Bloody Horowitz (9 page)

And that was odd too, because neither of them had noticed a turnoff on that part of the road. But the machine was correct. In a hundred yards, they came to an opening between two trees and, beyond it, a track snaking its way through the forest. Harry took it, even though Jason's sense of direction told him they were going the wrong way. But what was the right way now? They were completely lost. He wished now that they had followed his instinct outside Aldeburgh, taking the turning marked IPSWICH, 22 MILES. By now they should have been safely back on the A12.

“
Take—the—next—turning—on—the—right
.”

Harry seemed to have become enslaved by the ugly old woman's voice of the navigation system. Perhaps he didn't mind doing exactly what a machine told him, but Jason was less comfortable. He hated the idea of having to rely, one hundred percent, on a tangle of wires and software that might have been malfunctioning in the first place. Maybe that was why the BMW had been dumped at the Kenworth Estate. Nobody in their right mind would have actually wanted to drive there. Maybe the car's owner had gotten as lost as they were now and had gone off for help, accidentally forgetting the key. That made sense.

Jason's heart lurched. He blinked several times, his mouth hanging open, and for a moment he really did look like a child and not like an adult at all. It wasn't possible! They were back exactly where they had been ten minutes before. Somehow, the various tracks had brought them back to the broken wooden gate and the track beyond. Jason swore. He could feel tears pricking against his eyes. This was getting nasty. He wanted to go home.

“Turn left,” he said.

“It's saying straight ahead,” Harry countered.

“The machine doesn't know what it's talking about. If we hadn't followed it in the first place, we wouldn't be in this mess.”

And then a light blinked on in the woodland, straight ahead of them. It was about a quarter of a mile away, very tiny, almost concealed by the thick spread of the trees.

“There's something there,” Harry said.

“What . . . ?” Jason squinted into the darkness.

“It must be a house or something. We can ask the way.”

“At—the—crossroads—continue—straight—over,”
the navigation urged them. The voice sounded almost cheerful. Why had it repeated itself, Jason wondered, when they weren't even moving?

But Harry needed no further prompting. He changed gears and the BMW moved forward again, through the gate and onto the track with the barbed wire along the side. As they rolled forward, the trees thinned out a little. Somehow the moon had finally broken through and they saw fields spreading out, what looked like rough farmland that was completely surrounded by the forest. Ahead of them, a cluster of buildings sprang up, made of red brick with weeds and ivy climbing up the guttering. They passed an abandoned tractor, a rusting coil—more barbed wire. The light seemed to have vanished and they wondered if they had really seen it. Whatever this place was, it looked abandoned.

They turned a corner and there, once again, was the light, coming from an open barn on the other side of a yard. A tall, uneven chimney had been built behind the barn, stretching high above it. And someone was burning something. Thick black smoke rose into the night, and even with the windows closed, Jason could smell meat that was being roasted and smoked at the same time. They drove through a second gate, this one made of steel and brand-new. There was a vehicle parked to one side, a refrigerated truck that looked old but in better repair, at least, than the tractor. Jason saw some words painted in red along one side.

 

Somewhere, a dog barked. Behind them, Jason heard a clang as the steel gate closed and, just for a moment, he thought of
Dionaea muscipula.
The Venus flytraps that he had seen in Aldeburgh.

Harry pulled up in front of the barn. He didn't turn the key but the BMW stalled and they came to a halt. The two boys got out. The night air was very cold. They could feel it running through their hair, stroking the back of their necks.

This was a pork farm. It had to be. There was an oven burning at the back of the barn and the floor was covered with straw, which was splattered with blood that had dripped down from the carcasses hanging on hooks attached to wooden beams. But the carcasses didn't look as if they had come from pigs. They didn't look like any animal Jason had ever seen. He saw a leg severed just above the knee. What might have been a shoulder. And, on another hook, an arm. It might have been made of plastic, but Jason knew that it wasn't. It had been well smoked in the oven. The arm had had a bright red marking right on the shoulder.

