She offered him some tsatsiki. While he was eating it, she squatted down beside him and asked about the regulator.
‘You know,’ she said, looking in her husband’s direction, ‘he’s not really the man for this. Water is not a liquid he’s had much to do with. And he knows nothing, absolutely nothing, about gardens. I’m the only flower he’s heard of.’
‘I know,’ said Owen, ‘but he’s a wonderful man at getting people to talk to him.’
Georgiades and the gardener were coming back through the bushes.
‘Yes, well, I could put them in the stream, I suppose,’ Georgiades was conceding, ‘but I’m not happy about it. Not with all these thieves about. Now if there was a ghaffir around-’
‘Him?’ said the gardener. ‘He’d be the first to take them!’
At the regulator all was calm. The water winked placidly in the sun. Some papyrus heads which had crept through the main barrage circled slowly up to the breach and then spun away again. The workmen were sitting up on the bank. Macrae and Ferguson stood on top of the regulator looking down into the breach and conferring.
‘We’ve stopped it up,’ said Macrae. ‘Now we’ve got to find a way of letting the water through again.’
‘But controlled,’ said Ferguson.
‘We’re thinking of using the undamaged gate. It’s the other one that’s the problem.’
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson.
They took Owen back to their little office and produced coffee. Then Macrae sat back.
‘We’ve talked to the men,’ he said.
‘Talked to the men?’
‘Aye. About the dynamite. We’ve told them it won’t do. Now I don’t mind the odd spot of pilfering. But dynamite is different.’
‘Yes, but-’
‘Y’see, that hole in the shed was clean cut. It was done with proper tools. Now we reckon that whoever did it must have brought his tools with him. And there’s a chance that the other men might have seen them. Of course, there’s also a chance that he brought them some other time and kept them hidden. But they keep close together and there’s a possibility that one of the others may have seen something. So we put it to them.’
‘Put it to them?’
‘Aye. We said now was the time to speak up. This wasn’t a private thing, this was a matter for everyone. Everyone suffered from a thing like this and if it happened again they would suffer more, their own villages, their own people.’
‘And what did they say?’
‘They didn’t say anything. But they will.’
‘They’ve got to talk it over first, you see,’ Ferguson explained.
‘And you think it will work?’
‘Aye,’ said Macrae.
Chapter 4
In the Gardens the dancing was continuing furiously. The women had formed into a long line, their hands on the hips of the one in front of them, and were snaking about all over the place. The men had dropped back into a stationary row and were clapping the rhythm. The women danced up to them teasingly and then withdrew. Owen could see Rosa about half way down the line, plainly enjoying herself.
The dancers’ families had turned out in support. He recognized Rosa’s parents and formidable grandmother surrounded by lots of little children, themselves dressed for dancing, who must be cousins. Rosa belonged to a large extended family and to marry her was to marry the whole Greek community. Georgiades, a communal backslider, had had little choice in the matter. The marriage had been arranged; by Rosa.
Georgiades himself was nowhere to be seen. Owen began to walk round the group to greet Rosa’s family but then spotted him, beyond the dancers, among the bougainvillea, sitting on the edge of a gadwal talking to the ghaffir.
‘Lizard men!’ he was saying in appalled tones as Owen came up. ‘I wouldn’t meddle with them if I were you!’
‘Don’t worry!’ said the ghaffir fervently. ‘I won’t!’
Owen stepped back behind a bush.
‘Mind you,’ said Georgiades, ‘it could already be too late.’
‘Too late!’
‘Yes. I mean, you saw him, didn’t you?’
‘No! All I saw was his trail. I mean, I knew at once that it was a lizard man, you can tell by the marks, it’s their tail. But that’s not the same thing. I didn’t actually see him, not him himself-’
‘Well, then, you were a lucky man!’
‘I know, I know!’
‘I mean, you could so easily have seen him. It must have taken him some time to make that hole-’
‘Ah, no, it wasn’t like that. I mean, they don’t work like that. Not lizard men.’
‘They don’t?’
‘No. They don’t do it themselves, they get men to do it for them. That’s why you don’t see them. And that’s the way it was here. The wood wasn’t gnawed, was it? It was cut. If a lizard man had done it himself, it would have been gnawed. You don’t see lizard men with tools, do you?’
‘Well, no-’
‘No. He got someone to do it for him. Someone who had the tools. Then he came along afterwards, wriggled through the hole, took what he wanted and then was on his way.’
‘Well. I still think you were lucky. Because you could so easily have seen him at that point, couldn’t you?’
‘Yes, but I try to take care. I mean, that’s always the risk in a job like mine. You’ve got to be careful you don’t see too much. If you just go blundering around, you can easily walk into something, and then, bang! The next minute you’re in trouble.’
‘So what do you do?’
‘I creep. Then if you come across something, if you see something, or, more likely, hear something, like that night-’
‘So you did see him?’
‘No, no. like I said, you don’t see them. They get someone to do it for them.’
Ah, so that was the one you saw?’
‘I didn’t see anyone. But-’ the ghaffir lowered his voice-‘I knew he’d been there.’
‘Well, the hole, of course-’
‘No, no, not that.’
‘How, then?’
The ghaffir laid his finger along his nose.
‘Fair is fair, and if you take mine, I take yours. That’s fair all round, isn’t it?’
‘Depends what it is,’ said Georgiades.
But the ghaffir seemed to think he’d said enough. He picked up his gun and prepared to move away.
‘All the same, though,’ he said, with a slightly worried expression on his face, ‘it’s best not to meddle with the Lizard Man.’
Mahmoud seemed oddly uneasy Normally, although he was on the best of terms with Owen personally, he liked to keep his distance from him over legal matters. Constitutionally there was no place for the Mamur Zapt in the legal scheme of things, and Mahmoud was a stickler for constitutionality. Over this business of the Maiden, however, he seemed anxious to consult him at every turn. Owen knew that it was not because he had any doubts over the right course to pursue in terms of law. It must be something else; and Owen thought he knew what that was.
Mahmoud was not at home with this kind of case. It touched on things he knew very little about: women, for example. By this time most Egyptian men of his age would have married. Mahmoud’s father, himself a busy lawyer, had died young, however, and before he had had time to arrange that. Mahmoud had had to set about supporting his family and had immersed himself first in his studies and then in his career to the exclusion of all else. His mother broached the issue from time to time, indeed, was doing so with increasing frequency, but Mahmoud, determinedly modern, made it clear that he himself would see to the matter when the time came.
The time, however, had not so far come; and, since he had no sisters, and was, like many educated young Egyptians, distinctly prudish on sexual matters, the consequence was that he had had very little to do with women and knew very little about them. Given the way in which women were kept from any contact with men outside their own family, Owen doubted whether Mahmoud had ever spoken to a young woman of his own social standing.