The Ghost Runner

by Parker Bilal

  In the half-light Ragab’s features seemed to dissolve, so that Makana had the impression he was addressing a large, untidy ghost. A spirit from somewhere far back in time.

  ‘How does your wife feel about me working for you?’

  ‘My wife knows nothing about this arrangement between us, and I would prefer to keep it that way.’ Ragab reached into his pocket. ‘She knows I am here this evening, but she believes it is to settle her account.’ He held out an envelope. ‘This contains what she owes you for services rendered.’ A second envelope joined the first. ‘Here I have placed the same amount as a retainer if you should choose to accept the case. We can settle up any outstanding amounts at a later date.’

  Makana hesitated only for a moment before taking both envelopes. He had a feeling that Magdy Ragab was the kind of client he could get used to working for.

  Chapter Five

  Inspector Okasha strode down through the Ghuriyya quarter in his usual manner. As always, his commanding presence had an instant effect. The layabouts who hung around the entrance waiting for opportunity to tap people on the shoulder sidled away without a word. Pedlars shouting out their wares missed a beat, even a woman carrying a basket full of vegetables balanced on her head managed to crane her neck around without spilling a single onion. Okasha carried himself with authority. A big man in a uniform. To many around here his was a familiar face, having worked this part of town for many years, back in the old days.

  ‘Did I tell you about the time I was stabbed?’

  ‘More than once, I’m afraid,’ murmured Makana as they descended the steps beneath the high wooden beams, finely carved and painted, that supported the roof linking the sultan’s tomb to the mosque.

  ‘My first month on the job and a fool of a man pulled a knife on me. I wasn’t expecting it. We only wanted to question him but it seems we hit the target on our first try. Anyway . . .’ Okasha paused to exchange a greeting with a gnarled old stick of a man who rose up from where he was squatting against the wall when he recognised the officer.

  ‘You honour us, ya basha. Please come and sort out these harafeesh. They are only boys but they make our lives hell.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it, old man. I shall personally see to the matter.’ Okasha closed with a salute to make his vow official before turning back to Makana. ‘Now, where was I? So the knife went through my side, narrowly missing any vital organs. Cut straight through the uniform. Of course, that’s exactly the kind of thing that makes a man’s reputation.’

  ‘And you’ve never looked back.’

  ‘We caught the culprit in the end. Then he was sorry he had pulled the knife. He kept apologising. Of course, he came to a bad end, they all do.’

  They had turned off the main thoroughfare and were cutting through lanes of stalls, tightly packed together, brushing by hanging garments, stacks of aluminium pots and pans of all sizes, towers of shoe boxes and sacks of coffee beans. A handful of armed police officers had been sent ahead and were now clearing the area in front of a narrow shop. The paint around the edges of the wall was burnt and blistered as was a metal sign over the entrance that was sealed by a roll-down shutter. A sergeant stepped up neatly and saluted as they approached. Okasha returned the gesture.

  ‘Has someone sent for the keys?’

  ‘They’re just coming now, sir,’ the sergeant nodded and Makana turned to see an overweight man wearing a grubby olive-green gelabiya that was open down his chest to reveal an even dirtier vest. Unshaven, his plump face was blurred by a thick moustache that was itself buried within three days’ worth of white bristles. He walked with a limp, his right leg moving in a loose circle to catch up with his left. A sandal dangled like a stray leaf of lettuce that had attached itself to his foot unnoticed. As he approached he called ahead.

  ‘Hadir, effendi. Here I come.’ Onlookers stepped aside, as they might for a leading actor making his entry onstage. A large ring of keys jangled in his hand as he came. It was quite a performance and Makana wondered if Okasha had met his match.

  ‘Nineteen seventy-three,’ the man muttered loudly, fixing Makana with one eye. ‘I crossed the canal and we taught the Jews a lesson they never forget to this day. Since then I carry an Israeli bullet in my hip, proudly.’ The last word was accompanied by a thump of his hand to his chest.

  ‘That’s all very well, but can you open this door?’ Okasha didn’t have much time for other performers.

