by James Becker
'Thank you. Perhaps we could start now, with the car?'
'As you wish.'
Talabani stood up, then dismissed the interpreter with a gesture. 'I think we can manage without him now,' he said, as the man left the room. His English was fluent, and he spoke with a slight American accent.
'Ou, si vous voulez, nous pouvons continuer en français,' he added, with a slight smile. 'I think your French is probably good enough for that too, Sergeant Bronson.'
There were clearly no flies on Jalal Talabani. 'I do speak the language a little,' Bronson admitted. 'That's why my people sent me out here.'
'I guessed. You seemed to be following our conversation before the interpreter provided a translation. You can usually tell if somebody can understand what's being said, even if they don't actually speak. Anyway, let's stick to English.'
Five minutes later Bronson and Talabani were sitting in the back of a Moroccan police patrol car and speeding through the light mid-afternoon traffic, red and blue lights flashing and the siren blaring away. To Bronson, used to the slightly more discreet activities of the British police, this seemed a little unnecessary. They were, after all, only driving to a garage to look at a car that had been involved in a fatal crash, a task that could hardly be classed as urgent.
'I'm not in this much of a hurry,' he said, smiling.
Talabani looked across at him. 'No, perhaps you're not,' he said, 'but we are in the middle of a murder investigation, and I have a lot to do.'
Bronson sat forward, interested. 'What happened?'
'A couple of tourists found the body of a man in some gardens near the Chellah – that's an ancient necropolis justoutside the city walls – with a stab wound in his chest,' Talabani said. 'We can't find a witness or a motive, but robbery's an obvious possibility. All we've got at the moment is the corpse itself, and not even a name for the man yet. I'm under a lot of pressure from my boss to solve the case as quickly as possible. Tourists,' he added, as the police car swung off the road to the right and into a garage, the noise of the siren dying away in mid-bellow, 'don't normally want to visit a city where there are unsolved murders.'
At one side of the cracked concrete parking area was a Renault Mégane, though the only way Bronson could be certain about the identification was because he could see part of the badge on the remains of the boot-lid. The roof of the car had been crushed down virtually to the level of the bonnet, and it was immediately obvious that the accident had not been survivable.
'As I told you, the car was going too fast around a bend in the road a few kilometres outside Rabat,' Talabani explained. 'It drifted wide, hit some rocks at the side of the road and flipped over. There was a drop of about thirty feet into a dried-up river bed, and it rolled down the bank and landed there on its roof. Both the driver and passenger were killed instantly.'
Bronson peered inside the wrecked vehicle. The windscreen and all the other windows were smashed and the steering wheel buckled. Partially deflated air bags obscured his view of the interior. He pushed them aside and checked behind them. The heavy bloodstains on the front seats and on the roof lining told their own story. The two front doors had been ripped off, presumably by the rescue crews to allow them to remove the bodies, and had later been tossed onto the back seat of the car. It was, by any standards, a mess.
Talabani peered into the wreck from the other side. 'The two people in the car were clearly dead long before the ambulance arrived on the scene,' he said, 'but they were taken to the local hospital anyway. Their bodies are still there, in the mortuary. Do you know who will be making the arrangements for their repatriation?'
Bronson nodded. 'I've been told that the O'Connors' daughter and son-in-law will be coming out to organize it through the British Embassy. What about their belongings?'
'We found nothing in their hotel room – they'd already checked out – but we recovered two suitcases and a small carry-on bag from the scene of the accident. The boot of the car burst open with the impact, and the cases were thrown clear of the wreckage. Their locks had given way and the contents were scattered about, but we collected everything we could find. We also found a woman's handbag in the car itself. That wasn't badly damaged, but it was covered in blood, we presume from Mrs O'Connor.
We're holding all of those items at the police station for safe keeping, until the next of kin can arrange to collect or dispose of them. You can inspect them if you wish. We've already completed a full inventory of their contents for you.'
'Thanks – I'll need that. Was there anything significant in their bags?'
