The Last Cut
Michael Pearce
In this classic mystery from Michael Pearce’s award-winning series, set in the Egypt of the 1900s, the Mamur Zapt investigates the discovery of a young woman’s body at the site of a dam.Cairo, 1908. When an attempt is made to blow up a key regulator in the Cairo Barrage, the Mamur Zapt, British head of Cairo’s secret police, is called in to investigate.To make matters worse, the ceremonial cutting of a dam always requires careful policing, especially on this occasion as it is going to be the Last Cut. Which means the discovery of a young woman’s body at the site of the dam is extremely embarrassing. Is this the traditional ritual sacrifice? Or something more sinister?
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HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1998
Copyright © Michael Pearce 1998
Michael Pearce asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters
and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008259495
Ebook Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN: 9780007400300
Version: 2017-09-05
Praise for Michael Pearce (#ulink_0038201b-4c63-596e-9d26-f727f42bf5f9)
‘This series continues to be the most delightful in current detective fiction’
Gerald Kaufman, Scotsman
‘Pearce … takes apart ancient history and reassembles it with beguiling wit and colour’
Sunday Times
‘Irresistible fun’
Time Out
‘The Mamur Zapt’s sly, irreverent humour continues to refresh the parts others seldom reach’
Observer
Contents
Title Page (#uacd8198e-4f84-5f4b-8f0e-ca2c6fe06f48)
Copyright (#u912196be-ba78-5291-a4b8-1d5762bf4c53)
Praise for Michael Pearce (#u72b48019-bd7b-5c32-9b07-765c20ed9c92)
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Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
1 (#ulink_33d4b15f-eb4e-50ee-a08a-d66d08c17c08)
‘It will be for the last time,’ said Garvin, the Commandant of Police.
‘It seems a pity,’ said the Kadi’s representative, ‘after a thousand years.’
‘Oh, more than that,’ said McPhee, the Deputy Commandant. ‘The rites almost certainly antedate the Arab invasion. The ancient Egyptians –’
‘Yes, well, thank you,’ said Garvin. ‘That all?’
‘There’s the question of the gravediggers,’ said the young man from the Consulate.
‘Gravediggers?’
‘Yes. The ones who actually make the cut. It’s either the Muslim gravediggers or the Jews. This year it’s the Jews.’
‘Well, then –’
‘Yes, but it falls on their Sabbath this year.’
‘Okay, let the Muslim gravediggers do it, then.’
‘They won’t like that!’
‘The Muslims?’
‘No, the Jews. It’s their turn.’
‘Yes, but they won’t do it on the Sabbath, I thought you said?’
‘Well, they will do it if they’re told to. And if they get paid extra.’
There was a little silence.
‘I suppose I could get the Old Man to talk to the Finance Department.’
‘And I could get the Kadi to talk to the Khedive and get him to tell them.’
‘That all settled, then? Nothing else?’ asked Garvin. ‘Right, Mamur Zapt, the rest is up to you.’
As they got up from the table, McPhee said:
‘They used to sacrifice a maiden, you know.’
‘Nonsense!’ said the Kadi’s representative. ‘That’s just a myth. Anyway, it was the Christians.’
‘That’s a myth, too,’ said the representative of the Copts hastily. ‘You can’t blame it on us. The Canal wasn’t built till the Arabs came.’
‘The rite may be older,’ said McPhee. ‘It almost certainly dates back to the Pharaohs.’
‘Let’s blame them, then,’ said the young man from the Consulate, picking up his papers. ‘At least they can’t answer back.’
‘That’s all in the past, anyway,’ said Garvin. ‘These days we’ve got other things to think about.’
‘What other things?’ asked Owen. It was the first time he’d done this.
‘Oh, the general disorder. People use it as an excuse –’
‘They certainly do,’ said McPhee, cheeks going pink.
‘To do what?’
‘Well …’
‘The women go unveiled, that sort of thing,’ said the Kadi’s representative.
‘Worse than that,’ said McPhee primly.
‘Really?’ said Owen. ‘Exactly what –?’
‘You’ll find out,’ said Garvin. ‘At any rate, it will be for the last time.’
‘Watch out for the Maiden,’ said the young man from the Consulate, as he and Owen left the room together.
They found her, of course, the next day.
The canal bed, awaiting the water, was dry now throughout most of its insalubrious length. It ran through the heart of the city from Old Cairo to the new barracks at Abbasiya and was a handy dumping-place for rubbish of all kinds, from excrement to onion peelings to collapsed angarib rope-beds to dead dogs; and, of course, to dead humans. It had the additional advantage in the last case that towards the time of the Inundation it had become so foul as to deter all but the lowest scavengers from venturing into it. The maiden would have gone undiscovered had it not been for the fact that the ceremonial cutting of the dam involved the construction of a tall cone of earth, and it was while the workmen had been working on this that they had come upon the body.
Bodies deteriorated quickly in the heat and it was by no means evident now that the body was that of a maiden, but the workmen were in no doubt. Nor, unfortunately, was the rest of the population of Cairo.
‘Blast it!’ said Garvin. ‘They’ll all connect it with ending the Cut!’
Every year when the waters of the Nile began to rise, a temporary dam was constructed across the mouth of the Khalig Canal, just opposite Roda Island. When the Nilometer on the Island showed that the water was at its highest, the dam was cut and the water allowed to flow through the canal. The moment traditionally marked the release of waters throughout the land, when the dams would be opened and the water pour into the canals and through the irrigation system as a whole.
After this year the water would still pour but the Cut would be no more. The canal was to be filled in and a tramway put on top of it.
All the Departments were pleased: Sanitation, because the canal was a notorious health hazard, Transport, because they got a new tramway out of it. Finance, because they got it at a cost of next to nothing, Irrigation, because the damned thing was an irrelevance anyway, the Government generally because it could be seen as modernization.
The ordinary Cairene, however, who had always had great affection for the festivities which accompanied the Cut, was much less happy.
‘The British are taking away all our pleasures,’ they grumbled.
In most countries they would have blamed the Government. In Egypt they blamed the British. This was reasonable since the British ran the country. Invited in by a former Khedive to assist him to straighten out the country’s finances, they had decided to assist him to straighten out a few other things as well, and were still, thirty years later, assisting.
‘Another example of the British killjoy spirit!’ thundered the popular (Arab) press. ‘First, they ban the Hoseini celebrations –’
‘But that was because they were mutilating each other!’ protested Owen.
It had been the practice, as part of the general festivity, for dervishes to slash each other with swords, scourge their backs with razor-like chains, and impale themselves, and their neighbours, on meat-hooks.
‘Surely you don’t defend –’ he had said to his friend, Mahmoud.
Mahmoud, a young lawyer in the Ministry of Justice, was the last person to defend such practices. He regarded them as a thing of the past and the past was exactly what he wanted to get rid of. Like most of the Ministry lawyers, he was a member of the Nationalist Party and committed to modernization. For that reason he wasn’t much in favour of the canal, either.
‘It’s an open sewer,’ he said.
Nevertheless, he felt sorry about the ending of the Cut.
If even he, arch-modernizer that he was, felt a twinge over the Cut’s going, then Owen could just imagine how the ordinary inhabitants of the city felt. The Cut was part of popular history. Removing it was like removing a part of oneself, a tooth, say, yes, a wisdom tooth, useless but painful to extract. Not only that; some people believed in the wisdom. They might resist its going.
That was why this time Owen had become involved. Ordinarily, marshalling the festivity was a matter of simple policing and Owen preferred to leave simple policing to the simple police. The Mamur Zapt, Head of what had in the past been known as the Khedive’s Secret Police and what was today very properly thought of, in English terms, as the Political Branch, had a more discreet responsibility for preserving law and order. The Khedive liked to say that the Mamur Zapt was the hidden hand that held the city. Rather too often he saw the hand as a fist; whereas Owen preferred to keep it hidden.
What concerned him now was that whereas in any normal city the ending of the Cut would be merely a matter for mutter, in the explosive mixture of races and religions that was Cairo it could very quickly and all too easily ignite into violence. And the Maiden was just the thing that could provide the spark.
About the Maiden as maiden, Owen, as Mamur Zapt, cared nothing at all. Ordinary murder was not his concern. But about the Maiden as a possible source of political conflagration he cared a great deal. Even if she was a myth.
Which was why he decided to take an interest in the case. He rang up the Parquet to ask who was handling it.
‘El Zaki,’ they said.
This was fortunate, for El Zaki was Owen’s friend, Mahmoud.
‘Where is he?’ he asked.
‘At the mortuary.’
