The Girl in the Nile

by Michael Pearce

  Owen smiled encouragingly and waited.

  “I would like to help,” said the Prince suddenly. “I have been thinking over your suggestion the other day. Perhaps I was too hasty in rejecting it.”

  “About the money?”

  “Yes. I said then that it was a matter for the Government. But then, looking at it another way, I am, loosely speaking, the Government. In the old days, in a case like this, you would have appealed directly to the Khedive, not gone through layers of stupid bureaucracy. You were absolutely right to come direct to me. Right and proper.”

  “Ye—es?”

  This was not quite what Owen had expected.

  “And it was wrong of me to reject it out of hand. I was not being true,” said the Prince, looking at him earnestly, “to my responsibilities.”

  “No?” said Owen, a little taken aback.

  “No. You see, I was relieved. I thought it might all be going to go away without me having to do anything. That it might all blow over without any unpleasantness—”

  “Unpleasantness?”

  “Publicity.”

  “Oh yes. Of course.”

  “A woman dead.” The Prince waved a hand. “Sad. But what’s a woman dead in Egypt?”

  “Quite.”

  “So,” said the Prince, “I thought I would let it all blow over.”

  “Mm.” Owen sounded disapproving.

  “You’re right. It wouldn’t do. I couldn’t do it. Not when it came to it. Well, it’s not too late to put things right.”

  “Put things right?”

  “You can have the money, my dear fellow. Count on me.”

  Owen was dumbfounded. What was this? He had been half expecting a confession. Not an offer of help!

  Wait a minute: was this quite what it seemed? Was it a genuine offer? Or did the Prince expect something in return?

  “I am most grateful, Your Highness,” he said cautiously. “Indeed, I am overwhelmed. But, um, the money will go to redeeming the body, you know.”

  “Of course,” said the Prince, surprised. “What else? Oh, I see. Well, no. Not this time.”

  “In that case I can only express my gratitude. I will get in touch with Mr. el Zaki immediately.”

  The Prince regarded him thoughtfully.

  “I know what you think,” he said suddenly. “You think I did it. Killed the girl. Well, I didn’t. Indeed not.”

  ***

  “I’m not sure that we need his money,” said Mahmoud.

  “Well, ordinarily I wouldn’t pay that sort of price—”

  “I think we can do without it.”

  Mahmoud, Owen knew, did not like paying money for information. It smacked too much of the Old Egypt of bribes and favors which he wanted to sweep away. Trained in the French school of severe deductive logic, he preferred to rely on unassisted reason. Assemble your knowledge and analyze it: that was the way forward. Not haphazard reliance on rumor and gossip.

  He was different from Owen. Owen purchased information every day. He had his agents out in the bazaars and souks and offered a steady price for good information. He had inherited when he became Mamur Zapt a vast network of spies, informers and paid agents which dated back to his Ottoman predecessors and which the British saw no reason to disturb.

  It was the difference between a detective and an Intelligence Officer. Even in India, where Owen had served before he came to Egypt, and where in his latter years he had been seconded from his regiment to an Intelligence post on the Frontier, it had been normal practice to purchase information. He found Mahmoud curiously puritanical.

  “The fact is,” said Mahmoud, “I don’t think we need it.”

  “How else are we going to find the body now that those buggers have pinched it?” demanded Owen.

  Mahmoud frowned. Owen thought for a moment that he was taking exception to the casual obscenity, but it was not that. He was bothered by “pinch.” Mahmoud’s knowledge of English, as of French, was superb but army colloquial occasionally threw him.

  “Stolen,” Owen amended.

  “Ah yes, ‘pinch,’” murmured Mahmoud, filing the word away for future reference. “Well,” he said, “I think I have found out who did—pinch?—it.”

  “You’ve found the body?” said Owen incredulously.

  “No, not yet,” Mahmoud admitted. “But I have, I think, found the men. And that is where, my friend”—he placed his arm affectionately round Owen in the Arab way—“I need your help. For I do not think they will talk to me, not without encouragement. The Parquet, you see, is something new to them and the police they view with derision.”

  “New?” said Owen. The Parquet had existed, he thought, since at least 1883 when a reforming Minister of Justice had unearthed in his office some Arabic translations of parts of the French Code Napoléon and promulgated them as the new Egyptian legal system.

  “New to them,” said Mahmoud, urging Owen toward an arabeah drawn up beside the pavement. “Whereas the Mamur Zapt,” he said, as they settled back into the shabby, hot leather, “is old. They are used to him. And they know,” said Mahmoud, smiling, “that he is even more merciless than—well, wait and see.”

  “Look,” said Owen, “I’m not—”

  “All you have to do is just sit there,” Mahmoud reassured him. “The name will be enough.”

  “Who are these people?”

  ***

  They were, Mahmoud explained, the beggars who normally worked the part of the river where Leila’s body had come ashore.

  “They all have their territory,” said Mahmoud. “It was just a case of finding who they were.”

