The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in Nile. Michael Pearce

      

      HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1991

      Copyright © Michael Pearce 1992

      Michael Pearce asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780008259396

      Ebook Edition © JULY 2017 ISBN: 9780008257248

      Version: 2017-09-04

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

       Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

       Chapter 4

       Chapter 5

       Chapter 6

       Chapter 7

       Chapter 8

       Chapter 9

       Chapter 10

       Chapter 11

       Chapter 12

       Chapter 13

       Footnote

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also By

       About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

      ‘But,’ said Owen, ‘where is the body?’

      ‘Ah yes,’ said the watchman, rubbing one horny foot up and down his shin.

      ‘Ah yes,’ said the corporal, shuffling uneasily:

      Owen waited.

      ‘Well,’ said the corporal at last, looking out over the river to where a low mud shoal raised its back above the water, grey and wrinkled like a hippopotamus, ‘it was there.’

      ‘Well,’ said Owen, ‘it’s not there now.’

      It had been a long, hot, fruitless morning. And now this!

      He boiled over.

      ‘If this is some joke—’

      The watchman looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

      ‘But, effendi, it was there, I saw it.’

      ‘Or thought you did.’

      ‘Foolish man!’ said the corporal, swiftly switching sides. ‘It was all a dream.’

      He gave the watchman a push. The watchman pushed him back.

      ‘It was no dream!’ he insisted. ‘I saw it with my own two eyes. A woman, on the sandbank.’

      ‘A woman!’ said the corporal. ‘There, what did I tell you! It is time you got another wife, Abu. Then you would stop having these foolish dreams.’

      ‘I saw it plainly. On the sandbank.’

      ‘You saw something plainly,’ said Owen.

      ‘It was a woman,’ insisted the watchman doggedly.

      ‘A heap of camel dung!’ scoffed the corporal.

      ‘In the middle of the river?’ said the watchman angrily.

      ‘Anyway,’ said Owen, ‘it’s not there now.’

      ‘It was there.’

      ‘Then what has happened to it?’

      ‘Perhaps,’ suggested the corporal, ‘the river has washed it away?’

      Owen looked up and down the river. It stretched, broad and placid, to the horizon on both sides. Further on down, near to the city, a single felucca was gliding gracefully in towards the bank. It came to rest and then there was nothing else moving in the intense heat of the late morning Egyptian sun.

      He scanned the water’s edge carefully. At this time of year, with the flood still some weeks off, the Nile had shrunk back into its bed, uncovering a wide strip of mud, now baked hard and dry and cracked like crazy paving. Far away he thought he could see some goats grazing. But there was no suspicious heap lying grounded in the shallows, no flotsam or jetsam at all. Anything that came ashore would be snatched up at once by thrifty beachcombers.

      Under his feet a little floating clump of Um Suf, Mother of Wool, papyrus reed, torn loose from its moorings hundreds of miles to the south, nestled along the bank and came to rest against the shoal. Nestled and stuck. The current was not even sufficient to tug it loose again.

      ‘It can’t have!’ said