by Jane Arbor
She took both back into her room, opened the note first. As she saw that it began, ‘Dear Carey’—she wondered whether Gerda Ehrens had noticed he had called her ‘Carey’ last night. Its two or three lines went on—
‘As I told Frau Ehrens, I meant to interview Seid alone. But it occurs to me now that you, as his sponsor, as it were, might care to be present. I shall send for him at nine in my office. Please be there.’ The signature was his usual ‘R.Q.’
Carey read it, grateful for the thought behind the curt summons, though wondering, as she put it aside, what the quickened beat of her heart had prepared for at sight of it.
A post-mortem on that shame-making scene last night? A postscript of some sort to it? Well, he had offered her neither. She turned her attention to the box.
It contained a deep layer of dampened cotton wool, a moist bed for a spray of dark, glossy-leafed, waxen-flowered evergreen which she didn’t recognise until Randal’s card, thrust beneath the spray, identified it for her.
The card said, ‘Regrettably, no catkins, no acorns, no bean flowers on offer from a Moroccan garden. Instead, a belated tribute of common myrtle which, on reflection, seems an even better idea.’ This time the signature was merely ‘R’.
Carey took up the spray and held it sentimentally against her cheek for a moment, glad that even the cryptic message with it wasn’t a post-script to Randal’s empty embrace, but to their badinage which had gone before it. That meant she could thank him for it without embarrassment and the whole mortifying incident could be closed. She wouldn’t even ask him why myrtle should seem ‘a better idea’ for her. So far as she knew, it wasn’t an English shrub at all. Its home was here in the Mediterranean, the warm hillsides of Cyprus, of Italy, of Greece—a native child of the sun, which she was not. If he chose to explain when she thanked him, he could. But she would not ask.
When she presented herself in his office a few minutes before nine o’clock he said merely, ‘So you got my message?’ and then glanced at the spray which she had pinned to the lapel of her white linen suit. ‘That too? It pleased you enough to wear it?’ he asked.
Her hand went to it. ‘Yes. Thank you,’ she said. Their eyes met momentarily. Carey thought fleetingly, The things people have to leave unsaid when they’ve made fools of themselves! and then his curt ‘Come in’ to the timid knock at the door brought Absalom to stand to attention before the desk.
Carey’s heart sank at sight of the nervously twisting fingers at his side, at the damp beading of his usually jaunty face. If he guessed there was trouble ahead for him, that could mean he was guilty. She listened as Randal, who must have read the signs too, went through the motions of giving the boy the benefit of the doubt.
‘Do you know—or not—why I wished to see you?’ he asked in English.
The boy looked in mute appeal at Carey. ‘N-no, sir,’ he said.
‘No? But you’ll remember that last evening Frau Ehrens, in suite eight, sent you on an errand to the conservatories, and that when you came back she asked you to wait while she found some money to give you as a tip? Right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And while you waited did you notice, lying on the shelf of a bureau, a pair of cuff-links—gold ones? You understand what cuff-links are?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Absalom fingered his own cuff. ‘They are fasteners for the sleeve—so.’
Would he admit having seen them? Carey held her breath, then saw him nod. ‘Yes, I saw them,’ he said.
‘And helped yourself to them? Took them away with you when you left?’ Randal suggested.
The boy’s face suffused with dark colour. ‘No, sir, I did not take them. I saw them there. That was—all.’
‘You say that? So that if you didn’t take them, they must still have been there when you did leave the suite? Frau Ehrens didn’t move them herself while you were there?’
‘No, sir. Not while I was there, sir. But I did not take them. I do not have them. I do not!’
‘Even though you were the only other and the last person in the suite before Frau Ehrens locked it and went away for the evening, returning later to find the cufflinks had disappeared?’
‘I did not take them. I do not have them,’ Absalom repeated stolidly.
