The Girl in the Nile (7 page)

“Could you tell me first,” said Mahmoud, “why you were making an expedition to Luxor?”

“I was
not
making an expedition to Luxor. That makes me sound like your English tomb-robbers. I was merely making a boring journey by river and Luxor happened to be at the end of it.”

“What, then, was the purpose of your boring journey?” The Prince, unexpectedly, was silent for a moment.

“I was accompanying my nephew,” he said then.

“The Prince Fahid?”

“Exactly.”

“And what was the purpose of Prince Fahid’s journey?”

“To add to his knowledge. He is reaching the age, you see, when he will be expected to play a larger part in public affairs. So we are trying to introduce him to the larger world. He has not even seen yet all the Khedivial estates. There is one not far from Luxor. That is what we went to see.”

“You did not stay there very long.”

“Quite long enough. Once seen, better quickly forgotten. I believe my father hoped we would stay longer. But Fahid is, like myself, someone on whom the attractions of the desert quickly pall.”

“Would it be possible for us to talk to the Prince?”

“I thought you might like to see him.” Narouz clapped his hands. A servant came in. “Ask the Prince Fahid to come this way, will you? This, too,” he said confidingly to Mahmoud and Owen, “will add to his experience.”

A young boy came into the room. He looked inquiringly at Narouz and then came across to the two men, bowed and shook hands.

“More familiar,” said Narouz, slightly crossly. “And Captain Owen is British. Just shake hands.”

The boy was not in the least off-put. He just stood there smiling easily.

He was, Owen judged, about fourteen, a little below medium height and slim, although already showing signs of broadening out like his uncle. His face was delicate, almost girlish, with long eyelashes and large brown eyes.

He answered Mahmoud’s questions readily enough. They had been to the estate, yes. No, they hadn’t stayed long—a little amused glance at Narouz here. The journey had been interesting, yes. Quite, that was. He would have preferred a motorboat. His uncle was going to take him on one when they next went to Cannes.

Luxor? Like most Egyptians, he took the past for granted and was not particularly interested in it. The river? Was merely the river. The landscape, familiar since childhood, was not worthy of remark. There was something practical, matter-of-fact about the boy. If the dahabeeyah had had an engine room Owen could have imagined him poking around happily in it. He was not one for admiring the sunset.

The night the girl had disappeared; he remembered it well. A serious look came over his face. They had been about to have dinner. It was an important occasion because his uncle was to have initiated him into the mysteries of handling langoustines. When the girl hadn’t come down, his uncle had been angry and sent the eunuch up. They had started without her. And then, of course, the eunuch had returned.

“You see,” said Narouz, after Fahid had shaken hands all round and departed, “he’s very inexperienced. They spend too long in the harem these days.”

“He’s surely not still—”

“Of course not. He’s been out for some time. He has private tutors. English, French and Italian. But I sometimes think they are just as bad.”

The harem. Would it be possible to speak with the ladies of the harem, Mahmoud asked diffidently. They had after all been on board.

The Prince’s face clouded over.

“I don’t know about that,” he said doubtfully. Then his face cleared. “Why not?” he said enthusiastically. “It will be something different for them.”

He summoned the ladies of the harem. They appeared, wrapped like their less exalted sisters from head to foot in black, and ostensibly reluctantly. Over their veils, though, their eyes sparkled.

They answered Mahmoud’s questions demurely and vacuously.

“Oh, come on!” said the Prince crossly, getting bored. “Speak up!”

They had been having dinner separately in the harem quarters, as they always did, the night that it happened. No, they hadn’t been aware of anything untoward, not until, much later, the eunuch had come down and searched below deck inch by inch from bows to stern. That had been rather exciting and they were prepared to recount it at considerable length until Narouz intervened and told them to shut up.

Mahmoud asked them about the girl. The sparkle went out of their eyes, the veils, which had been slipping, came up. They had, alas, hardly spoken to her.

“Which is not surprising,” said Narouz, returning after chivvying them out. “It would hardly be proper for them to speak to such women. Though it might give them ideas,” he added wistfully.

“Would that also be true of Leila?” asked Mahmoud.

The Prince looked at him quickly.

“Why do you ask?”

“You said ‘such women,’ I wondered if Leila was the same sort of women as the other two.”

“They were foreign, of course.”

“Yes, and that puzzles me. I can see how they came to be with you. But Leila was not foreign and it is unusual for one of our women to do things like that. I wondered how it came about?”

“It is unusual, yes, but not so out of the common. Especially if the Khedive wishes.”

“Did the Khedive wish?”

“I was thinking of myself.”

“But for you to wish, you must have already known her. How did you come across her in the first place?”

“In the first place? I hardly remember.”

“In the second place, then,” said Mahmoud quietly, recognizing that he was being fenced with. “For you certainly knew her.”

