by Peter Tonkin
‘How will you be able to tell which is which?’ asked Richard. ‘Given that no one is likely to admit to a crime that would get them a good long term in prison, even after their situation as illegal aliens has been sorted out here?’
‘Experience over many years suggests,’ said Major Ibrahim, his quiet voice suddenly cold and extremely serious, ‘that the smugglers responsible for all this will be the ones with the money and the phones. Probably hidden in waterproofed money belts.’
‘Do you think there’s any way we can open it without him knowing?’ asked Robin. The table was cleared of breakfast things now. The black snake of the money belt lay in the middle of it. Richard and Robin were alone, and talking in low voices, as though they were up to mischief and didn’t want to be discovered. It was early afternoon. Richard had just returned from the hospital and the pair of them were due at the police station at four o’clock local time to give their statements to Ibrahim in person.
‘I don’t think so,’ answered Richard after a short pause. ‘And I’m still not sure I want to go through the poor guy’s private things.’
‘But from what you say, this poor guy might well be one of the smugglers!’ snapped Robin. ‘I know we’ve formed a bit of a bond – because of the rescue, the decompression …’
‘The fact that he looks to be about the same age as William and Mary …’
‘Whatever. But the simple fact is that we don’t know him from Adam and if everyone who was up to no good actually looked evil then there’d be a great deal less trouble in the world. Didn’t you get a chance to speak to him?’
‘Not in private, no. He was still pretty woozy to begin with, and I’m pretty sure his English is almost as limited as my Arabic. And in any case, after that back-handed telling-off about the ways hotel food can undermine security as well as good medical practice, both Ibrahim and Zabr stayed really close.’
‘Even so, you have to be getting some sort of impression. Is Nahom a smuggler or was he being smuggled?’
‘I’ll bet he’s an innocent guy trying to get to a better life, though I’m certain Ibrahim has him pegged as a smuggler. Perhaps as the leader of the group. But the problem is that I’m still not sure whether our charming Major was playing mind games with me or not.’
‘Looks like one of them is. Either Ibrahim or Nahom.’
‘Could he know about the money belt?’
‘Ibrahim?’ Robin shrugged. ‘You mean one of the four guys he has in custody at the police station has already put some suspicion in his mind?’
‘That, or maybe the decompression chamber has video.’
‘It may have but I doubt it. Especially as if Ibrahim had footage of you taking Nahom’s belt as you say you did, you wouldn’t be back here in Villa Shahrazad chewing the fat with me. You’d be up in a cell chewing the fat with the other four guys he has under lock and key. You’re sure no one was watching when Nahom gave it to you?’
‘No one I could see. But to be fair, if he suspects Nahom had a belt then it’s not really a problem that would take even one pipe for Sherlock Holmes to solve, is it? I mean, everyone agrees Nahom was unconscious all the time he was aboard Katerina so he can’t have done anything with it before he came ashore. And everyone was packed in together so no one had a chance to just take it without being seen. Ibrahim and his guards watched him being brought off Katerina, put in the ambulance and then being transferred to the decompression chamber. He didn’t wake up until the decompression was complete. The people from the hospital would have turned it over the moment they found it. And they would have found it, either when they were getting Nahom ready for treatment after he came out of the chamber or for bed. So that’s where the transfer must have happened – in the chamber. And, given the suspicion, they’ll have searched the chamber – which is hardly overstocked with hiding places. So if someone said Nahom had a belt and it’s not on his person or it’s not in the chamber, then the next most likely thing is that you or I took it. I’m the first one Ibrahim saw, so I’m the one he started with the mind games.’
‘OK,’ said Robin. ‘So the bottom line at this stage seems to be do we open it and go through it before we go across to see the laughing policeman? Or do we leave it until after the interview and see whether he gives anything further away.’
‘Or whether he plays even more mind games.’ Richard shrugged.
‘But, for all his cheerful charm, he strikes me as someone who doesn’t miss much,’ warned Robin.
