As the man opened the gate to let them in, he asked in a trembling voice, “Do you have news about my wife?”
Neither policeman said a word until they were in the courtyard—a small, well-tended garden, in the center of which stood a garden table shaded by a large umbrella and with several chairs around it. A narrow passageway led to the interior.
“Please have a seat, sir,” Hamid said gravely.
The man sat down, his eyes imploring Hanash to speak. Hanash, casting his eyes around the premises, asked, “Who lives here apart from you and your wife?”
“Do you know where my wife is?”
“Can you confirm your wife’s name?” asked Hamid.
“Fanida al-Ghali.” The man’s jaw began to quiver. “I’m afraid something’s happened to her. She didn’t come to pick me up at the clinic yesterday. She was supposed to meet me after I was discharged. She wasn’t here when I got home. I haven’t slept a wink all night. Her phone’s out of service. Do you have any information about her whereabouts?”
“Could you tell us your name, please, sir?” asked Hamid gently.
“Hajj Belaid Benmoussa.”
From his accent they could tell he came from the well-known merchant classes in the east.
Hanash paused for a moment before continuing, then spoke slowly and gently, trying to soften the shock. “Your wife, Fanida . . . may God rest her soul.”
“What did you say? Are you saying she’s dead?”
Officer Hamid stepped in. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that she was murdered. And in a manner that I find hard to describe to you, sir. . . . We found your wife’s body in Rahma. It had been dismembered and placed into several bags that were deposited in a trash receptacle there. Do you have any idea who might have committed such an atrocious act?”
“How could that happen? Are you sure she’s my wife? Do you know what you’re saying?”
He looked at Hanash as though entreating him to end the nightmare. The detective felt pity for the man as well as a concern that he might suffer a total breakdown.
“I’m terribly sorry, sir, but that’s what happened. When you’re ready we’d like you to come with us to the morgue to confirm the identity.”
Hamid asked, “Did you or your wife have any enemies? Is there anyone you suspect might have wanted to take revenge against you or against her?”
The man shook his head. He pulled his overcoat more tightly around himself. The blood drained from his face, his body trembled, and he started to slump. Officer Hamid rushed up to support him before he could fall off his chair.
“You have no one else living with you here?” Hanash asked.
Hajj Belaid was unable to speak. Hanash looked at the windows overlooking the courtyard. They were firmly shut. He turned back to the old man, who was still shivering as though running a fever.
At last the old man spoke. “I was afraid something bad had happened, but I’d never expected anything so horrible. I can’t believe it.”
“Had you noticed any change in her behavior?” asked Hanash. “Did she seem afraid or worried? Had someone threatened her?”
Belaid shook his head and began to mumble to himself incoherently.
“Do you want us to call anyone and have them come over?” Hamid asked urgently, afraid the old man might faint.
Belaid shook his head.
Hanash’s phone rang. He was about to ignore it, but he saw the name of the chief of police on screen. He walked to the other side of the courtyard and pressed “answer.”
“Yes, sir. . . . It’s appalling. . . . A woman. In her thirties. . . . Yes, we’ve identified her. We’re with her husband right now. Similar to Kahila’s MO. . . . No, no evidence yet. . . . The investigation has just begun. . . .”
After ending the call, he returned to the garden table, exchanged an anxious and dispirited glance with Hamid, then looked down at Belaid, who appeared even sicker and older as a consequence of the shock. Hanash sat down facing the old man, leaned toward him, and said gently but firmly, “Please try to pull yourself together. We will need some information from you. Do you know or have you heard of someone called Abdel-Salam Kahila?”
Belaid shook his head, his gaze empty.
“You said that Fanida al-Ghali was your wife.”
The man nodded as though even that wearied him. Hamid took over the routine questions.
“When did you marry her?”
“Seven years ago.”
“Do you have any children?”
“I have children from my first wife.”
“How many?”
“Three. My daughter, Fatiha, is divorced and she and her daughter are living with her mother, my first wife. I have two sons. Aziz is married with two sons. He works at the Electricity Authority and lives in Rabat. My younger son, Adel, is a university graduate but he’s unemployed.”
“When was the last time you saw your wife?”
“I’d been in the Shifa Clinic getting treatment for my prostate ailment. Fanida visited me every day. She’d bring me food I liked and stay with me until the nurses made her leave. Yesterday they discharged me. I waited for her to come pick me up, but she didn’t come. I rang her several times, but her phone was always out of service. In the end, I had to go home by myself. I’d hoped to find her there, but there was no sign of her. I stayed up all night. When the call to prayer sounded at dawn, I went to the mosque. After the communal prayers, I stayed on to pray to God to watch over her.”
“Did you call anyone to ask after her?”
“I called up her family in Had al-Sawalem village. They told me she hadn’t come to see them.”
“How about here in Casablanca? Does she have any relatives or friends here?”
“No, sir.”
“Didn’t you think of calling the police?” asked Hanash.
It was some time before Belaid answered. He seemed so shrunken and remote that for a moment Hanash thought he had fallen asleep. But finally the man looked up and said, as though irritated by the question, “That was what I was going to do when you came.”
