The Fig Tree Murder (3 page)

He was, it transpired, the woman’s brother, not her husband.

‘She’s lived here alone ever since her husband died.’

Asif asked to speak with her in her brother’s presence. This was normal. It was considered improper to speak to a woman alone. Indeed, it was considered to be on the verge of raciness to speak to a woman at all. Questions to women, during a police investigation, for instance, were normally put through her nearest male relative.

The woman appeared, unveiled. This at once threw Asif into a tizzy. He had probably never seen a woman’s face before, not the face of a woman outside his family. This woman had a broad, not unattractive, sunburned face. Things were less strict in the village than they were in the city and when the women were working in the fields they often left their faces unveiled. Even in the village, Owen had noticed, they did not always bother to veil. Sheikh Isa, no doubt, had his views about that.

She was as defiant as her brother.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he used to come here. Why not? It suited him and it suited me.’

Asif could hardly bring himself to look her in the face. Although she obviously intended to answer his questions herself, he continued to direct them to her brother, as he would have done in the city.

‘Did he come on the night he was killed?’

‘Yes.’

‘And’—he wavered—‘stayed the night?’

‘He never stayed long.’ She laughed. ‘Just long enough!’

‘Jalila!’ muttered her brother reprovingly.

Asif was now all over the place.

‘How—how long?’ he managed to stutter.

‘How long do you think?’ she said, looking at him coolly.

Owen decided to lend a hand.

‘The man is dead,’ he said sternly.

The woman seemed to catch herself.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘He died after leaving you.’

‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

‘He left you early. Did he say where he was going?’

‘He said he was meeting someone.’

‘Ah! Did he say who?’

‘No. And,’ said the woman, bold again, ‘I did not ask. I knew it wasn’t a woman and that was all I needed to know.’

‘How did you know it wasn’t a woman?’

‘Because it wouldn’t have been any good,’ she said defiantly. ‘Not after what he’d done with me. I always took good care to see there wasn’t much left. For Leila.’

‘Leila?’

‘That so-called wife of his.’

‘Why so-called?’

She was silent.

Then she said vehemently: ‘He should have married me. Right at the start. Then all this wouldn’t have happened.’

The tabernacle was now empty. The pile of shoes had gone. The square was almost empty. The heat rose up off the sand as if making one last effort to keep the advancing shadows at bay. The smell of woodsmoke was suddenly in the air. The women were about to cook the evening meal.

Owen wondered how late the trains back to the city would continue to run. Asif, too, was evidently reckoning that the day’s work was done, for he said:

‘Tomorrow I shall question the wife’s family.’

They turned aside for a moment to refresh themselves at the village well before committing themselves to the long walk back across the hot fields to the station.

‘It could be a question of honour, you see,’ said Asif, still preoccupied with the case. ‘The wife has been dishonoured and so her family has been dishonoured.’

‘You think one of them could have taken revenge?’

Revenge was the bane of the policeman’s life in Egypt. Over half the killings, and there were a lot of killings in Egypt, were for purposes of revenge. It was most common among the Arabs of the desert, where revenge feuds were a part of every tribesman’s life. But it was far from uncommon among the fellahin of the settled villages too.

‘Well,’ said Asif, ‘he was killed by a blow on the back of the neck from a heavy, blunt, club-like instrument. A cudgel is the villager’s weapon. And, besides—’

He hesitated.

‘Yes?’

‘It looks as if it was someone who knew his ways. Knew where to find him, for instance. Knew he would not be staying. Knew him well enough, possibly, to arrange a meeting. That would seem to me to locate him in the village.’

Owen nodded.

‘And if that’s the case,’ he said, ‘you’re going to have to move quickly. Otherwise the other side will be taking the law into their own hands.’

The trouble with revenge killings was that they had two sides. One killing bred another.

‘Tomorrow,’ promised Asif.

A man came round the corner of the mosque and made towards them. He was, like Asif, an Egyptian and an effendi and wore the tarboosh of the government servant. Unlike him, however, and unusually for the time, he wore a light suit not a dark suit and was dressed overall with a certain sharpness. Everything about him was sharp.

He recognized Owen and gave him a smile.

