by James Becker
The tablet was actually remarkably dull. Perhaps five inches by three, and maybe half an inch thick, it was a light grey-brown, almost beige, in colour. The back and sides were smooth and unblemished, and the front surface covered with a series of marks that Margaret assumed was some kind of writing, but not one that she recognized. It certainly wasn't any form of European language, and it didn't even look much like the Arabic words and characters she'd seen on various signs and in newspapers since they'd arrived in Rabat.
In exchange for her promise that she'd simply go back to the stall, hand over the object and come straight back to the hotel, Ralph had agreed not to come with her.
But when Margaret stepped into the souk and walked through the twisting passageways to the stall, there was an obvious problem. Neither the small Moroccan nor the collection of ancient relics she'd observed the previous day was there. Instead, two men she'd never seen before were standing behind a trestle table on which were displayed rows of typical tourist souvenirs – brass coffee pots, metal boxes and other ornaments.
For a few seconds she stood there, irresolute, then stepped forward and spoke to the men.
'Do you understand English?' she began, speaking slowly and clearly.
One of the men nodded.
'There was a different stall here yesterday,' she said, her words again slow and measured, 'run by a small man.' She made a gesture to indicate the approximate height of the Moroccan she'd seen previously. 'I wanted to buy some of his goods.'
The two men looked at her in silence for a few seconds before exchanging a couple of sentences in rapid-fire Arabic. Then one of them looked back at her.
'He not here today,' he said. 'You buy souvenirs from us, yes?'
'No. No, thank you.' Margaret shook her head firmly.
At least she'd tried, she thought as she walked away, but if the man who'd dropped the clay tablet wasn't there, there obviously wasn't any way she could return it to him. She'd just take it with her, back home to Kent, as a strange souvenir of their first holiday outside Europe, and a reminder of what they'd seen.
What she didn't notice, as she walked away from the stall, was one of the stall-holders taking out his mobile phone.
* * *
Margaret decided to take one last look around before she returned to the hotel. She was quite sure Ralph would never agree to return to Morocco, because he really hadn't enjoyed his time in Rabat. This would be her last opportunity to take in the sights and get a few final pictures.
She wandered through the souk, snapping away whenever she could, and then walked outside. She hadn't, she remembered, managed to persuade Ralph to visit the Chellah, and she really ought to walk around the gardens, even if she didn't visit the sanctuary itself.
But as she headed towards the old walls of the necropolis, she saw several police officers and other people milling about directly in front of her. For a moment, she wondered if she should simply call it a day and go straight back to the hotel.
Then she shrugged her shoulders – whatever the problem was that had attracted the small crowd, it had nothing to do with her – and pressed on. Curiosity had always been one of her virtues, or her faults in Ralph's view, and so as she walked past the handful of men she looked closely at what was going on.
At first, all she could see were their backs, but then a couple of them stepped slightly to one side and she could see exactly what they were all staring at. Fairly close to a large boulder, a slight figure lay on the ground, the front of his jellaba sodden with blood. That was startling enough, but what stunned Margaret was that she immediately recognized the dead man's face. She was so surprised that she stopped in her tracks.
Suddenly, she knew exactly why the small Arab wasn't behind the stall in the souk. She also guessed that the clay tablet in her bag – the object he'd dropped as he ran past them – might be more important and valuable than she'd ever thought.
One of the policemen noticed her standing there, her mouth open as she stared at the body on the ground, and irritably waved her away.
She turned back towards the souk, lost in thought. She wouldn't, she decided, follow her original plan and simply leave the clay tablet in her handbag when they left for the airport. She'd have to think of a way of getting it out of Morocco without it being detected.
And there was one obvious way to do that.
4
'I won't be sorry to get back home,' Ralph O'Connor said as he steered their hired Renault Mégane out of Rabat towards Casablanca and their flight to London.
'I know,' Margaret replied shortly. 'You've made it perfectly clear that Morocco is right at the bottom of your list of desirable places to revisit. I suppose you'll want to go back to Benidorm or Marbella next year?'
'Well, at least I feel at home in Spain. This country's just too foreign, somehow, and I don't like it. And I still think you should have just thrown away that blasted stone you picked up.'
'Look, what I did was the best option in the circumstances, and I'm not going to discuss it any further.'
They drove for some minutes in silence. She'd not told Ralph what she'd seen near the Chellah that morning, though she had sent her daughter a hasty email about it just before they left the hotel.
About five miles out of Rabat, the traffic died away almost to nothing, and they had the road virtually to themselves. The only vehicle Ralph could see in his mirrors was a large dark-coloured four-by-four jeep some distance behind them. Oncoming traffic grew less frequent as they got further away from the city.
When they reached a stretch of road fairly near the Atlantic coast, the driver of the jeep accelerated. Ralph O'Connor was a careful driver, and began switching his attention between the road ahead and the jeep, which was gaining on them very rapidly.
Then he saw an old white Peugeot saloon coming in the opposite direction. He eased his foot slightly off the accelerator to allow the driver of the jeep to overtake before the Peugeot reached them.
'Why have you slowed down?' Margaret demanded.
