Garment of Shadows (24 page)

“The dining room will be like ice, so yes,” she said. Clearly, he had anticipated her response: Before she finished the sentence, trays were coming in, to be arranged on a number of small decorative tables. Miss Taylor explained, “I hope you don’t mind this girls-school style of informality? I often take my supper in here, after a long day. It’s the only proper fireplace in the house, and we go through far too much firewood as it is.”

I assured her that warmth and informality were my own preferences, although I suspected that William did not fully approve. He settled us with tables across our laps, arranged the dishes within reach, filled our glasses, and left again.

Miss Taylor shot me an amused glance. “I sometimes think William would prefer a starched collar in a grand house, poor fellow. He has worked for me these thirty-five years, and I never fail to disappoint him.”

“You work as a nurse, here in the medina?”

“Nurse, doctor, mid-wife, dispensing chemist, occasionally dentist. I once performed surgery on a donkey. And you? What brings you to Fez?”

“I … I am told that I came to Morocco in the company of a moving picture crew.”

“Really? I didn’t know that a moving picture company was in town.”

“As far as I know, they’re still in Rabat. I seem to have come to Fez with my missing friend. And before you ask, yes, we have checked all the obvious places where a dead or injured man might be taken. Except here.”

“I’m afraid that you were our only unconscious foreigner this week. Who is ‘we’?”

“The ‘other friend’ whom you met on Saturday.”

“Oh yes, the pleasant older gentleman who spoke fluent French. You know, with all the foreign visitors I’ve met here, he is the first one who grew up in the same town as I. We couldn’t come up with any common St Albans acquaintances, though.” Holmes had not grown up in St Albans. Which told me that he had invented a persona in order to ingratiate himself into her confidences.

“What a coincidence,” I remarked.

“I thought so,” she said. I glanced sharply to the side. She appeared to be nonchalantly picking her way through her plate of chicken.

Not perhaps a mind to underestimate:
Missionary
is not always a synonym for
naïve
.

“You gave him my boots and gun,” I said, “but not the details of how I came to be here. Why not?”

She frowned as she worked a piece of meat from its bone. “He seemed to know you, well enough to be trusted with a pair of very old boots and a weapon that, in any event, I preferred not to have in the house. But I have lived in Fez a long time. I was here before the French. And hard experience has taught me that things may not be as they appear. That a man who may be trusted with a person’s footwear may not, in the end, prove worthy of that person’s safety. I was glad to be told that you were well, but that did not mean I was about to give him information that could create problems for my well-meaning young friend with the cart.”

“But you will talk to me about it.”

“You have the right to know.”

“What did the man with the cart tell you about where he found me? Did he say anything about the motorcar?”

“He said little more than what I’ve told you. I was more interested in saving your life than asking who had done it to you.”

“And I am very grateful, for all you did, but I now need to locate the motorcar. My friend may have been abducted in it.”

She lowered her fork and knife. “
Abducted?
What nonsense is this?”

“I told you, there was a fight, and—”

“Fight as in lovers’ spat, or fight as in fisticuffs?”

“Definitely the latter. Although I suspect it was more knives than fists.”

Now she dropped her utensils entirely. “Young lady, are you suggesting that you were in an actual
battle
? On the road outside of Fez?”

“What did you— Oh. You thought I’d been hit by the motor.”

“Weren’t you?”

“I was attacked. By men. Not that I remember, but the child says I was, and I have no reason to disbelieve him.”

She looked at me, and her eyes wandered across my garments. “They thought you were a man,” she concluded.

“Perhaps. In any event, they left me concussed and bleeding, and seem to have taken my friend. I must find him.”

“This is … most remarkable,” she murmured to her plate, then raised her eyes. “Morocco may be a violent country, but it has little crime in that sense. We must report this.”

“No!” The threat of a combined French and native bureaucracy would be more than I could face. “Let me talk to the man with the cart first.”

“He may not answer your questions. Strangers are mistrusted here.”

