We banished her [Firdus, a famously beautiful Cairo brothel keeper whom McPherson had arrested in delicto flagrante] to a town she expressed a loathing for in the Provinces where she was kept under police supervision in a circumscribed area kept for women of her profession. Tanta was the place but the name was kept secret because all the young officers would want to go there to pass their leave if it was known, and that is the last I know of her. [Postscript dated 17.7.1921] Not quite the last. Three years later my eye fell on this in the Egyptian Gazette. “The well known Tanta women murder case. The accused is charged with having wilfully murdered by suffocation and strangulation Bahia Ibrahim known as Firdus and robbed her of her jewelry and valuables.”
-The Man Who Loved Egypt, J.W. McPherson, recounting his service as Mamur Zapt
But this was another thing they both found puzzling, that the body should be boxed up and sent to a Pasha. Wasn’t that the last thing you would do if you murdered somebody?
-The Bride Box: A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce
Tanta isn’t so bad a place. During the 1978 moulid I bought cotton candy and a tin horn and paper hat. McPherson himself went there to keep an eye on the festivities in 1920 and got up early to watch the Zaffa al-Sharāmīt, Procession of the Prostitutes. He didn’t say if he’d been looking for Firdus.