The Girl in the Nile (15 page)

“Shut up!” said Georgiades, pressing the fiki back against the wall. He peered in the man’s face. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

There were shouts now from all sides. Some men at the back of the crowd tried to force their way forward. The crowd surged alarmingly. The policemen fingered their rifles.

“Enough!”

Owen stepped forward and held up his hand.

“Enough! This wrong will be righted. But that is for the Mamur Zapt and not for you. Go back to the Place of Tombs. My men will come with you. We will search together until the body is found and restored to its rightful place.”

This was well received but no one actually moved. Owen pushed his way into the crowd.

“I will lead you!” he shouted.

The crowd opened up and he headed for the gate. The sheikh fell in behind him.

“To the Place of Tombs!” shouted Georgiades, thrusting with his shoulders. The constables joined in enthusiastically. Gradually the crowd began to move.

Outside the gates they fell into a more or less orderly procession, Owen at their head. When they got to the Place of Tombs he would find a way of breaking them up. If they could find the body, that would be fine. He would assure them that the perpetrators would be punished and they would all go home happily.

It should not be too difficult to find the body. It must have been dumped somewhere nearby.

When he looked in the tomb he had not really noticed the body was missing. He had seen the arms and thought that was that. He had presumed the body was somewhere in the background.

God! Another body going missing! He’d thought for a moment that the fates had it in for him. But this, surely, was straightforward.

He hoped.

At this time of day, late in the morning, there was no shade in the Place of Tombs for anyone, apart from those underground. The sun shone down with a bright, hard glare and was reflected off the stonework of the tombs. In the space between the tombs the heat was in the 130’s.

This helped proceedings enormously. The crowd, which had at first congregated expectantly round the tomb, evidently hoping that the Mamur Zapt would conjure the girl, Lazarus-like, from the dead, wilted as the miracle continued to be deferred.

Weaker spirits spread out quickly in search not so much of the body as of shade. With the sun now almost directly overhead, the shadows cast by the tombs were thin and soon crowded. Stronger, or possibly more curious, spirits who deferred dispersal were obliged to seek further out. Thus in a short time the crowd dwindled to manageable proportions.

Georgiades, eager as always to get somebody else to do the work, organized those who remained into little groups which began to explore the area systematically. This thinned the crowd even further.

Where there was space to move, Owen set the constables to work. He expected to find the girl’s body dumped unceremoniously in some gap between the tombs, not very far away, perhaps tucked under some slanting tombstone. The arms runners would not, he thought, have gone far out of their way to dispose of it.

The sheikh and the girl’s father looked at him expectantly. They obviously hoped for more.

Owen couldn’t think for the moment what more there was to be done, so he climbed up on an old ruined tombstone to survey the scene.

The Place of Tombs was a vast necropolis which over the centuries had spread until it occupied the space virtually to the horizon, where the light quavered in continuing mirages. You could date the different parts of the cemetery not just by the state of disrepair or ruination of the tombs but also by their style: the tombs of the Mamelukes often had cupolas raised over them painted blue and with golden lettering.

Here, where Ali Marwash’s family were buried, and where he hoped to be buried himself—he had already purchased the ground and designed the tomb—were humbler brick tombs decorated only by upright headstones with turbans carved at the top of them. These were the graves of the middling to well-to-do folks. Poorer people had simple pottery shells. The poorest, of course, had nothing.

Apart from the dust devils and heat spirals flitting over the tombs, there was little to see. Owen scrutinized the area carefully to satisfy the sheikh and Ali Marwash but didn’t really expect to see anything significant. The main purpose of being up there was to keep an eye on the constables, who might otherwise have joined the general search for shade.

They were not having much luck with their search. Owen had expected to find the girl’s body relatively quickly. Surely the arms runners wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of taking the body away with them?

But as time went by and no body was found, that increasingly appeared to be what they had done.

The constables, even with Owen’s eye on them, were definitely lagging. He saw a suspicious human gap, got down from his vantage point and went over. The constable was, as he had expected, sitting down.

“By God, it is hot!” said the offender, looking up at him.

“By God, it will be hotter for you if you do not soon get on your feet!” said Owen.

The man grinned and rejoined the searching. Owen had some sympathy. He had seen the sweat running down the man’s face, could feel it running down his own.

Back near the tomb Georgiades was also sitting down. He had taken out a handkerchief and was mopping his neck.

“Why go to hell when you can have it here?” he said to Owen, before rising to his feet and shambling off.

Georgiades was on a patrol of his own, sniffing round the tombs. Owen let him carry on. The Greek usually knew what he was doing.