  ‘Effendi, you ask and it shall be done.’ With more huffing and puffing the man got down on his knees and began fiddling with the keys. It took longer than expected and Okasha was tapping his feet impatiently until the bawab eventually found the right key and the padlock was released. As the shutters rolled up the onlookers crowded round the entrance for a look, and the police officers, distracted, forgot about pushing them back.

  The interior of the shop was a charred cavern, the walls and ceiling thick with soot. Mounds of blackened debris had been swept to the sides along with strange contortions of twisted metal, a chair or a shelf. Coiled springs protruded from the remains of what had been a mattress. All was now sodden in water which filled the air with a thick, putrid stench.

  ‘What did they used to sell here?’ Makana asked absently, addressing no one in particular. The answer came from an onlooker standing behind him.

  ‘Blankets, pillows, small mattresses. All that kind of stuff.’

  ‘It goes up the moment you bring a match near it,’ another concerned shopkeeper added.

  ‘We’re only lucky nobody else’s shop was affected.’

  ‘What time was this?’ Makana asked.

  ‘It’s in the report,’ said Okasha, but he was cut off by one of the witnesses who elbowed himself forward.

  ‘It was late. Most of us had closed down for the night. We went to the mosque for the isha prayer and we stayed on afterwards, just talking.’

  ‘Then someone came in saying there was a fire down here,’ carried on another.

  ‘So, naturally, we ran back to protect our things.’

  ‘Naturally,’ agreed Makana. ‘And what did you see?’

  ‘The flames were shooting out of here, up past the windows above.’

  ‘Worse than the fire was the smoke,’ continued the second man. ‘Those things give off fumes that burn the lungs clean out of your chest.’

  ‘What did you do?’ Makana asked.

  ‘What could we do? We ran for buckets and filled them and threw them in.’

  ‘Someone called the fire brigade, but by the time they got here it was almost over.’

  ‘And the girl, where was she?’ Okasha asked, deciding it was time to get involved.

  ‘Upstairs,’ said one of the men. ‘She lived there with her mother.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ broke in the bawab. ‘Her mother died last year. Everyone knows that.’ This provoked more rumblings, agreements, disagreements.

  ‘That’s where the fire started, effendi,’ offered the sergeant. He turned to lead the way down a narrow gap alongside the entrance. It was so narrow Makana’s shoulders brushed against the walls on both sides. At the back a steep, rather unstable staircase rose up the wall. It was made of uneven planks of wood that appeared to have been salvaged from a selection of sources and knocked together by a blind man. The flat was really no more than a single room with a tiny alcove for a bathroom. The floor had been badly weakened by the fire. There were gaps where thin, scarred beams showed through, centuries old. A bed in the corner of the room was covered by a stiff layer of warped black plastic.

  ‘That’s where it started,’ Okasha pointed as they stepped gingerly around the edges of the room.

  ‘She was lying in the bed?’

  ‘That’s where they found her. The mattress was made of some kind of rubber foam. It stuck to her skin. Half of her back came off with it when they tried to get her out.’

  Makana looked at the way the middle of the narrow room was charred, almost like a channel leading to the bed.

>   ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Okasha, ‘but it’s more common than you think. People decide to kill themselves, but they can’t calculate how much kerosene they need. They tend to use too much rather than too little. The girl lived alone. Her mother died a couple of years ago. We have no idea of the father’s whereabouts. Apparently he lives abroad.’

  ‘I was thinking that it looks almost as if the fire began over there, away from the bed.’

  ‘With that kind of material all it takes is a spark,’ said Okasha. ‘The fire downstairs was blazing so hard they couldn’t get near it.’

  ‘So, she poured a trail of kerosene across the room and then lay down in bed and struck a match and threw it away from her?’

  Okasha frowned. ‘Why do you have to twist things around?’

  ‘I’m just looking at what’s in front of me.’

  ‘You’re twisting things.’

  ‘Okay, who got the girl out?’

  ‘The men we spoke to down below. Someone spotted the smoke. They rushed up and managed to get her out.’

  ‘And you think they are telling the truth?’