‘Let me guess,’ he said; ‘the railway?’

He turned to Asif.

‘Asif,’ he said softly. ‘I am sorry.’

Asif looked at him in surprise.

‘They have asked me to take over. Why? I do not know. But it is certainly no reflection on you.’

Asif was taken aback.

‘But, Mahmoud, I have only just—’

‘I know. Perhaps they have something more important in mind for you.’

Asif swallowed.

‘I doubt it,’ he said bitterly.

He got up from the well.

‘I will put the papers on your desk,’ he said, and walked off.

Owen made a movement after him but Mahmoud put a hand on his arm.

‘Let him go,’ he said. ‘It’s better like that.’

‘He was doing all right,’ said Owen.

‘I think he’s promising,’ said Mahmoud. He sighed. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do things like this. It hurts people’s pride.’

Mahmoud El Zaki was a connoisseur in pride. That was true of most Egyptians, thought Owen, but it was especially true of him. Proud, sensitive, touchy—all of them qualities likely to be rubbed raw by the situation that Egyptians were in: subordination of their country to a foreign power, subordination in government, subordination in social structure.

And the wounds were aggravated by what at times seemed an excessive emotionality. For a people so prickly they were surprisingly tender. Excessively masculine in some respects, they were sometimes surprisingly feminine. They were never in the middle; unlike the solid, stolid, sensible English, thought Owen. He himself was Welsh.

He and Mahmoud knew each other well. They had often worked together and had, a little to their surprise, perhaps, developed a rapport which survived political and other differences.

They watched Asif set out along the track across the fields.

‘You’ll need to pick things up quickly,’ said Owen. ‘There’s a danger of a tit-for-tat killing.’

‘The man’s family?’

Owen nodded.

‘The brother especially. There’s another woman involved. They think he was killed because of that.’

‘Her husband?’

‘No. She’s a widow. The wife’s family. Asif was going to take a look at them tomorrow.’

‘I’ll do that myself. I’ll come out tomorrow morning. However, I’ve arranged to do something else first.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m going to talk to the railway people.’ He looked at Owen. ‘You wouldn’t care to accompany me, would you?’

Owen knew exactly why he was asking that. Any investigation involving foreigners was potential political dynamite. Most foreigners doing business in Egypt were protected by special provisions of the legal code, forced on the Egyptian government in the past by foreign powers. No European or American could even be charged unless it could be shown that he had committed an offence not against Egyptian law but against the law of his own country. Even when a charge was accepted, he had to be tried, in the case of a criminal offence, by his own Consular Court, and in civil cases by the Mixed Courts, where there would be both foreign and Egyptian judges.

And those were merely the formal protections. Informally, there were jugglings for reference, disputes about nationality and the use of cases as pretexts for the assertion of national interests. In such circumstances the cards were always stacked against the unfortunate policeman; and especially so if he happened to be Egyptian.

It made sense, then, for Mahmoud to ally himself with the Mamur Zapt. It protected him personally against political comeback and increased the chances of successful prosecution. At the very least it meant that the Belgian-owned Syndicate would not be able to fob him off without even listening to his questions.

Owen was quite willing to allow himself to be used. Like many of the British officials, like, indeed, the Consul-General himself, he had considerable sympathy with the Egyptians over this issue of legal privileges, the Capitulations as they were called.

But only up to a point. The Parquet, too, had its political agenda. The Ministry of Justice was the most Nationalist of all the Ministries and the Parquet lawyers were Nationalist to a man. Mahmoud himself was a member of the Nationalist Party. Might not the Parquet be seeking to use the case for own political ends?

‘Why have they put you on the case?’ he asked.

Mahmoud smiled.

‘Why have they put
you
on the case?’ he countered.

There is this Tree,’ said the site foreman doubtfully.

‘Tree?’ said the man-higher-up-in-the-Syndicate, Varages, another Belgian. ‘What Tree is this?’

‘I gather there’s been some problem,’ said the site foreman, looking at Owen.

‘Is it in the way or something?’ said Varages.

‘If it’s a case of compensation—’ said one of the lawyers.

