- -
- 100%
- +
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001
Copyright © Michael Pearce 2001
Michael Pearce asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780008259334
Ebook Edition © APRIL 2017 ISBN: 9780007401338
Version: 2017-08-30
Praise for Michael Pearce
‘Pearce writes with a delicious wit and a firm sense of background’
The Times
‘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
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Praise
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Keep Reading
About the Author
Also by Michael Pearce
About the Publisher
1
Over towards the Nile the light shimmered and seemed to fall apart, and then it came together again and presented a beautifully clear picture of the river, with palms shifting gently in the river breeze, a pigeon tower, and children playing around a water buffalo in the shallows; so clear that you could make out every detail.
Only it was not a true picture, at least, not of this part of the river. The Nile bent away at this point and where the mirage was, was just scrub and desert.
The desert was playing tricks here, too, inland a quarter of a mile. Heat spirals danced away across the sand and dust devils chased among the graves, where galabeahed men stood silently, watching him.
‘You’re not a pet man, though, are you?’ said McPhee.
‘No.’
‘I’m dogs, myself.’
Only it was cats here; dozens and dozens, hundreds and hundreds of them. They lay in open circular pits, uncovered by the archaeologists and then abandoned. Each pit was about eight feet in diameter and five or six feet deep. The cats lay on ledges around the sides, except that when space had run out they had been piled carefully on top of each other in the middle. Each cat had been tenderly mummified, the body treated first and then swathed in yards and yards of linen bandages. The pits stretched out towards the horizon.
‘They weren’t really pets, though, were they?’ said Owen.
‘Someone must have loved them, to lavish such attention on them.’
‘But didn’t you say –?’
‘There are lots of inscriptions to the cat goddess round here, it is true,’ McPhee conceded.
‘So perhaps they were just running wild in the temples?’
‘I don’t know about running wild,’ said McPhee severely. ‘Fed, and not ill treated, perhaps.’
‘But hardly pets.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘Objects of devotion?’
‘Sacred, certainly.’
But in the grave at Owen’s feet there was something which was clearly not an object of devotion. It lay across the middle of the pit and cat mummies had been clumsily pulled off the shelves and spread over it in an attempt to hide it. It was rather longer than a cat mummy but bandaged tightly like them.
Except at the head, where the district mamur, alerted by the village omda, had uncovered enough of the modern bandages to reveal that the body was that of a twentieth-century, fair-headed woman.
‘Identification?’ said Owen.
‘They all know her. The omda –’ began the mamur.
‘Someone closer.’
‘There is a husband,’ said the mamur, almost unwillingly.
‘Husband?’
Owen looked at his papers. They made no reference to a husband.
‘Where is he?’
‘Up at the factory.’
‘Has he seen her?’
‘He knows,’ said the mamur evasively.
Owen bent over the body. Already, in the heat, it was changing.
‘You’d better get it moved,’ he said.
The mamur nodded, and beckoned to two of the villagers.
‘Mustapha! Abu!’
They came forward reluctantly.
‘Wait a minute!’ said Owen. ‘Aren’t you going to … ?’
He stopped.
‘Yes?’ said the mamur.
Owen shrugged. It wasn’t really any of his concern and out in the provinces things were done differently; when they were done at all.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘Is there a hakim?’ asked McPhee.
In the provinces any autopsy was usually conducted by the local doctor.
‘He has been sent for,’ said the mamur.
The two villagers were hesitating on the brink of the pit.
‘Get on with it!’ said the mamur. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘We don’t like it,’ said one of the men.
‘It’s nothing. Haven’t you seen a body before?’
‘We’re not bothered about the body,’ said the other villager. ‘It’s these.’
He gestured towards the mummies.
‘They’re bodies, too.’
The men still hesitated.
‘Look, they’re only bodies. The bodies of animals, what’s more.’
‘We still don’t like it.’
‘They’re not even recent bodies,’ said the mamur persuasively.
‘All the same …’
‘Are you going to do it or aren’t you?’
The answer, unfortunately, was probably not.
‘Look,’ said the mamur, ‘if I move the cats, will you move the woman?’
The men looked at each other.
‘If you move the ones on top –’
‘And put them back in their right places –’
The mamur jumped down into the pit and began putting the mummies aside.
‘Satisfied?’
The two looked at the other villagers.
‘We call upon the world to witness that it wasn’t we who interfered with the grave.’
‘We witness, Mustapha!’
‘Right then.’
The two got down into the pit, picked up the body of the woman, tucked it nonchalantly under their right arms and set out across the desert towards the sugar cane.
‘Are you coming up to the house?’ asked the mamur.
