The Fig Tree Murder mz-10

by Michael Pearce

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Was it to meet someone?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Did he not say?’

  The two men looked at each other.

  ‘All he said was that he had to go out.’

  ‘Did he often do thus in the evening?’

  ‘Not often.’

  ‘Were you not surprised?’

  ‘We thought he was going to sit with Ja’affar.’

  ‘Did he often sit with Ja’affar?’

  The old man hesitated.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘But when he did not return, did you not wonder what had befallen him?’

  ‘Why should we wonder?’

  ‘What, a man goes out into the night and does not return, and you do not wonder?’

  ‘What a man does at night is his own business.’

  Owen caught Asif’s eye and knew what he was thinking: a woman.

  ‘And when the morning came and he still had not returned, you still did not wonder?’

  ‘We thought he had gone straight to work.’

  ‘After spending the night with Ja’affar?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A strange village, this!’ said Asif caustically. ‘Where the men spend the night with the men!’

  The younger man flashed up.

  ‘Why do you ask these questions?’ he said belligerently.

  ‘Because I want to know why Ibrahim was killed.’

  ‘That is our business,’ said the brother. ‘Not yours!’

  ‘It is the law’s business.’

  ‘Whose law? The city’s?’

  ‘There is but one law,’ said Asif sternly, ‘for the city and for the village.’

  ‘It is the city that speaks,’ retorted the villager.

  ‘These are backward people!’ fumed Asif, much vexed with himself, as they walked away.

  ‘The ways of the village are not the ways of the town,’ said Owen.

  ‘I know, I know! I am from Assiut myself. That is not a village, I know, but compared with Cairo-’

  ‘You did all right,’ said Owen reassuringly.

  ‘I should have-’

  ‘Well, Ja’affar, you work late!’ said Asif.

  ‘I do!’ said Ja’affar, his face still streaked with sweat.

  ‘It is not every man who works so long in the fields!’

  ‘Ah, I’ve not been in the fields. I work at the ostrich farm.’

  ‘Ostrich farm?’ said Owen.

  ‘Yes, it’s over by the station. You would have seen it if you’d gone out the other side.’

  ‘And what do you do at the ostrich farm that keeps you so late?’ asked Asif.

  ‘I feed the birds. You’d think they could feed themselves, wouldn’t you, only if you don’t give them something late in the afternoon they make such a hell of a noise that the Khedive doesn’t like it.’

  ‘The Khedive can hear them all the way from Kubba?’

  ‘So he says.’

  Ja’affar removed his skull cap and splashed water over his face. A woman came and took the bowl away.

  ‘So what is it?’ he said. ‘Ibrahim?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘He was a mate of mine. We used to work at the farm together.’

  ‘The ostrich farm?’

  ‘Yes. Only then the chance of a job on the railway came along and he took one look at the money and said: “That’s for me!” I warned him. I said: “They don’t give you that for nothing, you know. They’ll make you sweat for it.” And, by God, they did. He used to come back home in the afternoon dead beat. Too tired even to lift a finger!’

  ‘Too tired to go out?’ said Asif. ‘In the evenings?’

  Ja’affar was amused.

  ‘There’s not a lot to go out to in Matariya,’ he said drily.

  ‘We heard he liked to go out and chat with his friends.’

  ‘Ah, well-’

  ‘You, for instance.’

  ‘He used to occasionally. He’s not done it so much lately. Not since I got married and he-’

  He stopped.

  ‘Found someone more interesting?’

  ‘Well-’

  ‘Just tell me her name,’ said Asif.

  A man came to the door.

  ‘Yes, he used to come here,’ he said defiantly. ‘Everyone knows that. And, no, he didn’t come here just to taste the figs from the fig tree. There’s no secret about that, either. What do you expect? A man’s a man, and if his wife-’

  ‘Did he come here on the night he was killed?’

  ‘How do I know?’

  ‘You live here, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I live on the other side of the mosque.’