“My Arabic is good,” I told her in that language.

“Even then.” But when I started to press her, she put up her hand. “I do see that you need to follow that train of events, but there is little point in your rushing off to question him. For one thing, he is almost certainly abed, and would be greatly alarmed by an invasion. And for another, I would be happy to accompany you into the medina tomorrow, but not tonight. I cannot force you to stay, but I refuse to countenance a person in your condition racing headlong into further activity.”

I watched her calmly resuming her fork, and her meal. “You will help me, if I agree?”

“If you permit me to examine you and then put you to bed, yes.”

“First thing in the morning?”

“If you wish.”

I picked up my utensils, and obediently ate what was on my plate.

And when she had finished prodding my skull and reassuring herself that I had not ripped out her neat stitches, I used the hot bath and curled up in the same bed I had occupied before.

To dream of vague figures flitting through the doorways of empty tiled rooms, carrying with them the loneliness of ghosts.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

T
uesday when I woke, the vague clamour of city noise trickled into the room. I lay listening for a time, then jerked upright as the significance hit me: If traffic in the medina had already reached that pitch, the hour was by no means early.

I threw on various pieces of clothing, shoved my glasses onto my nose, and scurried down the stairs.

Miss Taylor was seated over the remnants of her breakfast, going through a stack of letters. She took off her reading glasses and smiled at my dishevelment. “Good morning, Miss Russell. Do sit down. Would you prefer tea or coffee?”

“You shouldn’t have let me sleep in. Shall we go?”

“When you’ve had breakfast.”

“Miss Taylor, I appreciate your concern, but I have a friend who may be in danger.”

Her reading glasses went down atop the letters and she stood up. “I will be just a few minutes. Help yourself to coffee.”

I heard her voice from another room, and a minute later, the cook came in with a basket of warm rolls.

“Thank you, Fatima,” I said. Only when I lifted the buttered and jammed roll to my lips did I realise what I had said.

I remembered coming here! Not the arrival itself, but my early hours in this house. What before had been a vague sense of motion and warmth was now peopled with faces and voices: Miss Taylor, bent over me with professional concern, talking and explaining as she worked; William holding a steaming bowl for her to sponge off my face; a woman taking his place as the removal of garments revealed my unexpected gender: Fatima.

The shadows had drawn back from another piece of memory.

And yes—the desert, and a tent! I had gone from the sea to the sand, working on—oh Lord: the moving picture. I was
acting
in a moving picture? I pushed away the memory, and concentrated on the tent.

Idir, his eyes roaming over the canvas room and its peculiarly sumptuous fittings (hired from Morocco’s Sultan; hired by me, in fact) as I prepared to join—

Mahmoud! Yes, Mahmoud Hazr had called me out of the desert, piled me into a rattletrap lorry—stolen? Could that be right? We had climbed into the lorry, which trailed great clouds of black smoke and slowed alarmingly with every hill—and blew a tyre—no, two tyres—on the way. But we had repaired them, and we had found a spring to fill the boiling radiator, and we had made it over the mountains and …

And there again, I came to shadows. There was dust, and a row of laden camels, and Idir’s frightened face, and a sensation of fury and violence in the night, but the more I pushed at it, the harder I concentrated and tried to force it into focus, the thicker the shadows became. All it gave me was a headache.

“Miss Russell, are you ill?” Peg Taylor’s voice came, sharp with concern.

Startled, I dropped the bread and jerked around. How long had I been staring off into the space between my ears? “I’m fine, just thinking.”

“You do not look at all fine.”

I picked up the roll, wiping a smear of preserves from the table, and took a bite as if that might prove the excellence of my health. “I was thinking,” I said around the mouthful, “about what you said concerning the Fasi disinclination to talk freely with outsiders. I know that you have been here for a long time, but I fear that the sort of things I shall be asking are those that your admirers might wish to shield you from. It would be better if you were to introduce me as someone worthy of trust, then leave us to talk unheard.”

