There were some women at the well, filling their pitchers. They saw the face he had made and one of them said:
‘Here, have some of mine. We got it up before the water was disturbed.’
‘It was Miriam who disturbed it,’ said one of the other women. ‘She let the bucket go in too far.’
‘I had to, didn’t I?’ retorted Miriam angrily. ‘I was the last one and you’d got the good water out.’
‘Ali should have put the cover over the well,’ said the first woman accusingly.
An old man sitting in the shade straightened up.
‘I did!’ he protested. ‘It got underneath. It gets everywhere.’
‘Well, it does that,’ the woman conceded.
‘It got into my stew,’ said another of the women, ‘even though I had the lid on.’
Owen accepted the drink gratefully. The women, as was often the case in the villages, were very chatty. None of them wore veils and no one was particularly abashed at speaking to a man, even a white man. It was the men, thought Owen, who insisted on the forms, so jealous of their wives’ honour were they.
Or perhaps it wasn’t their wives’ honour but their own. That, he thought, was certainly so in the case of those brothers they’d locked up.
Actually, he was uneasy about that. He would have to release them soon. He couldn’t hold them forever. That was one of the things he wanted to talk to Mahmoud about. He rather hoped that by now Mahmoud was getting somewhere with his investigations. If he was closing in on someone, especially if, as Owen suspected, the person was one of the brothers, it would make it easier to hold them and to prevent the family of the murdered man from taking the law into their own hands.
Mahmoud emerged from one of the pilgrim’s houses, saw Owen and came across to greet him. The women, suddenly self-conscious, picked up their pitchers and went off.
Mahmoud sat down on the parapet of the wall and helped himself to some water.
‘Getting anywhere?’ asked Owen.
‘No. I’ve just about been through all the houses now and no one’s seen or heard anything. No one was out on the night Ibrahim was killed, nor knows anyone else who was out. Well, I can believe that. Once it gets dark, everyone in the village stays at home. But these days, when the nights are hot, they sit outside; and don’t tell me that no one, no one in the entire village, saw or heard anything!’
‘What might they have heard or seen?’
‘Someone going out to the Tree. People at the Tree, talking. They were talking, we know that from the goatherd.’
‘It’s some way from the village, though. And it was dark.’
‘I need to know who it was that met Ibrahim that night,’ said Mahmoud, frustrated.
‘Have you gone through the other village yet, Tel-el-Hasan? Someone might have seen people leaving that.’
‘The brothers, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ve got Asif helping me. He’s been through the village.’
‘Without any luck?’
‘The same thing as here. Villagers,’ said Mahmoud, ‘will tell you nothing. Not if you’re from outside.’
He put the bucket back into the recess.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m increasingly coming to think that the answer doesn’t lie here anyway.’
Chapter 7
'Not here?’ said Owen, taken aback.
‘Oh, here-the village-is something to do with it. It’s where it happened. But it’s not here that the meaning lies.’
‘The meaning?’
‘I see a lot of killings,’ said Mahmoud. ‘This one has a meaning. The body was put on the line to make a point.’
‘What kind of point?’
‘I don’t know. But I’m beginning to wonder whether it might not be more to do with the railway than it is with the village.’
‘You’re abandoning the idea of it being a revenge killing?’
‘Revenge might be part of it.’
‘I don’t see how revenge could be part of something else. Isn’t it complete in itself?’
Mahmoud was silent. Overhead, in the palms, the doves gurgled contentedly.
‘As I see it,’ he said at last, ‘Ibrahim crops up in two contexts. One of them is the village and there are things here that might have led to his death. But I cannot see why they should have led to his body being placed on the line. That part of it must be explained by something else. And it seems to me that we might find the explanation in the other context in which he crops up: the railway.’
‘His body was found there, certainly. Does that count as cropping up?’
‘He worked there.’
‘But that is incidental, surely?’
‘Is it? I have asked myself if it might not be-if I could find any connection between Ibrahim’s workplace and his death.’ Owen fanned himself. He was used to Mahmoud’s deductive approach. The Parquet lawyers had all been trained in the French tradition of law-the Egyptian legal system was based on that of France-and the French influence extended even to habits of thought.
‘And what answers did you get?’
He hoped that Mahmoud wasn’t going to allow himself to get distracted. He himself was convinced that the answer lay in the village and he wanted to find it pretty quickly before village law took over.
‘It was something the railwaymen said yesterday. About Ibrahim. They said there had been some incident or other when Ibrahim had acted as their spokesman.’
‘Well?’
‘I’d like to find out more about the incident.’
‘It sounded as if it was a dispute about work practices.’
‘Precisely.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t see what you’re getting at?’
‘I was just wondering if the two could be connected.’
‘The dispute and-?’
‘The fact that Ibrahim played a leading part in the dispute, and his death.’
Owen was shocked.
‘You’re surely not suggesting-?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything. I’m just saying that the time might have come to take a look at the Syndicate’s involvement in all this.’
‘But it’s not involved! It’s just that the body was found on the line that it’s building!’
‘And that the body was that of a man who’d been prominent in a dispute with it.’
‘But the dispute was trivial!’
‘We don’t know that. It might not have seemed trivial to them. Anything that threatened to slow down progress on the line would have struck them as important, I’d have thought.’
‘But you’re surely not suggesting that they would go to the lengths of-?’
‘I don’t know what lengths they might go to. That would be one of the things I would want to find out.’
‘But what for? What would be the point?’
As a warning, perhaps?’
‘You think the whole thing was meant as a warning?’
‘I think the possibility is worth investigating.’
Owen felt quite shocked. How could Mahmoud even entertain the possibility? The Syndicate bore down hard on its workers, perhaps, but to suppose that a respectable international company would go to those lengths was bizarre!
‘Companies don’t behave like that,’ he said.
‘Don’t they?’
‘No. Not even in Egypt.’
It was the wrong thing to say. Mahmoud’s face darkened. ‘Perhaps they might,’ he said, ‘in Egypt. Where they thought it didn’t matter.’
Owen backtracked swiftly. Talking to Mahmoud was sometimes like walking through a minefield.
‘OK, OK,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. What I meant was that I don’t believe a respectable company would do a thing like that anywhere.’
Mahmoud bowed his head in acknowledgement of the apology; stiffly, however.
‘Respectable companies don’t always behave respectably when they go to other countries,’ he said. ‘Especially if they’re poorer countries.’
Owen felt a tide of exasperation welling up.
‘What you’re suggesting is quite ridiculous,’ he said coldly.