The Heat of Betrayal (42 page)

So Ben Hassan had probably called his police contact early this morning while I was still asleep, telling them he had me at his place, but to wait until I was up and ready before coming to take me in. In the meantime the assistant consul had been contacted and everything put in motion to wrap this story up as quickly as possible and get me out of the country tomorrow.

‘That's all very thoughtful of you,' I said. ‘One important thing remains outstanding, though. Have there been any sightings of my husband? Any sense whatsoever of his whereabouts?'

The inspector pursed his lips and reached for another file.

‘On the day in question your husband checked out of the Oasis Hotel early in the morning, and was seen walking out of town. A local tour guide named Idriss was going to work in his jeep and saw Monsieur Leuen walking directly into the desert. He stopped and asked your husband if he could offer assistance, as he was heading into a barren area without oases, and was wearing no hat and carrying no backpack or canteen. Your husband told the guide he was fine and kept walking into the Sahara. That was the last sighting of him.'

‘And that was at what time?' I asked.

‘The tour guide said it was around seven-thirty a.m.'

‘But that's impossible,' I said. ‘I arrived in Ouarzazate at seven and caught sight of my husband at least three times that morning.'

‘Did you speak to him?' the inspector asked.

‘No – he always eluded me. And the woman at the hotel told me he returned briefly at two o'clock before heading to the bus depot to catch the bus to Tata. I followed him. I saw him in front of me. I missed the bus and took the next one.'

The inspector pursed his lips even further, mulling over some more documents, scrutinising them with care.

‘I have here the statement from the tour guide and the woman at the hotel. Again I repeat – she said your husband checked out at seven, and the tour guide confirmed that he had his conversation with him at seven-thirty. It's all here.'

‘But I saw him.'

‘If you saw him,' the inspector said, ‘then why didn't he answer you?'

‘He was avoiding me. But that woman at the hotel . . . I remember so well the conversation with her when I came back from seeing . . .'

I stopped myself from saying anything more. Because to do so would, I sensed, begin to raise questions about my sanity; questions which I myself didn't want to answer. I closed my eyes. There was Paul, running away from me on the streets of Ouarzazate. There was the scene at the hotel reception desk, after I'd visited his other wife. Yasmina told me that I'd just missed him. And the sight of his bobbing grey hair and his tall frame in the distance as I raced to catch him before he boarded the bus. Everything else that had happened to me after that was so real. I still had plenty of physical scars from the attack. They'd found the burnt body. Opening that passport in front of me I saw that it was, truly, my own. All tangible, all real. I had lived this story. It was all verified. But those hours in Ouarzazate when Paul was everywhere and nowhere . . . surely that couldn't have been a spectre, a hallucination, a mirage?

‘Are you all right, Robin?' Assistant Consul Conway asked me, her hand on my shoulder.

‘No.'

Leaning towards me she whispered in my ear:

‘I cannot give you official counsel, as that is not in my diplomatic remit. But speaking personally, if I were you I would sign the statement. I had one of our legal people and one of our translators look at all three versions. They all match up, and they all let you leave Morocco with the matter entirely resolved.'

So she too suspected (or, indeed, knew) that the burnt body in the desert wasn't the handiwork of the accomplice who was then ‘suicided' while in custody.

‘Give them what they want,' she continued. ‘Put your signature on the statement, pose for the press photograph, spend the night in the five-star hotel they've arranged for you, take the flight home tomorrow. They are being very smart about all this. Very conscientious. I strongly advise you to do the same.'

I shut my eyes again. Paul was there, sketching away on the balcony of our room in Essaouira, flashing me a seductive smile as I brought him a glass of wine, telling me he loved me. I blinked. Paul was gone. I blinked again. There he was dashing down that back alley in Ouarzazate, eluding me as always – but still so tangibly there. I blinked again. Nothing. A void as empty as the Sahara.

I opened my eyes. The inspector was staring at me concernedly.

‘Would you like some time to think about all this,
madame
?' he asked.

