The Girl in the Nile (10 page)

“Why all these questions?” asked someone.

“Because she’s dead,” said Zeinab.

“Dead?”

They were shocked.

“When was this? Are you sure? I saw her only recently,” said Gamal.

“It was Tuesday,” said Zeinab. “Tuesday when she was killed.”

“We don’t know that for cert—began Owen, but his voice was drowned in the barrage of questions, cries of concern and comment.

“But that is awful!”

“Leila! I cannot believe it!”

“I didn’t know her well, but—somehow one had got used to her.”

“None of us knew her well, I suppose.”

“Didn’t any of you ever talk to her?” demanded Zeinab.

“Of course we did. We all spoke to her.”

“That’s not the same thing. Did you ever talk to her in the way she wanted? Needed?”

“Suleiman did.”

“I’m not sure I did,” said Suleiman thoughtfully, “now.”

Zeinab was very quiet afterwards as she and Owen drove home in an arabeah. Cairo was at its most magical. The streets were still and cool and silver in the moonlight. The shadows of the minarets made gentle curves in the dust and when Owen looked up, there they were, graceful against the deep blue of the Egyptian night. He bent over and kissed her.

Zeinab kissed him back mechanically. She was thinking about Leila.

“She was very alone, wasn’t she?”

“If you leave home you are alone.”

“If you’re a woman,” said Zeinab.

“She must have wanted to leave home terribly badly. Maybe I ought to take a look at her family.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t so much that she wanted to leave home. Perhaps it was more that she just wanted to be somewhere else. Be someone else.”

Later, she looked up at him. The moonlight was on her face and he could see her clearly.

“You are going to do something about it, aren’t you?” she said.

The next morning, though, he found a message on his desk from Paul, asking if they could meet for a drink at lunchtime at the Club.

They took their drinks out on to the verandah where they would not be disturbed.

“I’m not following you,” said Owen, bewildered. “I thought you
wanted
me to stay close to it?”

“Not
so
close. Keep a gentle eye on it from afar.”

“Well, fine. I can do that,” said Owen, shrugging his shoulders. “It’s Mahmoud’s pigeon really. I’m just there to see, well, that it doesn’t build up into anything major.”

“That’s right.” Paul nodded approvingly. “We wouldn’t want that, so continue keeping an eye on it. But from afar. No need to involve yourself directly. Ease off a bit. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of other things to do.”

“I have, yes. There’s a lot on just at the moment. But— I’m still a bit puzzled. I thought this was important?”

“Well, hardly. Certainly not in itself. An accident, a murder— they come with the ice cream in Cairo. It was just that this could have had political implications.”

“And you don’t think that’s likely now?”

“I think there are more important political considerations.”

“Well, fine, you would know. Mahmoud will be getting on with it anyway. He doesn’t need me.”

For all Paul’s highly developed, possibly overdeveloped, political sense, he was normally straight with Owen. After all, he explained, politics wasn’t everything—what about drink, for instance?—and if you couldn’t be trusted to call properly when you were playing tennis, who would want to play with you?

Now he was toying uncomfortably with his glass.

“I have a feeling,” he said at last, “that Mahmoud may be receiving the same sort of advice.”

“To back off? What’s going on?” Light dawned. “You can’t—you don’t mean to say you’re giving in to Narouz?”

“Certainly not! Narouz is just a sideshow, a distraction. The fact is, though, that we could do without a distraction just now.”

“It’s this Special Agreement, is it?”

“How do you know about that? It’s supposed to be top, pinnacle-top, secret. Only the Consul-General and the Khedive are supposed to know.”

“
You
know.”

“I am the right side of the Consul-General’s brain. How do
you
know?”

“I have access to the left side of the Khedive’s brain.”

“You keep your spies in peculiar places, Gareth.”

“I do. But they didn’t tell me about this. Nor that you were giving in to Narouz.”

“We’re
not
giving in to Narouz. It’s just that we don’t want anything to ruffle the Khedive’s hair just when the negotiations are approaching a delicate stage.”

“Narouz is a sideshow. You said it yourself.”

“The Khedive will have to carry his family with him. Potential heirs, at least. The Treaty is to do with a possible extension of the British presence here in return for continuing political support. And cash, of course.”

“And Narouz is one of the heirs?”

“Potential. Only potential.”

“So you don’t want us to press this case?”

“Are you in a position to press a case?”

“No, not yet.”

“Why don’t you just leave it like that? Let it roll along, latent, so to speak. It’ll mean we’ve got a hold over him. We might use it sometime.”

“I don’t know if Mahmoud will play.”

“I don’t think Mahmoud will have any option. Not if he’s formally taken off the case.”

“I don’t know that I want to play, either.”