Talabani shook his head. 'Nothing that you wouldn't expect to find in the luggage of a middle-aged couple taking a week's vacation. There were mainly clothes and toiletries, plus a couple of novels and quite a large supply of travel medicines, most of them unopened. In the pockets of the clothes they were wearing and the woman's handbag we found their passports, car hire documents, return air tickets, an international driving licence in the husband's name, plus the usual credit cards and money. Were you expecting anything else?'
'Not really, no.'
Bronson sighed, convinced he was just wasting his time. Everything he'd seen and heard so far made him more and more certain that Ralph O'Connor had been fatally incompetent, and had lost control of an unfamiliar car on a road he'd never driven before. And he was itching to get back to London to reschedule his much-delayed dinner date with Angela. The two of them had recently spent some time together, and Bronson was starting to entertain hopes that they might be able to give their failed relationship another try. He just wasn't sure that his ex-wife felt quite the same way.
He stood up. 'Thank you for that, Jalal,' he said. 'I'll take a look at the O'Connors' possessions, if I may, and the place where the accident happened, and then I'll get out of your way.'
8
Bronson stood on the dusty, unmade verge of a road about ten miles outside Rabat.
Above him, the sun marched across a solid blue sky, not the slightest wisp of cloud anywhere, the air still and heavy. The heat was brutal after the air-conditioned cool of the police car, now parked some twenty yards down the road. He'd discarded his jacket, which had helped a little, but already he could feel the sweat starting to run down his body inside his shirt, an uncomfortable and unfamiliar feeling. He knew he didn't want to be out there any longer than absolutely necessary.
It was, Bronson reflected, looking up and down the road, a pretty desolate place to meet one's maker. The ribbon of tarmac stretched arrow-straight in both directions from the bend beside the wadi. On both sides of the road, the sandy desert floor, studded with rocks, stretched out in uneven ripples and waves, devoid of any kind of vegetation apart from the occasional stunted bush. Below the road, the narrow chasm of the dried-up river bed looked as if it hadn't seen a drop of moisture in decades.
Bronson was hot and irritated, but he was also puzzled. Although the bend was quite sharp, it was nothing that a reasonably competent driver couldn't have coped with. And the road was clear and open. Despite the bend, visibility was excellent, so any driver approaching the spot should have been able to see the curve well in advance and been able to anticipate it. But the two parallel skid marks that marred the smooth tarmac, their course heading straight for the point where the Renault had left the road, showed clearly that Ralph O'Connor hadn't done so.
Down below the road, the place where the Mégane had finally stopped rolling was obvious. A collection of bits and pieces of the vehicle – glass, plastic, twisted pieces of metal and torn sections of ruined panels – lay scattered in a rough circle around a patch of discoloured sand.
Apart from its location, some thirty feet below the edge of the road, it was typical of dozens of accident sites Bronson had been called to over the years, a sad reminder of how a moment's inattention could reduce a perfectly functioning vehicle to nothing more than a pile of scrap metal. Yet something about this accident site didn't quite ring true.
He bent down and looked at t
he line of rocks, roughly cemented into the very edge of the tarmac which, according to Talabani, the O'Connors' car had hit. The Renault, he'd noted back at the garage, was a silver-grey colour, and he could clearly see flakes and scrapes of grey paint on the rocks. Two of them had been dislodged from their concrete bases, presumably by the impact of the car as it slid sideways off the road.
It all seemed to make sense – yet why had the accident happened? Had Ralph O'Connor been drunk? Had he fallen asleep at the wheel? It was, he noted again, glancing up and down the road, a sharp bend, but it wasn't that sharp.
'You've explained what you think happened here,' he said to Talabani, but the Moroccan police officer interrupted him.
'Not so, Sergeant Bronson. We know exactly what happened. There was a witness.'
'Really? Who?'
