The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in Nile

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1991

Copyright © Michael Pearce 1992

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: 9780008259396

Ebook Edition © JULY 2017 ISBN: 9780008257248

Version: 2017-09-04

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

Footnote

Keep Reading

About the Author

Also By

About the Publisher

‘But,’ said Owen, ‘where is the body?’

‘Ah yes,’ said the watchman, rubbing one horny foot up and down his shin.

‘Ah yes,’ said the corporal, shuffling uneasily:

Owen waited.

‘Well,’ said the corporal at last, looking out over the river to where a low mud shoal raised its back above the water, grey and wrinkled like a hippopotamus, ‘it was there.’

‘Well,’ said Owen, ‘it’s not there now.’

It had been a long, hot, fruitless morning. And now this!

He boiled over.

‘If this is some joke—’

The watchman looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

‘But, effendi, it was there, I saw it.’

‘Or thought you did.’

‘Foolish man!’ said the corporal, swiftly switching sides. ‘It was all a dream.’

He gave the watchman a push. The watchman pushed him back.

‘It was no dream!’ he insisted. ‘I saw it with my own two eyes. A woman, on the sandbank.’

‘A woman!’ said the corporal. ‘There, what did I tell you! It is time you got another wife, Abu. Then you would stop having these foolish dreams.’

‘I saw it plainly. On the sandbank.’

‘You saw something plainly,’ said Owen.

‘It was a woman,’ insisted the watchman doggedly.

‘A heap of camel dung!’ scoffed the corporal.

‘In the middle of the river?’ said the watchman angrily.

‘Anyway,’ said Owen, ‘it’s not there now.’

‘It was there.’

‘Then what has happened to it?’

‘Perhaps,’ suggested the corporal, ‘the river has washed it away?’

Owen looked up and down the river. It stretched, broad and placid, to the horizon on both sides. Further on down, near to the city, a single felucca was gliding gracefully in towards the bank. It came to rest and then there was nothing else moving in the intense heat of the late morning Egyptian sun.

He scanned the water’s edge carefully. At this time of year, with the flood still some weeks off, the Nile had shrunk back into its bed, uncovering a wide strip of mud, now baked hard and dry and cracked like crazy paving. Far away he thought he could see some goats grazing. But there was no suspicious heap lying grounded in the shallows, no flotsam or jetsam at all. Anything that came ashore would be snatched up at once by thrifty beachcombers.

Under his feet a little floating clump of Um Suf, Mother of Wool, papyrus reed, torn loose from its moorings hundreds of miles to the south, nestled along the bank and came to rest against the shoal. Nestled and stuck. The current was not even sufficient to tug it loose again.

‘It can’t have!’ said the watchman angrily. ‘It was lying right up on the shoal.’

‘How did it get there, then?’ asked the corporal. ‘Did it jump up there like a fish?’

This was exactly the kind of non-issue that Owen didn’t want to get involved in. In fact, he didn’t want to get involved in any of this at all.

‘This isn’t anything to do with me,’ he said. ‘This is not for the Mamur Zapt.’

‘Quite right, effendi!’ said the corporal smartly. ‘Only a woman.’

That was not what he had meant.

‘This is a matter for the Parquet,’ he said.

This was an ordinary crime if ever he’d seen one. And ordinary crimes were handled by the Parquet, the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice. The Egyptian legal system was like the French. Conduct of a criminal investigation was the responsibility of a prosecuting lawyer, not of the police. The police worked under his direction. And, of course, when a crime was reported they were the ones who had to notify the Parquet in the first place.