The Deputy Commandant’s eccentricities were more easily containable in Cairo; but Owen had been desperately short of the right people for this sort of job.
It had probably been a mistake coming out here anyway. Why hadn’t he just accepted the mamur’s word in Minya and left it at that?
The path began to lead upwards now. The incline was slight but in this heat quite enough to make him break out in another shower of sweat. The mamur, too, stopped to mop his face.
Suddenly, from somewhere ahead of them and to the right, two shots rang out.
Owen looked at the mamur.
‘Abdul,’ said the mamur indifferently.
‘Abdul?’
‘The ghaffir.’
‘What would he be shooting at?’ said McPhee.
The mamur shrugged.
‘Brigands.’
‘Brigands!’
‘We have them here. They live in the cane.’
‘Can’t you root them out?’
The mamur shrugged again.
‘It’s not so easy,’ he said.
Again, it wasn’t Owen’s concern. Nor McPhee’s either. The Cairo Police Force was quite separate from that of the rest of the country. He could see that, all the same, McPhee was wondering.
‘Are there many of them?’ he asked.
‘About forty. They come and go. At the moment they’re led by a Sudanese.’
‘What do they do?’
‘Rob. Protection.’
‘The sugar factory?’
‘The factory’s got its own ghaffir. That was him shooting just then. No, mostly it’s the villages. Crops, cattle, that sort of thing. If you want them left alone, you pay the Sudanese.’
‘Don’t the villages have ghaffirs too?’
The mamur laughed. Owen could guess why. The village watchman, the ghaffir, was normally just an ordinary villager, paid a piastre or two a month for his extra duties and armed, if he was armed at all, with an ancient gun dating back to the wars against the Mahdi. You could hardly expect him to take on forty brigands single-handed.
But the local mamur, the District Inspector of Police, surely he would have men he could rely on?
The mamur saw what he was thinking.
‘It’s not so easy,’ he said again, defensively. ‘We’ve tried beating the cane, but they just move to another part. It goes on for miles.’
‘I can see the problem,’ said McPhee, with ready sympathy. He fell in beside the mamur and they continued up the path together, discussing the different difficulties of country and city policing.
Owen was left with something nagging him, however. For the moment he couldn’t identify what it was. It continued to worry away at the back of his mind as they walked up to the house.
In fact, there were several houses; neat, European-style bungalows with verandahs, gardens and high surrounding walls over which loofah trailed gracefully. Away to the right was the sugar factory, a long barn-like building with steam coming out at various points. In front of the building men were unloading cane from trucks and feeding it on to a continuous belt that led into the factory.
A European came up to them and shook hands.
‘Schneider. I’m Swiss,’ he said, as if making a point.
He glanced at the mamur.
‘They’ve just brought the body up,’ he said.
‘Has Mohammed Kufti arrived yet?’ asked the mamur.
‘One of my trucks brought him over,’ said Schneider. ‘He’s in the house now.’
‘We’d better go over,’ said the mamur.
‘Drop in for some coffee when you’ve done,’ Schneider said to Owen. ‘My wife will be glad to see you. She doesn’t get much chance to talk to Europeans.’
The mamur led them over towards the houses. The one they wanted was not part of the main cluster but set a little way back and native Egyptian in style: white, mud brick, single-storey, with an inner courtyard and a high surrounding wall. Inside, it was dark and although the room they were led into was empty, somehow there was the suggestion of many people off stage.
There was a piano in the room, a surprisingly good one, which looked used and well cared for. Little bowls of water, still half-full, were set beneath its feet. It had not escaped the usual ravages of the termites, however. In several places beneath the piano there were small piles of wood dust.
An Egyptian, dressed in a dark suit, came into the room and shook hands.
‘Kufti,’ he said. ‘I’m the doctor.’
‘Found anything yet?’ asked the mamur.
‘I haven’t really started. Some things are obvious, though. She was poisoned. That was almost certainly the cause of death. There are one or two tests I have to do, but that is consistent with the symptoms and there are no apparent injuries.’
‘What was the poison?’ asked Owen.
‘Arsenic.’
The usual. Especially in the provinces, where poisoning your neighbour’s buffalo was an old established custom.
‘Can you cover her up?’ asked the mamur. ‘We want the husband to identify her.’
‘He’s seen her already,’ said the doctor. ‘Does he have to see her again?’
‘For the purposes of formal identification,’ insisted the mamur.
The doctor made a gesture of distaste and left the room.
The mamur went out and then came back and led them along a corridor and into a small room where, in the darkness, a man was sitting hunched up on an angrib.
‘Come, Aziz,’ said the mamur, with surprising gentleness. ‘It is necessary.’
Aziz? For some reason Owen had not taken in that the husband was Egyptian.
They went into another room, where the woman was lying on a bed, covered up with a sheet. The doctor turned the sheet down. The husband broke into sobs and nodded.
‘That’s all,’ said the mamur reassuringly.
‘Come with me, Aziz, and I will give you something,’ said the doctor.
‘How can it be?’ said the husband brokenly. ‘How can it be?’
‘I’m Austrian,’ said Mrs Schneider, smiling prettily; quite.
‘And your husband’s Swiss.’
‘That’s right.’ They both laughed.
She led him out on to the verandah, where coffee things had been laid out on a table. A moment or two later Schneider joined them, with McPhee. They had dropped behind so that Schneider could take him into a room and show him something he’d found near the cat cemetery.
A servant brought a coffee pot and began helping them to coffee. The aroma mixed with the breeze that had come up from the river and spread about the house. They could see the river, just, over the sugar cane. The breeze had come across the cane and by the time it reached them was warm and sweet.
‘Of course, I didn’t know her well,’ said Mrs Schneider. ‘She kept herself to herself. Or was kept. I used to hear the piano playing, though.’
‘All the time,’ said Schneider. ‘Music, I like. But not all the time.’
‘I