'A local man was driving along this road in the opposite direction, towards Rabat. He saw the Renault come around that corner, much too fast, but he was far enough away to avoid being involved in the accident. He was the first on the scene and summoned the emergency services on his mobile phone.'
'Could I speak to him?' Bronson asked.
'Of course. He has an address in Rabat. I'll call my people and tell him to come to the station this evening.'
'Thanks. It might help when I have to explain what happened to the O'Connors' family.' Breaking the kind of news that irrevocably wrecks lives was, Bronson knew, one of the worst things a police officer ever had to do.
He looked again at the stones and the road at the apex of the bend, and noticed something else. There it was – a scattering of small black flakes, at the very edge of the road and barely visible against the dark of the tarmac.
He glanced around, but Talabani was again talking to the police driver, and both men were facing the other way.
Kneeling down, Bronson picked up a couple of the flakes from the verge and slipped them into a small plastic evidence bag.
'You've found something?' Talabani asked, moving away from the police car and coming back towards him.
'No,' Bronson replied, slipping the bag into his pocket and standing up. 'Nothing important.'
Back in Rabat, he stood by himself in the parking area of the police garage and stared again at the wreck of the O'Connors' Renault Mégane, wondering if he was seeing things that simply weren't there.
Bronson had asked Talabani to drop him at the garage so he could get some photographs of the remains of the vehicle, and the Moroccan had agreed. Bronson used his digital camera to take a dozen or so pictures, paying particular attention to the left-hand-side rear of the car, and the driver's door, which he pulled out of the wreck and photographed separately.
The vehicle's impact with the rock-strewn floor of the dried-up river bed – the wadi – had been so massive that every panel on the Renault was warped and dented, with huge scrape marks caused either by the accident itself or by the subsequent recovery operation.
Talabani had explained the sequence of events. Because it was perfectly obvious to everyone that the two occupants of the car were dead, the Moroccan police officer sent to the accident site had ordered the ambulance crew to wait, and had instructed a photographer to record the scene with his digital Nikon, while he and his men hadexamined the vehicle and the road above the crash site. Talabani had already supplied copies of all these pictures to Bronson.
Once the bodies had been cut out of the wreck and taken away, the recovery operation had started. No crane had been available at the time, and so they'd been forced to use a tow-truck. The wadi was inaccessible to vehicles anywhere along that stretch of highway, so they'd parked the tow-truck at the very edge of the road and used the power of its winch to pull the car over onto its wheels. Then they'd dragged the Renault up the steeply sloping bank of the wadi to the road, and finally hauled it onto the back of the low-loader.
Bronson had no idea what damage had been caused by the crash itself, and what by the subsequent recovery. Without specialist examination – and that would mean shipping the car to Britain for a forensic vehicle examiner to check it, and God knows how much that would cost or how long it would take – he couldn't be certain of his conclusions. But there were a number of dents in the Renault's left-hand-side doors and rear wing that looked to him as if they could have been caused by a sideways impact, and that didn't square with what Talabani had told him, and what the witness had apparently reported seeing.
Bronson reached into his pocket and pulled out the evidence bag containing the flakes of very dark paint he'd picked up at the bend in the road. They looked fresh but that, he realized, meant nothing. There might have been a dozen fender-benders along that stretch of road, and the paint flecks could have come from any accident. In Britain, the rain would have washed them away in a matter of hours or days but in Morocco rain was an infrequent event.
But in just one place on the driver's door of the Renault he'd found a dark scrape, possibly blue, perhaps black.
Bronson was just walking into his hotel when his mobile rang.
'Have you got a fax machine out there?' DCI Byrd asked, his voice loud and clearly irritated.
'This hotel has, I suppose. Hang on, and I'll get you the number.'
Ten minutes later, Bronson was looking at a poor quality fax that showed an article printed in a Canterbury local paper, with a dateline of the previous day. Before he could read it, his mobile rang again.
'You've got it?' Byrd demanded. 'One of the officers at Canterbury spotted it.'
