by Elise Noble
But Emmy was smiling in her sleep, her blonde hair spread over his chest, so he’d stick out the two weeks if it made her happy.
Where was his phone? He could catch up on emails, check the daily logs, help with any questions his team might have… Maybe review the crime scene footage from yesterday…
And it was a crime scene. No woman went hiking with a backpack full of fucking rocks. Well, Emmy did when she was working out with Alex, the ex-Spetsnaz personal trainer who kept her in shape. Rephrase: no sane woman. Coupled with the odd way the bag’s straps had been tied and the lack of footwear… Yes, she could have been wearing a pair of flip-flops that had drifted away, but she’d have shredded her feet climbing over the sharp rocks on the shore before she got near the water.
Black knew he should leave the case alone, but it’d piqued his curiosity. Was the boyfriend guilty? What kind of man killed a woman rather than showing her the door?
“Chuck? What are you doing?” Emmy mumbled.
“Nothing.”
“You’re incapable of doing nothing. Are you working?”
“Not exactly.”
She lifted her chin to take a better look. “You’re going through murder photos? It’s not even seven a.m. No death before coffee.”
“Thanks for offering. Make mine a double espresso.”
Curses were muttered, but Emmy still got up and stumbled through to the kitchen. She’d never been a morning person, and the vacation had left her drowsy. Or perhaps that was the cake. Or the sex. Never mind—she was easier to deal with that way, so Black wasn’t about to complain.
He took one last look at his phone and shut it off. How was the police investigation going? Next time he saw Bob, he’d get an update. Bob was well-connected, and he’d know somebody involved.
“What are we doing today?” Emmy asked.
“Whatever you want.”
“Wakeboarding, then. All I need to do is find my wakeboard.”
“Where did you leave it?”
She jerked a thumb towards the mountain of shit in the third bedroom. “Uh, I think it’s in there.”
Which was why at eleven o’clock, they found themselves driving into town in Bob’s pickup to buy a fucking closet.
“Where to?” Black asked Emmy.
“How the hell should I know? Dahab doesn’t exactly have a department store. Just drive around, and we’re bound to come across somewhere sooner or later.”
Later, it turned out. After an hour, they’d gotten stuck behind a herd of goats and helped a lost group of German tourists to locate their hotel, but the only furniture store they’d found was filled entirely with wicker.
“This is hopeless,” Emmy said. “It’s easier to buy a new villa than a new bloody wardrobe. I’m calling Bradley.”
“No, you’re not.” Black plucked her phone out of her hand before she could dial. “We can do this ourselves.”
“I need a donut.”
“You don’t need a donut.”
“Fine, a pastry. A croissant. Some sort of carbs.”
Black had slowed to steer around a stray dog, and Emmy leapt from the car before he could negotiate a healthier lunch, landed like a cat, and jogged straight into the nearest bakery. That crazy bitch. He had little choice but to wait for her, and she strolled back a minute later, clutching a family-sized paper carrier bag.
“I bought you a cookie.”
“I don’t like cookies.”
“No, you don’t like the idea of cookies. One won’t kill you. And take the road on the left up there—I got directions to IKEA.”
“IKEA? Here?”
“Apparently so.” Even Emmy didn’t sound convinced. “The dude at the bakery swore they sold wardrobes.”
In the embodiment of Dahabian enterprise, IKEA turned out to be a small room containing one man and a laptop. You picked whatever you wanted from the IKEA website, and he dispatched his brother to Cairo to pick it up. Their Platsa modular storage system would arrive the day after tomorrow, together with a chair shaped like a giant egg, a set of kitchen storage canisters, and a cactus.
Black edged towards the door as Emmy handed over a sheaf of hundred-pound notes. Was it over? Could they go back to the hotel now? Even festering on a sunlounger was more tolerable than this.
“Done?” he asked Emmy.
“I think so. Perhaps we should’ve ordered that hammock too…”
“Out.” Black half carried his wife to the door. “We’re leaving.”
