Jon Grimwood - Pashazade

Blood ran between Madame Sosostris's legs in a trickle like scarlet tears.

'Tell me,' suggested the ballerina.

'What's to tell ... ?' The question bubbled between bitten lips. 'I hired you. I didn't know he was dangerous ... I made a bad mistake.'

'No,' said the ballerina. 'Not you. Someone else ordered you to hire me.' She pivoted on her heel and buried rigid fingers into the side of the arched woman, ignoring piss that spread across wipe-clean leatherette and dribbled floorwards, following blood down a crack in the boards. And in the silence between falling drips Zara heard a knock at the door below and then the sudden jagged trill of a bell, so loud that even the ballerina jumped.

'Expecting someone?' she demanded, holding her blade close to her victim's eye. Madame Sosostris shook her head.

'Well?' The question was shot behind her, at Zara.

'No,' said Zara.

The ballerina turned back to her victim. 'Well, now,' she said, listening to a second, more impatient ring from below. 'Maybe we can kill you, after all. Okay, you ...'

Zara nodded.

This is how it works ... You answer the door and the child stays there. Any problems and ...' She flicked her knife sideways, leaving Zara no doubt what would happen to Hani's throat.

Zara went. Walking slowly down the ancient stairs until she reached the main door to the spice house. A big part of her wanted to keep walking, out of that door and into a world where upstairs wasn't happening. But she knew, stupid or otherwise, she'd probably die rather than leave Hani.

'Who is it?' she demanded.

'Me.' Lady Jalila's voice was scared or furious, but through an inch of sheet steel it was hard to tell which. 'Now open up, quickly...' She pushed at the door, then visibly jumped when she saw it was Zara. 'Where is Madame Sosostris?'

Zara pointed to the ceiling.

'And you brought Hani?'

Of course she'd brought Hani. This was where the message had told them to come. Zara nodded.

'Good.' The woman pushed past Zara and headed towards the stairs without needing to be shown the way. 'I'll be taking her with me.'

'Lady Jalila ...'

'What?'

What indeed. Zara thought of Hani upstairs and the blonde woman with her cold northern eyes and hot blade and said nothing. Besides, something was wrong. What did Lady Jalila mean, asking if Hani was there? Here, still? Here, now? Where else would the child ...

'Lady Jalila.'

'Well?' The woman's eyes flicked from Zara to dark drips on the floor behind her. And when she stayed silent, Lady Jalila sighed. 'Leave it to me,' she said, reaching into her pocket. 'Just leave it to me.'

The rest Hani and Zara reconstructed from memory. Remembering most a pas de deux faster and more intricate than any they'd seen on a newsfeed.

Sound travels relatively slowly but, being cool-loaded and thus subsonic, Lady Jalila's first bullet travelled more slowly still, which meant it wasn't quite the surprise to the ballerina that it might have been. Though by the time Hani looked up, the German's blonde hair had finished streaming out behind in a sticky white, grey and red plume.

The .38 hollow-point entered the ballerina's head just below the jaw, passed through her soft palate and removed what had until then been the back of her skull, sucking out blood, bone fragments and grey jelly to splatter them over the brick wall behind.

A split second after her head flicked back, the woman's bowels and bladder loosened and her body stepped back, exploded blue eyes staring blindly at nothing. The crash the ballerina made as she hit the boards was loud enough to echo through the almost empty building.

'Mid-period,' muttered Lady Jalila, surveying the wall. 'Maybe mid-to-late ...' Her eyes swept over the attic to take in Hani with her rag dog, the dead ballerina and finally, scornfully, Madame Sosostris hog-tied on the couch.

'Murderer.'

Before Zara could protest, Lady Jalila brought up her gun and yanked the trigger three times. Hollow-points took Madame Sosostris in the upper body, splintering ribs into bone fragments. Lungs collapsed as the first two bullets blossomed into sucking wounds in her side, the final shot taking Madame Sosostris sideways through the heart and blasting her off the couch onto the floor.

The gurgling stopped.

'She hired the German to kill Ashraf,' Lady Jalila said as if that explained everything, though whether it was said to Zara or herself wasn't clear. Walking over to the dead woman by the bed, Lady Jalila lifted a scalpel from a metal dish and slashed the twine binding her arms and feet. Then she rolled the sticky twine into a neat ball and dropped it into her pocket. She placed her own .38 in the dead herbalist's hand.

'We'll tell the police they shot each other.'

It wasn't a suggestion.

'Just leave the official stuff to me,' said Lady Jalila. 'Okay... ?' Without waiting for Zara's answer, Lady Jalila walked across to where Hani sat, hugging her knees and clutching her rag dog.

'Time to take Ali-Din home.'

Hani shook her head. 'You killed her,' she said, voice empty.

'Of course I killed her,' said Lady Jalila. 'There was no choice.'

Only the child wasn't talking about the blonde German, Zara realized. Or about Madame Sosostris. And everything fell into place as if the answer had always been right there, just waiting for Zara.

Cold.

Staggers.

Hallucinations.

'The pen was a side issue,' Zara said without thinking. 'Lady Nafìsa died from poisoning.' And she suddenly knew exactly how the woman standing in front of her had done it. Except that by then Lady Jalila was crouching beside the dead herbalist, taking back her own gun.

The next bullet she fired took Ali-Din through the head.

Always count the guns.

Crouching by the window, company to fat-toed geckos that had grown used to his stillness, Raf whispered it again — just in case he forgot. Counting the guns had been rule one, according to Hu San; and Raf had made a special point of remembering the things Hu San told him.

The automatic would belong to the ballerina, only she was dead. Raf had heard that happen. Lady Jalila had the revolver, subsonic slugs but unsilenced barrel, because silencing a revolver was a contradiction in terms. From an empty plastic coke bottle taped to the muzzle to the most expensive hand-turned tungsten mutetube, nothing actually worked. Some of the shock wave always forced its way between cylinder and chassis.

If you needed to mute a revolver then the answer was to self-load the brass and use less charge, which was what she'd done. Whether or not in imitation of Thiergarten dogma, Raf didn't know. But, either way, just knowing how to do it made her a professional in his eyes.

The ex-ballerina had a gun, so did Jalila and so did he ... Three in total, if he didn't count the one he'd lifted from the dead dancer. Which made it four functioning weapons. Quite how knowing that helped him Raf had forgotten.

'Enough already ...'

Old words but true ones. Bats echo-located around him through the warm night air, taking moths in mid-flight, each curving strike almost surgical in its precision. Their echo bounced off shutters, refracted from high walls or vanished through open windows to return milliseconds later. Cold and mysterious, like some distant music of the spheres.

There was a tom cat lurking in the dirt of the alley floor far below, its heavy shoulders hunched and thick muscles locked in anticipation as it walked, oblivious, round Raf's discarded jellaba and shades, tracking whatever vermin hid behind the rubble. If the cat was dimly aware of the spiralling almost-mice, it didn't allow them to put it off the prey within reach.