Again the sharp glance from the Prince.

“She had been about the Court.”

“Come!” said Mahmoud, a trifle wearily. “About the Court?”

“Not in the strict sense, of course. My father doesn’t have that sort of thing. Not in public.”

“You met her at the Palace?”

“Not exactly at the Palace.”

“Where, then?”

“About.”

“These things are important, Prince.”

“Why are they important?”

“We need to know her identity.”

The Prince rubbed his chin. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. I thought you would.”

“Well, then?”

“This is the embarrassing part. I don’t know.”

“Come!”

“I know you don’t believe me but it’s true. I don’t even know her name. Well, no, that’s not true. Her name was Leila. But that is all I know. I do not know her family.”

“Are you sure, Prince?”

“She did not wish me to know her family. I used to tease her about it. ‘Little Miss No-Name from Nowhere.’ She would not say. She was, I think,” said the Prince, “ashamed.”

“Where did you meet her?”

“At a play. I do not ordinarily go to Egyptian plays. I find them unredeemingly turgid. This one, I was assured, was different. It was by a modern playwright. I went in the belief that I was encouraging a modern renaissance of the Egyptian theater. I was,” said the Prince, “horribly mistaken. The play was as turgid as ever. And, what was worse, ridiculously radical.”

“The girl?”

“I met her afterwards, backstage. There was a party. Naturally I had been invited. Foolishly I went, to encourage, as I say, the theater. It was awful. The one interesting thing was the girl. I met her again afterwards. Several times. And then I thought of inviting her to accompany me on this foolish expedition.”

“Could you tell me the name of the play?”

“
New Roses in the Garden
.” The Prince shuddered. “Never again. The avant-garde is not for me. Not in the theater anyway.” He looked at his watch.

“Perhaps we can continue some other time,” said Mahmoud, rising dutifully.

“Of course. Of course.”

He accompanied them to the door. At the door he hesitated. “You have not,” he said diffidently, “not yet found the body?”

“I am afraid not.”

“No? Well, I expect you will.”

He hesitated again and then suddenly brightened.

“Of course,” he said, “if you don’t…Well, there ceases to be a problem, doesn’t there? No body, no crime.”

No problem?” said Zeinab, outraged. “The girl is dead, isn’t she?”

“We can’t be sure of that,” said Owen cautiously.

“No? You think she jumped off the top of that boat and swam to the shore?”

“Well, in principle she could have done—”

“Egyptian girls,” said Zeinab haughtily, “do not swim.” Owen was beginning to wish he hadn’t told her.

“In any case,” he said, “Narouz is wrong. Just because there isn’t a body, that doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a case. A potential crime has been reported. The report itself is sufficient to trigger things. An investigation has been started and it will continue until, well, the file is closed. It has become a bureaucratic matter now.”

“There are times,” said Zeinab, “when you sound boringly cold-blooded.”

“The investigation will continue,” Owen contented himself with saying.

“Oh, good.” Zeinab brooded awhile. Then she said, “It will continue, yes, but will it get anywhere?”

“We’ve only just started,” said Owen defensively.

“You haven’t got very far yet,” Zeinab pointed out.

“It’s a difficult case.”

“That is because you started in the wrong place. With the body, not with Leila.”

“We don’t know anything about Leila yet.”

“That’s just what I’m saying. You ought to find out about her. What sort of girl she was, how she came to do something like this—”

“Something like
what
?” asked Owen, exasperated. “It’s not what she’s done, it’s what’s been done to her.”

“How did she come to be on the dahabeeyah?” demanded Zeinab. “That’s not a thing a normal Egyptian girl would have done. Even I wouldn’t have done a thing like that!”

“We’ll try to find out. We
are
trying to find out. Only—”

“What was the name of that play?” demanded Zeinab, disregarding his patter. “The one Narouz met her at?”

“
New Roses in the Garden
. Pretty dreadful, too, according to Narouz.”

“But I know that play,” said Zeinab. “It’s Gamal’s latest. We received an invitation.”

“Did we?”

“Yes. You didn’t go.”

Owen enjoyed Zeinab’s artistic friends. And he liked Gamal, whose acquaintance he had first made when working on one of his earliest cases as Mamur Zapt. At the time Gamal had written a number of plays but none of them had yet actually been produced. Since then several had reached the boards. The audiences, though, had been confined to the especially perceptive.

“It would have been the opening night,” said Zeinab. “I couldn’t go, so I went to the second night. You couldn’t go either. You were down in Minya Province running after that Gypsy girl.”

“No I wasn’t!”

This was an old charge. Quite unjustified.

“While I was left in Cairo. Alone,” said Zeinab, unforgiving.

“This is beside the point.”