“But—”
“Hey, wait!” The shout came from their left. “Please?”
Was the woman yelling at Emmy and Black? He turned to see a twenty-something brunette dressed in yoga pants running towards them in that funny gait that only came with flip-flops. Knees high, heels dragging along the ground. He glanced sideways at Emmy. No, she didn’t know the girl either.
“Hi, sorry, excuse me…” American, but with the apologies, she sounded almost British. “But were you…?” She paused to suck in a breath. “Were you in Happy Fish last night?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Omar said it was a big guy, like a giant, and his wife was really pretty with blonde hair. And when I saw you, I just thought…”
“Perhaps you could start at the beginning?” Emmy suggested.
“My friend Omar called to say Carmela was missing, then he and Gunther told me you saw her, and now the police are saying she’s dead, that she killed herself, but she’d never have done that, and I need to know when she died because her boyfriend went to Cairo, and so they said he couldn’t have been involved, but if it happened before he left—”
“Ease up.” Emmy’s demeanour softened. “Slow down a bit. Who’s Gunther?”
The cops thought Carmela killed herself? Had they lost their fucking minds?
“Gunther Krause. He owns the Happy Fish restaurant.”
“And you were friends with Carmela? Are you Aurelie?”
“Yes, I’m Aurelie. How did you know?”
“Omar mentioned your name. I’m so sorry about Carmela.”
“It’s insane. She’d never have killed herself.”
“What makes them think she did?”
“They said the doctor did an autopsy yesterday, and she drowned because she deliberately wore a backpack filled with stones to make herself sink.”
How did the doctor come to the conclusion that she’d drowned? The rocks were merely circumstantial evidence. And more to the point, how did a medical professional come to that conclusion so quickly?
When a person drowned, there were several signs, the most obvious being water in the lungs, stomach, and frontal and ethmoidal sinuses, followed by haemorrhaging in the mastoid air sinuses. But Carmela’s stomach and lungs had been devoured by a school of hungry barracudas, and there wasn’t a whole lot left of her face either. Her head had been teeming with small shrimp-like creatures, lysianassid amphipods if Black wasn’t mistaken, and they’d been snacking on her flesh.
Which meant the only sure way to determine if she’d drowned was through analysis of her bone marrow. The sea contained diatoms, tiny unicellular organisms, and during the late stages of drowning, those got circulated to all the organs. Diatoms weren’t normally found in bone marrow, so if they showed up, that was an indicator of how she’d died.
But they’d only had the body for a day. Checking for diatoms meant digesting the bone marrow with strong acids first, and the process took time. Black wasn’t totally ruling out drowning, but rather questioning the authorities’ handling of the case. If he had to guess, he’d say it was more than likely that the police captain had pushed for a quick resolution in order to avoid any bad publicity, both for himself and for the town. The death of a foreigner in Dahab wouldn’t exactly boost tourism revenues.
“Interesting,” he said, more to himself than anybody else.
“Interesting? You think this is interesting? This…this is devastating.”
A tear rolled down Aurelie’s cheek, and Bl
ack gritted his teeth. “Interesting” had perhaps been the wrong word to use. Maybe he should go on the sensitivity training course that Logan, Blackwood’s development coordinator, was always emailing him about.
“Tell us more about Carmela,” Emmy said. “Why do you think the police are wrong?”
“Because she was happy. The week before last, we were planning a trip to Jordan to visit the ruins at Petra, and she was looking forward to it.”
“Sometimes, even those who seem the happiest can be depressed inside.”
“Not Carmela.”
“How long had you known her?”
“Eight months. We arrived in Dahab on the same day and ended up sharing an apartment until she moved in with her boyfriend. She was my best friend.”
Best friends, yet nobody had been aware of her disappearance before the body was found.
“Did you report her missing?” Black asked. “Before yesterday, I mean.”
“No, because I thought she’d gone to Cairo with Youssef.”