Randal spread a hand. ‘So. You deny it. But you understand you must agree to be searched; your room too? You will give the key of anything you keep locked to the head porter and be present when he searches your boxes and your room. You may go now, and though you are not to go on duty, you are not to leave the building until I have seen you again. You understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Absalom went out and Randal turned to Carey. ‘The East!’ he said defeatedly. ‘I declare it learns to wear a mask in its cradle and keeps the thing adjusted all its life. And so—did he or didn’t he? Even if he did, are we going to find the dam things? And if he didn’t, where are they?’
Carey shook her head. ‘From his obvious nerves I’m afraid he did know why you had sent for him.’
‘You noticed that, and read the same into it as I did?’
‘Yes, though is it possible Frau Ehrens put the links somewhere herself and forgot she had done so?’
‘Between the time Seid admitted to seeing them and her reporting the loss? Surely not? When anything like that happens, the first thing you ask yourself is, “Now what did I do with them?” In that space of time she couldn’t possibly have forgotten putting them away somewhere before she left the suite.’
‘Or they were stolen by someone else?’
‘Who, even if they had the use of a pass-key, took nothing else, ransacked nothing? No, young Seid is our man, I’m afraid. A pity. He seemed pretty keen and to have what hotel work takes.’
Carey echoed, ‘Seemed? You’re going to dismiss him, you mean?’
‘Unless he is proved innocent, what else can I do? We’re not responsible for valuables unless they’re put in the hotel safe. But I owe a certain peace of mind to all the guests as well as to Frau Ehrens; they must have a measure of liberty to be careless with their bits and pieces. No, I’ll see Seid again after the search, but if we’re still at the same deadlock tonight, he’ll have to go.’
‘I see.’ As Carey turned to go Randal stood, came round his desk and touched her on the arm.
‘Don’t take it to heart,’ he advised unexpectedly. ‘You’re not the first to be let down by a protégé, and you won’t be the last. You give time and thought to someone, you trust them, and they turn and make a meal of your hand. It happens all the time. But if giving is supposed to be the better part, maybe the substance you’ve expended hasn’t all been wasted. Just could be a thought worth looking at, h’m?’
Carey smiled faintly but gratefully. ‘Could be—’ she agreed.
And that was the Randal Quest whom Michael Croft knew and respected, she thought. The Randal who had spent substance and care on a brother and a boy, Michael, to whom he had had no obligations; who had been affronted by Martin’s rejection of him, but who took trouble to share his own thinking with her and to assure her that in her disappointment over Absalom, she was neither unique nor alone.
She remembered how, weeks ago, she had wanted to recognise as the real Randal the one whom Michael claimed to know. And now she did, if only in part, and loved what she knew.
He told her before they parted that he had Auto-Maroc business at Tangier and couldn’t re-interview Absalom until he returned. Meanwhile the boy was in virtual quarantine, free to come and go but not to mix with his fellows. ‘He’ll probably choose to stay in his room after it’s been searched. And if he does, that’s all right with me,’ Randal concluded.
But when Carey, anxiously on the watch for him, hadn’t seen him during the morning and went to see if he had indeed kept to his room, she found the door open to emptiness. As she turned away one of the French bellboys appeared, hopscotching an imaginary puck down the passage. At sight of Carey he lowered the foot which he held captive by its heel.
‘Vous
ne trouverez pas ce type-la, mademoiselle. II est parti,’ he said.
‘Est parti? He has gone?’ Carey echoed. ‘When? Where?’
The boy aided thought by chewing a thumb. Then he offered, ‘An hour perhaps. Yes, an hour. I do not know where. But I think he goes home, to Tangier. He must catch a bus, he tells me, and must hurry.’
A bus! thought Carey. Then he hadn’t just disobeyed Randal and left the building. A bus almost certainly meant Tangier and his home. He had run away from the consequences of guilt. Innocence would surely have stood its ground. Or would it? Mightn’t the reaction of a frightened thirteen-year-old be the same in either case—to run away?
She had to hope so—and to find out. What was more, Absalom, even if he were innocent, had to be saved from this further folly. He had to be back in the hotel before Randal himself returned. He must be!