She did not care for the feeling that she would be abandoning me, but she agreed that an un-overheard conversation might be for the best. It took the better part of an hour to get out of her door, following consultation with William, and checking on a patient, and just as we were about to leave, the arrival of a woman with a child needing stitches on his foot.

We finally stepped out into the medina. My companion slid through the tortuous streets with the ease of a native, although somewhat inevitably we found that the cart man was already about his day’s work. Miss Taylor insisted on accompanying me to the place where he had been going, a hillside tile-kiln outside the city walls, but when we were then informed that he had gone on to a destination over the next hill, I turned to the little woman.

“I can take it from here. You have patients requiring you, and I now know the man’s name and where he is going. I shall let you know what I find.”

In truth, I had no intention of letting her know anything, but I thought it would encourage her to leave me. And so it proved. Hesitantly, turning back twice to give me some forgotten piece of essential information about the man and his family, she finally retreated towards the city gates. I turned my face to the hills, in search of a man with a cart.

Few investigations follow direct lines, and this was no exception, but eventually I found the man, returning from a distant grove with three large canisters of olive oil and a tangle of firewood. I gave him greetings from Miss Taylor and engaged him in harmless conversation for a time, before asking him about the night he had found the wounded foreigner along the road.

He hesitated, but since I had established myself as a friend and nothing to do with the government, he agreed that he had found such a person, and helped him (as far as he knew, then and now, I was a him) down to the city gates.

“He was run down by the speeding motorcar, yes?”

“So it would seem. Some of the French drive so fast, it is a wonder any of us survive.”

“It was a French motor, then? Had you seen it before?”

“It was dark. I cannot be certain.”

“But something made you think it was a French motor. One you know.”

He chewed on his lip for a while.

“Your name will not come into it,” I assured him. “I promised Miss Taylor.”

At the reminder of the author of his son’s well-being, he reluctantly admitted that it was a motorcar he had seen before. “I do not
know
, for certain. But I was close enough to hear its engine, when it speeded up and flew down the hill, and it sounded like a motorcar that I have heard before, on that road. A motor that is kept at the palace.”

“What, it belongs to the Sultan?”

“The Sultan owns everything in the country,” he said. I did not correct him. “It is a handsome machine, very shiny. I have seen the Resident General in it. More than once. It is probably a different motor,” he said again.

I asked him for any identifying marks on the motor, hoping that perhaps it was missing a fender or had a crack across its wind-screen—something obvious enough for a farmer to notice. I did not hold out much hope.

“One-zero-zero-six-two-seven,” he recited. I stared at him in disbelief. “The plate it wears. I like numbers,” he said simply.

I hastily removed the expression from my face, and turned the conversation to lesser matters. When the next road forked off to the south, I thanked him, wished his son long health, and took my leave.

The Royal Palace was in Fez el-Jdid, the newer section of old Fez (as opposed to the upstart French Ville Nouvelle, where the streets were broad and the lights were electrical). I bought a handful of nuts in the Jewish quarter, amused at the queer pronunciation of Hebrew, then continued on towards the Bou Jeloud gardens, to sit beneath a tree and study the palace walls. This was a different city from that whose gate lay mere yards away. The medina was tight and secretive and Mediaeval, but here, two women in frocks were looking at the banner of a cinema house, while a man wearing suit, necktie, turban, and sunglasses stepped into a bank. Not that those in foreign dress weren’t outnumbered by draped women and robed men, or that an approaching motorcar wasn’t forced to thread its way around a donkey onto which were roped six European chairs, being driven by a child wielding a willow switch, then another donkey laden with a family of five or perhaps six—hard to tell, since they were all intertwined.

It was, all in all, not a bad place to wait, had I been in no hurry. However, time pressed on me, and I might have been forced to wait until darkness but for a works project, under French supervision, adjoining the palace. After a time I pocketed my snack and fell in with the queue of labourers, receiving my load of rough bricks, depositing them with the others, returning to the source.