A heart—and a name.

Romeo.

Jason felt his blood freeze. There was a rushing in his ears.

A woman appeared, coming out of the barn toward them. She had long silver hair, a yellow face and gray lips that were partly open, revealing teeth that could have come from the cemetery. She was wearing a dirty green apron that hung all the way to her feet. The apron was smeared with old blood. She lifted a hand to wipe her mouth with her sleeve and Jason saw a jagged knife, also bloodstained. Harry was standing dead still. He had gone white. Jason was surprised to see that Haz was crying. But Jason was crying too. He knew what this was. He knew where they were.

The woman was not alone. A man—huge and bearded —had appeared behind the car, holding a length of filthy rope, the sort you might use to tie down animals. Jason caught sight of him in the side mirror. Then the woman reached them.

Her eyes blazed and she smiled at the two boys. Her voice was shrill and high-pitched.
“You—have—arrived,”
she said.

The ancient taxi with its scratched paint and dusty windows rattled to a halt and the engine cut out. They had parked on a narrow street, next to a shop selling lanterns, chairs, boxes and chessboards, all of which were hanging off the front wall and spilling onto the pavement.

“Is this it?” Charles Atchley demanded.

“his is it,” the driver agreed with a smile.

“But it's not a hotel!” Charles whined.

“It's a
riad,
” his mother explained. “It's not quite the same thing.”

The truth was that Charles Atchley had never wanted to go to Marrakesh. It might be a vacation abroad, but from what he had heard, the capital of Morocco would be hot and sweaty with no beaches, no McDonald's, no amusement parks and nothing much to do at the hotel except sit and read. And as he hated books, what was the point of that? Worse still, the food would be strange, the people would speak little or no English, there would be flies everywhere and he would have to spend hours either walking through ruins or struggling up the Atlas Mountains. All in all, he would much rather have stayed at home.

But as usual, of course, he was going to have no choice. Charles was fifteen years old, the only son of Rupert Atchley, a successful barrister. His mother, Noreen Atchley, produced illustrations for women's magazines. The three of them lived in a house in Wimbledon, south London, and Charles went to a local school where he did just enough work to stay out of trouble but not enough to make any real progress. That was the sort of boy he was. You could never point your finger at him and say that he was actually bad. But he was undoubtedly spoiled and really had no interests outside of fast food, computer games and Manchester United. Left to himself, he would have stayed in bed until twelve and then watched television all afternoon, perhaps with a plate of fried chicken and fries balanced on his knees.

It was hardly surprising that he was rather overweight. Again, he wasn't exactly fat. He just looked unhealthy, with ginger hair that he never brushed and a scattering of acne that moved—almost liked clock hands—around his face. He liked to wear tracksuit pants and baggy T-shirts, and he could even make his school uniform look shabby and out of shape. It must also be said that he was something of a bully. There had been one or two incidents with some of the younger boys at the school, but he had been clever enough to avoid responsibility, and although the teachers had their suspicions, so far they'd never had enough evidence to nail him down.

His mother and father adored him and turned a blind eye to most of his faults. Noreen had once waited in line all night to make sure he was the first boy on the street with a PlayStation 3, and Rupert was certainly overgenerous with the pocket money. Whatever Charles wanted, Charles usually got, even if he did have to stamp his feet a bit to get it.

It was only when it came to vacations, or any decision that affected the whole family, that his parents would insist on having their own way. After all, they would argue, they both worked hard—and they were the ones who were paying. So like it or not (and the answer was definitely not), Charles had been dragged to no fewer than six art galleries in Rome, to a whole selection of dreary chateaus in the Loire, to far too many shops in New York, and now it seemed he would just have to put up with whatever horrors Marrakesh had in store.

