Michael Pearce - The Fig Tree Murder

The first smells of the evening cooking drifted down the street. A particularly pungent whiff made him splutter. Someone must have just thrown a load of too-recently-dried cattle dung on to a fire.

Men were coming back from the fields with hoes and baskets and a donkey nodded past carrying a huge load of berseem. The doves in the palms around the well were beginning to take up their evening cooing, a low, fulfilled murmur which would go on until the sun dropped finally beneath the horizon.

Another of the sounds had changed, too. For a moment he did not realize what it was, and then he saw a man lifting the small boy down from the back of the ox that had driven the water-wheel.

The day’s work in the village was coming to an end. Men would be walking back from the irrigation channels, the ostrich farm, the railway or wherever they worked. Everyone would be going home. Daniel, the Copt, would-on a normal day-be untethering his donkey in the grove of balsam trees and preparing to set out on the journey back to Tel-el-Hasan.

Owen stopped.

Daniel, the Copt, would, on a normal day, be just starting out on the journey back to Tel-el-Hasan.

The following morning Owen was at the Tree again; not as early as Daniel, the Copt, always eager to see that his property had not been stolen in the night, but early enough to share the first cup of tea of the day with the Tree’s unwilling guardians.

‘How much longer are we going to have to stay here?’ asked one of his policemen.

‘Not much longer, I think,’ said Owen.

He took his cup of tea and walked over to where Daniel was looking at the names on the Tree and fretting at the diminishing rate of new inscriptions.

‘If it goes on like this,’ said the Copt gloomily, ‘the Tree won’t be worth having.’

‘Have not the Belgians made you an offer?’

‘That money is still to come, meanwhile, this lot has to be paid,’ said Daniel, nodding sadly towards his Coptic henchmen.

‘It could go on for ten years,’ said Owen.

Daniel winced.

‘Tell me, Daniel: every morning you ride here across the desert from Tel-el-Hasan, and every evening you ride home again. It must be a lonely ride, for there cannot be many who make the journey. You would remember those you saw. That night that Ibrahim died-’

‘Would he had never died!’ said Daniel gloomily. ‘Since that day, the world has come to Matariya. If only it would go away again!’

‘You remember the night? Well then, tell me, as you rode home to Tel-el-Hasan that night, did you meet anyone on the way?’

‘I do not remember…’

‘Think. They would have been coming from Tel-el-Hasan. Might you not have wondered why they were making the journey so late in the day?’

‘That was not the riddle. He must have been taking her to meet her prospective husband’s family. He would eat with the men and she with the women and then they would go home again. No, that was not the riddle.’

‘What was the riddle, then?’

‘That they should stay so late. For the next morning as I rode I saw them on their way back.’

‘Ah! And their names?’

‘It was Ali and his sister. You know, that mad brother of Leila’s. Though who he was taking the girl to, I cannot think. For who, knowing what had happened to the husband of the one sister, would wish to take on the other sister and that mad family?’

‘Thank you, Daniel.’

Owen rose from his squat. They would have to make inquiries but he was pretty sure that no prospective husband’s family would be found. That was not what Ali and his sister had come over for. The old goatherd, as he had sat with his goats among the balsam trees by the well, had heard people talking by the Tree: a man and a woman. The sister had been there as bait. An assignation must have been made previously and Ibrahim, unable, it appeared, to resist any woman, and drawn to the sister anyway, had come to keep it.

But why had they taken so long? Some time must be allowed for them to take the body to the railway line and return; but then what had they been doing for the rest of the night? And why had they taken the body to the line anyway?

It kept coming back to that. And that, in fact, was where he, Owen, came in. For Ibrahim’s murder was not, strictly speaking, the Mamur Zapt’s concern but the Parquet’s. Owen was interested only in so far as it impinged on wider issues, the progress of the new railway, for instance, and its political and commercial implications.

He still could not fathom that bit out. Was there a connection between Ibrahim’s murder and the railway? Or were they quite separate, a matter of coincidence only, and Ibrahim’s death merely another revenge killing, one of the many that swelled Egypt’s crime lists?

One thing was clear, though. He had learned something that Mahmoud ought to know.

‘It’s not enough,’ said Mahmoud, however, as they walked away from the Tree the next morning, after Daniel had repeated his story for Mahmoud’s benefit.

‘Not enough? There won’t be any family-’

‘No, I know. But all that the Copt has told us is that Ali was in the area that night.’

‘And his sister.’

‘They might have gone on to somewhere else.’

‘The goat man heard them. At the Tree.’

‘We could still do with another witness.’

‘We’ve already tried, but-’

Owen stopped.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘I know somebody else who must have been near there that night. Or rather, something.’

‘Something?’ said Mahmoud.

‘Hello, Ja’affar,’ said Owen. ‘I’m surprised that you’re not with your friend, the barber.’

‘I’m just on my way,’ said Ja’affar.

‘My friend and I will walk with you if we may. How is the shoulder?’

‘Getting better. Unfortunately.’

‘Old man Zaghlul will soon be getting after you to go back, will he?’

‘He’s already been after me. In fact, he’s after me most days.’

‘Ah, well, there you are. You’re such a good man that he needs you.’

‘I’m beginning to wonder if I need him. It’s those birds. Once they’ve given you something, you never feel quite the same about them again.’

‘Ja’affar had his shoulder put out by one of the ostriches,’ Owen explained to Mahmoud.

‘They’re like an express train,’ said Ja’affar. ‘They weigh a ton, and when they hit you, bang! Down you go and you’re lucky if you don’t get your back broken. You’ve got to be fit to handle those birds. At least, that’s what I’ve been telling Zaghlul.’

‘And what does he say?’

‘He says you don’t have to be fit just to carry food to them. That’s true enough, but what happens if one escapes? You need every man you’ve got, then. And you need to be able to throw yourself around a bit, too. That’s the bit I wouldn’t fancy, not with a shoulder like this.’

‘They’re always getting out, are they?’

‘It’s the same one. When they’ve done it once, they know how to do it again. He’s either going to have to put it in a special pen or shoot it. Pity Malik didn’t shoot it the other day.’

‘That was the one, was it?’

‘It’s always the same one.’

‘And it’s always getting out? You don’t happen to remember, Ja’affar, do you, if it got out the night that Ibrahim was killed?’

‘The night Ibrahim was killed? They came and told me about it at the farm. That was a day to remember! Everything was all over the place that morning. They had a job bringing it back, you see. There were only two of them, Zaghlul himself-how he found out it had gone, I don’t know, I reckon he sleeps with those damned birds-and Sayid, who’s on at nights. Just the two of them. Well, that’s not enough, you need two just to handle the net, and then you need someone to chase it in. And at night, too! I don’t know how they managed it.’