  ‘They have no reason to lie. They have no interest in any of this.’ Okasha shot Makana a wary look. ‘I understand you’ve been hired to investigate this for anything suspicious, but I’m telling you there’s nothing to find.’

  Makana let his gaze wander around the room. It seemed a sad place to end one’s life, especially one so young. His eye was drawn to the streak that seemed to stretch across the room.

  ‘You have to ask yourself why anyone would want to harm a girl like that,’ Okasha went on.

  ‘Maybe to cover something up? Did you conduct forensic tests?’

  Okasha let out a soft laugh. ‘Where do you think you are?’ He squatted down and indicated the floor with his hand. ‘After she struck the match she must have dropped the jerrycan with the fuel in. The floor is uneven. The can would have rolled towards that side, which is exactly where the fire got more intense.’ He stood up again and brushed off his hands as he stood. ‘Who is it that you’re working for again?’

  ‘I told you, it’s connected to a client.’

  ‘An ex-client, I thought you said.’

  ‘Not exactly,’ said Makana. Ragab had asked that he try to keep his name out of the case so Makana was reluctant to say too much in front of the others who were crowded into the doorway behind them. People talked, and police salaries being what they were it wasn’t hard to imagine one of them being tempted to make a little extra cash by passing the information to a journalist.

  ‘Fine, you don’t feel like telling me, that’s up to you, but there’s not much else to see here.’

  ‘What about an autopsy?’

  ‘An autopsy would only tell us what we already know. Why go to all that expense? With the backlog it could take months.’

  As they turned to leave Makana noticed a photograph that had been fixed to the wall beside the door. It hung at a lopsided angle but by some miracle part of it had survived. Protected perhaps by the fact that air would have been sucked in through here during the blaze. Nevertheless, inside the frame the fire had eaten its way across from the bottom right-hand side. Protected by the glass, a corner had escaped damage. Makana rubbed away some of the soot from the cracked glass. The frame came apart in his hands. There were a few chuckles from the policemen standing at the top of the stairs, afraid to step into the room in case the floor gave way. Makana knelt and sifted through the debris until he had the blackened part of the photograph. He held it up to the light.

  ‘What is that?’ he asked.

  Okasha squinted at the picture. ‘It looks like a palm tree,’ he concluded. ‘Nothing too strange about that. There are plenty of them about.’

  Makana took a closer look. The picture appeared to be of a flat, open landscape. In the desert somewhere. On one side was what looked like the edge of a big house. An outside staircase. The family home perhaps? It didn’t seem to fit in this place.

  ‘Maybe somewhere they visited once. Can’t call it evidence. Keep it if you like,’ said Okasha, straightening up. ‘All this is going to be ripped out when they rebuild the place.’

  Makana tucked the picture into his pocket and took one last look around the room before following Okasha out. Back down the stairs in the street they waited while the bawab shut up the shop and thanked him for his help. Then, when Okasha had dismissed his men, they went in search of coffee which they found in a small place just outside the old city gates at Bab Zuwayla. Okasha sat with his back to the wall as usual, staring out at the street, eyeing everyone who went by with his usual look of suspicion.

  ‘I was surprised to get your call. Have you been so busy these last few months you haven’t had time to see old friends?’

  ‘I’ve been working. Small cases,’ said Makana. It wasn’t much of an explanation.

  ‘So tell me how you came to be mixed up in all this?’

  ‘There’s not much to tell really. One client led to another. You know how it is.’

  Okasha sighed. ‘You don’t give much away.’

  ‘The point is that my client doesn’t believe she took her own life, and frankly neither do I.’

  ‘And this is based on what, your natural intuition? A little bird told you?’

  ‘We both know how often suicide is used to cover up an honour killing.’

  ‘Which in this case is impossible because the girl has no other family here.’

  ‘The father is abroad,’ said Makana. ‘That doesn’t mean he can’t arrange things from there.’

  Okasha spluttered into his coffee. ‘You’re not serious, are you?’ He mopped his moustache carefully with a pristine white handkerchief he produced from his tunic. ‘Why? What motive could he possibly have to kill his daughter?’