Owen, too, felt like sitting down. The sheikh and Ali Marwash
had
sat down. He went over to talk to them, using it as a pretext to squat for a moment himself.

“Alas!” he said to Ali Marwash. “It begins to look as if those evil men have taken your daughter’s body further afield than I had thought.”

“Why should they go to the trouble?” asked the sheikh.

Why indeed? thought Owen. A body was surely as conspicious as a load of arms.

Georgiades came and hovered. When Owen stood up, he turned and walked quietly away. Owen walked back casually in the general direction of the girl’s tomb. Georgiades suddenly appeared beside him.

“Want to come and look?” he asked.

He led Owen to a tomb some distance away from where they had found the arms cache. It was a big square family tomb and had obviously been built some years ago, for the sand had drifted halfway up the sides. The headstones on top drooped towards each other.

“Old grave, new work,” said Georgiades.

He took Owen round to the entrance. It looked intact. The roofing stones were still in position over the entrance house and sand was piled over the top.

But there was something odd about it. It didn’t quite fit the pattern of drift. And there, to one side, were distinct spade marks, still not yet filled by the drifting sand.

Owen stood looking at it.

“Do you want me to open it?” asked Georgiades.

Some way across the cemetery a little party of men, supposed to be searching, came to a stop and stood for a moment talking. One or two of them looked idly in Owen’s direction. Beyond them he could see another party. And, just coming into sight were some constables scanning the ground halfheartedly.

“No,” he said.

They came back just before it grew dark. The vast cemetery was deserted. Only in the far distance was there any movement, a woman walking home between the tombs, a great water pot on her head.

In the pockets of air between the tombs it was still hot, but the glare had gone out of the sun and the soft evening light was easy on the eyes.

They had come properly equipped with spades and the wooden half-baskets used in Egypt for scooping and carrying soil. It would not take them long. And this time there would be no crowds of onlookers to interfere.

He ordered the men to start work.

They quickly scraped the sand from the roofstones and lifted them off. One of the smaller men climbed into the entrance house and wrestled away the large stone which blocked the entrance to the main chamber. Somebody handed him down a lamp. He held it out into the tomb and peered inside.

But already Owen knew. As the stone was pulled away from the entrance the smell of new corruption reached up to him.

The man with the lamp pulled the folds of his galabeah over his nose and mouth. Then he looked again.

He gave a startled exclamation and jumped back. In a second he came scrambling up out of the entrance house.

“Effendi!” he said, his eyes wide open with shock. “Effendi!”

“What is it?”

The man could hardly speak for a moment.

“Effendi!” he said at last. “Effendi! Not one but—two!”

Owen went down himself, holding a handkerchief over his face. It took a little while for his eyes to get used to the flickering shadows cast by the lamp. Besides, his vision was impeded by something.

Eventually he made out what it was. A girl’s body, not lying on its right side and supported on bricks as was proper, but cast higgledy-piggledy across the floor of the tomb.

And then, further away, he saw the other thing that had shocked the man. It was another body, clearly recent, also thrown in anyhow, and also of a girl.

This body had not even been prepared for interment. It was still in its ordinary workaday clothes. The clothes were deeply stained with ugly dark patches but had not yet had time to rot away and he could see what they were.

In the half light it was hard to tell, but—

“Shintiyan,” he said. “She’s wearing shintiyan.”

“Color?” asked Georgiades.

“But, laddie, I’m busy!” protested the pathologist.

Owen had caught the eminent man just as he was going to lunch. Lunch was important to Cairns-Grant and he approached it with the single-minded devotion which had made the Cairo forensic laboratory, despite its lack of size and facilities, one of the leaders in its field. It was also, of course, that it had plenty of practice.

“Better even than Chicago,” Cairns-Grant was wont to say fondly. Cairo, he was prone to point out to visiting Americans, was the murder capital of the world, with a higher rate of homicide than any other major city. And he regarded Owen with considerable affections for what he considered his contribution to this desirable state of affairs.

“A brief word!” pleaded Owen.

Cairns-Grant looked at his watch.

“I was going to the Club,” he said. “Would you care to join me?”

Owen sometimes went to the Sporting Club himself for lunch, but that was only if he was in that part of the city. Cairns-Grant went every day. It was about half an hour’s drive in an arabeah from the Government Laboratories but Cairns-Grant justified it on the grounds that in the middle of the day, considering the nature of the work, it was too hot to continue working. “They thaw,” he explained, “so quickly,” and no one felt drawn to explore the matter further.

