The Angel (10 page)

Chapter Twenty-Two

I
t took an hour before the doors to the carriage were finally opened. The train had moved down the platform a little, and the smashed screen doors did not match up evenly with the doorways. People went through in single file. The emergency lights on the platform were lit. It meant that they could see where they were going. It also meant that they could see the devastation that had been wrought around them.

They went forward as a long snake, each person holding on to the hand of the person ahead of them. A man was in front of Isabella. He was wearing a suit and a polished pair of brown brogues and looked completely out of place. They walked through the
passageway
and into the vestibule. She heard the man mutter a curse. Up ahead, there was a pile of people. None of them were moving. Some of them were in pieces. They had to climb over and through them.

The woman who was holding Isabella’s hand broke out of the line, jostling her, and as she caught her balance, she put her foot down on the leg of one of the bodies. It felt soft, with give to it, and was not what she would have expected at all. The woman stumbled and fell. Isabella kept walking.

A fireman was at the head of their little line. He led them to the escalator and ushered them up. ‘Keep going up,’ he said as Isabella passed by him. ‘The way out is just up ahead. Don’t stop.’

The shaft was blackened with soot, and chunks of the plaster had been gouged out by debris. They reached the top, and Isabella saw a woman who was hobbling. She had been in the line ahead of her, and now she was struggling to keep up. She was wearing a trouser suit, and because people were walking in single file, she was holding back the queue. Isabella released the hand of the man in front and went over to her.

‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ she said, gesturing to her leg.

Isabella looked down. It was horribly bent. She didn’t know how she could walk on it at all.

‘Can I help?’

‘Thank you.’

The woman rested her weight on Isabella’s shoulder, and straining with the effort, she helped her walk towards the gate and the daylight beyond.

PART TWO

Chapter Twenty-Three

I
sabella Rose idled the engine of her Kawasaki Ninja. The bike had belonged to her mother, and she had taught her how to ride it. It was big and powerful, and riding it was one of
Isabella’s
favourite pleasures.

She waited at the end of the road with the row of industrial units. The little industrial quarter was next to the Route de Safi, four
kilometres
south of Marrakech. It accommodated dozens of studios that produced made-for-export goods for tourists to take home with them.

She had noticed the workshops as she was riding out to the south. There was a sign staked into the baked ground, advertising cheap space. She had been looking for somewhere more secure than the garage that her mother had left her in the city. That place was in a bad part of town and she was concerned that it wasn’t secure. She had visited it one afternoon to find scrapes and gouges around the lock. Someone had tried to get inside. Squatters, maybe, or
junkies
looking for an easy score. It didn’t matter who. They must have been interrupted – she had been fortunate. She had no intention of
losing
the equipment that she stored there.

A car arrived, passing Isabella and slowing outside the vacant unit. The engine stopped and a man got out. She guessed that it was the
samsar
. Property in Morocco was let in various ways. Some leases were arranged with traditional realtors, whereas others were more ad hoc, employing the services of a
samsar
. They worked in every neighbourhood and knew where all the available property could be found. The landlord and tenant paid a small commission to the
samsar
for his services if the property was rented.
Samsars
tended not to have dedicated offices and advertised their business
in tea
cafés and convenience stores.

The man was in his late middle age, wearing a cheap suit that was dusty at the ankles, and cheap shoes. It was obvious that his profession did not offer him a particularly lucrative return.

She revved the engine and rolled down the road to him. He checked her out, a quick glance, and then looked right through her.

‘Monsieur?’

He looked at her with surprise. He replied, in French, ‘Hello?’

Isabella’s French was excellent. ‘You have an appointment.’

The surprise became mild annoyance. ‘Yes, but not with you. With Melody Atika.’

‘My mother.’

‘And where is she?’

‘I’m here on her behalf.’

‘And what is your name?’

‘Sabrina.’

‘I really need to speak to your mother, Sabrina.’

‘She would have come, but she has been detained. She sends her apologies, but she thought it was sensible that we keep the appointment.’

‘But you . . .’ He paused, trying to find the right words to
convey
his disappointment. He managed a smile. ‘But you are just a
girl, mademoiselle
.’

Isabella ignored the man’s patronising tone. ‘She trusts me to make a decision on her behalf.’

He sucked his teeth. ‘I think it would be better to wait, though, don’t you?’

‘No, I don’t. Neither does she. I’ve come all the way out here. So have you. If the premises are unsuitable, I can tell my mother and save you a second trip. But if they
are
suitable, perhaps you make your commission.’ The man still looked uncomfortable, although she could see that she was gradually persuading him. She pointed to the door. ‘Open it up. I’ll take a look.’

The
samsar
sighed but gave up. ‘Fine,’ he said, reaching into his pocket for a key that was fastened to a bright red fob. He unlocked the door, bent down to the handle and heaved the door up and over.

Isabella ducked down and passed beneath the half-open door and into the unit. There were no windows, and the only illumination was the daylight that seeped in through the door. The
samsar
pulled a drawstring, and a bulb flickered and caught. She looked around. It was a small space. She could walk from the front to the back with just five paces, and it was the same from left to right.

‘It’s tiny,’ she said.

‘The details are all on the website. The dimensions, the—’

‘The dimensions are listed as ten by ten. This is – what?
Half that?’

‘The dimensions—’

‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘How long can it be leased for?’

‘As long as your mother would like.’

‘How much is it?’

‘It is ten thousand dirhams a month.’

She shook her head. ‘That’s extortionate.’

‘I’m afraid that is the price.’

‘My mother will pay five.’

‘You can negotiate on her behalf?’

‘Five.’

He narrowed his eyes. ‘Seven.’

‘Five and a half. And she’ll pay the first year up front.’