The boyfriend. And Aurelie’s curl of the lip when she mentioned his name betrayed her opinion of the man, which appeared to be in line with Gunther’s.
“You didn’t get on with him?” Black asked.
“I always thought she could’ve done better. And now… Now…”
“You think he might have killed her?”
A nervous shrug. “Well, somebody sure did. Can you tell me when you saw her on the beach?”
That was the problem with lies. Occasionally, they came back to bite you in the ass. Now, should he tell a bigger lie or revert to the truth? Say they saw her last week, and Aurelie would go chasing after Youssef, which could be dangerous if he was the culprit. Say they saw her this week, and they risked ruling out a suspect.
“We didn’t,” Emmy said.
“Huh?”
“We didn’t see her on the beach. It’s a long story. Basically, we were the people who found Carmela’s body, and we told Gunther a small fib because it seemed like the fastest way to join the dots and steer the police towards her identity.”
“Why didn’t you just call them yourselves?”
“Honestly? Because we didn’t want to get wrapped up in a murder investigation on our vacation.”
“If you’re only here on vacation, how do you know Carmela? How did you work out it was her?”
“She was wearing her work shirt. We recognised the restaurant’s logo and figured she might be an employee.”
Another tear, this time accompanied by a trembling lip. “You shouldn’t lie. It wastes people’s time, and it’s…it’s rude.”
Aurelie turned away, mousy brown hair flying in the wind. She didn’t look like much—five feet nothing with delicate features and big hazel eyes—but her attitude, fiery with an undercurrent of fear, would get her into trouble if she wasn’t careful.
“We’re sorry, okay?” Emmy said. “Where are you going?”
“To talk to Youssef.”
“That’s probably not a good idea.”
“What else am I supposed to do? And don’t tell me to speak to the police again, because they won’t do anything. They never do. Gunther’s bicycle got stolen, and he knew who took it because the asshole was riding it around town, but the cops wouldn’t even file a report.”
Ah, fuck. Black glanced at Emmy at the same time as she cut her eyes sideways towards him. He knew that look. His beloved wife couldn’t stand by and watch while a woman walked into jeopardy alone. And how did he feel? Although two weeks of vacation had sounded like a nice idea, three days in, and he was bored already.
“We’ll come with you,” he said.
Aurelie paused mid-stride. “You will?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Because you feel guilty?”
Guilt wasn’t an emotion that had ever bothered Black. “Because neither of us wants to fish another corpse out of the sea.”
Aurelie wiped her eyes on the bottom of her T-shirt while Emmy pursed her lips. What was the problem now? The woman had just told him not to lie, no? So he hadn’t, for once.
“What he meant is that we’ll help because Carmela deserves justice,” Emmy said. “And we don’t want to see you get hurt either.”
“What if you get hurt?”
“Don’t worry about us. Back home, we do this for a living.”
“You’re cops?”
“No, we run a security and investigations company.”
“But w-w-what about your vacation?”
“Some things are more important than getting a suntan. Come on, let’s find a quiet spot and talk over what we know.”
CHAPTER 8 - BLACK
PREDICTABLY, AURELIE WANTED to go steaming over to Assalah Square and question Youssef right now, but Black quickly vetoed that idea.
“You only get one shot at questioning a person for the first time, and you want to do that armed with as much knowledge as possible.”
“But—”
“How can you catch him in a lie if you don’t know the truth yourself?”
“And nobody can work on an empty stomach,” Emmy put in. “Have you eaten lunch yet?”
Aurelie backed down easily. Too easily for this job. “I haven’t even eaten breakfast.”
They ended up back at Happy Fish. In mid-afternoon, the place was as popular as 1987 Chernobyl, and they settled at a table near the water’s edge. There was no sign of Gunther, but Omar materialised with an order pad.
