to do with smuggling, no. From the point of view of Finance, yes. There always is. But even those bastards haven’t got round to sending out shooting parties. Yet.’
‘If it’s not work it could be personal.’
‘Something in my personal life, you mean?’ Fairclough reflected, then shook his head. ‘Try as I might, I can’t find anything I’ve done bad enough for anyone to want to shoot me.’
‘Women?’
‘No,’ said Fairclough shortly.
‘Others?’
Owen was trying to find a way of referring to any other preferences Fairclough might have.
‘Bridge,’ said Fairclough.
‘What?’ said Owen, startled.
‘Bridge. I play a lot of bridge. And, of course, feelings sometimes run high. But,’ said Fairclough, weighing the matter, ‘not as high as that.’
‘Oh, good.’
Fairclough went on thinking.
‘No,’ he said at last, shaking his head. ‘No, I can’t say that anything comes to mind.’
‘Well, if it does, you’ll let me know, won’t you?’
‘You bet I will,’ said Fairclough. ‘I don’t want those bastards trying again.’
Owen could get little more out of him. He hadn’t even seen the men who had fired the shots. That piece of information had come from a passing water-carrier, who had seen two men step out from behind a stationary arabeah, fire the shots and then duck back in again. It had all happened so quickly that the water-carrier had barely had time to notice anything. He wasn’t even sure whether the men were dressed in Western-style clothes or in galabeahs.
‘I just heard the bangs,’ said Fairclough, ‘and then the bloody donkey was bucking all over the place.’
He cast a longing glance in the direction of the bar.
Owen took the hint.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
Fairclough got up. At the last minute he was reluctant to go.
‘It’s a funny business, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Why would anyone want to kill me?’
‘It might be simply a mistake, of course.’
‘Mistaken identity, you mean?’
‘Maybe.’
Fairclough brightened.
‘That could be it,’ he said. ‘That could well be it.’
Privately Owen doubted whether it was possible to mistake Fairclough for anyone else. The image of a second pink little man in the habit of riding home on a donkey rose unbidden to his mind. He put it down firmly.
Even Fairclough, after a moment, began to have his doubts.
‘I don’t think it could be that, you know,’ he said worriedly.
‘Why not?’
‘I think they knew what they were doing.’
‘What makes you say that?’
Fairclough hesitated. ‘You’ll probably think I’m being fanciful,’ he said. ‘But—I think that recently I’ve been followed.’
‘Followed?’
‘Someone behind me. I’ve never seen anyone, mind. I’ve just sensed it. There’s a sort of feeling you have.’ He looked at Owen. ‘You probably think I’ve been imagining things.’
‘No,’ said Owen. ‘No, I don’t.’
‘I thought that myself—thought I was imagining it. So I took no notice. Told myself not to be so bloody daft. But then, this shooting …’ His voice tailed away.
‘It’s not so daft,’ said Owen. ‘It makes sense for them to do their homework.’
‘But then—you see, that means they knew what they were doing. Knew it was me, I mean.’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘And then,’ said Fairclough, taking no notice, ‘this following business—’
‘Yes?’
‘There have been other cases, haven’t there? Recently, I mean. There’s been a lot of talk.’
‘I wouldn’t believe everything you hear.’
‘You see, that would explain it. The shooting, I mean. It might not be anything to do with me. Not personally, I mean. If it was—well, you know.’
‘No,’ said Owen, ‘I don’t.’
‘If it was something to do with, well, the present, well—situation.’
‘There’s no evidence of that,’ said Owen, ‘no evidence at all.’
‘I had to reassure the poor little devil,’ he explained.
‘Yes,’ said Garvin doubtfully. ‘The trouble is we actually want them to be a bit scared, don’t we? So that they’ll take precautions.’
Garvin was Commandant of the Cairo Police, a big man in every sense: big in terms of physical presence—he towered over Owen, who was himself a six-footer, big in reputation with the Egyptians—he had been in the country a long time and was known in the underworld to have a special eye, big in standing with the Consul-General.
They were at the Consul-General’s now. It was a reception for a delegation of businessmen newly out from London to which the Consul-General seemed to be attaching a lot of importance. Owen could see him now at the far end of the room deep in conversation with two of its members, both perspiring profoundly in their dark suits.
At any rate no one would be able to say he wasn’t talking to Englishmen, Owen thought. The current joke in the bar ran something like this: ‘Have you been to one of the CG’s receptions lately?’—‘Oh no. You see, I’m not an Egyptian.’
Gorst, the man who had recently replaced Cromer as Consul-General, was deeply unpopular with the expatriate British community. Although he had in fact served in Egypt before and was familiar with the country and its ways, he was something of a new broom, put in by the new Liberal Government in London specifically to liberalize the British regime in Egypt and to improve relations with the Khedive, Egypt’s hereditary ruler.
Cromer had in fact been the man who had ruled Egypt and for thirty years successive Khedives and their Prime Ministers had been forced to submit to his iron will. His regime had been by no means a bad one. Under him Egypt’s desperate economic problems, which had brought the British to Egypt in the first place to make sure they recovered their loans, had been largely resolved and he had introduced many much-needed reforms.
But after thirty years the Egyptians were beginning to feel that they would like to solve their problems themselves. The new Liberal Government in London was more sympathetic to nationalism than the previous Conservative Government had been, and Cromer’s heavy-handed approach had not commended itself. One of their first acts had been to replace him.
Anyone following Cromer would have had a difficult time. Gorst, with his new brief and new ways of doing things, soon ran into trouble. He was thought to be too pliable, too soft, too keen on the Egyptians. Personally, Owen thought he was all right. It was just that, new in the job, he lacked Cromer’s certainty, with the result that scruple and circumspection was easily misinterpreted as weakness.
As now.
There was something of a political crisis. The old Government had fallen. With all its faults it had been a good one. Its leader, however, had been a Copt. In a country where the bulk of the population was Muslim, a Christian Prime Minister could be only a temporary phenomenon.