The Snake-Catcher’s Daughter. Michael Pearce

thank you, Gareth. I’ll think about it. Yes, I’ll think about it.’

      ‘It goes on, doesn’t it,’ he said to Garvin as they passed in the corridor, ‘this heat? Could do with a bit of fresh air. Wish I was at the coast …’

      ‘The coast …’ murmured Garvin reflectively.

      Getting rid of those two would get rid of half the difficulty, he told himself. By the time they came back they would have forgotten all about it. He had no intention whatsoever of trying to find out what had happened to McPhee at the Zzarr. As far as he could see, all that had happened was that they’d slipped him something to make sure he didn’t see what he wasn’t supposed to see. It had been a bit nasty putting him in the cistern with all those snakes, though. Still, you could look at it another way, if the girl was going there regularly to milk them, she’d be bound to find him. And then, he’d have woken up anyway once the drug had worn off. Christ, what an awakening! No, the whole thing was best left alone. If, of course, it could be left alone …

      The first indication that it couldn’t came not, as he had half-expected, from rumblings in the Gamaliya but from the press. There was a paragraph in one of the fundamentalist weeklies about Christian interference in local religious rites. No details were given but the McPhee incident was obviously being referred to.

      Owen was a little surprised. He had expected, following the visit from Sheikh Musa, grumblings at the local level but, given the secrecy of the event and the unwillingness of Sheikh Musa to give it publicity, he had not expected it to reach the press. A couple of days later there was another reference to it, in the Nationalist press this time and with more detail. And then a day or so after, it was picked up yet again, more fiercely, in a sectarian paper which was critical of both the offender – now named unequivocally as an Englishman – and of the local religious authorities.

      It was clear that the tip-off had not come from Sheikh Musa. Who had it come from, then? Owen sat back and thought. Was there something after all in Garvin’s supposition that someone was trying to set up McPhee?

      This looked very like an orchestrated campaign. He thought about it a little more and then decided to test if it was by inserting a mild spoke in their wheel. He would excise all press reference to the incident for a week or two. It wouldn’t stop publication entirely since there was a large and thriving underground press in Cairo, but it would force someone’s hand if they were trying to mount a campaign. They would have to take the greater risk of illicit publication, and he could have the printers watched in the hope of picking up anyone new who came into the market.

      It seemed to work, for after about a week the references in the press died down. He waited for the approaches to the underground printers. Then one morning he came in to the Bab-el-Khalk to find Nikos waiting for him.

      ‘There’s been an attack on a Coptic shop in the Gamaliya,’ he said.

      Owen hardly needed to ask where it was.

      ‘Near the Place of Tombs? Right, I’ll go there.’

      The Copts, the original inhabitants of the city – they had been there long before the Muslims arrived – were Christians, and were usually the first targets of any religious unrest.

      He found the shop easily enough. There was a little knot of people standing in front of it. There was no broken glass. Shops in the traditional quarters, like the houses, did not have glass windows. They were open to the street. Instead, though, there were bits of wood lying everywhere. At night, the shopkeepers drew wooden shutters across their shops and these had obviously been broken open.

      He couldn’t at first make out what kind of shop it was. All he could see, scattered about on the ground, were little gilt cylinders. Puzzled, he picked one up. It had three thin metal rings attached to it.

      ‘It’s for women to put on,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘It keeps the veil off the face.’

      Seeing that Owen still did not understand – he knew little about technology and even less about female technology – he demonstrated by fitting it on himself. The cylinder went across the nose and the face veil was suspended from it. The rings held the cloth away from the nostrils and the mouth to allow passage of air.

      Owen shrugged.

      ‘At least with this sort of stuff you don’t get much broken,’ he said.

      ‘It’s not the damage,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘It’s the – I’ll never feel the same again. We’ve lived here for twenty years. We thought we were liked by our neighbours. We thought we liked them. Now something like this happens!’

      ‘It’s not the neighbours, Guptos,’ said one of the bystanders quietly.

      ‘It’s someone in the Gamaliya,’ said the Copt bitterly. ‘Don’t tell me they came right across the city just to break up my shop!’

      Owen went inside with him. At the back of the shop were some stairs which led to an upper storey. Some children, huddled on the stairs, peeped down at him.

      ‘It’s the effect on the kids,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘We’ve always let them run around, play with who they like. They’ve got friends … Now my wife is afraid to let them out of her sight.’

      He bent down and began to pick up cylinders from the floor.

      ‘It’s not the shop I mind about,’ he said. ‘We can always start again. It’s the kids, my wife. How can she go to the suk and look them in the face, knowing what they’ve done? What they could do again? We’ll have to move.’

      Owen looked around. The fittings of the shop were very simple. The walls were lined with shelves, as in a cupboard, on which the goods were stored. There was a low counter at the front on which, when a potential customer inquired, particular items could be displayed; or on which, typically, the shopkeeper would sit when he was not working. He worked on the ground behind the counter. Owen could see some tools scattered among the debris.

      There was not, in fact, a lot of debris. This was not the moment to tell the man he was lucky; but he was. Owen had often seen worse. This did not look like the random, total violence that usually resulted when a mob ran amok. It was something measured, selected, perhaps, to send a message.

      ‘Why was it you?’ he asked.