Tremor (22 page)

‘Those dreadful women,' Estrella said, changing tack. ‘Everywhere I go, everywhere I look, they are
there
, a disgrace to the fair name of France. And how they have insulted us – hanging their frightful clothes in our car, giggling lecherously whenever we go past. And one or more of them conspicuously drunk. I don't know how the manager of the Saada – who, let us face it, is a
Frenchman
– can tolerate their odious presence in what is
supposed
to be the best hotel! I do not know how
you
can tolerate them. I have learned a lot about my successful husband these last two days. What a past he has had! While bringing up a family and preaching the virtues of family life, he has been consorting with whores and Jezebels and generally disgracing his family and his name! You marry off a sweet innocent girl – your daughter,
your
daughter – to a distinguished young deputy and we come away thinking only happy thoughts – and
look
what we have found here! – a cesspool of perversity, a vulgar hotel constantly shaken by earth tremors, a motor car so tiny that you can hardly
squeeze
into it, a luncheon with the Governor where no one any longer seems to understand the courtesies of behaviour!'

She was in tears now and he held up a hand. ‘ You have made your feelings clear. They are exaggerated but I have to admit there is a basis for your complaints.' He drew himself up. ‘We shall go.'

She took out a tiny lace handkerchief and dabbed her eyes like a young girl.

‘Where?' She was cooling off, admitting that he was the master.

‘Where you wish. You were agreeable to come on this holiday. Now you want to end it. What do you wish? To go back to Paris? Do not forget Cecile and Armand are on holiday too. There will be no help in the house.'

Estrella considered the matter.

‘Do you know Marrakech?'

‘I have been once.'

‘Is there a good hotel?'

‘There is one. Very expensive. Where Winston Churchill stayed.'

‘What do you think, then?' Tension had really gone now.

‘We could leave here tomorrow. Or today if there is a flight. It is not a great way, but too far to drive in – in this car. I will enquire, if you wish.'

She sniffed. ‘I should be glad if you would enquire.'

He straightened a picture on the wall. ‘I must confess I had not imagined so disagreeable a climate as this. Even if one discounts the earth tremor the weather itself is so oppressive. Perhaps it would be for the best. I will go and see the manager and see what he can arrange.'

He noticed that the door was stiff to open, as if it had become wedged at the top.

At the time this decision was being made two men were boarding an Air France plane, AF 217, at Heathrow.

One was big, an inch or two over six feet and weighing probably 220lbs. He had streaky black hair very thin on the top and slicked back with brilliantine; his heavy jaw already needed another shave. Small eyes with pouches under them and a hint of scar tissue. At some stage his nose had been flattened. He was wearing a blue suit, black shoes, an MCC tie (which he had bought secondhand last week in Wolverhampton) and carried only hand luggage: a hold-all and an attaché case.

The other was short and dapper. Flint-coloured hair, flint-coloured eyes, a bland expression, almost boyish, unsophisticated. Only the absence of feeling in the eyes struck a chill. Double-breasted blue sports jacket with brass buttons, grey Daks trousers, suede shoes. A spotted yellow handkerchief flowed from his breast pocket.

It had been a frenetic few days. After the enormity of the betrayal had sunk in, Mr Artemis had put all his forces to work double time. He had not of course the almost unlimited resources of the police, the manpower, the criminal records, the fingerprint experts, the sniffer dogs, the cars, the informers. He only controlled, or had some influence over, a small corner of the underworld. But he had the supreme advantage over the police of knowing the identity of the culprit.

After Johnny Carpenter's flat had been taken to pieces inch by inch in search of any clue as to his likely whereabouts or destination, threatening enquiries had been made of his friends and cronies in London, of whom he seemed to have had very few and in whom he seemed to have confided little of his personal life. The nickname, Frère Jacques, had been fairly widely known, and this suggested a French connection, but no one knew what. He had taken part in a few minor robberies in the Home Counties in the last few years but had never been caught. Big Smith had enlisted him into this one because he was reputed to have a cool nerve, and just because it was necessary to use people without current form. (One didn't want the fuzz thundering on doors demanding alibis on pure hopeful guesswork within the first twenty-four hours.) He had apparently lived in London for the past few years, but one of the friends, suitably pressurized, had come up with the information that Johnny had been brought up in Wolverhampton.

