Outside, Sam and Eleanor caught a cab and were soon hurtling down a near-deserted highway towards the city. The driver had one hand on the wheel while the other held a cigarette at an open window. The back of the car was filled with warm, dusty and tobacco-tainted air. The radio was on – a jaunty African pop song coming out of tinny speakers in the back of the car. Worry beads hanging from the rear-view mirror swung with the car’s motion. The driver did not speak a word for the whole journey.
The Sofitel, where they’d decided to stay, merely confirmed Sam’s sense of alienation. They were the only Europeans in the reception area, an atrium dominated by a marble fountain and Islamic motifs on the walls and ceiling. North African businessmen in suits huddled around the fountain speaking in hushed tones. A group of black men in jeans and football shirts were checking out, sullen expressions on their faces. The one suggestion that there was a world beyond North Africa was the tune the hotel pianist was playing, which Sam recognised as a very slow version of Raindrops keep falling on my head.
Finally, once a stressed-looking receptionist had booked them in and given them their keys, they were travelling in a lift to the eighth floor, alone in their thoughts.
Their room was airless and stuffy. Sam slid open the French doors that led on to the balcony. The sound of a siren gathering strength and a distant muezzin call filled the room. Below were the hotel’s pool and gardens, beyond that a cluster of other large hotels. Sam’s eyes looked further into the distance. It was as if the city unfurled before him, a vast sea of rooftops cluttered with washing lines, water tanks and satellite dishes stretching into the distance.
Chapter 39
Marrakesh, Morocco
It was Eleanor, sitting on the bed poring over a map she’d picked up in reception, who dragged Sam back into the moment.
‘La Mamounia is just round the corner.’
Sam took one last look at the cityscape before him, then turned to Eleanor. ‘In which case now is as good a moment as any to start asking questions. If our arrival here has been noticed by our friends in the UK, then time’s pressing.’
Eleanor disappeared into the bathroom then re-emerged minutes later, drying her face. She dropped the towel on the bed then paused, closing her eyes briefly, as if summoning strength for the next stage.
As they walked through the foyer past reception, the woman who’d checked them in called out, urging caution.
‘Because of the riots,’ she added, when she saw Sam and Eleanor’s puzzled faces.
It was late afternoon in Marrakesh, the sun still beating down hard on the city. Sam felt himself beginning to sweat, his body unaccustomed to the sudden leap of mercury.
The streets had an eerie calm to them. Just as on the road into the city, there were only a handful of cars on the move. Sam and Eleanor passed several cafés where the scene was the same – men seated at tables, their shisha pipes and coffee cups abandoned as they stared at television screens.
Watching over the streets from above, on huge banners, was the face of the King. Sam dimly recalled coverage of riots in Morocco in 2011 before events in Libya, Egypt and Syria became the dominant stories of the Arab Spring. He had a sense that protests had been met with more restraint than in other countries – and there’d been enough promise of reform that things had calmed. But the omnipresent face of the monarch was a reminder that one family still dominated life here. Sam also remembered how both the US and UK were said to have farmed out the interrogation of terrorist suspects to the Moroccans, who were, it was alleged, less squeamish about using torture to extract information. The image Sam had in his mind was of an iron fist in a velvet glove, an impression compounded by the palpable tension on the streets.
Inside La Mamounia, the entrance reached through a large gate in the walls of the medina, the staff were doing their level best to dispel the unease outside in the city. Sam and Eleanor walked into a grand, air-conditioned lobby of Islamic horseshoe arches, marble flooring and vast blood-red sofas. In the background, soft musak – laced with some hint of North Africa – filtered out of concealed speakers. The clientele was mainly Arab, men in well-cut suits seemingly immune to the tense world beyond the hotel’s walls.
Neither Sam nor Eleanor had discussed how they were going to approach this. Suddenly Eleanor took the lead, marching up to reception where a man in a black jacket greeted her with a warm, five-star smile.
‘Hello Madam,’ he said. ‘How can I help you?’
