Michael Pearce: The Last Cut

Which was why he decided to take an interest in the case. He rang up the Parquet to ask who was handling it.

‘El Zaki,’ they said.

This was fortunate, for El Zaki was Owen’s friend, Mahmoud.

‘Where is he?’ he asked.

At the mortuary.’

This was fortunate, too, as the mortuary was the only cool place in Cairo. He went there with speed, or, at least, in an arabeah, the horse-drawn cab which at that time in Cairo served as taxi. Unsurprisingly, this being August, when men, flowers and horses drooped, by the time he got there Mahmoud was coming out.

‘Do they serve coffee in there?’

‘Yes, but it smells of formaldehyde.’

They went instead to a cafe round the corner. It was an Arab cafe and, as in most Arab cafes, the main room was underground, where darkness provided relief from the sun.

‘So they’ve put you on this?’

‘Yes,’ said Mahmoud ruefully. ‘You can’t win them all.’

‘I’d like to take an interest.’

‘No one else is,’ said Mahmoud sourly. ‘Not at the Parquet, at any rate.’

The Parquet was the Department of Prosecutions at the Ministry of Justice, to which Mahmoud belonged. In Egypt criminal investigation was not the responsibility of the police. Their task was merely to notify the Parquet that a crime had been committed. Once that had been done, responsibility for conducting the investigation was, as in the French system on which the Egyptian system was based, with the lawyer the Parquet assigned to the case.

‘I hope you’re right about that.’

He told Mahmoud of his fears. Mahmoud dismissed them.

‘The body could have been dumped anywhere,’ he said.

‘Yes. I know. But people are making a connection with the Cut.’

Mahmoud had little time for myths and none at all for the Myth of the Maiden.

‘Superstitious nonsense,’ he said. ‘We’re not still in the Dark Age, you know.’

Owen thought that some Egyptians, the ones he was worried about, might be dragging their feet. He wisely kept silent, however. Mahmoud was inclined to be touchy about remarks which he considered reflected upon Egypt.

‘What does the autopsy show?’ he asked.

‘The report’s not ready yet. It’s taking a while because of the condition of the body. There is some evidence of deterioration through water. If that turns out to be true, it would help us to establish when the body was dumped. There was still water in the Canal. That would put it in March or April.’

‘Or later,’ said Owen. ‘Even when most of it’s dry, there are still stagnant pools. Have you established the cause of death?’

‘Impossible to tell yet. Some evidence of wounding to the lower abdominal region. But that could just have been dogs.’

‘No evidence of, well, wounding of a ritual nature?’

‘I don’t know what that would be,’ said Mahmoud coldly. ‘We don’t have ritual killings in Cairo. Now, if we were some obscure tribe down in the Sudan-’

‘All right, all right. I don’t know what it would be, either. But if we could rule it out publicly, that might help to dispel the myth-’

‘She could have died of old age for all we can tell at the moment,’ said Mahmoud. ‘And it’s about time the Myth of the Maiden did.’

Owen, wisely, let the matter drop.

‘Failed?’ said the engineer from the Irrigation Department. ‘Our regulators don’t fail!’

‘Regulator?’ said Owen. ‘What’s a regulator?’

‘You don’t know what a regulator is! It’s a-well-’

‘It’s like a gate,’ said the Under-Secretary, to whose office Owen had been frantically summoned. ‘A gate in a dam. It controls the flow of water through the dam.’

‘And it’s failed? Well, I’m sorry about that. But, look, it all sounds very technical to me. I don’t quite see why I’ve been-’

‘It’s not failed!’ cried the engineer in exasperation. ‘That’s what I keep trying to say! It’s been sabotaged!’

The Manufiyah Regulator was one of the huge series of works which together formed the Delta Barrage. The barrage was built across the Nile about fifteen miles north of Cairo just where the river divided into two great arms which continued independently to the Mediterranean, coming out at Rosetta and Damietta. It controlled the supply of water to the whole of Lower Egypt but in particular to the immensely fertile region that lay between the arms. It distributed the water through a number of canals, the flow in each of which was determined by a separate regulator. The Manufiyah Regulator was one of the most important of these.

‘Important?’ said the Under-Secretary, who was travelling with them in the Irrigation Department’s launch. ‘You’d think so if you were a farmer in the Middle Delta!’

Owen could see the barrage now, rising up ahead of them. It was like a long castellated wall, with minarets in the centre and a campanile at each end. As it came closer, he could make out the arches, a hundred and thirty of them altogether, the engineer said. He looked for the damage.

‘No, no!’ said the engineer impatiently. ‘Not there! Behind! Regulator. Canal. See?’

That was exactly what Owen didn’t see. What he did see, suddenly, away to his right, was a vision of palms and water: palms jutting up from the water as from tiny islands in a sea; men walking between the islands apparently on the surface of the water but actually on little earth walls; buffaloes forging contentedly through the shallows but every now and then, surprised, dropping suddenly and having to swim, with their great noses held up high out of the water; flat, punt-like boats poled along by a man, often with a little boy in the stern, holding an animal, a calf or a goat, by the front hooves as it splashed behind, exactly as in the ancient friezes.

The vision shimmered and he knew that it wasn’t there really, or, rather, that it was not there but somewhere else, not there in the desert where he was looking but somewhere else, down river, where the water had already spread over the fields.

He turned to the engineer.

‘You’ve already released it, then?’

‘Some of it. It seemed best, with one of the regulators going. But we would have released it anyway.’

‘Without waiting for the Cut?’

‘Cut? What’s that? Oh, I know, the Khalig Canal and all that stuff. No, that’s all in the past. We don’t wait for that nowadays. No, it’s nothing to do with us.’

The single long wall of the barrage was in a sense illusory. There were, in fact, two separate barrages, one across the Damietta arm of the Nile, the other across the Rosetta arm. Each barrage was about five hundred metres long and they were linked by a revetment wall which ran for a thousand metres over the triangle of ground between the arms. The triangle had been made into spectacular gardens which were a great draw to the city’s inhabitants at weekends and on festival days.

Today, of course, there was an even greater draw and the Gardens on the Rosetta side were a solid mass of people. Policemen had to force a way through for the Minister and his party.

They were also trying, rather less successfully, to clear a passage for a long line of carts piled high with rubble, stretching now right across the Gardens. As each cart came up to the damaged regulator, it was turned and then backed up on to the embankment which led to the small service road running across the top of the regulator gates. It was then edged along the road until it reached the gap, where it would discharge its load in a great crash of stone and spray.

It was the turning of the carts that was the problem. The people were wedged in so tightly at that point that the carts could hardly make inroads. The drivers lost patience and laid about them with their whips, the constables with their batons. The crowd did not, could not budge.