Scrawny, nineteen or twenty years old, cheap clothes, but the shirt was spotless and ironed. Yesterday, Omar’s eyes had been worried but hopeful. Today, they’d dulled. He reminded Black of another kid, the son of a café owner in Fallujah he’d met in another lifetime. Syed. Twenty years on, Black still remembered his name. On the first visit, Syed had smiled as he served coffee that was too sweet in a cup that was too small, full of optimism that Good Samaritans like the businessman Black was pretending to be would rebuild his country. The second visit, after Syed’s parents had been killed by a suicide bomber and his sister had disappeared, he looked a decade older than his nineteen years. On Black’s third visit, he’d sipped weak tea as Syed ran across the street to the grocery store to get more sugar, only for the teenager to get picked off by a sniper hell-bent on eliminating infidels. Black had taken a certain satisfaction in dispatching the terrorist to meet his god in person.
“I almost can’t believe the news,” Omar said. “Are the police certain it’s Carmela?”
“That’s what they told me, but they said…”—a sniffle from Aurelie—“they said there wasn’t much left of her to identify. I don’t know what to do. I mean, I guess someone should organise a funeral, but how? Nobody close to me ever died before.”
Black didn’t see how they could’ve confirmed Carmela’s identity for sure. Not yet, when they hadn’t had time to run a DNA test. And had they even obtained a sample for comparison?
“What about her family?” he asked.
“They live in Salerno. What am I supposed to tell them? I’ve only spoken to her mom a handful of times.”
“Salerno? You should contact the Italian Embassy. They’ll be able to assist with the arrangements and advise on repatriating the body if that’s the route the family decides to go down. The Italian police should go and break the news.”
“What else did the police here say?” Omar asked. Was that a tremble in his voice? Sadness over Carmela, or a hint of nerves? “Do they have any suspects?”
“Suspects?” Aurelie shook her head, frustrated. “They’re not even looking. They think she drowned herself. Captain al-Busari told me I was misguided when I said Carmela wouldn’t have taken her own life. Mis-freaking-guided!”
“She did seem down lately. Sort of quiet.”
“She wasn’t suicidal.”
“Last night, Gunther mentioned problems with her boyfriend,” Black said, digging gently.
“What problems?”
“An incident with a door? Apparently, she said she walked int
o it, but also that it was Youssef’s fault.”
“That happened months ago! Youssef decided to take the door off its hinges to repaint it, and he left it propped against the wall in the dark. Carmela came home late after work and walked straight into it. Sometimes, Youssef just doesn’t think.”
“So he wasn’t violent towards her?”
“No, more…more…pushy.”
“Pushy?”
“Carmela just wanted to make everyone happy, and sometimes that meant she didn’t stick up for herself enough. But she was getting better. Last month, Youssef…”
Ah, shit. Aurelie looked as though she was about to cry again. Black grabbed a handful of napkins from the dispenser and shoved them in her direction. She dabbed at her eyes a bit, and Emmy reached across to squeeze her free hand. Thank fuck his wife was here. Over the years, he’d learned how to do a passable imitation of sympathy, but it always felt awkward on him, as if he’d bought the emotion in a half-price sale but it didn’t quite fit.
“Youssef asked Carmela to marry him,” Aurelie finally said.
“They were engaged?”
Aurelie’s hair stuck to her damp cheeks as she shook her head. “She told him she wasn’t ready. I mean, she was only nineteen, and she wanted to see the world before she settled down and got a job.”
“And Youssef wanted her to stay in Dahab?”
“No, he wanted to move to Italy. Her parents wanted her back home too. Her father always said she was dumb for living out here on a shoestring when she had a good job waiting for her in Salerno.”
“What kind of job?”
“Her parents own an accountancy firm.”
Yeah, Black saw how life by the water beat being shackled to a calculator. “How did Youssef take the rejection?”
“Like I said, he was pushy.”
“Pushy enough to get nasty when things didn’t go his way?”
“I don’t think so. And she never gave him an outright ‘no,’ more said that she wanted to wait.”
“Youssef drinks,” Omar said softly. “Sometimes too much.”
“Isn’t that against his religion?”