The Last Cut (3 page)

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 burn 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?’

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 were 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 corner 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 skillfully 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.’