The Moses Stone

Chellah, and she really ought to walk around the gardens, even if she didn't visit the sanctuary itself.

But as she headed towards the old walls of the necropolis, she saw several police officers and other people milling about directly in front of her. For a moment, she wondered if she should simply call it a day and go straight back to the hotel.

Then she shrugged her shoulders – whatever the problem was that had attracted the small crowd, it had nothing to do with her – and pressed on. Curiosity had always been one of her virtues, or her faults in Ralph's view, and so as she walked past the handful of men she looked closely at what was going on.

At first, all she could see were their backs, but then a couple of them stepped slightly to one side and she could see exactly what they were all staring at. Fairly close to a large boulder, a slight figure lay on the ground, the front of his jellaba sodden with blood. That was startling enough, but what stunned Margaret was that she immediately recognized the dead man's face. She was so surprised that she stopped in her tracks.

Suddenly, she knew exactly why the small Arab wasn't behind the stall in the souk. She also guessed that the clay tablet in her bag – the object he'd dropped as he ran past them – might be more important and valuable than she'd ever thought.

One of the policemen noticed her standing there, her mouth open as she stared at the body on the ground, and irritably waved her away.

She turned back towards the souk, lost in thought. She wouldn't, she decided, follow her original plan and simply leave the clay tablet in her handbag when they left for the airport. She'd have to think of a way of getting it out of Morocco without it being detected.

And there was one obvious way to do that.

4

'I won't be sorry to get back home,' Ralph O'Connor said as he steered their hired Renault Megane out of Rabat towards Casablanca and their flight to London.

'I know,' Margaret replied shortly. 'You've made it perfectly clear that Morocco is right at the bottom of your list of desirable places to revisit. I suppose you'll want to go back to Benidorm or Marbella next year?'

'Well, at least I feel at home in Spain. This country's just too foreign, somehow, and I don't like it. And I still think you should have just thrown away that blasted stone you picked up.'

'Look, what I did was the best option in the circumstances, and I'm not going to discuss it any further.'

They drove for some minutes in silence. She'd not told Ralph what she'd seen near the Chellah that morning, though she had sent her daughter a hasty email about it just before they left the hotel.

About five miles out of Rabat, the traffic died away almost to nothing, and they had the road virtually to themselves. The only vehicle Ralph could see in his mirrors was a large dark-coloured four-by-four jeep some distance behind them. Oncoming traffic grew less frequent as they got further away from the city.

When they reached a stretch of road fairly near the Atlantic coast, the driver of the jeep accelerated. Ralph O'Connor was a careful driver, and began switching his attention between the road ahead and the jeep, which was gaining on them very rapidly.

Then he saw an old white Peugeot saloon coming in the opposite direction. He eased his foot slightly off the accelerator to allow the driver of the jeep to overtake before the Peugeot reached them.

'Why have you slowed down?' Margaret demanded.

'There's a jeep coming up on us fast, and a fairly sharp bend in front. I'd rather he overtook us before we reach it.'

But the jeep showed no signs of overtaking, just closed up to about twenty yards behind the O'Connors' Renault and matched its speed.

Then everything happened very quickly. As they approached the left-hand bend in the road, the Peugeot suddenly swerved towards them. Ralph braked hard, and looked to his left. The jeep – a Toyota Land Cruiser with tinted windows and a massive bull bar on the front – was right beside him.

But the driver of the Toyota still seemed to have no intention of overtaking. He just held the heavy vehicle in position. Ralph slowed down even more. Then the Toyota driver swung the wheel to the right and drove the righthand side of the bull bar into the Renault. There was a terrifying bang and Ralph felt his car lurch sideways.

'Christ!' He hit the brakes hard.

The tyres screamed and smoked, leaving parallel skid marks across the road. The Renault was forced to the right, towards the apex of the bend.

Ralph's efforts were never going to be enough. The speed of the Renault, and the power of the two-ton Toyota, forced the lighter car inexorably towards the edge of the tarmac.

'Ralph!' Margaret screamed, as their car slid sideways towards the sheer drop on the right-hand side of the road.

Then the Toyota hit the Renault again. This time the impact triggered Ralph's air bag, forcing his hands off the steering wheel. He was now helpless. The Renault smashed into a line of low rocks cemented into the verge at the edge of the road.

As Margaret screamed in terror, the left-hand side of their car lifted and began to topple sideways. It rolled over the edge and began an uncontrolled tumble down the nearvertical drop to the bottom of a dried-up river bed some thirty feet below.

The comforting noise of the engine was instantly replaced by a thunderous crashing, thumping and jolting as the car left the road.

Margaret screamed again as the world span in front of her eyes, her terror the more acute because she was utterly helpless to do anything about it. Ralph still had his foot hard on the brake pedal, and was again grasping the steering wheel, both instinctive and utterly pointless actions.

In that moment, their world turned into a maelstrom of noise and violence. Their bodies were flung around in their seats as the window glass shattered and panels buckled with the repeated impacts. The belts held them in their seats, and the remaining air bags deployed, but neither action helped.

Margaret reached out for Ralph's hand, but never found it as the crashing and tumbling intensified. She opened her mouth to scream again as the violence suddenly, catastrophically, stopped. She felt an immense blow on the top of her head, a sudden agonizing pain and then the blackness supervened.

On the road above, the Toyota and Peugeot stopped and the drivers climbed out. They walked to the edge of the road and peered down into the wadi.

The driver of the Toyota nodded in satisfaction, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and scrambled swiftly down the slope to the wreckage. The boot of the Renault had burst open, and the luggage was strewn about. He opened the suitcases and picked through their contents. Then he walked to the passenger side of the car, knelt down and pulled out Margaret O'Connor's handbag. Reaching inside, he extracted a small digital camera. He put this in one of his pockets, then continued rifling through the bag. His fingers closed around a small plastic sachet containing a high-capacity memory card for a camera and a USB card-reader. He pocketed that as well.

But there was obviously something else, something that he hadn't found. Looking increasingly irritated, he searched the suitcases again, then the handbag and, his nose wrinkling in distaste, even checked inside the O'Connors' pockets. The glove box of the Renault had jammed shut, but after a few seconds the lock yielded to the long blade of a flick-knife that the man produced from his pocket. But even this compartment was empty.

The man slammed the glove box closed, kicked the side of the car in annoyance, and climbed back up to the road.

There, he spoke briefly to the other man before making a call on his mobile. Clambering down the slope again, he jogged back to the remains of the car, pulled Margaret's handbag out of the wreckage, searched through the contents once more and took out her driving licence. Then he tossed the handbag inside the Renault and climbed back up to the road.

Three minutes later, the Toyota had vanished, heading towards Rabat, but the old white Peugeot was still