Outside an open-fronted, small clothes shop, where rolls of fabric were being turned into assorted shirts and trousers, the van pulled up. The side door slid back, and she found herself on the pavement with her luggage next to a pile of rubbish in the gutter and an open manhole into which her suitcase could have fitted. She stepped through a small arch into a high-sided alleyway no more than three persons wide; the surface was of uneven, compacted earth. A donkey pulling a small cart was coming towards her. She pressed herself against the side, edging into an arched recess with a large wooden door held together by wide metal hinges. A small brass plate, unreadable from less than a foot away, confirmed that this was Riad des Tailleurs.
A door within the larger door opened inwards to reveal, well, absolutely nothing. It was pitch-black inside. She jumped back as a boy in a gold waistcoat stepped over the wooden lip and stood there smiling at her. Keen to get out of both the surprisingly busy alley and the heat, she started to lift up her suitcase, but without saying anything, he took it from her, and together they almost fell into the black void. Her eyes tried to adjust to the darkness gradually, but she had to squeeze them tight as protection from the acrid smoke from an incense burner lurking in some corner.
“Would you turn on a light?” she asked the boy in as unaggressive a tone as she could muster.
“It’s all part of the riad experience. Leave your bag and come through here.”
She couldn’t work out where the voice was coming from.
Eventually, she stepped past a row of neatly arranged Moroccan slippers, with one incongruous pair of Nike trainers, into a dimly lit, small sitting room. It was, in fact, the hotel reception, and it consisted of a wooden desk behind which sat a blonde-haired woman tapping at a keyboard. A grey cat was curled up on an armchair, which was the only place for a guest to sit.
“Welcome.”
Mike spun around to see a man emerging from a side room or cupboard – or perhaps a cave. She was beginning to get irritated by the ‘authentic’ riad experience.
“You must be Miss Kingdom?”
“And you must be … Oh, sorry, I can’t read your name badge in the dark.”
“Hassan. I am the manager. Welcome to the Riad des Tailleurs, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”
“Almost certainly. How often are the power cuts?”
Hassan tried a conciliatory tack. “You must be tired. The Royal Air Maroc flight from JFK to Casablanca is very good, isn’t it?”
“I have no idea; I didn’t fly from New York.” She turned around to the woman at the desk. “If you’ll just give me my key, that would be perfect.”
“We don’t have keys here. Nobody can come in except through that small door past Gharib and us here in reception,” Hassan replied.
Is he taking the piss? she thought, but her real concern was that she couldn’t imagine Randy would choose this riad as a base in Marrakech. This place must surely break every rule in the CIA manual, she considered, but then again, she hadn’t read them. Has he really been here?
She decided that now was not the time to discuss Randy or anything else with Hassan. She just needed to get to her room and regroup.
“May I have your passport?” The woman spoke with an Eastern European accent.
“Which room is Miss Kingdom in, Karolina?”
“It’s 127.”
Mike handed over her passport and was assessing whether Karolina was Polish or Czech. Actually, it didn’t matter because she was another potential route to finding Randy, although Czech would be a bonus.
“Would you like to follow me? You can collect your passport later. I will carry your suitcase,” offered Hassan.
With that, Mike began her journey through the labyrinth that this group of five old town houses provided. Each house was centred on one of three small courtyards, which were open to the sky; two of them were filled with a mature fruit tree that touched the walls on almost every side. With Hassan, she went up to the first floor in a glass lift that was the centrepiece of one atrium, and then she walked along the open-sided and carpeted corridor. Hassan slid back a bolt and opened a tall, glazed wooden door into a room that was mostly red – everything was red or leather or red leather.
When he had left, she tried to take stock. After a minute, she gave up and sat at a leather-inlaid table below a mirror surrounded by a black beaten-leather frame. The walls and floor were made of stitched leather rectangles – the floor black and the walls red. There was something disorientating and oppressive about the décor. She put her head in her hands and told herself quietly that she was out of her depth. You are not a field agent! she screamed silently to herself yet again.
Standing up, she pulled back the long curtains that were across the windows on to the open-sided corridor and stretched her left leg while taking off her black wig. A brass pot seemed to be tailor-made as a wig stand. She began to relax. The built-in wardrobe revealed a standard hotel bedroom safe, into which she put most of her personal items. All of her special computer bits went behind a leather sofa. Seeing a kettle, she opened a bottle of water, filled it up and made herself a mint tea.
She was halfway back to normal. The Wi-Fi was accessed via her phone, and she had attached a small piece of kit that gave her one level of encryption. Mike checked her messages, put her wig back on and decided to go for a walk around the hotel. There was no room key, so she jammed a small piece of paper between the door and frame. Later, this might give her an idea if anyone had been in the room.
Each courtyard was tall and narrow with the sole original purpose of cooling the residents during the hot months. There were no external windows or openings on to the streets or alleyways, except the one thick door. All of the threats were outside the houses, or now, the riad. Inside was calm and safe – except it wasn’t. Every sound in the hotel echoed off every surface and reverberated through the courtyards. As to safety, she felt like she was locked up in a prison – a prison during a fire.
Look on the bright side, she said to herself, Randy’s room won’t be locked.
She walked up to the roof terrace with its views across the rooftops to the Koutoubia Mosque, the central tower of Marrakech, and peered down into each courtyard. Disorientated and suffering from vertigo, she made her way back towards reception, having taken several wrong turnings.
Why had Randy chosen this place?
A couple of hours earlier, an attractive couple had been sitting in the corner of the Restaurant des Trois Lapins.
“You could try the salade automnale au sanglier légèrement fumé,” the woman had said.
“What’s that?” the man had asked, “Sanglier, I mean, not salade. My French extends to automnale and salade.”
“It’s wild boar, shot here in the Vosges mountains.”
“A sort of roast pork?”
“Well, yes, smoked pork.” Madame Bettancourt had broken some bread on her side plate. “My late husband used to shoot them.”
“In the Vosges mountains?”
“Yes, but only to put them out of their misery.”
Patrick Redwood raised an eyebrow.
