The Men Behind Page 11

  “Send it to the Lab,” he said. “That’s where the other one is. They’ll be able to do tests on it and establish whether the acids are the same.”

  “It’s the same principle, anyway,” said Georgiades.

  “Yes,” said Owen. “And that surprises me a little. I had expected it to be one of those that work with fuses.”

  “Because it was left?”

  “Seemed to have been. Not thrown, anyway. Or so I would have said until I saw this.”

  “It can’t have been thrown. The man was in the doorway.”

  “Unless the person who threw it was inside.”

  “Can’t have been. They wouldn’t have had time to get away. They’d have killed themselves at the same time.”

  “Are we sure no one else was in there?”

  “We haven’t found any other bodies.”

  “How about this for an idea: one of them threw it at the other.”

  “The same arguments still apply. It would have been suicidal.”

  “Maybe that’s what he wanted.”

  Georgiades was silent for a little while. Then he said: “I prefer the other possibility. That it was left and set up to explode.”

  “So do I. But how did they do that? Setting it up would have taken a lot of skill, a bit of time anyway. There were people coming and going all morning.”

  “Of course,” said Georgiades, “if they were really ingenious they might have set it up the night before.”

  “They’d have had to be really ingenious. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to count on it exploding at the right time—the right time to get those poor devils.”

  “If they wanted to get those two. Maybe they just wanted an explosion and weren’t particular about which poor devils it got.”

  “If that was the way it was,” said Owen, “then they weren’t very nice.”

  “Whichever way it was,” said Georgiades, “they were going to get students.”

  “Yes,” said Owen. “That’s what it all comes back to.”

  ***

  It was among the students that, for the moment, they were pursuing their inquiries. It was about the only avenue open to them.

  The Fairclough case was at a standstill. Mohammed Bishari had sent his notes around as promised, but, as he had warned, they contained little hard information. Owen did not blame him for that. His own men had failed to unearth anything either.

  Similarly with the Jullians case. The trackers had remained in the Law School for over a week but had failed to spot anyone resembling the two men they had followed. It was expensive using good trackers in this way and Owen didn’t dare do it for too long. He pulled one of them out altogether. The other he kept there but only for half of each day, varying the time.

  Georgiades, too, continued to hang around the Law School in his spare moments, maintaining the impression that he was somehow part of the proceedings.

  Owen took care not to use him for ordinary inquiry work on the case. This was a pity, for Georgiades was far and away the best man that he had. But the Greek had achieved a position on the inside of student life which he didn’t want him to compromise. It might pay dividends later. As in the case of the tracker, Owen was making an investment.

  He had not really expected the routine inquiries his men were making to produce anything, but surprisingly they did.

  Checking the backgrounds of the two students who had been killed in the bomb blast, Owen’s agents came across someone who knew them a little better than the previous informants. They brought him to the Bab el Khalk.

  Owen went down and took him for a walk under the trees of the square rather than seeing him in his office, which was often inhibiting for Arabs and might be especially so for a student.

  He was a tall boy, a student, in his third year at the School of Engineering. His face was pocked with smallpox scars, and although he had been for some time in the city he was still suffering from bilharzia, which was endemic in the country districts.

  “Yes,” he said, “I knew Abu. He came from near us, from a village at the other end of the estate. The Pasha sent him to the School, as he did me.”

  “How was it that the Pasha’s choice fell upon you two?” asked Owen.

  The boy shrugged. “We were cleverer than the others at the school, I suppose. Our teacher spoke for us. And then the Pasha owed my father something. It was like that for Abu, I expect.”

  “Abu came to the great city the year after you, is that not so?”

  “It is so. He looked me out when he arrived, for my father had spoken to his father. For the first weeks he slept on the floor of my room. But then he found his own room and I did not see so much of him.”

  Owen asked if it was about this time that Abu had taken up with Musa, the other boy killed in the bombing.

  “It was soon after. I know, because the first time I went to see Abu in his room he was alone and finding it expensive. He said he would have to leave it or else find someone to share with him. When I went again, he was sharing with Musa.”

  Owen inquired about Musa.

  “Musa? He was a boy like Abu. Like him, he came from the country, but it was north of us. His Pasha had sent him too, I think. But he did not like his Pasha and seldom spoke of him. He and Abu were like brothers. They went to lectures together, they studied together, they ate together, they worked and played—”

  “What did they do in the evenings?”

  The boy stopped short. “What did they do in the evenings? I do not know. Worked, I expect. They did not go out much. They had no money, of course.”

  “Had they friends?”

  “Few.”

  “What were they doing over in Ali’s café? It is a long way from the School of Engineering.”

  “I do not know. Perhaps they wished to work quietly, without interruption from other Engineering students.”

  “They did not go to meet friends.”