The Belgians had brought two lawyers. They had also insisted that the foreman could only be interviewed in the presence of someone high up in the Syndicate. It was likely that Varages was another lawyer. With Mahmoud, that made four of them. This meeting wasn’t going to get anywhere, decided Owen.

‘The Tree, actually, is beside the point,’ he said.

‘I thought you told me I had to look out?’ said the foreman.

‘That was because of the attitude of a local sheikh—’

‘That awkward old bugger?’

‘If it’s a question of compensation—’ began the lawyer again.

‘Pay him and let’s get the Tree moved,’ said Varages impatiently.

‘It’s not—’

‘Can we get the ownership straight?’ cut in the other lawyer. ‘It belongs to this old sheikh—?’

‘No,’ said Owen. ‘It belongs to a Copt. His name is Daniel. But—’

‘Ah, the ownership is disputed? Well, that gives us our chance, then. It will have to be settled in the courts. A Copt, you say? And a sheikh? That will be the Native Tribunals, then—’

‘I wouldn’t recommend that,’ said the other lawyer. ‘Not in the circumstances. Much better to get it referred straight to the Mixed Courts—’

‘On the grounds that the Syndicate is a party? Well, yes, of course, that is a possibility—’

‘Listen,’ said Varages, ‘we don’t want to get this tied up forever in the courts. We’ve got to get on with it. How long is it all going to take?’

‘About four years.’

‘Four years! Jesus! Can’t you speed it up a bit?’

‘If the Syndicate cared to use its influence—’

‘What would it take then?’

The lawyers looked at each other.

‘Two years?’ one of them ventured.

‘Two years? Listen, two months would be too long! We’ll have to do something else. Or rather—yes, that’s it. Why don’t we just dig up the Tree and argue about it afterwards? It wouldn’t matter then how long you took—’

‘Dig up the Tree of the Virgin,’ said Owen, ‘and you’ll have the whole desert in flames!’

‘Did you say the Tree of the Virgin?’ asked one of the lawyers.

‘Yes, it’s—’

‘The Tree of the Virgin?’ said the other lawyer. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Does that make a difference?’ asked Varages.

‘It certainly does. Captain Owen is quite right. The desert would be in flames. However, that is not the real difficulty.’

‘Not the real difficulty?’ said Owen.

‘No. Not from a legal point of view. The fact is—correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said, looking at his colleague, ‘the fact is that, well, the Tree doesn’t belong to either the sheikh or the Copt—’

‘The Copt’s put a railing round it,’ said Owen.

‘Who does it belong to, then?’ asked Varages.

‘The Empress Eugenie.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Varages, ‘the
Empress Eugenie
? Of
France
?’

‘That’s right. The Khedive gave it to her. In 1869. When she came to open the Suez Canal.’

‘Gave it to her?’

‘Yes. As a present.’

There was a moment’s stunned silence.

‘It’s still there!’ said Owen. ‘I saw it yesterday!’

‘Yes. She didn’t want to take it with her.’

‘And it—it still belongs to her?’

‘In theory, yes.’

‘We could ask the courts to pronounce,’ said the other lawyer eagerly.

‘How long would that take?’ asked the site foreman.

‘Oh, about eight years.’

‘I don’t think we’d better move the Tree,’ said Varages.

‘I would strongly advise against it.’

‘The French wouldn’t like it.’

‘They wouldn’t, indeed. They might even, I go so far as to suggest, see fit to treat it as a
casus belli
.’

‘Moving the Tree? A cause of war?’

‘It cannot be ruled out. As Captain Owen will know better than anybody, the French have always resented their exclusion from Egypt by the British. They might see this as an opportunity to reassert their influence.’

‘I don’t care who runs Egypt,’ said Varages, ‘just so long as I can get on with my job. Which happens to be building a railway. What are we going to do about this Tree?’

‘The Tree, actually, is beside the point,’ said Owen desperately.

‘It certainly is,’ said Mahmoud.

At the last moment the Syndicate had made difficulties. It had no objection in principle to meeting a representative of the Parquet and answering any questions he might care to put, but it failed to see any reason, beyond the purely adventitious one of where the body was found, why it should be expected to answer questions bearing on the circumstances of the man’s death.