‘My father came here recently. Charles Scott.’
The receptionist’s eyes lit up. It was as if Eleanor had just mentioned the name of a favourite uncle. ‘Of course,’ he said, beaming. ‘How is your father?’
‘I’m afraid he died,’ she said. ‘He committed suicide.’
Christ, thought Sam. She isn’t pulling any punches.
No amount of corporate hospitality training could prevent the man’s face from falling. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I am very sorry.’
Eleanor placed both hands on the dark, highly polished wood of the reception desk. ‘I wonder if you can help me.’
The man’s head tipped to one side sympathetically. ‘Of course.’
‘Morocco was one of the last places he visited. Do you remember anything strange about his time here?’
The man shifted on his feet. ‘Your father was not a guest here, just a delegate at a seminar. The people at these meetings – they go into a room at 9 o’clock. We take them lunch at midday. They come out at the end of the day. We really didn’t see much of him.’
‘What about the meetings he was attending?’
The man smiled uncomfortably, saying nothing.
Eleanor’s hands tensed. ‘I’m sorry, but the way you remembered him suggested that you knew him better.’
‘He was a good man, and I am very sorry for your loss. But as I have said, he was not a guest here. So no, I do not remember him well.’
Eleanor walked away, slumping in one of the sofas, her head in her hands.
Sam left her alone for a moment, moving away from reception down a broad corridor. By a door on his left there was an artfully rusted plaque etched with the words ‘Le Français’. Sam looked inside. It was a restaurant, with starched white table-clothes and swathes of heavy fabric framing the windows. Just two tables were occupied. Sam moved on. The next door opened on to a more informal restaurant, with subdued lighting and dark walls, again barely inhabited. Further on down the corridor were more doors – one to a hamman, which was closed, another to a ballroom, which was ajar. Sam eased it open and found himself in a vast area, its ceilings hung with huge chandeliers. A woman in a white tabard was guiding a floor polisher, the machine slowly inching across the acreage of marble.
Sam then tried a door opposite. This room was slightly smaller but still, he guessed, capable of holding around 200. As many seats were stacked in one corner. He could easily imagine the chairs arranged in a square and Charles Scott sitting on one side with his British team. But discussing what – and to what effect? Had what happened in these anonymous-looking rooms really been so significant that a Minister would commit suicide and the Government would kill innocent people? Sam stared at the bland décor, the huge framed photographs of what he guessed was the souk in the 1920s, with French policemen in white uniforms moving among locals dressed in djellabas.
‘Hey,’ said Eleanor behind him, startling Sam. ‘What have you found?’
Sam sighed. ‘Empty rooms.’
‘I think we need something to drink. I’m kind of spun out.’
Sam took another look at the photos on the wall. ‘Let’s go to the souk,’ he said. ‘Be tourists for a change.’
They took a cab from outside the hotel up to the Djemma el Fna. Sam had an image in his mind of a place packed with dancers, acrobats, snake charmers and countless food stalls. What greeted them was anything but.
Bar a couple of calèches – the horse-drawn carriages that took tourists on tours of the city – the square was deserted. Around i
ts edges the bars and cafés were all closed, their shutters drawn. A handful of shops had remained open, but trade was clearly not good. Boxes of cucumbers, tomatoes, mint and peppers were stacked high outside a grocer. The shopkeeper stood pensively in the doorway, drawing hard on a cigarette. The frontage of a hardware store – jammed with pots, pans and a huge selection of Tupperware in every colour – seemed more like armour than goods to sell.
They paid the driver, who was then gone, accelerating away as if the place were cursed.
Sam and Eleanor moved across the square in a slight trance. They passed one calèche, the horse’s weeping eyes thick with flies. In the carriage, his owner sat sullenly, staring into the middle distance.
A figure they hadn’t noticed from the cab window now approached. He wore faded jeans and a dirty green t-shirt, and carried a small monkey on a chain.
‘Take picture with monkey,’ he said.