  “They had a friend in the Law School. Perhaps they went to meet him.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “Alas, no. But I remember Abu speaking of him. He was the friend of a friend. The friend must have spoken to Abu of him, for as soon as he reached the city, Abu went over to see him. Perhaps someone in the village had given Abu his name, the way someone gave him mine. It is right for country boys to stick together.”

  “Was he a good friend? Did Abu see him often?”

  “He spoke of him warmly. But I do not know how often he saw him.”

  “You think Abu knew of him before he came to the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “He did not come from Abu’s village?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are there others from Abu’s village here?”

  “No. There was once but that was some time ago. I think the last one lost the Pasha’s pleasure and so for a time he did not send anyone.”

  “Why did he lose the Pasha’s pleasure?”

  The boy shrugged. “Who knows? It is easy to lose a great one’s pleasure.”

  Owen asked what the Pasha was like.

  Again the boy shrugged. “Pashas are Pashas,” he said. “They are the great and they hold us in their hand.”

  “What happens after you have finished your studies? Do you go back to the Pasha?”

  “I would prefer to work for the Khedive. But I do not think I am clever enough. I shall probably go back. Hamada is not such a bad place, after all.”

  ***

  “Hamada?” said Nikos, when Owen told him. He went back into his office and began to burrow through his files.

  ***

  Ali had had two men working for him in the café. Their names were Karim and Mustafa. When the café was bombed, they had both been out, Karim at the mosque, Mustafa at the souk, where he had been buying things for the caf�
�. That was definite; Owen’s men had checked.

  They had also discovered that the two men slept every night on the floor of the café. It counted towards their wages. They had slept there the night before the bombing. The door was kept locked and they were sure no one could have forced their way in without waking them.

  “That takes care of the setting-it-up-during-the-night theory,” said Georgiades. “I never did think much of it.”

  ***

  Attention now focused on the time between the café’s opening in the morning and the point about halfway through the morning when the bomb exploded. Gradually Owen’s men traced all the people who had been in the café during that period. All except one were students.

  Owen himself questioned them very carefully. They were eager to help. The killings had shocked students generally. At the end, though, Owen was none the wiser. Nobody had seen anything suspicious: no strange package lying around, no one fiddling with anything that might resemble a bomb, no one carrying anything or doing anything untoward.

  The evidence was even a little more negative. About fifteen minutes before the bomb exploded, and ten minutes before Ali took up his position at the door, the last two students—apart from Abu and Musa who had been in the back room—had left the café. Before doing so they had made a “sweep” of the café looking for some books one of them had lost. That was, in fact, the reason why they were the last of their group to leave. They had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

  Nikos came into Owen’s room.

  “Hamada,” he said. “Remember it?”

  “It’s where the student came from. Abu. And I’ve heard of it lately in some other connection. I’ve got it. Fairclough. That’s where he’d been to check the salt contraband. He thought someone might have seen him there and remembered it later.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said Nikos, “but Hamada was the scene of an interesting event about two years ago. There was an explosion. A boy blew himself up. Or that’s what they think happened. It was out in the desert and not a lot was found. He was a local boy and they couldn’t understand it. The Prosecutor down there investigated it but didn’t get anywhere. So they reported it and forgot about it.”

  “Hamada?”

  “Yes, Hamada.”

  “Well,” said Owen, “we’re not getting anywhere here, either. So why not go down to Hamada?”

  Chapter Seven

  There were two ways of getting to Hamada. One was by the river, the other by the desert. Approached by the river, Hamada was a clearing surrounded by fields of sugar cane. But in Upper Egypt cultivation was restricted to the Nile banks, and two or three miles from the water the vegetation ceased and became sand. Approached from the desert, Hamada was a brief thread of green in a thousand miles of brown.

  Owen went by river, his felucca skimming gracefully across the blue water, three Bedawin trackers sitting uneasily beside him. He had left Georgiades behind. The Greek was a city man and outside the city his expertise dwindled to incapacity. Besides, in the city there were things to do.

  There was no landing stage, just a bare stretch of bank which Owen would have taken for a chance interruption of the cultivation had it not been for the little group of figures waiting above the water.

  As the felucca nosed in, two of the figures splashed out and took the rope. One of the crew joined them and the captain guided the boat to the side with a paddle.

  One of the figures on the bank was dressed in a suit. This was the local Mamur, or Police Inspector. He shook Owen’s hand warmly but looked anxious. It was not every day—in fact, it was never—that he received a visit from one of the Cairo élite and who knew what errors of commission or omission might be discovered?

  Owen gathered the impression as they talked, though, that he was not more than ordinarily stupid—that is, for a country Mamur—and there was an easy camaraderie between him and the villagers that Owen found reassuring. In remote areas the Mamur could not but be the Pasha’s man and Owen had feared, after talking to the student, that the Pasha’s hand might lie heavily on the village. Although the use of the curbash, or whip, had been abolished by Cromer some years before, it was often still used in the country; and too often it was the Mamur who used it.

