The Last Cut by Michael Pearce

greet Rosa’s family but then spotted him, beyond the dancers, among the bougainvillea, sitting on the edge of a gadwal talking to the ghaffir.
    ‘Lizard men!’ he was saying in appalled tones as Owen came up. ‘I wouldn’t meddle with them if I were you!’
    ‘Don’t worry!’ said the ghaffir fervently. ‘I won’t!’
    Owen stepped back behind a bush.
    ‘Mind you,’ said Georgiades, ‘it could already be too late.’
    ‘Too late!’
    ‘Yes. I mean, you saw him, didn’t you?’
    ‘No! All I saw was his trail. I mean, I knew at once that it was a lizard man, you can tell by the marks, it’s their tail. But that’s not the same thing. I didn’t actually see him, not him himself—’
    ‘Well, then, you were a lucky man!’
    ‘I know, I know!’
    ‘I mean, you could so easily have seen him. It must have taken him some time to make that hole—’
    ‘Ah, no, it wasn’t like that. I mean, they don’t work like that. Not lizard men.’
    ‘They don’t?’
    ‘No. They don’t do it themselves, they get men to do it for them. That’s why you don’t see them. And that’s the way it was here. The wood wasn’t gnawed, was it? It was cut. If a lizard man had done it himself, it would have been gnawed. You don’t see lizard men with tools, do you?’
    ‘Well, no—’
    ‘No. He got someone to do it for him. Someone who had the tools. Then he came along afterwards, wriggled through the hole, took what he wanted and then was on his way.’
    ‘Well. I still think you were lucky. Because you could so easily have seen him at that point, couldn’t you?’
    ‘Yes, but I try to take care. I mean, that’s always the risk in a job like mine. You’ve got to be careful you don’t see too much. If you just go blundering around, you can easily walk into something, and then, bang! The next minute you’re in trouble.’
    ‘So what do you do?’
    ‘I creep. Then if you come across something, if you see something, or, more likely, hear something, like that night—’
    ‘So you
did
see him?’
    ‘No, no. like I said, you don’t see them. They get someone to do it for them.’
    Ah, so
that
was the one you saw?’
    ‘I didn’t see anyone. But—’ the ghaffir lowered his voice—‘I knew he’d been there.’
    ‘Well, the hole, of course—’
    ‘No, no, not that.’
    ‘How, then?’
    The ghaffir laid his finger along his nose.
    ‘Fair is fair, and if you take mine, I take yours. That’s fair all round, isn’t it?’
    ‘Depends what it is,’ said Georgiades.
    But the ghaffir seemed to think he’d said enough. He picked up his gun and prepared to move away.
    ‘All the same, though,’ he said, with a slightly worried expression on his face, ‘it’s best not to meddle with the Lizard Man.’
    Mahmoud seemed oddly uneasy Normally, although he was on the best of terms with Owen personally, he liked to keep his distance from him over legal matters. Constitutionally there was no place for the Mamur Zapt in the legal scheme of things, and Mahmoud was a stickler for constitutionality. Over this business of the Maiden, however, he seemed anxious to consult him at every turn. Owen knew that it was not because he had any doubts over the right course to pursue in terms of law. It must be something else; and Owen thought he knew what that was.
    Mahmoud was not at home with this kind of case. It touched on things he knew very little about: women, for example. By this time most Egyptian men of his age would have married. Mahmoud’s father, himself a busy lawyer, had died young, however, and before he had had time to arrange that. Mahmoud had had to set about supporting his family and had immersed himself first in his studies and then in his career to the exclusion of all else. His mother broached the issue from time to time, indeed, was doing so with increasing frequency, but Mahmoud, determinedly modern, made it clear that he himself would see to the matter when the time came.
    The time, however, had not so