Stamping Butterflies

CHAPTER 36 Lampedusa, Saturday 7 July [Now]

The file Petra Mayer put down in front of Katie Petrov was tattered along the edges and had a coffee stain prominently over one corner, but what Katie really noticed was the slew of Arabic running right to left across the top and the French translation underneath.

"You need to see this."

In case Katie couldn't read the French someone had thoughtfully provided a translation and paper-clipped it to the top of the file.

MARRAKECH POLICE -- HOMICIDE DIVISION.

They'd also provided a translation for every one of the pages inside, although Katie Petrov didn't need a translation to recognize most of the names. Marzaq al-Turq, Jake Razor, Malika bint Kasim...

The shot of Jake showed a man in his early twenties snarling at the photographer. Something about its studied defiance suggested the three-by-four originated with his record company. Moz's shot was very different, a diminished imitation that had the boy staring into the lens of a police camera, one of his lips badly swollen and a long gash taped shut in his hairline.

It was the third photograph that made Katie Petrov jerk forward and wrap her arms around her stomach.

"Fuck."

She fought briefly against the bile that rose in her throat and then gave up the fight, running from her office.

Professor Mayer smoked a cigarette while waiting for the younger woman to return and then smoked another. And when she finally reached for the photograph of Malika it was to turn it face down on Dr. Petrov's desk.

"This is for you," she said after Katie reappeared in the doorway, wiping the back of her mouth with one hand. "You may want to read it now."

The letter was short and polite. It thanked Katie Petrov for agreeing to be a court-appointed psychiatrist, assured her that her fee would be paid in full and told her that her services were no longer required. It was signed by the White House official who had appointed her in the first place.

"What did I do wrong?"

"Nothing," Petra Mayer assured her. "You did everything exactly as it was meant to be done. Your notes are a model of professionalism."

"But I haven't even submitted my report."

"They know that." Professor Mayer shook another cigarette from its packet, sat back in her chair and smiled. It was a particularly grim smile. The kind that glared from the back of her more recent books and suggested she knew her readers wouldn't understand the contents but they should damn well try. "What would it have said?"

"I'm not sure I can tell you," Katie Petrov said.

The Professor shook her head. "Don't sulk," she warned, "it doesn't suit you."

"I'm not," said Katie Petrov, obviously feeling about twelve. "I'm just not sure."

They were both in part engaged in displacement activity. Professor Mayer knew this and she imagined that Katie knew it as well. Neither one of them had so much as glanced at the down-turned photograph since Katie walked back into the hot little room she'd been given as an office.

"Give me your thoughts," Petra Mayer suggested.

"This is unattributable?"

The Professor smiled. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-seven."

"So young," said Professor Mayer, "and they've already got you speaking the language. Yes," she said, "this is unattributable. So tell me exactly what you think."

She watched Katie Petrov run through the main points in her head, and when Katie seemed sure she had them in the right order and wasn't about to make a fool of herself, Professor Mayer listened to Katie count them off aloud, waiting for interruptions that never came.

"So you think he's sane?"

"Speaking clinically? Not a chance. At least not in any sense I understand. As the Pentagon's man pointed out, the autistic silences, the self-cutting, the obsessive nakedness and coprophilia can all be faked, but I still think he's the real thing."

"And legally?"

"More tricky," said Katie. "Did Prisoner Zero know the nature and quality of his actions? Difficult to say. And I have to be certain he was incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Not as he is now or was when that journalist met him in Paris, but in Marrakech, that afternoon, when he loaded the gun, pointed it at the President and pulled the trigger."

"Tough call."

Katie Petrov leant back, nodded. "Near impossible," she said, "why else do you think it's taken me so long not to reach a conclusion?"

Petra Mayer smiled. "Off the record," she said, "which way were you leaning?"

"Legally, I think he was sane," said Katie Petrov. "Strictly off the record."

"Yeah, that's what I thought..." The older woman flipped open her packet of cigarettes, extracted the last and lit it with the stub of the one that had gone before. She had jet lag to make the vanished irritations of PMS feel like a minor cold and was in a space where she was surviving on will power and nicotine alone. The first mouthful of food or sip of alcohol would slam her into oblivion.

