The Snake-Catcher’s Daughter

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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First published in Great Britain in 1994

Copyright © Michael Pearce 1994

Michael Pearce asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008259433

Ebook Edition © JULY 2017 ISBN: 9780007485055

Version: 2017-08-30

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also by Michael Pearce

About the Publisher

1

One evening when Owen got home he found a girl in his bed.

‘Hello!’ he said. ‘What’s this?’

‘I’m a present,’ she said.

‘Who from?’

‘We can go into details later.’

‘A member of the British Administration is not allowed to accept presents,’ he said, stuffily.

And not altogether honestly. For the Mamur Zapt, Head of Cairo’s Secret Police, was not, strictly speaking, a member of the British Administration but a member of the Egyptian Administration; and whereas the British, under Cromer’s strait-laced regime had not been allowed to accept bribes, the Khedive’s servants had always taken a more relaxed view.

‘All the world knows about your Zeinab,’ said the girl, pouting.

Owen rather hoped that all the world did not know about Zeinab and was more than a little surprised that the girl did.

‘Ah, yes, but she is not a present.’

‘I don’t need to stay a present,’ said the girl.

‘Off you go!’

‘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.