'There's a jeep coming up on us fast, and a fairly sharp bend in front. I'd rather he overtook us before we reach it.'
But the jeep showed no signs of overtaking, just closed up to about twenty yards behind the O'Connors' Renault and matched its speed.
Then everything happened very quickly. As they approached the left-hand bend in the road, the Peugeot suddenly swerved towards them. Ralph braked hard, and looked to his left. The jeep – a Toyota Land Cruiser with tinted windows and a massive bull bar on the front – was right beside him.
But the driver of the Toyota still seemed to have no intention of overtaking. He just held the heavy vehicle in position. Ralph slowed down even more. Then the Toyota driver swung the wheel to the right and drove the righthand side of the bull bar into the Renault. There was a terrifying bang and Ralph felt his car lurch sideways.
'Christ!' He hit the brakes hard.
The tyres screamed and smoked, leaving parallel skid marks across the road. The Renault was forced to the right, towards the apex of the bend.
Ralph's efforts were never going to be enough. The speed of the Renault, and the power of the two-ton Toyota, forced the lighter car inexorably towards the edge of the tarmac.
'Ralph!' Margaret screamed, as their car slid sideways towards the sheer drop on the right-hand side of the road.
Then the Toyota hit the Renault again. This time the impact triggered Ralph's air bag, forcing his hands off the steering wheel. He was now helpless. The Renault smashed into a line of low rocks cemented into the verge at the edge of the road.
As Margaret screamed in terror, the left-hand side of their car lifted and began to topple sideways. It rolled over the edge and began an uncontrolled tumble down the nearvertical drop to the bottom of a dried-up river bed some thirty feet below.
The comforting noise of the engine was instantly replaced by a thunderous crashing, thumping and jolting as the car left the road.
Margaret screamed again as the
world span in front of her eyes, her terror the more acute because she was utterly helpless to do anything about it. Ralph still had his foot hard on the brake pedal, and was again grasping the steering wheel, both instinctive and utterly pointless actions.
In that moment, their world turned into a maelstrom of noise and violence. Their bodies were flung around in their seats as the window glass shattered and panels buckled with the repeated impacts. The belts held them in their seats, and the remaining air bags deployed, but neither action helped.
Margaret reached out for Ralph's hand, but never found it as the crashing and tumbling intensified. She opened her mouth to scream again as the violence suddenly, catastrophically, stopped. She felt an immense blow on the top of her head, a sudden agonizing pain and then the blackness supervened.
On the road above, the Toyota and Peugeot stopped and the drivers climbed out. They walked to the edge of the road and peered down into the wadi.
The driver of the Toyota nodded in satisfaction, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and scrambled swiftly down the slope to the wreckage. The boot of the Renault had burst open, and the luggage was strewn about. He opened the suitcases and picked through their contents. Then he walked to the passenger side of the car, knelt down and pulled out Margaret O'Connor's handbag. Reaching inside, he extracted a small digital camera. He put this in one of his pockets, then continued rifling through the bag. His fingers closed around a small plastic sachet containing a high-capacity memory card for a camera and a USB card-reader. He pocketed that as well.
But there was obviously something else, something that he hadn't found. Looking increasingly irritated, he searched the suitcases again, then the handbag and, his nose wrinkling in distaste, even checked inside the O'Connors' pockets. The glove box of the Renault had jammed shut, but after a few seconds the lock yielded to the long blade of a flick-knife that the man produced from his pocket. But even this compartment was empty.
The man slammed the glove box closed, kicked the side of the car in annoyance, and climbed back up to the road.
There, he spoke briefly to the other man before making a call on his mobile. Clambering down the slope again, he jogged back to the remains of the car, pulled Margaret's handbag out of the wreckage, searched through the contents once more and took out her driving licence. Then he tossed the handbag inside the Renault and climbed back up to the road.
Three minutes later, the Toyota had vanished, heading towards Rabat, but the old white Peugeot was still parked on the side of the road above the accident site. The driver was leaning casually against the door of his vehicle and dialling the number of the emergency services on his mobile phone.
5
'So what do you expect me to do when I get there?' Chris Bronson asked, his irritation obvious. He'd been summoned to his superior's office at the Maidstone police station as soon as he arrived that morning. 'And why do you want me to go? Surely you should be briefing one of the DIs for something like this?'
Detective Chief Inspector Reginald 'Dickie' Byrd sighed. 'Look, there are other factors to consider here, not just the rank of the officer we send. We've been tasked with this simply because the dead couple's family lives in Kent, and I've chosen you because you can do something none of the DIs here can: you speak French.'
'I speak Italian,' Bronson pointed out, 'and my French is good, but it's not fluent. And didn't you say the Moroccans were going to provide an interpreter?'
'They are, but you know as well as I do that sometimes things get lost in translation. I want a man out there who can understand what they're really saying, not just what some translator tells you they're saying. All you have to do is check that what they're claiming is accurate, then come back here and write it up.'
'Why do you think their report won't be accurate?'
Byrd closed his eyes. 'I don't. My own view is that this is just another bloody British driver forgetting which side of the road he was supposed to be on and losing it in a big way. But I need you to confirm this or see if there's any contributing factor – maybe there was a fault with the hire car, the brakes or the steering, say? Or perhaps another vehicle was involved, and the Moroccan authorities are glossing this over?
