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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.

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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

Contents

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.

‘That’s it, Effendi,’ he said.

A woman suddenly broke away from the group, rushed up to Owen and held out her hands.

‘Take me!’ she said frantically, waving her hands in front of him. ‘Take me!’

‘You’re not German, are you?’

‘I’m married to one. That’s him, there. You can’t take him and not take me. He’s my husband!’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Owen. ‘We’re only taking Germans.’

‘But I’m married to one! That’s the same, isn’t it? We’ve been married for forty years! You can’t take him and not take me!’

‘I’m sorry.’

He hated this. He hated the whole thing. It was not what he had come into policing for. But then, when he had first become Mamur Zapt, Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police, there hadn’t been a war on.

2

War had come to Egypt like a bolt from the blue. Looking back, Owen could see that there had been plenty of signs that it was coming, but at the time he, like everyone else in Egypt, had not taken them seriously. He had put them down to the infantile war games that the Great Powers were forever engaging in, manoeuvres which were merely ritual. And then, suddenly, barely more than a month ago, the manoeuvres had turned out to be not merely ritual.

What had made it even more of a surprise was that no one in Egypt had been paying much attention. The declaration had come during the hottest part of the year, when everything in Egypt had closed down. Most members of the Government were on holiday on the Riviera. Those British officials whose turn had come round had left for England. Egyptian officials had headed for the coast. Kitchener himself, the Englishman in whose hands most of the strings of power in Egypt lay, had departed for Europe; for which relief Owen, who had not got on with the Consul-General, had been giving much thanks.

The great Government offices were largely empty, their occupants having migrated, like the rest of the population of Cairo, to the cafés, where the Mamur Zapt, confident that in the extreme heat even the most desperate of criminals would not be thinking of crime, tended to join them.

And so when the news hit Egypt it did not at first really register. After the initial shock, Egypt had shrugged its shoulders and got on with doing what it normally did in August. That is, nothing.

But then the first orders began to arrive from London and among them was the instruction to arrest, detain and place in internment all German nationals and other suspicious foreigners. In the cafés, unkind Egyptians asked if that included Englishmen.

Owen had hardly got into his office when he heard the phone ringing; and he had hardly got it into his hand before the person on the other end was speaking, or, rather, bellowing.

‘Owen, is that you? Look, this is damned silly! They’ve taken Becker.’

‘Becker?’

‘Sluices. He’s the one who knows about sluices. Do you know about sluices? No, I’m not surprised. Not many do. They’re tricky things. And once you’ve got someone who knows about them, you don’t muck him about! What is more, you hang on to him. Because if he goes, you won’t find another.

‘Now this chap’s really good. He’s been working for us for fifteen years. It’s got so now that I can’t do without him. With him gone, the whole bloody system will close down. Sluices, dams, then the lot.

‘How would they like that, then? You tell me. The whole country depends on water, the water depends on the dams, the dams depend on the sluices and the sluices depend on – yes, you’re right: this man Becker!’

‘I take it he’s German.’

‘Of course he’s German! Or something. What the hell’s that got to do with it? He does his job, like everyone else. Only much better, that’s the point.’

‘Yes, I know, but there’s a war on, and there’s this policy of intern –’

‘Sod the war! The whole system will collapse, I tell you. Look, Owen, you’ve got to do something, make an exception …

‘You can’t? It’s nothing to do with you? Then who the hell is it to do with? Don’t tell me. I know. It’s London, is it? I might have guessed. Well, look, you can bloody tell London –

‘Yes, I know, but they’ll listen to you more than they will to me. I’m just a stupid engineer, just someone who makes everything work. You’ve got the gift of the gab, their gab –

‘They won’t? All right, talk to someone here, then. How about Kitchener? He’s not entirely without sense, have a go at him –

‘He’s not here? He’s in London, too? I might have bloody known it! Look, there must be someone you can talk to about this man of mine –

‘All right, all right, I know there’s a policy of internment, and it’s got to be general, I can see that. But surely it can be applied sensibly? Surely people can be reasonable, surely you –

‘Why should you be an exception, Owen?!’

He decided, nevertheless, that he ought to do something. Calls like this were coming in all the time. He took his helmet and went across to the Consulate to have a word with his friend, Paul. Paul had been one of Kitchener’s ADCs and was now the Oriental Secretary.

He found him in Kitchener’s office; sitting indeed, in Kitchener’s chair.

‘At last!’ said Paul, with a dramatic sweep of his hand. ‘They held me back, but now I’ve made it!’

‘You’re not really in charge?’

‘Cunningham is nominally.’ Cunningham was the Financial Adviser. ‘But, as always, the reality of power is different.’

He wriggled in his seat.

‘Just trying it out for size,’ he said. ‘I find it a little small for me.’

‘All right, if you’re really in charge, there’s something you can do. It’s this damned internment policy.’

‘Laid down by Whitehall,’ murmured Paul. ‘Can’t touch it.’

‘What I want is power of discretion. That wouldn’t solve everything, but it might help.’

‘Discretion is normally understood,’ said Paul. ‘You’ve got to leave some latitude to the man on the spot. However …’

He thought about it.

‘However, I’d be a bit careful about it, if I were you. Have you read the newspapers lately? The English ones? They’re full of spy scares. There’s all sorts of panic at home and some of it is spilling over here.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘And then there’s another thing: they’re making changes. They’re bringing some new people out here. One of them is something to do with security.’

‘That’s my job.’

‘Sure. I expect he’ll be working to you. But, Gareth, he’ll have contacts back at home and he, too –’ he waved his hand again – ‘might be wanting to try other people’s seats. I daresay he’ll be no problem, but you see what I mean when I say that you ought to be a bit careful just at the moment.’

‘Don’t use too much discretion – is that what you’re saying?’

‘That, and also that you ought to get some kind of formal approval, in writing, of your powers.’

‘You can give me that, can’t you?’

‘Yes. But I think it would be better if it came from Cunningham.’

‘OK, I’ll try and have a word with him.’

The bar at the Sporting Club was much less crowded than it usually was at lunch-time. This was because so many people were on holiday. Owen had been hoping to find Cunningham, but he wasn’t there. However, he did find someone he knew from the Ministry of the Interior, a man named McKitterick.

‘Guns?’ McKitterick said, leaning his arm easily on the bar. ‘Well, yes, and not before time. Look what the ghaffirs had to make do with up till now.’

‘Yes, but these are service rifles. You don’t want to put them in the hands of untrained men.’

‘They won’t be untrained. We’ve got a big training programme going.’

