When I returned from the lavatory, I sank into the chair, revelling at the heat. A wave of exhaustion took me. I sat without moving, too limp even to lean forward and unlace my boots. I would do so. In just a minute.
Voices came from out in the dar, men in conversation, their words indistinct. They went sharp, then silence fell, for perhaps a minute. I had just roused sufficient energy to sit upright, aiming at removing my boots for a time, when a rap came on the door. Youssef entered.
“Your tea, Madame. I apologise for the delay, I fear it has gone cold.”
“You were very quick, thank you.”
“Shall I pour?” he asked, already doing so. “Is it cold, Madame? Shall I take it away?”
I already had a cup in one hand and a fried savoury in the other, although with him standing at my side, I couldn’t carry through and shove the morsel into my mouth. He hesitated, adjusting a spoon, then noticed that my laden hand was hovering.
Whatever he had been about to ask, he did not, merely gave a small bow and left, saying, “Enjoy, Madame.”
I did.
A gratifyingly large plate occupied one side of the tray, contributing a spicy odour to the mint of the tea. Even cool, the savoury pastries were a perfect counterpoint to the sweet, fragrant liquid, and I polished them off, leaving only one or two of the sweet tit-bits.
Satisfied, I poured another cup of the refreshing brew, and sat back with it. The room was warming nicely. Really, I thought, I should slip off my boots to rest my feet, just for a few minutes. And perhaps the djellaba, since the room was growing so warm. Though I mustn’t get too settled. I had things to do. But the warmth of the room was lovely, so lovely, making me so relaxed, even drowsy. Oddly drowsy. Drowsy enough that the internal alarm seemed tiny and faraway. Not that it mattered. I was comfortable. Still, I mustn’t fall asl
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
I dreamt.
It was dark, and there was a sound. I stopped to listen, hearing only the gabble of conversation near the camp-fire and the laughter of English girls.
It came again, as of a finger-nail scratching canvas. I glanced at the pillow on my camp-bed and decided against pulling out the revolver I had just secreted there: A robber was unlikely to knock—or, scratch—at my door.
I pulled aside the canvas, standing back so the bright light fell on my visitor, and looked out, then down. The late-night intruder was a winsome young urchin with brown skin and hair, light brown eyes, and gleaming white teeth, of which I could see nearly all due to his wide grin.
“No thank you,” I said in Arabic. The local inhabitants were ingenious when it came to sales techniques, and had quickly learnt to send their most attractive children to prise coins out of the Fflytte Film crew. Either children or parents decided early which of our members were easy targets, and had left me alone. This lad seemed not to have got the message.
I fastened the door on his winning smile and outstretched hand, and turned back to my beckoning sleeping roll.
The scratching came again. And again.
Bare-footed now and with my knife clearly displayed in my hand, I yanked away the canvas door. The smile disappeared; the eyes fixed on the blade; the small hand remained outstretched.
“Whatever it is you are selling, I do not wish one,” I snarled.
The boy shook his head vigorously, and pushed his grubby hand at me. I looked more closely, and saw there a piece of paper, folded in precise quarters. The moment I took it, the lad’s hand dove back into his garments, coming out with something more solid. Not a weapon. Something the size of an acorn, with a gleam to it.
First things first. Taking a step back, lest he make a sudden grab for my person, I unfolded the paper.
Come with the boy.
I turned the page over, then back, but no more words appeared.
The clenched hand shot out again. I opened my palm. Onto it dropped a heavy gold ring.
And with that, I knew the writing. With recognition came pleasure and eagerness and apprehension, all together: The owner of this ring was a friend and colleague—a brother, even—whom I had never thought to see again, but whose sudden appearance was unlikely to be free of trouble.
“Where is he?” I asked. By answer, the lad stepped back, out of the light. “No, come in for a moment, I need to put my shoes on.”
He ducked inside: So, he understood Arabic.
I sat on the camp-bed and reached underneath for my increasingly ragged old boots that, despite Fflytte’s objections, had been my footwear for the past week. The boy stood in the centre of the canvas room, eyes wide at the fittings, which (unlike the footwear) were luxurious in appearance and occasionally even in comfort. He was particularly fascinated by the carbide lamp, bending to squint into its brilliance.
“Don’t touch that,” I warned. “It’s hot.”
When he looked at me, he blinked furiously against the spots the lamp had etched into his vision, and the grin returned. I reached behind me to slide the revolver into the back of my waist-band, and donned a coat against the cold outside.
“What is your name, child?”
He just blinked again and grinned. Odd; he hadn’t struck me as simple.
“Do you understand what I’m saying?” Vigorous nod, aimed to one side because of his temporary blindness. “But you don’t speak?” More nodding. Which could be seen as an ambiguous answer, but I decided it was response enough.
“Lead on,” I said, and he patted his way out the doorway and into the night beyond.
I dreamt.
It was dim, the sun obscured by clouds and the woven mats that covered the narrow streets. Mahmoud had given Idir a coin to buy sweets. The lad seemed to be taking a long time about the task.