“Now, Gareth, no moral heroics,
please
!”

“It’s not moral heroics, it’s Zeinab. She’s rather got the bit between her teeth on this.”

“Zeinab? How the hell does she come to be involved? She’s not a friend of the girl, is she?”

“No. Has friends who are. It’s not that. It’s—well, an abstract principle of justice, I suppose.”

“Oh, come, Gareth! Zeinab’s not interested in an abstract anything! A more concrete, realistic girl I’ve never met. Emotional, perhaps, but—”

“She’s pretty emotionally involved here.”

“How the hell did she get to be emotionally involved? How the hell did she get to be involved anyway? Gareth! You’ve been talking to her! Is that it?”

“A bit.”

“You daft idiot! Couldn’t you see that she would get emotionally involved?”

“We’ve talked about things before.”

“About girls trying to strike out alone in Egypt? I’ll bet you haven’t.”

“It has not arisen,” said Owen stiffly.

“Can you imagine Zeinab talking about a thing like that and
not
getting emotionally involved? Zeinab would get emotionally involved if she was talking about breakfast.”

“We’ve got to talk about something, haven’t we?”

“Your work? That the sort of thing you talk about in bed, Gareth? You worry me. You sound more and more like—I’ve got to say it—yes, a
husband
, Gareth.”

“I don’t think things have got quite as far as that yet.”

“They seem to me to be drifting that way. And if they are, then I think you want to think about it, Gareth. Because I can see problems. Zeinab’s a lovely girl, but—”

“For Christ’s sake, Paul!”

“I know, I know. All the same—”

“Let’s get off the relationships. You were giving me instructions.”

“
Advice
, I was giving you.
Advice
.”

“Advice. Back off the investigation. Leave it all alone. Let Narouz get away with it.”

“That was
not
my advice. Timing was what I was talking about. And the balance between political and personal priorities.”

“I get the message.”

“I hope you do. Especially the bit about balance.”

“I do. But will Zeinab?”

No,” said Zeinab.

“Look, let’s not be too hasty—”

“I do not understand. First you are on this case, then you are off. One moment you give all your time to it, you don’t come home till late at night, you don’t even come home in the afternoon like ordinary men, the next you are giving no time to it at all. Is it the same man, I ask myself?”

“Of course it’s the same man. It’s just that—”

“Don’t you care at all what you do? Or is it that your feelings suddenly alter? They switch and change all the time, phu! like this. You are,” said Zeinab, “emotionally erratic.”

“It’s nothing to do with emotion—”

“Oh?” said Zeinab, bridling. “You don’t care about Leila? You don’t care about a poor girl, alone and brutally murdered? You have no feeling? Is that it?”

“No, that’s not it. Of course I care. But—”

“She is only a woman, is that it?” said Zeinab, firing up. “An Egyptian woman, yes? What is a mere Egyptian woman to the mighty British? They brush her aside, yes, like a fly.”

“Calm down, calm down! I am very concerned—”

“Concern! Pah! Is that all? I am concerned too. I am concerned that you have a heart of stone. I am concerned that with you one minute it is this, the next it is that. I am concerned that the man who is here today is not the same as the man who was here yesterday. I—”

“OK, OK.” This was going to be as difficult as he had imagined. “It’s not me that changes,” he said mildly. “It’s just that—well, circumstances change.”

“And you change with them, yes? Just like that. Something happens and immediately you change.”

“No. It’s not like that.”

“It’s not? Well, it seems to me just like that. We talk, we agree, I go away and start doing something, and then suddenly it’s all different. It all changes. You blow hot, you blow cold. You go to bed saying one thing, you wake up saying another.”

“It’s not like that.”

“Oh, isn’t it? I am glad. Because I thought perhaps it was the same with me. Now you love me, now you don’t.”

“You know I love you.”

“But that,” said Zeinab, “is precisely what I don’t know. Now that we have all this change. You loved me yesterday, or so I believed. Yes, I believed you. But tomorrow? Will you love me then?”

The large dark eyes stared at him tragically. Owen, who had suspected that Zeinab was enjoying the drama, melted totally.

“Of course I will!”

“You say it,” said Zeinab somberly, “as if you meant it. But then, you spoke about Leila in that way too.”

“That’s different.”

“Oh? Why is it different?”

“That—well, that’s work.”

“I do not make that distinction,” said Zeinab.

“At work you’ve got to go along with things more. You’re subject to pressures.”

“I see.”

She sat there silently for a few moments. Owen hoped that she was calming down.

“That’s it, is it?” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“Pressure.”

“Arguments, rather.”

“And you have been persuaded by these arguments?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I haven’t,” said Zeinab.

“You haven’t heard them,” Owen pointed out.

