She leapt up, only just managing to suppress a scream. A rough-looking black-and-white mongrel nuzzled against her leg before jumping into the back of the pickup. It smelt only slightly worse than the fish crates. It wasn’t aggressive but more defensive and proprietorial. In a practised routine, it jumped in among the boxes and through the void where the back window of the cab should have been. It sat staring at her through the windscreen from the passenger seat.
Worried that her cover may be in the process of being blown, she stepped away from the pickup, only for the dog to start barking. She turned around and took two paces back. It stopped. Surely dogs start barking as you approach, not as you leave? The dog was looking at her with pleading eyes. She could hear Dylan laughing, and she looked skywards. Looking up at the sun-bleached sky in an exasperated way did not solve her problem, and she was too inexperienced to realise that the attention-seeking dog had given her a wonderful reason to be standing there. Instead, she spread the tourist map out on the bonnet while the dog turned its head on its side and looked back at her through the windscreen.
A grey Renault saloon pulled up fifty yards from her, closely followed by a rusting, white van. The car disgorged two tribesmen in Berber robes, and the van’s door opened to allow a tall, black African in a shiny, grey suit to step out before he bent over to look at himself in the wing mirror. They were obviously all together, but they walked separately towards the shade of the colonnade. Standing under the first arch for a few moments, they began to light cigarettes and blow smoke ostentatiously upwards as they scanned the car park and bustling harbour.
As soon as they turned to walk, Mike used her phone to take pictures of them and their vehicles. She would never be able to hack into the Moroccan car registration system, which was, of course, in Arabic, but it might prove useful if she ever had to ask anyone who these men were. She began walking through the first arch of the covered corridor, partially in pursuit and partially to get a view of Randy coming to the meeting from any direction. The dog started barking again, but it stopped quite quickly with a strangled yawn.
It was 2.00pm.
She had watched the three men enter the door that she had identified yesterday, but there was no sign of Randy. She listened briefly at the closed door, but she could hear only what she presumed was Arabic; there was no American voice. She retreated to the end of the colonnade and got out her guidebook. It might be a long wait.
Her plan was simple. She would use one of the numerous taxis parked at the rank next to where the coaches dropped off the tourists for their photo opportunities and follow the three men. The traffic in Essaouira wasn’t heavy. How difficult could it be?
By the time the men reappeared, she had begun to lose faith in her plan, despite having looked up ‘right’, ‘left’ and ‘straight on’ in her guidebook. They walked straight to their two vehicles, giving her no time to think. With a major change of plan, she opened the driver’s door of the pickup, much to the excitement of the friendly dog, who was clearly missing human contact. She beckoned him out of the door, which he did eagerly and jumped in herself. Earlier, she had seen that the keys were in the ignition, and this proved a temptation too far. She drove off slowly, not because it was a stick shift, as she had driven one in London on and off for five years, but more because the steering wheel was on the other side. The irony that this was the same as in the USA was not lost on her, but she had only learnt to drive automatics in Oregon.
She was just leaving the car park when there was an almighty crash.
As she was weaving between two coaches full of tourists, the dog had jumped into the back, knocking over the plastic crates, and had then leapt through the rear window. It ended up sitting on the passenger seat like Scooby Doo, panting through the sides of its mouth. She drove off northwards, following the white van and grey Renault in the direction of the bus station.
The dog put its front feet on the dashboard as if up for the chase. The traffic was sufficiently light and slow moving that a mad dash was unlikely to take place. The pickup had no working air conditioning, and therefore the missing cab window was a blessing in disguise. It also removed some of the overpowering stench of fish that came from, well, everywhere in the vehicle, including the dog, which must have been playing in the fish gutter.
“What’s your name?” she asked her new sidekick pointlessly.
It didn’t answer and kept its eyes on the road ahead, unlike Mike, who had looked across at it while talking, which forced her to swerve to miss a moped. The rider in a long, black leather jacket shouted at her. How can he wear a leather jacket in this heat? she wondered.
“Now, what am I going to call you? What goes with fish? Chips!”
Keep your eyes on the road and concentrate, she heard Dylan’s voice say in her head. “Fat lot of good it did you in the pickup in Holland,” she said out loud, but she subconsciously took the advice.