  The Mamur led him up to the village. It consisted of a single irregular street with mudbrick houses loosely grouped about it. The houses were single-story and flat-topped. Poking over the tops Owen could see the piles of brushwood for the household fires and occasional heaps of onions or melons or other garden produce.

  This meant that the village was not one of the most desperately poor ones. There was food here, perhaps not much, but enough. Several of the houses had rabbit hutches on top. Rabbits were bred for food and that again was a sign of a slight margin between living and subsistence.

  The Mamur led Owen to a house at the end. They did not go inside. Instead, the Mamur produced his cane chairs and they sat outside in the shade where it was cooler.

  The three trackers slumped down in the shadow of the wall and looked at the villagers disdainfully.

  Within moments of sitting down Owen found himself covered with flies. The warm, stagnant heat of the cane fields produced them in profusion. In the desert it would be better. But Owen had no intention of spending longer than he could help in either the cane fields or the desert; or the village, for that matter.

  “Tell me about the boy,” he said.

  “He was a good boy,” said the Mamur. He looked across the street to a man sitting patiently on the ground in an outer ring of observers. “That is his father,” he said. Behind them in the shadow of a doorway stood a group of women. “And there is his mother.”

  “If he was a good boy,” said Owen, “how was it that he came to blow himself up?”

  The Mamur scratched his head.

  The wife called something across to her husband. Reluctantly he stood up.

  “It was not his fault, effendi.”

  “Why was it not his fault?”

  The man seemed confused. He started to say something, then stopped and looked at the ground.

  The woman called out something. The man lifted his head.

  “It was the other boy’s fault,” he said.

  “What other boy was this?” asked Owen, surprised.

  “There was another boy with him,” said the Mamur.

  “Why was this not in the Report?”

  “Wasn’t it in the Report?” The Mamur looked alarmed.

  “No, it wasn’t. There was no mention of any other boy.”

  “There must have been,” said the Mamur, looking worried.

  “I have it here.” Owen tapped the paper on his knee. “It says nothing of any other boy.”

  The Mamur looked completely flummoxed. He shrugged his shoulders in bewilderment and turned the palms of his hands outwards as if appealing to the heavens.

  Owen sighed. The Reports that came from the provinces were often next to useless. Compiled by people who wrote only with difficulty, they often consisted of a few illiterate scrawls, formulaic clichés scrambled together. They did, however, usually contain the basic facts.

  He glanced down at the piece of paper, smudged almost to the point of unreadability by the Mamur’s original sweaty labors, crumpled by the journey down in Owen’s pocket.

  “It says here that one afternoon when the village was still sleeping there was a mighty clap as of thunder.”

  The semicircle of observers nodded vigorously.

  “That is true, effendi.”

  “It woke me from my slumbers,” said one.

  “And me. I went outside and, lo, in the sky a hundred birds were circling.”

  “They were beyond the fields. I remember them.”

  “We wondered what it might be. So we woke the Mamur.”

  “I had heard it,” said the Mamur defensively, “
but I thought it was some miracle of nature.”

  “You thought it was brigands in the sugar cane,” said one of the villagers tartly.

  “And so you did nothing?”

  “Not at first, effendi. But then we made him come with us. We went to the edge of the fields where the birds were circling. And there we found Hamid lying.”

  “Hamid?”

  “My son,” said the man.

  “We went to Hamid at once but he was already dead.”

  “So was the other boy.”

  “The other boy’s body was the more broken,” said an older villager, “so I think it was he who had been carrying it.”

  Owen considered for a moment.

  “What was it that he was carrying?” he asked.

  The villagers were silent.

  “We do not know,” one of them said.

  “What did you see?”

  “A piece of iron.”

  “Other pieces, too.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “We left them lying.”

  “You didn’t bring them back?” said Owen, looking at the Mamur, who was supposed to collect the pieces of evidence.

  “They were still too hot.”

  “You did not go back later for them?”

  The Mamur shrugged.

  “Well,” said Owen, “perhaps they are still there. If they are, we shall find them. Let us continue. You saw the bodies and you saw the iron. What then did you do?”

  “We bore Hamid back to the village.”

  “And the other boy?”

  “We left him there. The body was much broken.”

  “The boy had a family, too,” said Owen reprovingly.

  “He did not come from our village.”

  “From a nearby one?”

  “No. He came from the city. When Hamid came home—that was in the summer when all the Great Schools close—this boy was with him.”

  “Was he, too, at the Great School?”

  The villagers were silent.

  “I do not think so,” said the woman across the street.

  “I do not think so,” her husband echoed obediently.