Cairns-Grant’s lunchtime conversations tended to be full of this kind of grisly detail and today was no exception.

“Ye see,” he said, “when a body is left long in water, or buried in damp ground, it changes. Human fat, which is normally semifluid, is converted into firm fat. Like mutton suet,” he explained kindly.

Mutton was on the menu.

“No, thanks,” Owen said to the waiter. “I’ll have fish.”

“Oh, there you are,” said a voice. “I was hoping to catch you.”

Owen looked up. It was Garvin, an old card-playing crony of Cairns-Grant’s.

“Mind if I join you?”

“Do.” The waiter rushed to lay another place. “I was just explaining to young Owen here about adipocere.”

“Adipocere?”

“Human fat,” said Cairns-Grant, “in dead bodies.”

“Oh,” said Garvin, studying the menu.

“It’s to do with the body he’s just brought in. He’s a guid lad,” said Cairns-Grant fondly. “He brings me in a lot of cases.”

“Mutton, I think,” said Garvin, closing the menu with a snap. “What’s this one?”

“A lady who’s been in the river. Not for very long, I’d say, judging by the limited adipocere. But definitely long enough to start the process. Of course, it depends on temperature to some extent. Now up here in Cairo—”

Cairns-Grant went happily on.

“What did she die of?” asked Garvin when Cairns-Grant paused for a moment to draw breath.

“I was just telling you. You see, the hyoid—that’s the small bone at the base of the tongue—was fractured in two places, one at the top of the left horn, the other where the right horn joined the body. The point is,” said Cairns-Grant, “that there was some adipocere—limited, mind—in the fractured ends of the hyoid.”

“Which means?” said Garvin.

Cairns-Grant was slightly taken aback.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? The fracturing took place before immersion in the water. Haven’t I made myself clear?” he said worriedly.

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” Owen hastily reassured him. “Only—”

“You see,” Cairns-Grant explained to Garvin, “there’s often some degree of fracturing in the bodies we get. Especially those”—he gave Owen a proud glance—“we get from young Owen.”

“So what you’re saying,” said Owen, “is that the fracturing took place while she was still on board?”

“On board?” said Garvin.

“Aye,” said Cairns-Grant.

“Any idea what caused it?”

“Didn’t ye look?” said Cairns-Grant, surprised.

“Not closely.”

“Closely enough, I daresay,” said Cairns-Grant. “Well, ye’re right to be cautious ahead of the pathologist’s report. If only more of your ilk would do the same. Rushing to conclusions ahead of the evidence! That’s often the problem.”

“So what did she die of?” asked Garvin.

“Oh, she was garotted. The cord was still around the neck.”

“Garotted!” said Owen.

“Oh, garotted,” said Garvin indifferently. “We get plenty of those. How do you come to be involved?” he asked Owen.

Garotting might be a staple of ordinary police work but it was not something that Owen, as Political Officer, was normally concerned with.

“It’s that Sekhmet case. You remember, the girl on the dahabeeyah—Narouz’s dahabeeyah.”

Garvin put down his knife and fork.

“Garotte!” he said. “I don’t like the sound of that! We wouldn’t want
that
to come out!”

“Garotte!” said Paul, perturbed. “This is really very awkward. We’re just coming up to the final session, with any luck. The Agreement’s due to be signed next week. After that we’ll be home and dry.”

“Garotte!” whispered Zeinab. “That is horrible!”

She had a little weep. Owen put his arm around her. She let it rest there.

Suddenly she threw it off.

“What are you going to do about it?” she demanded.

“Well, I’m—”

“That’s not enough! Get it out of them!”

“Get what out of who?”

“The truth. Someone must know. The Rais, the eunuch, Narouz—”

“I’m trying to get it out of them.”

“You’re not. You’re too soft, too nice, too gentle. Oh, I love you”—Owen thought this at least was improvement— “but you are too weak.” He changed his mind. “This is Egypt.”

“What exactly did you have in mind? Amputation?”

“That will do for a start,” said Zeinab.

“Right!” Owen sprang to his feet. “Limbs, testicles and entrails! On the table tomorrow morning!”

He made to start for the door.

Zeinab looked at him uncertainly.

“Garotte!” said Prince Narouz, looking shaken. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“That’s awful!” The Prince shook his head. “Awful!”

“Yes.”

“You’re absolutely certain?” he asked again. “I mean, there’s no possibility—”

“The cord was round her neck.”

The Prince winced.

“That’s awful!” he said again. “Awful!”