Michael Pearce - The Snake Catcher’s Daughter

"Is that Mustapha?”

“Speaking.”

“The line is bad. I wasn’t sure it was you.”

“The line is always bad. It is best not to use it.”

“I had to use it. Mustapha, I must warn you. They have seized Hassan.”

“So?”

“He is being questioned.”

“What can he say?”

“He can tell them things that lead to us.”

“Hassan is too clever to do that. And if he did, we could always deny them.”

“Mustapha, I’m afraid you don’t understand. Abdul Bakri has talked. They know he has given money to Hassan. It will lead to us.”

“ ‘They’. ‘They’. Who are ‘They’?”

“Garvin. Mustapha, he has had Hassan in-”

“Garvin is ‘he’, not ‘they’. Who are the others?”

“Mustapha-”

“Not Wainwright Pasha, I take it? No? The Consul-General, then? Is it someone around the Consul-General?”

“I–I do not think so, Mustapha. I do not know. Mustapha, I-”

“But this is important. Please. Are there others? Or is it just Garvin?”

“Perhaps it is just Garvin.”

“Ah!”

“But, Mustapha, it does not make any difference. He will soon tell others.”

“It makes a lot of difference. I need to know what is behind this. If it is just Garvin, well, I will go to Wainwright Pasha at once and knock this canard on the head. People are always saying things against us. That is the nature of our job. It has happened before, it will happen again.”

“But, Mustapha, this is not anyone saying this, it is Garvin.”

“One unsupported man, new to Cairo, credulous. What does he know about our world? People tell us things, we listen, because that is the nature of our work, but we do not always believe them. They offer us money and sometimes we take it, because that, too, is the nature of our work, but our intention may be different from theirs. Wainwright Pasha knows all this but Garvin, what does he know? A simple policeman from Alexandria!”

“Mustapha, I do not think he is that simple.”

“It is the nature of his work that is simple. Compared with ours.”

“Mustapha, I still worry-”

“And I worry, too. But not for the same reason as you. If things are as you say they are, then I do not worry. It is if there are things behind them that I worry.”

“I hope you are right, Mustapha…But, please, what shall I do?”

“Do not phone me again, that is the first. The second is: carry on with your work and do not fear. But the third is: let me know the moment you think it is they and not he that we have against us.”

“An open-and-shut case, I would have thought,” said Owen, laying the transcript back on the table. Police office ink faded quickly in the light and heat of Egypt and the writing was already brown, although it had been written only five years before. “It’s a virtual confession, surely.”

Mahmoud picked the transcript up and looked at it again.

“There are problems about using this kind of evidence in court,” he said. “Were the words accurately recorded? Were they recorded at the time? Have the speakers been correctly identified?”

“You’ve got the sworn statements of the recorders here,” said Owen, tapping a folder which lay before him on Mahmoud’s desk. “Signed, dated, witnessed. They were people who knew the voices, too.”

“Oh yes,” said Mahmoud. “Garvin had it all worked out.”

“Well, then-”

“But shall we see what Philipides says?”

Philipides was thin, almost painfully so. The prison report spoke of ulcers. Owen judged he was a worrying man. The small mouth beneath the neat moustache occasionally twitched involuntarily.

He still denied the charges. Not so much the facts as their interpretation. Yes, his orderly, Hassan, had approached Sub-Inspector Abdul Bakri and solicited money in return for a promise of promotion; but this was merely part of a carefully planned, and officially inspired, attempt to probe allegations of corruption in the Cairo Police Force. As Mustapha Mir, the Mamur Zapt of the time, would confirm.

The offer of promotion was not, then, genuine? Mahmoud asked. Certainly not; and the money would have been returned, with a severe warning.

But, surely, offering money-as well as accepting money- was a grave offence and should have resulted in something more serious than a warning?

“An official warning,” said Philipides. “It would remain on his file.”

“Even so-”

“Ah, yes,” said Philipides, “but corruption was so widespread-one could almost say it was the fashion of the country- that to come down heavily on a minor individual would have been manifestly unfair. He had probably thought he was merely following normal practice.”

And then again, one had to be realistic. To proceed in too draconian a fashion might have left the Police Force so denuded of staff as to constitute a threat to public order.

It was not the way to achieve things. The Egyptian tradition had always been to combine the threat of severity with the practice of clemency. The possibility of severity was always real and if, occasionally, by chance, that was what they got in the end and not clemency, well, that was the working of fate and seen not as injustice but as God deciding to exact full measure this time. You could hardly complain about that! If, on the other hand, the threat of severity was always followed by the practice of severity, people would perceive that as most unjust. It did not give fate a chance to work on your side, it allowed no escape for human compassion or indulgence. The system would be perceived as cold and inhuman. Not everyone understood that, said Philipides pointedly.

Mahmoud, whose logic tended towards the severely linear, was probably one of those. However, Philipides’s remark was not directed at him.

“They come in from overseas,” he said bitterly, “and they think we don’t know how to do things, when it’s just that we’re doing them in a different way.”

“You are talking of Garvin effendi?”

Philipides hesitated but then committed himself.

“If he had been more patient,” he said, “he would have seen that it was not as he supposed.”

“You are saying you are innocent of the changes?”

“Garvin effendi refused to believe that we were merely setting a trap. And I ask myself why he refused to believe us.”

“And what answer do you give?”

Philipides lifted his head and looked Mahmoud in the eyes.

“Because we were Egyptian,” he said; “because we stood in the British way; because he wanted our places.”

Mahmoud said nothing but gave him the transcript to read.

The mouth beneath the moustache twitched painfully. “How does this square with your story?”

“It does not contradict it,” said Philipides defiantly.

“No? ‘He can tell them things that lead to us’?”

“I was afraid that it would look as if we really were accepting money in exchange for promotion.”

“But why should you be concerned about that? Surely, all you had to do was go to Garvin effendi and tell him this was an official inquiry?”

“I was afraid he would not believe me.”

“You could have referred him to your superior.”

“I was working on this occasion for the Mamur Zapt.”

“Why was that?”

“It was an inquiry into the police. Wainwright Pasha wanted it to be someone independent. He did not know how far it might involve senior officers. There were rumours-”

“Rumours?”

“About Garvin effendi. Some jewels. A present for his wife.”

Mahmoud glanced at Owen, then made a note.

“But you, too,” he said to Philipides, “were a member of the police, and if not a senior one, an important middle-ranking one.”