Bronson looked again at the headline: KILLED FOR A LUMP OF CLAY? Underneath the bold type were two pictures. The first showed Ralph and Margaret O'Connor at some kind of function, smiling into the camera. Below that was a slightly fuzzy image of an oblong beige object with incised markings on it.
'Did you know anything about this?'
Bronson sighed. 'No. What else does the article say?'
'You can read it yourself, and then go and talk to Kirsty Philips and ask her what the hell she and her husband think they're playing at.'
'You mean, when I get back to Britain?'
'No, I mean today or tomorrow. They should have arrived in Rabat about the same time you did. I've got her mobile number for you.'
Byrd ended the call as abruptly as he'd started it, and Bronson read the article in its entirety. The story was simple enough.
The O'Connors, the reporter suggested, had witnessed a violent argument in the souk in Rabat. Immediately afterwards, Margaret O'Connor had picked up a small clay tablet dropped by a man who was being pursued through the narrow streets and alleyways. The following day, on their way back to the airport at Casablanca, the couple was ambushed on the road near Rabat and killed.
'This was no accident,' David Philips was quoted as saying. 'My parents-in-law were hunted down and killed out of hand by a gang of ruthless criminals intent on recovering this priceless relic.' And what, the article demanded in conclusion, were the British and Moroccan police going to do about it?
'Not a lot, probably,' Bronson muttered, as he reached for the phone to call Kirsty Philips's mobile. 'And how do they know the tablet's worth anything at all?' he wondered.
9
The Canterbury copper wasn't the only person to read the brief article in the local paper with interest. A fair-haired young man saw the picture of the clay tablet and immediately reached for a pair of scissors. Snipping around the story, he put it aside and turned his attention to the rest of the newspaper. Beside him in his modest apartment on the outskirts of Enfield was a pile that contained a copy of every British national daily newspaper, a selection of news magazines and most of the larger-circulation provincial papers.
Going through every one of them and extracting all the articles of interest – a task he performed every day – had taken him all the morning and a couple of hours after lunch, but his work still wasn't finished. He bundled the mutilated newspapers and magazines into a black rubbish bag, then carried the pile of stories that he'd clipped over to a large A3-size s
canner attached to a powerful desktop computer.
He placed them on the scanner's flatbed one by one, and copied each on to the computer's hard drive, ensuring that every image was accompanied by the name of the publication in which it had appeared, and storing them in a folder that bore the current date.
When he'd finished, he put all the clippings in the rubbish bag with the discarded newspapers, then prepared an email that contained no text at all, but to which he attached copies of all the scanned images. Some days the sheer number and size of the attachments meant he had to divide them up and send two or even three emails to dispatch them. The destination email was a numerical Yahoo web-based address that gave no clue as to the identity of the owner. When the account had been set up, five separate email addresses had been created to form a chain that would obscure the identity of the originating email. Once the account was up and running, all those other addresses had been cancelled, ending any possible attempt to trace the source.
Of course, he knew exactly who the recipient was. Or, to be absolutely accurate, he knew precisely where his message would be read, but not exactly who would read it.
He had been stationed in Britain for almost two years, steadily building a name and establishing himself as a journalist specializing in writing for foreign magazines and newspapers. He could even produce copies of various continental journals that included articles he'd written – or which appeared over his byline. If anyone had bothered to check the original copies of those publications, they'd have seen the articles reproduced word for word, but with an entirely different byline. In fact, the copied pages had been carefully prepared in a secure basement in an unmarked and equally secure building in a town named Glilot in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv, for the sole purpose of helping to establish his cover.
He wasn't a spy – or not yet, at any rate – but he was an employee of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. One of his tasks as a support agent was to copy any and every article that related, however obliquely, to the British government and to all branches of the armed forces, including the special forces, and to the United Kingdom intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies. But like all agents in the employ of the Mossad, he had also been given an additional list of topics that were in no way connected with any of these subjects. Ancient tablets, whether made of clay or any other material, had been accorded a very high priority in the list.