‘Yes, I’ve heard about that. But it’s the wrong sort of training. It’s military training.’

‘Isn’t that what they need?’

‘Ghaffirs? Village watchmen? Mostly they shoot crows.’

‘But sometimes they have to shoot brigands, and when they do, they’ve got to have a weapon decent enough to put up a show with.’

‘Very rarely, only in some parts of Egypt, do you have to fight brigands. And when you do, you don’t want ghaffirs doing it. You want police or soldiers. It’s a confusion of functions, from an administrative point of view. A ghaffir’s function is much more limited.’

‘Yes, we know about confusion of functions, thank you,’ said the other man, nettled. ‘And we know about ghaffirs, too. Look, we’ve gone into this very thoroughly, more thoroughly, I suspect, than you have, and the conclusion we’ve come to is that there is a need to do something about the ghaffirs. Both in terms of training and in terms of weaponry. One of our inspectors looked into this in great detail and came up with a really first-class report.’

‘Which suggested turning ghaffirs into a sort of internal army?’

‘If that’s the way you want to put it, yes.’

‘Answerable to whom?’

‘The Ministry, of course.’

‘The ghaffir used to be answerable to his own village.’

‘And still will be. But there’s a need for wider coordination. Look, you’ve just come back from Minya, haven’t you? What chance has a single ghaffir there got against a pack of brigands?’

‘You use the police. Or the Army.’

‘I think, Owen, that the Army’s got other things on its mind just at the moment. And the whole point of this is to take some of the load off the police. I really don’t see what it is that you’ve got against reforming an antiquated, inefficient, and frankly useless service.’

‘It’s just that I don’t like the idea of a well-armed, militarily trained force of fifty thousand men operating independently in the country at a time when it’s at war.’

McKitterick stared at him incredulously.

‘God, Owen, what’s got into you? “Operating independently”? It’s not operating independently, it’s operating under us. Do you think the Ministry’s going to launch some kind of coup? You must be crazy! Aren’t you taking a perfectly sensible reform a little over-seriously? Perhaps you’ve been working too hard. Why don’t you just stay out of the sun for a day or two?’

When he got back to his office he found that Nikos had pushed to one side the lists he had been working on and put in a conspicuously central position on his desk the memorandum from Finance that he had been trying for several weeks to ignore.

We first wrote to you some seven weeks ago requesting an explanation of how your apparent disbursements under Headings J, P, Q and Y of your Departmental Expenditure Statement are to be reconciled with the figures you give in Section 5 (c) ii and 8 (g) iv, not to mention Financial Regulations (see Sections 4 (d) i, 6 (b) v and 7). Despite requested requests …

Didn’t these blokes know there was a war on? Hadn’t they realized that people might have something better to do than answer their potty memoranda? And how could anyone be expected to answer a memorandum that might have been written in Pharaonic hieroglyphics for all the sense he could make of it?

He pushed the memorandum indignantly aside.

‘There’s been a man phoning from the Ministry of Finance,’ said Nikos, watching from the doorway. ‘He says he’ll try again.’

On reflection, Owen thought he wouldn’t speak to Cunningham about discretionary powers. Not just at the moment.

He had recently moved into a new apartment in the Midan Kasr-en-Nil. Zeinab had moved in with him, which was a considerable act for a woman in Egypt at that time. It was a considerable step forward in their relationship, too, and Zeinab had doubts about it. Every time he came home he half expected to find her not there.

She wasn’t there now. However, her things were still scattered about the flat so he decided that it wasn’t permanent. He poured himself a whisky soda, took a shower and then went out on to the balcony, from where he could see right across the Midan to the Nile on the other side. He was watching the amazing sunset when Zeinab arrived.

She took off her veil and kissed him. Then she helped herself to a drink and came out on to the balcony.

‘Something terrible’s happened,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘They’ve taken Alphonse.’

‘Alphonse?’ He knew the names of most of Zeinab’s friends but couldn’t remember an Alphonse. He didn’t sound like an Egyptian. Perhaps he was a new artist friend?

‘I’d made my appointment as usual, but when I arrived he wasn’t there. Gerard said they had come and taken him that morning. I blame you.’

‘Me?’ said Owen, astonished.

‘You’re arresting them, aren’t you?’

‘Is he German?’

‘No, he’s a perfectly normal Levantine. However, he became a German because someone was chasing him for a debt. Or was it a woman who wanted to marry him? Breach of promise – yes, I think it was breach of promise. But he’s not really a German at all and I don’t think you should have arrested him.’

‘He’s down on a list, I expect.’

‘Can’t you take him off it?’

‘Well …’

‘Nikos could do it. Nikos is good with lists.’

‘Look, it’s not any old list, it’s a list for a purpose, and its purpose is the identification of German nationals so that they can be interned.’

‘But he’s not a German, as I keep telling you. He just became a German, and he certainly wouldn’t have done that if he’d known you were going to arrest him. I told him at the time that it wasn’t a good idea. He ought to have become a Panamanian or something, and then no one would really know what he was.’

‘Panamanian wouldn’t do. Panama doesn’t have consular privileges.’

Under international treaties imposed on Egypt many foreigners had so-called consular rights. Among them was the right to be tried not by an Egyptian court but by a court set up by the consul concerned, usually in another country and at a time far distant; which made possession of foreign nationality in some cases highly attractive.

‘If you can get him out,’ said Zeinab persuasively, ‘I’ll see he becomes something else.’

Nationality was a loose concept in Egypt. It could be acquired simply by recourse to a local consul, plus, of course, the payment of an appropriate sum; and brothel-keepers and the owners of gambling dens tended to change nationality with astonishing frequency.

Egyptians were cavalier about nationality partly because there was so much of it about. Egypt was one of the most cosmopolitan countries in the world. One eighth of the population of Cairo was foreign born and the proportion was even higher in Alexandria. Greeks, Italians, French, Albanians, Montenegrins and Levantines of all sorts jostled shoulders in the narrow Cairo streets. The Khedive himself was Turkish. And then there were the British, of course.

The British kept themselves very much to themselves. They worked alongside the Egyptians, but outside the office they seldom met. A few people – Owen, himself, for instance – had Egyptian friends, and the people at the Consulate, Paul especially, mixed socially with upper-rank Egyptians. But to a very considerable extent the two nationalities kept apart.

If this was true of the men, and true, too, of the women for that matter, it was especially true of relationships between men and women.