True, the man had been part of its workforce. But the death had occurred off the company’s premises and out of company time, while, in fact, the man had been at home and in his native village. The death was, surely, a private or domestic matter, on which the company could hardly be expected to be able to throw any light.

Nor was it reasonable for the Syndicate to be asked to make working time available for Mahmoud to question the workmen. If the death had resulted from an accident at work that would have been quite another matter. The Syndicate would have been glad to comply. But it had already lost a lot of valuable work time as a result of the accident of the body having been found where it had been and it was loath to lose any more.

Besides, if the death arose, as it appeared it did, out of private or domestic circumstances, what was the point of questioning the man’s working colleagues about it? What light could they be expected to throw on the incident?

In vain had Mahmoud put forward reasons. The Syndicate’s lawyers had merely raised further objections.

At last he had looked at Owen despairingly.

‘I think that the reason why the Parquet has asked for this meeting,’ said Owen, ‘is that it is in the Syndicate’s interests.’

‘How so?’ asked the lawyers.

‘Because while the circumstances of the man’s death remain undetermined, all sorts of stories are getting around. He is concerned that some of these could have an effect on your workforce.’

It was then that the foreman had mentioned the Tree and they had begun on their detour.

‘The Tree,’ said Owen, perspiring and making one last valiant attempt, ‘
is not in the way. You do not have to move it
. In itself it is nothing. It is the way it might be used that is important.’

‘To create mischief, you mean?’ said the foreman.

‘We certainly wouldn’t want that,’ said Varages, frowning. He glanced at the lawyers.

‘What do we have to lose by letting him ask questions?’

‘I think we should maintain our position,’ one of them said. ‘Strictly speaking, it is nothing to do with us. There is nothing that points to a connection between the man’s death and the railway.’

‘Oh, yes, there is,’ said Mahmoud. ‘We have found sand in the man’s clothes and superficial lesions consistent with the body having been dragged. We do not think he was killed at the place where he was found. He was killed somewhere else and dragged there. And the question is why? The answer, surely, is to make precisely the connection between the killing and the railway that you deny exists.’

‘The money is good,’ conceded the labourers.

‘But the work is hard.’

‘Heavy, is it?’ said Mahmoud sympathetically.

‘It’s more that they keep you going.’

‘They keep you going in the fields,’ said one of the men.

‘Yes. But it’s at a sensible pace. On this job they make you go faster than you’d like.’

‘That’s because they want to get it finished. The Khedive, they say, has fixed the day he wants to travel on it.’

‘Why can’t he wait a bit?’

‘He’s got some big do on, I expect.’

‘Well, if he wants to travel to the city, why can’t he go by coach and horses, the way he’s always done?’

‘He’s in a hurry, I suppose.’

‘All he needs to do is set out earlier. Then he’d get there at the same time.’

‘Ah, but that’s not it. Speed’s the thing today.’

‘Well, I don’t see why we need it.’

‘You’re a man of the past, Abdul. Egypt’s bursting into the future. Or so they say.’

‘Well, I wish they’d burst without me. There’s no point in working this hard. It’s worse than when they had the
curbash
!’

The
curbash
was the heavy whip the Pashas had used to force labour. One of the first acts of the British when they arrived had been to abolish it.

‘You wouldn’t want the
curbash
back, would you?’

‘I don’t reckon it’d make much difference.’

‘I reckon you’d feel the difference!’

‘
Curbash
, money, it’s all the same,’ remarked another of the labourers. ‘It’s all a whip held over the head of the poor.’

Mahmoud had been allowed to address them during their break. This was another bone of contention. It was usual in Egypt to work till early in the afternoon and then, if you were an office worker or a labourer, stop for the day. Shopkeepers would work again in the evening when it became cooler. The Syndicate, however, had insisted that the workforce on the railway work through till late afternoon, stopping for a brief break at noon when the sun was at its hottest.

The men were sitting in the shade now, eating their bread and onions.

‘Ibrahim found the work hard, so they say,’ said Owen.

The leader of the workmen looked at him.

‘Do they?’

‘Yes. In the village. They say he used to get home too tired to do anything.’

‘He used to do his share.’

‘It’s not entirely true, though. There was a woman he used to go to.’

