Pashazade By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Essay Research

Pashazade By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Essay, Research Paper

Pashazade by Jon Courtenay GrimwoodThe sound of fountains came in stereo. A deep splash from the courtyard below and a lighter trickle from the next room, where open arches cut in a wall that over-looked the courtyard had marble balustrades stretched between supporting pillars. It was that kind of house. Old, historic, near derelict in places. ‘Ambient temp 81 Fahrenheit, humidity sixty-two percent…’ The American spoke clearly, reading the data from the face of his watch, then glanced through a smashed window to what little he could see of the sky outside. ‘Passing cloud, no direct sunlight.’ Dropping clumsily onto to one knee, Felix Abrinsky touched the marble floor with nicotine-stained fingers, confirming to himself that this statement was correct. The tiles were warm but not hot. No latent heat had been stored up from that morning’s sunshine to radiate back into the afternoon air. Bizarrely, it took Felix less effort to stand than it had done to kneel, though he needed to pause to get his breath all the same. And the silver-ringed hand that came up to wipe sweat from his forehead only succeeded in smearing grease across his scalp and down his thinning ponytail. Police regulations demanded he wear a face mask, surgical gloves and – in his case – a sweat band to stop himself from accidentally polluting biological evidence. But Felix was Chief of Detectives and so far as he was concerned that meant he could approach the crime scene how he liked, which was loose, casual and lateral. Not to mention semi-drunk. All the virtues that first got him thrown out of the police in Los Angeles. Besides, if you wanted to talk about should have been, he should have been on holiday and would have managed it too if this particular buck hadn’t been bumped up the line so fast it practically hit the wall parking itself right outside his office door. The body in the chair was fresh, still warm to his touch. Stiffness had set in to the arms but then rigor happened fast when the victim was border-line anorexic. And even without the woman’s thinness there was the North African heat to factor into the equation. Heat always upped the rate at which rigor gripped a corpse. On his arrival Felix had considered obtaining an immediate body temperature but habit made him do the crime scene grabs first, then work a grid through the victim’s office, tweezering up clues. And technically, since she was obviously dead, he’d already broken his own regulations by checking under her jaw for a carotid pulse. ‘Covering the body prior to site shots.’ Some cities used electronic observers, 360 degree fish-eye vids, wired for movement and sound. El Iskandryia used the human kind, when it bothered to use observers at all. The silksuit Felix had chosen stood in the doorway, doing exactly what he’d been told, which was shut up and stay out of the way. From a foil packet Felix extracted a sheet of tissue-thin gauze designed to protected the woman’s modesty in death as surely as a scarf around her head would have hidden her hair on the streets in life. Except there was no scarf because the woman had been stabbed in her own house, at her own desk, in her own office… ‘Starting location shots,’ said the fat man and lifted an old Speed Graphic. The camera was linked to his even more ancient LAPD-issue Chronograph, which would back up each shot as it was taken, just as the camera would automatically stamp time, date and orientation across the bottom edge of each new shot. 15.30: July 5: SouthSouthWest. All the same, Felix dictated what he was doing, working fast to photograph the little office from every angle. Only when this was done could he start work on the body. ‘Exposure five. Al-Mansur madersa. Upstairs. Interior. West wall and corner of office taken from door. Speed Graphic Digilux. 50mm lens. K400-equivalence.’ The dictation did no more than tell the court what camera had been used, what the shot showed and what the light was like: something the camera told them anyway. But he’d learnt his craft back when Speed Graphics still took acetate and defence attorneys jumped on any conflict of technical information, no matter how small. And besides he spoke not to his camera or watch but to himself. These days defence attorneys weren’t an issue. If the Chief of Detectives said someone had committed a crime that was usually good enough for a judge. The suspect went down. Unfortunately it had take Felix a few months to realise this and there were three cases from his early days in El Iskandryia which still gave him sleepless nights – four, if he was being unusually hard on himself. ‘Exposure eleven. Al-Mansur madersa. Upstairs. Interior. Open door to office, taken from broken mashrabiya window in south wall adjacent to Rue Sherif…’ Mashrabiyas were originally shaded balconies were water jugs could be left to cool. But the term had long since come to signify both the balcony and the ornately-carved screen that hid those in the balcony from the street below. Marble was commonplace for the screen, as was gilded or painted wood. The smashed mashrabiya at the al-Mansur madersa had been carved two hundred years before from a single slab of alabaster and now lay in shards on the floor, apparently kicked in from outside. That the balcony was fifteen foot above a busy street only made the break-in more unlikely. Until one factored in the Thiergarten who apparently could move unseen, kill si