A Cold Touch of Ice. Michael Pearce

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      ‘Sidi Morelli!’ Some in the crowd had clearly not realized previously who it was.

      ‘But he had been here!’ said the patron of the café, bewildered, ‘only the moment before!’

      He pointed to a table at which three elderly men were sitting, stunned.

      From further along the street there came the sound of a bell and then a moment later someone crying: ‘Make way!’ A covered cart, drawn by two mules, was trying to work through the crowd.

      ‘Make way for the ambulance!’

      Somehow it forced its way through the mass of people and drew up alongside the coffee house. A short, thickset, youngish man, Egyptian, but dressed in a suit not a galabeah, began organizing things.

      ‘It is good that you are here, Kamal,’ Mahmoud said affectionately.

      ‘I had just got here. I was still shaking hands –’

      He seemed, for all his efficiency, bewildered.

      The body was lifted, passed over the heads of the crowd and laid in the back of the ambulance.

      ‘To the death-house,’ instructed Mahmoud. ‘Not to the hospital.’

      The crowd watched sombrely. Many of them were weeping. Owen was surprised; not at the crowd, for if there was anything that drew a crowd in Cairo, it was an accident or a fatality, but at the extent, and sincerity, of the feeling.

      ‘Sidi Morelli, Ibrahim!’ The man beside them shook his head as if in disbelief.

      Everyone here, thought Owen, appeared to know everyone else.

      Ibrahim Buktari seemed suddenly to have aged.

      ‘I shall go home, I think. Excuse me!’

      He shook hands with Owen.

      The efficient young man whom Owen had noticed earlier appeared beside them. He put his arm round Ibrahim Buktari’s shoulders and led him gently away.

      Mahmoud touched Owen’s arm.

      ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘We shall have to end our evening early. Another time, perhaps.’

      ‘Of course!’

      The crowd was breaking up.

      ‘I have work to do,’ said Mahmoud.

      ‘Work!’

      ‘He did not collapse. He was strangled.’

      In Cairo at that time investigating a crime was not the responsibility of the police. Nor, most definitely – with the exception of political crime – was it the responsibility of the Mamur Zapt. When a crime was suspected, it was reported to the Department of Prosecutions of the Ministry of Justice, the Parquet, as it was known, and the Parquet would appoint one of its lawyers to conduct an investigation. Ordinarily the appointment would come first. Mahmoud being Mahmoud, however, he had seen a responsibility waiting to be taken and had been unable to resist taking it, with the result that by the time – the following afternoon – that he was actually appointed to the case, he had already been pursuing his inquiries for some hours.

      A bearer had brought Owen a message from him about midway through the morning asking him to come to the Morelli house. Owen had been a little surprised, for it was not normally the habit of the strongly Nationalist Parquet to involve the Mamur Zapt in its investigations, and this was particularly true of Mahmoud, who, despite their friendship, did not believe that there should be a Secret Police at all, let alone that it be headed by an Englishman. However, Owen knew that he wouldn’t have sent for him unless it was important and, as there was nothing particularly to detain him in his office, set out almost at once.

      When he arrived at the house Mahmoud was somewhere else in the building and he was received by the dead man’s widow, Signora Morelli; and this was another surprise, for he had not realized, the evening before, that the dead man was Italian.

      ‘Italian?’ said Signora Morelli. ‘Of course we’re Italian! And Egyptian, too. We’ve lived in this country for forty years. In Cairo for thirty. In this very house! Everyone knows us here. Our children grew up here. This is the place they look upon as home. We, too. We have made our lives here, we were happy here –

      ‘And now this! How can it be? How can they do this to us? He was their friend, everybody knew him. Everybody loved him. He used to go there every night, to that café, and play dominoes with Hamdan and Abd al Jawad and Fahmy Salim. Every night! For years and years. They were inseparable. People made a joke of it. They were the four comers of the house, people said. Take one away, and the coffee house would fall down. That’s what they said. And now – now they have taken one away.’

      She poured it all out.

      ‘And it is all because of this stupid war. It must be! There can’t be any other reason. He never did anyone an injury.

      ‘This stupid war! But it’s not our fault. We were against it from the start, we were appalled, like they were. And they said: “No, no, Sidi,” – that is what they called him, Sidi – “you cannot be blamed. The politicians are mad. They always are. They are mad here, too. No, no, Sidi, you are one of us.”

      ‘And he thought he was one of them, too; I thought I was. This is our home, this is our country. Why should it turn on us? We have loved it, we have worked for it. We thought we were Egyptian too.

      ‘And now this. How can it be? How can they turn on him? What harm has he ever done them? What harm has he ever done anybody? Why should they turn on him, their friend, the man who has lived among them for years? How can people be like that?’

      Mahmoud had come in and was standing by the door expressionlessly. He caught Owen’s eye and Owen followed him out.

      ‘I see,’ said Owen. ‘So that’s why you called me.’

      ‘No,’ said Mahmoud. ‘We don’t know yet that it was a political crime.’

      ‘Then –?’

      He led him off through the house. It was tall and thin, rather like Mahmoud’s own, and, like that one, had an inner courtyard. They went across the courtyard and out through a door on the other side. It led them into a great, cavernous, hall-like building which seemed to serve as a warehouse. It contained a bewildering diversity of goods: divans, tables, rugs, great copper-and-silver trays, a lot of brassware – there was a whole corner of the elegant brass ewers called ibreek which the Arabs use for pouring water over the hands, along with the tisht, the quaint basins and water-strainers that went with them. There were, too, oddly, piles of clothes: finely embroidered shirts which might have belonged to sheiks, lovely old Persian shawls, hand-worked as close as if they were woven, filmy rainbow-coloured veils worn by dancing girls.

      Mahmoud led him across to a huge stack of bales of raw cotton. The stuff of one of the bales had been torn, probably in transit, and through the tear there appeared the gleam of something black. Mahmoud pulled more of the cotton aside, put in his hand and tugged. Even before it came out, Owen knew what it was: the barrel of a gun.

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