“What was your relationship like between you and your wife?”
“Excellent. It couldn’t have been better.”
“What about between her and the family of your first wife?”
“There was no contact between them.”
Sensing that his answer had sounded too abrupt, he explained, “When I divorced my first wife and married Fanida, my children thought I’d gone crazy. They did everything they could to have me declared insane and lock me up in an asylum. They weren’t really interested in my mental health, of course, let alone my happiness. They wanted my money.”
He suddenly began to rock back and forth, wailing. “Who could have done this to you, Fanida? How can I live without you? How am I going to wake up in the morning and not find you by my side?”
He burst into tears, slapped his cheeks, and gave full vent to his grief like a recently bereaved widow. It seemed pointless to continue to question the old man in his current state of anguish, but when he’d calmed down a bit, Hamid persisted and tried to keep Belaid focused. He pressed him a little more about his first wife and her family, but the old man was incapable of answering clearly. Then the inspector tried a different tack.
“Tell me a bit about yourself, please. How did you first meet Fanida?”
The old man heaved a sigh and smiled as he immersed himself in happy reminiscences.
“I met her at the wedding of a daughter of one of my friends in Had al-Sawalem. . . . I’ll have you know that I’m quite well off. I own quite a bit of farming land there and the only gas station in town. I also own three buildings here in Casablanca and I have a respectable amount of savings in the bank. All that is thanks to hard work and the grace of God. But my children, damn them all, aren’t like me. They take after their mother, who spoiled them rotten from the day they were born. She said I was cruel and miserly and that I kept them in hardship despite my good fortune. She and her rott
en children want everything to come to them easily, without having to lift a finger. They hate work. But I wouldn’t have cut them off if they hadn’t behaved like their mother when I decided to marry Fanida. . . . You know, son, at first I didn’t want to divorce the mother of my children. I would have kept her and given her and her children a decent income. I was even ready to turn some of my property over to them. . . . I really don’t want to dwell on the past. It means so little to me now. But if we must rake it up, I’ll tell you this, son: They bribed a doctor into writing a certificate stating that I’d gone senile and was no longer able to manage my financial affairs. Then they filed a suit to have me institutionalized. Before that, they stole my checkbook, forged my signature, and withdrew a lot of money from my accounts. Fortunately, thanks to my lawyer Sayyid Shukri—he’s a member of parliament, I’ll have you know, and a partner of mine in some of my businesses—I turned the tables on them and got them off my back. If I’d wanted to I could have had them all sent to jail.”
Hamid didn’t need all those details, but he hadn’t wanted to interrupt the old man.
“Do you have a maid?” he asked.
“Lalla Tamou. We call her when we need her. But Fanida does most of the housework. She’s a fanatic about cleanliness and order.”
“Are you sure we can’t call anyone for you? A member of your family or a friend?”
“I’ll call Fanida’s parents. But . . . but how will I ever tell them what happened to their daughter?”
When Hamid asked whether he was going to inform his first wife and children, Belaid knitted his eyebrows and looked away. After a pause, he sighed and said, “I haven’t spoken with them since the day they wanted to lock me away in the nuthouse. I can’t bear to see their faces. . . . Except for Adel. He was still young when they started to plot against me. He’s the only one I help out financially, because he studied hard at university and got his licentiate. But he hasn’t been able to find work yet. . . . He writes poetry. If he’d studied economics, I’d have helped him start a business.”
Simply as a matter of routine, Hanash asked the old man a second time whether he’d ever heard of the serial killer Abdel-Salam Kahila.
“Never heard of him. But what’s that guy got to do with my wife?”
The question was left unanswered. Hanash signaled Hamid that it was time to go. He’d begun to develop a dislike for the old gasbag.
After leaving Hajj Belaid’s place, there were two tasks that needed doing. First, they had to question the neighbors, visit the old man’s family, and find others who may have known the victim and her whereabouts. This he delegated to Hamid and an inspector of his choice. The second task he had to do himself, as it entailed spending the rest of the day in his office and working his way through his list of informers. There had been a long lull since the last homicide. Then suddenly another one occurred bearing the marks of the previous ones. Kahila was the thread they needed to follow. But so far, none of the police’s surveillance and tracking systems had managed to get a trace on him. Hanash needed a tip-off in order to move forward.
Rahma, where Fanida’s remains were found, was a popular quarter situated miles away from anywhere Kahila had operated so far. In that kind of neighborhood, where everyone knew everyone else, he couldn’t have just snatched his victim off the street if he’d had no previous connection with her. And where would he have taken her to murder her and do his grisly butchering work? Where could he be hiding? It would be next to impossible for him to rent an apartment, what with the new laws and regulations put into effect as part of the security precautions against terrorism. He’d need a proper ID, and the landlord would surely have notified authorities of his new tenant immediately. As clever as he might be at disguising himself, he could never alter his appearance entirely. Wanted posters of him were everywhere. Mugshots had been distributed to all neighborhood wardens, who knew the minutest details about everyone in their jurisdiction. These government-appointed officials had their own informants, too. Every doorman, building guard, grocer, and neighborhood resident was willing to furnish them with the latest gossip and tip them off should anything unusual occur. The wardens were also responsible for submitting signed daily reports, which would include information about a newcomer or a significant event. These were entered into the precinct ledgers, given a sequence number, and archived. In more urgent cases, the warden could phone or report in person to his superior. It would be fair to say that word of mouth was the mainstay of the national security services. It was and remains far more effective than surveillance cameras and the latest digital technologies, which are always vulnerable to damage and malfunction. Plus, however sophisticated and precise they may be, they lack the human instincts of suspicion and alarm. In short, there was no way Kahila could rent a place in any corner of the city without security agencies catching wind of it.
