Aggressor

by Nick Cook

  ‘Oh, Tom, I’m so glad you’re here.’

  They held each other for a moment. She took a step back. ‘You haven’t changed.’

  ‘Nor you.’

  They stood there awkwardly for a moment, neither knowing what to say after so long.

  ‘How’s little Alia?’ she asked at last.

  ‘She’s fine. I’ve left her with my parents, until-’ He stopped. ‘She’ll be with them for a while.’

  Sharifa looked across to the investigator. ‘I see introductions are unnecessary,’ she said.

  Al-Qadi ground the stub of his cigarette into the floor. He made to leave.

  ‘I hope you have a pleasant stay in Egypt, Mr Girling. If anything occurs to you that could help our investigation, do not hesitate to call me. Miss Fateem has my number.’ He clapped his hands and the militiaman took up his position inside the room again. ‘The guard will see to it that you are protected.’

  Al-Qadi’s eyes rested on the satin-smooth skin of Sharifa’s legs for a moment, then he turned and walked from the room.

  Girling waited till he heard the lift doors close. ‘I need a couple of hours in here,’ he whispered to her. ‘I have to check this place out, unsupervised.’

  She followed his gaze to the militiaman, who was engrossed in the pages of a magazine that had fallen from one of the boxes. Sharifa glanced towards Girling’s luggage and asked: ‘Do you have a carton of cigarettes?’

  He shook his head. ‘I quit.’ He pulled a bottle of Johnny Walker from his duty-free bag. ‘But this stuff always used to be better than currency around here.’

  Girling handed over the bottle and watched as the transaction was made. Sharifa cooed soothingly at the guard’s protestations. There was nothing to fear. She had things, private things, to discuss with her colleague from London. Captain Al-Qadi would understand. The militiaman looked at her quizzically for a moment, then headed for the door, seemingly satisfied, his prize tucked inside his tunic.

  Girling gestured after him. ‘Where’s he going?’

  ‘To guard the main entrance for a while. You probably have a little over an hour before he gets nervous and comes back. Providing, of course, Captain Al-Qadi doesn’t beat him to it.’

  ‘Unpleasant little runt, isn’t he?’ Girling said.

  ‘Do not underestimate Al-Qadi, Tom. You, better than most, know what the Mukhabarat can do.’

  Girling started with the filing cabinet nearest the door. He picked through the folders meticulously, occasionally removing a carnet and leafing through its pages like a bank cashier counting out money.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be getting some rest?’ Sharifa said. ‘You’ve been up all night.’

  Girling said nothing, but moved to the next cabinet, pulling each drawer out on its runners in turn and passing his hands over its underside.

  Nothing.

  ‘There’s a coffee-shop round the corner,’ she ventured. ‘I bet you could use some real Arabic coffee after that flight.’

  ‘Sounds good,’ he said distractedly. He never heard her leave.

  Girling moved to the cardboard boxes used by Stansell as surrogate filing cabinets. As he stripped away the layers, he found newspaper cuttings, some in English, others in Arabic, bound with pieces of string, or elastic. The Mukhabarat, he knew, would have looked on the boxes as junk. There had been no attempt to categorize the contents beyond their natural chronology. Yet Stansell knew where to find everything. He had that sort of mind.

  With a growing sense of unease Girling moved down the layers until he reached the period when he was last in Egypt. There was a long article clipped from the Economist on Libya’s return to the Arab fold, headed with a picture of Gaddafi shaking hands with Mubarak on the tarmac at the Cairo Airport. Girling remembered the Libyan leader’s visit. Gaddafi arrived the day he took his first steps in Stamen’s apartment. Stansell had gone to the airport to watch the plane come in and Girling had decided to use the solitude to practise walking. After two months in bed, it had been more difficult than he’d ever imagined. There were a few more pages of contemporary parliamentary reports. He nicked past them and there was Mona.

  The sight of her made him start. It was an enlargement of an official photo from her passport, or ID documents. The picture made her look stern, but then all booth-type snapshots the newspapers borrowed in the aftermath of tragedy appeared to do that. Beneath the picture, set half-way down the third page of the Egyptian Gazette, Egypt’s English-language daily, the caption read: ‘Mona Hamdi, photographer for the London Times, killed in Asyut crowd stampede.’

