‘When I saw your name on the hotel’s computer, I wondered whether it might be my friend’s daughter. Then I saw you, and I was sure. You have the same eyes – and the same kind face.’
Eleanor’s eyes welled.
‘I was going to introduce myself,’ continued Kamal, ‘but our paths had not yet crossed. But then, when I came to the hotel this morning, I heard that you were heading out and, given the atmosphere in the city, I wanted to ensure you and your friend came to no harm. So I followed you at a discreet distance.’ He smiled. ‘Clearly I have something to learn about surveillance. I think you saw me several times and all I ended up achieving was scaring you. For this, I apologise.’
Eleanor thanked Kamal for his kind words – and for his chivalrous attempt at protecting her.
‘Kamal,’ she then said, her voice a little hesitant. Sam could see that this sudden opportunity to talk to someone who, like him, had been with her father in his last few days, had taken Eleanor aback. But, resolute as ever, she was not going to miss it. ‘Could you tell me everything you remember about my father’s last stay in Marrakesh?’
Kamal nodded, clearly happy, after his botched attempt at protection, to help Eleanor any way he could. He then described how, one afternoon, the Minister had returned to the hotel and he and Kamal had got talking over tea. Scott had said that his visits seemed to be dominated by meetings and while these were very fruitful – he did not go into any detail about their content – he still knew little of the city. It was his last day – there was to be a dinner that evening with senior members of both the British and Moroccan delegations – and tomorrow they were all heading back to the UK.
Kamal offered to take the afternoon off and show him a little of Marrakesh. Scott seemed delighted. The next few hours were his last opportunity to see the city and he accepted gladly.
‘Your father was an enormously knowledgeable man,’ Kamal said. ‘His understanding of Morocco’s history and culture was exemplary.’
They visited the Kotoubia Mosque, Scott apparently bowled over by the building’s simplicity and the feeling of peace.
‘Your father,’ Kamal continued, ‘said that people in the West often chose to ignore the connections between religions and focus only on the differences. He talked about how Jesus Christ and John the Baptist are prophets in our faith and, more surprisingly, how the design of the mosque’s minaret had influenced many church towers in Spain and Eastern Europe. I didn’t know this myself.’
They then wandered the souks, visiting the different markets. A little later, Scott asked if he might visit a good antique shop so that he could buy some presents.
Kamal led him to a street south of the Djemma el Fna and to a shop run by a man called Marcel Hadad, a famous antique dealer in the city. But as they neared it, Kamal realised it was already hosting some illustrious visitors. Two men, clearly some kind of Moroccan security, stood outside scanning the streets. As Kamal and Scott neared the door, the men tried to bar their entrance. But then Scott heard a voice from inside.
‘It was the voice of an Englishman,’ said Kamal. ‘He was calling your father by his first name.’
Sam and Eleanor exchanged puzzled looks.
Kamal looked in the open doorway, where by now the men outside had relaxed, knowing that Scott was acquainted with the people inside. Kamal instantly recognised the owner of the voice. It was Philip Stirling, the Prime Minister.
‘I knew your Prime Minister was in Marrakesh for talks,’ said Kamal. ‘We’d seen him on television. But I never dreamed I’d meet him.’
Stirling, who was enjoying his own tour of the medina – his care of the Moroccan Minister for Tourism – beckoned Scott in. Scott introduced Kamal to Stirling, which made Kamal’s day, thanked him for the tour and Kamal returned to the Sofitel.
‘Did you see him again?’
Kamal looked down. When his face rose again it was sombre.
‘I was not on reception that evening when your father left for his dinner engagement. I believe he was joining Mr Stirling and our Prime Minister at a restaurant here in the medina. The next time I saw him was the following morning, when he checked out.’
Sam wondered why Kamal suddenly seemed so serious. He was looking Eleanor in the eye now, as if he felt the need to express maximum sincerity. ‘Your father was no longer the man I knew. He was – how can I describe it? – grey. Like a ghost. I wished him bon voyage but all he could manage in response was a weak smile.’
