Michael Pearce - The Bride Box

Soraya had fought before they killed her. They had had to stun her with a blow. And then they had strangled her. The body had decomposed badly in the heat of the box, but the pathologist had been able to make this out.

Owen was wondering how to tell Leila. He would tell her very little, as little as he could.

He would have to show her the button and ask her if she recognized it. It could have come from Soraya’s own clothes. But somehow he didn’t think it did. It had been ripped off. Did you do that to your own clothes? It was more likely that Soraya, who seemed to have been a girl of spirit, had fought back.

The question, though, was whether the button told you more. Trocchee buttons were everywhere in Egypt. But they were most plentiful, naturally enough, along the Red Sea coast, where they came from. There everyone wore them.

Did that indicate that her attacker had come from round there? The Sudan? Not Egypt.

More; could that mean that that was where she was being taken? As a slave, along with her little sister, and other children. First, to a port on the Red Sea — Port Sudan, say — where the control was not as tight as it was in Egypt, and where boats, Arab boats, came and went every day in large numbers? Once there it would be easy to put children on an incoming dhow just after it had dropped its cargo, of trocchee shells, possibly, and then sail them over to the other side of the Red Sea and on to the still existing slave markets of the Middle East. Was that where Leila — and possibly Soraya — had been bound?

That morning the first thing he did when he got into his office at the Bab-el-Khalk was to get Nikos to issue a general instruction to the police station and customs offices of south Egypt alerting them to the possible passage of a slave caravan with children. The Mamur Zapt had few officers of his own; but you ignored his direct instructions at your peril.

Of course, the slavers would be keeping to the desert and giving towns and police as wide a berth as possible. They might even have an arrangement with some police forces. That he could do nothing about. In fact, trying to pick the caravan up in the desert was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. The distances were vast and there was no question of combing the desert. He just didn’t have enough men to do that. The time to intercept them was when they were coming to the coast and looking for their port. The trouble was that that might be anywhere along the Red Sea coast.

He sat thinking for a moment and then gave the Navy a call. They didn’t have many ships and the sea was even more vast than the desert. But Navy ships patrolled the area regularly looking for gunrunners and they could just as well look for children as for guns.

And then he put in a call to the Sudan Slavery Bureau in Khartoum.

Mahmoud’s experts thought they had at last deciphered the address on the box’s label.

‘An illiterate scrawl,’ they sniffed. ‘And badly soiled.’

However, they thought the box had been directed to the Pasha Ali Maher, so Mahmoud went to see him.

‘A bride box?’ said Ali Maher incredulously. ‘Not much call for them up here!’

‘You don’t, perhaps, collect such objects? As antiques, possibly?’

‘No, I don’t!’ said the Pasha, waving a hand at the exquisite furnishing and objects that surrounded them. Even Mahmoud could see that the carpets that hung on the walls (you put carpets on the walls, not on the floors in Egypt, where the floors were cooler marble) were soft and luxurious and, in his terms, pretty well priceless.

‘A bride box.’ Ali Maher smiled and looked around at the lovely blue vases, probably Chinese, and the jade pieces standing discreetly in niches around the room. ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t go in for primitive art.’

They were talking in French. Cairo’s upper classes felt more at home in that language than in Arabic. Come to that, they felt more at home on the airy Riviera than in sweaty Cairo and spent as much time as they could in France.

Mahmoud had no problem with French. The Egyptian legal system was based on the Code Napoleon — an earlier Khedive who admired all things French, especially the women, had taken French law as the model when he had reformed the system. The lectures in the School of Law were all in French. Meetings in the Parquet were usually conducted in French; memoranda were usually written in French, occasionally in English but hardly ever in Arabic. Arabic was a tricky language to write and on the whole the Parquet preferred to keep the records in French. At home Mahmoud spoke Arabic; with his colleagues he usually spoke French (and either French or English when he was speaking to Owen; they both were at ease in both).

So Mahmoud was not bothered by Ali Maher’s assumption that they would converse in French. It was the language of all the Egyptian upper classes. You could almost say that he was treating Mahmoud as an equal.

But Mahmoud knew he wasn’t. There was a subtle condescension about everything Ali Maher said or did. It was as if merely receiving Mahmoud in his house was doing him a favour. Parquet officers did not rate high with Pashas.

‘It seems odd that the box should be specifically addressed to you,’ said Mahmoud.

‘A simple mistake, I expect,’ said Ali Maher languidly. ‘They happen all the time in this benighted country. Where did you say it came from? The south? Oh, well, that explains it! The people there are backward. Blockheads, most of them. Some oaf has just got it wrong.’ He shook his head. ‘A bride box? To me?’ He laughed. ‘Now, if it had been a bride or two, I could understand!’

It was then that Mahmoud told him what the box had contained.

He was watching Ali Maher closely and would have sworn that the Pasha lost colour. He pulled out a silk handkerchief and wiped his brow.

‘How ghastly!’ he said.

‘Does this put a different complexion on it?’

Ali Maher looked puzzled. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why should it?’

‘Addressed to you. Meant for you. You personally.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t see …’

‘Not a mistake,’ said Mahmoud.

‘Not a mistake?’

‘A threat, perhaps. Or a warning.’

‘Why should it be any of those things?’

‘I don’t know. I was hoping that perhaps you would tell me.’

‘I can see no reason why it should be either of those things.’

‘There is no one who might wish to harm you? Who has reason to feel hostile towards you?’

‘Well, of course, as a public figure …’

‘Down in the south?’

‘Well, that’s a big area …’

‘Near Denderah, say?’

‘Denderah? Well, I have heard of it. But, no, I don’t think so. I try to have as little to do with such places as I can.’

‘You have no connections with the place?’

‘No. I would try to avoid having any connections with anywhere like that.’

‘Or persons …?’

Ali Maher held up his hand. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘why go on? Is it not obvious that this is a simple mistake? What could I possibly have to do with a woman in a box?’

But was it Denderah? Leila had certainly said so. That was where she lived, she had said, and if she had lived there presumably her sister had done too. That was where the box had started. Or had it? Leila had thought that was the name of her village but she was a little girl and had not been too sure. Owen tried to question her about the village, but it seemed a village like any other: houses, a street (sort of), a kind of square. Doum palms. A water wheel pulled by an ox. The river? Not far away but the village had not been quite on the river.

That was where she had lived and thought she had got on the train. When she had slipped away, in the late night or early morning, from the other children, evading the guard, she had walked and walked. She didn’t know the way; she had just followed the tracks the caravan had made. It was easy. There were no other tracks to confuse her. The caravan had kept away from other people.