A classic murder mystery from Michael Pearce's award-winning series, set in Egypt in the 1900s, in which the Mamur Zapt confronts the secrets of his past. It is the beginning of the war and the Mamur Zapt, Gareth Owen, British head of Cairo's secret police, is called in to investigate a human corpse abandoned in a cat cemetery. Is the villagers' talk of a mysterious Cat Woman mere superstitious nonsense, or something rather sinister? The Mamur Zapt is preoccupied with missing guns and dubious ghaffirs, but the face in the cemetery refuses to go away. And Owen comes to realise that it poses questions that are not just professional but uncomfortably personal...