The Girl in the Nile

by Michael Pearce

  “No,” he said.

  They came back just before it grew dark. The vast cemetery was deserted. Only in the far distance was there any movement, a woman walking home between the tombs, a great water pot on her head.

  In the pockets of air between the tombs it was still hot, but the glare had gone out of the sun and the soft evening light was easy on the eyes.

  They had come properly equipped with spades and the wooden halfbaskets used in Egypt for scooping and carrying soil. It would not take them long. And this time there would be no crowds of onlookers to interfere.

  He ordered the men to start work.

  They quickly scraped the sand from the roofstones and lifted them off. One of the smaller men climbed into the entrance house and wrestled away the large stone which blocked the entrance to the main chamber. Somebody handed him down a lamp. He held it out into the tomb and peered inside.

  But already Owen knew. As the stone was pulled away from the entrance the smell of new corruption reached up to him.

  The man with the lamp pulled the folds of his galabeah over his nose and mouth. Then he looked again.

  He gave a startled exclamation and jumped back. In a second he came scrambling up out of the entrance house.

  “Effendi!” he said, his eyes wide open with shock. “Effendi!”

  “What is it?”

  The man could hardly speak for a moment.

  “Effendi!” he said at last. “Effendi! Not one but—two!”

  ***

  Owen went down himself, holding a handkerchief over his face. It took a little while for his eyes to get used to the flickering shadows cast by the lamp. Besides, his vision was impeded by something.

  Eventually he made out what it was. A girl’s body, not lying on its right side and supported on bricks as was proper, but cast higgledy-piggledy across the floor of the tomb.

  And then, further away, he saw the other thing that had shocked the man. It was another body, clearly recent, also thrown in anyhow, and also of a girl.

  This body had not even been prepared for interment. It was still in its ordinary workaday clothes. The clothes were deeply stained with ugly dark patches but had not yet had time to rot away and he could see what they were.

  In the half light it was hard to tell, but—

  “Shintiyan,” he said. “She’s wearing shintiyan.”

  “Color?” asked Georgiades.

  ***

  “But, laddie, I’m busy!” protested the pathologist.

  Owen had caught the eminent man just as he was going to lunch. Lunch was important to Cairns-Grant and he approached it with the single-minded devotion which had made the Cairo forensic laboratory, despite its lack of size and facilities, one of the leaders in its field. It was also, of course, that it had plenty of practice.

  “Better even than Chicago,” Cairns-Grant was wont to say fondly. Cairo, he was prone to point out to visiting Americans, was the murder capital of the world, with a higher rate of homicide than any other major city. And he regarded Owen with considerable affections for what he considered his contribution to this desirable state of affairs.

  “A brief word!” pleaded Owen.

  Cairns-Grant looked at his watch.

  “I was going to the Club,” he said. “Would you care to join me?”

  Owen sometimes went to the Sporting Club himself for lunch, but that was only if he was in that part of the city. Cairns-Grant went every day. It was about half an hour’s drive in an arabeah from the Government Laboratories but Cairns-Grant justified it on the grounds that in the middle of the day, considering the nature of the work, it was too hot to continue working. “They thaw,” he explained, “so quickly,” and no one felt drawn to explore the matter further.

  Cairns-Grant’s lunchtime conversations tended to be full of this kind of grisly detail and today was no exception.

  “Ye see,” he said, “when a body is left long in water, or buried in damp ground, it changes. Human fat, which is normally semifluid, is converted into firm fat. Like mutton suet,” he explained kindly.

  Mutton was on the menu.

  “No, thanks,” Owen said to the waiter. “I’ll have fish.”

  “Oh, there you are,” said a voice. “I was hoping to catch you.”

  Owen looked up. It was Garvin, an old cardplaying crony of Cairns-Grant’s.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Do.” The waiter rushed to lay another place. “I was just explaining to young Owen here about adipocere.”

  “Adipocere?”

  “Human fat,” said Cairns-Grant, “in dead bodies.”

  “Oh,” said Garvin, studying the menu.

  “It’s to do with the body he’s just brought in. He’s a guid lad,” said Cairns-Grant fondly. “He brings me in a lot of cases.”

  “Mutton, I think,” said Garvin, closing the menu with a snap. “What’s this one?”

  “A lady who’s been in the river. Not for very long, I’d say, judging by the limited adipocere. But definitely long enough to start the process. Of course, it depends on temperature to some extent. Now up here in Cairo—”

  Cairns-Grant went happily on.

  “What did she die of?” asked Garvin when Cairns-Grant paused for a moment to draw breath.

  “I was just telling you. You see, the hyoid—that’s the small bone at the base of the tongue—was fractured in two places, one at the top of the left horn, the other where the right horn joined the body. The point is,” said Cairns-Grant, “that there was some adipocere—limited, mind—in the fractured ends of the hyoid.”

  “Which means?” said Garvin.

  Cairns-Grant was slightly taken aback.

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it? The fracturing took place before immersion in the water. Haven’t I made myself clear?” he said worriedly.

