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.
You could buy one in the souk, of course, or have one made especially for you. The painting was done by a separate skilled, or possibly not so skilled craftsman. The craftsman was probably also responsible for the gaudy paintings, usually of trees and reeds, which appeared on the front of houses and showed that the owner had performed a pilgrimage to Mecca.
The present box was empty except for the person lying there, a young woman. So much could be made out but little more. The corpse had been so distended by the heat and the gases that it was practically unrecognizable. It could not have been in the bride box for more than three days. Otherwise its presence would have become even more unpleasantly obvious. Nor, probably, would it have been there for less than two days. He would check the documentation and see when the box had been picked up.