This was fortunate, too, as the mortuary was the only cool place in Cairo. He went there with speed, or, at least, in an arabeah, the horse-drawn cab which at that time in Cairo served as taxi. Unsurprisingly, this being August, when men, flowers and horses drooped, by the time he got there Mahmoud was coming out.
‘Do they serve coffee in there?’
‘Yes, but it smells of formaldehyde.’
They went instead to a café round the corner. It was an Arab café and, as in most Arab cafés, the main room was underground, where darkness provided relief from the sun.
‘So they’ve put you on this?’
‘Yes,’ said Mahmoud ruefully. ‘You can’t win them all.’
‘I’d like to take an interest.’
‘No one else is,’ said Mahmoud sourly. ‘Not at the Parquet, at any rate.’
The Parquet was the Department of Prosecutions at the Ministry of Justice, to which Mahmoud belonged. In Egypt criminal investigation was not the responsibility of the police. Their task was merely to notify the Parquet that a crime had been committed. Once that had been done, responsibility for conducting the investigation was, as in the French system on which the Egyptian system was based, with the lawyer the Parquet assigned to the case.
‘I hope you’re right about that.’
He told Mahmoud of his fears. Mahmoud dismissed them.
‘The body could have been dumped anywhere,’ he said.
‘Yes. I know. But people are making a connection with the Cut.’
Mahmoud had little time for myths and none at all for the Myth of the Maiden.
‘Superstitious nonsense,’ he said. ‘We’re not still in the Dark Age, you know.’
Owen thought that some Egyptians, the ones he was worried about, might be dragging their feet. He wisely kept silent, however. Mahmoud was inclined to be touchy about remarks which he considered reflected upon Egypt.
‘What does the autopsy show?’ he asked.
‘The report’s not ready yet. It’s taking a while because of the condition of the body. There is some evidence of deterioration through water. If that turns out to be true, it would help us to establish when the body was dumped. There was still water in the Canal. That would put it in March or April.’
‘Or later,’ said Owen. ‘Even when most of it’s dry, there are still stagnant pools. Have you established the cause of death?’
‘Impossible to tell yet. Some evidence of wounding to the lower abdominal region. But that could just have been dogs.’
‘No evidence of, well, wounding of a ritual nature?’
‘I don’t know what that would be,’ said Mahmoud coldly. ‘We don’t have ritual killings in Cairo. Now, if we were some obscure tribe down in the Sudan –’
‘All right, all right. I don’t know what it would be, either. But if we could rule it out publicly, that might help to dispel the myth –’
‘She could have died of old age for all we can tell at the moment,’ said Mahmoud. ‘And it’s about time the Myth of the Maiden did.’
Owen, wisely, let the matter drop.
‘Failed?’ said the engineer from the Irrigation Department. ‘Our regulators don’t fail!’
‘Regulator?’ said Owen. ‘What’s a regulator?’
‘You don’t know what a regulator is! It’s a – well –’
‘It’s like a gate,’ said the Under-Secretary, to whose office Owen had been frantically summoned. ‘A gate in a dam. It controls the flow of water through the dam.’
‘And it’s failed? Well, I’m sorry about that. But, look, it all sounds very technical to me. I don’t quite see why I’ve been –’
‘It’s not failed!’ cried the engineer in exasperation. ‘That’s what I keep trying to say! It’s been sabotaged!’
The Manufiyah Regulator was one of the huge series of works which together formed the Delta Barrage. The barrage was built across the Nile about fifteen miles north of Cairo just where the river divided into two great arms which continued independently to the Mediterranean, coming out at Rosetta and Damietta. It controlled the supply of water to the whole of Lower Egypt but in particular to the immensely fertile region that lay between the arms. It distributed the water through a number of canals, the flow in each of which was determined by a separate regulator. The Manufiyah Regulator was one of the most important of these.
‘Important?’ said the Under-Secretary, who was travelling with them in the Irrigation Department’s launch. ‘You’d think so if you were a farmer in the Middle Delta!’
Owen could see the barrage now, rising up ahead of them. It was like a long castellated wall, with minarets in the centre and a campanile at each end. As it came closer, he could make out the arches, a hundred and thirty of them altogether, the engineer said. He looked for the damage.
‘No, no!’ said the engineer impatiently. ‘Not there! Behind! Regulator. Canal. See?’
That was exactly what Owen didn’t see. What he did see, suddenly, away to his right, was a vision of palms and water: palms jutting up from the water as from tiny islands in a sea; men walking between the islands apparently on the surface of the water but actually on little earth walls; buffaloes forging contentedly through the shallows but every now and then, surprised, dropping suddenly and having to swim, with their great noses held up high out of the water; flat, punt-like boats poled along by a man, often with a little boy in the stern, holding an animal, a calf or a goat, by the front hooves as it splashed behind, exactly as in the ancient friezes.
The vision shimmered and he knew that it wasn’t there really, or, rather, that it was not there but somewhere else, not there in the desert where he was looking but somewhere else, down river, where the water had already spread over the fields.
He turned to the engineer.
‘You’ve already released it, then?’
‘Some of it. It seemed best, with one of the regulators going. But we would have released it anyway.’
‘Without waiting for the Cut?’
‘Cut? What’s that? Oh, I know, the Khalig Canal and all that stuff. No, that’s all in the past. We don’t wait for that nowadays. No, it’s nothing to do with us.’
The single long wall of the barrage was in a sense illusory. There were, in fact, two separate barrages, one across the Damietta arm of the Nile, the other across the Rosetta arm. Each barrage was about five hundred metres long and they were linked by a revetment wall which ran for a thousand metres over the triangle of ground between the arms. The triangle had been made into spectacular gardens which were a great draw to the city’s inhabitants at weekends and on festival days.
Today, of course, there was an even greater draw and the Gardens on the Rosetta side were a solid mass of people. Policemen had to force a way through for the Minister and his party.
They were also trying, rather less successfully, to clear a passage for a long line of carts piled high with rubble, stretching now right across the Gardens. As each cart came up to the damaged regulator, it was turned and then backed up on to the embankment which led to the small service road running across the top of the regulator gates. It was then edged along the road until it reached the gap, where it would discharge its load in a great crash of stone and spray.
It was the turning of the carts that was the problem. The people were wedged in so tightly at that point that the carts could hardly make inroads. The drivers lost patience and laid about them with their whips, the constables with their batons. The crowd did not, could not budge.
‘Clear the bloody lot out of the way!’ shouted a furious voice from down at the foot of the regulator somewhere.
Constables, carts, workmen and sympathetic onlookers hurled themselves at the crowd. It gave a yard or two. Some small boys fell into the river. Other onlookers were forced on to the flower beds.
‘My beds! My beds!’ cried an anguished voice.
A stocky little man, galabeeyah skirts hitched up round his knees, skull cap askew on his head, rushed across desperately.
‘Have you no thought? Have you no sense? Have you no feeling?’
He hammered on the sides of a cart with his fists.
The driver, face running with sweat, glanced down.
‘Abdullah, there are more important things in life just now than bougainvillea!’
He struck the horse a mighty blow with his whip. It shot forward; across a rose-bed and into a clump of datura, where it stuck. The heavy white blossoms closed over its flanks like ornamental wreaths.
‘I shall kill it!’ cried the gardener wildly, seizing a spade.
Concerned onlookers seized him.
‘But, Abdullah,’ one of them remonstrated, ‘the water is important –’
The gardener stopped his struggling. ‘Water?’ he said. ‘Do you think you need to tell me about water? Me? How do you think all this grows, then? What do you think I –?’
Owen moved away. If there was one thing any Egyptian was guaranteed to have a view on, it was water.
Which made it all the more extraordinary that –
The Ministerial party had at last reached the regulator. Down at its foot, some in the water, some out, men were working frantically. Among them was a European in a helmet. He looked up, then scrambled up to meet them.
‘Hello, Minister! Glad to see you!’
‘How are you getting on?’
The helmeted man shrugged.
‘At the moment we’re just trying to get it under control,’ he said.
‘Any idea of the extent of the damage?’
‘One of the gates has gone.’
He pointed to the regulator. The gates had been forced open. One of them bent back at an angle.
‘It got the full force of the blast.’
‘It definitely was a blast, was it?’ asked Owen.
The man looked at him.
‘Owen, is it? The Mamur Zapt? Seen you at the Club, but not spoken. Glad to meet you.’ They shook hands. ‘Yes, it definitely was. I can show you. Not just this moment, though. I’ve got things I must –’
He glanced back at the regulator.
‘No, that’s fine. Look, I won’t take your time. Can you put me on to someone else? Anyone see anything? Presumably you yourself weren’t –’
‘I was in bed. It was two o’clock in the morning.’
‘Someone called you. Who was that?’
‘The watchman. Ahmed.’
