Mamur Zapt 10 The Fig Tree Murder by Michael Pearce

Author:Michael Pearce [Pearce, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: det_history
Published: 2014-07-15T13:16:33.389986+00:00

Owen could quite see why the Nationalist Party was putting down a question. It wished to embarrass the Administration and a foreign company was a good stick to beat the government with.

He was a little disappointed, though, by Mahmoud. After that last exchange at the well, Mahmoud had stalked off in high dudgeon. This was not uncommon with Mahmoud, and usually after a decent interval had elapsed he stalked back again. This time, however, he had made no effort to contact Owen. Instead, he had approached the Syndicate head-on and received the rebuff he must have expected.

Why had he done that? Owen could see why this time he had not wished to enlist his own aid. Apart from understandable pique, he, too, had principles. But why had he gone at it like that? He was no fool, he was wise in the games that Cairo played, he must have known he would get nowhere.

Unless, of course, that was where he had wanted to get. Unless that had been his deliberate intention. Unless he had been party to the Nationalists’ decision to exploit the issue for political ends and had seen this, with them, as a heaven-sent opportunity to set the Syndicate up.

Mahmoud was, like all the other Parquet lawyers, himself a Nationalist. Unlike most of them, however, he was also his own man. He made it a matter of principle not to get into politicians’ pockets. The law for him was clean and pure and should be above politics. Those who professed it should serve it with independence and austerity. Friends said of him-increasingly-that he was a born judge but too honest to be an advocate. Especially in Cairo.

Owen was surprised, then, to find that in this instance he seemed to have shifted; surprised, and disappointed. He and Mahmoud had always seen eye to eye, in so far as it was possible for a foreigner to see eye to eye with an Egyptian. But it was precisely that which was raising the difficulty in the present case. For it was surely only the fact that it was foreign that had led Mahmoud to make his extraordinary accusations against the Syndicate.

It was most unlike him. Certainly, like most Nationalists and, indeed, most Egyptians, he chafed at his country’s subservience to foreign interests and objected, in particular, to British rule; but up till now he had always been temperate and pragmatic about this, believing that Reason-Mahmoud was a great man for Reason-and the ordinary political processes would in the end deliver Egypt from its foreign yoke. The sanguinary rhetoric of the extremists was not for him.

And yet here he was supposing things about the Belgians which would not have been out of place sixty years before at the court of Muhammed Ali! Muhammed’s daughter, taking after her father, had been in the habit of having slave girls who had fallen asleep on duty disembowelled in her bedroom.

It was most unlike him. So unlike him that Owen began to wonder.

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