The Bride Box mz-17

by Michael Pearce

  But didn’t the same argument apply if what Mahmoud had originally feared was correct? That this was a dull, ordinary murder, domestic, probably, in an ordinary town very much out in the sticks, just the sort of case that you would be assigned to if your career was on the point of plunging irrevocably downwards? Suppose it was — surely the very last thing a murderer would do would be to draw attention to it?

  Unless there was some ulterior motive. Mahmoud feared there might be. And he half feared that the motive was to do with him personally. Mahmoud was on the progressive side of Egyptian politics, which was a lonely place to be. It brought him right up against the most vested interests that there were in Egyptian society, those that were based around the Court and around the Pashas. The one thing they did not want was to have those interests questioned or exposed. But so often Mahmoud had found that they were precisely the thing that made progress impossible.

  Mahmoud believed deeply, passionately, in progress. It galled him that Egypt was seen as backward, primitive, locked in the past. It had to modernise — had to! He had fought for that throughout his career and was just beginning to believe that he was on the point of getting somewhere.

  And there, of course, lay the snag. For his efforts were beginning to bring him against the most powerful interests of all. They were beginning to notice him; and, no doubt, starting to do something about it.

  This case could be the beginning. An obscure case, miles from anywhere. And then the block on it. The introduction of a Pasha into it was the clue. It would stop the inquiry, as it always did. Not completely. Just enough to keep him tied up forever in some backwater down there.

  For Owen, too, the entrance of a Pasha into the case was something to make him think. If this really was something to do with the slave trade — an indication, perhaps, of its revival in Egypt — did the connection with a Pasha mean that there were big forces behind it? It was profitable enough to tempt even Pashas. And what about Leila’s mention of white men: how far did this go?

  ‘Political enough for you yet?’ he could hear Paul saying.

  ‘I told you it was big,’ Ali said to Hussein. ‘The Mamur Zapt and the Parquet!’

  ‘Must be a prize dog!’ said Hussein.

  ‘A Saluki at least!’

  ‘Shouldn’t have put it in a box like that!’ said Hussein.

  ‘Without any air!’

  ‘The Pasha will have the skin off them!’

  ‘And they’ll deserve it!’

  ‘Ought to know better!’

  ‘Ignorant sods down there!’

  ‘Are you two ever going to do any work?’ asked the overseer.

  ‘Coming, coming!’

  Hussein and Ali bent to the box. They straightened up again.

  ‘Heavy!’

  ‘Too heavy!’

  ‘Look, they’ve taken the dog out of it. So I gather. It’ll be lighter than it was!’ said the overseer.

  ‘It’s more than a two-man lift.’

  ‘Four men at least!’

  ‘Look, it’s only down to the Bab-el-Khalk!’

  ‘In this heat?’

  ‘Just get on with it! Or it won’t be the Pasha who flays your hide!’

  ‘Bastard!’ muttered Ali.

  ‘Bastard!’ muttered Hussein.

  ‘Right! Lift!’

  They raised it an inch.

  ‘Can’t be done!’

  ‘Not with just two of us.’

  ‘A bride box? Of course it can be done!’

  ‘Not just with two of us.’

  ‘All right. I’ll get Abdul.’

  ‘And Mustapha.’

  ‘Mustapha’s doing something else.’

  ‘We’ll wait.’

  ‘I’m going to fetch Abdul and Mustapha. And then I’m going to kick your backsides.’

  The overseer went off in a fury.

  Ali and Hussein sat down on the ground in the shade of the box.

  ‘Doesn’t smell as bad as it did.’

  ‘You fancy? It’s still pretty bad.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just that I’m getting used to it.’

  ‘You do get used to things, don’t you? This box, for instance, I’ve got used to seeing it here. I shall quite miss it when it goes.’

  ‘Well, I shan’t!’ said the guard Mahmoud had posted. ‘It’s really hot just standing here. And I can still smell it. And it smells pretty bad!’

  ‘Stop complaining! You don’t have to carry it.’

