The Last Cut. Michael Pearce
messed up the lot!’
‘Gadwals!’ sniggered the ghaffir. ‘To talk about gadwals when the Effendi have great things on their mind!’
‘Never mind that!’ said Macrae. He looked down into the gadwal. ‘Spares, you reckon?’ he said to Ferguson.
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson. ‘Discarded afterwards.’
Macrae picked them up.
‘And you know where they come from?’ he said.
‘Aye,’ said Ferguson.
The stores were kept in a hut beside one of the regulators. Its door was heavily padlocked.
‘I doubt they went that way,’ said Macrae.
He led them round to the back of the hut. The lower part of the rear wall was masked by a profusion of the mauve, thrift-like flowers that grew everywhere in the Gardens. Macrae pulled them away. At the very bottom of the wall a hole large enough for a man had been neatly cut in the wood.
Ferguson went round to the front again and unlocked the padlock and they went in. The hut was full of equipment neatly arranged on racks. There were spades, picks, drilling bits, coils of wire, nails, screws, packs of various kinds. There was a stack of the wooden trug-like baskets that were still universally used along the banks for carrying earth in. There were piles of the traditional wooden shovels.
Macrae went over to one of the walls and pulled aside some stacks. Behind them was a stout wooden chest with huge iron clasps and a padlock even stronger than the one on the door. Macrae unlocked it and looked in.
‘Aye,’ he said.
‘Detonators?’ said Owen.
‘Four missing.’
‘That would be right. And dynamite?’
‘At any rate,’ said Macrae sourly, ‘there’s some left.’
‘A padlock’s no good,’ said Ferguson. ‘We’ll have to find somewhere else to keep it.’
‘Have you a storeman?’ asked Owen.
‘He’s all right,’ said Macrae. ‘I’d trust him with my life.’ And then, catching Owen’s sceptical look, he added. ‘Aye, I know what you’re thinking. But he’s all right. I’ve known him for years. He was with me down in Aswan. Got injured in a fall, so I put him in charge of stores. That was six years ago and we’ve never had cause for complaint.’
‘Never!’ said Ferguson.
‘Does he have keys?’
‘No. I open up and lock up each day,’ said Ferguson.
‘And we’re the only ones with keys to the box. We each keep a set in case there’s a sudden need and one of us can’t be found. But no one else has a key.’
Owen bent and looked at the padlock. It was a fairly standard one. The storeman might be honest but people would be in and out of the hut all day and one of them might well have been able to size the padlock up, even, perhaps, take an impression while the storeman was distracted.
The hole in the wall had been hidden by some sacks.
‘Aye,’ said Macrae, ‘but it can’t have been done long before or we’d have found out.’
‘The same night?’
‘It would take a bit of time to cut,’ said Ferguson. ‘Maybe the night before.’
They went round and looked at the hole again from the other side. Whoever had cut it had dug himself a shallow burrow in the sand for extra concealment while he worked.
‘Yes, but Ibrahim ought to have seen him,’ grumbled Macrae. ‘He’s supposed to look all round.’
He summoned the ghaffir and showed him the burrow.
‘What’s this, then?’
Ibrahim studied it.
‘A lizard, Effendi?’
‘Lizard, bollocks!’ He indicated the hole. ‘This was a man!’
‘Yes, Effendi,’ said the ghaffir unhappily. ‘A lizard man.’
‘I can see, Ibrahim,’ said the gardener maliciously, ‘that you are not a man who knows about thieves breaking in.’
‘I know about thieves breaking in,’ said the ghaffir indignantly. ‘Ordinary thieves, that is. But this was a lizard man. Lizard men are different.’
The phrase unfortunately caught on. Walking past some of Macrae’s workmen later, Owen heard them discussing the latest developments, which, of course, by this time they knew all about.
‘… a lizard man, they say …’
‘Ah, well, there’s not much you can do about that, then, is there?’
‘I don’t like it. If he’s got it in for us, then there’ll be trouble!’
The newspapers picked it up. Waiting for Mahmoud that evening, sitting at an outside table in the big café at the top of the Mouski, Owen heard a new cry from the boys selling newspapers.
‘Lizard man! Lizard man!’
He bought a newspaper to find out all about it. It was as he feared. Prominent on the front page was the heading
LIZARD MAN STRIKES!
Beneath, was a lurid and totally inaccurate account of the attack on the regulator.
That kind of detail, however, was of little interest to the newspapers, which, at this comer of the Mouski, were largely Nationalist in tone. They preferred to speculate on the Lizard Man’s identity. Was he, for a start, a Nationalist? A number of the newspapers seemed to think so. They saw the whole thing as an attack on the British.
LIZARD MAN HERO STRIKES AT BRITISH DAM!
ran one of the headlines.
Other newspapers, however, pointed out that the Regulator was not British but Egyptian. Who would be so dastardly as to attack an Egyptian dam? Clearly, the inspiration was Christian. But not necessarily British. The British, for all their faults – and the newspaper listed a half page of them – were not lizard men. They had no need to be, because they controlled the show anyway. No, it was someone more insidious, someone who preferred to lie low and conceal himself in the sand; the Lizard Man was a Copt!
A Coptic newspaper, not surprisingly, took a different view. The Muslims, relative newcomers in the country (they had arrived a mere twelve hundred years ago), had never really appreciated the great architecture that had preceded them. They had seen it as the work of Satan. Was it surprising, then, that they should strike at one of the great buildings of modern Egypt? The Lizard Man was plainly a Muslim, almost certainly of a fundamentalist persuasion.
Various other newspapers took various other views. They agreed, however, on certain major points. The Lizard Man had done it, and he was aptly named, for he struck surreptitiously and he did reptile things. Like the snake, he snatched the young from the mother’s nest and the mother’s breast. All women should, therefore, be warned!
The authorities were, naturally, seriously concerned. The Mamur Zapt himself was on the trail. Unfortunately, if reports were correct, he had allowed himself to be led on a wild lizard chase …
‘What’s this I hear about a lizard man?’ asked Mahmoud, dropping into the chair opposite Owen.
‘A figure of daft speech,’ said Owen.
‘There are plenty of those around. Myths of Maidenhood, for a start.’
It was, in fact, the Maiden that Mahmoud wanted to talk about, although not in her mythic incarnation. The release of the autopsy’s findings had brought him certain leads and he thought he was now close to establishing the Maiden’s identity. That was not the problem.
‘The