She thanked the French boy, told him mechanically to walk properly in the corridors, and debated what she should do. As the head porter wouldn’t know she had heard of the theft, she was reluctant to ask him the result of his search of Absalom’s room and belongings. Besides, she hadn’t time to spare if she were going to follow Absalom to Tangier. On the other hand, it wasn’t yet noon and technically she was on duty until after lunch. She would be playing truant herself, and what might be the consequences of that? She decided against stopping to think.
Back in her room she found Absalom’s address in the Tangier medina—Calle Reno, 6. Bab Masrah. ‘Bab’ indicated the vicinity of one of the ancient gates, and she believed she knew which one. Next, a car. She was entitled to hire an Auto-Maroc car like anyone else and she found one free at the entrance. She told the Moroccan driver, ‘The Bab Masrah, Tangier’—and she was on her over-hasty, ill-planned way.
She calculated. So long after the bus, the car couldn’t overtake it. She could only hope she could find Absalom’s home and that he would be there. Two hours for the outward journey; say, half an hour to persuade him to go back with her; two more hours for their return . She roused from her estimate of times and ways and means to hear them being checkmated in part by her driver.
She confirmed what he told her. ‘You’ll have to drop me at the Bab Masrah because you can’t take the car into the alleys of the souk? And you can’t wait for me either? You have another booking at the El Gara to
keep? Oh dear, why didn’t you say so, and I’d have—’
The man said stolidly, ‘You order me to Tangier only. You say nothing about coming back.’
‘And you really can’t wait? Say for half an hour?’ (Though she might need more, if she had to find the address for herself.)
‘Impossible, madame. But when you are ready to return, you have only to call our garage in Tangier for another of our cars.’
‘Yes, I suppose I can do that.’
Carey found her memory had not played her false. The Bab Masrah entrance to the medina, near the Port, was the one by which Randal had taken her to dine on that first drive to Tangier. She dismissed the car, and, testing her theory that the Calle Reno would be near the gate, she began at once to look for name-plates on the walls.
There were no names to the alleys which passed for streets in the quarter. A man whom she asked shook his head in dumb non-comprehension; another, who clearly knew no more than the first, offered with a leer to accompany her search. She shook him off with difficulty, and when a foray of her own had taken her first into a noisome tanners’ yard and then to a dead end, she retraced her way to the Bab Masrah and played safe by climbing the shallow steps which she remembered led to the square where the restaurant was. She could take new bearings on the elusive Calle Reno from there.
She was in luck. A solitary waiter, drinking a siesta-hour glass of mint tea at one of his own pavement tables, directed her to a street at one corner of the square. A right turn and then a left off that was the Calle Reno, he told her.
And so it was. Number Six—marked so in chalk on a wooden door flush with the wall—was a narrow slice of house, windowless to the alley and echoing hollowly to Carey’s knock on the door.
At first, silence. Then footsteps pattering on stone and to her relief it was Absalom who opened to her, on to a roofless stone passage beyond.
He flushed to his hairline. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Mees—’ and made to shut the door. But Carey’s thrust on it was stronger and she stepped inside. To the right of the passage there was a small courtyard where, on the low surround to a water pump, a woman sat, paring vegetables into a bowl balanced in the hollow of her skirts.
Carey asked, ‘Your mother, Absalom?’
‘My mother, yes.’
‘Does she know why you have come home?’
‘Yes, I have told her. But she knows I am not a thief.’
‘Then why did you run away from your work? May I speak to your mother? Does she understand English?’
‘Enough to speak it a little. She works at night at the English laundry in the Rue Colombier.’
‘Then I’d like to talk to her. Will you explain to her who I am, please?’
Carey expected him to do so in whatever local dialect they used between themselves. But it was in English that she heard him tell his mother, ‘It is the Mees—the kinswoman of the sidi. He thinks I do not speak the truth about the jewels, and he has sent her to take me back—’
But there Carey intervened. ‘That’s not so. Mr. Quest doesn’t even know I came to find you, and if you will come back with me, perhaps he need not know, though I won’t promise that,’ she told him, and then met his mother’s grave dark eyes as they lifted to hers. ‘Tell Absalom, please, Madame Seid, that he is the only one who knows whether or not he is a thief, but that if he does not come back with me of his own will, we must all believe that he is,’ she begged.