“You won’t tell me them. You can’t,” said Zeinab, “tell me them. And do you know why? Because they are British arguments. They are not my arguments, they are not even your arguments. They are British arguments.”

She suddenly dissolved into floods of tears.

“I hate you!” she said. “I hate you!”

“Oh, look—”

“No. Don’t touch me. It is not the man I love who touches me, it is the British.”

“You mustn’t see it like that!”

“I see it like that because it is like that.”

“It is not like that.”

“No? Tell me then: are you going to do what they say?”

“Well—”

“You see,” said Zeinab.

Mahmoud had a case that morning in the Mixed Tribunals and Owen wanted to send a letter to England so they agreed to meet at noon at the Post Office.

Mahmoud wasn’t there when he arrived, so he went inside to buy his stamps and then came out to use the wet roller hanging against the wall. The heat tended to dry up the gum on stamps and getting them to stick on was the very devil.

Facing the front of the Post Office was a long row of seal-makers and scribes squatting in the dust with their customers. The ordinary Egyptian could not write and if he wished to send a letter he would have to get a scribe to write it for him. And since he could not sign it he would use a seal.

Owen wondered suddenly whether Leila had been able to write. Almost certainly not, for few women could. How, then, did Narouz communicate with her? If by note, then she would have had to get a scribe to read it to her. But perhaps Narouz sent a messenger.

In either case the man would know the message: and in either case they ought to be able to find him. But he was forgetting.

Mahmoud came out of the Mixed Tribunals and crossed the street towards him. He was carrying a huge bundle of papers and didn’t want to walk far, so they went into the Arab café beside the Post Office.

Mahmoud dumped the papers on a chair and sat down with relief. He had, he told Owen, been on his feet all morning.

“Did you get anywhere?”

“No,” said Mahmoud. “The usual.”

The Egyptian system of courts was one of the most complicated in the world. Foreigners in Egypt received considerable legal privileges. In some cases they could be tried only by their own national courts and cases had to be remitted to Smyrna or Ankara or wherever it was. In other cases, where an Egyptian national was involved as well as a foreigner, the case had to be sent to the Mixed Courts, where the law was different from that in the ordinary Egyptian courts. The possibilities for evasion were endless.

Owen commiserated.

Mahmoud shrugged his shoulders.

“You get used to it,” he said.

He was, understandably, not very cheerful this morning.

“Yes,” he said, “they told me yesterday.”

“What did they tell you? To drop it?”

“No, no. They wouldn’t do that. If a case is closed, you’ve got to say why. Sometimes,” said Mahmoud, “bureaucracy has its uses.”

“What did they tell you, then?”

“Basically, to leave it alone for a while. A long, long while. To concentrate on something else. That’s why,” said Mahmoud, tapping the bundle of papers, “they’ve given me this. I had to get it all up last night. I’ve got another one for tomorrow. And the day after. I don’t think,” he said, “they trust me to do nothing.”

He laughed, but it was an injured, bitter laugh. If you were a Parquet lawyer you got used to cases getting nowhere; but that didn’t mean you liked it.

“It’s Narouz, isn’t it?” he said. “He’s fixed it.”

Owen nodded.

“Well,” said Mahmoud, “it was always on the cards. He’s a member of the Royal Family. They wouldn’t want to go too close to the Khedive. What I can’t understand, though, is why the British should want to get involved.”

“They don’t want to get involved. All they want to do is make sure it doesn’t blow up into anything.”

“For the sake of the Khedive?”

“Certainly not for the sake of Narouz.”

Mahmoud, fortunately, did not probe.

“I wouldn’t have thought they’d have bothered,” he said.

It was the custom in Egypt, on the Friday after a body had been interred, for the women of the family to visit the tomb, where they would break a palm branch over the grave and distribute cakes and bread to the poor.

When Ali Marwash’s daughter died the custom was followed to the letter since the girl was Ali Marwash’s only child and he cared for her more than he probably would have had done had there been sons in the family.

The mourners went to the tomb and a fiki, a professional holy reader, especially hired for the occasion, chanted the appropriate verses from the Koran. The palm branch was broken and placed on the grave and the cakes and bread distributed.

The party was about to depart when the mother of the dead girl noticed that the earth over the entrance to the tomb had been disturbed, and when she looked more closely she saw that one of the roofing stones had been moved.

Grave-robbing in Egypt was a traditional pursuit and she immediately feared the worst. Ali Marwash was not a rich man, but he had loved his daughter and had wrapped her in a Kashmir shawl before interring her.

It was normal to tear the shawl first so that its value would not tempt a profane person to violate the tomb; but the shawl had been a beautiful one and he had not been able to bring himself to do that. His wife now feared that they had been punished for his presumption.