An Englishman could be in the country for years and not meet an Egyptian woman. He would rarely meet an Italian, Greek or Levantine woman either, since all round the Mediterranean men kept a peculiarly jealous eye on their womenfolk; but in the case of Egyptian women it was even worse. They were perhaps no longer confined to the harem as in the past (only the rich could afford harems these days), but instead were relegated to some dark back room, from which they only emerged heavily veiled and dressed in a long, dark, shapeless gown that revealed nothing of the woman underneath.

They were never seen in public. If they went out, say, to do the shopping, they would be accompanied by a servant who would zealously defend them against any exchange with a man. If, rarely, they went to some public place such as a theatre, they would sit on separate, screened benches. If their husband received guests at home they would stay out of sight.

Young men of any kind, not just British, had a hard time of it and possibly would not have survived had it not been for the obliging ladies in the streets off the Ezbekiya Gardens.

In the case of the British, extra help came annually in the form of ‘the fishing fleet’, as it was known, the arrival of dozens of young women from England for the start of the Cairo season. One effect of this, though, was to reinforce the existing social division between the British and the Egyptians, which was almost complete; and Owen never ceased to give thanks that very early in his time in Egypt he had had the good fortune to meet Zeinab.

It had come about through a case involving her father, Nuri. Nuri was a Pasha and, like most of the old Egyptian ruling class, French-speaking and heavily Francophile in culture. Partly in reflection of this, and partly, it must be admitted, from his own idiosyncrasy, he had allowed his daughter a degree of latitude quite unusual in Egyptian circles. He saw no objection to his daughter meeting Owen; and, once met, things had developed from there.

Zeinab had established her independence to such an extent that quite early on she had acquired a flat of her own, where she lived, she assured her father, very much à la française. Nuri, impressed, had acquiesced; not, perhaps, quite comprehending that even in Paris at this time for young women to live on their own was not entirely comme il faut. In this unusual setting it had been possible for the relationship between Zeinab and Owen to develop; and over time it had developed very strongly.

Lately, however, they had begun to notice just how much time. They were both now over thirty and were becoming aware that many of their friends, even those as young as themselves, were getting married. They wondered whether they should do so too.

Here, though, they came up against that division between Egyptian and British, a division that was not just social but brought with it all the extra baggage that went with nationality: race, religion, customs, expectations and assumptions. And this was especially true when one of the nations concerned was an occupied country and the other the country that was occupying it.

It was not actually forbidden for a member of the Administration to marry an Egyptian, but there was a kind of invisible wash of discouragement. It manifested itself in all kinds of ways: questions about whether it would be possible for a person holding a post like Owen’s to be seen to be impartial if he were married to an Egyptian (no one else in Egypt thought the British were impartial, anyway); sudden shyings away in the Club; the frown of the Great (which was one of the things Owen had against Kitchener).

On Zeinab’s side, too, there were all kinds of cuttings-off: political separation from her artist friends, many of whom would see her as having gone over to the enemy; social repudiation by many of the circles in which Nuri moved and which she had grown up in; and, perhaps above all, an alienation from Egypt itself and a mass of Egyptians actually unknown to her but from whom she was reluctant to distance herself.

And yet, in the end, it was the walls inside themselves, not the obstacles outside, that were the problem. Or so they were coming, tentatively, to think. But those, argued Owen, were things they could do something about. They could try to work themselves through them. And somehow, by what chain of reasoning they were not entirely clear, this had led to their decision to move into a new apartment together.

Zeinab, Owen knew, remained far from convinced about it; but then she had a lot more to lose. Owen himself, aware of the extent to which she felt herself vulnerable and exposed, was beginning to think they ought not to leave things like that for too long. Whatever their doubts about themselves, they ought to resolve things one way or the other.

And, besides, he was coming to think, might not this be their chance? Surely, with Kitchener out of the way and everyone’s minds on the war, a private exercise of discretion – well, yes, you could call it that – might go unremarked; or if not quite unremarked, at least without having the same degree of significance attached to it as in more normal times.

Still unhappy about the issue of service rifles to ghaffirs, he rang up the Ministry and asked if he could see a copy of the inspector’s report.

‘By all means,’ said the Egyptian civil servant he spoke to. ‘It’s rather a good one, actually.’

And when it came round, Owen could see why people were impressed. It was immensely thorough. The inspector had visited lots of districts – Owen recognized the references to Minya – and gone into great detail. Certainly, from what he said about Minya, he appeared to have a good grasp of the nature of the ghaffir’s work and the sorts of local problems that he faced. The analysis was respectable, the arguments well set out, and the conclusions appeared to follow from the arguments. The only thing was that they were daft.

He rang up the Ministry again and got the same obliging Egyptian as before.

‘About the Report,’ he said. ‘Do you think I could have a word with your inspector?’

‘Fricker Effendi? Certainly.’

He hesitated, however.

‘Is there some problem? My interest is of a departmental nature. I have already spoken to McKitterick Effendi about it.’

‘No, no … It’s just that, well, Fricker Effendi is no longer available.’

‘No?’

‘No.’ The official hesitated again. ‘As a matter of fact, I understand that you are holding him.’

‘I am holding him?’

‘Yes. He has been taken into internment.’

3

A little to Owen’s surprise, for he had not expected it so soon – indeed, he had not really expected it at all – he found next day on his desk the copy he had asked for of the mamur’s report on the German woman’s death. When he looked at it, however, he was less surprised. It was perfunctory in the extreme, merely reporting the death of a foreign national, female, and the discovery of her body in one of the graves of a local excavation.

The report had been sent, as was customary, to the Parquet, which was responsible, in Egypt, for investigating all deaths in suspicious circumstances, and a Parquet official had scrawled ‘Noted’ on the copy and initialled it before sending it on to Owen.

Owen wrote back asking to be kept informed of further action in the case.

He was out of the office for the next two days – taking more wretched people into internment – and when he returned he found a further communication from the Parquet. All it consisted of, however, was his own letter returned to him with, at the bottom of the page, in the same negligent handwriting as that on the mamur’s report, the words ‘Referred to the Department of Antiquities’.

Owen picked up the phone.

‘Why the Department of Antiquities?’ he demanded.

There was a little pause.

‘Wasn’t it something to do with an archaeological site?’ said the voice on the other end indifferently.

‘It was to do with a body. Found on one.’

‘The Department of Antiquities handles anything to do with desecration of sites –’

‘And the Parquet handles anything to do with bodies.’

‘Not old ones, not archaeological ones.’

‘This is a new one. Not archaeological.’