‘Was there?’

‘He didn’t speak to you about it?’

‘No.’

‘I expect he saved a bit for that,’ said one of the workmen. ‘You’d do that, wouldn’t you, Abdul?’

‘I bet he’d work fast enough then,’ said another of the men. ‘There’d be no need for someone to be standing over him with the
curbash
when it comes to that kind of work!’

There was a general laugh.

‘Why wouldn’t you let them move the body?’ Mahmoud asked the leader.

‘He was murdered, wasn’t he? You could see it. His neck was broken.’

‘You wanted the Parquet to take a look at it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s what they’re supposed to do, aren’t they?’ retorted the man.

Which was certainly true. Only it was a little surprising that the man should be so punctilious. Few Egyptians would have been. The Parquet was—in Egyptian terms—relatively new, having been created only some thirty years before when the government, anxious to introduce a modern legal system, had simply translated the French Penal Code and adopted it and French legal procedure lock, stock and barrel. Many Egyptians still harked back to the system which had preceded it and which had prevailed for centuries, a system of village watchmen,
ghaffirs
, and in which the local mudir, or governor, was judge, jury and, frequently, executioner. The Mamur Zapt had been part of that system, which accounts for the fact that the Matariya villagers had heard of him but not of the Parquet.

Yet here was someone, ordinary labourer and probably a villager, invoking the absolute letter of the—for many Egyptians—still newish law!

It was a small thing, perhaps, but it set Owen’s mind wondering. He knew little about employment law (and was damned sure that very few Egyptians did) and not much about labour disputes. Maybe it was different in the more modern industries.

Maybe the workers’ leaders there did know something about the modern legal system. Maybe that was why the workmen, very sensibly, chose them.

Perhaps he was making too much of it. He looked at the workmen’s leader. He was a youngish man in his thirties, with a thin, sharp face and a wiry body. He was certainly intelligent.

The doubt began to niggle at Owen’s mind again. Too intelligent? He did not know what the workmen in Egypt’s newer industries—the railways were, of course, one of Egypt’s newer industries—were like but suspected that they might well be sharper than the average. But that would surely be true only of the more skilled trades, the engine drivers and signalmen and repairmen. It wouldn’t necessarily be true of the labourers working on the track.

He was probably making too much of this. Only the Belgians had spoken of agitators, and he had dismissed it as the kind of thing foreign contractors would say. And so far he had seen absolutely no sign of this man being an agitator in their sense. He had directed attention to a body, that was all, and insisted that the due process of the law should be observed. Nothing wrong with that; it was just that in Egypt, a country of many murders and much casualness about death, it was a bit unusual.

He reproached himself. A man did exactly as he was supposed to do and it struck him as odd! What were things coming to!

The niggle, however, remained. What it came down to was, why had the man done it? Normal zeal for the public good? Compassion for the dead man, anger at the killing of a friend? Or could it be, could it just be, that someone saw in the death an opportunity to exploit the situation for their own ends, that the Khedive’s charges of political manipulation on the part of the Nationalists were not entirely without foundation?

The men finished their break and went back to their work. Mahmoud, lunchless, set out for the village. He was probably the only man in the Parquet, and, possibly, Cairo, who reckoned to work through the heat of the day.

Owen took a buggy back to the Pont de Limoun and then an arabeah up to the Ismailiya Quarter, where, among the ‘butterfly shops’, he hoped to find Zeinab.

The ‘butterfly shops’ were open only in the season and were kept by dressmakers, milliners and purveyors of general unnecessaries who had come over from Paris specifically for the occasion. Fashionable Egypt was oriented heavily towards Paris, and the goods were the latest in the Paris shops. They were also the most expensive in the Paris shops and Owen frequently wondered what Zeinab was doing in them. She received an allowance from her father, a wealthy—or so she claimed—Pasha. He denied it, but then these things, thought Owen, were relative. A dress from one of the ‘butterfly shops’, which cost more than Owen’s pay for the whole year, probably seemed like nothing to him. He could deny his daughter, his illegitimate child by his favourite courtesan, nothing. Not that it would have done much good if he had, she would simply have gone ahead all the same, bought it and charged it to his account.