The Bride Box (2 page)

‘So who do I have a word with?'

‘A good question.'

‘I thought you might—'

‘Have a word with my boss? Yes. I will. But I'm not sure he'll want to know. Doing anything will cost money and he hasn't got any. Not until the next financial year.'

‘It will be too late by then. They'd be out of Egypt.'

‘It looks as if you're on your own, then.'

‘Not me. It's really nothing to do with me. It's not political.'

The Mamur Zapt reckoned to concern himself only with political matters.

And meanwhile there was the question of what to do with Leila. Paul said that he thought they could find some institution which could look after her. Again, however, Miss Skiff was having none of it.

‘They'd steal her back,' she said.

‘
Steal
her?' The thought had not occurred to him.

‘It would be better if she went home with you,' said Miss Skiff firmly.

Owen was not so sure about that. How would Zeinab react, for one thing?

He put it to her.

Zeinab was taken aback. She felt sorry for the child and wouldn't mind helping; but broad sympathy was one thing and having a child about the house where you would always be tripping over her was quite another. The prospect was faintly alarming.

Like Nikos, she was not used to children. She was the next best thing to an only child. She had a half-brother but he was much older than she was and they had never been close. Never, in fact, had much contact at all. He had not been around for years, hurried out of Egypt a while ago following an abortive attempt on the Khedive's life.

Zeinab was not, actually, Nuri Pasha's legitimate daughter. Her mother had been a famous courtesan who had resisted Nuri's repeated proposals of marriage, preferring to keep her independence. And her daughter had taken after her, insisting on cutting her own way through life. Nuri, modern-minded in some things, had gone along with this, seeing only that she received a proper (i.e. boy's) education along French lines. (Like many rich Egyptians he had no time for Egypt but plenty of time for France. England was a necessary evil.) Having done this he got out of the way and gave Zeinab her head. He had not frowned upon her relationship with Owen. There were, after all, advantages for a wily and eternally hopeful politician in having the Mamur Zapt as a sort of son-in-law.

But Zeinab had not exactly had a normal family upbringing. Nuri had doted on her as on her mother but had not actually had much to do with her. Her closest relationships had been with servants – or, in truth, with slaves – of whom, of course, given that this was a Pasha's household, there had been plenty. Not much difference, in fact, existed between slaves and servants. The result was that Zeinab, who thought of herself as a French liberal, was not too bothered about the slavery issue.

When she had moved in with Owen, she had not taken any slaves with her. Because of his special position, Owen, unusually among Europeans in Cairo, had no servants. Zeinab hadn't minded this. To her it was rather exotic, one of the many exotic things that had drawn her to Owen.

She had never had anything to do with children. Lately, one of her friends, Aisha, had had a baby. Zeinab had held it in her arms and, once she had got used to it, quite liked the experience. She wouldn't mind having a baby herself. In fact, at nearly thirty, perhaps she had better get on with it.

But having a grown child in the house was a bit different. She wasn't sure about that.

Not only that, the child was … different. She was, for a start, darker than Zeinab, or, indeed most Egyptians.

‘She looks Sudani,' she said to Owen.

‘She comes from Denderah,' he said. But he knew what Zeinab meant. Leila's features were not those of an Arab. But then, nor were those of many Egyptians. Still …

And then there was the question of colour. Again, this was not unusual among Egyptians, particularly those living in the south, where races had mixed over time. All the same, Leila's face was a bit … different.

Not that it mattered. The girl was only going to be with them for a short time. It was just that it was difficult for Zeinab to feel close to her. Not like a mother but, say, like an aunt. She told Leila to call her ‘aunt'.

But there were practical things, too. What was the girl going to do all day? Zeinab hadn't the faintest idea. She consulted Aisha.

‘Don't be daft!' said Aisha. ‘Give her some things to play with. I'll let you have some of ours. And if you're really bothered, get someone in – a maid or a nurse or something.'