  He was, it transpired, the woman’s brother, not her husband.

  ‘She’s lived here alone ever since her husband died.’

  Asif asked to speak with her in her brother’s presence. This was normal. It was considered improper to speak to a woman alone. Indeed, it was considered to be on the verge of raciness to speak to a woman at all. Questions to women, during a police investigation, for instance, were normally put through her nearest male relative.

  The woman appeared, unveiled. This at once threw Asif into a tizzy. He had probably never seen a woman’s face before, not the face of a woman outside his family. This woman had a broad, not unattractive, sunburned face. Things were less strict in the village than they were in the city and when the women were working in the fields they often left their faces unveiled. Even in the village, Owen had noticed, they did not always bother to veil. Sheikh Isa, no doubt, had his views about that.

  She was as defiant as her brother.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘he used to come here. Why not? It suited him and it suited me.’

  Asif could hardly bring himself to look her in the face. Although she obviously intended to answer his questions herself, he continued to direct them to her brother, as he would have done in the city.

  ‘Did he come on the night he was killed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And’-he wavered-‘stayed the night?’

  ‘He never stayed long.’ She laughed. ‘Just long enough!’

  ‘Jalila!’ muttered her brother reprovingly.

  Asif was now all over the place.

  ‘How-how long?’ he managed to stutter.

  ‘How long do you think?’ she said, looking at him coolly.

  Owen decided to lend a hand.

  ‘The man is dead,’ he said sternly.

  The woman seemed to catch herself.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘He died after leaving you.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

  ‘He left you early. Did he say where he was going?’

  ‘He said he was meeting someone.’

  ‘Ah! Did he say who?’

  ‘No. And,’ said the woman, bold again, ‘I did not ask. I knew it wasn’t a woman and that was all I needed to know.’

  ‘How did you know it wasn’t a woman?’

  ‘Because it wouldn’t have been any good,’ she said defiantly. ‘Not after what he’d done with me. I always took good care to see there wasn’t much left. For Leila.’

  ‘Leila?’

  ‘That so-called wife of his.’

  ‘Why so-called?’

  She was silent.

  Then she said vehemently: ‘He should have married me. Right at the start. Then all this wouldn’t have happened.’

  The tabernacle was now empty. The pile of shoes had gone. The square was almost empty. The heat rose up off the sand as if making one last effort to keep the advancing shadows at bay. The smell of woodsmoke was suddenly in the air. The women were about to cook the evening meal.

  Owen wondered how late the trains back to the city would continue to run. Asif, too, was evidently reckoning that the day’s work was done, for he said:

  ‘Tomorrow I shall question the wife’s family.’

  They turned aside for a moment to refresh t
hemselves at the village well before committing themselves to the long walk back across the hot fields to the station.

  ‘It could be a question of honour, you see,’ said Asif, still preoccupied with the case. ‘The wife has been dishonoured and so her family has been dishonoured.’

  ‘You think one of them could have taken revenge?’

  Revenge was the bane of the policeman’s life in Egypt. Over half the killings, and there were a lot of killings in Egypt, were for purposes of revenge. It was most common among the Arabs of the desert, where revenge feuds were a part of every tribesman’s life. But it was far from uncommon among the fellahin of the settled villages too.

  ‘Well,’ said Asif, ‘he was killed by a blow on the back of the neck from a heavy, blunt, club-like instrument. A cudgel is the villager’s weapon. And, besides-’

  He hesitated.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It looks as if it was someone who knew his ways. Knew where to find him, for instance. Knew he would not be staying. Knew him well enough, possibly, to arrange a meeting. That would seem to me to locate him in the village.’

  Owen nodded.

  ‘And if that’s the case,’ he said, ‘you’re going to have to move quickly. Otherwise the other side will be taking the law into their own hands.’

  The trouble with revenge killings was that they had two sides. One killing bred another.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ promised Asif.

