The Moses Stone

that sharp.

'You've explained what you think happened here,' he said to Talabani, but the Moroccan police officer interrupted him.

'Not so, Sergeant Bronson. We know exactly what happened. There was a witness.'

'Really? Who?'

'A local man was driving along this road in the opposite direction, towards Rabat. He saw the Renault come around that corner, much too fast, but he was far enough away to avoid being involved in the accident. He was the first on the scene and summoned the emergency services on his mobile phone.'

'Could I speak to him?' Bronson asked.

'Of course. He has an address in Rabat. I'll call my people and tell him to come to the station this evening.'

'Thanks. It might help when I have to explain what happened to the O'Connors' family.' Breaking the kind of news that irrevocably wrecks lives was, Bronson knew, one of the worst things a police officer ever had to do.

He looked again at the stones and the road at the apex of the bend, and noticed something else. There it was – a scattering of small black flakes, at the very edge of the road and barely visible against the dark of the tarmac.

He glanced around, but Talabani was again talking to the police driver, and both men were facing the other way.

Kneeling down, Bronson picked up a couple of the flakes from the verge and slipped them into a small plastic evidence bag.

'You've found something?' Talabani asked, moving away from the police car and coming back towards him.

'No,' Bronson replied, slipping the bag into his pocket and standing up. 'Nothing important.'

Back in Rabat, he stood by himself in the parking area of the police garage and stared again at the wreck of the O'Connors' Renault Megane, wondering if he was seeing things that simply weren't there.

Bronson had asked Talabani to drop him at the garage so he could get some photographs of the remains of the vehicle, and the Moroccan had agreed. Bronson used his digital camera to take a dozen or so pictures, paying particular attention to the left-hand-side rear of the car, and the driver's door, which he pulled out of the wreck and photographed separately.

The vehicle's impact with the rock-strewn floor of the dried-up river bed – the wadi – had been so massive that every panel on the Renault was warped and dented, with huge scrape marks caused either by the accident itself or by the subsequent recovery operation.

Talabani had explained the sequence of events. Because it was perfectly obvious to everyone that the two occupants of the car were dead, the Moroccan police officer sent to the accident site had ordered the ambulance crew to wait, and had instructed a photographer to record the scene with his digital Nikon, while he and his men hadexamined the vehicle and the road above the crash site. Talabani had already supplied copies of all these pictures to Bronson.

Once the bodies had been cut out of the wreck and taken away, the recovery operation had started. No crane had been available at the time, and so they'd been forced to use a tow-truck. The wadi was inaccessible to vehicles anywhere along that stretch of highway, so they'd parked the tow-truck at the very edge of the road and used the power of its winch to pull the car over onto its wheels. Then they'd dragged the Renault up the steeply sloping bank of the wadi to the road, and finally hauled it onto the back of the low-loader.

Bronson had no idea what damage had been caused by the crash itself, and what by the subsequent recovery. Without specialist examination – and that would mean shipping the car to Britain for a forensic vehicle examiner to check it, and God knows how much that would cost or how long it would take – he couldn't be certain of his conclusions. But there were a number of dents in the Renault's left-hand-side doors and rear wing that looked to him as if they could have been caused by a sideways impact, and that didn't square with what Talabani had told him, and what the witness had apparently reported seeing.

Bronson reached into his pocket and pulled out the evidence bag containing the flakes of very dark paint he'd picked up at the bend in the road. They looked fresh but that, he realized, meant nothing. There might have been a dozen fender-benders along that stretch of road, and the paint flecks could have come from any accident. In Britain, the rain would have washed them away in a matter of hours or days but in Morocco rain was an infrequent event.

But in just one place on the driver's door of the Renault he'd found a dark scrape, possibly blue, perhaps black.

Bronson was just walking into his hotel when his mobile rang.

'Have you got a fax machine out there?' DCI Byrd asked, his voice loud and clearly irritated.

'This hotel has, I suppose. Hang on, and I'll get you the number.'

Ten minutes later, Bronson was looking at a poor quality fax that showed an article printed in a Canterbury local paper, with a dateline of the previous day. Before he could read it, his mobile rang again.

'You've got it?' Byrd demanded. 'One of the officers at Canterbury spotted it.'

Bronson looked again at the headline: KILLED FOR A LUMP OF CLAY? Underneath the bold type were two pictures. The first showed Ralph and Margaret O'Connor at some kind of function, smiling into the camera. Below that was a slightly fuzzy image of an oblong beige object with incised markings on it.

'Did you know anything about this?'

Bronson sighed. 'No. What else does the article say?'

'You can read it yourself, and then go and talk to Kirsty Philips and ask her what the hell she and her husband think they're playing at.'

'You mean, when I get back to Britain?'

'No, I mean today or tomorrow. They should have arrived in Rabat about the same time you did. I've got her mobile number for you.'

Byrd ended the call as abruptly as he'd started it, and Bronson read the article in its entirety. The story was simple enough.

The O'Connors, the reporter suggested, had witnessed a violent argument in the souk in Rabat. Immediately afterwards, Margaret O'Connor had picked up a small clay tablet dropped by a man who was being pursued through the narrow streets and alleyways. The following day, on their way back to the airport at Casablanca, the couple was ambushed on the road near Rabat and killed.

'This was no accident,' David Philips was quoted as saying. 'My parents-in-law were hunted down and killed out of hand by a gang of ruthless criminals intent on recovering this priceless relic.' And what, the article demanded in conclusion, were the British and Moroccan police going to do about it?

'Not a lot, probably,' Bronson muttered, as he reached for the phone to call Kirsty Philips's mobile. 'And how do they know the tablet's worth anything at all?' he wondered.

9

The Canterbury copper wasn't the only person to read the brief article in the local paper with interest. A fair-haired young man saw the picture of the clay tablet and immediately reached for a pair of scissors. Snipping around the story, he put it aside and turned his attention to the rest of the newspaper. Beside him in his modest apartment on the outskirts of Enfield was a pile that contained a copy of every British national daily newspaper, a selection of news magazines and most of the larger-circulation provincial papers.

Going through every one of them and extracting all the articles of interest – a task he performed every day – had taken him all the morning and a couple of hours after lunch, but his work still wasn't finished. He bundled the mutilated newspapers and magazines into a black rubbish bag, then carried the pile of stories that he'd clipped over to a large A3-size scanner attached to a powerful desktop computer.

He placed them on the scanner's flatbed one by one, and copied each on to the computer's hard drive, ensuring that every image was accompanied by the name of the publication in which it had appeared, and storing