The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus

The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus by Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page B

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Authors: Jon Courtenay Grimwood
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where Lady Jalila went first…
    “I don’t care who he’s with. Tell him I’m at the al-Mansur madersa and I need to talk to him now.” For once Lady Jalila didn’t have to raise her voice. The urgency in her tone was obvious even to his idiot PA and, seconds later, her husband’s worried face flashed up on her tiny silver Nokia. As ever, he looked just like a small startled rat.
    “What’s…”
    “Wait,” said Lady Jalila suddenly, snapping off the camera option on her mobile. Something silver and sickening had just caught her eye. Let him read about it or look at the crime-scene photographs later if he must. Nafisa dead with her blouse ripped open—there were some things she didn’t think her husband needed to see.
    “Nafisa’s been murdered,” said Lady Jalila.
    “Nafisa?” His horror was absolute, obvious. There were several things the Minister immediately wanted to say. But he said none of them, contenting himself with a simple “I’m so sorry.” He glanced beyond the edge of her screen to a group of people she couldn’t see and waved his hand, dismissing them. A muted question filtered into her earbead and she heard her husband’s grunt of irritation. “Tomorrow,” he said crossly. “It can wait.” And then she had his full attention again.
    “How did she die?”
    “She was stabbed…with her pen.”
    Lady Jalila heard him punch buttons on his desk. “Don’t touch anything.” That was the policeman in him speaking. “I’ll get my best man onto it now.”
    “Mushin.”
    The anger in her voice stopped him dead.
    “You really don’t get it, do you?” She didn’t care if all his calls were taped or not. Or what his PA thought when the little tramp typed up that day’s transcripts. “Nafisa was stabbed with her pen, understand? She wrote that letter and someone stabbed her.”
    He understood now. She could see that from the sudden tightening of his jaw.
    “You know who else signed that letter,” said Lady Jalila. “Don’t you?”
    He did. He knew only too well.
    She had.
    “I want you to put Madame Mila on this case,” Lady Jalila said fiercely. “It’s an attack on our values.” By “our”, she meant women’s.
    The Minister’s lips screwed into a tiny moue of irritation but he nodded. “I’ll do it now,” he promised.
    “Good,” said Lady Jalila and punched a button on her Nokia, consigning her husband’s rat-like features to a flicker, then darkness.

 
    CHAPTER 15
    New York
    It was ZeeZee’s childhood therapist who first suggested that, since the small boy had hated his time in Switzerland and New York obviously didn’t suit him, the best answer might be to find him a place at a specialist boarding school in Scotland.
    So, four months after he first arrived in New York, the child who would become ZeeZee left again, at the suggestion of a therapist that ZeeZee knew, even then, he didn’t need. And the boy knew why he was being sent away too. He kept fusing the man’s neural-wave feedback machines…
    The next time ZeeZee arrived in America he was eleven. The Boeing had come in low over Long Island and sank onto the runway at Idlewild in a simulation-perfect landing. It was the first time ZeeZee had ever flown in an Alle Volante. He travelled executive-class with his own tiny room, and though the cubicle walls were veneered from a single peel of Canadian maple and his bed had a frame made from the same extruded magnesium alloy found in Japanese racing bikes, the cubicle was still no bigger than the inside of a small van.
    ZeeZee hadn’t minded about the size at all. After a term in a dorm with nine other boys—the largest of whom thought Welham sounded enough like wanker to be interchangeable—the privacy and silence of his cabin was enough to make him drunk with the luxury of it all.
    There was a stewardess who arrived every time he pushed the button, and who smiled and didn’t mind because he was travelling on his own and looked just like she thought

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