Petra Mayer knew her body. It was one of the things most men found frightening about her. "Are you okay to go through the rest of the file?"

"I'm off the case," Katie said, "why would I want to do that?" It was a real question.

"Because I want to hire you," said Professor Mayer. "To work with me on what comes next."

"And what does?"

Petra Mayer shrugged. "Good question," she said. "Read the file and we'll begin to work it out."

On 15 August 1977 Marzaq al-Turq, known also as Moz, was charged with the rape and murder of a girl whose age was put as between thirteen and sixteen, with a coroner's side note in French that a history of malnutrition would have put her age in the latter bracket. There was no mention in the brief and almost insultingly dismissive report that anorexia would have achieved the same, this not being a problem commonly facing the poor of Marrakech in the late 1970s.

The girl was described as half and half, with neither half being specified. She was not pregnant at the time of her death and her heart, lungs, liver and kidneys were in excellent condition. Her last meal had been vegetables, bread and water. There were no traces of alcohol, hashish or any other drug in her blood.

A long list of injuries matched those in the photograph; that is, all those injuries which could be seen in the original photograph were listed, although there were many more on the list which were not visible.

"Why only one crime scene?"

"I'm sorry?" Professor Mayer glanced up.

"Only one crime-scene shot," said Katie Petrov. "Where are the others?"

The Professor smiled sadly. "This was Marrakech, 1977. The miracle is that there are any at all." She thought about that, dragging on the last of her cigarette before stubbing it out in a saucer now filled to overflowing with splayed and twisted filters that looked like nothing so much as extracted bullets.

"In fact," said Professor Mayer, "the real question is why did somebody bother to take this photograph at all?"

"And you know the answer..." It was not quite a question.

"Read the file," Professor Mayer said, sitting back.

A sworn statement from an officer in the Marrakchi police stated that Marzaq al-Turq was the only suspect for the murder of Malika, daughter of Corporal Sidi ould Kasim, sometime informant and agent provocateur. The suspect lived in ould Kasim's house, in a room directly above the girl's, and a search of that room had revealed that a hole in the floor allowed the occupant to spy on the room below.

A trawl of the Mellah by the police had revealed no clue to the suspect's current whereabouts and extensive questioning of his known associates had produced so little information about the suspect's recent activities that this was suspicious in itself. Katie Petrov read this twice, to make sure she understood what was being said.

On the basis of the statement a warrant for the boy's arrest on sight had been issued by the Marrakchi police and then allowed to gather dust. Both the arrest warrant and the sworn statement were signed by a Major Abbas.

"What do you think?"

"The interest is in the gaps," said Katie Petrov. "If I got sent this back home I'd have returned it and demanded sight of the real thing. And I'd refuse to start work until the real thing arrived."

Professor Mayer nodded. "That's what I've done," she said. "Although I'm not sure how much we'll get."

Flicking through the three photographs, Katie forced herself to glance again at the final one. There existed crime-scene shots of Texas lynchings that showed less tissue damage.

"Check the file again," suggested Petra Mayer.

Three photographs, an arrest warrant, a sworn statement, a tatty strip of fingerprints lifted from a pocket knife found at the crime scene, a crudely drawn map of the wasteland marking where the girl's body was found and a report from the coroner.

"What am I missing?" Katie Petrov asked.

"These," Professor Mayer said, tossing across a cromalin of a second set of fingerprints, each one neatly positioned in a different-coloured box. The cromalin was new and still smelt of chemicals. The fingerprints came from the police HQ in Amsterdam and the name scrawled at the top of the original sheet was Jake Razor.

"Don't tell me..."

Katie held up the strip of fingerprints lifted from the crime scene in Marrakech and compared them to prints on the page in front of her. She didn't really need to be told what she would find. The American minimum for matching points was ten, the European standard was set at sixteen.

To Katie's gaze it looked like the match between Prisoner Zero's prints, those taken from the Marrakchi knife and the prints for Jake Razor from the Amsterdam drug clinic had at least eighteen points of similarity, maybe more.

"Still think he's sane?" Professor Mayer asked.