Michael Pearce - The Face in the Cemetery

The mamur nodded, and beckoned to two of the villagers.

‘Mustapha! Abu!’

They came forward reluctantly.

‘Wait a minute!’ said Owen. ‘Aren’t you going to … ?’

He stopped.

‘Yes?’ said the mamur.

Owen shrugged. It wasn’t really any of his concern and out in the provinces things were done differently; when they were done at all.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.

‘Is there a hakim?’ asked McPhee.

In the provinces any autopsy was usually conducted by the local doctor.

‘He has been sent for,’ said the mamur.

The two villagers were hesitating on the brink of the pit.

‘Get on with it!’ said the mamur. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘We don’t like it,’ said one of the men.

‘It’s nothing. Haven’t you seen a body before?’

‘We’re not bothered about the body,’ said the other villager. ‘It’s these.’

He gestured towards the mummies.

‘They’re bodies, too.’

The men still hesitated.

‘Look, they’re only bodies. The bodies of animals, what’s more.’

‘We still don’t like it.’

‘They’re not even recent bodies,’ said the mamur persuasively.

‘All the same …’

‘Are you going to do it or aren’t you?’

The answer, unfortunately, was probably not.

‘Look,’ said the mamur, ‘if I move the cats, will you move the woman?’

The men looked at each other.

‘If you move the ones on top –’

‘And put them back in their right places –’

The mamur jumped down into the pit and began putting the mummies aside.

‘Satisfied?’

The two looked at the other villagers.

‘We call upon the world to witness that it wasn’t we who interfered with the grave.’

‘We witness, Mustapha!’

‘Right then.’

The two got down into the pit, picked up the body of the woman, tucked it nonchalantly under their right arms and set out across the desert towards the sugar cane.

‘Are you coming up to the house?’ asked the mamur.

‘We ought to check the identification, I suppose,’ said Owen.

It was probably being over-punctilious. When he had arrived in Minya the day before and presented the mudir, the local governor, with the list of names, the mudir, knowing most of them, had gone through them mechanically, ticking almost every one. It was only at the last one that he had stopped.

‘There’s been a development,’ he said.

He had gone to the door of his office and called in the mamur, sitting uneasily outside, and had shown him the list.

‘That one,’ he had said, pointing. ‘Wasn’t that the one … ?’

‘Yes,’ said the mamur. ‘She’s been found,’ he said to Owen.

‘Found?’

‘Found dead. This morning.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Owen.

‘Would you like to see her? You could come with me. I’ve got to go back.’

‘Perhaps I’d better,’ decided Owen.

The mudir put a cross against her name.

‘Is she worth the journey?’ he said.

The path to the house led up through long plantations of sugar cane. The cane was twelve feet tall and planted so densely that the long ribbon foliage of one plant intertwined with the leaves of the next, making an impenetrable jungle. You could not see as much as a yard from the path; only the sky overhead, and the path itself, winding, not straight, and stubble underfoot.

Yet it was not the sudden loss of light, the hemmed-in feeling, that became troubling after a while, but the heat. The cane caught the sunshine and trapped it, so that, hot though it was outside the plantation, out on the open desert by the graves – well over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit – it was hotter still inside. In no time at all Owen’s shirt was sodden with perspiration.

McPhee took off his helmet, mopped his forehead, and swung the hat at the flies.

‘Of course,’ he said meditatively, ‘there’s the Speos Artemidos at Beni Hasan.’

‘What?’ said Owen.

Used as he was to the heat of Egypt, this walk through the sugar cane was leaving him quite dazed.

‘The Cave of Artemis.’

‘Really?’

‘Artemis is the Greek version, of course,’ said McPhee.

The sweat running down Owen’s forehead was beginning to sting his eyes. Maybe McPhee was right. He took off his sun helmet too.

‘Greek version?’ he said.

‘Of Pakhet.’

Packet? What the hell was McPhee on about?

‘The cat goddess,’ explained McPhee. ‘The one those mummies were probably dedicated to.’

‘Oh.’ And then, after a moment: ‘You think there could be a connection?’

‘Well, Beni Hasan’s not far from here, is it? There could even have been other temples nearer, of course. The whole area is noted for the special recognition it gives to Pakhet.’

It was the kind of curious information in which McPhee excelled.

‘Fascinating!’ said Owen heartily.

‘It is, isn’t it?’ agreed McPhee with enthusiasm.

And totally irrelevant. It had probably been a mistake to bring McPhee. The Deputy Commandant’s eccentricities were more easily containable in Cairo; but Owen had been desperately short of the right people for this sort of job.

It had probably been a mistake coming out here anyway. Why hadn’t he just accepted the mamur’s word in Minya and left it at that?

The path began to lead upwards now. The incline was slight but in this heat quite enough to make him break out in another shower of sweat. The mamur, too, stopped to mop his face.

Suddenly, from somewhere ahead of them and to the right, two shots rang out.

Owen looked at the mamur.

‘Abdul,’ said the mamur indifferently.

‘Abdul?’

‘The ghaffir.’

‘What would he be shooting at?’ said McPhee.

The mamur shrugged.

‘Brigands.’

‘Brigands!’

‘We have them here. They live in the cane.’

‘Can’t you root them out?’

The mamur shrugged again.

‘It’s not so easy,’ he said.

Again, it wasn’t Owen’s concern. Nor McPhee’s either. The Cairo Police Force was quite separate from that of the rest of the country. He could see that, all the same, McPhee was wondering.

‘Are there many of them?’ he asked.

‘About forty. They come and go. At the moment they’re led by a Sudanese.’

‘What do they do?’

‘Rob. Protection.’

‘The sugar factory?’

‘The factory’s got its own ghaffir. That was him shooting just then. No, mostly it’s the villages. Crops, cattle, that sort of thing. If you want them left alone, you pay the Sudanese.’

‘Don’t the villages have ghaffirs too?’

The mamur laughed. Owen could guess why. The village watchman, the ghaffir, was normally just an ordinary villager, paid a piastre or two a month for his extra duties and armed, if he was armed at all, with an ancient gun dating back to the wars against the Mahdi. You could hardly expect him to take on forty brigands single-handed.

But the local mamur, the District Inspector of Police, surely he would have men he could rely on?

The mamur saw what he was thinking.

‘It’s not so easy,’ he said again, defensively. ‘We’ve tried beating the cane, but they just move to another part. It goes on for miles.’

‘I can see the problem,’ said McPhee, with ready sympathy. He fell in beside the mamur and they continued up the path together, discussing the different difficulties of country and city policing.

Owen was left with something nagging him, however. For the moment he couldn’t identify what it was. It continued to worry away at the back of his mind as they walked up to the house.

In fact, there were several houses; neat, European-style bungalows with verandahs, gardens and high surrounding walls over which loofah trailed gracefully. Away to the right was the sugar factory, a long barn-like building with steam coming out at various points. In front of the building men were unloading cane from trucks and feeding it on to a continuous belt that led into the factory.