Owen was silent for a moment, then shrugged.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘in a way that’s quite helpful for me at any rate. Any chance that we could publish the findings?’
‘Why not?’ said Mahmoud.
‘It would help me if we could. It would knock all the daft “Myth of the Maiden” nonsense on the head. And with the Cut coming up so soon-’
‘I don’t see why not,’ said Mahmoud. ‘I’d have to make it clear that they were preliminary findings, of course.’
‘They’re not likely to be altered, though, are they?’
‘I wouldn’t have thought so. Only if something new comes up. Or if they find anything unusual. Actually,’ said Mahmoud, ‘there is something unusual. Mildly so. Her age. Circumcision usually takes place at thirteen, or even younger. This girl was about twenty.’
‘That’s not going to affect anything, though, is it?’
‘No. I just find it puzzling, that’s all.’
‘A late marriage, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps. At any rate it should help us to make an identification.’
Are you going to do anything about it?’ asked Owen. ‘When you’ve found out who it was?’
‘Probably not. It’s not illegal.’
‘I know, but-’
‘Yes. I know.’
It was an issue that the Parquet generally fought shy of. Charges of some sort could certainly have been brought but the case would probably have gone to the Native Courts, where it might well have been thrown out. The Native Courts were the most traditional of the courts and unlikely to have any doubts about the practice itself. As for the consequences, while they were undesirable and unfortunate, they were also, one might say, in the natural way of things. The practice was so deeply embedded in social custom that it was, besides, something of a political hot potato. Even the Nationalists steered clear of it.
‘It’s not illegal,’ Mahmoud repeated.
That for him was usually decisive. He had been trained in the French School of Law and had a thoroughly French frame of mind. A thing was either legal or it was not. If it was legal, then it was no concern of lawyers. If it was illegal, then that had to be spelled out.
All the same, Owen could see that he was not happy.
The release of the findings had the desired effect. Public interest in the Maiden disappeared entirely. No one, after all, cared much about a woman dying. Certainly, of natural causes.
The next morning Owen presented himself at the Department of Irrigation. When he learned what Owen wanted, the clerk threw up his hands.
‘Effendi,’ he said tragically, ‘there is only I.’
Owen looked round the office.
‘There is not,’ he said. ‘There are Yussef and Ali and Selim and Abdul. Not to mention the man who has gone out to make the tea.’
‘But, Effendi-’
‘As well as the people in the next office. And the one after that. And what about-?’
‘Effendi, we are as grains of gold in a desert of sand!’
‘I’m sure you are. But how about getting on with-’
‘Does the Effendi want all the names?’ asked the clerk despondently.
‘Certainly.’
‘But surely only of those fine men who are on the permanent strength?’
‘I want the names of all those who are working on the barrage at the moment.’
‘But, Effendi, they are legion!’
‘How legion are they?’
The clerk consulted his ledger.
‘At this time of year, Effendi,’ he said impressively, ‘sixteen thousand.’
‘Not working on the barrage at the moment, there aren’t. About two hundred, I’d say.’
‘But, Effendi, they are for the most part worthless fellows, mere villagers, who come up here for the Inundation, work for a few weeks and then return to the dreadful place from where they came!’
‘They are the ones I am particularly interested in. First, I’d like disciplinary cases-’
‘But, Effendi, they are all unruly, mere savages-’
‘Then injuries.’
‘But, Effendi, what does it signify if a few are injured? When we think of the general good? If a few fall by the wayside or into the river?’
‘And the dismissals.’
‘Effendi, at the end of the Inundation they are all dismissed, and a good thing too-’
‘The ones who are dismissed before the end.’
‘But, Effendi, why bother about the few whom Macrae Effendi and Ferguson Effendi have shrewdly seen have got it coming and wisely advanced the hour?’
‘Just see I get the names tomorrow,’ said Owen.
When Owen went into his office the next day, Nikos, his official clerk, had the list in front of him. Owen was taken aback by the remarkable burst of productivity. Then he saw the reason. The list had only five names.
‘No dismissals, two injuries, minor, the rest, wages docked for being late,’ said Nikos. ‘That what you wanted?’
Owen frowned.
‘I want to know first if it is true,’ he said.
Nikos nodded.
‘I’ll check,’ he said.
‘And while you’re doing that, can you look a bit more widely?’
‘What for?’
‘Possible reasons for a grudge. I’m after motive.’
Nikos was looking through the list.
‘They’re all Corvee men,’ he said. ‘You can tell by the payroll numbers.’
‘They will be at this time of year. It’s the height of the Inundation.’
‘I was just wondering if that could be anything to do with it.’
The Corvee was the name given to the system by which the Government had traditionally summoned up labour each year to maintain the river banks and watch the dams when the Nile rose. In the past the system had been full of abuses. Virtually every able-bodied man between fifteen and fifty had been called up and obliged to work unpaid for a substantial part of the year away from his own land. Worse, the great Pashas, or noblemen, had frequently contrived to divert them to work on their own estates, flogging them if they refused. Anyone then might well have had a grudge against the system.
But not now. When the British had come they had abolished the Corvee, at least in its old form. Now the work was voluntary, paid, and for a shorter period. And the Pashas’ abuses were twenty years in the past. Surely, thought Owen, no one could harbour a grudge for so long? Even in Egypt, where grudges were sometimes nourished for generations.
When Owen entered the Gardens he experienced a mild shock. They were covered with water. For a moment he thought that something must have gone wrong at the regulator and the canal overflowed. But then he realized. This was Thursday and watering day throughout the city.
Every Thursday water was pumped up out of the river and distributed through the city in pipelines to parks and public gardens, where it was drawn off locally into systems of raised earth ditches, called gadwals.
That was what had happened here. The Gardens looked like a vast shallow lake out of which the trees and shrubs jutted incongruously. In the water between them hundreds of birds were playing. Palm doves crouched and crooned. Hoopoes hesitated inhibitedly like bathers on an English beach. Bulbuls and sparrows, not at all inhibited, splashed water over their backs in a furious spray. Brightly-coloured bee-eaters, never still, swerved and dived. Buff-backed herons stalked and stabbed. There were even some green parakeets, released deliberately from Giza Zoo to see if they would breed wild.
Owen hesitated a moment, wondering how to cross the Gardens and get to the regulator dry. Across the water he saw the gardener, up to his ankles and bent over a gadwal, and made a gesture of inquiry. The gardener pointed to a path leading up into the trees. It ran along the slight crest beside the valley he’d walked through previously and took him nearly to the regulator.
At the regulator things were quieter. A solitary cart had been backed up to the breach and from its rear men were lowering sandbags precisely into position with a rope and pulley. Ferguson was lying on his front peering down into the breach and directing proceedings. He stood up when he saw Owen coming.