‘Are you sure? It was found –’

‘If you look at the report you will see that the mamur refers to the body of a German national. Were there German nationals in Egypt in Pharaoh’s time?’

There was another pause.

‘Perhaps it had better be looked into,’ said the man unwillingly.

‘Perhaps it had. And the Consulate notified.’

‘The German Consulate has been closed,’ said the man triumphantly.

‘But another Consulate will have taken on the job of looking after the interests of German nationals remaining in the country.’

There was an audible sigh.

‘Please continue to keep me informed,’ said Owen.

In the shops at least there were signs that there was a war on. The prices of all imported goods rose sharply. The rise in the price of petrol didn’t affect many people since there were still very few cars in Egypt and only the rich had them. But the rise in the price of paraffin was a different matter. The poor used paraffin for both heating and cooking (wood had been scarce in Egypt for years) and were hard hit.

The rise in the prices of imported goods Owen could understand, but those weren’t the only prices that rose. The cost of flour and sugar went up too and they were things that were produced locally. He had only just seen sugar cane growing in huge quantities down by Minya. He couldn’t understand it and nor could the ordinary Egyptian. The newspapers were full of complaints and charges of profiteering.

They were talking about this one evening in the Officers’ Mess at the Abbassiya Barracks. The regiment was leaving for Europe the following day and Owen had been invited for a farewell drink.

‘It’ll mean problems for you,’ said his friend, John, one of the Sirdar’s ADCs and someone who had been a useful contact at Army Headquarters.

‘Why him?’ asked one of the other officers.

‘Because the man in the street will become restive, and he’s the one who will have to keep order when we’ve gone.’

‘Thank you for pointing that out,’ said Owen. ‘However, in one way things should become easier: there’ll be fewer drunken soldiers around.’

‘Ah, yes,’ said someone, laughing, ‘but the Australians will be here instead. Or so the rumour goes. You might do better to come with us.’

There was a general laugh.

‘Where do you stand, actually, Gareth?’ asked John curiously. ‘You’re on secondment, aren’t you?’

Owen had served with the British Army in India before coming to Egypt.

‘It started as secondment,’ said Owen, ‘but then I applied for a transfer. And after that it became permanent.’

‘So, strictly speaking, you’re a civilian now?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Yes, but with your experience –’ said John.

‘You were up on the North West Frontier, weren’t you?’ asked one of the other officers.

‘For a while, yes.’

‘Just the sort of man we need.’

The thought had occurred to Owen, too.

The Parquet official had obviously taken heed of Owen’s observation – perhaps it was the mention of the Consulate that had done it – for in the mail the next morning was a copy of the letter he had sent to the mamur at Minya. It asked him to supply further details of the ‘incident’ in the cat cemetery. In particular, it asked for details of any damage to the site – a thrust at Owen, this? – but also the cause of death.

McPhee’s mind, too, seemed to have been on the cat cemetery that morning – possibly because he and Owen were on their way to intern some other unfortunates – for, as they were passing the House of the Kadi, just after noon, he glanced at his watch and said:

‘Shall we go in? And have a look at the cats?’

‘Cats?’ said Owen.

‘Yes. They bring the offal just about now.’

They went through an ancient ornamental gateway into a beautiful old enclosed courtyard. Sure enough, a servant was just emerging from the Chief Justice’s house carrying a large bowl. He threw the contents on the ground and at once dozens of cats emerged from all corners of the courtyard and began to tuck in.

‘It used to be a garden,’ said McPhee. ‘The Sultan Baybars set it aside specifically for the use of cats. Over the centuries the garden was built on, but the custom of feeding the cats has survived. Only now, it’s the Kadi that does it.’

‘The Kadi feeds the cats?’

‘That’s right. I think the Prophet was fond of cats, or perhaps he said he was, once.’

They turned back and through the gateway.

‘I know this is Muslim,’ said McPhee, ‘but am I fanciful, do you think, to see a continuity from that cemetery in Minya? That was Pharaonic, of course, but often later practice has its roots in some earlier custom, and it would not be surprising. What do you think?’

Owen had absolutely no opinion on this at all and they continued on their way up the Darb el Asfar.

They had almost reached the Bab-el-Foutouh when McPhee said:

‘You know, Owen, about that business at Minya: there are a lot of things that trouble me. That poor woman, of course, and how she landed up there. Horrible! Just think of how her husband must feel! And then those brigands. You really would have thought that the local police would have eliminated them by now. And then those shots! Surely, arming the local ghaffirs is not a sensible way of dealing with such problems. I really do feel you should speak to someone.’

‘I have.’

He told McPhee about his conversation with McKitterick.

McPhee listened intently.

‘Have I understood you correctly, Owen? The ghaffirs are being issued with new service rifles, brought together and trained to operate as some kind of independent force?’

‘An independent army, I called it.’

‘But under whose command?’

‘The Ministry’s, apparently.’

‘Owen, I find this rather disquieting. Does the Sirdar know? What does he, as Commander-in-Chief of the Army in Egypt, think of another army operating independently in the country?’

‘Well, it’s not quite like –’

‘And under foreign command, too?’

‘Well, hardly foreign. It’s the Ministry –’

‘But, Owen, you know as well as I do what the political situation is like here. Sadly, not everyone is on our side. There are some here – politicians –’ McPhee spoke the word with disdain, ‘who question the relevance of the war from an Egyptian point of view. Is the Minister among them?’

‘Well, I really don’t know –’

‘But, Owen, it is important to know. Where does he stand? Could he be playing his own game?’

‘Look, he’s got McKitterick right by his side –’

Every Minister had an English ‘adviser’ alongside him. It was one of the ways in which the British made sure that the Government was going in the right direction.

‘But, Owen, he could be pulling the wool over McKitterick’s eyes!’

‘McKitterick’s not daft.’

Although, come to think of it, this new policy with respect to the ghaffirs was not very bright.

McPhee tut-tutted impatiently.

‘Owen, where did the idea come from? The Minister?’

‘Well, I think it came from one of the inspectors, actually. He went into it and wrote a report –’

‘An Egyptian? Close to the Minister?’

‘A German, actually.’

‘A German!’

‘Yes. McKitterick thinks very highly of him.’

‘German! But, Owen, we are at war! Are you seriously telling me that we are allowing an independent army, fifty thousand strong, to roam the countryside under the command of a German?!’

Despite Owen’s attempts to straighten him out, over the next few days McPhee kept returning to the matter.

