her feet. 'If that's what you want.' With a shrug and a sigh, she tipped the remains of the can into a saucepan and lit a small ring in the pull-down galley. When the sweet liquid was hot she poured it carefully back into the can.

'Here,' she said.

Raf drank it while she watched, her eyes alert for any hesitation. 'Perfect ..." He sat back and put his hand behind his aching head, thinking about his aunt's bank details. 'You had a computer at the madersa, didn't you?'

'LuxorEON,' she said. 'Broadband access, running Linux.' Her voice was a dry imitation of Nafisa's at its most patronizing. Then she shrugged, bony shoulders hunching beneath her tee-shirt. 'Why?' Hani asked. 'What do you need ... ?'

Numbers rolled up the screen so fast they made Raf feel even more hungover than he already was. These were dead accounts at Banque de Lesseps. And he had Lady Nafisa's account details scrawled on a scrap of paper but Hani wasn't interested in that. The numbers on the VSV 's screen were scrambled and she had an animated on-screen helper doing something with algorithms at lightning speed as she searched for Lady Nafìsa's old account.

The computer aboard the VSV was an old stand-alone, the kind that used a satellite modem and made up in sheer memory what it lacked in speed or connectivity. It had taken Hani all of two minutes to junk every default setting and come up with a configuration she actually liked. But then, as she pointed out with a surprising lack of bitterness, if you've spent nine years trapped in the same house with only a computer for company, you get good at it or you get bored.

'That one,' said Hani as a 28-digit number lit red and the screen froze. Everything else on the screen disappeared and the number shuffled itself until Hani was left with the same 8-digit/3-letter sequence Raf had scrawled in front of him. She made a couple of passes with the cursor, her thumb moving lazily over a trackball, and the number disappeared. 'Don't worry,' she told Raf, just as he started to do exactly that. 'It's checking we're legal.'

She smiled and Raf tried to smile back. He'd no idea what Hani had just done.

'Here we go,' said the child as a bank logo began to animate on screen and the account went live again. There was quiet pride in her voice and an air of competence about her that would have looked impressive on someone three times her age.

'You're good.'

Hani nodded, taking Raf's compliment as a statement of fact. Fingers dancing and thumb rolling her trackball, Hani opened and shut screens at the speed of thought, collecting passwords and opening and closing trapdoors. She rode a rhythm that drummed inside her own head until her fingers suddenly faltered and Raf could almost feel the child's confidence vanish. When Raf looked round, a photograph of Lady Nafisa stared at him from the screen, arrogant and imperious.

'I'm going to use the—'

Hani slipped out of her seat before Raf could say anything and so he sat there, trying not to listen to the child throw up her breakfast. The water in the heads ran, then ran again and she came out wiping her mouth. Neither of them said anything but the first thing Hani did when she climbed back into her seat was to make Lady Nafisa disappear.