Michael Pearce - The Fig Tree Murder

‘No. After.’

Puzzled, Owen went to join Mahmoud.

It was getting dark now and if they did not leave soon they might find it difficult to trace their way back across the fields to the station.

As they left the village behind they saw a long line of people coming across the desert. They were leading donkeys and camels heaped high with packs and some of them were carrying banners.

Owen and Mahmoud stopped to watch them pass.

‘Have you thought,’ said Mahmoud, ‘that the concentration of pilgrims will be at its highest at just the moment that the new railway reaches Heliopolis?’

Owen had not; but other people, it soon appeared, had. One of the Mamur Zapt’s duties was to read the press for material of a politically inflammatory nature. Splashed across the front page of one of the most popular Nationalist newspapers the following morning was a heavy-breathing article drawing attention to the fact and making much of the insensitivity of the government and of foreign businessmen in allowing such a thing to happen. ‘Surely,’ the article concluded, ‘someone could have foreseen how greatly traditional religious susceptibilities would be offended by such an untimely intrusion at an important moment of spiritual preparation.’

Owen had just put the newspaper down when the phone rang. It was the Syndicate.

‘Have you seen-?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Owen wearily.

‘We wouldn’t want everything to go wrong now. Not when we’re so close to completion.’

‘ Are you so close to completion?’

‘Another couple of weeks. Working Fridays will make all the difference.’

The railwaymen had in the end decided not to strike. They were too near the end of their contracts to want to lose money.

The railway, then, would be finished on time; and that would certainly be while the pilgrims were still congregated at Birket-el-Hadj. It took them several weeks to gather, not as long as in the past, when the first pilgrims would arrive months before departure, but long enough for them to be a considerable presence in the neighbourhood for some time.

But how close would the terminus of the railway actually be to Birket-el-Hadj?

‘Not very close,’ said the man from the Syndicate. ‘We’re ending it in Heliopolis. Quite near to the racecourse, as it happens.’

But distance, like so many other things, was blurred by the paper’s feverish prose, and the next day another article appeared recording, with satisfaction, the volume of protest the paper had received about the foreigners’ determination to press ahead and calling for a public demonstration at the Pont de Limoun the following evening.

The demonstration, coincidentally, was timed to start at exactly the moment that Mr Rabbiki, the veteran Nationalist politician, was due to initiate debate in the Assembly on the question he had put. The question, of course, was to do with Ibrahim and not with the arrival of the railway at Heliopolis, but Owen had no doubt that Mr Rabbiki’s broad brush would tar widely.

‘Any problems?’ he asked Paul.

‘Nothing that we can’t handle,’ said Paul confidently, ‘if you can handle it at your end.’

Owen’s end was the demonstration. It was far larger than the previous one. The Nationalist Party had pulled out all the stops and there were banners everywhere, a properly constructed platform for speakers, speakers of stature and a bodyguard of even greater stature to protect them, together with cohorts of supporters marched in for the occasion.

Owen, too, had pulled out all the stops and had policemen at all street corners and lots more policemen close at hand but tucked away discreetly out of sight.

He had stationed himself on the roof of one of the houses, from where he soon saw first that the number of demonstrators was greater than he had anticipated and then that the policemen he had left on the street corners had noticed this and prudently withdrawn into the cafes with their fellows.

The square below was full of people, their faces ruddy in the light of the torches that many of them held. They were listening quietly and attentively. Owen was always impressed by this, more impressed than he usually was by what was served out to them. They had a kind of hunger, the same hunger that Ali and Ibrahim had shown.

And patience, too, the long patience of the Egyptian fellahin, patience enough to listen for hours to the inflated rhetoric, the got-up emotion, about issues that were in the end unreal. What did they care about when the new railway would get to Heliopolis? What, for that matter, did the Nationalists care, either? The whole thing was being stage-managed just in order to create difficulty for the government.

But perhaps, thought Owen, listening with half an ear as the speeches entered their third hour, that was where the real issue came in. For what the political manoeuvring was ultimately about was who was going to govern Egypt. Who was going to do the stage-managing-Mr Rabbiki with his doomed question or Paul, behind the scenes, getting the Khedive and his Ministers to act to a script that was written in London?

But, hello, what was this? Something was going wrong with the script, or at least with his part of it! Over at the back of the crowd, in one corner, something was going on. The crowd was swirling around, breaking apart. Fighting? Was that fighting? He trained his field glasses.

Yes, fighting. He could see the clubs and sticks. But not among themselves. Someone was coming in from outside. It looked as if a great wedge had suddenly been driven into the back of the crowd. Surely his men had not come out without orders?

He’d have their blood for this! He turned and made for the outside steps leading down from the roof.

But wait! It wasn’t them. They weren’t in uniform. Who the hell were they? What the hell was going on?

Owen had his runners at the bottom of the steps, waiting for instructions. Each one knew the cafe where he had to go. They went at once. Within minutes, policemen were pouring out of the cafe.

The Cairo constables were for the most part country boys, chosen for their size and strength and, some alleged, their simplicity. Given orders to clear a square, they would.

They had, moreover, the advantage of surprise. The crowd, confused already by the disturbance at the rear, split apart under their charge and the separate parts were forced back upon the exits from the square. Many of the torches fell down or were extinguished and in the darkness it was hard to see anything. There was only the pressure of bodies driving people to the edges of the square, the confused shouting and screaming and the incessant blast of the police whistles.

There was hardly any resistance. The crowd was largely unarmed. There were the usual few with knives and clubs but, hemmed in by people and in the darkness, they were unable to use them.

Only in one part of the square, where the original wedge had burst into the crowd, was there serious fighting. The men there were armed and were holding the constables back.

Owen gathered a few extra men and ran across. There were no torches here, but in the dim light from a nearby cafe he could see a struggling throng of men.

‘Police!’ he shouted. ‘Back!’

There was a moment’s uncertainty and then men detached themselves from the throng and came back towards him.

‘Form into line!’ he shouted.

The men spread out on both sides of him. For a moment they stood breathing heavily and looking at the dark mass of men ahead of them.

‘Line: Advance!’

The line moved forward. This was the moment when training and discipline told. Or so Owen hoped.

Someone pushed up beside him.

‘You might need this.’

He recognized the voice. It was one of his plainclothesmen, a Greek.