Sam lifted the palm of his hand in response but, in the absence of any other tourist, the monkey man seemed disinclined to give up, moving right into their path. He repeated his terse sales pitch. Sam and Eleanor sidestepped the man and tried to continue on but he was quickly at their side. The monkey made a hissing sound and bared its teeth in a snarl.
Eventually Sam turned to the man and barked ‘No!’
The man stared Sam hard in the face, a look of venom in his eyes, and started spouting an angry barrage of Arabic, his free hand gesticulating violently. Then, admitting defeat, he walked away, muttering to himself.
Shaken, Sam led Eleanor on across the square, eventually reaching its north eastern corner. There they stopped and turned, Sam relieved that the monkey man hadn’t followed them. Now, apart from the calèche drivers, who were being given an ear-bashing by the monkey man, the only other figure in the square was a man in a black leather jacket who appeared engrossed in the window of a closed patisserie.
‘Shall we move on, see if we can find anything open in the souks?’ Sam suggested.
Eleanor nodded listlessly.
They progressed up a broad cobbled avenue and moments later, the light and heat were partially extinguished as a slatted metal roof cut out all but narrow shafts of sunlight, beams in which thousands of tiny dust specks danced.
Just a handful of places were open, shops cluttered with colourful kaftans, scarves and richly embroidered shirts. But there was little sign of the pestering sales techniques the souk was famous for. The shopkeepers sat subdued in front of their stalls, the sight of two foreigners failing to ignite even a glimmer of a pitch.
As they moved on through the souk, Sam glanced back and noticed the man in the black leather jacket, about 30 metres behind. On seeing Sam, the man suddenly looked away to study a shop display. Sam tensed. He exhaled, dismissing his paranoia and the idea that anyone could be following them out here.
After a couple of minutes the darkness intensified as they moved into a narrower alleyway in which the sunlight barely registered. The few open shops here sold leather goods – wallets, backpacks, handbags and purses that were hung in floor-to-ceiling displays, filling the air with a dense and cloying smell of hide and polish.
‘I need to find a bar or café,’ Eleanor said. ‘Somewhere to sit down.’
Sam happened to look behind and saw the man again. He was still the same distance away and was staring right at them. When he caught Sam’s eyes he looked away again. A sickeningly familiar feeling returned to the pit of Sam’s stomach. This was no longer a coincidence. They were being followed, again.
Sam grabbed Eleanor’s hand. ‘Don’t panic,’ he said. ‘But when I say run, run.’
Chapter 40
Marrakesh, Morocco
Gripping Eleanor’s hand, Sam shot left down an alleyway between two shops until they came to a low arch to their side. He looked back. His instinct had been right. The man was now running too. Sam pulled Eleanor under the arch and into darkness.
They moved rapidly down the narrow alleyway towards a source of light at the end, the cobbles of the souk now replaced by dusty, impacted earth.
At the end of the alleyway, Sam didn’t stop to think, darting right and then left past gaudy displays of decorated slippers, hoping to God they’d lose the man simply by getting lost themselves.
They ran between crumbling red buildings that leaned towards each other across the street. Strung between the houses, washing lines heavy with clothes compounded the sensation that they were in a tunnel. Sam felt his throat tighten, as if a noose were being pulled taut.
They dashed towards another darkened alleyway only to halt in their tracks as a moped emerged out of the shadows, the young male rider skidding in front of them and firing off expletives as he sought to right his bike. They dodged past him into the gloom but then, as they reached light, they came face to face with a plastic barrier emblazoned with a message in both Arabic and French. The latter’s meaning was unmistakeable: ‘Police – Défense d’entrer.
‘Shit,’ said Sam.
He turned. They seemed to have lost their tail – for now. The wound Sam had sustained in the lake had begun to pulse with pain, as if his body were reminding him where all this activity inevitably led. But there was no time to contemplate other courses of action.
