Buktari was plainly such a nice man. He was short and wiry, with close-cropped grey hair and an open, intelligent face. They embraced warmly in the Arab fashion.
‘You have something in common,’ said Mahmoud, pouring out the coffee.
‘Oh, yes?’
‘You were both soldiers.’
Ibrahim Buktari’s face lit up.
‘You were?’
‘Well,’ said Owen, ‘briefly.’
‘I was with Al-Lurd,’ said Ibrahim, ‘in the Sudan.’
‘With Kitchener?’
‘That was before he was a lord,’ said Mahmoud.
‘And now he returns to Egypt!’ said Ibrahim. He shrugged. ‘Well, at least we have as Consul-General a man who knows something about Egypt.’
‘He knows it only as it was twelve years ago,’ said Mahmoud.
That was something that all the Egyptian newspapers had said when the appointment was announced. Especially the. Nationalist ones. When Kitchener had been here before, Egyptian nationalism had been in its infancy. But a lot of things had changed since then and among them was that there was now a Nationalist movement which touched almost all parts of the population, especially the young professionals. Like Mahmoud.
How would Kitchener handle it? Would he try to work with it, as his predecessor, Gorst, had done? Or would he – and this was what was feared in Egypt, given his recent record against the equally Nationalist Boers in South Africa – try to suppress it? Was that the point of putting a general into what had hitherto been a civilian post? Was that why Kitchener had been made Consul-General?
When Kitchener had been here before, at the time of his conquest of the Sudan, Owen had been just a junior subaltern on his way out to India to take up his first posting.
‘India?’
Ibrahim began to question Owen eagerly about campaigning conditions in the North West Frontier. Seeing them getting along well together, Mahmoud, who had in truth been slightly apprehensive about his prospective father-in-law’s visit, sat back happily and let them talk.
The conversation was still in full flow when the door opened suddenly and an elderly woman came into the room. She was very agitated and wasn’t even wearing a veil.
‘Mahmoud!’ she said. ‘You are needed. Sidi Morelli has collapsed.’
Mahmoud sprang up and hurried out of the door.
‘Sidi Morelli?’ said Ibrahim, standing up too. ‘Perhaps we can help,’ he said to Owen.
‘It was in the coffee house,’ said Mahmoud’s mother, lighting them down the stairs.
Owen had noticed the café as he had turned into Mahmoud’s street. Indeed, he could hardly help noticing it, for its tables and chairs spread out right across the street and into the Nahhasin also. Now there was a large crowd gathered at the corner, their faces all strange in the light from the café’s vapour lamps. He could see Mahmoud bending over a man lying among the tables.
‘Has anyone sent for an ambulance?’ asked Ibrahim Buktari.
‘We have, Ibrahim, we have,’ said someone. ‘But it is taking a long time coming.’
‘All the ambulances are at the front,’ said someone, ‘because of the war.’
‘A hakim, then?’
Mahmoud looked up.
‘There is no need for a hakim,’ he said.
Someone in the crowd gasped.
Mahmoud straightened up.
‘Cover him,’ he said.
Several people at once stripped off their long outer gowns and laid them over the body.
Mahmoud glanced round.
‘It didn’t happen here,’ he said.
‘It happened over there, Mahmoud. Just round the corner!’
Some of the men took him by the arm and led him a little way along the Nahhasin to where an alley snicked off among the houses.
‘It was here, Mahmoud. I found him here,’ said one of the men, distressed. ‘I nearly fell over him. I didn’t see him, it was so dark.’
‘And then I called for help, Mahmoud,’ said another man, ‘and we carried him back to the coffee house.’
‘We laid him down,’ said someone else, ‘and then we saw – saw that it was Sidi Morelli.’
‘Sidi Morelli!’ Some in the crowd had clearly not realized previously who it was.
‘But he had been here!’ said the patron of the café, bewildered, ‘only the moment before!’
He pointed to a table at which three elderly men were sitting, stunned.
From further along the street there came the sound of a bell and then a moment later someone crying: ‘Make way!’ A covered cart, drawn by two mules, was trying to work through the crowd.
‘Make way for the ambulance!’
Somehow it forced its way through the mass of people and drew up alongside the coffee house. A short, thickset, youngish man, Egyptian, but dressed in a suit not a galabeah, began organizing things.
‘It is good that you are here, Kamal,’ Mahmoud said affectionately.
‘I had just got here. I was still shaking hands –’
He seemed, for all his efficiency, bewildered.
The body was lifted, passed over the heads of the crowd and laid in the back of the ambulance.
‘To the death-house,’ instructed Mahmoud. ‘Not to the hospital.’
The crowd watched sombrely. Many of them were weeping. Owen was surprised; not at the crowd, for if there was anything that drew a crowd in Cairo, it was an accident or a fatality, but at the extent, and sincerity, of the feeling.
‘Sidi Morelli, Ibrahim!’ The man beside them shook his head as if in disbelief.
Everyone here, thought Owen, appeared to know everyone else.
Ibrahim Buktari seemed suddenly to have aged.
‘I shall go home, I think. Excuse me!’
He shook hands with Owen.
The efficient young man whom Owen had noticed earlier appeared beside them. He put his arm round Ibrahim Buktari’s shoulders and led him gently away.
Mahmoud touched Owen’s arm.
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘We shall have to end our evening early. Another time, perhaps.’
‘Of course!’
The crowd was breaking up.
‘I have work to do,’ said Mahmoud.
‘Work!’
‘He did not collapse. He was strangled.’
In Cairo at that time investigating a crime was not the responsibility of the police. Nor, most definitely – with the exception of political crime – was it the responsibility of the Mamur Zapt. When a crime was suspected, it was reported to the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice, the Parquet, as it was known, and the Parquet would appoint one of its lawyers to conduct an investigation. Ordinarily the appointment would come first. Mahmoud being Mahmoud, however, he had seen a responsibility waiting to be taken and had been unable to resist taking it, with the result that by the time – the following afternoon – that he was actually appointed to the case, he had already been pursuing his inquiries for some hours.
A bearer had brought