“Let. Me. Go.”

Patterson nodded. After a brief pause, he leant forward and carefully unbuckled her head restraint. One by one he continued to remove the straps that held her down, until she was free.

As the final strap fell clear, Gail fancied she was floating above the bed, as if the will she had been held against was stronger than gravity itself. She felt her body moving up, and wondered at how easily she could lift herself, before realising that Patterson was using the controls of the hospital bed. She was now fully upright, and the sudden return of gravity to her stomach awoke a feeling she had not experienced for an age.

“You must be hungry,” he guessed.

She hesitated slightly before nodding. She thought of flight, but she was barely dressed and didn’t even know what was out there. There would be, she hoped, better opportunities. And anyway, Patterson appeared to be on her side; maybe she had been wrong about him.

He started to leave, but she called out to him.

“Where’s Mamdouh? Where’s the Professor?” Her last memory: a knock at the door, Mamdouh had just told her his story, and then she remembered nothing, except for a series of strange and extremely vivid nightmares. “Is he here too?”

Patterson stopped dead, but didn’t turn to look back. He stood there for what seemed like an age. “Professor Mamdouh was an old friend of mine.”

“Was?”

“I understand that there was unfortunately an accident, and he didn’t make it.”

She froze. “What?”

He tried to explain what had happened, though in truth he barely understood it himself. All he could think was that rather than being collateral damage, the Professor had been silenced. Seth Mallus finishing off the cover-up he started ten years ago, he thought. Halfway through his explanations, the Wizard of Oz man came back, holding a tray of food.

Dr Patterson thanked him and put the food on a table next to the bed. She barely looked at it, or the other man.

“Mamdouh’s dead and I’m being held prisoner because of that book?” Gail asked, angrily.

He looked at her apologetically. “I’m as upset as you are about what happened to him, Dr Turner. And please, call me Henry.”

It didn’t matter how nice he was trying to come across, she refused. “I’m being as civil as I can. For all I know you’re only being nice to me so that I’ll cooperate more readily.”

“I had no idea you would be forced to come here, and I have no intention of helping anyone force you to cooperate,” he said. “But you’re right, I do need your help, and even if I had wanted to force you to come here, I would want you from now on to cooperate of your own free will.”

“What kind of psychological battle are you playing with me?” she exclaimed. “Abducting me, drugging me, then pretending that somehow you’re not at all involved in anything that’s happened to me? Are you the Good Cop?”

He motioned for her to talk less loudly.

“And who the hell is the Bad Cop?”

“You’ll find out in a moment, we’re going to see him after you’ve finished eating.”

She looked down at the tray; roast meat and vegetables and some kind of fluorescent dessert. She pushed the table away and it glided softly on its wheels to the foot of her bed

“I’ve finished eating,” she glared defiantly.

   Henry Patterson liked Gail Turner; it was something about her defiance. It was ironic that he be attracted to a woman for her attitude, when it was exactly that trait that would make most men think twice.

And attracted he was, from her long dark hair and full lips down to her cute southern English accent that made her pronounce all of her Ts perfectly. He had been smitten before they had met, too, having done a fair bit of research on her profile online since Mallus had advised she would be joining him.

So when he had seen her restrained and drugged in the facility in which he worked, an urge to protect her had overwhelmed him, and even made him have a direct confrontation with Mallus, something he would have been far more cautious about had he been in complete control of his emotions.

It was towards Seth Mallus’ office that they now walked. Somehow, despite the fact that he was walking ahead of her, Gail was setting the pace and they moved briskly down the long bleach white corridor. They walked in silence, mainly because Gail didn’t seem to want to talk to him, but also because he didn’t know what to say to her anyway.

He stopped in front of an inauspicious door set flush with the wall. She positioned herself so that she was standing next to him in front of the door. He caught the look in her eyes, decided against saying anything, then knocked.

“Come in,” came the muffled reply from within.

He let Gail enter, though he somehow felt that even if he had moved first she would still have entered before him.

“Ah! Dr Gail Turner!” he heard Mallus say with glee.

“Ah! Dr Gail Turner my arse,” she exclaimed angrily. “Where the hell am I, who the bloody hell are you and what the bloody hell do you want with me?”

Henry Patterson couldn’t resist a wry smile as he closed the door behind them, if not for the vehemence of her assault on the mighty Mallus, then purely for the way that she pronounced arse.

Chapter 51

Ben hadn’t liked Captain Kamal from the moment George had described him. It wasn’t because he was a policeman: some of his best friends were. It was simply a gut feeling that something was wrong with the situation surrounding Gail’s death and that of the Professor.

Kamal had been quick to put forward an unquestionable explanation of the events, which made him suspicious. It also struck him as being odd that he hadn’t heard anything about Gail’s death in the news. He hadn’t even known that there had been another death in Professor Mamdouh al-Misri’s murder case!

His first step, however, was not finding out what was being covered up, it was confirming for sure that there was a cover up in the first place. He may have had a gut feeling, but if he was wrong, then he wanted to get that out of the way now so that he, and in particular George, could mourn in peace.

“Salaam,” he said as the phone answered. “May I speak with Captain Kamal please? It’s Farid Limam, from the British Embassy.” There was a pause, a brief click and then ringing. He was being put straight through.

Ben loved his country. He was extremely proud to be Egyptian and to come from Egypt, with its vast cultural heritage spanning more than seven thousand years. Coming to his country was, for many, the trip of a lifetime, and an unattainable dream holiday to so many more. There were so many reasons to be a proud Egyptian.

But being Egyptian, Ben was not blind to corruption; for so long it had run so deep it was next to impossible to eradicate.

For the most part, he could understand it. Tourism Police, underpaid, looking for extra money to feed their families by taking people on unofficial ‘tours’ of areas normally closed to the public; hotels in cahoots with taxi drivers to artificially increase fares from the airport; tour guides charging a hundred times the going rate to take tourists to see pyramids, claiming that taxis are simply too ‘dangerous.’

That didn’t really harm anyone: people needed to make a living somehow, and if you’d travelled halfway round the world to see Egypt, you could probably afford it.

The problem with corruption was that once you accepted it, there was pretty much no stopping it. Embezzlement of funds, rigged elections and conflicts of interest were all commonplace in Egyptian politics.  Everyone had their price.

That fact notwithstanding, it was no less true that in Egypt bribery and corruption of a member of the police force, especially a Captain of the Cairo Police Department, was illegal. Under recent laws aimed at trying to reduce bribery and corruption, there was technically no cap on what punishment could be levelled by the State if someone was found guilty. More importantly, while in the past there was a tendency to focus on all parties involved, which led to few denouncements, new guidelines were to focus on the corrupt official first and foremost.