Michael Pearce - The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in Nile

‘There’s just one thing,’ said Owen.

‘Not there?’ said the Prince incredulously.

‘Not there?’ echoed McPhee.

Mahmoud did not say anything but started immediately down the slope.

By the time they got there he was already talking to the watchman.

‘I don’t understand,’ said the Prince. ‘Are you saying that this is all a mistake?’

‘A body was reported,’ said Owen.

‘A false report?’

Owen shrugged.

The watchman fell on his knees.

‘It was true , effendi,’ he protested vehemently. ‘I saw it. I swear it. On my father’s …’

‘I begin to doubt,’ said the Prince coldly, ‘whether you had a father.’

The watchman swallowed.

‘It was there, effendi,’ he said, pointing to the shoal. ‘There! I swear it.’

‘Then where is it?’

The watchman swallowed again.

‘I don’t know, effendi,’ he said weakly. ‘I don’t know.’

‘The river, effendi,’ insinuated the corporal sotto voce . ‘It could be the river.’

Bur the Prince had already turned away.

‘This is awkward,’ he said.

‘It could have been somebody else,’ said Owen. ‘It needn’t have been the girl.’

‘The report was of a woman’s body.’

‘Another woman, perhaps.’

The Prince shrugged.

‘Unlikely, I would have thought. Unless you have women’s bodies floating down this part of the river all the time.’

‘Oh no, effendi,’ said the corporal hastily.

‘Awkward,’ said the Prince again. ‘It would have been much more convenient … Well, it must be somewhere. You’ll have to find it, that’s all.’

‘I’ll get on to it right away,’ promised McPhee. ‘I’ll alert all the police stations—’

‘Quietly,’ said the Prince. ‘If that’s possible with the police.’

‘There’s a bend below the city,’ said Mahmoud. ‘It will probably turn up there.’

‘Have someone looking out for it,’ ordered the Prince. ‘This needs to be handled discreetly.’ He looked at Owen. ‘You’re managing this. Remember?’

Owen and Mahmoud were left on the river bed.

‘Like it?’ said Owen.

‘No,’ said Mahmoud. ‘But then, there’s quite a lot I don’t like.’

He called the watchman over.

‘Come here,’ he said. ‘You saw the body. Describe it.’

‘It was a woman.’

‘Clothed?’

‘Of course!’ said the watchman, shocked.

‘It mightn’t have been. What was she wearing?’

The watchman looked down at his feet, embarrassed.

‘Shintiyan,’ he muttered.

‘Trousers?’ said the corporal, unable to restrain himself. ‘Oh ho, Abu, this is the stuff of dreams!’

‘Colour?’

‘Pink,’ muttered the watchman.

‘She was not a village woman, then?’

‘No, effendi.’ The watchman shook his head definitely.

‘What else was she wearing? A tob?’

The watchman hesitated.

‘I think so, effendi. It was hard to tell.’

The corporal guffawed.

‘He only saw the shintiyan!’

‘She wore something, though, apart from the shintiyan?’

‘Oh, yes, effendi. It was just the way she was lying,’ he said aside to the corporal. ‘That’s how I came to see them.’

The shintiyan were ordinary trousers, not undergarments, and came right down to the ankle.

‘How was she lying?’ asked Mahmoud.

The watchman lay down on the sand and put his arms together over his head. His body formed a kind of crescent.

‘There’s a hump on the shoal,’ he said. ‘She was lying round that.’

‘Show me.’

They splashed out to the shoal. The water was shallow and hardly came up their knees.

The shoal was some twenty feet long, and about four feet wide. At the downstream end it rose into a little hump.

‘She was lying round that,’ said the watchman. ‘Head that side, feet this.’

‘The body probably caught up against it on its way downstream,’ said Owen.

‘Well, yes,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Possibly. But you can see from the mud that normally the upper part of the shoal is above the water.’

‘The wash of a boat? The Prince’s boat?’

‘Possibly.’

Mahmoud examined the mud carefully.

‘We’ll have to get the trackers out here,’ he said. ‘I can’t see anything.’

‘Does it matter?’ asked Owen. ‘If anything happened, it happened on the boat. Where the body finishes up is neither here nor there.’

‘Yes,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Except that there’s one thing I find puzzling. I can accept that the body might have been carried high up on to the shoal by an exceptionally heavy wash from a boat. But I find it hard to believe in a second exceptionally heavy wash from a boat in the same morning—one so heavy as to carry the body off again.’

Owen had to go back to his men. He found them, as he expected, doing nothing. They were supposed to be carrying out an arms search. In fact, they were chatting peacefully in the shade.

He put them back to work. The tip had come from a reliable source. You didn’t waste things like that in his business.

According to his informant, the arms had come into the quarter the previous day. The consignment was substantial, at least two donkey-loads. It would be hidden in the quarter until the necessary deals were struck and the arms could be distributed.

For a consignment as large as that hiding-places were limited. The houses in this poor part of town were single-storey, one-room affairs and there was seldom any furniture in the room. The men would simply come into the room, stand and look.

Usually they concentrated their attention on the roof. The roofs were flat and used for storage: onions, maize stalks, cattle dung being dried out for fuel, firewood.

It was under the firewood that arms were usually hidden. The men would run up the outside staircases and make straight for that.

By now, though, the sun was directly overhead and on the roofs it was unbearably hot. It was hot even to step on them. The men winced as their bare feet touched the plaster and Owen could feel the heat even through the soles of his shoes.

That was the trouble about missing a couple of hours. If he had not been called away it would have been done by now.

The men were beginning to slow down. He went round chivvying.

Two men were taking a suspiciously long time on a roof. He went up to see what they were doing.

He had maligned them. They were working. Like many of the roofs, this one had a dovecot. It consisted of large earthenware pots stacked on top of each other on their sides so that the mouths all pointed one way like a battery of guns. The doves flew in at the mouths and made their nests inside.

The trouble was that a number of the birds were inside now and the constables, country boys, were conscientiously taking them out one by one before feeling around inside.

‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to do that.’

‘You told us to check everything!’

‘Yes, but—’

He was forced to admit they were right. It could be a possible hiding-place. Though only for pistols.

‘Don’t do them all,’ he said. ‘Just try a few. Otherwise you’ll be here all day.’

‘We don’t want to miss anything,’ one of them said, reaching unhurriedly into another pot.

‘Yes, but we want to get a move on.’

‘Sure!’ they agreed equably.

They were some of the men he had borrowed from the local District Chief. Out here on the edge of the city life was still close to that of the village and the pace was very different from what it was further in.

He thought it would probably confuse them if he insisted on their moving on. Instead, hoping to expedite matters, he squatted down beside them and gave them a hand.