  A man came round the corner of the mosque and made towards them. He was, like Asif, an Egyptian and an effendi and wore the tarboosh of the government servant. Unlike him, however, and unusually for the time, he wore a light suit not a dark suit and was dressed overall with a certain sharpness. Everything about him was sharp.

  He recognized Owen and gave him a smile.

  ‘Let me guess,’ he said; ‘the railway?’

  He turned to Asif.

  ‘Asif,’ he said softly. ‘I am sorry.’

  Asif looked at him in surprise.

  ‘They have asked me to take over. Why? I do not know. But it is certainly no reflection on you.’

  Asif was taken aback.

  ‘But, Mahmoud, I have only just-’

  ‘I know. Perhaps they have something more important in mind for you.’

  Asif swallowed.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said bitterly.

  He got up from the well.

  ‘I will put the papers on your desk,’ he said, and walked off.

  Owen made a movement after him but Mahmoud put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Let him go,’ he said. ‘It’s better like that.’

  ‘He was doing all right,’ said Owen.

  ‘I think he’s promising,’ said Mahmoud. He sighed. ‘I wish they wouldn’t do things like this. It hurts people’s pride.’

  Mahmoud El Zaki was a connoisseur in pride. That was true of most Egyptians, thought Owen, but it was especially true of him. Proud, sensitive, touchy-all of them qualities likely to be rubbed raw by the situation that Egyptians were in: subordination of their country to a foreign power, subordination in government, subordination in social structure.

  And the wounds were aggravated by what at times seemed an excessive emotionality. For a people so prickly they were surprisingly tender. Excessively masculine in some respects, they were sometimes surprisingly feminine. They were never in the middle; unlike the solid, stolid, sensible English, thought Owen. He himself was Welsh.

  He and Mahmoud knew each other well. They had often worked together and had, a little to their surprise, perhaps, developed a rapport which survived political and other differences.

  They watched Asif set out along the track across the fields.

  ‘You’ll need to pick things up quickly,’ said Owen. ‘There’s a danger of a tit-for-tat killing.’

  ‘The man’s family?’

  Owen nodded.

  ‘The brother especially. There’s another woman involved. They think he was killed because of that.’

  ‘Her husband?’

  ‘No. She’s a widow. The wife’s family. Asif was going to take a look at them tomorrow.’

  ‘I’ll do that myself. I’ll come out tomorrow morning. However, I’ve arranged to do something else first.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m going to talk to the railway people.’ He looked at Owen. ‘You wouldn’t care to accompany me, would you?’

  Owen knew exactly why he was asking that. Any investigation involving foreigners was potential political dynamite. Most foreigners doing business in Egypt were protected by special provisions of the legal code, forced on the Egyptian government in the past by foreign powers. No European or American could even be charged unless it could be shown that he had committed an offence not against Egyptian law but against the law of his own country. Even when a charge was accepted, he had to be tried, in the case of a criminal offence, by his own Consular Court, and in civil cases by the Mixed Courts, where there would be both foreign and Egyptian judges.

  And those were merely the formal protections. Informally, there were jugglings for reference, disputes about nationality and the use of cases as pretexts for the assertion of national interests. In such circumstances the cards were always stacked against the unfortunate policeman; and especially so if he happened to be Egyptian.

  It made sense, then, for Mahmoud to ally himself with the Mamur Zapt. It protected him personally against political comeback and increased the chances of successful prosecution. At the very least it meant that the Belgian-owned Syndicate would not be able to fob him off without even listening to his questions.

  Owen was quite willing to allow himself to be used. Like many of the British officials, like, indeed, the Consul-General himself, he had considerable sympathy with the Egyptians over this issue of legal privileges, the Capitulations as they were called.

  But only up to a point. The Parquet, too, had its political agenda. The Ministry of Justice was the most Nationalist of all the Ministries and the Parquet lawyers were Nationalist to a man. Mahmoud himself was a member of the Nationalist Party. Might not the Parquet be seeking to use the case for own political ends?

  ‘Why have they put you on the case?’ he asked.

