To have such a figure publicly drunk as a guest in one’s country was bad enough; that he should die apparently as a result of that excess suggested an embarrassment to Egypt so monumental that I could only guess at its political implications. But that was what it amounted to. And the next step was easy enough. What if someone had contrived such an embarrassment? — and there were many who might have — the French, the Israelis, the British; they had done their best to get Nasser off the map a year previously; how better to continue their efforts than by eroding Nasser’s prestige among his Arab neighbours — by knocking off one of their Crown Princes? And finally there was Bahaddin the British agent, his last role, which everything else had been a cover against, and perhaps the one that had killed him. It hardly seemed credible, least of all when Henry explained that he’d had a heart attack.
We’d met later on that evening in one of the Club lounges looking over the cricket and croquet pitches, the last few elderly members folding up their bridge games under the table lights so that we were almost in darkness.
“Yes, I got a doctor. And there was another who came from his Embassy. A coronary.”
Bridget had been numb with some sort of emotion and had hardly said a word in the half hour that we’d waited for Henry. Now, her fear or nerves quite gone, she levelled a barrage of impatient whispered questions at Henry.
“How? A heart attack? He was perfectly well. They must have got on to him, that he was with us. I thought they’d got you too.”
“No. There was no question of that. It was the dancing, I suppose. It must have been. Some people just go like that. Suddenly.”
I remembered the girl with the dark hair.
“The girl then. What about the girl?”
“What about her?” Henry said. “Unless she knew that Bahaddin had some sort of heart condition. What’s she got to do with it?”
“They’ll do a post-mortem?” Bridget asked.
“I doubt it. His father was coming over here anyway next week. They’ll take the body home. Untouched. Like the Jews, these families don’t go in for the idea of cutting up their relatives. I can’t see why it wasn’t just an attack — why do you think it wasn’t?”
“I can’t see why you’re so sure it was. It’s too convenient. People of Bahaddin’s age, whatever it was, don’t drop dead after a few drinks and a dance. He’d been doing that sort of thing most of his life.”
“Perhaps that’s what happened. It finally hit him.”
“The point is, Henry — and you’re being very thick about it — surely he was murdered in some way: if they weren’t after Bahaddin because of us, then what could they have been after him for — and who could? Anyone who wanted to do Nasser a very bad turn. And who would that most likely be?”
“A lot of people — ”
“But particularly who?”
“The French, the Israelis — ” Henry paused, resenting the logic of Bridget’s questions.
“And the British,” she added. “What about them? What about London?”
“Don’t be mad. I’d have known about it.”
“They could have sent someone in.”
“Why would they? He was crucial to the circle out here. London knew that perfectly well — worth far more alive, for his work, than as a pawn in any power game. The main thing is they’re not after us.”
“How do you know? Security here may have had a lead on Bahaddin — which would have led to us — if he hadn’t had his ‘heart attack’. That would have been reason enough to get rid of him.”
“You mean Crowther and Usher? They had something to do with it — and didn’t tell me? Hardly.”
“You said they were madmen, quite fanatic about the whole thing out here — that they’d do anything,” I added. “If they’d heard something about Bahaddin …”
“I don’t know what you’re going on about. There’s a chance he may have been killed. All right. It’s a possibility. Some personal trouble or jealousy back home — one of his numerous uncles or brothers wanting a crack at the throne, it’s happening all the time where he comes from. But the idea that he was part of some international plot is absolute conjecture, I don’t go for theories. Until I know any more I’ll settle for what the doctors said it was — heart failure.”
And so his death was described on the back page of the Egyptian Gazette the following day. What wasn’t reported, on that day or any other, was that the Sheik’s Mission to Egypt was withdrawn by the end of the week, along with thirty-eight million sterling held on deposit with the Bank Misr as part of a development loan to Egypt, and that the Ambassadors and other senior officials of three other Arab states had left the country by the end of the month. A good part of the Arab world outside Egypt was aflame with indignant editorials though no breath of this appeared in the Egyptian press and no other papers which dealt with the topic got further than the censor at the airport. None the less these facts and rumours — this scandal, along with its glittering centre-piece — quickly spread among the bars and cafés of the city: that Bahaddin had been poisoned. By whom? Unlike Henry, the Cairenes were much given to theories and Bahaddin’s death provided them with an orgy of speculation.
Incidental to all this, everyone who had dealt with Bahaddin at the school, or who had been in any way connected with him in the city, was closely questioned by the police. It must have been a long job, which in my case, at least, was conducted with meticulous thoroughness.
“Yes, I was on the boat that night. We spoke to Bahaddin just before he joined Farid’s party. I was a teacher at Maadi, out here on a contract, yes, you know about that. With the ex-British schools …”
I rambled on through the details of my connection with Bahaddin and my presence in Egypt. And Colonel Hassan Hamdy, from the Army’s special security branch, I assumed, made a pretence of noting these facts although I could see that he had in front of him my file from the Ministry of Education and must have known nearly as much about my activities in Egypt as I did.
For some reason I’d been called not to the main police building up by the railway station in Ramses Square but to an office at the top of a new twelve-storey apartment block which housed the Ministry of Information in Soliman Pasha. And then it struck me that, of course, with anyone who’d been as closely involved with Bahaddin as I’d been — and likely to give a lead — this part of the investigation would have been passed over to the Army who ran everything of importance in Egypt in those days — then as now.
“Forgive me for pressing these details but you can see our embarrassment in the whole affair. We have to go into everything very carefully. You’ve heard the rumours of course?”
“I’ve heard a few, yes.”
“You don’t have to worry about incriminating yourself, Mr. Marlow, this isn’t Scotland Yard. I mean, that he was murdered, poisoned?”
“I’d heard that, yes.”
“Of course there’s no proof. They wouldn’t let us touch the body. But the police doctor thinks it wasn’t a heart attack, some sort of quick poisoning. Of course normally we would have thought that he’d been killed by one of his own people, a relation, a rival for the succession. But that’s not the way his family see it. And I must admit that nothing’s happened in his own country since to suggest that any sort of coup de palais was the reason for his death. So we have to look into all the other possible motives.”
Colonel Hamdy was unlike the usual Egyptian army officer at that time in that he spoke English perfectly, with barely any accent, and was middle-aged — early fifties, I’d have said. He might have been a British colonel really, with his little half-moustache, his tired, civilized features, his lanky frame and air of casual lack of interest in everything. He seemed to have finished with his wars long ago; there was no sense of urgency or viciousness in his approach, which I had expected. We might almost have been chatting in a London club, except for the heat, which the tiny fan on his desk did nothing to alleviate, and the baking smells of refuse and hot tar which rose from the street engulfing the small room. He pressed a buzzer on his desk and ordered coffee.