Free The Snake Catcher's Daughter by Michael Pearce Page A

which the Egyptian closely resembled, to the appropriate court.
    “Yes,” said Garvin, “but if they get that far it will go to the Mixed Courts.”
    The Mixed Courts were a feature unique to the Egyptian judicial system. Where cases involved foreigners, they were heard not by the native courts of law but by a court on which sat judicial representatives from the foreigner’s own native country as well as the Egyptian judges.
    “That being so,” said Garvin, “and, considering that one of the people involved is a senior member of the British Administration—me—it would seem desirable that a representative of the British Administration was attached to the case from the outset. Then, if it came to prosecution, the case that was presented would have the support of both countries.”
    “Quite,” said Owen. “If it came to that. But will the Parquet agree?”
     
    “You must be joking!” said Paul in the bar that evening. “The most they’ll agree to, with their arms twisted high up behind their backs and the army indicating that it’s about to come out on manoeuvres, is to the attachment of an observer.”
    “That’ll do,” said Owen.
    “It will have to,” said Paul. “Though it’s not at all the same thing. The observer just observes. He doesn’t join in the presentation of the case. Nor in the decision as to whether the case is to be presented. He can stick his oar in when it actually comes to the court but only as a secondary witness. The Old Man’s not happy about that but it’s as much as we’ve been able to get.”
    “Do they genuinely want a conviction?”
    “Probably not. They almost certainly know there’s nothing to convict. What they’re looking for, I suspect, is the publicity of its coming to court. It makes the British look bad to the outside world and it makes them look good to their own supporters.”
    “It won’t make them look so good if the case is a real shambles.”
    Paul smiled.
    “We’ve already tried that,” he said. “I tried to get them to appoint some real duds to carry out the investigation, the likes of Mohammed Isbi. Said how greatly we respected his judgement, how much he had our confidence. Any case presented by him would be sure to have our support.”
    “Well?”
    “They wouldn’t wear it, of course. They’re not that daft. They know he’s as thick as a post.”
    “So who have they appointed?”
    “Their best and brightest. Mahmoud.”
     
    Mahmoud el Zaki was one of Owen’s oldest friends. The two were actually very much alike, young men on the rise. They had met on one of Owen’s earliest cases, which had turned out to be one of Mahmoud’s first cases, too, and since then their careers had kept a parallel course. They were both self-sufficient, not exactly loners—Owen was quite gregarious—but standing a little apart from their fellows.
    They were both to a certain extent outsiders: Owen because he stood outside the charmed circle of those who had been to public school and the ancient universities, and because of the ambiguity of the post of Mamur Zapt, responsible to the Egyptian and British Administrations; Mahmoud because he, too, was not by birth a member of the Egyptian elite. His father, a first generation graduate and, like Mahmoud himself, a lawyer, had died young while establishing a position and Mahmoud had inherited both the family’s expectations and its lack of wealth and social connections. He had had to work hard to rise, to do it all himself. There was quite a lot in common between him and the Welsh grammar school boy from an impoverished Anglican family; not least a tendency to define for oneself a social identity by siding with the suppressed Nationalist opposition.
    Mahmoud was in fact formally a member of the new Nationalist Party, which did him no harm in the Parquet but which left him politically and socially uneasy when it came to encounters with representatives of the Egyptian elite. He was, for example, completely at