  That had not been difficult since they were, in fact, known to all the neighborhood. The boatmen knew them, the watchman knew them—he greeted them every day—and the police certainly knew them.

  Mahmoud had had, however, some good fortune. He had remembered having seen, that first day, some goats grazing further on down the riverbank, had made some inquiries and discovered that they were taken down on to the riverbed every morning by a boy who acted as herd.

  He had found the boy and questioned him. Yes, he had taken the goats down that particular morning. No, he had not seen a body, still less a woman’s body. If he had, he might have gone out and had a look.

  But he did remember seeing the two beggars. Their names were Farag and Libab and he saw them every day. They worked the bank where his goats grazed and they would always stop and have a chat.

  He remembered that day because Farag had asked him if he had a sister. He did have a sister but he thought that, poor though his family was, it would not be very keen on her marrying a beggar. Where was the profit in that?

  He had pointed that out to Farag but Farag had not been put off. He had said that things might be going to change. The boy had scoffed at this but Farag had told him to wait and see. He was still waiting.

  It would have been, he said, late in the morning when the men were coming back. They worked outward from the city to a point not far south of the Souk al-Gadira and then returned, thus making two sweeps of the riverbank. They made caches on their way out which they picked up as they returned.

  “What do they make caches of?” asked Owen.

  “Wood, mostly.”

  Wood was in short supply in the city. It was the main fuel used for large-scale cooking and faggots were brought into the city every day. It had to come from some distance away since over the centuries the trees and bushes on both sides of the river had been lopped down. Driftwood, then, fetched a not inconsiderable price.

  So there was evidence that the beggars had been on the bank that morning. And there was the additional point that on their return they had appeared cheerful, as if from a windfall.

  ***

  They were being held at the local police station. The Chief had resigned himself to Mahmou
d but had not been expecting Owen. When he saw him he flinched slightly. His doom still hung over him like a sword.

  The two beggars were crouched in the courtyard. One affected to be lame and had probably become so by constant practice. The other affected blindness and certainly had something wrong with his eyes, though half the population of Egypt suffered from ophthalmia and the eyes couldn’t have been too bad since he relied on them every day.

  Mahmoud, sitting behind the Chief’s desk to better express the awful power of the state, had them brought in.

  Owen sat behind the two men, back in a corner. They did not see him as they came in.

  “You are Farag,” said Mahmoud, “and you are Libab?”

  “Yes, effendi.”

  “And you patrol the bank every day and what you find you take back to the Man?”

  The beggars hesitated.

  “We patrol the bank, yes.”

  It was best not to use the name of the Man.

  Mahmoud had established, though, that he knew him.

  “Think back,” said Mahmoud, “think back to the morning when you asked the boy Farakat about his sister. What had happened that morning to make you think, Farag, that you were rich enough to afford a wife?”

  “It was idle talk,” said Farag. “I do not remember.”

  “I think you do remember,” said Mahmoud, “but you do not want to tell me. And that is foolish. Foolish because I may know the answer already and just be testing you. Foolish because if you do not tell me, I have the power to take you away from the riverbank, away from the sun and light, and shut you in the caracol forever.”

  “At least it would be cool there,” said Farag sturdily.

  “And they would give us food,” said Libab.

  “Every day,” said Farag. “I have heard.”

  The whole population had heard. An unexpected side effect of Cromer’s reform of the prison system was to make conditions inside prison better for the poor than they often were outside.

  “Forever,” repeated Mahmoud, significantly but untruthfully. That was another change. In the old days a man could be left to languish in prison uncharged and forgotten. Nowadays his case had to be heard within a given time.

  The beggars were not impressed. They felt they might be onto a good thing. Indeed, the more they reflected on it, the better it appeared, and they quickly passed from affecting forgetfulness to unaffected obduracy. There had been nothing out of the ordinary about that morning, they said, nothing.

  “You did not find something on the riverbank that you thought had made your fortune?”

  “That would have just been a dream,” said Libab.

  “Yet you, Farag, believed the dream was real enough for you to fancy you were rich,” Mahmoud pointed out.

  “That was mere fancy,” said Farag.

  Mahmoud could not break through. He sat silent for a moment, thinking.

  The beggars, emboldened, became cheeky.

  “You can’t do anything to us,” said Libab. “Let us go!”

  “What if we did find something on the bank?” asked Farag. “What is that to you?”

  “Little to me,” Mahmoud admitted. He had made up his mind how to play the next bit now. “But a lot to the Mamur Zapt.”

  “The Mamur Zapt? What’s he got to do with it?”

  “You’re just dragging him in,” said Farag. “The Mamur Zapt is not interested in the likes of us.”

  “On the contrary,” said Owen from behind them. “I find you very interesting.”

  The men froze.

  Mahmoud came round the desk and sat on the front of it.

  “There you are,” he said amiably. “What did I tell you?”

  Farag tried to look over his shoulder. Mahmoud reached forward, took him by the head and turned his face back towards him.

  “You are talking to me. Would you like me to take them through it?” he asked Owen over their shoulders.

  “Please do.”

