Michael Pearce - The Fig Tree Murder

The old Arab, Zaghlul, whom Owen had seen on the day of the ostrich hunt, was overseeing the work.

‘Yes,’ he said impatiently, ‘the fences were damaged. What do you expect? Think the sand’s going to miss me out?’

‘The fences need to be kept in good order,’ said Salah sternly. ‘Things are not like they used to be!’

‘What do you think I’m doing to the fences? And I know things are not the way they used to be; they’re a great deal worse!’

‘We can’t have these birds getting out.’

‘Do you think I want them to get out? Each one costs me a packet, I can tell you. That’s money walking away, that is. And if they don’t get away altogether, some fool tries to shoot them!’

‘You go easy on the “fools”. We’re talking Pashas here!’

‘What do I care about Pashas? Or the Khedive either. Put a bullet in my birds and I’ll put a bullet in them!’

‘These birds of yours are nothing but a nuisance. They frighten the horses. Do you know what a racehorse costs?’

‘I know what an ostrich costs. And the birds were here before the racehorses.’

‘Yes, well, you keep them on this side of the railway line! Otherwise there’ll be trouble.’

‘There’s been no trouble up till now. It’s building this new city that’s causing the trouble. City!’ said the old man contemptuously. ‘What do they want to build a city for out in the desert? The desert’s the desert. Keep it like that!’

‘Things don’t stand still. They’re going to build the city and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’re going to have to live with it. And that means seeing that your birds don’t get out.’

‘They’d be all right if they were left alone.’

‘If they stay in the pens they will be left alone.’

‘No, no, it’s in the air. They can smell it. It frightens them. That’s what makes them panic.’

‘What’s in the air?’

‘People. Houses. That new railway line. The old one’s all right. They’ve got used to that. But now they’re building a new one. What do they want another one for? They’re building them all over the place. How many more are there going to be?’

‘There aren’t going to be any more. Just this one. And they’re having it because it’ll go straight to Heliopolis. It won’t come near your pens.’

‘There’s something wrong with it, isn’t there?’

‘What do you mean, something wrong with it?’

‘It’s electric, isn’t it?’

‘Well?’

‘There you are, then. It’ll be getting out and affecting my birds.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘Well, I can tell you, if it starts affecting my birds, I’ll be over there with my gun! I’ll soon put a stop to it!’

‘It won’t affect your birds at all.’

‘It had better not. And you’d do better to be worrying about all that stuff getting out than about my birds getting out. I’ll look after my birds. And I’ll look after that new electric railway, too, if you don’t watch out!’

Since he was out at Matariya, Owen thought he might as well go over to the village. With any luck he would meet Mahmoud and find out if he had made any further progress.

The village was only a mile from the ostrich farm but by the time he reached it, even in what he had thought the fresher atmosphere of out of town, the sweat was running down his face and his shirt was sticking to his back. When he got to the village he went to the well and scooped water over his face and drank a little from the bucket he had pulled up. It tasted of sand.

There were some women at the well, filling their pitchers. They saw the face he had made and one of them said:

‘Here, have some of mine. We got it up before the water was disturbed.’

‘It was Miriam who disturbed it,’ said one of the other women. ‘She let the bucket go in too far.’

‘I had to, didn’t I?’ retorted Miriam angrily. ‘I was the last one and you’d got the good water out.’

‘Ali should have put the cover over the well,’ said the first woman accusingly.

An old man sitting in the shade straightened up.

‘I did!’ he protested. ‘It got underneath. It gets everywhere.’

‘Well, it does that,’ the woman conceded.

‘It got into my stew,’ said another of the women, ‘even though I had the lid on.’

Owen accepted the drink gratefully. The women, as was often the case in the villages, were very chatty. None of them wore veils and no one was particularly abashed at speaking to a man, even a white man. It was the men, thought Owen, who insisted on the forms, so jealous of their wives’ honour were they.

Or perhaps it wasn’t their wives’ honour but their own. That, he thought, was certainly so in the case of those brothers they’d locked up.

Actually, he was uneasy about that. He would have to release them soon. He couldn’t hold them forever. That was one of the things he wanted to talk to Mahmoud about. He rather hoped that by now Mahmoud was getting somewhere with his investigations. If he was closing in on someone, especially if, as Owen suspected, the person was one of the brothers, it would make it easier to hold them and to prevent the family of the murdered man from taking the law into their own hands.

Mahmoud emerged from one of the pilgrim’s houses, saw Owen and came across to greet him. The women, suddenly self-conscious, picked up their pitchers and went off.

Mahmoud sat down on the parapet of the wall and helped himself to some water.

‘Getting anywhere?’ asked Owen.

‘No. I’ve just about been through all the houses now and no one’s seen or heard anything. No one was out on the night Ibrahim was killed, nor knows anyone else who was out. Well, I can believe that. Once it gets dark, everyone in the village stays at home. But these days, when the nights are hot, they sit outside; and don’t tell me that no one, no one in the entire village, saw or heard anything!’

‘What might they have heard or seen?’

‘Someone going out to the Tree. People at the Tree, talking. They were talking, we know that from the goatherd.’

‘It’s some way from the village, though. And it was dark.’

‘I need to know who it was that met Ibrahim that night,’ said Mahmoud, frustrated.

‘Have you gone through the other village yet, Tel-el-Hasan? Someone might have seen people leaving that.’

‘The brothers, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got Asif helping me. He’s been through the village.’

‘Without any luck?’

‘The same thing as here. Villagers,’ said Mahmoud, ‘will tell you nothing. Not if you’re from outside.’

He put the bucket back into the recess.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I’m increasingly coming to think that the answer doesn’t lie here anyway.’

'Not here?’ said Owen, taken aback.

‘Oh, here-the village-is something to do with it. It’s where it happened. But it’s not here that the meaning lies.’

‘The meaning?’

‘I see a lot of killings,’ said Mahmoud. ‘This one has a meaning. The body was put on the line to make a point.’

‘What kind of point?’

‘I don’t know. But I’m beginning to wonder whether it might not be more to do with the railway than it is with the village.’

‘You’re abandoning the idea of it being a revenge killing?’

‘Revenge might be part of it.’

‘I don’t see how revenge could be part of something else. Isn’t it complete in itself?’

Mahmoud was silent. Overhead, in the palms, the doves gurgled contentedly.

‘As I see it,’ he said at last, ‘Ibrahim crops up in two contexts. One of them is the village and there are things here that might have led to his death. But I cannot see why they should have led to his body being placed on the line. That part of it must be explained by something else. And it seems to me that we might find the explanation in the other context in which he crops up: the railway.’