The Snake-Catcher’s Daughter

‘Like this?’ demanded the girl, pulling the sheet back. Underneath she was completely naked.

‘If that’s the way you came.’

The girl, rather sulkily, rose from the bed and picked up a dress that was lying across a chair. A European dress, but was she European? Such questions were on the whole unprofitable in cosmopolitan Cairo. A Levantine, say, and a beautiful one.

Owen began to wonder if perhaps he should make more of an effort to get to the bottom of this attempt to bribe him. Bottom, as a matter of fact, was exactly what he was contemplating just at this moment …

‘Oh yes?’ said Zeinab belligerently when he told her.

‘Oh yes?’ said Garvin, the Commandant of the Cairo Police Force, sceptically.

‘Oh yes?’ said everyone in the bar when he happened to mention it. ‘What happened next?’

‘She put on her veil and left,’ said Owen with a firmness which did not altogether, unfortunately, dampen speculation.

‘Leaving her honour behind her?’ suggested someone.

‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

Leaving behind her, actually, a small embroidered amulet, the sort of thing you could pick up in one of the bazaars. Inside it was a single quite respectably sized diamond. Perfume stayed on his fingers long after the girl was gone.

‘So that is why you told everybody,’ said his friend, Paul. Paul was ADC to the Consul-General and wise in the ways of the world; wise, at any rate, in the ways of protecting your back.

Owen nodded.

‘People must always be attempting to bribe you,’ observed Paul.

‘Not so much now,’ said Owen. ‘When I first came, certainly.’

He had been in post for nearly three years.

‘And it has taken them all that time to find out?’ said Paul, marvelling.

‘That I couldn’t be bribed?’

‘That you weren’t worth bribing.’

‘Someone,’ Owen pointed out, hurt, ‘has apparently still not found out.’

‘Yes,’ said Paul. ‘Odd, isn’t it?’

The next morning one of the orderlies came in in great agitation.

‘Effendi,’ he said, ‘the Bimbashi’s donkey is not here.’

Owen laid down his pen.

‘Someone’s stolen it?’

‘No, no. It has not been here all morning. The Bimbashi has not come in.’

This was unusual. McPhee, the Deputy Commandant, always came in.

‘A touch of malaria, perhaps,’ said Owen, picking up his pen again. ‘Send someone to find out.’

A buzz of excited chatter outside his door told him when the someone returned.

‘Well?’

‘Effendi,’ said the orderly, with a long face, ‘the Bimbashi’s not there.’

‘He has not been there all night,’ put in another of the orderlies.

‘Hm!’ What members of the Administration did in the night was their business and it was normally wisest not to inquire. McPhee, however, was not like that. He was very puritanical; some would say undeveloped. He was the sort of man who if he had been in England would have joined that strange new organization, the Boy Scouts. After some consideration, Owen went in to see Garvin.

Garvin, also, took it seriously.

‘He’d have let us know if it was work, wouldn’t he?’

‘It can hardly be play,’ said Owen.

‘He won’t be sleeping it off, certainly,’ said Garvin. Owen thought that the remark was possibly directed at him.

‘What I meant was, that he’s not one to let his private life interfere with his work,’ he said, and then realized that sounded unnecessarily priggish. Garvin tended to have that effect on people.

‘What was he doing yesterday?’ asked Garvin. ‘Was it something he was likely to get knocked over the head doing?’

Apparently not. The office had been quiet all day. Indeed, it had been quiet all week. The weather, hot always, of course, had been exceptionally so for the last fortnight, which had brought almost all activity in Cairo, including crime, to a standstill.

‘You’d better get people out looking for him,’ said Garvin.

Owen didn’t like Garvin treating him as just another deputy. The Mamur Zapt reported – in form, of course – to the Khedive and it was only for convenience that Owen was lodged in the police headquarters at Bab-el-Khalk. However, he quite liked McPhee and wasn’t going to quibble.

Garvin, in fact, was genuinely concerned and wasn’t doing this just as an administrative power game.

‘Get them all out,’ he said. ‘They’ve got nothing better to do.’

It was now nearly noon and the sun was at its hottest, and this was therefore not the view of the ordinary policeman. If turned out now they would probably make for the nearest patch of shade.

Besides, what were they to look for? A body? There were thousands of places in Cairo where bodies might be lying and usually it was simplest to allow them to declare their presence later – in the heat it would not be much later – by their smell. There was, however, an easier solution.

‘You all know the Bimbashi’s donkey,’ said Owen. ‘Find it.’

‘Look for a donkey?’ expostulated Nikos, his Official Clerk. ‘You can’t have the whole Police Force out looking for a donkey!’

‘Why not?’

‘It sounds bad. Have you thought how it would look in the pages of Al-Lewa?’