Michael Pearce - The Face in the Cemetery

A European came up to them and shook hands.

‘Schneider. I’m Swiss,’ he said, as if making a point.

He glanced at the mamur.

‘They’ve just brought the body up,’ he said.

‘Has Mohammed Kufti arrived yet?’ asked the mamur.

‘One of my trucks brought him over,’ said Schneider. ‘He’s in the house now.’

‘We’d better go over,’ said the mamur.

‘Drop in for some coffee when you’ve done,’ Schneider said to Owen. ‘My wife will be glad to see you. She doesn’t get much chance to talk to Europeans.’

The mamur led them over towards the houses. The one they wanted was not part of the main cluster but set a little way back and native Egyptian in style: white, mud brick, single-storey, with an inner courtyard and a high surrounding wall. Inside, it was dark and although the room they were led into was empty, somehow there was the suggestion of many people off stage.

There was a piano in the room, a surprisingly good one, which looked used and well cared for. Little bowls of water, still half-full, were set beneath its feet. It had not escaped the usual ravages of the termites, however. In several places beneath the piano there were small piles of wood dust.

An Egyptian, dressed in a dark suit, came into the room and shook hands.

‘Kufti,’ he said. ‘I’m the doctor.’

‘Found anything yet?’ asked the mamur.

‘I haven’t really started. Some things are obvious, though. She was poisoned. That was almost certainly the cause of death. There are one or two tests I have to do, but that is consistent with the symptoms and there are no apparent injuries.’

‘What was the poison?’ asked Owen.

‘Arsenic.’

The usual. Especially in the provinces, where poisoning your neighbour’s buffalo was an old established custom.

‘Can you cover her up?’ asked the mamur. ‘We want the husband to identify her.’

‘He’s seen her already,’ said the doctor. ‘Does he have to see her again?’

‘For the purposes of formal identification,’ insisted the mamur.

The doctor made a gesture of distaste and left the room.

The mamur went out and then came back and led them along a corridor and into a small room where, in the darkness, a man was sitting hunched up on an angrib .

‘Come, Aziz,’ said the mamur, with surprising gentleness. ‘It is necessary.’

Aziz? For some reason Owen had not taken in that the husband was Egyptian.

They went into another room, where the woman was lying on a bed, covered up with a sheet. The doctor turned the sheet down. The husband broke into sobs and nodded.

‘That’s all,’ said the mamur reassuringly.

‘Come with me, Aziz, and I will give you something,’ said the doctor.

‘How can it be?’ said the husband brokenly. ‘How can it be?’

‘I’m Austrian,’ said Mrs Schneider, smiling prettily; quite.

‘And your husband’s Swiss.’

‘That’s right.’ They both laughed.

She led him out on to the verandah, where coffee things had been laid out on a table. A moment or two later Schneider joined them, with McPhee. They had dropped behind so that Schneider could take him into a room and show him something he’d found near the cat cemetery.

A servant brought a coffee pot and began helping them to coffee. The aroma mixed with the breeze that had come up from the river and spread about the house. They could see the river, just, over the sugar cane. The breeze had come across the cane and by the time it reached them was warm and sweet.

‘Of course, I didn’t know her well,’ said Mrs Schneider. ‘She kept herself to herself. Or was kept. I used to hear the piano playing, though.’

‘All the time,’ said Schneider. ‘Music, I like. But not all the time.’

‘I didn’t mind it,’ said Mrs Schneider. ‘She played beautifully. Anyway, she didn’t play all the time.’

‘It seemed like it.’

‘She’s played a lot lately.’

‘What sort of music did she play?’ asked McPhee.

‘German music.’

‘Lieder?’

Schneider looked at his wife.

‘Sometimes,’ she said. ‘Brahms, I think, often.’

‘I suppose there will have to be an investigation?’ said Schneider. ‘Or won’t you bother?’

‘There will certainly be an investigation,’ said Owen. ‘But that will be conducted by the mamur. Neither Mr McPhee nor I do that sort of thing.’

‘Not down here, at any rate,’ said McPhee.

Schneider looked at Owen curiously.

‘I thought you did do that sort of thing,’ he said.

‘Only if there’s a political side to it,’ said Owen.

The role of Mamur Zapt was roughly equivalent to that of the Head of the Political Branch of the CID. Only in Egypt, of course, there wasn’t a CID. The nearest equivalent to that was the Parquet, the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice. The Parquet, though, was Egyptian and the British Administration, which in effect ran Egypt at that time, kept it at arm’s length from anything political.

‘You wouldn’t call this political?’ said Schneider.

‘Not at the moment, no.’

‘I thought that was the reason why you were here … ?’

‘That’s quite different. The two are completely separate. From the point of view of the law, murder is a civil crime and will be treated as such; that is, investigated by the civil authorities.’

Mrs Schneider flinched.

‘I suppose it must be murder,’ she said. ‘Only, hearing it said like that –’

‘Of course it’s murder,’ said her husband impatiently. ‘What else could it be?’

‘I just thought that, well, you know, when I first heard about it, and heard that it was poison, well, I thought –’

‘What the hell did you think?’ said Schneider.

‘That it might be suicide.’

‘How could it be suicide? She was bandaged, wasn’t she? And in the pit. Did you think she walked there?’

‘Well …’

‘Suicide!’

From somewhere out beyond the immediate houses, in the direction of the house they had just left, came the sound of a mourning ululation starting up.

Mrs Schneider flinched again.

‘It doesn’t seem right,’ she said. ‘Not for her.’

‘It’s the family,’ said Schneider. ‘You wouldn’t have thought they’d have cared enough to bother.’

Owen knew now what it was that had been nagging at him.

‘I heard some shots,’ he said to Schneider, as they were walking back out to the truck.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘The mamur said it was your ghaffir.’

‘Very probably,’ said Schneider.

‘What would he be shooting at? The mamur said brigands.’

‘We do have them. Not as often as he claims, however. I think sometimes he just blazes off into the cane.’

‘That’s a service rifle he’s got.’

‘Yes.’

‘I was surprised. Ghaffirs don’t usually have that sort of gun.’

‘They’ve all been issued with them round here.’

‘Not just your ghaffir?’

‘No, all of them. We had to get one especially so that our ghaffir wouldn’t feel out of it.’

‘Whose bright idea was this?’ demanded Owen.

‘The Ministry’s. We had an inspector down a few months ago.’

‘Well, I think it’s crazy. Putting guns like this in the hands of untrained people like –’

‘Oh, they’re trained, all right. Musketry courses, drill, mock exercises, the lot.’

‘Ghaffirs?’ said Owen incredulously.

It didn’t square at all with the picture he had of the usual Egyptian village watchman, who was normally much more like Shakespeare’s Dogberry.

‘Yes. It’s the new policy of the Ministry, apparently.’

‘Well, I still think it’s bloody crazy.’