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” Owen hastily reassured him. “Only—”

  “You see,” Cairns-Grant explained to Garvin, “there’s often some degree of fracturing in the bodies we get. Especially those”—he gave Owen a proud glance—“we get from young Owen.”

  “So what you’re saying,” said Owen, “is that the fracturing took place while she was still on board?”

  “On board?” said Garvin.

  “Aye,” said Cairns-Grant.

  “Any idea what caused it?”

  “Didn’t ye look?” said Cairns-Grant, surprised.

  “Not closely.”

  “Closely enough, I daresay,” said Cairns-Grant. “Well, ye’re right to be cautious ahead of the pathologist’s report. If only more of your ilk would do the same. Rushing to conclusions ahead of the evidence! That’s often the problem.”

  “So what did she die of?” asked Garvin.

  “Oh, she was garotted. The cord was still around the neck.”

  “Garotted!” said Owen.

  “Oh, garotted,” said Garvin indifferently. “We get plenty of those. How do you come to be involved?” he asked Owen.

  Garotting might be a staple of ordinary police work but it was not something that Owen, as Political Officer, was normally concerned with.

  “It’s that Sekhmet case. You remember, the girl on the dahabeeyah—Narouz’s dahabeeyah.”

  Garvin put down his knife and fork.

  “Garotte!” he said. “I don’t like the sound of that! We wouldn’t want that to come out!”

  ***

  “Garotte!” said Paul, perturbed. “This is really very awkward. We’re just coming up to the final session, with any luck. The Agreement’s due to be signed next week. After that we’ll be home and dry.”

  ***

  “Garotte!” whispered Zeinab. “That is horrible!”

  She had a little weep. Owen put his arm around her. She let it rest there.

  Suddenly she threw it
off.

  “What are you going to do about it?” she demanded.

  “Well, I’m—”

  “That’s not enough! Get it out of them!”

  “Get what out of who?”

  “The truth. Someone must know. The Rais, the eunuch, Narouz—”

  “I’m trying to get it out of them.”

  “You’re not. You’re too soft, too nice, too gentle. Oh, I love you”—Owen thought this at least was improvement—“but you are too weak.” He changed his mind. “This is Egypt.”

  “What exactly did you have in mind? Amputation?”

  “That will do for a start,” said Zeinab.

  “Right!” Owen sprang to his feet. “Limbs, testicles and entrails! On the table tomorrow morning!”

  He made to start for the door.

  Zeinab looked at him uncertainly.

  ***

  “Garotte!” said Prince Narouz, looking shaken. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s awful!” The Prince shook his head. “Awful!”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re absolutely certain?” he asked again. “I mean, there’s no possibility—”

  “The cord was round her neck.”

  The Prince winced.

  “That’s awful!” he said again. “Awful!”

  “We can be certain about these things,” said Owen, “now that we have the body.”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” The Prince put his hand to his head. “It’s just that…Death, I was prepared for, we know about that. But garotte!” He shuddered. “It’s awful, horrible!”

  A thought suddenly struck him.

  “But isn’t that an unusual way of killing someone?”

  “Very common in Cairo.”

  “No, no. I don’t mean that. I mean, if people quarrel, or have a fight, that’s not what they do to each other. They hit each other, or stab each other, or…”

  His voice trailed away.

  “It’s a professional way of killing, if that’s what you mean. There are people who specialize in it.”

  “But—but—how could a person like that be on board the dahabeeyah?”

  “You tell me,” said Owen, and waited.

  The Prince moistened his lips.

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “The dahabeeyah is a small place, you see. A stranger—a stranger like that—would be bound to be noticed. He would be conspicious, wouldn’t he?”

  “There are places to hide,” muttered the Prince, “even on the dahabeeyah.”

  “And then, why was he on board in the first place? Perhaps you could tell me that, Prince Narouz?”

  The Prince put his hand to his head again.

  “I can’t think,” he whispered. “I can’t think. There’s no reason—there could be no reason.”

  “Do you think he would go to that trouble, that risk, for no reason?”

  “I don’t know,” said Narouz wretchedly.

  “He would have to be wellpaid, wouldn’t he? And hired beforehand. Which makes it, well, premeditated, doesn’t it?”

  Narouz appeared in a state of shock.

  “It couldn’t be,” he said, “it just couldn’t be.”

  “These are questions,” said Owen, “to which I would like answers. And I was hoping you would be able to help me.”

  Narouz put both hands to his head.

  “I would if I could,” he said desperately. “But I can’t! It’s—it couldn’t have happened that way! I must think! I must think!”

  “Yes,” said Owen, “you must.”

  ***

  “Well,” said Mahmoud, pouring Owen some more coffee, “you’re quite right. You don’t have to be a professional to garotte people but the chances are you are!”

  “This one was. Cairns-Grant says there’s a difference in the way you garotte people between a professional and an amateur. The amateur just wraps a cord round the throat and pulls as hard as he can. The professional knows just where to apply the pressure. It’s a much quicker job. The marking is quite different.”

  “Well, if it was professional, that alters things quite a bit.”