‘Yes, I know, Owen. I realize that, strictly speaking, he was not in charge. But, surely, it is very likely that, having written the report, and it having been received in such glowing terms, he would be given responsibility for implementing it. And if he was responsible for implementing it, then –

‘Yes, I realize that even if he was given responsibility for implementing it, he wouldn’t be able to do anything now because he is in an internment camp. But there may be others in the Ministry – the Minister himself –

‘No, I am not bonkers! Look, the report was accepted, wasn’t it? And implemented. That means there must be support for it inside the Ministry. I really do feel –’

Then one morning he stuck his head triumphantly in at the door.

‘Owen, I have been looking at the Departmental Handbook, and do you know how many Germans there are in senior posts in the Ministry of the Interior?’

‘No.’

‘Six!’

McPhee came right into the room.

‘Doesn’t that say something about the Minister’s sympathies? Six! How do you explain that?’

It was, in fact, a little on the high side for a single Ministry. There were plenty of foreigners scattered around the Ministries, but not usually such a concentration of one nationality.

‘Owen, I really do feel –’

McKitterick came into the bar, ordered a beer, collected a newspaper from the rack and then went and sat down by himself. Owen gave it a moment or two and then went across.

‘I read that report,’ he said. ‘The one your man did on the ghaffirs. You’re right. It was a good piece of work.’

‘It was, wasn’t it?’ McKitterick nodded him into the chair opposite. ‘Went into everything. We were able to implement it pretty much as it stood.’

‘No one asked any questions? Apart from me?’

McKitterick smiled.

‘No one. Apart from you.’

‘Ah, well. Just goes to show, doesn’t it?’ He took a sip from his glass. ‘You were able to get straight on with it, then?’

‘Yes. And just as well we did. This internment thing is hitting us pretty hard.’

‘I’m sure. You’ve had rather a number of posts affected, haven’t you?’

‘Six’.

McKitterick looked at him.

‘Is that another thing that’s bothering you?’

‘Not any more,’ said Owen, smiling amiably.

McKitterick drained his glass.

‘Germans are damned efficient,’ he said. ‘They know what they’re doing and they work hard. They’ve given themselves to this country and worked their guts out for it. And, as far as I’m concerned, that’s all there is to it.’

And that, thought Owen, would have been the Khedive’s view, too. Desperate to modernize Egypt’s creaking medieval systems, he had recruited far and wide, believing that this was the quickest way of gaining access to the technical and management know-how that more developed countries possessed. The result was that his administration was one of the most international in the world, employing experts of almost every nationality, some drawn to Egypt by the lure of higher pay, others simply by the satisfaction of helping to put a developing country on its feet.

For the most part they worked together harmoniously; and now he was extremely angry that a particular group of people in his service should be singled out by the British in this way. They were his servants, not Britain’s; and, like McKitterick, as far as he was concerned, if they served him with efficiency and loyalty, that should have been that.

But on this, as on most things, there was little he could do if the British wished it otherwise. Partly in recognition of this, he had just taken himself off in high dudgeon to Constantinople.

In Owen’s mail the next day was yet another communication from the Parquet. This time it was a copy of the mamur at Minya’s response to the Parquet letter. Clearly taken aback by the speed of the Parquet’s reply, and sensing that it implied an importance to the case which he had hitherto not suspected, he had himself responded with unusual celerity.

He listed, as requested, various instances of damage to the walls of the grave, which he attributed to ‘Mustapha’s foot’, and confessed to the disturbance and displacement of sundry feline corpses, which had come about in the course of the removal of the woman’s body. Otherwise, God be praised, the site was essentially ‘as Pharaoh left it’.

As for the woman herself, the cause of death, according to the hakim, was poisoning by arsenic. After deliberation and much consultation with the husband, the husband’s family, and the village at large, the mamur had come to the conclusion that the poison had been self-administered. The woman had always been the odd one out.

The Parquet official had written ‘Noted’ on the letter and then, in bold, triumphant script: ‘Case closed’.

Moved to wrath, Owen wrote back inquiring how, if it was a case of suicide, the mamur could be so confident that the woman had lingered long enough to bandage herself tightly from head to foot, take herself to the grave, and climb in.

Paul rang up to propose a game of tennis.

‘It’ll have to be singles,’ he said, ‘now that John and Peter have gone.’

John had left with the regiment a couple of days ago. Peter, who was with another regiment, had gone the week before. Cairo seemed to be emptying.

They met that afternoon, about five, when the heat had gone out of the sun, played a couple of sets and then went to the bar. The bar was almost empty. What people there were at the Gezira were not playing golf or tennis. Owen wondered what they would do for cricket now that the regiments were gone.

‘They’ll be all right when the Australians come,’ said Paul.

‘They’re definitely coming, are they?’

‘Oh, yes. And soon. The Sirdar won’t release his regiments until he’s sure of replacements. Not with the Turks on the Canal.’

The other side of the Suez Canal was Ottoman ground and for some time there had been rumours of an increasing concentration of troops on that side. Turkey had not yet come into the war and whose side it would come in on was still in doubt. Not that of the British, most people suspected.

Owen told Paul that he had been thinking about his own position.

‘They need experienced officers,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the experience. It seems wrong not to use it.’

‘I’ve been wondering the same thing,’ said Paul. ‘Not that I’ve had your training or experience, of course. Still, I’ve been wondering whether I ought to volunteer. I’ve got so far as to think I’ll have a word with Kitchener when he gets back.’

‘You might have a word with him about me, too.’

‘I will. But do you know what I think he’s going to say to me? “You’re more use here,” that’s what he’ll say.’

He looked at Owen.

‘And I think he might say the same of you.’

‘I think he might not,’ said Owen. ‘He doesn’t like me.’

‘It’s not just up to him.’

‘Perhaps you could float the idea generally,’ said Owen. ‘You know, sound people out.’

Paul nodded.

They got up from the table. As they left the verandah, he said:

‘Have you talked to Zeinab about it yet?’

That was something he’d been deferring; but, as he climbed the stairs to their apartment, he told himself it was something he could not go on putting off. That evening, as they sat over their drinks on the balcony, he broached it.

Zeinab seemed to freeze.

‘You can’t do that!’ she said.

‘Well, I know, but –’

‘What’s the war got to do with you? It’s over there. You’re here.’

‘Well …’

‘You belong to Egypt now,’ she said fiercely. ‘You belong to me!’

‘Yes, I know, but –’

‘What the hell’s it got to do with you?’ she said again, her eyes filling. ‘You’ve made your life here. With me. Don’t I count for anything?’

