Major Jalal shrugged. "I'm only Kashif Pasha's aide-de-camp," he said modestly. "But these are difficult times so I imagine His Highness is worried for your safety."

CHAPTER 40

Tuesday 8th March

"Okay, let's try that again."

Eduardo spun the knife in his hand and tossed it at a door scarred by more cuts than it was possible to count. At least, impossible to count without taking the offending object off its hinges, having the thing carried to Police HQ and getting someone to shoot it, resize the photographs and cross off the cuts one at a time.

A lifetime's worth of staff at Maison Hafsid had stood in a short corridor outside the cellar kitchens and honed their throwing skills or taken out their frustration on that cupboard door.

"You know what's really interesting?" Eduardo said.

No one answered, but then that wasn't surprising. He'd recognized them all. Not the names and not even the faces, but the types. Loners and misfits. The usual scum found working in kitchens. And they'd recognized him. As one of them.

Besides, the knife he threw was the one found plunged into the heart of Pascal Boulart. In the alley behind Maison Hafsid.

"What's really interesting is that the killer left no fingerprints on his blade . . ." There were, in fact, dozens of fingerprints on the blade, but all of them belonged to the coroner, his assistant or members of the police who'd processed the knife later, when it was being bagged for evidence.

"Why do you think that is?" Eduardo asked.

A boy shrugged.

"Because he wore gloves?" The man who spoke was tall and dark-faced, his hair grey with age. A heavy bruise ripened over one high cheek and his mouth was split. According to a report recently filed by Kashif Pasha's mubahith, Chef Edvard could be a difficult and sometimes violent man. So far there had been nothing to suggest that either of those statements was true.

"Gloves? Possibly," Eduardo admitted. "But then there are none of the victim's fingerprints on the blade either. Which is very odd, because Pascal was stabbed five times . . ." He paused and was disappointed to realize they didn't all immediately see the implication. "Have you ever been stabbed?"

Only Chef Edvard nodded.

"Show me your hands," Eduardo demanded.

There were faded slash marks across one palm and a long cicatrix that vanished beneath his sleeve. In return Eduardo showed the chef his own hands with their wounds from days Eduardo did his best not to remember.

"There were no defensive cuts on the hands of Pascal Boulart. His fingerprints were missing from both blade and handle. Do you know what this suggests to me?"

Ripping the knife from battered wood, Eduardo walked ten paces to the far end of the corridor and threw again. Another bull's-eye. Straight into the middle of the door, where it joined a hundred other cuts.

Behind him, where the corridor gave way to the kitchens, someone clapped, probably mockingly but maybe for real. That was Eduardo's tenth throw and the tenth time he'd put the knife in the door exactly where he wanted it.

A misspent childhood had its uses.

"You try." He pointed to the boy who'd been clapping. A thin youth with a rash on his chin hidden beneath what looked like blusher. "Come on . . ."

Reluctantly Idries stepped forward. Well aware that he had no choice.

The first thing Eduardo had done on entering the cellar was flash his shield. This was gold, maybe real gold, in a crocodile-skin case with a top that flipped up, like one of those little vidphones. It had been left for him at Police HQ, in his office, along with a matte black .45 paraOrdnance and a scribble pad of notes covered with Ashraf Bey's writing.

Eduardo hadn't even known he had an office until a fat man with sweat stains under his arms, a man who wouldn't meet his eye, silently offered him the key. Concerned with trying to make sense of His Excellency's terrible writing, it took Eduardo until the next morning to realize his scowling deputy with the striped shirts and perspiration problem was the old Chief.

In the end, unable to translate Ashraf Bey's notes into any language he understood, Eduardo stored them for safety in the top drawer of his new desk and turned to the files he'd asked Alexandre to bring him. Sometimes in life it was just easier to start over.

And he was right; the files were much more interesting.

"Find me the man with stripy shirts," Eduardo demanded. He had a box on his desk that let him talk to a serious-looking woman in the office outside without having to get up and open the door.

"You wanted me?"

Eduardo indicated a seat without looking up from his files. "You used to run this place?"

The man's nod was sullen. Although he added, "Yes, sir," when Eduardo raised his head from a folder.

"You can have it back once I'm done," Eduardo said. "I don't imagine I'll be staying. In fact"–he stared at the unhappy man–"assume you have total autonomy in everything except the Maison Hafsid case, but first find me . . ." Eduardo glanced down at a crime report. "Ahmed, cousin of Idries, who worked at the Maison Hafsid."

At first Chef Edvard felt sure Eduardo was there to shut down his restaurant. Given the disaster at Domus Aurea and the fact he'd put an Egyptian deserter on the staff list as Hassan, because that was the only way to get the man through security clearance, Chef Edvard could hardly have been surprised if this was true.

Mind you, if the mubahith had even suspected that second fact he'd already be dead. Chef Edvard's position, held to under questioning, was that he'd assumed the thin-faced blond waiter was just another undercover police officer providing protection.

Neither he nor his staff had ever seen the man before.

"Throw it," Eduardo told the boy.

"What about prints?" Idries glanced back at the others, looking for support. At least that's what Eduardo assumed he was looking for.

"I don't want to trick you," Eduardo said. "I just want to see you throw the knife." Pulling a pair of cheap evidence gloves from his suit pocket, he tossed them across. "Wear these."

The boy threw as expertly as Eduardo had expected. Without even bothering to heft the knife to find its balance.

"Now you," he told a girl hovering silently near the back.

She struggled with the gloves, finally throwing with the latex fingers only half over her own so they flopped like a coxcomb. The knife bounced off the door.

"Try again," said Eduardo as he handed Isabeau the knife and a clean tissue, something Rose insisted he carry. "Get rid of the gloves," he said, "then wipe down blade and handle when you've finished. I don't mind."

She stared at him.

"Throw," said Eduardo.

Without the gloves to hamper her, Isabeau put the blade straight into the door.

"I don't understand," Chef Edvard said into the silence that followed the thud of the blade. "Are you saying Ahmed flung this knife at my pastry cook? That was how Pascal was killed?"

"Of course not," said Eduardo. His tone of voice made it clear he'd never heard anything quite so ridiculous. "Wipe the blade," Eduardo told the girl, "and give it to someone else."

They all threw after that. Taking the handkerchief and carefully wiping clean the knife before passing it to the next person. Even Chef Edvard, his throw little more than a dismissive flick of the wrist that buried the blade in the door at throat height.

"Right," said Eduardo. "Only two more questions and we're done." Plucking the blade from the door one final time, he wiped it on his own shirt and dropped it back into its evidence bag. The stain on its steel blade was rust not blood and its edge was blunt. The only thing this knife had ever been good for was throwing at a door.