Sam watched Eleanor’s face, wondering how she was taking this story. Something dreadful had clearly happened to Scott between leaving Kamal at the antiques shop and the following morning.
Kamal glanced at his watch. ‘I should get back to the hotel.’
He stood, dipping his head again in Eleanor’s direction. ‘I am so sorry for your loss, Miss Scott. And I am sorry if I have added to your sadness with my story.’
Eleanor stood, taking Kamal’s hand in her own. ‘Not at all, Kamal,’ she said. ‘It’s been comforting to know how fondly you remember him.’
And with that, Kamal was gone.
‘You OK?’ Sam asked.
Eleanor had sat down, clearly a little shell-shocked. ‘These new glimpses of my Dad slightly freak me out. But yes, I’m fine. I want to find out what happened that night.’
‘I reckon our next move is to retrace your father’s footsteps as best we can,’ said Sam, sensing that support, not sympathy, was what was required. ‘At some point in the hours between when he left Kamal and when he saw him the next morning, we’ll find the event that unlocks this whole business.’
Eleanor nodded. Then she looked up, right into Sam’s eyes.
‘How about you?’ she asked.
‘I’m OK,’ he said, unnerved by the penetrating stare.
‘You didn’t look that great in the barber’s shop.’
‘Just a bit out of shape,’ Sam said with a shrug. ‘And shit-scared.’
‘Something else was happening,’ Eleanor said. ‘I saw that look on your face as you were about to get in the lift at the hospital. Ashen white. Chest rising and falling too quickly. You’re claustrophobic, aren’t you?’
Sam felt his body break into a cold sweat as a wall he’d carefully constructed in his head came tumbling down. He was completely unused to such direct questioning. Even his Jungian psychoanalyst, who could on occasion directly challenge, would never have been so blunt. But there was something about their situation – so far from the safe and, out here, somehow irrelevant, boundaries of therapeutic practice – that made him want to answer.
‘When I get extremely stressed and anxious – and these past few days have given plenty of opportunity for that – and I find myself in a confined space, the claustrophobia can be quite pronounced.’
Eleanor placed her hands on the white tablecloth. ‘What’s that about?’
Her approach was so different to the delicate therapeutic dances around pain he often found himself engaging in. She was attacking the issue with a lance – and Sam realised he didn’t want her to stop.
‘Without going into too much detail – it’s probably not wise right now; you don’t want me descending into self-pity – small spaces tend to remind me of a rather unhappy period of my life.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘My mother,’ he said, the two words catching in his throat, ‘was a rather complex person.’ He let out a short, mirthless laugh, aware of other, less generous phrases he’d used in the past to describe the woman. ‘Her approach to parenting was a mix of harsh discipline and cold detachment.’ Sam could hardly believe he was revealing this information – and so easily. ‘The claustrophobia stems from when I was a toddler. I spent a great deal of it locked in a cupboard under the stairs. It was one of my mother’s favourite punishments.’
He shook his head, attempted a smile, as if to say, ‘it’s nothing’. The throwaway description of those moments was, Sam knew, quite at odds with the intensity of his experience at the time;
the knowledge, even at a very young age, that his mother’s only feelings for him were, at best, displeasure and indifference, at worst, intense anger.
But Sam was also aware that while those early experiences had been hugely damaging to him, they paled when compared with her other legacy, a fear that had surfaced towards the end of his psychoanalysis. He’d ignored it then, but as with any part of a person’s subconscious, it had a habit of returning – in his case, as part of the recurring nightmare that would wrench him from sleep into wakefulness, leaving him drenched in sweat, his heart pounding. There was, he knew, only so long that he could continue to disregard such a significant part of his emotional DNA.
Eleanor placed a hand over both of Sam’s, which had knotted together. ‘I’m sorry I pried. That was clumsy of me.’
Sam felt a strange sensation come over him, one he had never felt with Kate. He wasn’t sure whether it was the circumstances he and Eleanor were in – their relationship being baptised in such a fiery way – but he realised that he trusted her. And the fact that he trusted anyone was a completely novel sensation.