“No it isn’t. Because if you had not been down in Minya chasing that Gypsy woman you would have been at the theater. And then you would have met Leila. So,” said Zeinab, “it’s all your fault.”

Owen was silenced for a moment. Then he recovered.

“So it is. You’re right. If I had not been chasing that Gypsy woman I could have gone to the party and chased Leila.”

“You will not deflect me,” said Zeinab, “with your perverse remarks. I intend to find out whether she was there that night and who Leila was.”

Mahmoud, adopting more orthodox procedures, was also trying to establish Leila’s identity.

“So,” he was saying to the Prince’s chauffeur as Owen arrived, “you picked the two girls up from the salon and took them to the river at Beni Suef?”

“If that’s what they say, yes.”

“It’s not what they say, it’s what you say,” said Mahmoud sternly.

The man shrugged, confident in the power of the Prince to protect, at least against the Parquet. A confidence which Mahmoud had anticipated and which he had invited Owen along to undermine.

“This is the Mamur Zapt,” he said. “Be careful how you answer.”

The man flinched slightly.

“I shall answer as I please,” he said, but less boldly. Something of the Mamur Zapt’s old aura still clung to the post. To it was added a certain unpredictability these days because of its British incumbency.

“You picked the two girls up?” Mahmoud repeated.

“Yes.”

“That is better. And now you are speaking with your own voice. Let us keep it that way. You took them to the river at Beni Suef?”

“Yes.”

“Good. And there you waited till the dahabeeyah came in. At which point you put the women on board. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“But,” pursued Mahmoud, “there were three women, were there not?”

“If you say so.”

“I would like to hear you say so. With your own voice.”

“Three women, then,” said the chauffeur.

“So where did this other woman come from?”

The man hesitated.

“Tell us the truth,” said Owen, speaking for the first time. “And remember that we may already know it. Remember, too, that we do not have to ask you here. I may take you back to the Bab el Khalk and ask you.”

“I picked her up too,” said the chauffeur.

“Of course. And where did you pick her up? Not from the salon, was it?”

“No. I had picked her up first, before going to the salon. She was waiting for me.”

“And waiting for you where?”

“I was to pick her up by the Souk Al-Gadira.”

“
By
the Souk Al-Gadira? Did you not pick her up from a house?”

“No, effendi”—the chauffeur was being polite now—“the souk there is where four roads meet. The streets are narrow and twist and turn and it is not advisable to take a car up them. Not a car like this one.”

There was a note of reverence in the chauffeur’s voice. All the time he talked he kept his hand on the bonnet, partly for reassurance—he was less confident than he seemed—and partly as a caress.

“So where did you meet?”

“At the junction of the Sharia el Garb with the Sharia el Hakim. I was told she would be waiting for me.”

“Who told you?”

The chauffeur looked very unhappy.

“Effendi,” he whispered, “I—I do not think I should say.”

The Prince, then.

“Had you been to the spot before?”

Eventually they brought him to admit that he had either collected the girl from or returned the girl to the spot on several occasions over the last two months.

“And did you ever go with the girl to her house? Think before you speak.”

Never. The chauffeur swore on the Book. He had always delivered her to the same spot. Always. He had stayed in the car. She had never asked him to accompany her home. He would have been reluctant to accede if she had. Who knew what might befall the car if left unattended? “Effendi,” said the chauffeur earnestly, “there are bad men abroad.” Worst; there were small boys. It was clear that, for the chauffeur at least, cars had priority over women.

The chauffeur, then, had no idea where the girl lived? He had not. He was prepared to swear it on the Book.

Nevertheless, Owen thought he might be speaking the truth.

Mahmoud tried one last way. Had the chauffeur ever picked up the Prince from the neighborhood? Or delivered him to a house in that vicinity? He stopped the chauffeur wearily before he got to the Book.

Owen went down to the souk himself. The man he was looking for, a Greek, was sitting at a table outside a café, deep in conversation with three Arabs. From time to time, almost absentmindedly, he reached into his pocket and produced a sweet, which he gave to any small boy who happened to be near. There were, naturally, quite a lot of small boys near.

The Greek was deep in a dramatic tale of misadventure.

“And then, by God, it pulled out to miss a donkey and I looked, lo, and it was coming straight towards me! I threw myself against the wall and prayed. And God must have heard my prayers, for it passed by me leaving me unharmed.”

“God is great!” said the rapt audience.

“Unharmed,” said the Greek, “but not untouched. For as it passed, it reached out and caught my sleeve and rent it. And I stumbled and would have fallen had it not been for the wall.”

“God is indeed merciful!”

“He is indeed!” agreed the Greek.

“Such things ought not to be,” said one of his hearers. “That is true. And do you know what I believe to be at the root of the problem?”

His listeners shook their heads.

“Speed,” declared the Greek. “That’s what it is. People are trying to go too fast.”