  ‘You just have to stand there.’

  ‘All day,’ said the guard. ‘All day. And all night!’

  ‘I’ll bet you don’t stand there all night!’

  ‘Well, no one would expect me to. But I’m still on guard.’

  ‘With his eyes closed!’

  ‘I would know if anyone tried to make off with it.’

  ‘You’d probably have tipped them off. Then down in the souk with it and split the money!’

  ‘A bride box?’

  ‘Well, there’s always a demand for them. Girls are always getting married.’

  ‘Yes, well, most girls don’t put dogs in them!’

  ‘Hello, here are Abdul and Mustapha!’

  ‘This it? We’re not expected to carry this down to the Bab-el-Khalk, are we?’

  ‘Yes, you bloody are!’ said the overseer. ‘Four of you! Why, I could carry it there myself!’

  ‘Go on, show us!’

  ‘I’ll show you something else in a minute! Now bloody get on with it!’

  They bent and lifted.

  ‘Hey! What are you doing with my sister’s box?’ said Leila indignantly. She had just come up the platform with Owen and Mahmoud.

  The men put the box down.

  ‘Your sister’s, is it?’ one of the guards said. ‘Well, it needs a bit of a clean.’

  ‘It was all right when she took it away!’

  ‘Well, that was then, and this is now. It’s had something in it since. Something which doesn’t smell too good.’

  ‘What the hell do you think it can be?’ said Abdul, sniffing.

  ‘I reckon a rat’s got in there,’ said Mustapha.

  ‘Got in and stayed, by the smell of it!’

  ‘A pretty big-sized rat, it must be.’

  ‘We reckon it was a dog. It’s addressed to a Pasha, see. And we reckon it’s one of his prize dogs. Must be, for them to go to the trouble.’

  ‘A dog!’ said Leila, bursting into tears. ‘In my sister’s box?’

  The men looked at each other uncomfortably.

  ‘It’s not right, you know,’ said Abdul. ‘You shouldn’t do that to a girl’s bride box.’

  ‘It’s special,’ said Mustapha. ‘It means a lot to her.’

  ‘Do you know what I think?’ said Abdul. ‘I reckon the Pasha came along and said: “I need a box. That one will do.” So they just tipped everything out and put the dog inside.’

  ‘They shouldn’t do that!’ said Leila, crying. ‘It’s my sister’s bride box!’

  ‘No more they should!’ said Abdul. ‘These Pashas are bastards!’

  ‘Think they can get away with anything!’ said Mustapha.

  ‘Bastards!’ all four men agreed.

  ‘But what about my sister’s things? They were beautiful things. She’d made them herself!’

  ‘Yes, well, that’s how it is,’ said Abdul, with a sympathy surprising since this was only a girl.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ said Mustapha. ‘The people in the village will have picked them up.’

  ‘And gone off with them, I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Hussein.

  ‘If they have, her husband will get them back,’ said Abdul. ‘“Give them back or I’ll beat your head in,” he’ll say. And you’ll be surprised at the effect it will have.’

  ‘They ought not to have done it,’ said Leila. ‘It’s my sister’s box!’

  When it was hot, really hot, for it was always hot in Cairo, they slept on the roof. They had fenced off a garden area with trellis work up w
hich they had trained beans. Beans were grown for decoration as well as food in Egypt. On the roof they served as a dense, green screen, with occasional splashes of red from the flowers. Behind the screen they were invisible to the sleepers on neighbouring roofs, like them in search of air during the hot nights.

  The drawback was that you woke with the sun. Zeinab merely pulled the sheet over her head and carried on sleeping. But Owen was fully awake from the moment the first sun touched his face. He always was.

  This morning he got up and walked to the edge of the roof and looked out over the still, sleeping city to where the Nile curved round the houses and the hawks were already beginning to hover on the upward currents of air. Below him, in the little nearby gardens, the doves were beginning to gurgle in the trees. He always loved this moment of the day before the city woke up, when all was still and quiet and the air fresh, sometimes with dew.

