The Last Secret Of The Temple (33 page)

Layla rose at five a.m. and, leaving Topping asleep, quietly gathered her things, tiptoed from the bedroom and left the house.

She wasn't sure why she'd slept with him. He'd been good company – witty, charming, attentive – and the sex had been great, among the best she'd ever had. Despite that, at no point had she felt fully engaged in the experience, allowed herself simply to let go and disappear into the whirlwind of his love-making. Even as she had ridden on top of him, hips grinding into his, beads of passionate sweat jerking down her small, tight breasts, still a part of her, most of her, had stayed detached, locked away in her own thoughts, turning over what she'd heard earlier, what was happening back in the Middle East, as if her body was simply some inanimate vehicle that had been programmed on to autodrive while she, the pilot, sat back inside and focused on something completely separate.

She clicked the front door closed and stepped out onto the empty street, rows of neat Victorian houses running off to either side, the world around her grey and still, no longer dark but not yet light either, the dim no-man's land between night and dawn.

She had called Jean-Michel Dupont, Topping's contact in Toulouse, the previous evening, explaining that she was interested in Dieter Hoth and his excavations at Castelombres. They had agreed to meet at his antique shop at 1.30 p.m., and she was now booked on to BA's ten a.m. flight from Heathrow. Briefly the thought struck her that with so much time to kill she could walk out to Grantchester, have a look at the old house where she had gone to live after her father's death. Although both her grandparents had long since passed away, her mother, so far as she was aware, still lived there, with her second husband. A barrister. Or was it a banker? Layla couldn't be sure. She hadn't spoken to her since she had remarried six years ago, unable to forgive what she regarded as a grotesque betrayal of her father's memory.

Yes, she thought, it would be nice to see the old place again, with its moss-covered roof and garden full of plum and apple trees, about as far away from the dust and horror of Palestine as you could possibly get. She even started to cross the street, aiming for the public footpath that, if memory served her right, led out through the water meadows that lapped against the town's eastern fringes. After only a few metres, however, she stopped and, with a shake of the head as if to say 'What's the fucking point?', turned and set off in the opposite direction, towards the station, tears pricking her eyes at the thought of how utterly and irrevocably alone she was in the world.

Khalifa sipped at the plastic beaker of tepid in-flight coffee, nibbled on the corner of his biscuit and glanced out of the aeroplane window at the miniature world beneath. It was a spectacular view – the Nile, the cultivation, the crumpled yellow sheet of the Western Desert – and under other circumstances he would have spent the entire journey staring down at it in wide-eyed wonder. It was, after all, only the second time in his life he had ever been in an aeroplane, and there was surely no better way of appreciating the natural miracle that was Egypt, the extraordinary juxtaposition of life and barrenness – Kemet and Deshret as the ancients had known it, the Black Land and the Red Land – than to view it from above in this way, stretched out from horizon to horizon like some vast unfolded map.

This morning, however, his mind was preoccupied with other things, and after gazing out of the window for only a moment he looked away again, draining the remainder of his coffee and refocusing on the business in hand.

He had wanted to travel down to Cairo the previous afternoon, immediately after his conversation with Ben-Roi. Unfortunately, force etiquette dictated that he couldn't just turn up on another station's patch without some sort of official notification, and by the time he had jumped through all the necessary bureaucratic hoops he had missed the last flight up to the capital. Which, as it turned out, had proved to be a blessing in disguise, because the delay had afforded him the time to do a bit of background checking into the mysterious Mr and Mrs Anton Gratz, with some extremely interesting results.

For a start, it turned out that Anton Gratz used to run a medium-scale fruit and vegetable import business. According to Ben-Roi, the 'Gad' or 'Getz' who had ordered the destruction of Hannah Schlegel's Jerusalem flat had also been involved in the fruit business. Khalifa had already assumed, of course, that 'Getz' and 'Gratz' were one and the same, but this new snippet of information seemed to provide absolute confirmation of the fact.

Equally if not more intriguing had been the similarities between the Gratzes' background and that of their friend Piet Jansen. Like Jansen, both were foreigners. Like Jansen, both had applied for and been granted Egyptian citizenship in October 1945. And like Jansen, neither seemed to have any discernible history prior to that date. Where they came from originally, when and why, whether Gratz was even their real name – all were questions to which Khalifa had been unable to find answers. The more he had dug the more he had got the feeling that, like Jansen, the Gratzes had something to hide. And the more he had dug the more he had got the feeling that all three were trying to hide the same thing.

