Michael Pearce - The Fig Tree Murder

‘But you did lend a hand that night?’

‘I could see he needed one. There was just him, you see, him and Sayid. I knew that wouldn’t be enough, not in the dark. So I pitched in. It wasn’t that easy even then. It took us the best part of the night. But in the end we did it. And it was only then, after we’d got the bird trussed up, that Zaghlul says to me: “Well, Ali, what are you doing here this time of night?”

‘ “I’ve had business to attend to,” I says.

And he says: “I reckon I saw some of that business back by the Tree. There’s a dead man lying there.”

‘ “I’m not saying anything,” I says.

‘ “No,” he says, “and you’d better not. But who was that girl, then?”

‘ “That was my sister,” I says.

‘ “Oh,” he says. Of course he knew the whole story. “Well,” he says, “he had it coming to him.”

‘He was right, too. I couldn’t do anything else, Leila being my sister. I was sorry in a way. He’d been a friend of mine. But I was that mad-! I’d brought them together, you see. I said to Ibrahim one day: “I’ve got a sister, you know.” And he said: “Let’s have a look at her, then.” And it seemed all right. They’re a good, hard-working family. But that stupid bastard-I ought to have known, all right. I ought to have known. But he was so open about it. Everyone knew about it. Well, I couldn’t let that go on, could I? And then there was this other thing-it all came together, so he had to go, I couldn’t do anything else, could I?’

‘Why did you put the body on the line?’ asked Mahmoud.

‘That was Zaghlul’s idea. “What are you going to do about that there body?” he says.

‘ “Leave it where it is,” I says.

‘ “I’ve got a better idea than that,” he says.

‘ “Oh?” I says. “What’s that, then?”

‘ “Put it on that new railway line,” he says. “That’ll give them something to think about!”

‘Well, the more I thought about it, the better I liked it. I reckoned Ibrahim wouldn’t mind it at all. He’s always been one to speak up against the Belgians and if he could cause them trouble just by lying there, I thought he’d be glad to. And then I knew how other people would see it. A death well spent, they would say. So I says, “Right, then.”

‘Well, old man Zaghlul helps me carry him-he weighed a bit, I can tell you, we had to drag him in parts-and we put him down there on the new railway line-all decent, mind you, quite respectful. And then I had to get away because it was already beginning to get light.’

Zaghlul confirmed the story, once he had received Ali’s permission. So, too, did Sayid.

So also did Ali’s sister, speaking to them in her brother’s presence. The question arose of what to do with her. She was plainly an accomplice but equally plainly had been entirely under the influence of her brother, to whom it had obviously never occurred that if he were to suffer for the crime, she would suffer too.

‘Effendi, this is not right!’ he said to Owen, perturbed. ‘She is a good girl.’

‘Allowances will be made,’ Owen assured him. ‘I have spoken to my friend from the Parquet and he says that she will be treated lightly, the time she has served in prison being counted for her.’

‘The time she has served in prison?’ said Ali, aghast.

‘Just until the trial.’

‘How long will that be?’

‘A month or two.’

Ali was still perturbed.

‘Who will do the house?’ he said.

‘Have your brothers no wives?’

‘No,’ said Ali. ‘For some reason families are not eager to marry us.’

‘Well, that’s your problem. Or your brothers’.’

They had been let out the day before.

‘I will do what I can for her,’ promised Owen.

And that, he thought with satisfaction, was that. The matter had been resolved, and without any of the wider problems, which had at one time seemed so threatening, coming to a head. In the end it had boiled down to another revenge killing, regrettable, but not, as he pointed out to Mr Rabbiki, exactly unusual in Egypt.

‘The cause,’ said Mr Rabbiki resourcefully, ‘is the state of backwardness in which the people are kept. Now, with more education and more social spending-’

The Nationalists, however, dropped the issue like a hot brick. They had, in any case, got most of what they wanted. The government had been severely embarrassed. It had been shown, yet again, to be in the pocket of the foreigners. It would have been nice if the railway could have been delayed sufficiently to muck up the Khedive’s plans for a Grand Official Opening, but you couldn’t have everything. The Nationalists, anyway, were not against development. They were just against anyone else doing the developing.

The last part of the track was now being laid. A few things remained to be done but they would certainly be completed before the Opening. The Khedive purred like a contented cat.

The Belgians were already making arrangements to pull out. The Baron would retain a controlling interest in the New Heliopolis Scheme but from now on his influence would be able to be exerted from behind the scenes, which was likely to be less provocative and by no means less lucrative.

The Syndicate had had, in the end, nothing to do with the murder, Owen pointed out to Mahmoud as they sat sipping coffee one evening in a cafe in the Ataba. Nor, of course, as Mahmoud pointed out to Owen, had it had anything to do with the Nationalists. The Nationalists had, indeed, as Mr Rabbiki admitted privately, infiltrated Wahid among the railway workers so as to create trouble; but that trouble definitely did not extend to murdering Ibrahim. Wahid had been genuinely shocked and angered when the body had been found on the line. He had been convinced that it was the Syndicate’s doing. That was why he had been so determined to make an issue of it.

By the time they had finished their second cup, Mahmoud had succeeded in convincing Owen that the Nationalist move had been fair, given the heavy-handedness of the Belgian employers; and by the time they had finished their third cup they had both agreed that the new electric railway and other such developments might actually be a good thing if the March of Progress eventually led to a diminution in the number of revenge killings in the more backward parts of Egypt.

Everything, thus, was tidied up. Except-

Except that one morning Ibrahim’s widow, Leila, came to Owen. She sat down on the floor of his office, declining a chair; declining, too, the coffee he offered. He imagined that she had come to talk about the gratuity that he had persuaded the Syndicate to award her. He had asked for a pension but the Syndicate said that it did not pay pensions to widows, did not pay pensions anyway to casual workers, did not, in fact, if it could help it, pay pensions to anybody. A one-off cash payment in the circumstances and not to mar the Khedive’s Official Opening, they were prepared to consider.

Leila had indeed come to talk about that. She was, first of all, astonished to receive anything. Having received it, though, she wanted to talk to Owen about the mechanics of the payment. Could it be done, she wondered, in such a way that the benefit would go to her children and not to the men of the family that she had married into?

Owen said that this was not easy, that if payment were made direct to the children then the family would simply annex it. Much the same would happen, he admitted, if the payment were made to her. The family would reason, he said, that since it was supporting her and her children, the payment should go to the common good.

That would be only fair, she said hesitantly. But suppose they were no longer supporting her?

What had she in mind, asked Owen.