  Sometimes, as now, it was even chilly. At least, you could imagine that, and people, English men especially, nostalgic for home, often liked to do that. In the evening you sometimes even lit a fire, which you never really needed to do, but it was nice to imagine it on a frosty morning in England and to stretch out your hands and feel the warmth. Of course, there was warmth all the time but this was a different warmth. He didn’t need that today, though. Already the heat was beginning to build up. Already, over the Nile, there were little heat shimmers.

  All the same, he pulled on his cotton dressing gown. In the pocket he felt something. He pulled it out. It was a little trocchee shell and it had been found clutched in the girl’s fingers when they had conducted the post-mortem.

  He had shown it to Mahmoud and Mahmoud had asked him where it came from.

  ‘Probably Flamenco Bay,’ he had said. ‘That’s where most of them come from.’

  Flamenco Bay was a little to the north of Port Sudan and was where the red, green, and yellow-painted dhows unloaded their cargoes of trocchee shells in hundreds of thousands.

  ‘The shells go to the United States and to France, where they’re cut up into buttons. Most of the pearl buttons that you see come from Flamenco Bay.’

  He had told Mahmoud to smell it.

  ‘That’s awful!’ said Mahmoud. ‘It smells like rotten fish!’

  ‘It is rotten fish. They sort of stew inside the shells. The sun rots them, and then they drop out. But the smell! You should smell it in Flamenco Bay!’

  ‘I’d rather not!’

  ‘They grind them up into a powder. There’s a steady demand for it in Arabia.

  ‘As a fertilizer?’

  Owen smiled.

  ‘As an aphrodisiac.’

  It was a button, here, one they had found in Soraya’s hand.

  Pulled off from her assailant? That didn’t necessarily mean that the attacker had been a woman. Men wore pearl buttons as well, sometimes on their shirts, if they were posh, on their galabeyas if they were not. Even sometimes among the beads on their skull caps.

  Soraya had fought before they killed her. They had had to stun her with a blow. And then they had strangled her. The body had decomposed badly in the heat of the box, but the pathologist had been able to make this out.

  Owen was wondering how to tell Leila. He would tell her very little, as little as he could.

  He would have to show her the button and ask her if she recognized it. It could have come from Soraya’s own clothes. But somehow he didn’t think it did. It had been ripped off. Did you do that to your own clothes? It was more likely that Soraya, who seemed to have been a girl of spirit, had fought back.

  The question, though, was whether the button told you more. Trocchee buttons were everywhere in Egypt. But they were most plentiful, naturally enough, along the Red Sea coast, where they came from. There everyone wore them.

  Did that indicate that her attacker had come from round there? The Sudan? Not Egypt.

  More; could that mean that that was where she was being taken? As a slave, along with her little sister, and other children. First, to a port on the Red Sea — Port Sudan, say — where the control was not as tight as it was in Egypt, and where boats, Arab boats, came and went every day in large numbers? Once there it would be easy to put children on an incoming dhow just after it had dropped its cargo, of trocchee shells, possibly, and then sail them over to the other side of the Red Sea and on to the still existing slave markets of the Middle East. Was that where Leila — and possibly Soraya — had been bound?

  That morning the first thing he did when he got into his office at the Bab-el-Khalk was to get Nikos to issue a general instruction to the police station and customs offices of south Egypt alerting them to the possible passage of a slave caravan with children. The Mamur Zapt had few officers of his own; but you ignored his direct instructions at your peril.

  Of course, the slavers would be keeping to the desert and giving towns and police as wide a berth as possible. They might even have an arrangement with some police forces. That he could do nothing about. In fact, trying to pick the caravan up in the desert was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. The distances were vast and there was no question of combing the desert. He just didn’t have enough men to do that. The time to intercept them was when they were coming to the coast and looking for their port. The trouble was that that might be anywhere along the Red Sea coast.