Chapter 42
Downing Street
The inexplicable news Frears had relayed – via a mix of BlackBerry ‘code’ and a hurried conversation at Number 10 – was the worst possible.
One of his team had tapped an old colleague at the Border Agency to see if Keddie and Eleanor had, by chance, left the country. As it turned out, they were in Marrakesh.
The news felt like a winding blow to the stomach. And the fact that they’d only just discovered it, a full day after the two of them had arrived there, hurt almost as much. Here he was, the most powerful man in the UK, receiving scraps of information from the very departments he was in overall charge of. But this was the nature of his grubby little operation, one in which he could not afford to involve anyone else.
Stirling had spent the day at an academy school in Kent, gurning at teachers, pupils and parents while inside, his stomach did somersaults.
What had he been thinking? He should have fessed up right at the beginning. It would of course have been a cataclysmic story and his premiership would have died there and then. But at least he’d have exited with some grace, perhaps even with the sympathy of the nation. Now he’d be vilified.
It was simply a case of waiting. He’d stand on the beach, awaiting the tsunami that would sweep him away.
But at a certain moment in the afternoon, sitting in the assembly hall listening to the school choir annihilating a Beatles song, he perked up. Christ knows, he’d survived scraps before. The hopeless briefs he’d won as a barrister, armed only with guile and intellect. The rivals he’d beaten with a mix of bloody-mindedness, luck and determination to win the party leadership. And the biggest fight of all, the battle for Number 10. He wasn’t out yet.
What would Keddie and Eleanor Scott realistically find in Marrakesh? There was no smoking gun. No piece of evidence that would conveniently drop into their lap. This wasn’t a Hercules Poirot mystery. They were two British people in a very foreign city who in all likelihood didn’t even know what they were looking for.
And even if they did strike lucky, surely there was something Frears could do, something pre-emptive. He thought of the turning point he’d made days before, when he’d more or less directly asked Frears to eliminate Scott and Keddie. He’d already crossed the line. Now it was time to finish the job.
*
Across the apartment’s kitchen table, Frears looked the PM hard in the eye.
‘So you want someone to go in. A specialist.’ The Guardsman’s voice was barely a whisper, but the note of derision was still evident.
‘Yes,’ hissed the PM.
There was another bottle of single malt on the table, but only one glass. Philip Stirling hadn’t offered the Guardsman a drink. Frears was not a colleague, and certainly not a friend.
The sounds of the apartment leaked through the closed door: Newsnight on in the living room, some junior minister being slowly eviscerated. Further away, a lavatory flushed. Aidan getting ready for bed.
Frears was dressed, as usual, in suit and tie, a flash of red brace visible beneath his jacket. ‘As I’m sure you know, these things require meticulous planning. Adequately prepping a man for Marrakesh would be impossible, given our resources. We can’t ask the embassy to carry out surveillance on our behalf.’
Stirling, his head down, both hands lost in the thick locks of his hair, looked up.
‘Well, that’s not strictly speaking true.’
‘I thought this was a tight-knit op,’ Frears said. ‘The secret we’re protecting,’ he looked briefly at the closed kitchen door as if he suspected someone was listening on the other side, then lowered his plummy voice even further, ‘would, if out, ruin you.’
He said those last words, Stirling noted, without a huge amount of emotion in his voice, as if the prospect of his premiership going tits up were merely inconvenient.
‘It was a tight-knit op,’ said Stirling. ‘But the members of the small team you assembled have not proved capable. Anyway, calm down. All I’m planning is a by-product of what we’ve been doing there anyway. The Foreign Office has, with the help of the embassy in Rabat, been compiling the names of every British national in Morocco, just in case the riots turn nasty and our people need to be rapidly pulled out. They will know where Keddie and Scott are staying. I can find an excuse to attend one of their contingency meetings and easily get my hands on the information we need.’
‘The name of their hotel is just the start,’ said Frears.