‘We ought to check the identification, I suppose,’ said Owen.
It was probably being over-punctilious. When he had arrived in Minya the day before and presented the mudir, the local governor, with the list of names, the mudir, knowing most of them, had gone through them mechanically, ticking almost every one. It was only at the last one that he had stopped.
‘There’s been a development,’ he said.
He had gone to the door of his office and called in the mamur, sitting uneasily outside, and had shown him the list.
‘That one,’ he had said, pointing. ‘Wasn’t that the one … ?’
‘Yes,’ said the mamur. ‘She’s been found,’ he said to Owen.
‘Found?’
‘Found dead. This morning.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Owen.
‘Would you like to see her? You could come with me. I’ve got to go back.’
‘Perhaps I’d better,’ decided Owen.
The mudir put a cross against her name.
‘Is she worth the journey?’ he said.
The path to the house led up through long plantations of sugar cane. The cane was twelve feet tall and planted so densely that the long ribbon foliage of one plant intertwined with the leaves of the next, making an impenetrable jungle. You could not see as much as a yard from the path; only the sky overhead, and the path itself, winding, not straight, and stubble underfoot.
Yet it was not the sudden loss of light, the hemmed-in feeling, that became troubling after a while, but the heat. The cane caught the sunshine and trapped it, so that, hot though it was outside the plantation, out on the open desert by the graves – well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit – it was hotter still inside. In no time at all Owen’s shirt was sodden with perspiration.
McPhee took off his helmet, mopped his forehead, and swung the hat at the flies.
‘Of course,’ he said meditatively, ‘there’s the Speos Artemidos at Beni Hasan.’
‘What?’ said Owen.
Used as he was to the heat of Egypt, this walk through the sugar cane was leaving him quite dazed.
‘The Cave of Artemis.’
‘Really?’
‘Artemis is the Greek version, of course,’ said McPhee.
The sweat running down Owen’s forehead was beginning to sting his eyes. Maybe McPhee was right. He took off his sun helmet too.
‘Greek version?’ he said.
‘Of Pakhet.’
Packet? What the hell was McPhee on about?
‘The cat goddess,’ explained McPhee. ‘The one those mummies were probably dedicated to.’
‘Oh.’ And then, after a moment: ‘You think there could be a connection?’
‘Well, Beni Hasan’s not far from here, is it? There could even have been other temples nearer, of course. The whole area is noted for the special recognition it gives to Pakhet.’
It was the kind of curious information in which McPhee excelled.
‘Fascinating!’ said Owen heartily.
‘It is, isn’t it?’ agreed McPhee with enthusiasm.
And totally irrelevant. It had probably been a mistake to bring McPhee. The Deputy Commandant’s eccentricities were more easily containable in Cairo; but Owen had been desperately short of the right people for this sort of job.
It had probably been a mistake coming out here anyway. Why hadn’t he just accepted the mamur’s word in Minya and left it at that?
The path began to lead upwards now. The incline was slight but in this heat quite enough to make him break out in another shower of sweat. The mamur, too, stopped to mop his face.
Suddenly, from somewhere ahead of them and to the right, two shots rang out.
Owen looked at the mamur.
‘Abdul,’ said the mamur indifferently.
‘Abdul?’
‘The ghaffir.’
‘What would he be shooting at?’ said McPhee.
The mamur shrugged.
‘Brigands.’
‘Brigands!’
‘We have them here. They live in the cane.’
‘Can’t you root them out?’
The mamur shrugged again.
‘It’s not so easy,’ he said.
Again, it wasn’t Owen’s concern. Nor McPhee’s either. The Cairo Police Force was quite separate from that of the rest of the country. He could see that, all the same, McPhee was wondering.
‘Are there many of them?’ he asked.
‘About forty. They come and go. At the moment they’re led by a Sudanese.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Rob. Protection.’
‘The sugar factory?’
‘The factory’s got its own ghaffir. That was him shooting just then. No, mostly it’s the villages. Crops, cattle, that sort of thing. If you want them left alone, you pay the Sudanese.’
‘Don’t the villages have ghaffirs too?’
The mamur laughed. Owen could guess why. The village watchman, the ghaffir, was normally just an ordinary villager, paid a piastre or two a month for his extra duties and armed, if he was armed at all, with an ancient gun dating back to the wars against the Mahdi. You could hardly expect him to take on forty brigands single-handed.
But the local mamur, the District Inspector of Police, surely he would have men he could rely on?
The mamur saw what he was thinking.
‘It’s not so easy,’ he said again, defensively. ‘We’ve tried beating the cane, but they just move to another part. It goes on for miles.’