'The family – it's just the daughter and her husband – live in Canterbury. They were told about the accident first thing this morning and I understand from the local force that they'll be going out to Casablanca themselves to arrange the repatriation of the bodies. But I'd like you to get out there before them and run some checks. If they haven't left here by the time you get back, I'd also like you to go and see them, just to answer any questions they might have. I know it's a shitty job, but—'
'Yeah, I know, someone's got to do it.' Bronson looked at his watch and stood up, running his hand through his unruly dark hair. 'Right, I'll go and pack a weekend case, and I'll need to make a few phone calls.'
In fact, Bronson would only have to make one call. His plan to take his ex-wife Angela out for a meal the next evening – an event that had already been postponed twice because of the pressure of his work – would have to be put on hold yet again.
Byrd slid the file across the desk. 'The ticket is for Casablanca, because all the Rabat flights were full, andyou're flying economy.' He paused for a few seconds. 'You could always try smiling at the girl on the check-in desk, Chris. She might decide to upgrade you.'
6
'Is that it?' David Philips demanded, staring at the image on the screen of his wife's laptop. They were sitting side by side in the bedroom-cum-study in their modest semidetached in Canterbury.
Kirsty nodded. Her eyes were red-rimmed and streaks of tears marred the smoothness of her cheeks.
'It doesn't look like much. Are you certain that's what your mother picked up?'
His wife nodded again, but this time she found her voice. 'That's what she found in the souk. She said that was what the man dropped.'
'It looks like a piece of junk to me.'
'Look, David, all I can tell you is what she told me. This is what fell out of the man's pocket as he ran past them.'
Philips leant back from the screen and sat in thought for a few moments. Then he stuck a blank CD into the disk drive and clicked the touchpad button a couple of times.
'What are you doing?' Kirsty asked.
'There's one easy way to find out what this tablet is,' Philips said. 'I'll give this photograph to Richard and tellhim what happened out there. He can write a story about it and do the research for us.'
'Is that really a good idea, David? We've got to get out to Rabat tomorrow morning, and I've not even packed anything yet.'
'I'll call him right now,' Philips insisted. 'It'll take me ten minutes to drop off the CD at his office. I'll pick up something for lunch while I'm out, and you can start sorting the stuff we'll need in Morocco so we're ready to leave first thing tomorrow. We should only be out there for a couple of days – can't we manage with a couple of carry-on bags?'
Kirsty dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, and her husband wrapped his arms around her. 'Look, my love,' he said. 'I'll be out for maybe twenty minutes, then we'll have lunch and do our packing. We'll get to Rabat tomorrow and sort everything out. And I'm still happy to go there on my own if you'd rather stay at home. I know how hard this must be for you.'
'No.' Kirsty shook her head. 'I don't want to be left here by myself. I don't want to go to Morocco either, but I know that we have to.' She paused and her eyes filled with tears again. 'I just can't believe they've gone and that I'll never see them again. Mum seemed so happy in her email, and really excited by what she'd found. And then this happens to them. How could everything have gone so wrong, so quickly?'
7
'I'd like to see the vehicle, please, and the place where the accident happened.'
Bronson looked across the table at the two men facing him and spoke slowly, in English. Then he sat back and waited for the police interpreter to translate his request into French.
He was sitting in an u
pright and fairly uncomfortable chair in a small interview room at the police station in Rabat. The building was square, white-painted and distinguished from its neighbours only by the large parking area for police vehicles at its rear, and by the signs – in Arabic and French – that graced its façade. Bronson had arrived in Rabat about an hour earlier, having rented a car at Casablanca airport and checked into his hotel. He'd then driven straight to the police station.
The capital of Morocco was smaller than he'd expected, with lots of elegant squares and open spaces linked by generally wide roads. Stately palm trees lined many of the boulevards, and the city exuded an air of cosmopolitan sophistication and gentility. It felt, in fact, more Europeanthan Moroccan. And it was hot: a kind of dusty, dry, baking heat redolent with the unfamiliar smells of Africa.
Bronson had decided that if DCI Byrd was right, and there was something about the fatal accident that the Moroccan police were trying to conceal, the easiest way to catch them out was to pretend he spoke no French whatsoever and just listen to exactly what they said.
So far, his plan had worked brilliantly, except that the local police had answered all of his questions without so much as a hint of evasion and, as far as he could tell, the translations had been exceptionally accurate. And he was lucky that all the police officers he'd met so far had tended to converse in French. The first language of Morocco was Arabic, French the second, and his plan would have failed at the first hurdle if the Rabat police had decided to speak Arabic.
'We expected that, Sergeant Bronson,' Jalal Talabani, the senior police officer from Rabat – Bronson thought he was probably the equivalent of a British inspector – replied, through the interpreter. About six feet tall and slim, with tanned skin, black hair and brown eyes, he was immaculately dressed in a dark, Western-style suit. 'We've had the vehicle transferred to one of our garages here in Rabat, and we can drive out to the accident site on the road whenever you want.'
