‘Did he come on the night he was killed?’
‘Yes.’
‘And’-he wavered-‘stayed the night?’
‘He never stayed long.’ She laughed. ‘Just long enough!’
‘Jalila!’ muttered her brother reprovingly.
Asif was now all over the place.
‘How-how long?’ he managed to stutter.
‘How long do you think?’ she said, looking at him coolly.
Owen decided to lend a hand.
‘The man is dead,’ he said sternly.
The woman seemed to catch herself.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘He died after leaving you.’
‘Yes,’ she said quietly.
‘He left you early. Did he say where he was going?’
‘He said he was meeting someone.’
‘Ah! Did he say who?’
‘No. And,’ said the woman, bold again, ‘I did not ask. I knew it wasn’t a woman and that was all I needed to know.’
‘How did you know it wasn’t a woman?’
‘Because it wouldn’t have been any good,’ she said defiantly. ‘Not after what he’d done with me. I always took good care to see there wasn’t much left. For Leila.’
‘Leila?’
‘That so-called wife of his.’
‘Why so-called?’
She was silent.
Then she said vehemently: ‘He should have married me. Right at the start. Then all this wouldn’t have happened.’
The tabernacle was now empty. The pile of shoes had gone. The square was almost empty. The heat rose up off the sand as if making one last effort to keep the advancing shadows at bay. The smell of woodsmoke was suddenly in the air. The women were about to cook the evening meal.
Owen wondered how late the trains back to the city would continue to run. Asif, too, was evidently reckoning that the day’s work was done, for he said:
‘Tomorrow I shall question the wife’s family.’
They turned aside for a moment to refresh themselves at the village well before committing themselves to the long walk back across the hot fields to the station.
‘It could be a question of honour, you see,’ said Asif, still preoccupied with the case. ‘The wife has been dishonoured and so her family has been dishonoured.’
‘You think one of them could have taken revenge?’
Revenge was the bane of the policeman’s life in Egypt. Over half the killings, and there were a lot of killings in Egypt, were for purposes of revenge. It was most common among the Arabs of the desert, where revenge feuds were a part of every tribesman’s life. But it was far from uncommon among the fellahin of the settled villages too.
‘Well,’ said Asif, ‘he was killed by a blow on the back of the neck from a heavy, blunt, club-like instrument. A cudgel is the villager’s weapon. And, besides-’
He hesitated.
‘Yes?’
‘It looks as if it was someone who knew his ways. Knew where to find him, for instance. Knew he would not be staying. Knew him well enough, possibly, to arrange a meeting. That would seem to me to locate him in the village.’
Owen nodded.
‘And if that’s the case,’ he said, ‘you’re going to have to move quickly. Otherwise the other side will be taking the law into their own hands.’
The trouble with revenge killings was that they had two sides. One killing bred another.
‘Tomorrow,’ promised Asif.
A man came round the corner of the mosque and made towards them. He was, like Asif, an Egyptian and an effendi and wore the tarboosh of the government servant. Unlike him, however, and unusually for the time, he wore a light suit not a dark suit and was dressed overall with a certain sharpness. Everything about him was sharp.
He recognized Owen and gave him a smile.
‘Let me guess,’ he said; ‘the railway?’
He turned to Asif.
‘Asif,’ he said softly. ‘I am sorry.’
Asif looked at him in surprise.
‘They have asked me to take over. Why? I do not know. But it is certainly no reflection on you.’
Asif was taken aback.
‘But, Mahmoud, I have only just-’
‘I know. Perhaps they have something more important in mind for you.’
Asif swallowed.
‘I doubt it,’ he said bitterly.
He got up from the well.
‘I will put the papers on your desk,’ he said, and walked off.
Owen made a movement after him but Mahmoud put a hand on his arm.
‘Let him go,’ he said. ‘It’s better like that.’
‘He was doing all right,’ said Owen.
‘I think he’s promising,’ said Mahmoud. He sighed. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do things like this. It hurts people’s pride.’
Mahmoud El Zaki was a connoisseur in pride. That was true of most Egyptians, thought Owen, but it was especially true of him. Proud, sensitive, touchy-all of them qualities likely to be rubbed raw by the situation that Egyptians were in: subordination of their country to a foreign power, subordination in government, subordination in social structure.
And the wounds were aggravated by what at times seemed an excessive emotionality. For a people so prickly they were surprisingly tender. Excessively masculine in some respects, they were sometimes surprisingly feminine. They were never in the middle; unlike the solid, stolid, sensible English, thought Owen. He himself was Welsh.
He and Mahmoud knew each other well. They had often worked together and had, a little to their surprise, perhaps, developed a rapport which survived political and other differences.
They watched Asif set out along the track across the fields.
‘You’ll need to pick things up quickly,’ said Owen. ‘There’s a danger of a tit-for-tat killing.’
‘The man’s family?’
Owen nodded.
‘The brother especially. There’s another woman involved. They think he was killed because of that.’
‘Her husband?’
‘No. She’s a widow. The wife’s family. Asif was going to take a look at them tomorrow.’
‘I’ll do that myself. I’ll come out tomorrow morning. However, I’ve arranged to do something else first.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m going to talk to the railway people.’ He looked at Owen. ‘You wouldn’t care to accompany me, would you?’
Owen knew exactly why he was asking that. Any investigation involving foreigners was potential political dynamite. Most foreigners doing business in Egypt were protected by special provisions of the legal code, forced on the Egyptian government in the past by foreign powers. No European or American could even be charged unless it could be shown that he had committed an offence not against Egyptian law but against the law of his own country. Even when a charge was accepted, he had to be tried, in the case of a criminal offence, by his own Consular Court, and in civil cases by the Mixed Courts, where there would be both foreign and Egyptian judges.
And those were merely the formal protections. Informally, there were jugglings for reference, disputes about nationality and the use of cases as pretexts for the assertion of national interests. In such circumstances the cards were always stacked against the unfortunate policeman; and especially so if he happened to be Egyptian.
It made sense, then, for Mahmoud to ally himself with the Mamur Zapt. It protected him personally against political comeback and increased the chances of successful prosecution. At the very least it meant that the Belgian-owned Syndicate would not be able to fob him off without even listening to his questions.
Owen was quite willing to allow himself to be used. Like many of the British officials, like, indeed, the Consul-General himself, he had considerable sympathy with the Egyptians over this issue of legal privileges, the Capitulations as they were called.
But only up to a point. The Parquet, too, had its political agenda. The Ministry of Justice was the most Nationalist of all the Ministries and the Parquet lawyers were Nationalist to a man. Mahmoud himself was a member of the Nationalist Party. Might not the Parquet be seeking to use the case for own political ends?