The Bride Box Read Online Free PDF Page B

to Mahmoud and Mahmoud had asked him where it came from.
    â€˜Probably Flamenco Bay,’ he had said. ‘That’s where most of them come from.’
    Flamenco Bay was a little to the north of Port Sudan and was where the red, green, and yellow-painted dhows unloaded their cargoes of trocchee shells in hundreds of thousands.
    â€˜The shells go to the United States and to France, where they’re cut up into buttons. Most of the pearl buttons that you see come from Flamenco Bay.’
    He had told Mahmoud to smell it.
    â€˜That’s awful!’ said Mahmoud. ‘It smells like rotten fish!’
    â€˜It
is
rotten fish. They sort of stew inside the shells. The sun rots them, and then they drop out. But the smell! You should smell it in Flamenco Bay!’
    â€˜I’d rather not!’
    â€˜They grind them up into a powder. There’s a steady demand for it in Arabia.
    â€˜As a fertilizer?’
    Owen smiled.
    â€˜As an aphrodisiac.’
    It was a button, here, one they had found in Soraya’s hand.
    Pulled off from her assailant? That didn’t necessarily mean that the attacker had been a woman. Men wore pearl buttons as well, sometimes on their shirts, if they were posh, on their
galabeyas
if they were not. Even sometimes among the beads on their skull caps.
    Soraya had fought before they killed her. They had had to stun her with a blow. And then they had strangled her. The body had decomposed badly in the heat of the box, but the pathologist had been able to make this out.
    Owen was wondering how to tell Leila. He would tell her very little, as little as he could.
    He would have to show her the button and ask her if she recognized it. It could have come from Soraya’s own clothes. But somehow he didn’t think it did. It had been ripped off. Did you do that to your own clothes? It was more likely that Soraya, who seemed to have been a girl of spirit, had fought back.
    The question, though, was whether the button told you more. Trocchee buttons were everywhere in Egypt. But they were most plentiful, naturally enough, along the Red Sea coast, where they came from. There everyone wore them.
    Did that indicate that her attacker had come from round there? The Sudan? Not Egypt.
    More; could that mean that that was where she was being taken? As a slave, along with her little sister, and other children. First, to a port on the Red Sea – Port Sudan, say – where the control was not as tight as it was in Egypt, and where boats, Arab boats, came and went every day in large numbers? Once there it would be easy to put children on an incoming dhow just after it had dropped its cargo, of trocchee shells, possibly, and then sail them over to the other side of the Red Sea and on to the still existing slave markets of the Middle East. Was that where Leila – and possibly Soraya – had been bound?
    That morning the first thing he did when he got into his office at the Bab-el-Khalk was to get Nikos to issue a general instruction to the police station and customs offices of south Egypt alerting them to the possible passage of a slave caravan with children. The Mamur Zapt had few officers of his own; but you ignored his direct instructions at your peril.
    Of course, the slavers would be keeping to the desert and giving towns and police as wide a berth as possible. They might even have an arrangement with some police forces. That he could do nothing about. In fact, trying to pick the caravan up in the desert was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. The distances were vast and there was no question of combing the desert. He just didn’t have enough men to do that. The time to intercept them was when they were coming to the coast and looking for their port. The trouble was that that might be anywhere along the Red Sea coast.
    He sat thinking for a moment and then gave the Navy a call. They didn’t have many ships and the sea was even more vast than the desert. But