The Moses Stone

Talabani stood up, then dismissed the interpreter with a gesture. 'I think we can manage without him now,' he said, as the man left the room. His English was fluent, and he spoke with a slight American accent.

'Ou, si vous voulez, nous pouvons continuer en francais,' he added, with a slight smile. 'I think your French is probably good enough for that too, Sergeant Bronson.'

There were clearly no flies on Jalal Talabani. 'I do speak the language a little,' Bronson admitted. 'That's why my people sent me out here.'

'I guessed. You seemed to be following our conversation before the interpreter provided a translation. You can usually tell if somebody can understand what's being said, even if they don't actually speak. Anyway, let's stick to English.'

Five minutes later Bronson and Talabani were sitting in the back of a Moroccan police patrol car and speeding through the light mid-afternoon traffic, red and blue lights flashing and the siren blaring away. To Bronson, used to the slightly more discreet activities of the British police, this seemed a little unnecessary. They were, after all, only driving to a garage to look at a car that had been involved in a fatal crash, a task that could hardly be classed as urgent.

'I'm not in this much of a hurry,' he said, smiling.

Talabani looked across at him. 'No, perhaps you're not,' he said, 'but we are in the middle of a murder investigation, and I have a lot to do.'

Bronson sat forward, interested. 'What happened?'

'A couple of tourists found the body of a man in some gardens near the Chellah – that's an ancient necropolis justoutside the city walls – with a stab wound in his chest,' Talabani said. 'We can't find a witness or a motive, but robbery's an obvious possibility. All we've got at the moment is the corpse itself, and not even a name for the man yet. I'm under a lot of pressure from my boss to solve the case as quickly as possible. Tourists,' he added, as the police car swung off the road to the right and into a garage, the noise of the siren dying away in mid-bellow, 'don't normally want to visit a city where there are unsolved murders.'

At one side of the cracked concrete parking area was a Renault Megane, though the only way Bronson could be certain about the identification was because he could see part of the badge on the remains of the boot-lid. The roof of the car had been crushed down virtually to the level of the bonnet, and it was immediately obvious that the accident had not been survivable.

'As I told you, the car was going too fast around a bend in the road a few kilometres outside Rabat,' Talabani explained. 'It drifted wide, hit some rocks at the side of the road and flipped over. There was a drop of about thirty feet into a dried-up river bed, and it rolled down the bank and landed there on its roof. Both the driver and passenger were killed instantly.'

Bronson peered inside the wrecked vehicle. The windscreen and all the other windows were smashed and the steering wheel buckled. Partially deflated air bags obscured his view of the interior. He pushed them aside and checked behind them. The heavy bloodstains on the front seats and on the roof lining told their own story. The two front doors had been ripped off, presumably by the rescue crews to allow them to remove the bodies, and had later been tossed onto the back seat of the car. It was, by any standards, a mess.

Talabani peered into the wreck from the other side. 'The two people in the car were clearly dead long before the ambulance arrived on the scene,' he said, 'but they were taken to the local hospital anyway. Their bodies are still there, in the mortuary. Do you know who will be making the arrangements for their repatriation?'

Bronson nodded. 'I've been told that the O'Connors' daughter and son-in-law will be coming out to organize it through the British Embassy. What about their belongings?'

'We found nothing in their hotel room – they'd already checked out – but we recovered two suitcases and a small carry-on bag from the scene of the accident. The boot of the car burst open with the impact, and the cases were thrown clear of the wreckage. Their locks had given way and the contents were scattered about, but we collected everything we could find. We also found a woman's handbag in the car itself. That wasn't badly damaged, but it was covered in blood, we presume from Mrs O'Connor.

We're holding all of those items at the police station for safe keeping, until the next of kin can arrange to collect or dispose of them. You can inspect them if you wish. We've already completed a full inventory of their contents for you.'

'Thanks – I'll need that. Was there anything significant in their bags?'

Talabani shook his head. 'Nothing that you wouldn't expect to find in the luggage of a middle-aged couple taking a week's vacation. There were mainly clothes and toiletries, plus a couple of novels and quite a large supply of travel medicines, most of them unopened. In the pockets of the clothes they were wearing and the woman's handbag we found their passports, car hire documents, return air tickets, an international driving licence in the husband's name, plus the usual credit cards and money. Were you expecting anything else?'

'Not really, no.'

Bronson sighed, convinced he was just wasting his time. Everything he'd seen and heard so far made him more and more certain that Ralph O'Connor had been fatally incompetent, and had lost control of an unfamiliar car on a road he'd never driven before. And he was itching to get back to London to reschedule his much-delayed dinner date with Angela. The two of them had recently spent some time together, and Bronson was starting to entertain hopes that they might be able to give their failed relationship another try. He just wasn't sure that his ex-wife felt quite the same way.

He stood up. 'Thank you for that, Jalal,' he said. 'I'll take a look at the O'Connors' possessions, if I may, and the place where the accident happened, and then I'll get out of your way.'

8

Bronson stood on the dusty, unmade verge of a road about ten miles outside Rabat.

Above him, the sun marched across a solid blue sky, not the slightest wisp of cloud anywhere, the air still and heavy. The heat was brutal after the air-conditioned cool of the police car, now parked some twenty yards down the road. He'd discarded his jacket, which had helped a little, but already he could feel the sweat starting to run down his body inside his shirt, an uncomfortable and unfamiliar feeling. He knew he didn't want to be out there any longer than absolutely necessary.

It was, Bronson reflected, looking up and down the road, a pretty desolate place to meet one's maker. The ribbon of tarmac stretched arrow-straight in both directions from the bend beside the wadi. On both sides of the road, the sandy desert floor, studded with rocks, stretched out in uneven ripples and waves, devoid of any kind of vegetation apart from the occasional stunted bush. Below the road, the narrow chasm of the dried-up river bed looked as if it hadn't seen a drop of moisture in decades.

Bronson was hot and irritated, but he was also puzzled. Although the bend was quite sharp, it was nothing that a reasonably competent driver couldn't have coped with. And the road was clear and open. Despite the bend, visibility was excellent, so any driver approaching the spot should have been able to see the curve well in advance and been able to anticipate it. But the two parallel skid marks that marred the smooth tarmac, their course heading straight for the point where the Renault had left the road, showed clearly that Ralph O'Connor hadn't done so.

Down below the road, the place where the Megane had finally stopped rolling was obvious. A collection of bits and pieces of the vehicle – glass, plastic, twisted pieces of metal and torn sections of ruined panels – lay scattered in a rough circle around a patch of discoloured sand.

Apart from its location, some thirty feet below the edge of the road, it was typical of dozens of accident sites Bronson had been called to over the years, a sad reminder of how a moment's inattention could reduce a perfectly functioning vehicle to nothing more than a pile of scrap metal. Yet something about this accident site didn't quite ring true.

He bent down and looked at the line of rocks, roughly cemented into the very edge of the tarmac which, according to Talabani, the O'Connors' car had hit. The Renault, he'd noted back at the garage, was a silver-grey colour, and he could clearly see flakes and scrapes of grey paint on the rocks. Two of them had been dislodged from their concrete bases, presumably by the impact of the car as it slid sideways off the road.

It all seemed to make sense – yet why had the accident happened? Had Ralph O'Connor been drunk? Had he fallen asleep at the wheel? It was, he noted again, glancing up and down the road, a sharp bend, but it wasn't