  He sat thinking for a moment and then gave the Navy a call. They didn’t have many ships and the sea was even more vast than the desert. But Navy ships patrolled the area regularly looking for gunrunners and they could just as well look for children as for guns.

  And then he put in a call to the Sudan Slavery Bureau in Khartoum.

  Mahmoud’s experts thought they had at last deciphered the address on the box’s label.

  ‘An illiterate scrawl,’ they sniffed. ‘And badly soiled.’

  However, they thought the box had been directed to the Pasha Ali Maher, so Mahmoud went to see him.

  ‘A bride box?’ said Ali Maher incredulously. ‘Not much call for them up here!’

  ‘You don’t, perhaps, collect such objects? As antiques, possibly?’

  ‘No, I don’t!’ said the Pasha, waving a hand at the exquisite furnishing and objects that surrounded them. Even Mahmoud could see that the carpets that hung on the walls (you put carpets on the walls, not on the floors in Egypt, where the floors were cooler marble) were soft and luxurious and, in his terms, pretty well priceless.

  ‘A bride box.’ Ali Maher smiled and looked around at the lovely blue vases, probably Chinese, and the jade pieces standing discreetly in niches around the room. ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t go in for primitive art.’

  They were talking in French. Cairo’s upper classes felt more at home in that language than in Arabic. Come to that, they felt more at home on the airy Riviera than in sweaty Cairo and spent as much time as they could in France.

  Mahmoud had no problem with French. The Egyptian legal system was based on the Code Napoleon — an earlier Khedive who admired all things French, especially the women, had taken French law as the model when he had reformed the system. The lectures in the School of Law were all in French. Meetings in the Parquet were usually conducted in French; memoranda were usually written in French, occasionally in English but hardly ever in Arabic. Arabic was a tricky language to write and on the whole the Parquet preferred to keep the records in French. At home Mahmoud spoke Arabic; with his colleagues he usually spoke French (and either French or English when he was speaking to Owen; they both were at ease in both).

  So Mahmoud was not bothered by Ali Maher’s assumption that they would converse in French. It was the language of all the Egyptian upper classes. You could almost say that he was treating Mahmoud as an equal.

  But Mahmoud knew he wasn’t. There was a subtle condescension about everything Ali Maher said or did. It was as if merely receiving Mahmoud in his house was doing him a favour. Parquet officers did not rate high with Pashas.

  ‘It seems odd that the box should be specif
ically addressed to you,’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘A simple mistake, I expect,’ said Ali Maher languidly. ‘They happen all the time in this benighted country. Where did you say it came from? The south? Oh, well, that explains it! The people there are backward. Blockheads, most of them. Some oaf has just got it wrong.’ He shook his head. ‘A bride box? To me?’ He laughed. ‘Now, if it had been a bride or two, I could understand!’

  It was then that Mahmoud told him what the box had contained.

  He was watching Ali Maher closely and would have sworn that the Pasha lost colour. He pulled out a silk handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  ‘How ghastly!’ he said.

  ‘Does this put a different complexion on it?’

  Ali Maher looked puzzled. ‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t think so. Why should it?’

  ‘Addressed to you. Meant for you. You personally.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t see …’

  ‘Not a mistake,’ said Mahmoud.

  ‘Not a mistake?’

  ‘A threat, perhaps. Or a warning.’

  ‘Why should it be any of those things?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was hoping that perhaps you would tell me.’

  ‘I can see no reason why it should be either of those things.’

  ‘There is no one who might wish to harm you? Who has reason to feel hostile towards you?’

  ‘Well, of course, as a public figure …’

  ‘Down in the south?’

  ‘Well, that’s a big area …’

  ‘Near Denderah, say?’

  ‘Denderah? Well, I have heard of it. But, no, I don’t think so. I try to have as little to do with such places as I can.’

  ‘You have no connections with the place?’

  ‘No. I would try to avoid having any connections with anywhere like that.’

  ‘Or persons …?’

  Ali Maher held up his hand. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘why go on? Is it not obvious that this is a simple mistake? What could I possibly have to do with a woman in a box?’