‘Tell us about that,’ said Owen.
A man had come and gone off with her father and they had been drinking. She always knew when her father had been drinking because when he came back he was red in the face and shouted a lot. This time, he had come into the house and shouted for her new mother and when she had come out they had sent Leila off and her father had fetched more beer. When Leila had returned some time later they had been still drinking, her new mother, too, and Leila had gone to bed. Well, not to bed, because they didn’t have one. In the house it was too noisy and they had shouted at her to keep away. So she had curled up in a corner of the yard and slept there. And in the morning her father had woken her and said that she was to get ready. ‘There’s no need for her to get ready,’ her new mother had said. ‘She doesn’t have a box; she can go as she is.’ And, later in the morning, a man had come for her.
‘Was this the white man?’ asked Owen.
‘White man?’ said Mahmoud.
No, just an ordinary fellah, like the fellah in the village, only he didn’t come from the village, or not their village at any rate. The man had come and taken her to a place outside the village where the white man was waiting. He had looked her over carefully and then nodded, and then she had been led to where a group of children were waiting with other men.
‘A group of children?’ said Mahmoud.
‘Yes.’
How many?
Leila had a problem with that. She thought about fifteen.
‘And then?’
‘They had all started walking.’
‘This is a bad family,’ whispered Mahmoud. ‘They drink, and they do not fear God.’
Mahmoud, a good Muslim, never drank.
‘And they beat their children. And — I think you are right — they sell them as slaves. What sort of people are these?’
‘Worse,’ said Owen. ‘What did they do to the sister?’
‘You think they killed her?’
‘I think they might have done. Were they going to sell her, too? And did she stand up against it? It sounds, from what Leila says, like she was the sort of girl who might. There could have been blows.’
Mahmoud nodded. ‘That does not sound unlikely,’ he said and sighed. ‘It sounds as if I’m going to have to go down south,’ he said.
‘Me too,’ said Owen.
They solved the problem of identification by getting Leila to describe the clothing her sister normally wore. There wasn’t a lot of it, even when you took into account what had been in the bride box. And then Mahmoud had taken a less soiled piece of the clothing the woman in the box had been wearing and showed it to Leila.
‘Like this?’
Leila had nodded. She didn’t really understand the purport of the questions but they were making her uneasy. Mahmoud had thought it best not to go on.
‘The body will keep,’ he said to Owen, ‘now that it’s in the mortuary. I’ll get somebody from down there to identify it.’
But where was ‘there’? The little girl had said Denderah. That was certainly a place, and they would try it. It was also on the main line to Luxor. It was where she could have got on the train. And possibly where the bride box had been put on, too. If it was, there would be a record of some sort of it. The Egyptian bureaucracy was not always efficient but it was always there. Even in such a one-horse town as Owen suspected Denderah was.
It would especially have been recorded if it was addressed to a Pasha, if for no other reason than that if you got it wrong, thunderbolts would fall.
But this was another thing that they both found puzzling: that the body should be boxed up and sent, as it apparently had been done, to a Pasha. Wasn’t that the last thing you would do if you murdered somebody? Suppose, for instance, that Owen’s theory was correct and that Soraya had been killed by a bunch of slave traders: would they want to draw attention to themselves? It was, surely, the last thing that they would want to do.
But didn’t the same argument apply if what Mahmoud had originally feared was correct? That this was a dull, ordinary murder, domestic, probably, in an ordinary town very much out in the sticks, just the sort of case that you would be assigned to if your career was on the point of plunging irrevocably downwards? Suppose it was — surely the very last thing a murderer would do would be to draw attention to it?
Unless there was some ulterior motive. Mahmoud feared there might be. And he half feared that the motive was to do with him personally. Mahmoud was on the progressive side of Egyptian politics, which was a lonely place to be. It brought him right up against the most vested interests that there were in Egyptian society, those that were based around the Court and around the Pashas. The one thing they did not want was to have those interests questioned or exposed. But so often Mahmoud had found that they were precisely the thing that made progress impossible.
Mahmoud believed deeply, passionately, in progress. It galled him that Egypt was seen as backward, primitive, locked in the past. It had to modernise — had to! He had fought for that throughout his career and was just beginning to believe that he was on the point of getting somewhere.
And there, of course, lay the snag. For his efforts were beginning to bring him against the most powerful interests of all. They were beginning to notice him; and, no doubt, starting to do something about it.
This case could be the beginning. An obscure case, miles from anywhere. And then the block on it. The introduction of a Pasha into it was the clue. It would stop the inquiry, as it always did. Not completely. Just enough to keep him tied up forever in some backwater down there.
For Owen, too, the entrance of a Pasha into the case was something to make him think. If this really was something to do with the slave trade — an indication, perhaps, of its revival in Egypt — did the connection with a Pasha mean that there were big forces behind it? It was profitable enough to tempt even Pashas. And what about Leila’s mention of white men: how far did this go?
‘Political enough for you yet?’ he could hear Paul saying.
‘I told you it was big,’ Ali said to Hussein. ‘The Mamur Zapt and the Parquet!’
‘Must be a prize dog!’ said Hussein.
‘A Saluki at least!’
‘Shouldn’t have put it in a box like that!’ said Hussein.
‘Without any air!’
‘The Pasha will have the skin off them!’
‘And they’ll deserve it!’
‘Ought to know better!’
‘Ignorant sods down there!’
‘Are you two ever going to do any work?’ asked the overseer.
‘Coming, coming!’
Hussein and Ali bent to the box. They straightened up again.
‘Heavy!’
‘Too heavy!’
‘Look, they’ve taken the dog out of it. So I gather. It’ll be lighter than it was!’ said the overseer.
‘It’s more than a two-man lift.’
‘Four men at least!’
‘Look, it’s only down to the Bab-el-Khalk!’
‘In this heat?’
‘Just get on with it! Or it won’t be the Pasha who flays your hide!’
‘Bastard!’ muttered Ali.
‘Bastard!’ muttered Hussein.
‘Right! Lift!’
They raised it an inch.
‘Can’t be done!’
‘Not with just two of us.’
‘A bride box? Of course it can be done!’
‘Not just with two of us.’
‘All right. I’ll get Abdul.’
‘And Mustapha.’
‘Mustapha’s doing something else.’
‘We’ll wait.’
‘I’m going to fetch Abdul and Mustapha. And then I’m going to kick your backsides.’
The overseer went off in a fury.