Michael Pearce - A dead man in Tangier

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Although how we shall manage without you, I don’t know. You’ve been here right from the start. Bossu brought you with him, didn’t he? We’ve always thought of you as Bossu’s man.’

‘That is just the trouble, sir,’ said Mr Bahnini.

‘Mind if I have a quick look?’ said Seymour.

Mr Bahnini showed him into Bossu’s office. It was full of potted palms. They were everywhere. There were two by the window, as if Bossu couldn’t stand the harsh daylight, two either side of his desk, and others scattered around the room. Two were hanging over a long divan, two more stood beside easy chairs, and there was one near a low coffee table.

Seymour went over to the desk and tried it. The drawers were open but there was little of interest in them. Few papers of any kind. No desk diary, as far as he could see.

‘You kept his diary?’

‘In so far as one was kept. Mr Bossu didn’t work by journal appointments. He liked to drop in on people, meet them in hotels over a drink. It was very hard to tie him down, sir.’

Beside the desk was a filing cabinet. Seymour tried it but it was locked.

‘I have the key, sir,’ said Mr Bahnini.

He went out of the office and returned with a small brown envelope.

‘The keys were on his person, sir, when he was found. Mr Macfarlane took charge of all his private belongings. The keys were among them. He brought them back and deposited them with me. The envelope has not been opened.’

When Seymour opened the filing cabinet he found it largely empty. There were just a few scraps of paper, leaves torn from a pad, with some notes scribbled on them. Seymour looked at them and then, for the moment, put them in his pocket.

Macfarlane had invited him home to dinner. When they got there his wife had just finished putting the children to bed. Macfarlane went up to kiss them goodnight and Mrs Macfarlane collapsed with a drink on the divan. She was a small, bright, birdlike woman, Scottish, like her husband.

‘Well, Mr Seymour,’ she said, ‘how do you find us?’

He took her to be referring to Morocco as a whole.

‘A strange mixture,’ he said. ‘Strange, but interesting.’

‘It is that,’ she said. ‘And sometimes I think it’s getting stranger.’

‘As the French move in?’

‘As the West moves in. I think I liked it more as it was. Dirty and barbarous. Often cruel. But, somehow, authentic. Itself.’

‘You liked it under the Parasol?’

She laughed.

‘Life under the Parasol was not that special,’ she said drily. ‘Especially at court. Diplomats see a lot of courts, and they’re not always the most interesting places to see. When we came out here first the Sultan was very young. Just a child, really. And he made the whole court a nursery, a kind of playroom, as my parents would have called it.

‘At one time he developed a craze for bicycle polo. Bicycles were a new thing then. He got the whole court to play, even the Viziers. Even-’ she laughed — ‘some of the Consuls. My husband, for instance. Although he quite liked it. Actually, I would like to have played, myself. We used to play it as children at home. But, of course, as a woman I wouldn’t do it here. The court became very indulgent but not quite that indulgent! This is, after all, a Muslim country.

‘And, as in many Eastern countries, the Sultan had absolute power. Even if he was just a child. And because his power was absolute, he thought he could do anything. They all had to obey his will. And if his will was to play bicycle polo all day, well, so be it.

‘He had no sense of — well, measure. For example, they were always smashing the bicycles up. Well, that was no problem. He would just order the Vizier to get new ones. And everything was like that. Money was no object. If he suddenly felt he wanted something, he would just get it. Money simply ran through his fingers. He thought it would never run out. But, of course, it did. And that enabled the French to come in. It’s always like that. It was just the same in Egypt under the old Khedive when we were there.’

‘He’s still like that, is he?’

‘Less so now. The French have hemmed him in. Controlled his expenditure. And, besides, he’s grown up a bit. But it’s too late. He’s lost all his support. His capriciousness has turned everybody against him. Even his own half-brother.’

She sighed.

‘So you see,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t always that good under the Parasol. I liked it as it was but maybe it had to change. And you could have worse people coming in than the French. I sometimes think that the French and the Moroccans have a lot in common. Their cultures are more traditional than ours, more formal, more polite, naturally courteous. When you go to a French household the children come round before going to bed to shake hands. In a Moroccan family it’s rather like that, too. Whereas with my savages…!’

Macfarlane came downstairs and they went out into a little courtyard to dine. The house was an old Arab one, with a courtyard almost inside the house and boxed wooden windows looking down on it from above. A fountain played into a small pond and around the walls were cypresses and jasmine. As it grew darker the smell of the jasmine was joined by the scents of other flowers which opened only at night.

The meal was Arab, too, with hot, peppery soup and then various kinds of meats, served with rice and burning hot peppers. Afterwards, there was melon and iced orgeat, made of crushed almonds, milk and sugar.

Seymour was a little surprised. In his office Macfarlane had seemed so British. At home he seemed much more responsive to things Moroccan. Perhaps that was the effect of his job. More likely, thought Seymour, it was the effect of his wife.

She asked him if the hotel was comfortable.

‘Very,’ he said. ‘And the people are most helpful.’ He mentioned the receptionist.

‘Chantale,’ said Mrs Macfarlane, with a smile.

‘She seems very versatile.’

‘Aye, she is that,’ said Macfarlane.

‘She has to be,’ said Mrs Macfarlane. ‘She and her mother run that hotel between them and there can’t be a lot of money to spare.’

‘She’s a good lassie,’ Macfarlane conceded.

‘A journalist, too, you said,’ said Seymour.

‘She would like to be. But it’s not easy if you’re a woman and in an Arab country.’

‘She writes mostly for the French newspapers,’ said Mrs Macfarlane.

‘It’s still not easy.’

‘She seems to have good French contacts,’ said Seymour. ‘I saw her with the pig-sticking crowd and then again, I think, at the Resident-General’s.’

‘She would have been going to see Cecile,’ said Mrs Macfarlane.

‘Cecile?’

‘The Lamberts’ daughter. They were at school together.’

‘Not altogether happily in Chantale’s case,’ said Macfarlane.

‘She rebelled against it. It was a convent school and too strict for her. So soon after her father’s death. But what could they do? There aren’t many schools here and they wanted it to be a French one. The Lamberts were very good to her. They treated her like another daughter. She’s always been very close to them.’

‘She wanted to be independent, though.’

Mrs Macfarlane laughed.

‘She would, wouldn’t she? But it’s a good thing they got that hotel. It gives them a base of their own, and you need that if you’re a woman in Morocco.’

‘Aye, but will it do for her in the long run?’

‘Why shouldn’t it?’

‘You always feel that she’s champing at the bit.’

‘Isn’t that inevitable?’

‘She ought to go to France,’ said Macfarlane.

‘But would that work out any better? It would be the same thing only the other way round.’