Big Smith, accompanied by Greg Garrett, had rushed up there and there had found quite a goldmine of information. Johnny had arrived in England with his mother just before the war. His mother, who had begun life as a dancer, had died six years ago, but a neighbour provided them with some useful clues. Johnny was indeed half-French, sometimes had boasted of it. He had friends or relatives in Morocco, she thought, and went out there now and then. He had worked in the motor works until the factory closed in the post-war slump. Then for a long while he had been on the dole. After his mother died he sold the house and moved to London, and she had lost sight of him. Did he have any other name, they asked, other than Johnny Carpenter? What was his father's name? Was he still alive? Where abouts in Morocco did Johnny go? To these questions she had no answer.

Big Smith was very disappointed that there seemed to be no woman involved. He always believed if you were looking for a man in hiding you could spring him like as not by finding his woman first.

Some frantic hours later they ran to earth an old schoolfriend of Johnny's who told them that he had once or twice spoken of going to Agadir.

But no other name.

Johnny Carpenter flying off to Morocco, by himself.

By devious extra-legal connections they had a friendship with an Air France official working in Piccadilly. He reported that no one called Carpenter had flown to Morocco in the last ten days. The last one was Sir Rowan Carpenter, who had taken plane to Marrakech with his wife on the 10th of February.

A dead end. Or did one fly to Agadir and stroll round the shops and hotels and bazaars looking for a familiar face?

They went back to the flat in Bulstrode Street. It was as they had left it. Everything in chaos. Drawers pulled out, linings torn, newspapers draped everywhere, letters torn apart, clothing ripped. Nothing new except a couple of circulars delivered since yesterday and a communication from
Reader's Digest
saying that the recipient was in the running for a £20,000 prize. The draw was to take place within a month, and all the recipient had to do was fill out the enclosed form, etc., etc. The envelope was addressed to John R. Frazier, Esq. at this address.

Being Sunday, the Air France offices in Piccadilly were closed, and the Air France official had said that on no account was he to be rung at his private number, which somehow these dubious acquaintances of his had got hold of. But Greg Garrett said, to hell with that, time is vital, so rang him immediately from Johnny's devastated flat.

The official was wary, irritable and said he was busy, but ultimately agreed to see what he could do. An hour later he rang back to say a Mr John Frazier had left England last Friday on an Air France flight, AF 217, for Bordeaux. This had on-going connections with Casablanca and Agadir.

Without hesitation Garrett told him to reserve two seats on tomorrow morning's flight. The Frenchman replied sourly that he could do nothing from his private address, but gave them the number to ring at Heathrow.

The afternoon was intensely sultry, thundery, though no thunder rolled. The sun broke through just before sunset; a half slice of a glowing disc: it was as if one looked into a furnace of incandescent heat and trembled at the sight, before a mass of curled grey cloud drifted across, shutting it in like shutting a furnace door. Large spots of rain fell.

Dr Ibrahim Berrada was the senior doctor at the hospital. A farmer's son, his parents had contrived to get him sent to the Karaouine University in Fez, and from there he had gone to Paris and returned to Morocco ten years ago, when he had been appointed to run the Ben Ahmed Sanatorium for tuberculosis. Four years ago, when Independence came, he had been chosen as one of the purely Moroccan doctors of distinction with a partly Western education to change and rehabilitate the hospital at Agadir, giving it for the first time a non-racial administration, yet maintaining its Western traditions. He had made an outstanding success of the job.

But Dr Berrada, though a good Muslim, was by race pure Berber and therefore not without superstition. He knew about
baraka
, the healing power possessed by some holy men, and he understood about amulets, charms, evil signs and taboos. While his European culture and his medical knowledge suggested he should deride such things, a deeper strain, born into him through generations of his Hamitic forebears, still carried old influences along.

