‘No need for me,’ said Owen.
‘No need for me either,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Though I expect I shall get the case now.’
The Parquet, not the police, were responsible for investigation. It was clear that they already had the case in hand. The Ministry of Justice was nearer than the Bab el Khalk and they must have sent a bright young man down as soon as they had heard. There was nothing that Owen could do.
He pushed his way back through the crowd to where the wounded lemonade-seller lay.
‘Are you badly hurt?’
‘I am dying,’ said the man.
There seemed no evidence of any wound.
‘Where is your hurt?’
The man groaned but said nothing.
‘In the bum, effendi,’ a woman said eagerly. ‘Look!’
She lifted the man’s galabeah. The bullet had glanced along the buttock, leaving a livid furrow.
‘He will survive,’ said Owen.
The man was unconvinced.
‘I am dying.’
‘This is not a houris you see,’ said the woman. ‘It is your wife.’
The man groaned again, louder. The crowd guffawed.
‘Take heart, man,’ said Owen. ‘You might have been hit in the front.’
The woman looked up at him mock-demurely. She was a villager and did not wear a veil.
‘What difference would that have made, effendi?’
‘None at all in his case,’ said a voice from the crowd. ‘He has not been with his woman for weeks.’
The wounded man sat up indignantly.
Owen moved away. There seemed very few casualties from the shooting. Whoever it was had thoroughly bungled his job.
McPhee was talking to the man from the Parquet. He signalled to Owen to come over.
‘They think they’ve got the man,’ he said. ‘He was seized as he tried to run away.’
‘Who by?’ said Owen, surprised.
It was very rare for the ordinary populace to intervene in an assault, which, as opposed to an injury or accident, they tended to regard as a private matter.
‘It’s not so surprising,’ said the man from the Parquet. ‘Come and look.’
He led them across the Place and into the Hotel Continental.
In a small storeroom at the back, guarded by a large, though apprehensive, constable, an Arab lay prone on the floor.
He was completely unconscious. Mahmoud turned the head with his foot so that they could see the face. The eyelids rolled back to reveal white, drugged eyes.
McPhee dropped on one knee beside the man, bent over him and sniffed.
‘Don’t really need to,’ he said. ‘Smell it a mile away. Hashish.’
He began searching the man methodically.
‘I expect you’ve already done this,’ he said apologetically.
‘Police job,’ said Mahmoud.
‘And I don’t expect they’ve done it,’ said McPhee.
Most of the ordinary constables were volunteers on a five-year contract and were recruited from those who had finished their conscript service, again five years, with the Egyptian army. They tended to come from the poorer villages and were nearly all illiterate. They were paid three pounds a month.
‘He wasn’t like this when he was caught, surely?’ said Owen, puzzled.
‘Pretty well,’ said Mahmoud. ‘That’s why they caught him. He more or less fell over.’
‘Then how—?’
‘How did he fire the shot?’ Mahmoud shrugged. ‘My guess is he took the hashish to stiffen himself up. He just about managed to fire the shot, and then it caught up with him. That’s why he shot so poorly.’
‘Maybe,’ said Owen.
The other smiled.
‘The other explanation is, of course, that he was drugged up to the hilt, someone else fired the shot—equally poorly—and then put the gun in his hand.’
McPhee looked up. ‘The gun was definitely in his hand at some point.’
He took up the Arab’s limp hand, smelled it, and then offered it to the other two.
‘No, thanks,’ said Owen.
‘Distinct smell of powder.’
‘I’m surprised you can pick it out among the other things.’
McPhee let the hand drop and rose to his feet.
‘Nothing else,’ he said.
‘Did you find the gun?’ Owen asked Mahmoud.
Mahmoud nodded. ‘On the ground,’ he said.
He signed to the constable, who went away and returned a moment later gingerly carrying a large revolver in a fold of dirty white cloth.
‘Standard Service issue, I think,’ said McPhee, ‘but you’ll know better than I.’
He looked at Owen.
‘New model,’ said Owen. ‘Only started being issued here last February. Wonder where he got that?’
‘I’ll have to check,’ said Mahmoud.
‘You’ll have something to go on at any rate,’ said McPhee.
He was always pleased to put the Parquet in its place.
‘More than that,’ said Owen. ‘I think we’ve got a witness for you.’
Mahmoud looked at him inquiringly.
‘Blue galabeah,’ Owen said to McPhee.
He turned to go.
‘Have a word with Fakhri Bey,’ he said as they went.
Afterwards, Owen and McPhee went to the Sporting Club for lunch, and then Owen had a swim. In the summer working hours were from eight-thirty till two. The whole city had a siesta then, from which it did not stir until about six o’clock. Then the shops reopened, the street stall-holders emerged from under their stalls, the open air cafés filled up, and the narrow streets hummed with life until nearly three in the morning.
Owen had got used to the pattern in India and it did not bother him. However, he never found it possible to sleep in the afternoon. Usually he read the papers at the club and then went for a swim in the club pool. The mothers with their children did not come until after four, so he had the pool to himself and could chug up and down practising the new crawl stroke.
Usually, too, he would return to his office about six and work for a couple of hours in the cool of the evening, undisturbed by clerks and orderlies, agents and petitioners. It was a good time for getting things done.
That evening he had intended to get to grips with the estimates, but when he arrived in his office he found a note on his desk from McPhee, asking him to drop along as soon as he got in.
‘Oh! Hullo!’ said McPhee, when he stuck his head round the door. ‘Just as well you’re here. The Old Man wants to see us.’
Garvin, the professional policeman who had relatively recently been appointed Commandant of the Cairo Police, was, if anything, a little younger than McPhee, but McPhee always liked to refer to him in what Owen considered to be a prep-school manner. McPhee had spent twelve years teaching in the Egyptian equivalent of a minor public school before Garvin’s idiosyncratic, and amateur, predecessor had recruited him as Assistant Commandant at the time of the corruption business.
The choice was not, in fact, as eccentric as might appear. McPhee was patently honest, a necessary qualification in the circumstances and one comparatively rare in worldly-wise Cairo; he spoke Arabic fluently, which was a prime prerequisite for the post so far as the British Agent, Cromer, was concerned; and he possessed boundless physical energy, which, although irritating at times, fitted him quite well for some of the tasks a policeman was called on to do.
He was, however, an amateur, and, Owen considered, would not have stood a cat’s chance in hell of getting the job if Garvin had been making the appointment.
The same was probably true of his own appointment as Mamur Zapt, Head of the Political Branch and the Secret Police.
McPhee himself had been responsible for this. The post of Mamur Zapt had become vacant at the time when McPhee, pending Garvin’s arrival, had been appointed Acting-Commandant. The post was considered too sensitive to be left unfilled for long and McPhee had been asked to advise the Minister. Not a professional soldier himself, he had been over-impressed by Owen’s service on the North-West Frontier in India, and Owen’s facility with languages had clinched the matter.
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