Sam guided Eleanor back up the dark alley and took the first left. The route was wider and Sam breathed again, sensing that this would take them to a more open, populated area. The alley wound to the left slightly and Sam saw, with enormous relief, a semblance of activity ahead. A barber’s shop – the internationally recognisable red-and-white pole hanging outside – and a small workshop. As they passed, the dark interior was momentarily illuminated by sparks. A man holding a welding torch turned to watch them.
But just ahead was the thing Sam had most dreaded. Another police sign stopping them in their tracks.
He turned in exasperation – and froze. There, just metres away, was the man in the black leather jacket. He was slowly approaching them, his face stripped of emotion. Eleanor had turned now and flinched.
They had a choice. Leap the barrier and hope to run into a sympathetic policeman, or try and find refuge in one of the shops they’d passed.
Sam didn’t stop to think long. He grabbed Eleanor’s arm and made for the barber’s shop. As they burst in, the barber, who’d been sitting reading a newspaper, leapt up. But no sooner had he registered their presence and they were running through a beaded curtain for the back door. Up ahead, past shelves packed tightly with cardboard boxes, was a closed door. Sam turned to see that the man in the leather jacket had entered the shop behind them. The barber was barking something at him in Arabic. The man said nothing in response.
They reached the door. Sam tried the handle. It was locked. He began to push his shoulder against it. But it was jammed tight. He took a small run and charged at the door. With a splinter of wood, it gave way and they ran into daylight – and a cramped and high-walled backyard.
Chapter 41
Marrakesh, Morocco
Cornered in the backyard of the barber’s shop, Sam felt two overwhelming sensations in quick succession.
The first was the all-too-familiar feeling of claustrophobia. He’d just about held it together in the warren-like alleys of the souk. Now, as the walls closed in on him, Sam felt as if he were being choked. But then he saw the man approach and knew that protecting Eleanor was the priority. He felt his body flood with adrenaline. But as he tensed, preparing for confrontation, Sam noticed his pursuer’s now contradictory signals. His palms were raised and when he spoke, it was with an unthreatening voice.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘I mean no harm. I am here to protect Miss Scott.’
At this, Sam’s aggression cooled a fraction.
‘How do you know her name?’ he uttered, between rapid breaths.
‘I will explain,’ said the man, ‘but first let us go somewhere a little calmer.’
Sam turned to Eleanor. She nodded.
The man spoke to the irate barber, handing him a w
ad of notes, then gestured for Sam and Eleanor to follow him back through the maze of alleyways.
They walked, Sam still uneasy about their companion but convinced that, had he meant them harm, he would already have caused it.
At a certain stage, as if they had crossed an invisible line in the medina, Sam became aware of posters stuck on walls and doorways, all depicting the same image – a pretty young woman – and some words in a language he didn’t recognise, daubed in red.
A moment later they walked through an ornate carved doorway, down a corridor of heavily patterned tilework, then turned into a courtyard open to the sky. Around them were sand-coloured walls and orange trees in large terracotta pots. Empty tables were ranged around a small marble fountain in which water gently burbled. Somewhere in the courtyard a bird was singing. Save a handful of waiters standing idle, they were alone with the man.
He signalled to a waiter then sat in silence, as if there were no point in attempting to explain anything until his order arrived.
Minutes later, the waiter returned carrying a tray loaded with a stainless steel teapot and three engraved glass beakers filled with mint leaves. He placed the tray down on a neighbouring table then, with a slight flourish, poured the tea from on high. The beakers were then placed in front of them, sending a calming cloud of minty steam into the air. Sam took a sip. The tea was laced with sugar.
The man introduced himself as Kamal. He had short dark hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He was, he said, the deputy manager of the Sofitel and, as such, he’d known Charles Scott from what he described as the Minister’s ‘frequent trips to Marrakesh’.
‘The day I heard that your father had died,’ said Kamal, his English, though spoken in a heavy French accent, flawless, ‘I was so sorry.’ His head dipped in a small bow.
‘Thank you,’ said Eleanor, clearly touched.
Disorder (Sam Keddie thriller series Book 1) Page 13