‘Can I have a word with him? Where would I find him?’
The engineer pointed up to the main wall of the barrage.
‘He’s up there,’ he said. ‘Ask for Ahmed.’
The watchman’s hut was empty except for a woman with a baby and a small boy. When Owen asked for Ahmed, she nodded and sent the boy to fetch him. Meanwhile, Owen walked out on to the barrage.
Upstream, feluccas were tacking gracefully in the wind and, closer to, a large gyassa, sails newly lowered and rigging bright with the little scarlet flags used for marriages and the return of pilgrims from Mecca, was disgorging passengers on to the shore. They were already beginning to make their way up to the gardens, past a long line of stalls selling peanuts and pastries and sweetmeats and souvenirs. In the gardens there were yet more stalls, tucked among the bamboo thickets and the prickly pears, the clumps of datura and the bright masses of bougainvillea.
Everywhere, too, there were water-sellers. It was a hot day and their services were much in demand; so much so that there was a steady file of them going back to the river to replenish their water-skins. Down by the gyassa he could see their black bags floating on the water.
The boy returned with an old, grey-haired man; not too old, apparently, for both the boy and the baby were his.
‘Pardon my slowness, Effendi.’
‘Even the Khedive should wait for age,’ said Owen courteously.
‘Ah, it’s not age,’ said the man, tapping his leg. ‘It’s this. I broke it when we were building the Dam at Aswan. It set badly and they said I could not work again. But when Macrae Effendi came up here he sent for me and made me watchman.’
‘And you were watching last night?’
‘That is so.’
‘And what did you see?’
The man hesitated.
‘Well, Effendi, it was not what I saw. It was – I was out on the bridge. And then the air hissed suddenly across my face and at once there was a mighty clap, as of thunder. And I said: “That cannot be right, for no one does that sort of work at night.” For I knew what it was, having worked on the Dam at Aswan. And then I heard the rush of water, and saw the whiteness in the darkness, and knew the dam had broken. And I hastened back and sounded the signal and called Macrae Effendi.’
‘You did well.’
‘And then I went back on to the bridge. Effendi, I know I could have gone to the breach. But with this –’ he motioned towards his leg–‘what could I have done? And, besides, Macrae Effendi says: “Let every man do his duty. If every man does his duty, then all will be well.” And my duty, Effendi, was on the bridge.’
‘Quite right. So there you were, back on the bridge, watching, as was your duty. What else did you see?’
‘Nothing, Effendi. The night was dark. But shortly I heard shouts and knew that the workmen were there. And then I heard Macrae Effendi.’
‘But you saw nothing? No man fleeing the spot, for instance?’
‘It was dark, Effendi. And, besides, he would have come through the gardens, where there are trees and bushes.’
‘There are other watchmen?’
‘There are watchmen on all the dams when the river rises. But, Effendi, they would have been watching the dams and the banks.’
‘They would have been watching against the river and not against people?’
‘That is right. What need is there to watch against people? To strike against the river is to strike against oneself.’
‘And yet last night someone did.’
‘What could have possessed them, Effendi?’ asked the watchman, shaking his head. ‘Who could do a thing like that?’
‘Some loony,’ said Macrae bitterly, now unhelmeted and slumped exhaustedly in the office. There was coffee on the table in front of them. He picked up one of the cups.
‘Inexplicable!’ said the Minister. ‘Unless –’ he looked at Owen –‘you don’t think it could have been some ridiculous Nationalist –?’
‘Politics, you mean?’ said Macrae. ‘Well, you could be right. Anyone who gets mixed up with politics has to be crazy. Especially in Egypt. Oh, sorry, Minister!’
‘Let’s not jump to conclusions!’ said Owen. ‘It could just be an individual with a grudge.’
‘Well, let’s hope you find him before he does any more damage,’ said Macrae.
‘Are you going to be able to put this right?’ the Minister asked.
‘Depends what you mean. We’ll have things more or less under control by the evening. But then we’ll need new gates.’
‘New gates?’
‘And we’ll have to set them,’ said the other engineer, the one Owen had met at the Ministry. His name was Ferguson. ‘That means that what we’re talking about really is a complete new regulator.’
‘But that will cost millions!’ said the Minister.
‘Aye,’ said Macrae.
‘We’ll have to divert the canal,’ said Ferguson.
‘Divert the canal!’
‘Aye,’ said Macrae.
‘But – but – that will –’
‘Cost more millions,’ said Ferguson.
‘We have to keep the flow going, you see,’ said Macrae. ‘And you can’t build when the water’s still going through. You have to build somewhere else. Nearby, of course.’ He looked out of the window. ‘The gardens, I should think. And then divert the water into the new channel.’
The Under-Secretary pulled himself together.
‘I’ll put it to them. It – it may take some time.’
‘Can’t wait,’ said Macrae. Ferguson nodded in agreement. ‘If you want it done before next year’s rise – and you do – you’ll have to start next month.’
‘I’ll put that to them, too,’ said the Under-Secretary, downcast.
‘But that’s not the main thing,’ said Macrae.
‘No?’ said the Under-Secretary.
‘No?’ said Ferguson, surprised.
‘No. The main thing is to get the madman who did it. Before he does it again. Owen?’
2 (#ulink_17ac21ac-508a-5a12-9e13-bd2f8e535bda)
The world of water, on the brink of which Owen had hitherto remained, was clearly a different one from any that he had known. It seemed, for a start, to be inhabited primarily by Scotsmen. Owen put this down to the fact that it was technical. He had long established that all engineers, in the Levant at any rate, were Scottish. It must be something in the blood, he decided; which perhaps accounted for him himself having no technical competence whatsoever. He understood enough about such things, however, to know when someone was being given the technical run-around. As here, he suspected.
After the Minister had left, shell-shocked, Macrae produced a bottle of whisky and three glasses.
‘Do you like it with water or without?’
Owen hesitated.
‘Aye,’ said Macrae, ‘you’re right. It’s a big question. I take it with just a splash, myself. It releases the aromas.’
‘Aye, but that’s in Scotland,’ said Ferguson. ‘Out here, where it’s warmer, they’re released anyway.’
‘You don’t take it with ice, anyway. That’s the main thing,’ said Macrae, pouring a generous dram.
‘In the Club, perhaps. With soda. And a different whisky.’
‘My view entirely,’ said Macrae. He took a careful sip, nodded approval, and put his glass down.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘you’ll have some questions for us, I fancy.’
‘Basic facts, first,’ said Owen.
‘Aye,’ said Macrae. ‘I like facts.’
‘First: time?’
‘A couple of minutes either side of two o’clock. Ahmed phoned me at five past. I was here by twenty past.’
‘Good.’
‘Next, place. You’ll be wanting to know about that. Well,’– he looked at Ferguson for corroboration –‘I’d say bottom right-hand comer of the gates as you look towards the main barrage. About by the culvert.’
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson. ‘We’ll be able to tell you better later.’
‘What was it done with?’ asked Owen.
‘Dynamite, I fancy,’ said Macrae. ‘Where there’s dams, there’s dynamite. Have you checked the store?’ he asked Ferguson.
‘Not yet,’ said Ferguson. ‘I will.’
‘They’ll have come across the Gardens,’ said Owen. ‘I’ll take a look at those in a moment.’
‘You won’t find anything,’ said Ferguson. ‘They’re a labyrinth.’
‘I’ll look, anyway. Now I want to ask you about workmen.’
‘Workmen?’ said Macrae, surprised. ‘Why?’
‘One of them could have done it.’
Macrae and Ferguson both shook their heads.
‘Not one of ours,’ they said in unison.
‘Why not?’
‘Well –’ Macrae sat back and thought. ‘We’ve known them for years,’ he said finally. ‘Some of them worked with me down at Aswan.’
‘Even the ones who come up for the Inundation,’ said Ferguson. ‘We’ve known them for years. Every year, there they are. Really, there are too many of them. I ought to turn some away. They’re needed elsewhere in the system. But we know them and they know us.’
‘Good men,’ said Macrae.
‘What, all of them?’ said Owen.
‘Look,’ said Macrae. ‘I know what they say about Egyptian workmen. But ours are not like that.’
‘All of them?’ said Owen. ‘I’m looking for one, that’s the point.’
‘We’d have got rid of them if they were.’
‘Well, that, too, could be the point.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m asking, not saying. I’m asking why anyone would want to do a thing like this. And the answer I come up with is: because they’ve got a grudge.’
‘Grudge?’ said Ferguson. ‘Who against?’
‘The Department. You.’
‘Not our workmen,’ said Macrae positively. ‘Why would they have a grudge?’
‘Because they fancied they’d been wronged. Let’s have a try. Any injuries lately?’