  Girling had no desire to reread the official account of her death. He replaced the things in the box and moved to the shelf beside Stansell’s desk. It was lined with back numbers from Stansell’s career, bound religiously into fading volumes. For one so apparently disorganized, Girling thought, it was a curious discipline. Beyond the seven years’ worth of Dispatches, there were other volumes, all present, all complete. Except one.

  Girling’s finger stopped at the point where the 1979 (July-December) Dispatches binder should have been. He started to look for it, somehow anxious that this diligent record should be restored to its proper complement, but gave up when Sharifa returned with two copper jugs brimming with piping hot coffee, its strong, spicy aroma instantly filling the room.

  ‘Have you found anything?’ she asked as she poured.

  ‘Not yet.’ He took his cup. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Tom, the police have been through this place already.’

  ‘Their comb,’ Girling said, ‘isn’t quite the same as mine.’

  ‘They still managed to find his contact book.’

  Girling began picking through the contents of a box. ‘I know. Al-Qadi lost little time in telling me. Where was it, did they tell you?’

  She shook her head. ‘Most of what I know about the case comes from snatches of conversations I’ve picked up around the police.’

  ‘Did you hear any mention of his notes?’

  ‘Notes?’

  ‘Al-Qadi was evasive when I asked, but Stansell must have made notes. I know if I were Stansell - and I was on to something as big as he was -I would have hidden them somewhere.’

  ‘I have heard nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Then maybe they’re still around.’ He fanned through the pages of a book as he spoke. ‘By the way, you wouldn’t know where a volume of Stansell’s Dispatches wandered off to, would you?’

  She shrugged. ‘No. Is it important?’

  ‘Probably not.’ He carried on searching the box.

  ‘Do you think you can find him?’ she asked suddenly.

  He paused and looked up at her. The dark glasses and scarf made her look like she was in official mourning.

  ‘I’ve got to.’

  ‘Tom, this is Cairo, not Kensington.’

  Girling tossed the book back into a box. ‘The Mukhabarat are just going through the motions. You know that as well as I do. Stansell needs someone else on his case. Well, I’m here now.’ He looked up at the shelves, the piles of magazines, the newspaper cuttings and all Stamen’s other work props. ‘But I need to get to know him again.’

  Girling sat at the desk. He removed the top drawer and began picking his way through the detritus that Stansell kept next to him. It was the sort of junk that filled the drawers of his own desk. Letters awaiting replies; others lying unopened in limbo between the trash-can and the filing cabinet. There was a bottle of typewriter correcting fluid, a pack of Stamen’s business cards held together by a plastic band. Paper clips, endless paper clips. Girling cursed as he pricked his hand on an upturned drawing pin.

  ‘I don’t suppose he started keeping a desk diary?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ she laughed softly. ‘You know him better than that.’

  ‘And his pocket diary was on him when he was taken?’

  ‘I guess so. The police don’t have it.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘What?’

&nbs
p; ‘That the police don’t have his diary.’

  For a moment she seemed confused. ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She shrugged. ‘A hunch, I suppose. Is it really important, Tom?’ she retorted testily.

  ‘Everything could be important. Stansell’s somewhere out there and he doesn’t have much time.’

  Girling sucked the blood from his finger. ‘What about tapes? The ones he put his interviews on?’

  ‘The Mukhabarat took them away.’

  Girling pulled out another drawer, then stopped. ‘Tell me what happened the day he went missing.’

  She had arrived at Stansell’s apartment to find the door swinging on its hinges, the note from the terrorists anchored to the desk by an ashtray. She told him how Al-Qadi and his team arrived, several hours later, followed by the Mukhabarat’s forensic people.

  Every now and again, Girling questioned her on details, but for Sharifa, recalling the minutiae wasn’t always easy. Much of the day in question she had been in shock. When he was satisfied he had all she knew, Girling asked her to cast her mind back to the day the terrorists blew the plane.

