parted and brought McPhee to where a man was lying stretched out in the grit and dust of the square.
‘Make space! Make space!’
McPhee thrust the bystanders apart by main force and held them off.
‘Why!’ he said in disappointed tones, ‘this isn’t Nuri Pasha! Who is this?’
‘It is Ibrahim, sir,’ said a voice from the crowd. ‘He was wounded when Nuri Pasha was shot.’
‘And where is Nuri Pasha?’
‘He was taken into the hotel, sir,’ said the constable.
‘What sort of condition was he in?’
Seeing that the constable did not understand, McPhee changed his question.
‘Was he alive or dead?’
Various voices from the crowd assured him that Nuri Pasha was (a) dead, (b) unhurt, (c) suffering from terrible injuries. Leaving McPhee to sort that out, Owen pushed his way back through the crowd.
To one side of the mêlée two constables were casually talking to a slight, spare Egyptian in a very handsome suit. He looked up as Owen approached.
‘The Mamur Zapt? I did not expect to see you here in an affair of this sort. Mahmoud el Zaki. Parquet.’
The Parquet was the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice.
They shook hands.
‘You were here very quickly,’ said Owen.
The Egyptian shrugged his shoulders. ‘Nuri Pasha is an important man,’ he said.
‘How is Nuri Pasha?’
‘Shaken.’
‘That all?’
‘The shot did not touch him. It slightly grazed a lemonade-seller.’
‘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.