There was a little silence.
‘I think I’m coming to agree with you,’ said Mahmoud, surprisingly.
‘You are?’
Zeinab looked at him with favour.
‘The trouble is,’ said Mahmoud, with a slight shrug. ‘I don’t see how it is to be done.’
‘Education,’ said Owen, ‘of women.’
‘Men,’ said Zeinab.
‘Legislation would, of course, be the answer,’ said Mahmoud. He looked at Zeinab. ‘Perhaps your father-?’
‘Suicide,’ said Zeinab firmly. ‘Political suicide. That’s how he would see it. In any case, it’s no good hoping for anything from the old guard. But perhaps the Nationalists-?’
She looked at Mahmoud.
‘Not on a thing like this,’ said Mahmoud unhappily. ‘Not yet, at any rate.’
They both looked at Owen.
‘The Government?’
‘I don’t think the Khedive-’
‘The British,’ said Zeinab, whose knowledge of the political situation, though sketchy, was realistic.
‘I don’t think we would interfere with local practice on a thing like this,’ said Owen.
‘You interfere with the women,’ said Zeinab nastily.
‘But,’ said Mahmoud, ‘it wasn’t circumcision, it was garotting.’
He and Owen were lingering over their coffee, Zeinab had departed for art galleries unknown, and Mahmoud was bringing Owen up to date with where he had got to on the Leila killing.
The key information from his point of view was that, according to the stall-holder’s wife, Leila had left the souk with a man who appeared to be known to her. Now there were not many men she could have known, or should have known, added Mahmoud primly. It was the other side of the seclusion of Islamic women.
‘They are not all like Zeinab,’ said Mahmoud, getting, perhaps, his own back.
Leila came from a poor household and did the shopping herself so she was known to such people as the stall-holders in the souk, although that did not mean that they had ever seen her face. Figure, they knew, and voice, and some of their wives had been to her house where they might have seen her unveiled; and some of the older people remembered seeing her face when she was a little girl and played with the children on the rubble heaps among the derelict houses.
‘She had a sweet nature,’ they said.
And that was the general opinion of the quarter. Timid and retiring she might have been, invisible she might have thought herself behind the long black veil, but everyone seemed to have known her. And the one thing they were all agreed on was that she was certainly not a loose woman.
‘Her?’ scoffed one of the women. ‘She was that proper she never even looked at a man.’
And yet she had been seen with one, appeared to have gone off with one.
‘Well, if she did, you can be sure there was nothing wrong with it!’ declared a woman, one of a group assembled by Um Fattouha.
‘She went with the boy,’ Mahmoud had pointed out. Smiles all round. Apparently that did not count. The Gamaliya ladies were romantics at heart.
‘They were like babes!’ they said.
‘I doubt if they ever got as far as holding hands.’
‘You all knew about it?’ said Mahmoud, surprised.
‘We weren’t born yesterday!’
‘You could see it in his face!’
‘They used to wait for each other.’
‘She was that put out one day when he didn’t come. And then when he arrived all huffing and puffing, she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Made him walk behind her.’
Which was not the way it usually was.
‘Ah, but then she felt sorry for him, didn’t she?’
‘Within about two yards!’
They all burst out laughing. And they dismissed out of hand any possibility that Suleiman could have been the attacker.
‘It’s not in him!’
Mahmoud was not so sure.
Or, at any rate, he was not ruling it out. Because if it was not Suleiman, who else could it have been?
‘However unlikely,’ he said, ‘you have to look at all the men she knew.’
And so he had come to her father.
First, though, he had scrupulously checked for others. Had she uncles? Cousins?
‘Not up here,’ they said. ‘Back in the village, maybe. But they never come up here.’
‘Sometimes they do,’ someone objected, ‘I remember a cousin once.’
‘Ah, but he was up here to do his corvee. He didn’t come up to see them especially.’
Men from the village did drop in from time to time if they happened to be in Cairo. Usually it was when they came up to do their annual duties maintaining the Nile banks and dams. It wasn’t usually the same person, however, just whoever happened to be up that year from the village, bringing the villagers’ greetings and a few presents.
‘There were no regular visitors?’
Not that they remembered.
Friends? What about other friends?
‘Friends?’ said one of the women. ‘That old bastard never had any!’
‘I’m not so sure about that,’ said Owen, sipping his coffee. ‘What about Fatima’s husband? He and Ali Khedri seem to hang around together.’
‘I asked about him,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Fatima said that in fact they weren’t very close.’
‘Close enough for them to take Leila in when her father threw her out,’ said Owen.
‘That was her doing, not his. She had known Leila since she was a child. But the two men hadn’t been very close. It was only in the past year that they’d been getting together. She rather agreed with the others: Ali Khedri didn’t have friends.
‘Not even among the water-carriers?’
‘Apparently not.’
‘They’re a tight-knit group over in the Gamaliya,’ said Owen.
‘Yes, but the others don’t like him. They say he’s too bitter.’ A surely devil,’ one of the women had called him.
‘He was better before his wife died.’
‘She was a saint; and Leila took after her.’
‘Never a cross word!’
‘He could have done with a few. Particularly after his wife died. The way he treated that girl!’
‘Yes, but he treated everyone like that.’
‘It got so that people didn’t like going to his house.’
‘What about when people did go to his house?’ asked Mahmoud. ‘Did they see Leila?’
‘They wouldn’t have done. He was very strict. He always used to send her out. They only had the one room so she used to have to go out into the yard.’
‘There was no one, then, who might have had his eye on her?’
‘They didn’t get the chance.’
‘Omar Fayoum?’
The women looked at each other.
‘I don’t know how he came to light on her. Maybe he’d seen her about in the streets. Bringing her father’s food. I’ll bet he liked that! Thought that was the kind of girl he wanted!’
Patiently Mahmoud had worked through all the men she might have known. And in the end he was left with the father.
‘He had just quarrelled with her,’ Mahmoud pointed out. ‘Badly enough to throw her out of his house. He had built a lot on her. And then it had all collapsed. He blamed her.’
‘Well, yes, but-’
‘I know. But most murders occur within the family. And this wasn’t a particularly good family Anyway, I checked his movements that night. Fatima had gone to see him when Leila had not come back, and she had found him in. We know that because there are independent witnesses. They heard them quarrelling. But that was probably after the assault. What about earlier in the evening?’
Mahmoud had asked Ali Khedri that.
‘What business is it of yours?’ Ali Khedri had said truculently.
Mahmoud had told him.
Grudgingly Ali Khedri had told him that he had finished his water-carrying rounds early that day and gone to help Omar
Fayoum’s driver to unharness the horse. They had stayed for a while, chatting.
‘How long?’ asked Mahmoud.
‘How do I know?’
About a couple of hours, he had finally acknowledged.
‘Who was there?’
Omar Fayoum, the cart driver, Ahmed Uthman and one or two others.