But that would mean having a servant in the house and Zeinab was not sure how Owen would feel about that.

Owen, as a matter of fact, was already toying with the idea. But for a different reason. He had been left uneasy by Miss Skiff's suggestion that the slavers might try to steal Leila back. What if they did that while he was out of the house?

He didn't want to have a guard. He had never gone in for guards and wasn't going to start now. But maybe, just while Leila was here …

An idea came to him. There was a man he knew, Musa, who had been in the police and whom Owen had borrowed on occasion and found reliable. He was now retired and working, so Owen had heard, as a part-time servant in several wealthy houses. People liked to employ ex-policemen in that capacity. There was some – well, better than none, anyway – guarantee of honesty and they were usually good at polishing things. Like ex-army people. Come to think of it, hadn't Musa served in the army as well? That might come in handy.

He sent for Musa and explained the situation to him. Musa would be glad to come, not just for the money but also for the prestige of working for the Mamur Zapt.

‘Nights as well, Effendi? I can sleep on the floor.'

Owen thought. ‘That might be a good idea,' he said.

Musa shuffled his feet. ‘Can I bring my wife?' he asked. ‘She would sleep on the floor, too,' he added quickly.

‘I don't see why not. It would only be for a short time.'

There could even be other advantages to this. He knew that Zeinab felt uneasy at having a child around.

‘Have you any children?' he asked.

‘Three,' said Musa. ‘But they're grown up now.'

‘Would your wife mind looking after the girl?'

‘She'd jump at the chance!' said Musa.

Zeinab's friend Aisha was married to a colleague of Owen's. Not exactly a colleague, since Mahmoud worked for the Parquet, and the Parquet, staffed by lawyers anxious to keep their distance from the government, and especially from the Mamur Zapt, whose legitimacy they (along with a lot of other people in Cairo, not all of them Egyptians) denied, tried to steer clear of anything to do with the Secret Police.

The Parquet was the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice. The Egyptian system followed the French and not the British. Investigating a crime was the responsibility not of the police but of the Parquet. When a crime was committed, the police reported it to the Ministry of Justice, who passed it on to the Parquet to handle. The Parquet officer assigned to the case, a lawyer, looked into the matter and decided if there was a case to answer. If he thought there was he would bring the evidence together and present it to the Court. It was then his responsibility to prosecute and carry the case through to sentencing.

Mahmoud, one of the Parquet's bright young men, had just reached the stage in his career when things got difficult. That is, in Egypt, they got political. Egypt was a country of a multiplicity of nationalities, many religions, many diverse ethnic groups and several legal systems. There was the French-based national legal system, the Muslim law-based system, presided over by the Kadi, with its own independent laws and courts, and in addition a complicated financial and legal system known as the Capitulations, under which any citizen of another country could elect to be tried by a consular court set up by that country, answering to that country's law and judgements.

Enterprising criminals soon learnt the skills of switching rapidly from one nationality to another, delaying the prosecution, the verdict and the consequences. The system made the Parquet lawyers tear their hair out, and Egypt was a great place for crooks.

What made the situation worse was for each consular court there was, naturally, a consulate and a country. The effect was to shift everything from the criminal to the political. You could get so far and then the politicians, and their lawyers, took over.

Mahmoud was just hitting these buffers. Owen, of course, had hit them long before. Shared frustration had brought Mahmoud and Owen together. At the most general level they shared the same aim: justice – although Egyptians defined that differently from the British. Mahmoud, a staunch Arab Nationalist, didn't believe there should be such a thing as the Mamur Zapt. Nor did the Khedive and nor, officially, did the High Commissioner. It was just that, given the way things were in Egypt, it was handy to have one around.

Despite all this, Mahmoud and Owen got on very well.

This morning Mahmoud had been assigned a new case, one which reflected, he suspected, his declining value in the eyes of his superiors. A goods train had come in from Luxor and when the men went to unload it they had been put off by the nasty smell emanating from one of the boxes.