He tried to put his arm round her, but she shook it off.

‘You say one thing and then you do another! You say you love me and then you do – this!’

‘Look, I’ve not done anything yet. And maybe I won’t do anything. All I’m doing is thinking about it.’

‘Even to think about it,’ said Zeinab, ‘is wrong. It hurts me. Even for you to think about it!’

She jumped to her feet and ran inside. He heard the door of the bedroom slam.

The telephone was already ringing in the outer office as he went through. Nikos picked it up, listened and then put his hand over the mouthpiece.

‘It’s another one,’ he said.

Owen went on into his office. He heard Nikos say:

‘I’ll put you through, Effendi.’

He picked up the phone on his desk.

‘Yes?’

‘Owen, what the hell do you think you’re doing? Your men have arrested one of our nurses!’

‘Is she German?’

‘Her mother’s German.’

‘Well, then –’

‘But her father’s English.’

‘That ought to be all right, then.’

‘But it’s not all right! Your men have arrested her.’

‘Which Consulate is she registered with?’

Foreign nationals were supposed to register with their Consulate.

‘Both.’

‘She can’t be registered with both. It’s got to be one or the other.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, Christ, you can’t be both English and German.’

‘What about dual nationality?’

Owen swore quietly to himself.

‘Is she registered for dual nationality?’ he asked.

‘Well, she’s registered with both Consulates.’

‘But that’s not the same thing.’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No. Look, we’re working from a list supplied to the Ministry by the German Consulate and it doesn’t say anything about her having dual nationality. What it says is that she’s German.’

‘Well, she isn’t that, is she? Not if she’s half English.’

‘She ought to have said she was half English. Then this wouldn’t have happened.’

‘I think she just thought … All right, all right. The thing is, she can’t quite make up her mind which she wants to be. She’d quite like to be both. She says you never know which nationality is going to come in handy.’

‘At the moment, it’s definitely the British. Look, no matter how she’s registered, this is clearly a case of dual nationality –’

‘At least.’

‘At least?’

‘She was born in Egypt. Doesn’t that make her Egyptian as well?’

‘No. Not unless she wants it.’

‘Well, she does want it. Quite. The point is that that’s what she is, really. She was born here and has spent all her life here –’

‘Look, if she wants to be an Egyptian, she’s got to get herself registered as an Egyptian.’

‘Yes, but she doesn’t want to be just that, she wants to be the others as well. Could she apply for triple nationality, do you think?’

‘She’s not, by any chance, getting married to a Panamanian?’

Afterwards, though, he fell to wondering about the girl and her situation. It was not uncommon in Egypt. With so many nationalities, it was not surprising if, despite the tensions and barriers between them, sometimes people got married across the lines of division. As, perhaps, he and Zeinab would.

As the girl’s parents had. He wondered if they were still alive and, if they were, whether they were living in Egypt. They might well be. In that case the wife might be on one of the lists. Was she being taken away like all the other Germans? The picture came into his mind of the woman on the landing stage at Minya holding out her hands to him. Would it be like that?

It was easy to take people if you thought of them just as names on lists. But Owen had always found it difficult to do that. His mental maps were bristly with the individual reality of people. This was sometimes an advantage to him in his work as Mamur Zapt, sometimes a disadvantage. In the case of taking people into internment it was definitely a disadvantage. Every so often he would become aware of the lives behind the lists and then it was as if a piece of grit had got into the process, like a grain of sand beneath his eyelid, and then he would worry at it and worry at it and be unable to leave it alone.

The woman in the cat cemetery was a bit like that. He had no real sense of her as an individual, yet she refused to go away. Partly it was that the Parquet, with their incompetence, kept bringing her back before him. Partly, though, it was a certain curiosity about the life that lay behind the body; the life of a European married to an Egyptian. How had it gone? he wondered.

Yet another communication from the Parquet! Goodness, had they no other work to do? What depth of idiocy would they sink to now? He took the slip of paper out of the envelope and looked at it.

Then he sat up.

The handwriting was different from that of the communications he had recently been receiving. It was small, neat, precise, purposeful.

The message merely said:

I have taken over this case.

Mahmoud

4

Mahmoud el Zaki was one of the Parquet’s rising stars and Owen had known him almost ever since he had been in Egypt. He was a young, ambitious lawyer whose ambition, however, took the form less of personal advancement than of advancement for his country. Like the Khedive – a comparison he would have hotly rejected – he wished to free Egypt from the ramshackle practices of the past and see it take a place among the developed nations. Unlike the Khedive, he saw no need for foreign help in achieving this. Egyptians could and should do it on their own. Owen knew exactly where he would stand on the issue of the Germans in the Ministry of the Interior: they shouldn’t be there anyway. Egyptians should be doing the work.

Mahmoud felt much the same about Mamur Zapts, too, with this addition, that he didn’t believe there should be such a post as Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police at all. The Khedive was among the ramshackle practices of the past that he wished to get rid of. Let alone his Secret Police. And as for the post being held by the representative of an occupying power – well, the British were another of the things he wanted to see an end of.

Despite this, he and Owen got on fairly well. Indeed, a slightly surprising friendship had developed between them. They were men of a similar type, cats who walked by themselves; and perhaps the difficulty each found in making close friends among their fellows had made them readier to reach across the British–Egyptian divide.

Owen welcomed his involvement now. At least the case would be properly handled. He picked up his pen and wrote to him, expressing his pleasure and offering his help if needed. He was fairly confident, though, that it would not be drawn upon. On criminal investigation, as on other things, Mahmoud believed that Egypt did not require foreign assistance.

This damned internment business was taking all his time. The lists kept piling up on his desk. He hadn’t realized there were so many Germans in Egypt! Come to think of it, he didn’t believe there were so many. This name, for instance: Abu Ali ’Arrami. That didn’t sound very German. Where did he live? Near the Mosque Sayidna Hussein. Right in the middle of the bazaar area. There wasn’t a German within miles!

He summoned Nikos.

‘This list is a load of old bollocks!’ he said. He pointed to the name accusingly.

Nikos looked over his shoulder.

‘Not necessarily,’ he said. Nikos, Copt bureaucrat that he was, always defended lists. He felt a protectiveness towards them that normal people reserved for their children. ‘He might be a German who’s converted to the Muslim religion and taken on a Muslim name. Or he might be an Arab who’s taken on German nationality, to escape seizure for debt, for instance.’

‘Yes, or he might be a sweeper in the Scentmakers’ Bazaar who’s got a pretty wife whom someone’s got his eye on and wants him out of the way!’