‘No,' I said. ‘I want to go home. Where do I sign?'

AT FOUR O'CLOCK
that morning I sat up in bed. I could not remember a single detail of the nightmare that had snapped me into consciousness. All I felt was a dangerous, oppressive presence. Undefined. Entombing me.

But then I opened my eyes and found myself in this heavily over-upholstered hotel room. Hours earlier, upon being checked in here, I was brought upstairs to find the two suitcases that had been dispatched from Essaouira. It was a shock to see all my clothing intermingled with that of my vanished husband. Whoever had packed up our room there had not separated his from hers. It took me just ten minutes to repack all of my clothes, and to lay out the items I would need until the flight tomorrow. While handling Paul's things I felt neither rage nor trauma, just a profound numbness. Assistant Consul Conway – she insisted on me calling her Alison – had accompanied me to the hotel in the unmarked police car that the inspector had ordered after I had signed the official statement and posed for a photograph with him.
Case closed
,
it told the world. I had extracted one promise from the police – that the photo would not be released to the press until I was en route to the States the next day. I didn't want stares at the airport tomorrow. I wanted to be home by the time it was revealed that I'd emerged safely from the wilderness.

‘You handled that all very well back there,' Alison said when we reached the hotel. The management offered us tea while the room was being made up. ‘They wanted to wrap this up quickly, without fuss. They're pleased you played ball.'

‘What else was I going to do?'

‘After an experience like yours . . . well, most people would already be showing signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. I am very impressed that you didn't break down in front of the inspector, and kept yourself so contained.'

‘I've had several weeks to sort through the worst of it. And I need you to do me a favour.'

I explained about the desert family who had taken me in, and the vague location of the oasis which they were calling home right now. I gave her the remaining 28,000 dirhams, then asked if she could perform a minor miracle and get the money to them.

‘I can't promise anything,' she said, ‘but I'll try.'

‘I don't want the law involved. They're a bit wary, I sense, about anything to do with the government.'

‘Berbers?'

I nodded.

‘It will be an interesting challenge finding them.'

‘May I ask you a direct question?'

‘Of course.'

‘Have the police conducted a search of the desert near to where my husband was last seen?'

‘Absolutely. And they've found nothing so far.'

By nothing I knew she meant no body, no desiccated corpse, burnt by the sun, fed upon by vultures.

‘And that tour guide who saw him – he clearly identified Paul?'

‘I read the report from the Ouarzazate
Sûreté
. He described a Caucasian male, around two metres tall – that's six foot five – thin, with long grey hair and several days' growth of beard. Does that sound like your husband?'

I shut my eyes and again saw Paul's hair slapping the shoulders of his white shirt as he raced for the bus in Ouarzazate, my entreaties to him to stop only accelerating his pace.

‘Yes, that sounds like him.'

‘Of course, there could have been another Caucasian male of a similar age and build and hairstyle who went out hiking in the desert that day. And I have checked with my colleagues at all the other Western consulates and embassies here. There's no one else of that description missing.'

She chose her next words with care. ‘You still do maintain that you saw him on the streets of Ouarzazate, later that same day, several hours after he allegedly disappeared?'

‘I saw what I saw. But what any one of us sees . . . is that ever the truth? Or is it just what we want to see?'

She considered this for a moment.

‘Trust me – and I know this, because I lost my sister five years ago in a car accident where I was the passenger – it's when you are beyond the initial trauma that it jumps up out of nowhere and grabs you by the throat. Don't be surprised if, now that you are out of danger, it begins to get tricky for a while.'

At four that morning the ‘trickiness' began. That sense of a dark force in the room with me, about to encircle me and wreak havoc. I couldn't pinpoint who or what it was. What I found myself doing, after getting up and pacing the room, was throwing on something to wear, heading downstairs with a suitcase containing all my husband's clothes, and giving them to a homeless man in his forties who was lying near the gutter. I just put the case in front of him and handed him 500 of the 1,000 dirhams I'd held onto for tips and incidental expenses. His eyes widened when he saw the sum of cash I had pressed into his palm.