“True. Oh, very true.”

“It is the curse of the age.”

“What is wrong with donkeys?” asked one of the men. “That’s what I say. God put man in the world. He put donkeys in the world. But he did not put cars!”

“That is true,” said his hearers, impressed. They volunteered their own embroiderings of the theme.

The Greek could not, however, put the incident out of his mind.

“It was a mighty car,” he said, “and painted green.”

“Green?” said one of the small boys, all of whom had been following the conversation as closely as the men.

“Yes. And that is not right, either. For green is the color of the Prophet and—”

The small boy, however, was not interested.

“I have seen a green car,” he said. “It comes down here.”

“What sort of car?”

The boy described it.

“The very car!” declared the Greek. He slipped the boy two large boiled sweets and turned to his friends across the table.

“Be warned!” he said. “Lest you, too, be crushed and defiled! Guard your footsteps! Look over your shoulder!” Etcetera, etcetera. His hearers enjoyed every minute of it. Cairenes liked a good alarm.

The Greek, satisfied with the effect of his story, rose from his seat, shook hands all round and prepared to depart. At the last moment he caught sight of Owen, who had taken up position at an adjoining table, and raised hands to heaven. “My friend!” he declared. “And I had not seen you!” Owen rose to greet him and they embraced like long-lost brothers. The Greek was persuaded—needed no persuasion, really—to sit down. More coffee was called for. The Greek’s friends at his previous table watched benignly; and the phalanx of small boys switched support.

The Greek continued to feed them with sweets. And then, after he and Owen had been talking for some while, he crooked his finger and called over the boy who had seen the car.

“My friend has in interest in our car,” he said. The small boy swelled with the pride of implied shared possession.

“It is a good car,” he said.

“Sadly, though—and this is the way of the world as you will find out when you grow up—my friend is less interested in the car itself than in some of the people it carries. One in particular.” He winked at the boy. “Did not the car, when it stopped here, pick up a fine young woman?”

“I don’t know about fine,” said the boy. “It picked up Leila.”

“There!” said the Greek to Owen. “I knew it! And he even knows her name!”

“Leila Sekhmet,” said the boy.

“And she lives near here?”

“Just up the street.”

“Show me the house,” said the Greek, “and if it should happen that on the way we meet a sweet-seller…”

It did so happen. The Greek purchased a bag of sweets, well, not so much a bag as a twist of newspaper, distributed some of the sweets among his retinue of small boys and gave the rest to his guide.

“It may be that future conversation could benefit us both,” he said.

The boy led them up one of the dark streets to a place where the houses were tall and thin and so closely packed together that door followed immediately upon door. He stopped outside one of these.

“Leila lives here?”

“Yes.”

“Who does the house belong to?”

“Mrs. Rabaq.”

“And who is Mrs. Rabaq?”

“Leila’s aunt.”

The Greek knocked on the door. After some moments it was opened by an elderly woman servant.

“Please announce me to Mrs. Rabaq,” said the Greek. “Tell her we come about Leila.”

The woman stood still.

“Who are you?” she said.

“This is the Mamur Zapt,” said the Greek, indicating Owen.

The woman’s eyes swept over him.

“I shall not tell her that,” she said.

She stumped away. They heard her steps going up the stairs. It was a while before they returned.

“She will see you.” The woman hesitated. “She is very old,” she said, “and no longer understands things clearly. But she will see you.”

The room was closely shuttered and very dark. The only light was from a dim kerosene lamp standing on a low table. There was a sofa in the middle of the room on which an old woman was sitting. She had pulled her veil right over her face so that they could not even see her eyes.

“Leila is my niece,” she said. “What has happened to her?”

She had spoken in Arabic and Owen replied in Arabic. He fell naturally into the courteous, familiar mode used to address the elderly.

“We do not know that anything has happened to her, mother,” he said. “But we fear.”

“I fear too,” said the woman. “I always fear.”

“We fear that an accident may have befallen her.”

The woman drew her breath in sharply. Then she stood up. “I will go to her. Tell me where she is. I will go—”

She swayed and put out her hand. Owen caught her and eased her gently back on to the sofa.

“When the time comes, mother,” he said soothingly. “If it comes. But it has not come yet. At the moment it is just that she is missing.”

“She is always missing,” said the old woman querulously. “It is not right. She comes and goes as she pleases. My sister’s daughter. We were never like that. Our father would never have allowed—”

She put her hand to her head.

“Leila!” she said and burst into tears.

The servant, who had followed them into the room, put her arms round her and comforted her.

“It is time you went to bed,” she said.

She helped the old woman up and led her across the room. At the door the old woman shook herself free.

“Wait!” she said. “Who are these men, Khadija? Why are they here?”

“It is nothing, mother,” said the servant. “Come!”