‘So if we open the belt before we go and find anything suspicious in it then we might as well just take it with us, because he’ll see from our expressions that we know more than we’re saying.’
‘From the sound of things, he knows that already, lover.’
‘But if we leave it for the time-being at least we won’t be any deeper in trouble than we are now.’
‘True. But if we’re not going to open it or take it, then where on earth are we going to hide it?’
‘Is it usual for a major to conduct witness interviews?’ asked Robin, her face a picture of innocent enquiry. She looked around Ibrahim’s office. It was a spacious, air-conditioned room with windows looking back over a hedge-lined parking lot with bougainvilleas in full pink flower. The windows were closed; the netting fly-screens outside them were closed also. And where the frames provided thick lines of shadow, the netting was packed with long-bodied, red-tailed hornets sheltering from the sun. The only sounds were a muted rumble of traffic and the whispering of the air-conditioning unit.
‘It depends on the investigation,’ answered Ibrahim. ‘And on the witness.’
‘Well,’ said Richard, ‘we feel very flattered anyway.’ He leaned back in his chair, apparently completely at ease. His gaze wandered away over the certificates and photographs on the wall. Everyone from the President to the Chief of Police by the look of things. All staring accusingly straight at him.
‘A feeling that may, sadly, be short-lived,’ continued Ibrahim blandly.
‘How so?’ He had Richard’s full attention now.
‘I’m afraid you will not be interviewed together.’ As he spoke, Ibrahim pressed a button on his desk console. A distant buzzer sounded. ‘I will take down the details Mrs Mariner remembers about the incident and its aftermath. I have a colleague who will take your statement in another room, Captain.’
More mind games, thought Richard grimly, focusing on Ibrahim’s bland smile. The door behind him opened. ‘Fine,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Can’t wait. Lead me to him.’ He was still smiling amenably when his interviewer came right in to stand between him and Robin. And the smile hardly flickered at the surprise he felt when he saw her.
‘Sergeant Sabet will take you next door. She and I will compare your versions of the incident later.’
She stood at five foot three. The white uniform made her look a little on the plump side, but there were clearly several layers of it. Her name badge was printed in English and Arabic: Gamila Sabet. The headdress that concealed her hair framed a round face which would have been almost girlish were it not for the determined dimple in her chin and the way her espresso-dark eyes somehow also managed to contain a hint of steely intelligence.
‘If you will follow me, Captain,’ she said in quiet but perfectly modulated English. ‘This need not take too long.’ Richard hadn’t heard a tone like that since childhood visits to the dentist who promised, Now this won’t hurt at all.
Half an hour later, Richard really was beginning to feel that the sergeant was starting to extract information which, like teeth, he was unwilling to part with. In her smaller, cramped office there was no air conditioning. A pedestal fan blew slightly cooler air at Richard, who crouched on an uncomfortable chair that was rather too small for him. The windows behind the sergeant stood wide open and only the dusty netting kept the restless hornets out of the room. On the other hand it allowed the snarl of traffic, the fine dust on the brick-kiln breeze, the odd mixture of smells represented by hot tar, petrol and bougai
nvillea and the restless buzzing of the hornets all to enter the room.
Sergeant Sabet had prompted him to establish the facts of the rescue as he remembered them, but he was getting the increasingly disturbing feeling that she already had all of the information she needed and was checking it against what she had been told – with a decided spin on the facts, perhaps even a hidden agenda. To begin with, she seemed certain that the men were all from Eritrea. That the wrecked boat, designed to carry twelve, had been carrying twenty-four. Twenty-four passengers. And an unknown number of smugglers – or traffickers – who were currently hiding themselves in the crowd of survivors both here and in Hurgada. The four men held in this police station overnight, together with the thirteen under the control of Captain Mohammed in Hurgada, had all been keen to explain what was going on and what innocent part they had been playing in it.
