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stupid.
    Besides, the night was the best time for walking in Cairo. The city was at its coolest then. Shadow veiled the strident and the angular and cooperated with the moon to emphasize the soft shapes and arches. The lower level of the city disappeared and you suddenly became aware of the magical beauty of the upper parts of the houses, with their balconies and minarets, the fantastic woodwork of the overhanging, box-like meshrebiya windows, and the grotesque corbels which carried the first floor out over the street. Higher still and the moon revealed more clearly than in the day the delicacy of the domes and minarets of the mosques and the slender towers of the fountain houses. Everything was silvery. The moon seemed even to strike silver out of the fine, tight-packed grains of sand of the streets.
    As Owen set out, an arabeah drew up alongside him. He waved it away but it stopped just in front of him determinedly.
    “Hello!” said a soft female voice, which somehow seemed familiar. Suddenly he remembered.
    “You again!” It was the girl he had found in his bed. “What do you want?”
    “I want you to be nice to me. And I want to be nice to you.”
    “Sorry,” said Owen. “I’m well supplied, thanks.”
    “It’s not like that,” she said.
    “What is it like?”
    “Why don’t you come home with me and find out?”
    “Sorry.” He shook his head. “Someone is expecting me.”
    “Zeinab’s not the only girl in the world. And, anyway, she’s not expecting you. She’s at Samira’s.”
    Owen stopped, astonished. How did a girl like this know about Samira, the Princess Samira? And how did she know about Zeinab, for that matter?
    “You know Samira?”
    “As well as I know you. Surprisingly well.”
    Owen considered the matter. He was intrigued.
    But then, he was intended to be intrigued.
    “No, thank you,” he said, and walked on.
    Later, he was sorry. Plums, after all, do not grow on every tree.
     
    Owen went down to the Gamaliya next day to see that things were all right. He found the shop open and the Copt busy behind the counter. The shelves, though, were half empty.
    “A lot missing?” asked Owen, indicating the shelves with his hand.
    “No, no. I’ve just not put them up. I have to take them down at night, you see, now that the shutters have been broken. It’s not worth it. The women know what they want and can always ask for it. I keep the stuff inside now.”
    An idea came to Owen.
    “Do you talk to the women?”
    “Of course.”
    “And sometimes, perhaps, you overhear things?”
    “Perhaps,” said the Copt, slightly bewildered.
    “Did you know about the Zzarr?”
    He caught the look before the Copt’s face became studiously blank.
    “Zzarr? I don’t think so.”
    Owen smiled.
    “
I
think so,” he said.
    The Copt shook his head.
    “The reason I am asking,” said Owen, “is that I think the Zzarr could have something to do with the attack on your shop.”
    The shopkeeper looked surprised.
    “How could it?”
    “Just believe me, that I think it could. Now, what I’m trying to do is stop it happening again. So I need to know.”
    “I know there was a Zzarr,” said the shopkeeper. “That’s about all I know. Honestly!”
    “Where was it?”
    “It was in the house over there.”
    “Show me.”
    The Copt called into the house and a woman appeared. She was dressed in black like the other women in the street and veiled like them. The Copt told her to look after things while he was gone. He said he wouldn’t be long.
    “Normally she doesn’t mind,” he said to Owen. “It’s just that now—”
    The house was only about a couple of hundred yards away. Owen knocked on the door. No one responded.
    “I think it’s empty,” said the Copt.
    “Who does it belong to?”
    “A Mr Abbas, I think. He lives in the Gamaliya somewhere.”
    There were still some policemen about. Owen set them to work finding out where Mr Abbas lived—it was simply a question of knocking on