Last night he had been up to the Kasbah on business and had stopped for a few minutes to listen to old El Ufrani speaking to a circle of elders around a smouldering fire; they leaned against walls, crouched on haunches, sat cross-legged, stood silently among the flickering shadows listening to him. El Ufrani's word was that there would come a vengeance on the town. It had become utterly ungodly, as accursed as Sodom and Gomorrah and Admah and Zebolim and all the cities of the plain and would as surely be overtaken and overthrown by the earth's convulsion and God's revulsion at so evil and carnal a way of life.

Of course in the light of day it was easy to throw off such prophecies of apocalypse as the ramblings of a crazed old man, but in the half-lit gloom of the old walled city with its narrow alleys and tattered roofs, amid the smell of the donkeys and the leather and the spices and the smoke, it was easy to be taken in, to remember childhood tales of holy men and curses and old women muttering in the dark.

Also, there had been signs and portents of another sort that Dr Berrada had observed. Two of his sister's cattle had died inexplicably and there had been strange marks upon their bodies. The five-pointed star over the door of the hospital had suddenly, inexplicably, become stained and cracked. Nothing to go on for a rational man.

But the weather was brooding, threatening, unseasonal. And there had been the earth tremor at midday. It had done no damage, but it was the heaviest that anyone in the hospital could remember.

At four o'clock Dr Berrada passed out into the rough compound of grass and gravel surrounding the hospital and looked at his charge.

Built in 1910, when the French, having recently taken over the country, were anxious to show the world and perhaps even themselves the civilizing effects of their dominion, the building was not much to look at either architecturally or structurally. While a fair amount of modernization had taken place inside, nothing had been spent on the exterior at all. The roof leaked, stucco peeled from walls, and there were cracks behind the stucco, window frames rattled, a door at the back was off its hinges. Since Independence the new Moroccan government, short of money, had yielded only to demands for new equipment, not for repairs.

Berrada strolled back and spoke to the almoner, a man called Sadeq.

‘How many patients have we in the hospital at the moment?'

‘It will be – yes, the man died – it will be eighty-nine.'

Berrada took off his glasses to polish them. ‘ If an order were given to evacuate the hospital, how long do you think it would take?'

Sadeq stared. ‘ I don't understand.'

‘No … It is probably nothing. I don't like the look of things … But it was just a thought that crossed my mind. How long – an hour?'

‘Oh yes, that and more. Wards three to six would all be stretcher cases. But I'm still not following you. Do you mean in case of fire?'

‘That sort of thing.'

‘But where could they be taken? We have only two ambulances.'

‘Wherever it was safe. Or safer. In the grounds outside. It is such warm weather for the time of year. One would hope also to save blankets.'

Dr Sadeq watched his superior as he walked off towards the dispensary. This was something he must tell his wife when he got home – that Ibrahim Berrada was becoming increasingly eccentric, while still relatively so young.

M. Thibault had told the manager, M. Taviscon, they were leaving. They would have liked to walk out, making something of a dramatic exit; but the one plane a day to Marrakech had long since gone and tomorrow's was fully booked. The manager said they were first on the waiting list and he would put pressure on the line to accept them. But the distance from here to Marrakech was not great, scarcely more than two hundred kilometres, and the roads were magnificent. They had a car. It would not surely be difficult to drive there?

M. Thibault said under no circumstances would he consider driving two hundred kilometres in that box on wheels which was all the hire company had seen fit to provide him with. If necessary he would hire a chauffeur-driven car. But in the meantime, if no seats were available on tomorrow's plane, he would complain personally to M. Bouamrani.

Taviscon bowed and said quite so, he understood how they felt, and should he in the meantime reserve them accommodation at the Mamounia in Marrakech from tomorrow? Thibault thought angrily of the extra amount this would cost him; but Estrella was so temperamental that only the height of luxury would ease her feelings now. He nodded to the manager. The plane left at twelve. By ten thirty they would leave the hotel by one means of transport or another. Meanwhile the bill, so far as their short stay at the Saada went …