Stirling glared at the soldier. His obstructive comments were becoming very tiresome. ‘Do I need to come up with every single solution? That’s what I pay you for, isn’t it?’
Stirling watched as the Guardsman clenched his hands on the table before him. The PM swilled the whisky in his glass and downed it. He was, increasingly, waking every morning with a hangover – a thick, pounding head and a stomach that swam with acid.
Frears seemed to calm. ‘I’ve got an idea,’ he said. ‘I’ll get on to the company database. I’m pretty sure we’ve got someone in Tunisia, a local. Just get me the hotel name. I’ll look after the rest.’
Stirling’s shoulders dropped slightly. This was better. ‘I acknowledge that this is way beyond your original brief,’ he conceded. ‘But we don’t have a choice, do we? The alternative is to sit and wait to be screwed every which way imaginable. And I’ve put way too much into this –’
At that moment, the kitchen door opened and Charlotte Stirling stepped into the room. With a look that the PM felt was worthy of the most wooden member of an amateur dramatics society, she froze in an attempt at surprise.
‘Oh,’ she said, with a smile that could have sunk the economy, ‘I didn’t realise you were still chatting.’
‘We’re not,’ said Stirling. ‘Frears is just going.’
The Guardsman rose from the table, muttered goodnight to them both, and headed out of the kitchen, turning left to the lift.
Charlotte dropped into his seat, taking the whisky bottle and pouring a large glass.
‘I hardly think that’s wise,’ said Stirling.
‘It’s not for me,’ she said, lifting the glass to her nose and inhaling deeply before placing it on the table before him. ‘It’s for you. You look like you could use it.’
Stirling didn’t argue with her, taking another deep glug from the proffered glass.
‘I want to thank you,’ said Charlotte.
Christ, thought Stirling. This sounds ominous.
‘You’re sticking with this, aren’t you?’ She leaned across the table, fixing him with her eyes.
Once, a long time ago, Stirling had found those dark pupils, set off against the pale skin, rather attractive. But what had really drawn him to Charlotte Bowlby was her family wealth, money accrued from the vast tracts of Scotland her aristocratic parents owned. Dosh that had supported him on his long journey to the top.
‘I am,’ he said,
hardly needing to spell out the implications of him not doing so.
‘Good,’ she said, matter-of-factly.
Despite the death of their marriage, which had foundered when Philip was still practising at the Bar, the Stirlings had remained together because their overriding individual needs found succour in the relationship. At first it had been a mix of Charlotte’s vulnerability and Philip’s reliance on the Bowlby fortune that had done the job. But these days, the marital glue was made of different stuff. She was, at least ostensibly, much stronger, no longer so desperate for the crumbs of support he offered. The self-harm, pills and booze had been replaced by a steely façade acquired through years of therapy. He’d noticed another trait too. She actually liked being the Prime Minister’s wife. He could tell she got off on it. She had charities begging her to be their patron, organisations asking her to give speeches, magazines who craved interviews. She was wanted, if only after a fashion.
And of course one other thing bonded them together. Something both of them shared and neither of them ever wanted exposed. A poisonous family secret that had, in recent days, like a powerful virus, mutated in a deadly new direction.
This evening’s exchange had been unusual. Usually the dark secret was the source of blazing rows in which Charlotte, with tedious predictability, always sided with Aidan. Tonight seemed to suggest to Stirling that she was moving on, appreciating his efforts. Or possibly, he thought, she was simply aware of the very precarious situation the family found themselves in. They were staring into the abyss, a Tunisian assassin all that stood between them and a very long fall.
Chapter 43
Marrakesh, Morocco
They stayed in the riad, ordering more tea. Little was said. It wasn’t just that they were both tired. Sam could feel himself processing their recent exchange, his head, despite the danger of their continued quest, noticeably calming.
As they paid their bill they asked the waiter if he’d heard of Marcel Hadad’s antique shop. The man sucked his teeth before finally giving in and scribbling a small map on the back of a napkin.
Disorder (Sam Keddie thriller series Book 1) Page 14