  “Well, then. Let us begin with what you found on the riverbank.”

  “We found nothing on the riverbank,” said Farag, still sturdily but less confidently.

  “The girl’s body. As you came along the bank, where was it lying?”

  “We saw no girl’s body.”

  “On the shoal. A little out from the bank. As I said, perhaps I know the answers already. Tell me what you did when you saw the body.”

  “We saw no—” began Farag, and stopped.

  “The Mamur Zapt is beginning to get impatient,” said Mahmoud. “And I don’t think I will help you anymore.”

  “We saw the body,” whispered Libab. “And I said to Farag, ‘There it is.’”

  “So!” Mahmoud nodded approvingly. He turned to Farag. “And what did you say?”

  “I said,” replied Farag reluctantly, “I said: ‘Perhaps it is not. Perhaps it is another. Let us go and see.’”

  “So you walked out to the shoal and—?”

  “We saw that it was the body.”

  “How did you know that it was the right body?”

  “By the dress,” whispered Libab.

  “The shintiyan?”

  He caught their look of surprise.

  “As I told you. I know everything. They were pink, I think?”

  “Yes, effendi.”

  Libab, at any rate, was docile now.

  “It wasn’t just the shintiyan,” said Farag, caving into line.

  “Oh? What was it?”

  “It wasn’t a peasant woman, you see. Most of the ones that come down are.”

  “You knew she wouldn’t be?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You had been told?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who by?”

  Farag hesitated. “You know,” he muttered.

  “The Man?”

  Libab looked involuntarily over his shoulder, half saw Owen and was transfixed.

  “Yes,” said Mahmoud chattily. “It is difficult, isn’t it? The Mamur Zapt stands on one side of you, the Man on the other. I would watch my step if I were you. So you had found what you had been told to find. What then?”

  “Well,” said Farag, “we saw the ghaffir coming. So we ran away and hid.”

  “We thought he might not see the body,” said Libab.

  “But he did. He went down on to the bank and looked at it. And then he looked around to find someone he could send to the omda. But there was no one.”

  “We stayed hid.”

  “He had to go himself.”

  “Then Farag said to me: ‘Let us take the body now, before he comes back.’ So we ran into the water and took the body.”

  “What did you do with the body?”

  “Carried it behind the wall.”

  “It was as far as we could get,” explained Farag, “because then the ghaffir came back.”

  “But first the policeman came with his pole. That was good, wasn’t it?”

  “He didn’t know what to make of it.”

  “We laughed. Farag laughed so loudly I thought they would hear us.”

  “Because then the ghaffir came back and he was even more amazed.”

  “And then the Englishman came down—”

  “And that was a good laugh too, I expect,” said Owen.

  “Yes, it was,” said Libab enthusiastically. “There they were, all three of them, scratching their heads and wondering where the body was—”

  “And all the time it was behind the wall. Right nearby!”

  “Very funny,” said Mahmoud. “And how long did it stay behind the wall?”

  “Until they were all gone. A lot of people came down. You were there yourself, weren’t you?”

  “Yes,” said Mahmoud. “I was.”

  The merr
iment died away.

  “Well, yes,” said Farag.

  “Yes,” echoed Libab faintly.

  “Yes. So what did you do then? With the body?”

  “We hid it.”

  “Where?”

  “Under a boat. There’s a boatman along the bank. He does things for the Man sometimes. We went to him and said: ‘We have hidden something for the Man under one of your boats.’ And the boatman said: ‘Tell me which boat it is so that I will know which boat not to look under.’ And we told him. And he said: ‘I will see that it stays there until the Man sends someone for it.’”

  “Show me the boat,” said Mahmoud.

  They showed him the boat. But when he lifted the upturned boat and peered into the hollow beneath it he found nothing there.

  Chapter Eight

  “So the Man has it,” said Owen.

  They were walking home along the riverbank. The sudden, brief Egyptian twilight had come upon them while they were looking at the boat. One moment the sun had been hanging above the desert, the next it had plunged out of sight, leaving only the copper and rose and saffron of the water to testify that it had been there.

  As the shadows closed over the land the heat went out of the day. A delicate river breeze sprang up. Mahmoud and Owen looked at each other, then with one accord started walking.

  The beggars had been sent to the caracol. All the information they possessed had probably been got out of them, but if they were released they would simply disappear. They might even, as Mahmoud pointed out, disappear for good.

  “More than that,” said Mahmoud. “He not only has it but he sent them to fetch it.”

  “So he knew it would be there.”

  “And that,” said Mahmoud, “takes us back to what happened on the dahabeeyah that night.”

  “And rules out one thing: that she fell overboard by accident.”

  “Or jumped of her own accord.”

  “He knew the body would be there. He knew it beforehand. Which makes it—”

  “Yes,” said Mahmoud, “I would think so.”

  As darkness fell, the birds began their evensong. There were not many trees in the poorer part of the city but the few trees there were, preserved to give shade in the little squares, were full of birds. From the topmost branches where the pigeons sat came a continuous cooing.