‘I can see the problem,’ said McPhee, with ready sympathy. He fell in beside the mamur and they continued up the path together, discussing the different difficulties of country and city policing.
Owen was left with something nagging him, however. For the moment he couldn’t identify what it was. It continued to worry away at the back of his mind as they walked up to the house.
In fact, there were several houses; neat, European-style bungalows with verandahs, gardens and high surrounding walls over which loofah trailed gracefully. Away to the right was the sugar factory, a long barn-like building with steam coming out at various points. In front of the building men were unloading cane from trucks and feeding it on to a continuous belt that led into the factory.
A European came up to them and shook hands.
‘Schneider. I’m Swiss,’ he said, as if making a point.
He glanced at the mamur.
‘They’ve just brought the body up,’ he said.
‘Has Mohammed Kufti arrived yet?’ asked the mamur.
‘One of my trucks brought him over,’ said Schneider. ‘He’s in the house now.’
‘We’d better go over,’ said the mamur.
‘Drop in for some coffee when you’ve done,’ Schneider said to Owen. ‘My wife will be glad to see you. She doesn’t get much chance to talk to Europeans.’
The mamur led them over towards the houses. The one they wanted was not part of the main cluster but set a little way back and native Egyptian in style: white, mud brick, single-storey, with an inner courtyard and a high surrounding wall. Inside, it was dark and although the room they were led into was empty, somehow there was the suggestion of many people off stage.
There was a piano in the room, a surprisingly good one, which looked used and well cared for. Little bowls of water, still half-full, were set beneath its feet. It had not escaped the usual ravages of the termites, however. In several places beneath the piano there were small piles of wood dust.
An Egyptian, dressed in a dark suit, came into the room and shook hands.
‘Kufti,’ he said. ‘I’m the doctor.’
‘Found anything yet?’ asked the mamur.
‘I haven’t really started. Some things are obvious, though. She was poisoned. That was almost certainly the cause of death. There are one or two tests I have to do, but that is consistent with the symptoms and there are no apparent injuries.’
‘What was the poison?’ asked Owen.
‘Arsenic.’
The usual. Especially in the provinces, where poisoning your neighbour’s buffalo was an old established custom.
‘Can you cover her up?’ asked the mamur. ‘We want the husband to identify her.’
‘He’s seen her already,’ said the doctor. ‘Does he have to see her again?’
‘For the purposes of formal identification,’ insisted the mamur.
The doctor made a gesture of distaste and left the room.
The mamur went out and then came back and led them along a corridor and into a small room where, in the darkness, a man was sitting hunched up on an angrib.
‘Come, Aziz,’ said the mamur, with surprising gentleness. ‘It is necessary.’
Aziz? For some reason Owen had not taken in that the husband was Egyptian.
They went into another room, where the woman was lying on a bed, covered up with a sheet. The doctor turned the sheet down. The husband broke into sobs and nodded.
‘That’s all,’ said the mamur reassuringly.
‘Come with me, Aziz, and I will give you something,’ said the doctor.
‘How can it be?’ said the husband brokenly. ‘How can it be?’
‘I’m Austrian,’ said Mrs Schneider, smiling prettily; quite.
‘And your husband’s Swiss.’
‘That’s right.’ They both laughed.
She led him out on to the verandah, where coffee things had been laid out on a table. A moment or two later Schneider joined them, with McPhee. They had dropped behind so that Schneider could take him into a room and show him something he’d found near the cat cemetery.
A servant brought a coffee pot and began helping them to coffee. The aroma mixed with the breeze that had come up from the river and spread about the house. They could see the river, just, over the sugar cane. The breeze had come across the cane and by the time it reached them was warm and sweet.
‘Of course, I didn’t know her well,’ said Mrs Schneider. ‘She kept herself to herself. Or was kept. I used to hear the piano playing, though.’
‘All the time,’ said Schneider. ‘Music, I like. But not all the time.’
‘I didn’t mind it,’ said Mrs Schneider. ‘She played beautifully. Anyway, she didn’t play all the time.’
‘It seemed like it.’
‘She’s played a lot lately.’
‘What sort of music did she play?’ asked McPhee.
‘German music.’
‘Lieder?’
Schneider looked at his wife.
‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Brahms, I think, often.’
‘I suppose there will have to be an investigation?’ said Schneider. ‘Or won’t you bother?’
‘There will certainly be an investigation,’ said Owen. ‘But that will be conducted by the mamur. Neither Mr McPhee nor I do that sort of thing.’
‘Not down here, at any rate,’ said McPhee.