Sergeant Sabet was typing everything he said into a laptop as he said it – as well as making a recording of the conversation. He hadn’t thought to ask about having a lawyer present. He hadn’t thought he would need one. Now he was beginning to wonder, though he had no idea whether the Egyptian legal system would have allowed him one in any case. But he could have done with one. Particularly as the way her eyes were moving over the screen made him wonder whether his evidence, Robin’s evidence and the statements of some of the others were being presented in parallel on multiscreen, so they could be compared at once, point after point. An increasing amount of the sweat on his upper lip was not a direct result of the heat.
‘And this man, Nahom,’ she said again, gently. ‘You noticed nothing unusual about him as you were freeing him from the anchor and bringing him to the surface?’
‘What do you mean, unusual?’
The flash of her gaze told him she found the prevarication immediately suspicious. But her tone remained gently probing. ‘He wasn’t carrying anything? Nothing about his person?’
‘Not that I noticed …’
Again with the prevarication. The gentle curves of her eyebrows rose. The sweat on his lip gathered. She gazed at him for a moment like a tabby eyeing up a juicy mouse. ‘You have to understand,’ he persisted, thinking you’re in a hole – stop digging! ‘It was a race against time. He was drowning. We had to get him to the surface first, then on board Katerina and into hospital as fast as we could. We all got the bends because we had to come up so fast. There was no chance for chats or changes of clothes. And anyway, he was deeply unconscious all the time. Until he woke up in the decompression chamber.’
‘Ah, yes. The decompression chamber. He woke up, you say. No one else seems to have registered that—’
‘It was quite brief. He scarcely did more than stir. He was awake when I went back later that morning. Major Ibrahim …’
‘Has told me what happened later. But at the moment, you are the only witness we have as to what happened when this man Nahom first woke up in the decompression chamber. Did he say anything to you?’
‘Nothing I understood. I don’t think he speaks English and I don’t speak much Arabic.’
‘And you were the only person he could have been speaking to?’
‘I don’t understand.’ And he didn’t. He frowned, trying to see what she was driving at. Licked his lip without thinking, tasting the bitter salt.
‘The other man, the one Mrs Mariner brought to the surface. His name, apparently, is Aman, though like Nahom he has no papers at all, so could actually be anybody. Was he awake? Could Nahom have been talking to him? Giving him orders?’
‘No.’
‘You sound very certain all of a sudden. Why?’
‘The other chap, Aman, you say? He was absolutely unconscious. I’m sure.’ But now that Sergeant Sabet had raised it, of course, he wasn’t sure at all.
‘And Nahom just said things you didn’t understand …’
‘Certainly nothing that made sense. He may have just been speaking nonsense as he began to come to … Gibbering …’ Gibbering like me, he thought.
‘Gibbering. Nonsense. Yes, I see. And he didn’t try to communicate with you?’
‘No.’
‘Or give you anything?’
‘Look, Sergeant, we’ve been over this. I saved the man’s life, took him aboard my boat, got him to hospital and I’m trying to help all I can. I did not search him or try to interrogate him. I didn’t see him talk to anyone else until this morning when Major Ibrahim, Doctor Zabr and I went into the secure ward with the food I had sent over from the Jaz Mirabel and saw him talking to the nurse, telling them what he would like to eat. That’s it. That’s all. What is the problem?’
Sergeant Sabet sat silently for a moment, her gaze flicking from one section of her screen to another. Then she looked up and focused on Richard. Her brown gaze held his bright blue one. There was silence, except for the whirring of the fan and the buzzing of frustrated hornets. And she allowed the moment to last before she answered, ‘No problem at all, Captain Mariner. Thank you for all your help. You have advanced our enquiries quite considerably. If you think of anything else that might help us further, please get in contact.’ She slid a card across the table top towards him. ‘And if we come across anything else we need clarified, we’ll be in touch with you. You and Mrs Mariner are free to leave. Did your car wait, or can we offer you a lift?’