The woman set aside the bowl, rose and combined a gesture of greeting with an invitation to Carey to sit beside her on the stonework. She said, choosing her words with painful care, ‘Ah, mees, that is not so. I too know he does not steal. But I think he has not told the sidi what he tells me.’ She looked across at Absalom, scuffing at the underfoot dust with a toe of his shoe. ‘My son, say to the Mees what you say to me!’ she told him.
Absalom shook his head. ‘No.’
As if she had not heard him she went on—‘About the foolish play that you make with the jewels which you were wrong to touch. About—’
She broke off and Absalom’s sullen face came up with a jerk at Carey’s smothered exclamation.
Foolish play? Of course! Why hadn’t she remembered Absalom’s conjuring as having some bearing on the cufflinks’ disappearance? That light-fingered manipulation of the beans with which he had been entertaining his two French cronies on the pages’ bench last night! Substitute for beans a pair of cuff-links—In a couple of strides she was facing Absalom, her hands firmly on his shoulders as she urged,
‘You saw the cuff-links. You have said so. You did not steal them, nor mean to, but while Frau Ehrens was in her bedroom, you touched them, took them up. So where are they now?’ She had to wait. Then Absalom muttered, ‘In—in the big copper pot which stands near the door.’
Carey remembered the pair of copper floor-vases which were part of the Moroccan decor of Gerda’s suite and wished she dared laugh aloud in sheer relief. Instead she admonished sternly, ‘You had no right to touch them—you know that. But you did, so how and why did you put them in the vase?’
‘I—I was making a trick with them, as with my beans.’ A bean was produced from a pocket and flicked adroitly from finger to finger of Absalom’s hand. ‘I do—so with these others and then the Frau comes back too soon. I have no time to put them back where they were, so I drop them in the pot and she does not know.’
‘I see. But why did you not tell Mr. Quest this when he questioned you?’
‘He would be angry. I was afraid.’
‘So you allowed him to think you were a thief, and you ran away. That was very stupid of you, stupid and wrong. So now you are comin
g back with me. When Mr. Quest sends for you again, you will go to him alone. I shall not be there to help you, and you will tell him the truth. You understand?’
His nod answered that and Carey turned to take leave of his mother, who said, ‘He is foolish and he does wrong. But, young and afraid, who may not do the same? And so he runs to me and I would have allowed him one night here. But then I should have sent him back.’
‘I’m sure you would,’ Carey told her.
‘And now, before you go, you will take a glass of tea?’
Carey was anxious to be away, but knowing that Eastern hospitality should rarely be refused, she thanked Madame Seid and stayed.
‘Wait, please, and I will bring it.’
Absalom went with his mother through a door at the back of the courtyard and Carey waited in the hazy sunshine, knowing it would be mint tea, which she found cloying, though courtesy would demand that she accept three glasses of the stuff. She looked up quickly at the sound of a clucking and fluttering on the netted flat roof of the house and saw the form of Madame Seid silhouetted against the sky. She was there for a few minutes, making a strangely Biblical figure, scattering grain from a wooden bowl as she fed the hens which she kept, by centuries-old custom, on the roof-top. Then she disappeared. And then came the crash and the strangled cry which chilled Carey’s blood and set her running headlong for the house.
White-faced and wide-eyed, Absalom met her at the door. ‘It is my mother! She goes—up,’ he gestured, ‘while I brew the tea for you. And she falls. She is dead. She—!’
‘Where? Show me—’ Carey pushed past him into the interior, dark enough, though not so dark that she could not discern the inert form at the foot of the wooden stairway which must lead roofward. She dropped to her knees at the woman’s side.
She was moaning faintly; blood oozed in beads from a gash on her temple and her feet were still tangled in the folds of the long gown which must have tripped her. Carey told Absalom, ‘She is hurt, but she is not dead.’ Glancing at the low broad shelf which served as seating along one wall of the room, ‘Have you neighbours who could help me to make her comfortable there until a doctor can come to her?’
