The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1992

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: 9780008259402

Ebook Edition © JUNE 2017 ISBN: 9780007485031

Version: 2017-08-31

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

CHAPTER 1

A tall, thin, angular woman came through the door of the hotel.

Immediately a hand was thrust up at her. It was holding something grey, crumbly and rubbery—rather like old fish—from which a faint aroma arose.

‘What is this?’ she said, sniffing suspiciously.

‘Real mummy!’ said the voice behind the hand. ‘Genuine mummy flesh! Only ten piastres!’

‘Thank you, no!’ said the woman firmly.

Her initial hesitation, however, proved fatal. In a moment they were all round her. Other hands pushed out brandishing bits of bandage (mummy linen), bits of wood (mummy coffin), bright blue saucers straight from the tombs (well, near them, at any rate), genuine old scarab beetles (and some of them were), little wooden images of the gods, little clay images of scribes (such is our fate), little plaques of rough clay engraved with religious images and little coloured wooden Ships of the Dead.

She tried to brush past.

Something was held up in front of her to block her way. It was a mummified arm, complete with fingers.

As she recoiled, a voice said: ‘For you, Madame, for you!’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘For you especially!’ the man insisted.

‘Thank you, no.’

A young man in a white European suit and a fez came through the door behind her and at once released a torrent of Arabic so impressive that even the hardened owners of the hands were taken aback. The porters lounging at the doorway, shaken, rushed forward and chivvied them from the terrace.

‘Why, thank you, Mr Trevelyan!’ said the lady in a cool American voice. ‘You come to my rescue yet again!’

The young man bowed.

‘A pleasure, Miss Skinner.’

He looked up and saw the man sitting on the terrace.

‘Gareth!’ he said. ‘This is a bit of luck!’

Owen had just been thinking how nice it was to see so many old swindlers of his acquaintance back in town, only that day arrived from Upper Egypt where they had been passing the winter selling pillaged or fabricated antiques to the tourists on Cook’s Nile steamers. He recognized some of the old faithfuls. That surely was—

And then Paul Trevelyan had come through the door.

‘Gareth! There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’

He shepherded the woman across.

‘Captain Owen,’ he said, ‘the Mamur Zapt.’

Owen rose.

‘Miss Skinner.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Captain Owen,’ she said, extending a hand, then sitting down in one of the chairs opposite him. ‘But who or what is the Mamur Zapt?’

‘It’s the traditional Arabic title of the post I hold.’

‘And what post is that?’

‘It’s a kind of police post.’

‘You are a policeman?’

‘Yes,’ said Owen, ‘yes. You could say that.’

The woman frowned slightly. She was about thirty and had a long, thin, sharp face. Sharp eyes, too.

‘There seems some doubt about it,’ she said.

Paul Trevelyan came to his assistance.

‘Captain Owen looks after the political side,’ he explained.

‘The post was originally Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police,’ said Owen.

‘Ah!’

‘But, of course, things are very different now.’

They certainly were. For this was 1908 and although the Khedive was still the nominal ruler of Egypt and Egypt was still nominally an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans were no longer in power.

Nor were the Egyptians, for that matter. The new rulers of Egypt were the British, who had come into the country thirty years before to help the Khedive sort out his chaotic finances: come and stayed.