‘All these things are possible,’ Nikos agreed.

‘Yes, but do you expect me to waste my time on … ?’

Yes, unfortunately; not just Nikos’s answer, but that of the dimwits back in London also.

Normally, Owen did the arresting and somebody else did the ferrying to the internment camps. This morning, though, the man in charge of the ferrying was down with malaria and Owen, short-staffed, decided to do the job himself.

There was, too, a particular reason for going with this convoy. It was taking people to the camp to which Fricker, the inspector who had produced the report on the ghaffirs, had been transferred. Owen thought he might have a word with him.

The convoy went first by train and then by cart. They got out of the train at a halt marked only by water tanks and a great arm which swung out over the engine. A line of open carts was drawn up nearby. There followed a long, jolting ride across the desert until suddenly, in the middle of nowhere, Owen saw hundreds and hundreds of tents. When he got closer he saw that they were surrounded by barbed wire.

Soldiers opened a gate in the barbed wire and they drove through. Inside, men laden with pots and pans were queuing up at a stand-by pump for water. They looked at the arrivals curiously and some of them called out greetings.

Owen found Fricker sitting in the entrance to one of the tents, reading a book.

He shrugged.

‘No, it is not very nice,’ he said. ‘But I see the necessity for it. From the British point of view, that is. I have made a list of some suggested improvements. Please be so kind as to give them to the camp commandant when you leave.’

Inside the tent were four angribs, native rope beds without mattresses, on two of which men were lying. Beneath each bed was a suitcase, and beside it was a packing case, which served as a bedside table, on top of which some of the men had put personal effects: a set of writing materials, for example. There were remarkably few signs of personal occupation, however. Used to army tents as Owen was, he was struck by how meticulously tidy this one was, and how scant in anything personal; a reflection, he suspected, of Fricker’s character.

Fricker went across to the packing case with the writing materials upon it and took out a sheet of paper, which he gave to Owen. It was neatly set out with headings, subheadings and sub-sub-headings.

Owen folded it and put it in his pocket.

‘I was reading a report of yours recently,’ he said. ‘The one on the ghaffirs. I thought it was good.’

Fricker seemed pleased.

‘I tried to think of the ghaffirs as a system,’ he said. ‘It is, I think, the first time that anyone has done that.’

‘Yes, the ghaffir has always been seen merely as an individual or as just part of the village.’

‘That is so. But if one thinks functionally …’

They discussed the report for a while. Then Owen said:

‘There is one part, though, that I don’t think I go along with you on. Arming the ghaffirs.’

‘But they must be armed, if they are to do their duties properly!’

‘But need they be armed quite so heavily?’

Fricker shrugged.

‘They need to be armed well enough to do the job,’ he said.

‘The job is usually quite humble. Scaring away the birds, that sort of thing.’

‘Usually, but not always. Sometimes they have to fight brigands.’

‘Yes, I saw your reference to the situation at Minya.’

‘Minya, yes. That is an interesting place.’

‘But exceptional, surely? Ghaffirs don’t usually have to fight brigands.’

‘You have to build it into the system specification, though.’

‘Well, do you? I don’t think it’s fair to expect a ghaffir to fight brigands.’

‘Not a ghaffir on his own, no. But that is the point of my report. He should not be asked to fight on his own. When it comes to brigands, he should be operating as part of a group. A trained group, trained for such operations. And with the right weapons to do the job. Superior force, that is the point. At the moment, the ghaffirs do not have superior force. But that is not their fault, it is a fault of the system. And to put that right we have to think of it as a system.’

Owen could see the logic, although he remained unconvinced. He could see, too, why Fricker might appeal to McKitterick. He was analytical, a quality always useful in senior administrators. His mind dwelt too much on the theoretical parameters of his system for Owen’s taste, but he could see how it might appeal to others.

What he could not see, however, was any sign that Fricker was playing a deeper game. If anything, his mind seemed to be entirely preoccupied with his work.

Owen asked how he found the Ministry. Was it a congenial place? Congenial? Fricker seemed puzzled. ‘A good place to work,’ amplified Owen, thinking he might not have understood him. ‘Oh, yes, most interesting,’ said Fricker. Owen decided that it was the concept, not the vocabulary, that was the problem for him.

He asked how Fricker found the Minister. Fricker didn’t have much to do with him, not directly. McKitterick? He quite liked McKitterick. He thought he was a very open man. (Open? McKitterick?) But he didn’t really have a lot to do with him either. As an inspector, he explained, he worked very much on his own. He was often away touring the provinces. Sometimes he would stay in a place for weeks.

Owen could get no feeling for his private life. He began to suspect he didn’t have one. Everything seemed to begin and end in work.

Fricker asked how his colleagues were managing in his absence.

Owen said that they were, of course, below establishment now, which inevitably made a difference.

Fricker shook his head and said that it was very regrettable.

‘And unnecessary,’ he said. ‘For, surely, here in Egypt there is no war. German and Englishman are on the same side. We work together. We are both servants of the Khedive.’

Owen was not without sympathy for this point of view. All the same, it was pretty naïve. And it made it all the more unlikely that Fricker was engaged in the kind of deep plotting that McPhee had supposed. No, Fricker was just an ordinary chap: hard-working, a little narrow, perhaps a bit rigid – even unimaginative.

Which certainly could not be said of McPhee.

‘Yes, I know,’ said the camp commandant defensively, when Owen gave him Fricker’s paper. ‘It’s not satisfactory. We’re working damned hard, but we’re not keeping up. That’s because you’re sending us so many people. At least it’s dry, though. When it rains, the place will turn into a morass, and that’s when disease will start. I’ve been in places like this before. In South Africa.

‘But it’s not because they’re prisoners. Go five miles in that direction –’ he pointed with his hand – ‘and you’ll find another camp like this. It, too, is full of people. Only they happen to be soldiers. Our soldiers. That’s war for you. Now please get out of my way.’

Zeinab wasn’t speaking to him. But she wasn’t moving out, either. He took this as a good sign, although he suspected that it merely meant war hadn’t been opened on that front yet.

In any case, he still hadn’t really made up his mind about volunteering. When he had been with John and the other officers he had been conscious of old fellow-feeling; but now he was remembering that he had left the Army in India precisely because he had thought he didn’t have enough fellow-feeling with the officers he met there. Would it be any different in France? Or in Mesopotamia?

But that wasn’t really the point, was it?