‘She will agree to that?’

The man was a bumptious oaf, and Isabella had to fight to keep the irritation from her voice. ‘Yes, she will. In cash.’

He couldn’t disguise the greed that passed across his face.

‘Tell her if she can bring the money to the café tomorrow, I’ll personally make sure that it is all arranged.’

Isabella said that she would. She took one final look around the space to confirm that it was suitable for her purposes and, satisfied that it was, went back outside to her bike. The
samsar
pulled the drawstring, lowered the door and locked it.

She gunned the engine and rode back to the city.

Isabella followed the main road into the suburbs of the city, then followed a well-worn route to the Rue Kaa El Machraa. It was on the other side of town from the place that she had shared with her mother and was approached through a similar warren of alleyways and passages, each narrower and darker than the last, ancient and mysterious. She turned right and then left, and when it became too narrow to ride safely, she got off and pushed the bike. She skirted two local boys playing games on their phones in the light of a
kerosene
lamp, and finally reached the thick oak door. The small sign fixed on the wall next to it announced the Riad Farnatchi.

She unlocked it, pushed it all the way back and negotiated the bike inside. The first room was a generous vestibule, and she pushed the bike through it into the open courtyard beyond. Moroccan riads were built around open shafts that typically featured a freezing-cold plunge pool at the bottom. The warm air was drawn down into the shaft, cooled at the bottom and then recirculated so that the rooms arranged around the opening were cooled.

This riad was smaller than the one she had shared with Beatrix, and much less opulent. It had been a wreck when she had purchased it, using some of the bequest that her mother had left to her, but a year of hard work had seen it brought back to life again.

There was still a little work to do, but most of the big jobs had now been completed.

The crumbling bricks had been renewed with fresh courses. The rotting window frames had been taken out and replaced. The décor, which had been so dated, had been brought up to date.
The walls
had been painted a slate grey, with colourful pieces of local art hung to provide splashes of colour. She had bought second-hand
furniture
from the souks and then refurbished each piece herself. She had bought carpets from the Berber markets in the mountains. The plunge pool had been retiled in emerald green, and her favourite pastime was to sit beside it in one of her lime-green easy chairs and stare up at the square of sky above.

She climbed the stairs to her bedroom on the second floor, found the false floorboards underneath the Berber rug and lifted them aside. There was a small cavity beneath, with a leather satchel inside. She took it out, opened it and withdrew two bundles of banknotes. She still had a lot of money in a bank in the Caymans, but she always ensured she had enough to manage without needing recourse to it. She had $20,000 in the bag. A rent of 5,500 dirhams a month meant that it would cost 66,000 for the year. That was a touch over $6,500. She counted out $7,000, put the rest back into the satchel and replaced it in its hiding place. She laid the floorboards over it and covered those with the rug.

She returned to the ground floor and made herself a glass of mint tea.

It had been a relief to escape London and return home. The aftermath of the bombing had been chaotic. A triage centre had been established in a nearby branch of Marks & Spencer and the police were insistent that everyone pass through it. The reason, they said, was that they wanted to check that those people who had been in the station had not been injured by the first blast. Isabella had checked herself immediately and was happy that she was unscathed. The police also required that everyone leave their name and contact details. Beatrix had been very clear that she should never leave a record of her presence and so, using the routine that had been taught to her, Isabella provided a fake name and address and then pretended to cry. The policeman who had been talking to her went in search of a box of tissues, and Isabella took the opportunity to make her exit.

It had been difficult to get to the airport. The entire Tube
network
had been suspended, and there had been no cell phone reception until the early evening. She had walked for two hours before she was able to find an empty taxi. Heathrow had been
operating
, albeit under the watch of armed soldiers. Anyone who had looked remotely suspicious was stopped. The terminal had been loud with the sound of raised voices and accusations of
racism
. She had found a space on the floor where she could lean against a wall and watched the looped footage of the atrocities on the twe
nty-four-h
our news channel.

Her plan had been to return to Morocco that day, but she had concluded that it would not have been prudent to fly directly to a Muslim country. Instead, she had taken a British Airways flight to Gibraltar and stayed overnight at the Ibis near to the airport.
A fer
ry crossed the Strait of Gibraltar several times a day, and she had taken a place as a walk-on passenger on the following morning’s first crossing. She had caught a coach from Tangier to Marrakech and arrived in the early evening. The diversion had cost her a day’s travel, but it was what her mother would have done, and it pleased Isabella to know that she was following her mother’s example.

The tranquillity of the riad had been a balm when she finally arrived home. She had stocked up on the things that she thought she might need and intended to stay out of sight for the rest of the week.

She rarely used her television, but she found that she was unable to resist watching the news. That it was a terrorist attack was beyond question, but the authorities were unable to suggest who might have been responsible. Pundits filled the spaces with incessant speculation. Isabella was not interested in international affairs, and she would not have pretended to have the knowledge to qualify her for making her own determination, but even to her eye, it was obvious that the authorities were floundering.

It didn’t look as if they had any idea what had happened.

The first footage of the aftermath of the blast was vivid to her. She watched the camera jerk and shudder as the operator struggled to negotiate the debris. She saw the brief suggestions of atrocity caught in the camera’s light. The report triggered her own
recollection
and replayed the things that she had seen. She had
nightmares
that night. She knew that she was buttressed against shock by the things that she had already seen and done, but that did not mean that the nightmares were any less frightening. She woke up in the middle of the night, wide-eyed with fear and with sweat-drenched sheets wound around her legs.

She went to the roof of the riad and looked out over the
sleeping
city. There was a breeze blowing in from the desert, and it cooled her. She took a drink, swallowed a sleeping tablet and returned
to he
r bed.