Free The Girl in the Nile by Michael Pearce

With the body, not with Leila.”
    “We don’t know anything about Leila yet.”
    “That’s just what I’m saying. You ought to find out about her. What sort of girl she was, how she came to do something like this—”
    “Something like
what
?” asked Owen, exasperated. “It’s not what she’s done, it’s what’s been done to her.”
    “How did she come to be on the dahabeeyah?” demanded Zeinab. “That’s not a thing a normal Egyptian girl would have done. Even I wouldn’t have done a thing like that!”
    “We’ll try to find out. We
are
trying to find out. Only—”
    “What was the name of that play?” demanded Zeinab, disregarding his patter. “The one Narouz met her at?”
    “
New Roses in the Garden
. Pretty dreadful, too, according to Narouz.”
    “But I know that play,” said Zeinab. “It’s Gamal’s latest. We received an invitation.”
    “Did we?”
    “Yes. You didn’t go.”
    Owen enjoyed Zeinab’s artistic friends. And he liked Gamal, whose acquaintance he had first made when working on one of his earliest cases as Mamur Zapt. At the time Gamal had written a number of plays but none of them had yet actually been produced. Since then several had reached the boards. The audiences, though, had been confined to the especially perceptive.
    “It would have been the opening night,” said Zeinab. “I couldn’t go, so I went to the second night. You couldn’t go either. You were down in Minya Province running after that Gypsy girl.”
    “No I wasn’t!”
    This was an old charge. Quite unjustified.
    “While I was left in Cairo. Alone,” said Zeinab, unforgiving.
    “This is beside the point.”
    “No it isn’t. Because if you had not been down in Minya chasing that Gypsy woman you would have been at the theater. And then you would have met Leila. So,” said Zeinab, “it’s all your fault.”
    Owen was silenced for a moment. Then he recovered.
    “So it is. You’re right. If I had not been chasing that Gypsy woman I could have gone to the party and chased Leila.”
    “You will not deflect me,” said Zeinab, “with your perverse remarks. I intend to find out whether she was there that night and who Leila was.”
     
    Mahmoud, adopting more orthodox procedures, was also trying to establish Leila’s identity.
    “So,” he was saying to the Prince’s chauffeur as Owen arrived, “you picked the two girls up from the salon and took them to the river at Beni Suef?”
    “If that’s what they say, yes.”
    “It’s not what they say, it’s what you say,” said Mahmoud sternly.
    The man shrugged, confident in the power of the Prince to protect, at least against the Parquet. A confidence which Mahmoud had anticipated and which he had invited Owen along to undermine.
    “This is the Mamur Zapt,” he said. “Be careful how you answer.”
    The man flinched slightly.
    “I shall answer as I please,” he said, but less boldly. Something of the Mamur Zapt’s old aura still clung to the post. To it was added a certain unpredictability these days because of its British incumbency.
    “You picked the two girls up?” Mahmoud repeated.
    “Yes.”
    “That is better. And now you are speaking with your own voice. Let us keep it that way. You took them to the river at Beni Suef?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good. And there you waited till the dahabeeyah came in. At which point you put the women on board. Yes?”
    “Yes.”
    “But,” pursued Mahmoud, “there were three women, were there not?”
    “If you say so.”
    “I would like to hear you say so. With your own voice.”
    “Three women, then,” said the chauffeur.
    “So where did this other woman come from?”
    The man hesitated.
    “Tell us the truth,” said Owen, speaking for the first time. “And remember that we may already know it. Remember, too, that we do not have to ask you here. I may take you back to the Bab el Khalk and ask you.”
    “I picked her up too,” said the chauffeur.
    “Of course. And where did you pick her