The war seemed to come closer that lunch-time in the bar of the Sporting Club. Paul was there with two men freshly arrived in Cairo, both of whom Owen knew. One was a man named Cavendish, from the British Embassy in Constantinople, whose role there Owen was not quite sure of but who seemed to feel that he had something in common with Owen.

The other person was a little fair-headed archaeologist, a bit of a know-all, whom Owen hadn’t got on with when they had previously met.

‘You see,’ Cavendish was saying, ‘if they play the “holy war” card, it could really cause trouble for us.’

‘I don’t think it would,’ said the archaeologist. ‘Not in the Peninsula, at any rate. Tribal rivalries are stronger than religion.’

‘How about Egypt, Owen?’ said Cavendish, turning towards him.

‘Too early to say. In any case, it would be a difficult card to play, wouldn’t it? For the Germans.’

‘Yes, but not for the Turks.’

‘Will they definitely come in?’

‘Any day, now. That’s why I left Constantinople,’ said Cavendish.

‘It might be a difficult card even for them. At least, as far as Egypt is concerned. All right, they’ve got religion in common, but there’s as much Nationalist feeling here against the Turks as there is against the British. Almost.’

‘If you’re really worried about the “holy war” card,’ said the little archaeologist, ‘you want to get talking to the Sherif.’

‘Yes, but he’s at Mecca.’

‘Go there.’

‘I can’t,’ said Paul. ‘Not with Kitchener away.’

‘I could,’ said the archaeologist.

Both Paul and Cavendish seemed rather taken aback.

‘It ought to be someone more senior,’ said Cavendish.

‘Ought it?’ said the archaeologist. ‘I could sound him out and then, if he seemed at all responsive, you could send someone more senior.’

Neither Cavendish nor Paul seemed to like the idea.

‘We’d better hold it,’ said Paul, ‘until Kitchener gets back.’

‘Is he coming back?’

Paul seemed surprised.

‘Well, isn’t he?’

‘Britain’s leading soldier. A war on. They might have something else in mind for him.’

It had never occurred to Owen that Kitchener might not return to Egypt. That would certainly alter things. He had a sudden feeling of elation.

The other three put down their glasses and turned to go, obviously off to some meeting or other.

Cavendish nodded to him.

‘We’ll be seeing quite a lot of each other,’ he said, ‘now that I’m here permanently. We’ll probably be setting up some kind of committee, or even a Bureau. I’d like you to be on it.’

‘Owen’s internal,’ said the archaeologist, dissenting.

‘That might come in handy,’ said Cavendish.

‘The war isn’t going to be fought in Egypt,’ said the archaeologist.

He always rubbed Owen up the wrong way and now something about his tone made Owen take exception.

‘There’ll be more going on in Egypt than there will be in Mecca,’ he retorted.

‘Come on, Lawrence,’ said Paul impatiently, from the doorway.

He was thinking about it later that afternoon as he drove back over the Kasr-en-Nil Bridge. Below him he could see feluccas shimmering across the water, their graceful lateen sails bowing under the weight of the wind, and at the edge of the river water-sellers wading into the water with their black goatskin bags to fill up for another load.

He asked himself why he took against the man so. They had only met about three times and each time they had rubbed each other up the wrong way.

The first time, Lawrence had made some remark, which Owen had taken to be disparaging, about Owen’s ignorance of the world of Oxford colleges that both Lawrence and Paul had once inhabited. Why Owen had taken umbrage at this he couldn’t now think. There were plenty of worlds he was on the outside of and usually it didn’t bother him.

He decided it must have been the affectation of superiority. Owen didn’t take kindly to other people thinking they were superior to him; and Lawrence seemed hardly able to speak without implying that he knew more than the person he was addressing.

He couldn’t see them working together on that committee, or Bureau, of Cavendish’s. Cavendish himself he didn’t exactly warm to, but at least he could get along with him for five minutes without quarrelling. Whereas Lawrence –

And what the hell was the committee all about anyway? It sounded to him like Intelligence work, and he was not sure that he wanted to get involved in that sort of thing. Everything at the moment seemed to be taking him away from his real work. First, all this damned internment stuff, and now, it appeared, Intelligence work of some kind. It was the war, of course. It was affecting everything. He didn’t have to go to it. It would come to him, whether he went or stayed, whether he liked it or not.

‘And then there’s another one,’ said the man from the Swiss Consulate, glancing at his list. ‘A Mrs Aziz Hanafi.’

‘Are you sure she’s German?’

The Swiss Consulate had taken over responsibility for looking after the interests of German nationals when the German Consulate had been withdrawn. Problems had come up in the cases of some of the people interned and they were going through them now.

‘Yes. Hanafi is her married name. She married an Egyptian. Her original name was Langer. Hilde Langer.’

‘Langer?’

The name rang a bell.

‘Yes. Actually our concerns here are different from those in the case of the others. This one is deceased.’

‘Was she down in Minya?’

‘That’s right. You know her?’

‘I know of her.’

She was the one who had been found in the cat pit.

‘Apparently she died in suspicious circumstances.’

‘Yes.’

‘We don’t actually know all the details.’

‘I can tell you some of them.’

The man from the Consulate noted them down.

‘It’s a case of informing the family,’ he said. ‘Or, rather, of informing our diplomatic colleagues so that they can inform the family.’

He read through the notes.

‘It’s not very much,’ he said. ‘I think the family will want to know more.’

‘Well, of course, the death is the subject of an investigation.’

‘Ye-e-es.’

He sounded doubtful.

‘The man in charge of the case now is extremely competent.’

‘That’s good. Yes, that will help. Do you happen to know his name?’

He wrote it down.

‘I’ll contact him directly and ask him to keep us informed.’

He hesitated.

‘But, you know …’

‘He really is good, I can assure you.’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m sure.’ He hesitated again. ‘But, you know, these are rather special times, and it would be so easy for things to slip.’

‘He won’t let them slip, believe me.’

‘No, no. Perhaps not.’ He hesitated again and then went on resolutely. ‘But, you know, in normal times one would have the extra guarantee, in the case of non-Egyptian nationals, that the Mamur Zapt was keeping an eye on things.’

‘I’ll keep an eye on things, if you want.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

He looked down at his notes. He seemed a decent enough man. This kind of thing was trying and it must be particularly difficult when they weren’t even of your own nationality. Owen got up and went to the earthenware jug, covered with a towel, which stood in the window, as in all Cairo offices, and poured him some water. The air coming through the slats of the blinds was supposed to cool the water. He had an uneasy feeling that today the heat was winning. He returned and gave it to the man.

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