Schneider looked at Owen curiously.
‘I thought you did do that sort of thing,’ he said.
‘Only if there’s a political side to it,’ said Owen.
The role of Mamur Zapt was roughly equivalent to that of the Head of the Political Branch of the CID. Only in Egypt, of course, there wasn’t a CID. The nearest equivalent to that was the Parquet, the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice. The Parquet, though, was Egyptian and the British Administration, which in effect ran Egypt at that time, kept it at arm’s length from anything political.
‘You wouldn’t call this political?’ said Schneider.
‘Not at the moment, no.’
‘I thought that was the reason why you were here … ?’
‘That’s quite different. The two are completely separate. From the point of view of the law, murder is a civil crime and will be treated as such; that is, investigated by the civil authorities.’
Mrs Schneider flinched.
‘I suppose it must be murder,’ she said. ‘Only, hearing it said like that –’
‘Of course it’s murder,’ said her husband impatiently. ‘What else could it be?’
‘I just thought that, well, you know, when I first heard about it, and heard that it was poison, well, I thought –’
‘What the hell did you think?’ said Schneider.
‘That it might be suicide.’
‘How could it be suicide? She was bandaged, wasn’t she? And in the pit. Did you think she walked there?’
‘Well …’
‘Suicide!’
From somewhere out beyond the immediate houses, in the direction of the house they had just left, came the sound of a mourning ululation starting up.
Mrs Schneider flinched again.
‘It doesn’t seem right,’ she said. ‘Not for her.’
‘It’s the family,’ said Schneider. ‘You wouldn’t have thought they’d have cared enough to bother.’
Owen knew now what it was that had been nagging at him.
‘I heard some shots,’ he said to Schneider, as they were walking back out to the truck.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘The mamur said it was your ghaffir.’
‘Very probably,’ said Schneider.
‘What would he be shooting at? The mamur said brigands.’
‘We do have them. Not as often as he claims, however. I think sometimes he just blazes off into the cane.’
‘That’s a service rifle he’s got.’
‘Yes.’
‘I was surprised. Ghaffirs don’t usually have that sort of gun.’
‘They’ve all been issued with them round here.’
‘Not just your ghaffir?’
‘No, all of them. We had to get one especially so that our ghaffir wouldn’t feel out of it.’
‘Whose bright idea was this?’ demanded Owen.
‘The Ministry’s. We had an inspector down a few months ago.’
‘Well, I think it’s crazy. Putting guns like this in the hands of untrained people like –’
‘Oh, they’re trained, all right. Musketry courses, drill, mock exercises, the lot.’
‘Ghaffirs?’ said Owen incredulously.
It didn’t square at all with the picture he had of the usual Egyptian village watchman, who was normally much more like Shakespeare’s Dogberry.
‘Yes. It’s the new policy of the Ministry, apparently.’
‘Well, I still think it’s bloody crazy.’
Schneider shrugged.
‘Maybe you’re just out of date,’ he suggested.
Maybe he was, thought Owen, as he drove back to Minya in one of the company trucks, lent for the occasion.
But now it nagged at him even more.
Trucks were still new in Egypt and it was the first time he had ridden in one. He wasn’t sure that he liked it. The sensation of speed was disturbing and it was very bumpy. Once they had left the cane behind them they were driving across open desert. There was no real road and they were thrown about heavily. He and McPhee both put their sun helmets on to protect their heads when they hit the roof. What with the unfamiliar motion, the constant jolting and the fumes from the engine, he began to feel more than a little queasy. He saw that McPhee’s face was looking increasingly strained, too.
Still, it certainly got you there quickly. He glanced at his watch. At this rate they would soon get to Minya and with any luck would be able to catch the afternoon boat.
‘Have you got them all now?’ asked the mamur.
‘I think so.’
‘Except for her, of course.’
‘Ought we to have something in writing?’ asked McPhee.
‘To say she’s dead?’
‘If we don’t, she’ll stay on a list somewhere and that could cause endless trouble.’
Owen looked at the mamur.
‘Will you be sending in a report?’
‘Report?’ said the mamur, as if it was the last thing that would occur to him.
‘She’s a foreigner. You have to file a report.’
The mamur looked very unhappy.
‘Certainly, certainly,’ he muttered.
Owen guessed there was no certainty at all.
‘When you do, I’d like to be sent a copy.’
‘Of course!’ said the mamur, even more unhappily.
The party was already assembled on the landing stage. Some had bags, some had cases. A little group of spectators watched curiously.
‘That it?’ asked Owen, as he went down on to the landing stage.
A police sergeant came forward and saluted smartly.