‘Nothing serious. It’s not construction work. It’s not like Aswan. And when there are injuries we look after them.’
‘But you do have injuries?’
‘Yes, but –’
‘I’d like the names. Next, dismissals.’
‘We don’t have any.’
‘You said yourself that if people weren’t up to the mark you got rid of them.’
‘Yes. But – Look, all that is in the past. We haven’t needed to get rid of anyone for –’
‘Years,’ filled in Ferguson.
‘What about disciplinary problems? Don’t tell me you haven’t had any of those!’
‘If we have, we’ve known how to handle them.’
‘But that’s the point: how they were handled.’
‘Look –’
‘We’ve had words,’ said Ferguson. ‘I don’t deny that. But nothing serious.’
‘Blows?’
‘I don’t believe in blows,’ said Macrae. ‘If you can’t manage without blows, you can’t manage.’
‘Fine!’ said Owen. ‘But let me have the names, will you?’
‘The Department’s got the records,’ said Ferguson.
‘In any case,’ said Macrae, ‘aren’t you barking up the wrong tree? If they had a grudge against us, wouldn’t they want to take it out on us? Not on a dam they depend on for their livelihood. The only people they’d be hurting there would be themselves!’
Out by the damaged regulator the crowds were thinning now and the carts could turn more easily. They were still coming. The long line still stretched across the gardens. It was testimony to the engineers’ capacity for getting things done that they had been able to organize so many loads in such a short space of time.
The loads, inevitably, were an incongruous mixture. There was masonry, rubble, rocks, wood, mattresses – even old chairs and tables. Not so old, as a matter of fact. Some of them were quite new.
‘Mr Macrae said anything would do,’ explained the hot young man marshalling the carts. His pinkness told that he was fresh from England. ‘He said that I could raid the houses if necessary. A lot of them are just standing empty, you know.’
A cart went by piled high with swathes of fine velvet curtaining. On top teetered a beautiful old escritoire.
‘Just a minute –’ said Owen.
‘Where did you get that?’ asked Ferguson.
‘Oh, a sort of villa over there,’ said the young man, pointing along the river bank.
‘But –’ said Ferguson.
‘Anything wrong?’ inquired the pink youth anxiously.
‘That’s the Khedive’s Summer Chalet,’ said Owen.
‘Murderers!’ muttered the gardener wrathfully, struggling to restore a rose-bed.
‘Take heart, man,’ counselled Owen, standing beside him. The people will go, the gardens remain.’
‘But what will they be like?’ asked the gardener.
‘In time they will be as new.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the gardener, ‘but how much time? A garden like this isn’t built in a day, you know.’
‘It takes time,’ agreed Owen soothingly.
‘And work! A garden is built with one’s back.’
‘But out of the sweat of one’s brow a thing of beauty emerges.’
‘Well –’
‘This is truly one of the Wonders of Egypt,’ said Owen, looking round.
‘Well –’ said the gardener modestly.
‘Of Egypt? No, of the world!’
‘It’s pretty good,’ acknowledged the gardener. ‘Though I say it myself.’
‘Who better to say it?’
‘And those stupid bastards –’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Owen hurriedly. ‘But, tell me, Abdullah, you of all men must know the gardens well?’
‘Like the back of my hand.’
‘Just so. And you will be able to tell me this: if you were coming by night and making for the Manufiya Regulator, and did not wish to be seen, by what way would you come?’
The gardener gave him a shrewd look.
‘Would you be carrying something, Effendi?’
‘You might. You might well.’
‘Then there is only one way you would come. For if you came by any other you would have to cross canals. And you would not want, would you, Effendi, to get your load wet?’
‘You would not. So how would you come?’
‘Shall I show you, Effendi?’
Owen was not exactly a connoisseur of gardens. Indeed, he seldom noticed that they were there at all. But even he, now that he looked, could see that there was something special about the Barrage Gardens. They were a miracle of colour. Everywhere there were great splashes of bougainvillea and datura, banks of roses, huge beds of thrift. The trees, many of them rare and not native to Egypt, were tied together with flowering creepers and lianas. The pools, and there were lots of pools, were vivid with the ancient emblems of Lower and Upper Egypt, the papyrus and the lotos.
The gardens occupied the land between the Rosetta and Damietta arms of the Nile which was completely flat. That was not, however, the impression you received as you walked through them. Every rise, every declivity, had been somehow enhanced so that what you were conscious of, unusually in Egypt, was wooded hills and valleys.
It was along one of these valleys that Abdullah was leading Owen. A stream ran down the middle and on the opposite side were crumbling walls festooned with brightly-coloured climbers, the remains of the old French fort which had been here. Scattered along the valley were great clumps of bamboo and prickly pear, all making, thought Owen, if you wanted it, for invisibility.
He saw now that they were coming to the edge of the gardens. For the whole of their walk they had been out of sight of the barrages; out of sight, too, he suddenly realized, of any of the watchmen who might be manning them.
Except that –
‘Hello, Ibrahim!’ said the gardener.
A man was lying on his back beneath a baobab tree, an antique musket stretched out alongside him.
‘He sleeps during the day,’ said the gardener with a grin, ‘because he works during the night. Or so he claims.’
‘He is, then –?’
‘The ghaffir.’
The night watchman. He sat up, yawned and splashed water over his face from a nearby gadwal.
‘I am showing this Effendi how a man might get to the Manufiya Regulator without being seen,’ said the gardener.
‘You are showing him the wrong way, then,’ said the ghaffir, ‘for if he had come this way, I would have seen him.’
‘Not during the night, Ibrahim. For would you not have been walking the gardens?’
‘I might still have seen him,’ said the ghaffir, ‘if he had walked this way. For that is the way I walk when I am going to see that the stores are all right.’
‘And did you in fact see anyone?’ asked Owen. ‘Or anything untoward?’
The ghaffir chuckled.
‘I saw no one, Effendi. But I did see something untoward.’
‘What was that?’
‘Well, I didn’t really see it, Effendi. Unfortunately. But I heard.’
‘What did you hear?’
‘Chuckling, Effendi.’
‘Chuckling?’
‘And other noises, Effendi.’ He winked knowingly. ‘As of lovers.’
‘And you saw them, Ibrahim?’ said the gardener, scandalized.
‘Not actually saw them. They were in the bushes.’
‘And you’re sure about the noises?’ asked Owen. ‘I mean, that they were –?’
‘Effendi, they were like a pair of jackals!’
‘Ibrahim!’ said the gardener, shocked, but delighted.
‘Like this!’
The ghaffir gave an orgiastic cry.
‘Okay, okay,’ said Owen. ‘And where did all this take place?’
‘Just there, Effendi,’ said the ghaffir, pointing. ‘I had just got back from the stores when I heard –’
‘Ibrahim!’
‘All right, all right. And you saw, or heard, nothing else?’
‘No, Effendi. But that was pretty good, wasn’t it?’
‘I’ll bet he had a look,’ said the gardener, as they walked back to the regulator.
At the regulator the men were taking a break. They were sprawled tiredly on the bank.
‘Hard work!’ said Owen sympathetically.
‘It’s what we’re paid for,’ said one of the men.
‘If this is what we’re going to do all day,’ said the man next to him, ‘then I’m not being paid enough!’
‘You’d rather be back at home, would you, Musa?’ asked someone, apparently innocently.
There was a general laugh.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said Musa.
‘It’s his wife,’ someone explained to Owen. ‘She keeps him on the go.’
‘You’d better make the most of it while you’ve got the chance, Musa,’ said someone else. ‘You’ll be back there soon enough.’
‘If this gate business doesn’t hold things back,’ said Musa.
The men turned serious.
‘You don’t think it’ll come to that?’
‘We wouldn’t want that,’ said someone. ‘There’s work to be done at home.’
‘You’re just up here for the Inundation, are you?’ asked Owen.
‘That’s right. It works out very well usually. There’s not much we can do at home just now. At this time of year you’ve got to wait for the water. And then when it comes you’ve got to wait for it to sink in before you can plant the seed. By that time we’re home again.’
‘You work your own lands, do you?’
There was a rueful chuckle.
‘It’s mostly Al-Sayyid Hannam’s land now. But, yes, we work it.’
‘They’re fellahin,’ said Ferguson, joining him. ‘They work in the fields. Every man jack of them. And if there’s anyone who knows the meaning of water, it’s the Egyptian fellah. That’s why I can’t believe it would be one of them. I just can’t!’
The workmen started to go back. Macrae was already there. He saw Owen and waved an arm in greeting. Owen suddenly realized that the man had been there since two o’clock the previous night. He wondered if the workmen had, too. They were going back to work, however, willingly enough.
Ferguson squinted at the sun.