  ‘That afternoon Jack Carey ordered him to drop everything and go for the terrorists at Beirut. He spoke to me, because Stansell was out.’

  ‘Where was he?’

  ‘Midday he went to a cocktail reception at the Soviet Embassy, but I don’t know what time he left. He didn’t always like to tell me where he was going. That said, I - ‘

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Finding him wasn’t usually very difficult.’

  He sensed her reluctance. ‘Go on.’

  ‘One day it would be the Metropolitan Club, another it would be the piano bar in the Hilton. Or maybe, the English Pub out at Heliopolis.’

  ‘That doesn’t come as any great surprise,’ Girling said. ‘That was how he liked to do business.’

  ‘This wasn’t business, Tom. It wasn’t just the odd lunch.’

  Girling had a fleeting image of Moynahan, ruddy faced and red eyed, sneering at him during the news meeting. ‘So Stansell drinks. He’s always been a drinker. That’s Stansell.’

  He smiled. ‘Stansell always liked a drink, Sharifa.’

  She nodded. ‘He wasn’t happy when you left.’

  ‘It’s not as if I haven’t spoken to him in three years,’ he said defensively.

  Sharifa moved over to the window and looked out over Cairo’s skyline. ‘Couldn’t we talk about this later?’

  ‘I want you to tell me now,’ he said. ‘What didn’t he want me to know?’

  She tossed her thick black hair over her shoulders. ‘He kept the copy coming in, but he found it more and more difficult. He’s not young-’

  ‘You make him sound like a lonely old man,’ he said. ‘A drunk, tired, lonely old man.’

  Sharifa looked away.

  Girling managed to keep his voice even. He forced himself back to Stansell’s itinerary. ‘But that day, the day Jack Carey called, you didn’t know where he was?’

  ‘No.’

  Girling sat back in the chair. Suddenly, he felt exhausted. He could have slept right there, but he got to his feet and checked the floorboards. None of them seemed loose. He looked beneath the two tables, but there was nothing taped to their undersides.

  ‘So when did you next see him?’ he asked.

  ‘Not until the following day. I arrived at the office early and found Stansell already here. He hardly spoke. He just sat at the desk - right there - staring at the piece of paper with Carey’s message on it. Then he got out a map and started writing on it. I don’t know what.’

  Girling stopped pacing. Sharifa had removed her sunglasses. She seemed transfixed by the desk.

  ‘When you were a kid, did you ever put a butterfly that was sapped of strength on to a little bit of sugar?’ she asked. ‘Did you see how it would flex its wings, how the life would come back to it?’

  He hadn’t, but he understood.

  ‘He threw himself into this story like he was a cub reporter again,’ she continued. ‘I knew he was on to something, but he wouldn’t tell me about it. He rarely discussed big stories with me. The day... that day, he returned here late in the afternoon excited about something. His eyes shone, he was short of breath. He called London and held a whispered conversation with someone, Kelso maybe, or Jack Carey.’

  ‘It was me,’ Girling said. ‘Looking back on it, I think he might have been saying goodbye.’

  ‘He knew who they were, didn’t he?’

  ‘He said he did.’ He didn’t bother to tell her about Kelso’s duplicity, or his own shame. She would have got the details off somebody in London.

  ‘That was the last time I saw him,’ she said.

  It was some time before Girling spoke. ‘Did he talk to you about his contacts, at all?’

  She shook her head. ‘You know what he was like about the people he dealt with.’

  ‘The most important thing in Stansell’s life was that little black book,’ Girling said. ‘I wonder if Al-Qadi realizes what he’s got.’

  Half an hour later, Sharifa dropped Girling at the apartment in Hassan Assem Street, across the river in Zamalek.

  ‘Call me, day or night,’ she said.

  Girling had decided that he would stay at Stansell’s for as long as it took. He wanted to immerse himself again in Stansell’s shadowy life.

  A lone militiaman appeared from the shadows of the lobby. The lift was out of action, forcing him to hump his bags up four flights of stairs. The hasty repairs to the apartment door were readily apparent - nails hammered through the wood to secure the lock, and a shiny new hinge.