‘Why me?' he asked.

‘Why not you?'

Back in the room I ran a very hot bath and sat in it for the better part of an hour. A long soak, during which I started to cry and then couldn't stop until I was so wrung out that, after drying myself, I forced myself back into bed with the hope that sleep might overtake me again. But I was wired now and very wide awake. So I turned on my laptop and saw that Morton had answered the email I'd sent to him after checking in to the hotel, informing him that I was alive and would definitely be landing tomorrow (now today) in Buffalo. I also mentioned that Paul was missing, presumed dead. Morton's reply was all business:

Will be at the airport. Very glad you are out of harm. Re: Paul. You should know that, under NY state law, a missing person cannot be declared dead for seven years. But there are some legal things we can do to protect you. More when we meet. Best – Morton. PS – I can finally sleep now, knowing you are OK.

Trust Morton to practise ultra-pragmatism at a difficult juncture.

The rest of the day passed in a strange blur. An unmarked police car picked me up at the hotel, as arranged, at nine-thirty. At the airport I was checked in and taken through a special security line by the two officers charged with getting me on the plane. A representative of the airline met us and escorted us to a private lounge. The cops stayed with me until the flight was called, taking me to the gate and watching me board the plane. They wanted to make sure that I was leaving the country.

Eight hours later I was in front of an immigration officer at Kennedy airport in New York. I had expected to be bombarded with questions – but it seems that my ‘gone missing' status hadn't been filed against my name on the Homeland Security website (or maybe the US Consulate in Casablanca had already arranged for it to be pulled). The officer scanned my passport and asked me how long I had been out of the country. When I told him, he asked:

‘Were you only in Morocco?'

‘That's right, just Morocco.'

‘Working?'

‘No, just travelling.'

‘That must have been quite an adventure.'

I paused for a moment before saying:

‘Indeed it was.'

When I finally landed in Buffalo, Morton was there to greet me. He gave me a paternal hug and said I looked a lot better than he had expected.

Morton being Morton he didn't push for details. En route to my house he did inform me that the
Buffalo Sun
had reprinted international press service reports about my being found alive and well in Morocco. He showed me the clipping, which featured that official photograph of me shaking the hand of Inspector al-Badisi in Casablanca and looking the wrong side of shell-shocked. Morton said that there had been several calls at my office for interviews from former colleagues on the
Sun
.

‘I took the liberty of telling them you wanted to be left alone,' he said.

‘That was the right call.'

That first night back I found I couldn't cope with the sight of all the detritus of my life with Paul spread around our dusty, shadowy house. Sleep evaded me. The next morning I called the manager of a downtown hotel whose accounts I had helped to straighten out. I asked him if he could give me a rate on one of his apartment suites for a few weeks and he got back to me thirty minutes later with a very reasonable price. I moved in that afternoon. I then contacted my doctor who told me to get over to her immediately. Dr Hart had been my physician for a decade. A smart, no-nonsense woman in her late fifties; direct, canny, but also sympathetic. I could see her taking in the state of my face when I walked into her office. I asked if she had followed my disappearance in the press.

‘Of course, not that there was much in the way of detail, except that you and your husband had gone missing. And then I saw the report yesterday in the paper that you'd been found.'

I told Dr Hart about the insomnia and the sense of oppressive darkness that had taken hold of me the last few nights. I came clean with her about the revelation that had seen me indirectly confront Paul with his betrayal of me. I also told her about the abduction and rape. But I stopped short of revealing what I had done in response to this attack. That was a secret which I knew I couldn't share with anybody. Not just because the Moroccan authorities had conveniently excised it from the narrative, but also because a secret shared (even with the most trustworthy of friends or professionals) is no longer a secret. Even Assistant Consul Conway – who clearly knew the truth of the matter – reiterated her advice when she left me: