Garment of Shadows (33 page)

“Holmes, do I take it that you propose a direct confrontation? Rather than laying the evidence before Lyautey and letting him carry out the investigation?”

“When the motor and the four hirelings fail to return, our quarry will flee.”

“Very well,” I said. “Your boots are in the pile.”

I traded shoulders with him, and helped Mahmoud towards the lorry. “Your young protegé seems to have paid more attention to the starter than the gear lever,” I remarked.

“So the smell would suggest,” Mahmoud admitted.

“That motorcar is going nowhere, but the lorry may be drivable,” I said. If the engine hadn’t fused entirely.

Idir and I between us got Mahmoud into the cab. Leaving the boy to puzzle over the canvas leg-covers, I went back to help retrieve the armaments.

Holmes rose from lacing his boots, and held something out to me. “My spectacles!”

“And your
djellaba
,” he said. “They were wrapped inside mine.”

He’d even managed to catch the glasses before they hit the ground, for which I was very grateful. I put them on, and the world came into focus. And became warmer, with the second layer of clothing.

“Everything in the lorry seems to be in place,” I told Holmes. “Shall we try it?”

By answer, he picked up the starter handle. “Can you manage the controls?”

“God knows.”

“Just be certain it’s in neutral,” he said, walking towards the front end.

“And you take care how you work that thing,” I retorted. “When it catches, this engine could rip your arm off.”

But it did not. And if twice I was not fast enough with the adjustments of the unfamiliar throttle and choke, on the third time the engine roared into life. Giving Holmes a moment to get clear, I located the switch for the big guide-lamp above the bonnet—fender-mounted head-lamps being too vulnerable for this lorry—and turned it on. The flattened back end of the motor jumped into view—along with a dangling registration plate: 100627. In reaction to the blow, of noise or light, the plate dropped to the ground; an instant later, the bulging wall collapsed—fortunately showing nothing but open space, rather than the interior of a house filled with shocked and bleeding inhabitants.

Holmes trotted towards the back of the lorry. I ground the shifting lever horribly before locating a reverse gear, and we lurched backwards twenty yards before Holmes’ palm hammered against the side, at which signal I clashed the gears some more. Holmes scrambled onboard. We lunged forward, a motion that to my astonishment neither killed the motor nor attracted a volley of gunshots.

“Does anyone know where we are going?” I shouted at the men squeezed onto the seat beside me.

“Fez,” Holmes replied helpfully.

“I was rather hoping one of you could suggest a direction.”

Mahmoud said something I didn’t hear, and a small hand stretched past my ear. For lack of a more certain authority, I followed the direction of the pointing finger. In five minutes, we were on a road. Perhaps not the road to Fez, but it was a road.

Holmes played the powerful beam back and forth along the approaching track for a half-mile or so before he sat back, satisfied that we were going in the right direction. He showed Idir how to move the lamp about, then took up the hand-torch again.

“Back in a moment,” he shouted, and before I could ask what he intended, he had swung out of the side, pulling himself through the flapping canvas into the lorry’s back. A minute later, pads and travelling rugs started landing on our heads. Idir grabbed the first few, swathing Mahmoud, me, and lastly himself. Holmes eventually reappeared with what looked like a tramp’s bundle—a linen table-cloth, out of which he drew a feast.

“There was a party of some kind, at the Roman ruins,” he bellowed, handing me a stale bread-roll into which he had shoved a wedge of soft cheese. “It seems that this lorry was being used to clear up afterwards. If you can think of any use for seven long tables, a hundred place-settings, and four acetylene lamps, we have those as well.”

There was even drink, a half-empty bottle of wine for us, some very fizzy lemonade for Mahmoud and the boy.

Warmth; food; transport. If the abused engine did not die completely and the lorry retained its wheels—
insh’Allah!
—we should cover the thirty miles or so to Fez in little more than an hour. I took a harder grip on the steering wheel (which vibration was adding loose shoulder sockets to my list of ailments) and stepped more firmly on the accelerator. The noise grew. I raised my voice. “Do you believe our man is at Dar Mnehbi?”

Holmes said something. I asked him to repeat it, then a third time. “Certainly, someone inside the staff is behind these attacks,” he bellowed in agreement.

I leant towards him. “How will we get in the gates?” I shouted. “You want to telephone to Lyautey?”

“Sorry?”

I took a deep breath and tried again. “Telephone? Lyautey?”

“No!”

“Wait until morning?”

“Exactly!” he said. “There must be another way.”

“What?”

“Another way … to warn him!”

“
Warn
him? I said
morning
!”

I felt a hand then upon my juddering arm. The other two passengers had been communicating, Mahmoud’s mouth to the boy’s ear, the replies visible by the light from the head-beam. I tipped my head to the side, and felt as much as heard Mahmoud’s words.

“Idir knows a way in.”

I glanced across the child at him. Mahmoud repeated the offer to Holmes, who looked at me for a long moment. We both shrugged. I gestured for Mahmoud to shift forward, then said into his ear, “Where?”

He and the boy consulted for a couple of miles, ending with a vigorous nod of the young head. Mahmoud spoke against my hair. “The north end of the town, near the tanneries.”

“Lord, I hope we don’t have to wade through them!” I exclaimed, recalling all too vividly the stink.

“What was that?”

But I shook my head, and drove.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SIX

F
ez was dark, apart from a few lights in the new quarter. I steered along the city’s north-facing walls, pausing for Holmes to get Mahmoud and the boy out, then continued on a mile into the hills before aiming the lorry off the road and letting the brakes kill the engine.

With a cough, silence returned to the night (so far as I could tell over the ringing in my ears). I cradled my aching arms for a moment, then kicked open the door, hitched up my
djellaba
, and trotted back along the road, abandoning tables, silver, and acetylene lamps to the resident thieves and lepers.

Limited by Mahmoud’s pace, the three had barely reached the wall when I came up to them. There was a lot of débris out here, and we settled Mahmoud cautiously onto a trunk-sized hunk of fallen wall, trusting that the rest of the structure wasn’t about to come down on us.

Holmes handed me the torch, which now had an obscuring handkerchief around its beam, and drew a pair of empty lemonade bottles from his robes. “Idir, take these and see if you can find a fountain.” His voice was low, but fortunately, the ringing in my ears was subsiding.

Mahmoud protested that he was fine to go on, but Idir was already trotting off. We all knew that it would be an arduous trip across the city to Dar Mnehbi. Apart from which:

“We’re looking at Youssef, right?” I asked.

“I don’t believe we are,” Holmes said.

“Holmes, the man brought me a drugged meal! And he’s the very definition of a shadowy presence. He’s everywhere in the house, overhears everything, no one questions him.”

“Yes, Youssef
brought
you the meal.”

“What—you think the cook was responsible?”

“You said that there was a delay while someone spoke with Youssef outside of the door on Tuesday evening.”

“Yes, Youssef apologised for letting the meal go cool, although it wasn’t actually—”

“Whose voice was it?”

“I couldn’t hear.”

“What was your impression?”

“Holmes, are you asking me to
guess
?”

“Your impression.”

“I suppose I’d have said it was François Dulac, Madame Lyautey’s secretary.”

“Exactly.”

“But he’s a secretary—and not even Lyautey’s secretary.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Yes. Why? Isn’t it true?”

“It is true that originally he was hired for Madame la Maréchale, and that he still handles her appointments schedule and official correspondence. However, the major part of what he does now is for the Maréchal.”

“But strictly speaking, he may regard himself as working for Madame Lyautey?”

For the first time, Mahmoud spoke up. “A man’s pride would drive the lie in the opposite direction.”

I opened my mouth to object that it was not a lie, but he had a point: A lady’s secretary might claim to work for the husband, but it was unlikely the claim would go the other way without a reason.

“You just don’t want it to be Youssef because of his coffee,” I grumbled.

“An investigation of the link between slipshod work and a more profound breach of trust would indeed make for an interesting monograph,” he mused, “but I doubt that the reverse would prove true: that pride in one aspect of an employee’s life warrants—”

I interrupted, before Idir could return and find us bogged down in a debate over responsibility and ethics. “If Dulac deliberately misled me, it would suggest that he knew who I was—who we both were. Did he know your name, when you came to visit?”

“I did not use my name, and my cousin knows to make use of whatever pseudonym I may be employing. In this case, Vernet.”

“But the Maréchal would not keep your identity from Madame,” I pointed out.

“True. And,” he went on before I could, “she might have found it so amusing—the idea of having the one and only
Shairlock ’Olmes
in her house—that she could not resist passing it on.”

“—in the hearing of either servant or secretary,” I concluded. “Would he also have mentioned Mycroft?”

“That would be unlikely. My brother is not a public figure.”

“That would make it less likely that international politics has entered in, which is a relief. If the matter is domestic, then, and the man we’re after could be either Youssef or Dulac, how do you wish to proceed? Secure them both and let your cousin sort it out?”

“My cousin may be a gifted social tactician, but he has an insufficiently devious mind for unsnarling this kind of knot. He might require evidence before taking action against one of his own servants.”

“So what are you suggesting? That we break into the Resident General’s house, search the rooms of not one, but two men, and locate evidence without alerting the guards? Simple.” We probably weren’t even going to make it across the city without being caught.

“We have guns,” Mahmoud spoke up. “You and Holmes can bring both men—and anyone else who wakes—to the library. I will keep them there while you search their rooms.”

I took off my spectacles and rubbed my tired eyes, visions of bloody gun-fights and international incidents playing out across my mind. “And if we find nothing? If we keep an entire household under gunpoint, and whoever it is already got rid of all evidence? Not even Mycroft would be able to talk us out of that.” I could all but feel the noose around my neck.

“You could stay here,” Mahmoud said.

I put my spectacles back on. “Sure. I can always do that.” I glanced in the direction the child had gone. “Isn’t it taking the boy a long time to find water? This city has a fountain on every— Ah, there he is.”

With a rattle of loose tiles, a patch of the night took substance, and Idir was there, pressing one of the bottles at Mahmoud, the other at Holmes. We left the empty bottles among the fallen masonry, picking our way after the boy into the medina.

Our noses alone might have led us inside, considering the almost tangible solidity of the air oozing through the wall’s narrow gap. The tannery stink grew, and an interminable time later, receded, leaving a marvellous freshness to the remaining odours of mildew, urine, damp plaster, and rotting vegetables.

Silently, we passed through the sleeping city, our way lit by the cloth-muffled torch. I had no sure idea of the time, but it had to be a couple of hours past midnight. Even the perpetually-labouring Resident General might have taken to his bed by now.

Twice, late-night pedestrians approached down the lanes, their ways lit by bobbing lanterns held by servants. Both times, Mahmoud and Idir at the fore had ample warning, and we pressed back into corners and invisibility.

The ground rose; street after street of shuttered buildings, windowless houses, skittish cats—but fortunately, few dogs. Dozens of times, we turned left or right or through a ruined building, and after a while, I realised that somehow the lad was managing to circumvent the city’s internal gates.

How did he know Fez so well?

Holmes and I followed the pair ahead, our progress slowing as the child took more and more of Mahmoud’s weight. But we did not want to risk coming upon trouble with only a single gun, and putting Holmes under Mahmoud’s arm would leave me the only one able to respond.

So the child bore the weight, and the child led the way.

Until we came to a junction I knew.

“Wait,” I whispered.

My three companions came to a halt, Mahmoud staggering to put his shoulder against a wall. “I know where we are,” I said in English. “We should go left, not right.”

Mahmoud translated for the boy, who nodded and pointed to the right.

“No,” I said, in Arabic this time. “That way leads up to the Kebira. It’s a long way around.”

But the boy was adamant: to the right. He tugged at Mahmoud’s robe, to underscore his certainty.

Holmes raised the torch until its diffuse light shone on Idir’s face. “Do you know a back entrance to Dar Mnehbi?”

Another set of nods, even more emphatic.

I could hear the precise echo of my own thought running through Holmes’ mind:
Just how had this lad come to learn so much about Fez in so few days?
I could feel his decision, identical to my own, in the way he stood back with the light, waving the boy towards Mahmoud again. And I knew, as we moved up the road to the right, that he would surreptitiously adjust the rifle he carried across his shoulder, making it ready for instant use.