  Girling used the key Sharifa had given him and let the door swing open. He stepped just inside and looked slowly around him.

  It was as he remembered it, a large, airy, open-plan affair, filled with functional furniture. Its plainness contrasted with the beautiful collection of water-colours and prints that Stansell had garnered from all corners of the Middle East. To Girling’s left was the sitting-room. Beyond that, the balcony overlooking the front of the block and the back street below. Before him was the dining-room that Stansell used as an office, and to his right the long corridor, off which were three bedrooms, kitchen, and bathroom.

  Stansell’s desk rested against the opposite wall. Its surface was covered still with forensic powder. The Mukhabarat’s investigators had long gone, but the powder was everywhere. Girling shook his head. As if terrorists were worried about fucking fingerprints.

  Girling lingered in front of the photo-frames documenting Stansell’s career. There were old pictures of Stansell with Sadat, Gaddafi, Shamir, and Arafat, plus some he hadn’t seen before, including one of the two of them lifting their Stella bottles at the bar of the Metropolitan, Old Mansour the waiter looking on benignly. Girling picked it up and blew the forensic dust from the frame. Stansell’s eyes appeared strikingly blue in the light of the camera flash. The crow’s feet that creased their edges gave him a scholarly look. He had a full beard greying at the chin. For his age, he was a good-looking man. Girling knew that Stansell, half a head taller than Girling’s six foot as they stood beside the bar, would not have succumbed without a hell of a fight the night the Angels came for him, however much drink he’d had inside him.

  The picture had been taken the day his job offer came through from Dispatches. Mona had been dead six, maybe seven months. Much of the intervening period had been a blur. But the offer had been a big step towards his recovery. And like so much of his gradual recuperation, it had been brought about by Stansell. A week later Girling had passed by his parents-in-law in Medinat-Al-Sahafeen, picked up his baby daughter and boarded the plane for the UK, a new career, and a new life. That had been the theory, anyhow.

  Girling replaced the photo, knowing that, sooner rather than later, he would have to see Mona’s parents. It was not a meeting he relished. For as long as he and Mona had been married, they had never accepted him. And in the three years he had
been back in England he had not communicated, except to send them a picture of their granddaughter each Christmas.

  Girling started with the bathroom. He checked the tiles, inside the toilet cistern, and behind the panels lining the bath, but found nothing. Next he moved into the kitchen. He flicked on the light and heard the scuttle of cockroaches pelting for the shadows. Like all kitchens in Egypt, Stansell’s was dark, functional, and devoid of comforts; a place for storing and preparing food, nothing more. He inspected the fridge and the freezer, opening cartons and packets for anything that was not supposed to be there.

  When the heat became intolerable, Girling moved to the window and heaved it open. A fire escape led down to the ground. The building was like a bad tooth, scrubbed clean on the outside, but decaying in parts that the eye could not normally see. There was rubbish everywhere and its smell rose to meet him. He shut the window and suffered the heat. At the back of his mind, Girling wondered why Stansell’s abductors had gone to the trouble of kicking in the front door when they could have entered so easily from the back.

  It was late afternoon by the time he finished searching the bedrooms and moved on to the dining-room. The desk seemed the most obvious place to start, but it was also where the police had spent the most time, judging from the dust. Girling turned instead to the shelves on the opposite wall where Stansell kept his books. There were hundreds of them. Each would have to be searched. He only wished he knew what he was looking for.

  He spotted the missing volume of Dispatches leaning against a collection of books on the lower shelf. He picked it up and thumbed through it. Tucked away at the back was a Cairo street map. Girling opened it up and laid it on the dining-room table. It was marked in two places, both in the same black ink. A nearby street called Ibn Zanki had been under-lined and the number ‘22’ written beside it. Girling made a note of the address in his pocket-book. And a large black arrow had been etched from Ibn Zanki across town and into the heart of the City of the Dead.

  Girling refolded the map and put it back inside the binder. Was this what Sharifa had seen him scribbling on in the office? Underneath the note he had made of the address, Girling wrote down City of the Dead, and below that, binder.