‘I’d better be rigging up some lights,’ he said.
The sun was already beginning its downward plunge. The Egyptian twilight was short. Already there was a reddish tinge to the water.
The gardens were emptying rapidly.
‘You’d best be getting back,’ said Ferguson.
Owen joined the crowd streaming back down to the river on the other side of the main barrage. Down at the water’s edge the boats were filling up fast. The big gyassa had already left. There was no sign of the launch. He found a felucca which was not too crowded and stepped in.
By the time the felucca nosed into the bank at Bulaq, the sun had already set and the lights were coming on in the streets. He took an arabeah back to the Bab-el-Khalk, the Police Headquarters, where he had his office. There were no lights in that. Like all Government buildings it closed for the day at two. Admittedly it opened at seven.
He found a porter, however, who produced a lamp and showed him to his office. He wasn’t going to stay, he merely wanted to check for messages. There was one from Mahmoud suggesting a meeting. The first findings of the autopsy had come through.
Owen knew Mahmoud’s habits. Indeed, they were his own and those of most Cairenes. After the inertia of the afternoon the city came alive in the evening and made for the cafés. Owen tried one or two of Mahmoud’s favourites and found him at a third. He was sitting outside at a table, sipping coffee and preparing for an appearance in court tomorrow.
‘I tried to get you earlier,’ he said.
‘I was up at the barrage.’
‘The regulator?’
‘Yes.’ Then, knowing that Mahmoud would be wondering, he said: ‘It looks like sabotage.’
‘Sabotage?’ said Mahmoud, surprised. ‘But who on earth would –?’
‘Exactly,’ said Owen. He asked about the autopsy.
They’re only preliminary findings,’ said Mahmoud, ‘but I thought you’d be interested.’
The Maiden, it appeared, had not been murdered at all, ritually or otherwise, but had died of natural causes.
‘If you can call it that,’ said Mahmoud.
‘Why shouldn’t you call it that?’
‘She probably died as a result of circumcision.’
‘It went wrong?’
‘That, or infection.’
As was commonly the case. The practice was widespread, especially in the older, poorer and more traditional quarters of the city. It was defended on the grounds of hygiene but the operation itself often took place in circumstances that were the reverse of hygienic, performed by an old woman in a filthy room, with consequences that were too frequently the same as those in the case of the Maiden.
Owen was silent for a moment, then shrugged.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘in a way that’s quite helpful for me at any rate. Any chance that we could publish the findings?’
‘Why not?’ said Mahmoud.
‘It would help me if we could. It would knock all the daft “Myth of the Maiden” nonsense on the head. And with the Cut coming up so soon –’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Mahmoud. ‘I’d have to make it clear that they were preliminary findings, of course.’
‘They’re not likely to be altered, though, are they?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Only if something new comes up. Or if they find anything unusual. Actually,’ said Mahmoud, ‘there is something unusual. Mildly so. Her age. Circumcision usually takes place at thirteen, or even younger. This girl was about twenty.’
‘That’s not going to affect anything, though, is it?’
‘No. I just find it puzzling, that’s all.’
‘A late marriage, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps. At any rate it should help us to make an identification.’
‘Are you going to do anything about it?’ asked Owen. ‘When you’ve found out who it was?’
‘Probably not. It’s not illegal.’
‘I know, but –’
‘Yes. I know.’
It was an issue that the Parquet generally fought shy of. Charges of some sort could certainly have been brought but the case would probably have gone to the Native Courts, where it might well have been thrown out. The Native Courts were the most traditional of the courts and unlikely to have any doubts about the practice itself. As for the consequences, while they were undesirable and unfortunate, they were also, one might say, in the natural way of things. The practice was so deeply embedded in social custom that it was, besides, something of a political hot potato. Even the Nationalists steered clear of it.
‘It’s not illegal,’ Mahmoud repeated.
That for him was usually decisive. He had been trained in the French School of Law and had a thoroughly French frame of mind. A thing was either legal or it was not. If it was legal, then it was no concern of lawyers. If it was illegal, then that had to be spelled out.
All the same, Owen could see that he was not happy.
The release of the findings had the desired effect. Public interest in the Maiden disappeared entirely. No one, after all, cared much about a woman dying. Certainly, of natural causes.
The next morning Owen presented himself at the Department of Irrigation. When he learned what Owen wanted, the clerk threw up his hands.
‘Effendi,’ he said tragically, ‘there is only I.’
Owen looked round the office.
‘There is not,’ he said. ‘There are Yussef and Ali and Selim and Abdul. Not to mention the man who has gone out to make the tea.’
‘But, Effendi –’
‘As well as the people in the next office. And the one after that. And what about –?’
‘Effendi, we are as grains of gold in a desert of sand!’
‘I’m sure you are. But how about getting on with –’
‘Does the Effendi want all the names?’ asked the clerk despondently.
‘Certainly.’
‘But surely only of those fine men who are on the permanent strength?’
‘I want the names of all those who are working on the barrage at the moment.’
‘But, Effendi, they are legion!’
‘How legion are they?’
The clerk consulted his ledger.
‘At this time of year, Effendi,’ he said impressively, ‘sixteen thousand.’
‘Not working on the barrage at the moment, there aren’t. About two hundred, I’d say.’
‘But, Effendi, they are for the most part worthless fellows, mere villagers, who come up here for the Inundation, work for a few weeks and then return to the dreadful place from where they came!’
‘They are the ones I am particularly interested in. First, I’d like disciplinary cases –’
‘But, Effendi, they are all unruly, mere savages –’
‘Then injuries.’
‘But, Effendi, what does it signify if a few are injured? When we think of the general good? If a few fall by the wayside or into the river?’
‘And the dismissals.’
‘Effendi, at the end of the Inundation they are all dismissed, and a good thing too –’
‘The ones who are dismissed before the end.’
‘But, Effendi, why bother about the few whom Macrae Effendi and Ferguson Effendi have shrewdly seen have got it coming and wisely advanced the hour?’
‘Just see I get the names tomorrow,’ said Owen.
When Owen went into his office the next day, Nikos, his official clerk, had the list in front of him. Owen was taken aback by the remarkable burst of productivity. Then he saw the reason. The list had only five names.
‘No dismissals, two injuries, minor, the rest, wages docked for being late,’ said Nikos. ‘That what you wanted?’
Owen frowned.
‘I want to know first if it is true,’ he said.
Nikos nodded.
‘I’ll check,’ he said.
‘And while you’re doing that, can you look a bit more widely?’
‘What for?’
‘Possible reasons for a grudge. I’m after motive.’
Nikos was looking through the list.
‘They’re all Corvée men,’ he said. ‘You can tell by the payroll numbers.’
‘They will be at this time of year. It’s the height of the Inundation.’
‘I was just wondering if that could be anything to do with it.’
The Corvée was the name given to the system by which the Government had traditionally summoned up labour each year to maintain the river banks and watch the dams when the Nile rose. In the past the system had been full of abuses. Virtually every able-bodied man between fifteen and fifty had been called up and obliged to work unpaid for a substantial part of the year away from his own land. Worse, the great Pashas, or noblemen, had frequently contrived to divert them to work on their own estates, flogging them if they refused. Anyone then might well have had a grudge against the system.
But not now. When the British had come they had abolished the Corvée, at least in its old form. Now the work was voluntary, paid, and for a shorter period. And the Pashas’ abuses were twenty years in the past. Surely, thought Owen, no one could harbour a grudge for so long? Even in Egypt, where grudges were sometimes nourished for generations.
When Owen entered the Gardens he experienced a mild shock. They were covered with water. For a moment he thought that something must have gone wrong at the regulator and the canal overflowed. But then he realized. This was Thursday and watering day throughout the city.
Every Thursday water was pumped up out of the river and distributed through the city in pipelines to parks and public gardens, where it was drawn off locally into systems of raised earth ditches, called gadwals.
That was what had happened here. The Gardens looked like a vast shallow lake out of which the trees and shrubs jutted incongruously. In the water between them hundreds of birds were playing. Palm doves crouched and crooned. Hoopoes hesitated inhibitedly like bathers on an English beach. Bulbuls and sparrows, not at all inhibited, splashed water over their backs in a furious spray. Brightly-coloured bee-eaters, never still, swerved and dived. Buff-backed herons stalked and stabbed. There were even some green parakeets, released deliberately from Giza Zoo to see if they would breed wild.
Owen hesitated a moment, wondering how to cross the Gardens and get to the regulator dry. Across the water he saw the gardener, up to his ankles and bent over a gadwal, and made a gesture of inquiry. The gardener pointed to a path leading up into the trees. It ran along the slight crest beside the valley he’d walked through previously and took him nearly to the regulator.
