Chapter 1
The Count in Her Hand
The dead woman had been counting something, and whatever it was, she had got as far as fourteen.
Inspector Yasmin Radzi crouched two steps above her and did not touch anything. It was five forty in the morning. Rain was still coming off the tower in sheets that you could hear through the concrete, a long soft roar like a crowd in another country. In the curl of the dead woman’s right hand, held the way a child holds a coin it is afraid of losing, was a small brass hand tally counter, the kind stocktakers use, the kind you press with your thumb. Its little window showed 0014.
“Amira binti Zainal,” Sergeant Manny Tiong read from the lanyard, holding his torch at an angle so it did not fall across her face. “Twenty-six. Sabak Fire Engineering. Consultant’s pass, issued by the building. She was doing a night audit.”
“Alone?”
“That’s what the guard says.”
Yasmin let her eyes travel the stair the way she had been taught to: from the body outward, in rings. Nine steps up to the landing above. A dark scuff on the nosing of the fourth step from the top, fresh, the rubber still raised in a curl. A rubber-cased torch three steps below the body, switched on, the battery long dead by now, the lens pointing up the stairs it had rolled down. A clipboard, empty. Not a clipboard with the paper torn off. A clipboard with the spring clip closed on nothing at all, its jaws holding a soft clean line of air.