The traffic was moving at a slow pace because of all of the handcarts, donkeys and overladen mopeds, which made it relatively easy for her to follow Aksil Zadi or whoever had been attending the meeting. She realised that she didn’t actually know whom she was following, but this was now her sole link to Randy, however tenuous that might be. They turned off the main road, and she instinctively hung back, keeping two cars as a buffer between her and the van. The buildings began to thin out and some brown fields started to appear, punctuated by scrub and silvery-grey olive trees. They had been driving for less than half an hour.
Mike hadn’t the slightest idea where they were going – a local village or, at worst, deep into the hinterland? She also had no idea what she was going to do when they stopped at their destination. If necessary, she would drive past a couple of times, take some photographs and head back to Essaouira. She could phone Leonard, and he would call in a CIA team in hours. Well, not many hours, to be precise, as there were probably fifty of them in Marrakech watching the President.
It dawned on her suddenly that she had an additional problem: Chips. If she stopped and got out of the pickup, he would bark and probably jump out of the back window and follow her. He wasn’t wearing a collar, and there was no lead or rope anywhere. So much for undercover observation. I’m not cut out for fieldwork, she said to herself for the hundredth time, Why do I end up in situations like this?
She had no more time to reflect on this as the two vehicles slowed down and turned off down a short, dusty farm track to the left. The farm buildings were set about fifty yards back from the road under two palm trees. Mike had no choice but to carry on along the road until she could find a place to turn around. She parked and waited for a few minutes before driving back slowly. Apart from a lorry loaded with livestock and a local taxi, which drove on towards the east, there was no traffic.
She had her phone on her lap ready to take a couple of quick photographs.
At the farmhouse, there was no sign of human activity, which encouraged her to slow down to a virtual stop. She took a picture of the farm sign at the side of the road, although it meant nothing to her as it was in Arabic. In fact, she wasn’t even sure it was a name and not a road sign saying “Slow down for camels”. The main house was a whitewashed cube with shuttered windows and it was also attached to some buildings partly painted in peeling turquoise. The colour changed quite abruptly where the decorator had run out of the blue paint. There was a stone arch half-buried in the garden area to the front of the farm that had been partially blocked in by a loose stone wall. Mike had no idea what it was, but she thought it looked like the entrance to a Roman irrigation system.
Two terracotta pots containing spiky yuccas were positioned one each side of the old wooden door. Sadly, one was a healthy dark green, but the other was a crispy orange-brown. Mike was musing on why the pots, so lovingly positioned, had recently been neglected when Chips jumped out of the window and ran towards the farmhouse.
Walter had finally stopped surfing in Sennen Cove. There’s never an obvious reason to stop surfing. You just go in and out of the water until the cold becomes unbearable or the light fades. Surfing is, after all, an obsession. He was becoming aware of his surroundings and the fact that it hurt to take a deep breath. A tube appeared to be draining his lungs, and there were patches stuck to his chest with wires coming from them that converged at the back of a device cantilevered over his hospital bed. Sitting alongside him were Madame Bettancourt, whom he recognised, and a man called Patrick Redwood, whom he wasn’t sure he could place.
It had been an intense half an hour of diplomatic discussion when the French authorities’ desire to interview a prime suspect in the murder of a British government minister conflicted with the British police’s desire to interview a victim who was a national working in the British Embassy in Paris. The compromise was achieved only through the working relationship that Patrick Redwood and Jacqueline Bettancourt had established over their lunch the previous day.
“Walter, I’m Patrick Redwood from the British police. Do you feel well enough to speak?”
“Yes,” Walter answered in a surprisingly robust voice.
“You’re in hospital in Colmar; do you remember what happened to you?”
“Yes, I was shot.”
“Who shot you?”
“Brendan … from the embassy,” he said slowly.
“Do you know why?” Patrick asked as the prosecutor sat quietly listening to the replies.
“Um … not really.”
“Could it be connected to the poisoning of Johnny Musselwhite? You remember that, do you?”
“Yes.” He moved his gaze over to Madame Bettancourt.
“It’s OK to speak in front of the prosecutor, Walter; we’re all working together to sort this out.”
In the silence that followed, Walter’s other senses took precedence, and he became aware of the whirring of a pump and that indefinable smell of hospitals.
“I phoned him.” Walter put his head back against the pillow and breathed heavily.
“Johnny?” Patrick prompted.
“No, Brendan.”