At the regulator things were quieter. A solitary cart had been backed up to the breach and from its rear men were lowering sandbags precisely into position with a rope and pulley. Ferguson was lying on his front peering down into the breach and directing proceedings. He stood up when he saw Owen coming.
‘We’ve got something for you,’ he said.
He called down to Macrae, who came up and joined them. They walked down the canal to where what looked like a piece of broken pipe had evidently been heaved up out of the water.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s part of the culvert. From just beside the regulator gates. It was blown out by the explosion and carried here by the water. The thing is, though: see those? They’re bum marks. That means, that’s where the stuff was put. Just shoved up inside, I’d say.’
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson. ‘That would have been enough. It’s the position, you see. It would have cracked the concrete that held the frame just by the hinge. The weight of the water would have done the rest. Whoever did it knew just what they were doing.’
‘And you still say,’ said Owen, ‘that it wasn’t one of your workmen?’
3 (#ulink_a5e87d17-e5e9-532c-8eca-09f31021a39f)
The gardener came running.
‘Effendi! Oh, Effendi!’
He arrived panting.
‘Oh, Effendi! Another one!’
‘Another what?’
‘A bomb! Oh, Effendi, come quickly!’
‘Another! Jesus! Where?’
The gardener pointed across the Gardens.
‘The Rosetta? Jesus!’
They ran straight across the Gardens, splashing through the water. Birds scattered. Herons rose with a clap of wings like a gunshot. The palm doves rose in a flock. Hoopoes hesitated no longer and made for the trees.
The gardener ran ahead of them, his bare feet kicking up the water. He led them across the lawns and then up on to the crest along which Owen had passed previously. Down into the bamboo clumps of the valley and then left along the stream, almost to the spot where the ghaffir had been taking his repose. There, virtually beneath the baobab trees, the gardener halted.
‘But –?’ began Macrae.
‘There, Effendi, there!’ pointed the gardener with trembling finger.
He was pointing towards a gadwal.
‘Leave this to me!’ said Macrae, shouldering Owen aside.
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson. ‘We know about these things.’
He pushed Owen behind a tree and then went forward to join Macrae.
‘Bloody hell!’ they said in unison.
Owen, who had served with the Army in India before coming to Egypt, and thought he also knew about these things, re-emerged from behind the tree and went cautiously up to them.
They were peering into the gadwal. Lying in the bottom were a pair of detonators.
‘It is easy to see, Abdullah,’ said the ghaffir superciliously, ‘that you are not a man who knows about dynamite!’
‘How was I to know?’ said the gardener defensively. ‘It looked like a bomb to me!’
‘How did you find it?’ asked Owen.
‘I was clearing the gadwal,’ said the gardener. ‘You need to, to make sure that the water can flow along it. You’d be surprised what gets into it. Leaves, sticks, that sort of thing. All these birds! And then the people – they put rubbish in it, though you’d think they knew better. So before I let the water through I go along and see there are no blockages. I mean, you don’t want water coming over the sides until you’re ready, do you? What would be the point of that? You may not think I know about dynamite,’ he said aside to the ghaffir, ‘but I do know about gadwals. Mess up one and you’ve messed up the lot!’
‘Gadwals!’ sniggered the ghaffir. ‘To talk about gadwals when the Effendi have great things on their mind!’
‘Never mind that!’ said Macrae. He looked down into the gadwal. ‘Spares, you reckon?’ he said to Ferguson.
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson. ‘Discarded afterwards.’
Macrae picked them up.
‘And you know where they come from?’ he said.
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson.
The stores were kept in a hut beside one of the regulators. Its door was heavily padlocked.
‘I doubt they went that way,’ said Macrae.
He led them round to the back of the hut. The lower part of the rear wall was masked by a profusion of the mauve, thrift-like flowers that grew everywhere in the Gardens. Macrae pulled them away. At the very bottom of the wall a hole large enough for a man had been neatly cut in the wood.
Ferguson went round to the front again and unlocked the padlock and they went in. The hut was full of equipment neatly arranged on racks. There were spades, picks, drilling bits, coils of wire, nails, screws, packs of various kinds. There was a stack of the wooden trug-like baskets that were still universally used along the banks for carrying earth in. There were piles of the traditional wooden shovels.
Macrae went over to one of the walls and pulled aside some stacks. Behind them was a stout wooden chest with huge iron clasps and a padlock even stronger than the one on the door. Macrae unlocked it and looked in.
‘Aye,’ he said.
‘Detonators?’ said Owen.
‘Four missing.’
‘That would be right. And dynamite?’
‘At any rate,’ said Macrae sourly, ‘there’s some left.’
‘A padlock’s no good,’ said Ferguson. ‘We’ll have to find somewhere else to keep it.’
‘Have you a storeman?’ asked Owen.
‘He’s all right,’ said Macrae. ‘I’d trust him with my life.’ And then, catching Owen’s sceptical look, he added. ‘Aye, I know what you’re thinking. But he’s all right. I’ve known him for years. He was with me down in Aswan. Got injured in a fall, so I put him in charge of stores. That was six years ago and we’ve never had cause for complaint.’
‘Never!’ said Ferguson.
‘Does he have keys?’
‘No. I open up and lock up each day,’ said Ferguson.
‘And we’re the only ones with keys to the box. We each keep a set in case there’s a sudden need and one of us can’t be found. But no one else has a key.’
Owen bent and looked at the padlock. It was a fairly standard one. The storeman might be honest but people would be in and out of the hut all day and one of them might well have been able to size the padlock up, even, perhaps, take an impression while the storeman was distracted.
The hole in the wall had been hidden by some sacks.
‘Aye,’ said Macrae, ‘but it can’t have been done long before or we’d have found out.’
‘The same night?’
‘It would take a bit of time to cut,’ said Ferguson. ‘Maybe the night before.’
They went round and looked at the hole again from the other side. Whoever had cut it had dug himself a shallow burrow in the sand for extra concealment while he worked.
‘Yes, but Ibrahim ought to have seen him,’ grumbled Macrae. ‘He’s supposed to look all round.’
He summoned the ghaffir and showed him the burrow.
‘What’s this, then?’
Ibrahim studied it.
‘A lizard, Effendi?’
‘Lizard, bollocks!’ He indicated the hole. ‘This was a man!’
‘Yes, Effendi,’ said the ghaffir unhappily. ‘A lizard man.’
‘I can see, Ibrahim,’ said the gardener maliciously, ‘that you are not a man who knows about thieves breaking in.’
‘I know about thieves breaking in,’ said the ghaffir indignantly. ‘Ordinary thieves, that is. But this was a lizard man. Lizard men are different.’
The phrase unfortunately caught on. Walking past some of Macrae’s workmen later, Owen heard them discussing the latest developments, which, of course, by this time they knew all about.
‘… a lizard man, they say …’
‘Ah, well, there’s not much you can do about that, then, is there?’
‘I don’t like it. If he’s got it in for us, then there’ll be trouble!’
The newspapers picked it up. Waiting for Mahmoud that evening, sitting at an outside table in the big café at the top of the Mouski, Owen heard a new cry from the boys selling newspapers.
‘Lizard man! Lizard man!’
He bought a newspaper to find out all about it. It was as he feared. Prominent on the front page was the heading
LIZARD MAN STRIKES!
Beneath, was a lurid and totally inaccurate account of the attack on the regulator.
That kind of detail, however, was of little interest to the newspapers, which, at this comer of the Mouski, were largely Nationalist in tone. They preferred to speculate on the Lizard Man’s identity. Was he, for a start, a Nationalist? A number of the newspapers seemed to think so. They saw the whole thing as an attack on the British.
LIZARD MAN HERO STRIKES AT BRITISH DAM!
ran one of the headlines.
Other newspapers, however, pointed out that the Regulator was not British but Egyptian. Who would be so dastardly as to attack an Egyptian dam? Clearly, the inspiration was Christian. But not necessarily British. The British, for all their faults – and the newspaper listed a half page of them – were not lizard men. They had no need to be, because they controlled the show anyway. No, it was someone more insidious, someone who preferred to lie low and conceal himself in the sand; the Lizard Man was a Copt!
A Coptic newspaper, not surprisingly, took a different view. The Muslims, relative newcomers in the country (they had arrived a mere twelve hundred years ago), had never really appreciated the great architecture that had preceded them. They had seen it as the work of Satan. Was it surprising, then, that they should strike at one of the great buildings of modern Egypt? The Lizard Man was plainly a Muslim, almost certainly of a fundamentalist persuasion.
Various other newspapers took various other views. They agreed, however, on certain major points. The Lizard Man had done it, and he was aptly named, for he struck surreptitiously and he did reptile things. Like the snake, he snatched the young from the mother’s nest and the mother’s breast. All women should, therefore, be warned!