  ‘Maybe she wasn’t his daughter.’

  ‘This is why you won’t tell me the name of your client. Now I get it.’ Okasha studied Makana for a moment. ‘Do you think perhaps you’re taking this thing too personally?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, it sounds to me like your client has a conflict of interests here. Either he does truly believe the girl’s father did it, or . . .’

  ‘Or what?’

  ‘Or he’s covering up his own indiscretions. Maybe that’s where you should be looking,’ said Okasha. ‘If you want motives then start with the most obvious. Who would gain from her death? A father who lives in a foreign country, or a wealthy man seeking to protect his reputation? I assume your client is a wealthy man.’

  Makana lit a cigarette and stared out at the street. He had difficulty imagining Ragab being capable of murdering anyone. He struck him as the kind who lacked courage in the final instance. Ragab was the kind who was smart enough to always find an easy way out for himself. He didn’t like getting his hands dirty. Everything about him, his elevated view of himself, was a strategy to avoid conflict.

  ‘If twenty-two years in this job have taught me anything,’ Okasha was saying, ‘it is that people never do anything purely for benevolent reasons. Believe me.’

  Makana did believe him, everything pointed to it. Yet there was still an element of doubt that he could not cast aside. Perhaps he wanted to believe that Ragab was acting out of selfless reasons.

  ‘In any case,’ Okasha went on, ‘honour killings,’ he pursed his lips in distaste, ‘these are not matters to involve yourself in.’

  ‘The girl had eighty per cent burns. Can you imagine how painful that is? Even if she had survived she would never have lived a normal life.’

  ‘I understand.’ Okasha ground his teeth together. ‘But that doesn’t change the facts.’

  ‘You’re not saying you condone it?’ Makana raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I’m saying this country has some old ways and nothing you and I can do will change that.’

  By now they were drawing looks from other people. Okasha glared around the ahwa just long enough to make everyone else go back to mind
ing their own business, then he reached for his cup and took a leisurely sip. Holding the cup between thumb and forefinger to sip delicately, managing not to dampen the ends of his moustache. ‘There was a woman at the scene yesterday, talking about the same thing.’

  ‘What woman?’ Makana recalled the woman who had appeared at the clinic.

  ‘You know, one of those . . . activist types, works for an organisation, no doubt funded by some well-meaning people in Europe who feel they have a duty to enlighten us with their civilisation and whatever else they can think of.’ Okasha finished his tea. ‘Take the advice of an old friend and walk away from this case. You’re taking it too seriously. It’s affecting your judgement.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my judgement.’

  ‘This is a bad case. It’s not for you. Not now, not so soon after all this with your daughter.’

  Okasha sat back, having said his piece. Makana stubbed out his cigarette and got to his feet. Suddenly he wanted to be away from here, this place, this coffee shop with its noise and chatter, the street with all the chaos and confusion.

  ‘You know that if there is anything I can do to help, anything at all . . .’ Okasha stood and held out his hand. ‘And no need to thank me for this morning. It makes a change from all of this hysteria about catching Al Qaida operatives. Now we are all part of the War on Terror. What do they think we were doing before?’ Okasha patted Makana on the shoulder as he made to leave. ‘Forget about this girl and get yourself a decent case. You need to work. We all do. It’s the only thing that makes sense in this crazy world.’

  For a long time Makana watched him walk away, then he lit another cigarette and turned on his heels and went the other way.

  Chapter Six

  Makana spent the next few hours wandering the area talking to everyone and anyone he came across. It’s not hard to get people to talk. Give them half a chance and most leap at the opportunity to display the breadth of their knowledge. The real problem was always getting to the little details, the things which stuck out and which, hopefully, would eventually illuminate a way forward. Listening was tricky. It was an acquired skill. You had to give people space and time, you had to sift out what was useful from the flood of irrelevant information. You had to sniff out what was true from what was embellishment, exaggeration, fabrication, fantasy, pure lies. In other words, everything had to be tempered by a good pinch of scepticism.