  “Yes, it rules out a quarrel and then a blow or perhaps even a push.”

  “Yes, it means it had to be thought about beforehand and a killer hired and brought on board.”

  “That puzzles me a bit. If it’s Narouz. Why would he want to go to the length of bringing someone on board especially to do the killing when he must have known this would immediately direct attention on him and he could so easily have arranged for it to happen somewhere else?”

  “There’s the question of motive, too,” said Mahmoud, waving away a fly. “The most likely explanation of the girl’s death was always a quarrel on board, followed, as you said, by a blow or a push. But that’s ruled out if it’s premeditated, and it must be something else.”

  “And if it’s something else, why do it on board?”

  They were in one of the shopping centers of the city and the street was filling up after the afternoon siesta. The lengthening shadows were bringing people out of their houses for that universal Mediterranean evening promenade.

  Even Mahmoud, very un-Cairene in that he seemed to blaze with energy all day, was Cairene enough to expand and relax almost visibly as the evening came on.

  “How’s Zeinab?” he asked mellowly.

  “The same. She’s not moved an inch. She can be very inflexible sometimes.”

  “Ah well,” murmured Mahmoud commiseratingly.

  “Of course, she was very upset when I told her it was garotte.”

  “Unpleasant,” said Mahmoud. “Nasty.”

  “No, no, it wasn’t so much that. She fired up. She said I was too soft.”

  “What did she expect you to do?”

  “Castrate them, I think.”

  “Anyone particular?”

  “Narouz, his Rais, the crew in general—”

  “Well, she has a point, hasn’t she?”

  “I don’t think I’d go as far as that,” said Owen dubiously.

  “They must have known,” said Mahmoud. “You couldn’t have somebody like that on board without them knowing. There are no hiding places on a dahabeeyah so far as the crew are concerned. It’s a small space. It wouldn’t be possible to keep out of their way. Someone must have seen him.”

  “They won’t say anything. They’re loyal to Narouz.”

  “Of course,” said Mahmoud, “we could always try someone who’s not loyal to Narouz!”

  ***

  “It’s been a long time,” said the Belgian girl, Nanette.

  “I’ve had other sweethearts to attend to,” said Owen.

  “What about him?” asked Nanette, pointing to Mahmoud. “Has he got other sweethearts, too?”

  Mahmoud, straitlaced and not at all sure about all this, looked uncomfortable.

  The girls laughed.

  They were meeting in the girls’ appartement.

  “We don’t usually do business here,” said Masha, the Hungarian one. “We’re making an exception for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Owen. He had passed them a note at the gambling salon where they worked, thinking that this time he would not approach them through the manager in case it caused them problems.

  The girls were used to receiving notes. On his way out a reply was tucked in his pocket. It was on scented paper and in a little mauve envelope and invited him round to the girls’ flat the following day.

  The flat was soft and cushioned and had two low divans. Nanette sat on one and invited Mahmoud to sit beside her. Masha lay on the other and made a little space for Owen.

  “How much are you prepared to pay?” asked Nanette.

  “Pay?” said Mahmoud.

  Ow
en shook his head.

  “I’m afraid that’s not what I had in mind,” he said apologetically. “We’re here on business. Remember? That incident on the river.”

  “That? We’d thought you’d solved that long ago!”

  “Still a few questions.”

  “Oh dear!” Nanette pulled a long face. “We’ve told you all we know. Can’t we talk about something else?”

  “You still ought to pay,” said Masha. “Our knowledge is priceless.”

  “There is no question of payment,” said Mahmoud severely. “It is a question of duty under the law.”

  Masha made a moue.

  “You behave yourself!” said Mahmoud. “This is the Mamur Zapt. He can deport you from the country.”

  “Oh dear,” said Masha. “From Egypt? That would really hurt. Can I say where I want to go, please?” she asked Owen.

  “Let’s get back to the point,” said Owen.

  “Right!”

  Both girls sprang up and sat to attention on the divans.

  Mahmoud seemed about to explode.

  “Relax, sweetie,” said Nanette, patting him on the hand. “It’s only a joke!”

  “Can I ask you some questions?” said Owen hastily.

  “It is about this girl, yes?” asked Masha.

  “Yes. Can we go back to the night you were picked up at Beni Suef. Was anyone else picked up with you?”

  “The girl.”

  “Apart from her?”

  The girls looked at each other.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “There was just the boatman.”

  “Was he one of the crew?”

  “Yes. Abdul.”

  “He took you out to the dahabeeyah.”

  “Yes. It was a little rowing boat.”

  “Was there anyone else waiting at the landing stage? Someone he might have gone back for?”

  The girls looked at each other again.

  “It was dark. We didn’t really see anyone.”

  “OK. Now can you think hard and see if you can remember anyone else coming on board? Not at Beni Suef but anywhere else?”

  “What sort of person?”

  “An Arab. Not a member of the crew.”

  “Lots. When we were at Luxor, lots came on board. They were carrying things. Food, water, that sort of thing.”

  “Did any of them stay on board?”