‘We have to open it,’ said Robin. ‘I’m sure they think Nahom is taking us for a ride. I mean, could he really be one of the smugglers? Perhaps even the leader? That’s what Ibrahim seemed to be driving at while he interviewed me.’
‘Someone certainly seems to have given them that impression. But there seems to have been eighteen or so statements so far either here or in Hurgada. And some of those statements must have come from smugglers pretending to be smuggled …’
The conversation, which had started in the Mercedes on the run back from the police station, followed them through the echoing corridors of Anastasia Asov’s palatial villa and spilled out on to the balcony where they looked down on Katerina a couple of hundred feet below as they talked. The balcony was the most private place in the villa except, perhaps, for the bathrooms. Still talking, they walked side by side to the balustrade. On the top of each section there was a terracotta jardinière secured to the marble. Cascades of flowers poured inwards, adding colour and fragrance to the already heady sights and smells of the balcony. As though by common consent, they moved to the right, where the jardinières stopped and a teak gate in the balustrade opened on to a short bridge that ended at the top of a private lift designed to spirit the owners and their guests, eight at a time, to and from the private beach at the cliff foot far below.
Richard was tempted to step in, go down and turn right, away from the private beach with its sunbeds and palm-frond sunshades and walk to the equally private marina where Husan and Mahmood were back aboard Katerina. Their advice had been invaluable so far. But his experience with Sergeant Sabet had started alarm bells ringing in his head and he really did not want either man to get deeper into this business – at least until he had a better idea what they were dealing with. Especially as the worst that was likely to happen to them as tourists was to have their visas withdrawn and be sent back home with a judicial slap on the wrist. But matters would be different for local people getting mixed up in something that might turn out to be quite seriously illegal. What was the phrase in British law – aiding and abetting? Anyway, between them, Robin and he would be able to remember quite clearly what the captain, the mate and the dive captain had told them already.
‘If he’s being smuggled or trafficked,’ Robin said, breaking into Richard’s thoughts, but extending them as though they had a psychic link, ‘then he’s likely to have some money, but not much; a couple of sets of documents – one possibly genuine and one almost certainly false. An address or two – probably written in Hebrew on the assumption that even after the action in Gaza during the summer 2014 he’s still hoping to be smuggled in through whatever tunnels are left between Egypt and Israel
. And that’s about it.’
‘On the other hand, if he is a smuggler or a trafficker then it’s likely just to be money – mostly US dollars, but also whatever currency he’s been collecting off his victims—’
‘And a phone. Don’t forget the phone. So he can call the families back in Africa and up the ante with a little rape and torture.’
‘That seems pretty definitive, doesn’t it?’ As Richard spoke, he lifted the last jardinière, which was not quite as firmly secured as the others, and pulled Nahom’s money belt out from underneath it. ‘So, let’s find out, shall we?’
Robin insisted on looking after their diving kit herself, so everything except their tanks was piled in a big marble bathtub in the master suite’s en suite. But of course, all they needed was Richard’s Aropec K1 dive knife. Robin laid the black rubber tube along the broad edge of the marble tub, holding it tightly, like an eel that needed skinning. Richard pulled the blade from its quick-release sheath and leaned forward, eyes narrow. The rubber inner tube had been packed with whatever it contained and then sealed shut with waterproof duct tape, into which the rope ends had been pushed. The whole thing looked pretty solid and utterly waterproof. But it was going to be impossible to open it without leaving obvious traces. Richard hesitated for a moment longer.
‘Come on,’ said Robin impatiently. ‘You need an air-drawn dagger?’
‘Thank you, Lady Macbeth,’ he answered. ‘Remember how that little enterprise turned out.’
‘It’s a rubber inner tube,’ she snapped. ‘It’s not the King of Scotland.’
‘Yeah,’ he answered. ‘And you’re not in contact with several witches.’ But he drove the point of the knife into the bulge of duct tape securing the rope end nearest her right fist.