Still, there are always unpredictable twists, thought Hanash.
When Hamid knocked and entered his office, Hanash could tell immediately that he had come back empty-handed. He motioned Hamid to a chair, listened to his report, and felt his anger rise. There was not a single useful item apart from the fact that Belaid’s former wife could barely hide her delight at Fanida’s demise. To be sure, she wailed and cried, but they were obviously crocodile tears.
“They’re all packed into that tiny apartment, which reeks of dirty diapers,” Hamid recounted, referring to Belaid’s grandchild from his divorced daughter.
“What about the unemployed son with a university degree?”
“He wasn’t there. His mother told us that she had no idea where he was. He hadn’t spent the previous night at his home, but she said that he did that often. I had Baba continue the search for him.”
There was a knock on the door. A security guard entered and saluted the detective.
“There’s a woman here who wants to speak with you. She said she’s Fanida al-Ghali’s mother.”
Without answering the guard, Hanash got up, strode over to the door, and opened it to invite the woman in. Hanash was immediately struck by the resemblance between her and her daughter. She wore a loose-fitting djellaba and a kerchief riding high on her head and tied at the back of her neck. When she reached the center of the room and stood between Hanash and Hamid, she tried to be the first to speak, but her face grew pale and her lips trembled. However, as Hanash asked her to take a seat he thought she seemed more uncomfortable than distressed, as though she hadn’t yet heard the news about her daughtert. Hamid, also unsure whether she had heard about her daughter, struggled to keep the pity out of his face while Hanash kept his voice neutral.
“What can I do for you, ma’am? I’m Detective Hanash.”
She hesitated before speaking, as though unsure how to comport herself in front of these two officials.
“Could you please tell us your name first?” asked Hanash, as a way to encourage her to speak.
“Aisha Haddad, Fanida al-Ghali’s mother.” She reached into her purse to extract her ID.
“That won’t be necessary. Please continue,” Hanash said.
“Thank you. . . . My son-in-law, Hajj Belaid, phoned me and told me something horrible had happened to my daughter. He said . . . he said you found her dead . . . killed . . . and that her body had been cut up. I came to tell you that the body you found . . . it can’t possibly be my daughter.”
“Have you seen her this morning?”
“No.”
“Has she phoned you?” asked Hamid.
Hanash extracted a photo of the victim that Belaid had provided from his desk and showed it to her.
“Is this her?”
“It’s a pretty old picture. But yes, that’s my daughter. But she couldn’t have been killed.”
“Could you tell us why?” asked Hanash.
She shifted her eyes back and forth between the detective and the officer, as though about to confide a secret.
“The day before yesterday, my daughter came to the village to attend the weddi
ng of her best friend. She didn’t want to tell her husband, who was still in the hospital. If she had, he wouldn’t have given his permission. He’s a kind and generous man, but he’s the jealous type. . . . My daughter spent that night in the village. Yesterday morning she took the bus back so she could be at the clinic before noon in order to bring him a change of clothes and take him home. . . . Please don’t tell him what I just told you. As I said, he’s jealous and might start imagining things.”
Hanash, who’d been observing her intently as she spoke, asked, “Did your daughter call you after she got back to Casablanca?”
“Yes, she rang me from her home yesterday evening. She said everything was fine, that her husband had been discharged from the clinic and was in good health. But then her husband called me today to tell me that they found her cut-up body in a dumpster. How can that be? She called me up just yesterday evening and sounded perfectly normal. In fact, she was happy to have her husband back home and relieved that the tests showed he didn’t have something malignant.”
Hanash was uncertain how to proceed. He glanced at Hamid, signaling him to take it from here, and then contemplated the photo in his hand as though searching for inspiration.
The inspector, for his part, struggled to order his thoughts while Aisha waited expectantly for a response, confident that she’d opened the officers’ eyes to their grave mistake. The two men were momentarily lost for words.
Then Hanash reached into a drawer, pulled out a picture of Kahila, and presented it to the woman. “Have you ever seen this person before?”
The woman took a quick glance at the picture, wrinkled her nose at the ugly face, and shook her head.
Hanash picked up the phone and dialed the morgue.
“Doctor Wafa Amrani, chief medical examiner.”
After some brief pleasantries, he turned to business. “Can you tell me anything about the items that came your way?”
After a moment’s pause, Dr. Amrani said, “I haven’t started work on them. I can’t give you anything yet. I’m sorry.”
The Butcher of Casablanca Page 13
