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.
The shrewd, unsentimental Garvin, thought Owen, would have appointed neither of them; neither the eccentric McPhee nor the inexperienced Owen. He would probably have got on better, Owen thought, with the previous Mamur Zapt: the one who knew the underworld of Cairo just a little too well.
Now, when he and McPhee took up their accustomed chairs before the large desk, Owen felt the usual small-boy-about-to-be-disciplined feeling creeping up on him. He guessed that McPhee felt it, too, but they reacted in different ways. McPhee sat up ramrod-straight and barked ‘Yes, sir!’ Owen lolled back in what he suspected was an absurdly exaggerated manner and said nothing. He suspected that Garvin found him far too easy-going.
The suspicion was soon reinforced.
‘Nuri Pasha,’ said Garvin.
‘Nasty shock, sir,’ said McPhee. ‘But he’s recovering. We have the man who did it.’
‘Oh,’ said Garvin.
McPhee described the circumstances.
Garvin did not seem much interested.
‘So that’s all buttoned up,’ McPhee concluded.
‘Buttoned up?’ Garvin regarded him incredulously. ‘You haven’t bloody begun!’
He turned to the Mamur Zapt.
‘Did you get any warning of this?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
Owen thought that was an unfair question.
‘We get any number of warnings,’ he began defensively. ‘Three or four a day—’
Garvin cut across him.
‘Did you get one about this? About Nuri Pasha?’
‘Not specifically,’ Owen admitted.
‘Worrying.’
‘Nine-tenths of them are boloney.’
‘The other tenth isn’t,’ said Garvin.
He brooded for a moment.
‘What do you do about those? The ones that aren’t boloney?’
‘We check them all out,’ said Owen. ‘Boloney or no boloney. The ones that look as if they might have something in them we take action over.’
‘What action?’
‘Notify the appropriate people. Stick a man on. Stay with the source.’
‘Sometimes it works,’ said Garvin.
‘It nearly always works,’ said McPhee loyally.
Garvin ignored him.
‘But those are the cases where you hear something. You didn’t even pick up a whisper this time?’
‘No.’
‘Slip-up,’ said Garvin.
Owen fought back.
‘Not necessarily,’ he said. ‘Anyone who’s plotting an assassination isn’t going to broadcast the fact. There may have been nothing to pick up.’
‘There’s always something to pick up in Cairo,’ said Garvin dismissively.
He turned his attention back to McPhee.
‘Buttoned up!’ he repeated. ‘You haven’t bloody even started! Whose man was he? What’s behind this? What are they after?’
‘The Parquet—’ Owen began.
Garvin swung round on him.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he said. ‘Stop messing around! You know damned well this is nothing to do with them. It’s political.’
Garvin’s eyes bored into his.
‘So you’d better bloody get on with it,’ he said. ‘Mamur Zapt.’
Owen was at the Place de l’Opéra shortly before seven the following morning. Early though he was, the Parquet was there before him.
Mahmoud was surprised.
‘The Mamur Zapt?’ he said.
He broke into a smile.
‘They have been leaning on you, too?’
‘They told me to stop messing around and bloody get on with it,’ said Owen.
‘Moi aussi.’
They both laughed.
‘It must be political,’ said Mahmoud.
‘What isn’t?’ said Owen.