The Bride Box

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Gareth Cadwallader Owen, The Mamur Zapt, Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police, was sitting in his office, the blinds drawn against the sun, grappling with the latest misdeeds of the Brotherhood, when Nikos, his official clerk, came in looking pale.

‘Effendi …’

‘Yes?’

‘Miss Skiff to see you.’

Miss Skiff was the elderly and eccentric English lady who ran the Cairo Dispensary for Sick Animals.

Owen’s responsibilities, although wide, did not in his view extend to sick animals. He turned back to the Brotherhood. ‘You sort it,’ he said.

After a while he became aware that Nikos was still standing there. ‘Well?’

‘She has a girl with her.’

‘So?’

‘A little girl,’ said Nikos with emphasis.

Owen thought he understood. Nikos was not a family man. Owen sometimes suspected that his most intimate relationships were with the steel filing cabinets that filled his office. People, he was not good at; children, he could not make out at all. They filled him with alarm. He sometimes saw them from his window. They milled about in an unruly and unpredictable way. How did you deal with them? How, so to speak, did you come at them?

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