By far the most significant piece of information he had come up with, however – a real revelation – concerned Mr and Mrs Gratz's original citizenship applications. The contemporary paperwork for these had, inevitably, been lost or destroyed. What remained, according to a contact of Khalifa's in the Interior Ministry, was a basic administrative record of the receipt and subsequent approval of said applications. And who was the security official responsible for that approval? None other than Farouk al-Hakim, the man who, four and a half decades later, would step in to stop Jansen being investigated for the Schlegel murder. Some further digging had revealed that al-Hakim had also dealt with Jansen's citizenship application, thereby establishing for the first time a clear link between the two men. More importantly, it implied that whatever Jansen and the Gratzes had been up to prior to October 1945, whatever it was they were all so desperate to keep hidden, al-Hakim had most likely known about it. It still didn't explain why he should have been so intent on protecting Jansen back in 1990, but it did reinforce Khalifa's conviction that the key to the Schlegel murder and subsequent cover-up, the key to everything that had been troubling him this last fortnight, lay in those crucial years prior to Jansen's arrival in Egypt.

And the only people who, it seemed, could now shed any light on those years were the ones he was currently on his way to see.

As the plane banked and dipped, beginning its descent into Cairo Domestic, the ruins of Saqqara drifting slowly by as though viewed through deep, clear water, Khalifa closed his eyes and prayed that the trip wouldn't be a wasted one; that when he returned to Luxor later that evening it would, finally, be with some clear idea about what the hell this whole thing was all about.

El-Maadi, the Cairo suburb where the Gratzes lived, lay on the southern fringes of the city. A quiet, leafy district favoured by diplomats, ex-pats and wealthy businessmen, its expensive villas and long avenues shaded by flame and eucalyptus trees were a world away from the poverty and mayhem that defined most of the rest of Egypt's capital.

Khalifa arrived just after midday, having taken the Metro down from the city centre. He got directions to Orabi Street from a peanut-seller near the station, and ten minutes later was standing outside the Gratzes' apartment block, a large pink building with whirring air-conditioning units bolted to the outer walls, an underground car park, and, opposite, the public payphone whose number had figured so prominently on Piet Jansen's telephone bill.

He lingered for a moment on the front steps, struck by the depressing thought that however hard he worked, and for however long, he would never be able to afford to live in a place like this. Then, flicking away his half-smoked Cleopatra, he passed through into the glass-fronted foyer and took the lift up to the third floor. The Gratzes' flat was halfway down a brightly lit corridor, with a varnished wooden door from the centre of which, like a large, curled tusk, protruded a brass knocker, a matching brass letterbox beneath it.

The detective paused a moment, sensing that what followed was either going to make or break the investigation, then, with a deep breath, he reached out towards the knocker. Before his fingers had reached it, he seemed to have second thoughts, lowering his hand again and instead dropping to his haunches and gently pushing back the letterbox flap. Through the rectangular opening he could make out a dim carpeted hallway stretching off in front of him, very neat and tidy, with rooms opening off to either side. From one of these – the kitchen, to judge by the rack of plates and the corner of a fridge just visible through the doorway – came a faint hum of music, a radio or cassette, and, even fainter, the sound of someone moving around. He brought his ear right up to the letterbox to make sure he wasn't imagining things, then, assured that he had indeed heard movement, straightened up, grasped the knocker and gave three loud bangs.

He counted ten beats, then, when there was no response, he repeated the action, four knocks this time. Still no answer. He squatted and eased open the letterbox again, thinking perhaps whoever was in the kitchen was elderly or infirm and thus simply taking a long time to reach the front door. The hall was empty.

'Hello!' he called. 'Is there anyone there? Hello!'

Nothing.

'Mr Gratz! My name is Inspector Yusuf Khalifa of the Luxor Police. I have been trying to contact you for the last three days. I know you're in there. Please open the door.'

He waited a few seconds, then added, 'If you don't I will have no choice but to assume you are deliberately obstructing a police inquiry and to place you under arrest.'

He was bluffing, but it seemed to have the desired effect. There was a faint choking sob from the direction of the kitchen, and then slowly, hesitantly, a short, plump, elderly woman, Mrs Gratz presumably, shuffled a few steps out into the hallway, supporting herself on a metal walking stick, staring in terror at the letterbox.

'What do you want with us?' she said, her voice weak and unsteady. 'What have we done?'

She was clearly not well: both her calves were heavily bandaged and the skin of her face was cracked and grey, like dried putty. Khalifa felt a pang of guilt for having so obviously upset her.