  Mahmoud smiled.

  ‘Why have they put you on the case?’ he countered.

  Chapter 3

  'There is this Tree,’ said the site foreman doubtfully.

  ‘Tree?’ said the man-higher-up-in-the-Syndicate, Varages, another Belgian. ‘What Tree is this?’

  ‘I gather there’s been some problem,’ said the site foreman, looking at Owen.

  ‘Is it in the way or something?’ said Varages.

  ‘If it’s a case of compensation-’ said one of the lawyers.

  The Belgians had brought two lawyers. They had also insisted that the foreman could only be interviewed in the presence of someone high up in the Syndicate. It was likely that Varages was another lawyer. With Mahmoud, that made four of them. This meeting wasn’t going to get anywhere, decided Owen.

  ‘The Tree, actually, is beside the point,’ he said.

  ‘I thought you told me I had to look out?’ said the foreman.

  ‘That was because of the attitude of a local sheikh-’

  ‘That awkward old bugger?’

  ‘If it’s a question of compensation-’ began the lawyer again.

  ‘Pay him and let’s get the Tree moved,’ said Varages impatiently.

  ‘It’s not-’

  ‘Can we get the ownership straight?’ cut in the other lawyer. ‘It belongs to this old sheikh-?’

  ‘No,’ said Owen. ‘It belongs to a Copt. His name is Daniel. But-’

  ‘Ah, the ownership is disputed? Well, that gives us our chance, then. It will have to be settled in the courts. A Copt, you say? And a sheikh? That will be the Native Tribunals, then-’

  ‘I wouldn’t recommend that,’ said the other lawyer. ‘Not in the circumstances. Much better to get it referred straight to the Mixed Courts-’

  ‘On the grounds that the Syndicate
is a party? Well, yes, of course, that is a possibility-’

  ‘Listen,’ said Varages, ‘we don’t want to get this tied up forever in the courts. We’ve got to get on with it. How long is it all going to take?’

  ‘About four years.’

  ‘Four years! Jesus! Can’t you speed it up a bit?’

  ‘If the Syndicate cared to use its influence-’

  ‘What would it take then?’

  The lawyers looked at each other.

  ‘Two years?’ one of them ventured.

  ‘Two years? Listen, two months would be too long! We’ll have to do something else. Or rather-yes, that’s it. Why don’t we just dig up the Tree and argue about it afterwards? It wouldn’t matter then how long you took-’

  ‘Dig up the Tree of the Virgin,’ said Owen, ‘and you’ll have the whole desert in flames!’

  ‘Did you say the Tree of the Virgin?’ asked one of the lawyers.

  ‘Yes, it’s-’

  ‘The Tree of the Virgin?’ said the other lawyer. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, but-’

  ‘Does that make a difference?’ asked Varages.

  ‘It certainly does. Captain Owen is quite right. The desert would be in flames. However, that is not the real difficulty.’

  ‘Not the real difficulty?’ said Owen.

  ‘No. Not from a legal point of view. The fact is-correct me if I’m wrong,’ he said, looking at his colleague, ‘the fact is that, well, the Tree doesn’t belong to either the sheikh or the Copt-’

  ‘The Copt’s put a railing round it,’ said Owen.

  ‘Who does it belong to, then?’ asked Varages.

  ‘The Empress Eugenie.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Varages, ‘the Empress Eugenie? Of France?’

  ‘That’s right. The Khedive gave it to her. In 1869. When she came to open the Suez Canal.’

  ‘Gave it to her?’

  ‘Yes. As a present.’

  There was a moment’s stunned silence.

  ‘It’s still there!’ said Owen. ‘I saw it yesterday!’

  ‘Yes. She didn’t want to take it with her.’

  ‘And it-it still belongs to her?’

  ‘In theory, yes.’

  ‘We could ask the courts to pronounce,’ said the other lawyer eagerly.

  ‘How long would that take?’ asked the site foreman.

  ‘Oh, about eight years.’