Even the airport seemed to confirm his worst fears. It consisted of a single, rather old-fashioned building that wouldn't have looked like an airport at all but for the runway outside. And it was hot. The breeze seemed to be blowing out of some enormous hand drier. It almost burned his skin and he was sweating and irritable long before the bags turned up—last, of course—on the single carousel.

His mood got no better in the taxi on the way to the city. His first impression of Marrakesh was of a vast cluster of low redbrick buildings all jammed together inside an ugly wall. Palm trees sprouted out of the rubble, but they somehow failed to make the place any more appealing. The traffic was terrible and it didn't help that the airconditioning inside the taxi wasn't working. It was all the more annoying that both his parents were enchanted by what they saw.

“It's so exotic!” his mother exclaimed, peering out of the window. “And listen to that!”

From a high, slender tower—a minaret—the high-pitched voice of an imam was echoing across the city.

“What's that racket?” Charles demanded.

His father, sitting in the front seat, twisted around. He had noticed the driver frowning next to him. “It's not a racket, Charlie,” he explained. “You should be more respectful. It's the Muslim call to prayer.”

“Well, I hope it doesn't go on too long,” Charles muttered.

 

And now the hotel.

The Riad El Fenn was about halfway down the alley. A large wooden door opened into a dark, cool hallway with deep red walls and a chessboard floor. A bowl of white roses had been arranged in a vase on a low Arabstyle table, and there were about fifty pairs of slippers—all of them different colors—spread out for guests who preferred not to wear shoes. From the hall, a passageway led to an inner courtyard with doors on all sides and four orange trees forming a tangled square in the middle.

Noreen had been right. The riad was more like a house than a hotel, with half a dozen different courtyards connected by a maze of stairs and corridors. Even after several days, Charles would still have difficulty finding his way around. There wasn't what he would have called a swimming pool here, although every courtyard had its own plunge pool, like something you might imagine in an Arabian palace, just big enough for five or six strokes from end to end. There were flowers everywhere, scenting the air and giving a sense of cool after the dust and heat of the city. And unlike a hotel, all the rooms were different. Some were modern. Some were old. All of them had a little surprise of their own.

Charles was sleeping next door to his parents in a turquoise room with a keyhole-shaped door and antique wooden latticework all around his bed. His bathroom was huge, with gray stone walls, a little like a cell in a monastery only with a shower at one end and, at the other, a bath almost big enough to swim in. There were more roses on a table and rose petals scattered over the bed. His parents had almost fainted with pleasure when they saw it. But the first thing that Charles had noticed was—no TV! No plasma screen. No flat screen. Not even a portable. He wondered how he was going to survive.

They had lunch together on the roof. That was another strange thing. The riad didn't seem to have a proper dining room. Everyone ate sitting on low cushions, at tables shielded from the sun by a canopy that stretched from one end of the roof to the other. Charles could barely recognize any of the food. There was some sort of bean salad and pieces of lamb cooked in a sauce, but there wasn't anything he actually wanted to eat.

His parents were in raptures.

“This is the most wonderful place!” Noreen exclaimed. “It's so beautiful. And so peaceful! I can't wait to get out my watercolors.”

“The food is sensational,” Rupert added, helping himself to a spoonful of couscous, which was a local specialty.

“Look at those flowers!” Noreen had a new digital camera and quickly focused it on a terra-cotta pot on the other side of the roof. She had taken at least a hundred pictures and they had only been there an hour.

“More wine!” Rupert lifted his glass and a waiter appeared almost at once, carrying a bottle fresh from the ice bucket.

What was even worse than all this was that, as Charles discovered, all the other guests were equally delighted by the Riad El Fenn. They swam in the pools, drank in the courtyards, took steam baths and massages in the warm, scented air of the hammam and chatted until midnight, sitting under the stars as if they had known each other all their lives. It didn't help that Charles was the youngest person there. One of the couples had two sixteen-year-olds, but the three of them didn't get along, so Charles was largely left on his own.