'There's no need to be afraid,' he said, speaking as gently and reassuringly as the situation permitted. 'I'm not going to hurt you. I just need to ask you and your husband some questions.'

She shook her head, a tress of white hair dislodging from the bun in which it had been clipped and swinging down across her face, giving her a faintly deranged look.

'My husband's not here. He's . . . gone out.'

'Then if I could talk to you, Mrs Gratz. About your friend Piet—'

'No!' She cowered back, half raising her walking stick as though to ward off an attack. 'We haven't done anything, I tell you! We obey the law. We pay our taxes. What do you want with us?'

'Like I said, Mrs Gratz, I need to ask you some questions. About Piet Jansen, Farouk al-Hakim—'

At the mention of this last name her fear seemed to redouble, her entire body trembling as though a pair of invisible hands had grasped her frail shoulders and were vigorously shaking them.

'We don't know anyone called al-Hakim!' she wailed. 'We never had anything to do with him. Why can't you leave us alone? Why are you doing this to us?'

'If you could just—'

'No! I won't let you in without my husband here. I won't! I won't!'

She started to back away down the hall, one hand clutching her stick, the other supporting herself against the wall.

'Please, Mrs Gratz,' said Khalifa, coming down onto both knees, fully aware of the ridiculousness of trying to conduct a conversation in this manner but unable to see any other way of proceeding. 'I have no wish to frighten or harm you. I believe, however, that you and your husband are in possession of important information concerning the murder of an Israeli woman named Hannah Schlegel.'

If the mention of al-Hakim's name had provoked a strong reaction, it was nothing compared to the look of abject terror that now swept across her face. She staggered backwards against the wall, one hand pawing at her throat as though she was struggling to draw breath, the other clasping and unclasping around the handle of her walking stick.

'We don't know anything,' she choked. 'Please, we don't know anything.'

'Mrs Gratz—'

'I won't talk to you! Not without my husband here. You can't make me! You can't!'

She began to sob, fierce spasms jerking her body, mucusy tears bubbling from her eyes. Khalifa remained as he was for a moment, then, with a sigh, he lowered the letterbox flap and stood up, shaking the stiffness from his legs.

There was no point pushing her any further. She was too distraught. Whatever she knew about Hannah Schlegel – and she certainly did know something – she wasn't going to tell him in her current state. Some of his colleagues would have simply kicked down the door and dragged her off into custody, but that wasn't the way Khalifa did things. He lit a cigarette, took a couple of drags, then dropped to his haunches again and pushed back the flap. The old woman was just as he'd left her.

'What time is your husband home, Mrs Gratz?'

She didn't answer.

'Mrs Gratz?'

She mumbled something inaudible.

'I'm sorry?'

'Five o'clock.'

He glanced down at his watch. Four and a half hours.

'He'll definitely be here then?'

She gave a weak nod.

'OK,' he said after a brief pause. 'I'll come back. Please tell your husband to expect me.'

He thought of adding 'and no tricks', but couldn't imagine what tricks they'd play so left it at that, lowering the flap, standing and setting off back down the corridor towards the lift. About halfway along he heard her voice calling after him, frail, desperate.

'Why are you hunting us like this? They're your enemies too, you know. Why are you helping them? Why? Why?'

He slowed, thinking of going back to ask what she meant, but then decided against it and, continuing to the lift, pressed the button for the ground floor. Things hadn't turned out quite as he'd hoped.

After he had gone the old woman remained as she was for a long moment, then she slowly hobbled down the hallway into the living room at the far end of the apartment. A small, erect man with a pencil moustache and a pinched, puckered face, like a piece of dried fruit, was waiting just behind the door, his hands held stiffly at his sides as though he was standing to attention on a parade ground. She shuffled across to him and, opening his arms, he wrapped them tenderly around her.

'There, there, my dear,' he said gently, speaking in German. 'You did the best you could. There, there.'

She pressed her cheek against his chest, shivering like a frightened child.

'They know,' she whimpered. 'They know it all.'

'Yes,' he said. 'It seems they do.'

He held her tight, stroking her neck and back, trying to calm her; then, easing her away, he took the tress of hair dangling across her face and tucked it back into the bun on top of her head.

'We always knew it might come to this,' he said softly. 'It was foolish to think it could last for ever. We had a good run. That's the main thing. Didn't we have a good run?'

She nodded weakly.

'That's my girl. That's my beautiful Inga.'

He reached into his pocket, removed a handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes and upper cheeks, wiping away the tears.

'Now, why don't you go and put on your dress while I sort things out here? No point hanging around, eh? We should be ready for them when they come back.'