Still, his absence gave us time to linger over our coffee and catch up on life in the past year. It was a gift, to see Mahmoud restored to robes and Arabic after watching his painful transformation into an English gentleman the year before. He was solid again, the confidence returned to his hands, the authority to his glance—the only thing lacking was his habit of sprinkling his speech with aphorisms and quotes, most often from the Qur’an. I missed the depth it provided his thoughts, but perhaps its absence was due to the change in setting, and that Moroccans didn’t appreciate the habit.
No matter what this favour of his cost me, it would be worth it, to have seen him like this once more.
He had been born an English earl, become a Bedouin spy, and for a brief time, worn a ducal coronet. Now he was … something else.
My teacher. An elder brother perhaps. A friend, no doubt.
In Mahmoud’s presence, my Arabic seemed to go more smoothly. I told him about our time in India, the previous spring, and he had been talking about the unveiled women of the Rif when Idir came sauntering up to our tiny table, sucking his fingers, sticky to his ears.
“Happy now?” Mahmoud asked.
The boy nodded vigorously.
“Honey may be a drink of many colours, healing for men,” Mahmoud solemnly pronounced, “but its presence necessitates a visit to the hammam this afternoon.” As he stood, gingerly pinching the boy’s sleeve to draw him towards a wall-mounted fountain, I was pleased to realise that Mahmoud had come very close to giving one of his habitual quotes.
Once the boy was not a hazard to passers-by, we set off again through the bustling gloom of the medina.
Now it was dark, and I was walking up a hill. With Mahmoud. Precisely the companion one wants in a dark dream, solid and competent.
When the road turned, I saw below us a scattering of lights, climbing the slopes of the wide hollow. Some lights moved, suggesting the lamps of travellers in the medina. Off to the south was an area of greater, and stronger, lights: There, people had electricity.
Underfoot was a road, grit crunching under my boots. The sky had cleared, with the bright half-moon sufficient to keep us from walking off the cliffs. The moon—and the head-lamps of the unmoving motorcar, half a mile distant on the road above.
I slid my hand into my robes, on one side the comforting solidity of the revolver, on the other the weight of the knuckle-duster I had fashioned from a scrap of copper pipe found as we came through Fez el-Jdid earlier in the day. “You expect trouble?”
His hand came up, following the scar that ran from left eye to beard. “One always expects trouble,” he said absently.
“Who else would this be, but Lyautey?”
“Still. You have the paper?”
“The scrap? Of course.”
“Give it to me.”
“Mahmoud, what is going on?”
“Show me,” he insisted.
Impatiently, I dug around in various pockets until I came out with the bit of onionskin on which he had sketched a brief illustration earlier, to show me the place along the route where, if there was an ambush, it might be. He’d told me, he said over coffee, simply because it was foolish not to. One never knew when a brick would fall out of the sky or a soldier would decide to make an arrest.
This demand for reassurance suddenly placed a lot more weight on the possibility of his disappearance.
“Mahmoud, if this is a trap, let’s stop right now.”
He said nothing, but there was sufficient brightness to see that his hand was out.
Asking to “see” the paper scrap was somewhat pointless in the dark, but I pulled it out, flicking it back and forth to prove its existence. His hand came over mine, removing the little triangle, wrinkling it until he was satisfied that it was the correct one. Then he thrust it back into my pocket, and turned away.
“Stay here. I will call when I am sure it is safe.”
“Don’t be long,” I said. “I’m half-frozen.”
His footsteps went ahead of me, towards the motorcar, not hesitating even as the light blinded him. It was, it would seem, the correct motor: Maréchal Lyautey, making a brief stop in his incredibly busy day for an appointment with a man he had met but once. I could hear Mahmoud’s feet over the low idle of the engine. His black silhouette grew, robes tugged by the breeze coming up the hillside.
The wind made me shiver. I squatted down to give it less of a target. Listening to Mahmoud’s footsteps recede, watching his long-stretched outline grow along the road and then disappear as he reached the motorcar, hearing his voice speak a question, my left hand held the revolver while the fingers of my right hand idly explored the ground at my feet, picked up a couple of conveniently-sized stones, and—without my thinking much about it—slipped them in the nearest pocket. Except that when I did so, there seemed to be one there already: a bump, where none had been before. My eyes watched the road while my fingers let go of the stones to explore this foreign object: a lump, with a crinkle around it—the scrap of paper, and …
I leapt upright, and my cry loosed an explosion.
“Mahmoud!” I screamed, and many things happened at once. The flash from his revolver imprinted a sense of struggling figures; voices began to shout. I ran, the revolver useless with Mahmoud up there and invisible. But before I had covered ten yards, the engine sound changed and the twin beams ahead of me swept over the road, splashing across me for a moment before they returned, seeking me out, blinding me as they drew rapidly closer.
Hand raised against the brilliance, I leapt behind a boulder just off the road, where the driver would have to risk flying off the mountainside if he wanted to run me down. Gun in one hand and knife in the other, I turned my head from the searing brightness, and waited for the impact.
