Status Updates From Arab Jazz

“Three Salafists and a fanatical Lubavitcher. One of their younger sisters is reported, and the other two are anything but fundamentalists. Their best friend gets murdered, the crime scene smacking of religious impurity. What does it mean? Common sense – not to mention the current climate – demands that we focus on the Salafists, but then there’s Rébeccà’s disappearance. . .

Another face is playing dead there at the very edge of his consciousness, just where it had frozen during his trance after the discovery of Laura’s body. He can sense it twitching imperceptibly – slowly, like a mollusc, a crustacean, a starfish – as if it were moving towards towards a flicker of light between the shadows of two rocks in a stretch of calm water. He mustn’t force this one. He mustn’t send it

Rachel is tidying her desk. It helps her think. The theatricality of the crime scene had to be significant. She remembers her criminology lectures explaining that the stagecraft indulged in by serial killers is for the police; must be why it’s called the “scene of the crime”. Ultimately, police and murderers both have a role to play. In this case, however, it strikes her that the message left by the killer

Ahmed loves poetry, even if his memory of it consists of fleeting snippets that bubble occasionally to the surface of his soul. Lines often return of their own accord, without author or title. This one brings back Baudelaire: something about a stranger, freedom, something English. Baudelaire was his favourite writer back in the day, along with Van Gogh and Artaud. Debord followed later. And then he stopped reading.