‘There's something dead in that,' Ali said to Hussein. ‘You mark my words!'

The box, which was about the size of a small trunk, was sewn into a coarse canvas bag of the sort often used to protect items in transit. You could almost have taken it, but for its rectangular shape, for one of the larger Post Office mail bags.

When they had lifted it out of the wagon and put it down on the dusty sand, the smell was even more apparent, and after it had been resting there for an hour or two – things did not move fast in Egypt, particularly loading and unloading – it became clear that the package was secreting fluid at one end.

‘Don't like the look of that,' Hussein said to Ali, giving the box a wide berth and moving on to another one.

They continued giving it a wide berth and moving on to another one until there were no other ones for them to move on to.

‘What about that one?' said the overseer, going past the box.

‘Don't like the look of it,' said Ali.

‘Don't like the smell of it,' said Hussein.

‘What?' said the overseer, taken aback because Hussein and Ali had never shown signs of aesthetic or olfactory discrimination before.

He went up to the package and sniffed and looked and then he went to fetch the yard supervisor.

‘There's something dead in there,' said the supervisor. ‘Who's the package for?'

He instructed the overseer to read the label. The overseer would have instructed someone else to read the label, since the smell now was quite overpowering. However, neither Ali nor Hussein could read and he knew that the clerk would refuse to move out of his office, so, with the greatest reluctance, he approached the box himself.

‘Can't read it,' he announced. ‘It's for a Pasha somebody or other.'

‘Look, just find out who it is and then we'll get them to send someone to come and move it.'

The overseer reluctantly approached the package again. ‘It's like I said: you can't read it. It's been soiled by … Well, it's been soiled, anyway.'

‘Of course you can read it! Someone must be able to read it!'

Others were pressed into trying but without success.

‘Look, we can't just leave the box there, not the way it is. I mean, people have to go past,' said the supervisor.

‘And some of us have to go past a lot,' said Ali and Hussein.

‘It's what's inside it,' said the overseer.

‘We can't just leave it there,' the supervisor said again. ‘We'll have to move it.'

But where to? Anywhere else in the yard would just move the problem rather than solve it; and if the package was just moved out of the yard and dumped, as they were tempted to do, this would almost certainly cause trouble too. And plenty of it, if the box did indeed belong to a Pasha.

‘We're going to have to open it,' said the supervisor with decision. ‘It's probably a dead dog or something.'

‘Yes,' said Ali, more cheerfully now there was a prospect of something happening. ‘Probably sent up from his estate or something.'

‘A prize dog!' said Hussein enthusiastically. ‘A hunting dog. A Saluki maybe. He wanted it sent up to him!'

‘And the bastards put it in a box with no air and no water! Just sealed it up and sent it off!'

‘A prize dog, too! Now if it had been an ordinary dog—'

‘And not a Pasha's dog. There'll be trouble over this, you mark my words! He'll kick their backsides for this!'

‘Well, they deserve kicking! Ignorant bastards! But that's what they're like down there in the south.'

‘Sudanis, I shouldn't wonder,' said Hussein.

‘Are you going to open that box or not?' demanded the overseer.

Not, was the answer they would have preferred. But jobs were jobs and someone had to do it, and if it was a nasty job or a dirty job, it was usually them.

So … When the cloth covering was cut away and removed it revealed a cheap, gaudily decorated box, painted in all the colours of the rainbow.

‘Why!' said Ali. ‘It's a—'

‘Bride box,' finished Hussein.

And when Mahmoud opened the box later, he saw that the bride was inside.

Bride boxes were perhaps less common than they had once been but no respectable girl, especially in Upper Egypt, would consider getting married without one. In it she accumulated her trousseau and when the great moment came would transfer with it to the bridegroom's house. She would build it up over the years and as the wedding approached it would become more and more prominent. In the days immediately before the wedding the world would be invited round to gaze and wonder.