Her screams attracted a large crowd and the fiki, taking control, sent someone to fetch her husband. A sheikh was summoned and with his authority and before a vast concourse of onlookers the tomb was reopened.

The mother’s fears were realized, for the tomb had indeed been violated. Her daughter’s body had been removed altogether. And in its place, stacked high in the subterranean vault, was a large pile of guns and ammunition.

The police were called at once and the District Chief of Police, whose recent experiences had reinforced a strong natural tendency towards caution, sent immediately for the Mamur Zapt.

By the time Owen arrived the crowd was sixty deep and he had to get his constables to clear a way through.

The tomb consisted of an oblong brick vault with an arched roof high enough to allow a person buried in it to sit up with care when visited by the two examining angels, Munkar and Nekeer. On top of this was a solid brick monument with an upright stone. The entrance was through a small separate cell to the northeast, and it was this which had been tampered with.

Owen stepped down into the cell, bent and looked through the doorway into the burial vault. At first he could not see anything, but then someone pushed a lighted torch in front of him and he caught the gleam of the bluish-gray metal inside.

It was a large cache of arms. He pulled one out. It was a rifle in pristine condition, still greasy from the packing case and with the heavy, cold distinctive smell he knew so well.

The man holding the torch was, he saw now, one of the local constables he had used on the arms search.

“Is this it, effendi?” said the man excitedly.

Owen slipped his hand in again and felt around on the floor. His hand closed around an object. He pulled it out and looked at it. It was a clip of ammunition, exactly similar to those left behind in the kuttub in the fountain house.

“Oh, good,” said Garvin, “I was afraid you’d forgotten about things like that, with your recent preoccupations.”

He was, nevertheless, in a genial mood this morning. A bearer slipped in behind Owen and stood up a gun in the corner behind Garvin’s desk. That accounted for it. It was a sporting gun.

“Bag anything this morning?”

“Two hare and a hoopoe.”

“Hoopoe?”

“It happened to be there so I potted it.”

It was possible to get good, though restricted, shooting within an hour’s ride from Cairo and sometimes Garvin went out in the early morning before coming to the office. For duck you needed really to go north, to the big lakes around Alexandria and, of course, for big game you had to go south. But hare and even the odd gazelle were available locally.

Like many of the British, Garvin brought his past with him. He was the son of a “squarson,” a country parson who had the standing and habits of a squire. Garvin had been brought up to hunting and shooting, skills which in the opinion of the Consul-General exactly equipped a young man for a career in the Ministry of the Interior.

Those and one other: facility at learning Arabic. Cromer had expected all his staff to speak Arabic fluently and Garvin, after twenty years in Egypt, spoke the language like a native. He also knew the country like a native.

“Oh, good,” said Owen.

“Foolish of them,” said Garvin. “They must have known the women would be back.”

“I don’t think they meant to leave them there,” said Owen. “They had to move them in a hurry when my people started going through the district and it was just intended as a temporary hiding place. My guess is that they meant to come back, only with so much police activity they didn’t like to risk it.”

“So all that faffing around actually achieved something?”

“The operation was successful, yes. The trouble is,” said Owen, “that it was only partly successful. We got the arms but not the men.”

“Well, at least it means that if we’re shot, it’ll be by another lot of guns. That’s something.”

“There’ll be other shipments. We’ve got to get the men. So I’m keeping some people down in Al-Gadira.”

“They’ll be miles away by now,” said Garvin.

“I don’t know that they will. My hunch is that they’re local. Why did they move the arms in the first place? Because they saw the search coming their way. That suggests they were in the area. What did they do? They moved them out of the way but not out of the district, just to somewhere handy where they could easily pick them up. That suggests they were local, too.”

Garvin nodded his head in acknowledgment.

“Who have you got down there?”

“Georgiades.”

“He’s all right,” said Garvin.

“Yes. There’s another thing, too. While he’s down there he can keep his eyes open generally. There seems to be a lot happening in Al-Gadira just now.”

He told Garvin about Leila.

“That girl?” said Garvin. “I thought you were dropping that?”

“I’m distancing myself. But I couldn’t help noticing that was Al-Gadira too.”

“Coincidence,” said Garvin dismissively.

“Maybe. But she lived there and she died there.”

“Her body was washed up there. That’s not the same thing.”

“It’s what happened to her body.”

“Halfway to Alexandria by now, I would say.”

“Well,” said Owen, “it might not be.”

“Does it matter?” asked Garvin.

“Yes,” said Owen. He found it difficult to pick the right words. Everything that came to mind seemed inappropriate. He wanted to say “untidy” but that was ridiculously inappropriate. Then he wanted to say that you couldn’t have bodies floating around but “floating,” in the circumstances, was hardly the word.