Free The Snake Catcher's Daughter by Michael Pearce

and, though a university man (Cambridge), his pursuits were those of the country squire: riding, shooting and fishing. And, of course, hunting.
    But there was another side to the man which the bluff exterior concealed. Garvin was no fool. He had spent two decades in the country and knew his job back to front. He knew it at all levels, too. He spoke Arabic like an Egyptian and was as familiar with the patois of the Alexandrian seafront underworld as he was with the slow rhythms of the fellahin in the fields around Cairo. Because of the time he had spent in the provinces before coming to the city, he was intimate with the background of family feuds and alliances which the fellahin carried with them when they migrated to the city. The Cairo poor were still villagers at heart; and Garvin knew them as he knew his own face in the mirror.
    Yet he had been to Cambridge, too, and this gave him entry to an inner club from whose members the rulers of Egypt and India and, indeed, England were almost exclusively drawn. Mixing on equal terms with the British elite, inevitably he mixed, too, with the Egyptian elite. He knew the political preoccupations of both.
    Garvin was, then, a formidable operator. He knew Egypt from top to bottom; and behind the frank, open face and the honest blue eyes was a political mind of no mean order. He played bridge regularly with the Consul-General and the Financial Secretary. Garvin was a great card player.
    If there was a plot against him, the plotters would have their work cut out. The Administration would close ranks around Garvin in a way that Owen knew they would not close around him. He was not a member of the magic circle. He had not been to Cambridge. His father had died young and his family had been too poor to do other than secure him a commission in the army. He was, too, a Welshman; slightly suspect even in the army.
    He was the magic circle’s servant, no closer to them, in the end, than he was to the Khedive. But they would expect him to protect Garvin. Certain things did not need to be spoken. He knew what the job was that he was being told to do.
    In fact, he did not expect that to put much of a strain on him. Garvin, for all his faults, was honest. This would be a trumped-up charge, if charge it came to. It would be a political manoeuvre. Garvin, in any case, probably was not so much the object as a means: a means of hitting at the British Administration itself.
    Owen sighed. He could see himself being forced to take sides. It was a thing he did not like, something he tried to avoid. Usually he got round it by interpreting his loyalty as to Egypt as a whole. There was a sense, a very real sense, as a matter of fact, in which the Khedive and the British Administration together formed the Government of Egypt. His loyalty was to that mystic concept; very mystic, he sometimes felt.
    There was, though, a less mystic consideration. In a complex political game the outcome might require sacrifices. He could not see the magic circle going so far as to be ready to sacrifice one of themselves. They would be far more likely to sacrifice someone else; say, him.
    Owen thought he had better take up card playing.
    Garvin turned to him.
    “I gather you know the situation,” he said.
    Owen nodded.
    “In general terms,” he said.
    Garvin came back to his desk.
    “Well, you’ll be raking over the details later,” he said. “That’ll be the job of the investigation. The question is, though, what’s the procedure to be?”
    “The Parquet will be responsible, presumably.”
    The Parquet, or Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice, was responsible for carrying out all investigations. The police merely reported a crime. A lawyer from the Parquet was then at once assigned to it and he was thenceforth responsible for investigating the circumstances, compiling the evidence, taking a view, and then, if the view was in favour of prosecution, presenting the case, as in the French judicial system,