The authorities were, naturally, seriously concerned. The Mamur Zapt himself was on the trail. Unfortunately, if reports were correct, he had allowed himself to be led on a wild lizard chase …
‘What’s this I hear about a lizard man?’ asked Mahmoud, dropping into the chair opposite Owen.
‘A figure of daft speech,’ said Owen.
‘There are plenty of those around. Myths of Maidenhood, for a start.’
It was, in fact, the Maiden that Mahmoud wanted to talk about, although not in her mythic incarnation. The release of the autopsy’s findings had brought him certain leads and he thought he was now close to establishing the Maiden’s identity. That was not the problem.
‘The problem is that Labiba Latifa has got hold of it.’
‘Labiba Latifa?’
‘You’ve not heard of her?’
He had, just. Mahmoud filled him in.
Labiba Latifa was a lady of independent means and independent spirit who in her youth had trained as a nurse – abroad – and on her return occupied herself with a number of good causes, most of them in the field of health. That she had been able to do this so publicly had been in large measure due to the position of her husband, who had been the Dean of Cairo’s Medical School. When he had died, she had proposed to carry on in exactly the same way.
That, however, was a quite different thing. While widows, especially wealthy ones, were accorded more leeway in Egyptian society than most women, the prominence of her activities and the outspokenness of her views had soon brought her notoriety. Even in reformist circles, opinions of her were mixed, some feeling that progress was more likely to be made in quieter ways. She was altogether a formidable lady; as Mahmoud had found when she had come to see him.
She said that she had read the findings of the autopsy with interest, and asked him what position he proposed to adopt on the case.
Mahmoud had replied, with strict correctness, that he proposed to adopt no position on the case. His task was simply to present such evidence as he could to the inquest.
Labiba had asked him if that would include evidence that she had died of the effects of circumcision. Mahmoud had reminded her that these were only the preliminary findings; but if the final report was to that effect, then he certainly would.
What verdict did he expect? And what action was likely to follow?
Mahmoud, honest to a fault, replied that he thought it highly unlikely that any action would follow.
Was he satisfied with that?
Mahmoud had replied, truthfully, that he wasn’t.
So what did he propose to do about it?
Owen imagined that there must have been quite a silence at this point. Eventually Mahmoud had said that he didn’t know.
Labiba had nodded her head.
What did she expect him to do, Mahmoud had asked?
Labiba had said that this was a case in the public eye, and that the right thing to do was to make an issue of it.
Mahmoud had said that this was hardly up to him. His role was to serve the law as it stood. If wider issues were raised by the case, then they would be identified either by the court or by the Parquet.
Was there nothing that he, as investigating lawyer, could do, Labiba had asked? And waited.
Mahmoud was much too sharp not to understand how he was being pressurized, and to recognize that his integrity was being skilfully called into play. Labiba had done her homework and knew her man.
He had replied neutrally that he was still at an early stage of his investigations and if when he had completed them there were issues to be raised he would consider the matter then.
He had braced himself for further pressurizing. Instead, Labiba had merely nodded her head again, as if accepting what he had said. He had realized afterwards that this was a clever way of binding in his commitment.
She had then, to his surprise, completely switched tactics. In fact, she had confessed, she was not sure herself how to proceed in the circumstances. Could she discuss them with him?
Following the publication of the autopsy findings, the case had been brought to her attention by a group of midwives with whom she had dealings on other matters. They had been especially concerned about the age at which the circumcision had taken place.
‘Opinions differ, Mr el Zaki,–even amongst midwives – on whether female circumcision is in itself an acceptable practice. I have my own views on the matter and they are clear-cut, but I do have to recognize that they are not universally shared, especially in the poorer, more traditional quarters. The group of ladies in question live out beyond the Khan-el-Kahlil and they usually disagree with me on such issues. We do not, however, disagree on the fact that if it has to be done at all, it is best done at an early age. In this case, as you know, the poor girl was twenty.’
‘Why, then, was it done?’ asked Mahmoud.
‘She was going to get married. Late, yes, but she was the only woman in the household – her mother died some years ago – and I fancy her father did not want to lose her services about the house. However, the opportunity of a profitable marriage came up and he couldn’t afford to miss it. Now, the bridegroom was very much older than she was and very traditional in his thinking. He would certainly expect her to be circumcised. Indeed, the marriage might well have been off if she wasn’t. So –’
‘Why hadn’t she been circumcised before?’
‘Her mother had died. These things are usually seen as women’s matters and there was no woman to see they were done.’
‘No one else in the family?’
‘They had moved from the country. The father is a water-carrier, poor, and’ – Labiba sniffed – ‘very ignorant. Do you know what is the greatest cause of crime in the country, Mr el Zaki? Ignorance. Not even poverty, for we can be poor without being ignorant. Admittedly, the two usually go together.’
Mahmoud bowed his head gravely. He had expected a lecture at some point.
‘So he knew no better. That is why, Mr el Zaki, I am in some difficulty. On the one hand the case is in the public eye, and an issue of principle is involved, an issue which we can make narrow enough – the age, not the fart, of circumcision – to enlist public support. On the other, the person in the dock should be ignorance, not some poor, lowly, uneducated man. Nor the poor, lowly, uneducated woman who performed the circumcision.’
‘You know the woman?’
‘I do.’
‘And the girl?’
‘I know of her.’
‘So,’ said Mahmoud, putting down his coffee and looking at Owen, ‘the issue of principle is very close.’
Which way Mahmoud would go on the issue when the moment of decision came, Owen did not know. No one could rise as far and as fast in the Parquet as Mahmoud had done without being worldly wise. Yet there was at the same time an odd streak of naiveté in Mahmoud which took the form of an obstinacy about principle. He remained, thought Owen, as he walked down to the river the next morning, an idealist at heart.
He was on his way to see how preparations for the Cut were getting on. As he neared the point where the Khalig Canal came out into the river and where the Cut would be made, there were increasing signs of the coming festivities. Banners had appeared on some of the houses and brightly-coloured strings of bunting hung across the streets.
He had arranged to meet McPhee and when he turned a corner he saw him ahead of him. Along with a group of small boys and half the neighbourhood he was watching the public crier crying the height of the river.
‘Fifteen digits today and still rising!’ the crier intoned sonorously.
A hand was pushed through the lattice-work of one of the harem windows above and some coins thrown down. The crier scooped them up swiftly before the small boys got to them and bowed to the window.
‘Blessed be the mistress of this house!’ he called.
‘Digits?’ asked Owen.
‘On the Nilometer,’ said McPhee.
It stood at the end of Roda Island, just opposite them.
‘It’s very important, you know,’ said McPhee. ‘In the old days it used to relate to tax. There was a law which said that you couldn’t levy land-tax until the river had reached a height of sixteen cubits. Very sensible, really, because people’s capacity to pay depended on the irrigation of their land. Of course, the Government used to fake it.’
The dam, a simple earth one, ran across the canal just at the point of its entrance into the river opposite Roda Island. Its top was now only some six feet above the level of the water but its builders had been in this business for a thousand years and knew what they were doing.
Some way in front of the dam, in the dry bed of the canal, a tall cone of earth had been constructed. Its top had been sown with millet.
‘Obvious fertility associations,’ said McPhee.
When the Cut was made, and the dam breached, the water would pour through and demolish the cone, to the great satisfaction of onlookers. In the past, tradition had it, a young virgin had been sacrificed simultaneously, no doubt to their even greater satisfaction.
‘Although there is possibly some confusion here,’ said McPhee. ‘You see, the cone is also called “The Bride” – the Nile, as it were, impregnates it – and popular imagination may have distorted that into a real woman.’
Popular imagination was still alive and kicking in Cairo and one of the distortions it had threatened was the absorption of Mahmoud’s dead young woman into the traditional story. That had been stopped, fortunately, by the release of the autopsy findings. There was little purchase for the popular imagination in a woman who had died in so apparently ordinary a way.
McPhee, however, was reluctant to let the connection go.
‘You don’t think,’ he said wistfully, ‘that the woman who was found –’
‘No,’ said Owen firmly, ‘I don’t.’
He made the mistake, however, of telling Zeinab about it when they met for lunch at her father’s house later that morning. It was a mistake firstly because female circumcision was exactly the kind of topic likely to intrigue Nuri Pasha.
‘It is a barbaric practice,’ he said, ‘and I am totally opposed to it. They say it improves the woman’s beauty, that unless you do it, the labia minora dangles unbecomingly, but I have never been able to see that myself. I have always felt that the more a woman is developed in that area, the better. And then the cutting pares away the most interesting parts. It diminishes the woman’s capacity for pleasure. I am totally against that,’ said Nuri, shaking his head. ‘It diminishes mine.’