Instead, a mad scuffle of hard braking made the motor veer wildly back and forth until it came to a halt, thirty feet away, its head-lamps shining at the opposite hillside. Voices, one of them sharp, commanding, even furious. After a moment came the sound of a man jumping down to the road. I crouched in silence, waiting for him, and for the dazzle to clear from my eyes.
Steady footsteps came down the roadway, on a line between me and the motor, forcing me to hold my fire. More harsh words came, in the language I did not understand. No response from the man on foot. The car stayed where it was, facing the upper hill, engine idling. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the man drew nearer.
The situation was perplexing: They must have guns—everyone in Morocco seemed to have one. Why not just pin me in the head-lamps and shoot me? Either they wanted to capture me alive, or they feared attracting attention: One or two gunshots might go overlooked, but not a blazing battle. Which meant that the man coming towards me either bore a silent weapon—against the gun they would assume I, too, carried—or he had been given the task of drawing me out. With a torch, perhaps, to guide the aim of a comrade at his back …
The threats of an angry commander with a rifle might also explain the reluctance of the footsteps—I might almost have suspected that the approaching man was a bound and gagged Mahmoud, were I not certain that he’d have contrived to give me a clue. No, this was a different kind of sacrificial goat—not a captive, but one of their own.
As my eyes cleared, the approaching figure’s stance betrayed the weapon in his hand.
Moving with stealth, I laid down the revolver. The steps slowed, and stopped, twenty feet away. He listened for my breathing, then I heard the sound of fabric shifting, and I moved.
Half a second after the beam from his hand-torch came on, my rock knocked the torch to the ground.
But he’d had the torch in his left hand, and as I closed with him, his right hand came up fast.
I was lucky, both that he could not see well, and that he was not used to left-handed opponents. His blade sliced fire across my upper arm before I danced back, but my hand was alive with the awareness that my own knife had cut deep: I had done more damage than he.
He staggered away, calling out to the motorcar. Gears clashed and the beams drew back from the facing hillside, but the moment the head–lamps appeared, the first of my missiles clattered off the metal fender. The second went wide, but the third hit home, splintering one glass head-lamp into darkness while they pulled their wounded colleague inside. Then the engine roared as the driver realised the danger, and the remaining beam was rushing at me, swerving back and forth to avoid my stones. At the last instant, I threw myself to the side.
But either I’d left it too late, or a twitch on the steering wheel brought them a fraction too close. The front fender brushed beneath my arms like a bull under a toreador, and the running board slid past my legs, but as the metal body travelled down my garments, some portion reached out to snatch me, pulling me in and slamming my head a great blow.
I stepped into the dark, and was gone.
I woke, again. It was cold. I was thirsty.
This time, the darkness was absolute.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Sherlock Holmes did not look back. One would think, he reflected, that a person could grow accustomed to walking away from a wife who might be headed towards danger (Russell? Might?) but after nearly four years of marriage, he had yet to learn indifference. Although considering her general state, the last thing he wished was for her to accompany him. He’d end up with her collapsed on the road, and having to purchase a donkey across which to sling her.
Still, in her stead he had been given an almost ideal travelling companion, one who would not interrupt with questions that were either imbecilic (at the one extreme) or overly perceptive (at the other), one whose very passivity was a strength. One for whom there was no distracting attachment: no hostage to fortune, no emotional grit in the machinery.
“Do you know how to whistle?” he asked the boy. The voiceless lad glanced at him without comprehension, so Holmes repeated the question—and in case his Arabic vocabulary was faulty, he followed with a brief demonstration.
In resp
onse, Idir pursed his lips and blew, with no result.
So as they walked, Holmes demonstrated first simple tunes, then the piercing blare made by a pair of fingers. Idir’s were filthy, but efficient, and he soon mastered both a breathy warble of notes and a short blast.
“Very good,” Holmes said. “Now you have a means of attracting attention. Your next task is to find us a place to sleep for the night. Preferably with a roof.”
The boy gave him a sideways glance, then gestured at his mouth with pinched-together fingers.
“By all means, we must have a meal.”
The fingers rubbed together, the universal symbol for cash.
“I have a little money, yes.”
The child was of an age when responsibility came as a gift; he walked on with a bounce in his step and a whistle on his lips.
Holmes’ plan was simple: to talk, and to listen. The fabric of social interactions in this country was closely woven, and if a group of men had lingered in the vicinity of a motorcar, waiting for a message that would send them to an abduction, elements of that series of events would make them stand out: access to a motorcar, a means of receiving a message (be it by hand, telegraph, or telephone), and a place where a minimum of three men might wait for that message.
A town was the most obvious place to find all three elements. In this part of the country, that meant either the outskirts of Fez, the growing town of Mequinez, or the hillside town of Moulay Idriss. If their opponents were followers of Raisuli, it suggested a degree of religious conservatism that might feel more at home in the last of those.
Fez itself he would leave to Russell: As he’d told her, he and the boy were too liable to be recognised there. And if his veteran beekeeper’s mind persisted in its vision of a hive turning to attack an invader, well, there was little he could do about it now except trust to Russell’s skills.
Garment of Shadows: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Page 19