The Fig Tree Murder by Michael Pearce Page B

pretty good guess. But I couldn’t tell you. It wouldn’t be right.’
    ‘Just tell me, you old bitch!’
    ‘My sheikh told me not to!’
    Sheikh Isa raised his stick and the old woman darted back behind the door.
    ‘Shame on you!’ she said. ‘First you tempt me into vice; then you beat me! I shall go to your prayer meeting tomorrow and I shall call out to all the people: “Sheikh Isa tempted me to vice and then when I wouldn’t succumb, he threatened to beat me!” ’ The stick smashed against the door. Evidently Sheikh Isa was not feared as greatly in the village as Owen had supposed. Mahmoud decided to intervene.
    ‘You joke, Mother,’ he said sternly, ‘but this is no laughing matter. A man has died.’ The woman opened the door and looked at him.
    ‘Are you the kadi?’ she asked.
    ‘I am as the kadi.’
    ‘You’ve been a long time coming. Justice doesn’t get to this place often.’
    ‘It has come now. And it seeks your help. When Ibrahim went out that night, after he had left Jalila, he went out to meet another woman. Do you know who she might have been?’
    The old woman looked at him for a moment or two without replying. Then she sighed and said:
    ‘Ibrahim was a fool. He never could leave the women alone. But it’s not right that he should die because of that. That’s not justice, is it? So I will tell you. I don’t know who he went out to see that night. But I know who he had an eye for: Khadija.’
    ‘Khadija?’ shouted the sheikh. ‘Khadija?’
    ‘That’s right.’
    ‘You old bitch! You’re just mischief-making!’
    ‘Who is Khadija?’ asked Mahmoud.
    The woman turned to him.
    ‘Leila’s sister.’
    ‘The murdered man’s wife,’ said Owen.
    ‘You lie, woman!’ shouted the sheikh.
    ‘I don’t lie!’ said the woman defiantly. ‘It’s true! He’s always had an eye for her. Some say he wanted to marry her and not the other one. I don’t know about that but I do know he’s always had an eye for her, even after he got married.’
    ‘Did you talk to the wife’s family?’ Owen asked Mahmoud quietly.
    ‘I did. But I didn’t talk to her.’
    ‘It is possible,’ Sheikh Isa grudgingly acknowledged. ‘Though unseemly!’ He glared at the old woman.
    ‘Of course, she doesn’t come from our village,’ said the old woman cunningly.
    ‘That’s true!’ said Sheikh Isa, struck.
    ‘Where does she come from?’ asked Owen.
    ‘Tel-el-Hasan.’
    ‘I must go there,’ said Sheikh Isa, ‘and tell Sheikh Riyad. Together we will denounce her!’
    ‘Hold back a little,’ said Mahmoud. ‘We do not know yet that she was the one.’
    ‘He had an eye for her; we know that, don’t we?’
    ‘Yes, but we don’t know that she had an eye for him.’
    ‘He wouldn’t have looked in her direction if she hadn’t lured him, would he? Whores! Whores! They’re all whores!’ shouted Sheikh Isa, as he hurried away.
     
    Tel-el-Hasan, where the wife’s family came from, was a village less than two miles away. Like Matariya, it was a cluster of trees. Although the villages were some four or five miles away from the Nile, they were connected to it by irrigation channels. Their chief course of water, however, was the main Khalig Canal, which became the Ismailiya Canal just beyond Matariya. Again, they were not directly on the canal but connected to it through the irrigation system, a mass of small channels, ditches and furrows which ran water across the fields. There was, though, probably at both Matariya and Tel-el-Hasan, an underground supply of water which the wells were tapping and which accounted for the dense foliage of the trees.
    In one of the
gadwals
, or ditches, two small boys were fighting. Mahmoud, for justice even among small boys, stepped down into the ditch and pulled them apart.
    ‘He’s smaller than you,’ he remonstrated.
    ‘It’s a blood feud,’ said the bigger boy.
    ‘Shame on you! In the same village?’
    ‘He’s not really of this village,’ said the