He looked tenderly at the latest painting he had acquired: a Renoir nude. Nuri was fond of things French; especially women.
‘It’s a lower class practice, of course. But, do you know, my dear, I was talking to Shukri Pasha this week – he’s just taken another wife, she’s only fourteen, but a beauty, I gather – and he told me that when Khadiya came to him – she is his second wife – or is it his third? – anyway, when she came to him he was astonished to find that she had been circumcised. “My dear Shukri,” I said, “that’s what you get if you marry out of your class.” Anyway –’
He continued happily for some time.
‘Anyway, my dear,’ he said suddenly to Zeinab, ‘that’s why I didn’t have you circumcised.’
‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ said Zeinab. ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on anything.’
Zeinab was the second reason why it was a mistake to raise the subject. She wasn’t very interested in circumcision but she was interested in Labiba Latifa. Modern in spirit, although not quite in the way that Mahmoud was, Nuri had raised his daughter to be independent. That was a very difficult position for women to be in in Egypt at that time and Zeinab was eager to hear about others in the same position.
‘Do you think she would like some help?’ she asked suddenly.
‘No,’ said Owen.
It was Greek day in the Gardens. There was a festival of some sort and they were doing their national dances. The women were in traditional costumes, in which a fine lawn chemisette seemed to play a great part, and danced in a group, with much spirited skipping and rhythmic stamping of feet. The men were dressed more drably, in shiny black clothes and black wideawake hats. They took off their coats and waistcoats to dance, but were less stripped down than the Levantines, some of whom came in singlets, as for the gymnasium. Their women, too, appeared to be feeling the heat, for they had removed their dresses and were sitting in their petticoats, retaining, however, the white wreaths round their heads.
A pretty young woman danced across to Owen.
‘He’s in the shade,’ she said, ‘with the beer.’
She took Owen in among the bamboos to where a rug had been spread for a picnic. There was a hamper but no beer. Rosa, who knew her husband’s habits, led Owen further into the shade. Georgiades was standing beside a gadwal talking to the gardener. He was embracing an armful of bottles.
‘I was asking him if he could let some water into the gadwal,’ he explained.
‘And I was telling him I couldn’t,’ said the gardener. ‘This isn’t the right day.’
‘I was just wondering if you could make an exception,’ said Georgiades, fishing in his pocket.
The gardener looked at the coins.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t. Look, there’s a stream just over there. Why don’t you put the bottles in that?’
‘It’s too far.’
‘For God’s sake,’ said Rosa. ‘Why don’t you dance, like the other men?’
‘Yes,’ said Owen, eyeing the Greek’s bulk. ‘Why don’t you dance, like the other men?’
‘Besides,’ said Georgiades, ignoring all these remarks, ‘there are always thieves about in a place like this. I’ll bet you’ve had some trouble –’
‘Well,’ said the gardener, ‘as a matter of fact –’
Owen walked back with Rosa to the picnic place.
‘I suppose you wouldn’t like to dance?’
‘I’m not familiar with the Greek dances,’ Owen excused himself.
‘Perhaps there wouldn’t be much point,’ Rosa conceded.
She had always had a soft spot for Owen, especially since that business of the ransom. Indeed, if ever Zeinab should fall by the wayside, and if, by any unfortunate chance her husband, too, should be struck down, then – She brushed aside the possibility that Owen might have his own views. Rosa believed that whoever her mate was, she and he would be of one mind; hers.
She offered him some tsatsiki. While he was eating it, she squatted down beside him and asked about the regulator.
‘You know,’ she said, looking in her husband’s direction, ‘he’s not really the man for this. Water is not a liquid he’s had much to do with. And he knows nothing, absolutely nothing, about gardens. I’m the only flower he’s heard of.’
‘I know,’ said Owen, ‘but he’s a wonderful man at getting people to talk to him.’
Georgiades and the gardener were coming back through the bushes.
‘Yes, well, I could put them in the stream, I suppose,’ Georgiades was conceding, ‘but I’m not happy about it. Not with all these thieves about. Now if there was a ghaffir around –’
‘Him?’ said the gardener. ‘He’d be the first to take them!’
At the regulator all was calm. The water winked placidly in the sun. Some papyrus heads which had crept through the main barrage circled slowly up to the breach and then spun away again. The workmen were sitting up on the bank. Macrae and Ferguson stood on top of the regulator looking down into the breach and conferring.
‘We’ve stopped it up,’ said Macrae. ‘Now we’ve got to find a way of letting the water through again.’
‘But controlled,’ said Ferguson.
‘We’re thinking of using the undamaged gate. It’s the other one that’s the problem.’
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson.
They took Owen back to their little office and produced coffee. Then Macrae sat back.
‘We’ve talked to the men,’ he said.
Talked to the men?’
‘Aye. About the dynamite. We’ve told them it won’t do. Now I don’t mind the odd spot of pilfering. But dynamite is different.’
‘Yes, but –’
‘Y’see, that hole in the shed was clean cut. It was done with proper tools. Now we reckon that whoever did it must have brought his tools with him. And there’s a chance that the other men might have seen them. Of course, there’s also a chance that he brought them some other time and kept them hidden. But they keep close together and there’s a possibility that one of the others may have seen something. So we put it to them.’
‘Put it to them?’
‘Aye. We said now was the time to speak up. This wasn’t a private thing, this was a matter for everyone. Everyone suffered from a thing like this and if it happened again they would suffer more, their own villages, their own people.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘They didn’t say anything. But they will.’
‘They’ve got to talk it over first, you see,’ Ferguson explained.
‘And you think it will work?’
‘Aye,’ said Macrae.
4 (#ulink_283a8908-24f4-5d68-9dc5-a4e5e6f92e5f)
In the Gardens the dancing was continuing furiously. The women had formed into a long line, their hands on the hips of the one in front of them, and were snaking about all over the place. The men had dropped back into a stationary row and were clapping the rhythm. The women danced up to them teasingly and then withdrew. Owen could see Rosa about half way down the line, plainly enjoying herself.
The dancers’ families had turned out in support. He recognized Rosa’s parents and formidable grandmother surrounded by lots of little children, themselves dressed for dancing, who must be cousins. Rosa belonged to a large extended family and to marry her was to marry the whole Greek community. Georgiades, a communal backslider, had had little choice in the matter. The marriage had been arranged; by Rosa.
Georgiades himself was nowhere to be seen. Owen began to walk round the group to greet Rosa’s family but then spotted him, beyond the dancers, among the bougainvillea, sitting on the edge of a gadwal talking to the ghaffir.
‘Lizard men!’ he was saying in appalled tones as Owen came up. ‘I wouldn’t meddle with them if I were you!’
‘Don’t worry!’ said the ghaffir fervently. ‘I won’t!’
Owen stepped back behind a bush.
‘Mind you,’ said Georgiades, ‘it could already be too late.’
‘Too late!’
‘Yes. I mean, you saw him, didn’t you?’
‘No! All I saw was his trail. I mean, I knew at once that it was a lizard man, you can tell by the marks, it’s their tail. But that’s not the same thing. I didn’t actually see him, not him himself –’
‘Well, then, you were a lucky man!’
‘I know, I know!’
‘I mean, you could so easily have seen him. It must have taken him some time to make that hole –’
‘Ah, no, it wasn’t like that. I mean, they don’t work like that. Not lizard men.’
‘They don’t?’
‘No. They don’t do it themselves, they get men to do it for them. That’s why you don’t see them. And that’s the way it was here. The wood wasn’t gnawed, was it? It was cut. If a lizard man had done it himself, it would have been gnawed. You don’t see lizard men with tools, do you?’
‘Well, no –’
‘No. He got someone to do it for him. Someone who had the tools. Then he came along afterwards, wriggled through the hole, took what he wanted and then was on his way.’
‘Well. I still think you were lucky. Because you could so easily have seen him at that point, couldn’t you?’
‘Yes, but I try to take care. I mean, that’s always the risk in a job like mine. You’ve got to be careful you don’t see too much. If you just go blundering around, you can easily walk into something, and then, bang! The next minute you’re in trouble.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘I creep. Then if you come across something, if you see something, or, more likely, hear something, like that night –’
‘So you did see him?’
‘No, no. like I said, you don’t see them. They get someone to do it for them.’
‘Ah, so that was the one you saw?’
‘I didn’t see anyone. But –’ the ghaffir lowered his voice – ‘I knew he’d been there.’
‘Well, the hole, of course –’
‘No, no, not that.’
‘How, then?’
The ghaffir laid his finger along his nose.
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