A Death in the Medina

by James von Leyden

Genres: International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

' Clever, captivating and colourful; an absorbing thriller rich in atmosphere' Philip Gwynne Jones, author of The Venetian Game and Vengeance in Venice Death stalks the medina of Marrakech . . . Marrakech, August. It is the start of Ramadan, the hottest in memory. Among the few foreigners left in the sweltering city are a riad owner, her French boyfriend and an English girl whose bag has been stolen after a hen weekend. At the local commissariat 24-year old detective Karim Belkacem is struggling to fast while holding down two jobs to pay for his sister's wedding. On the day that the English girl comes to him for help, a Moroccan girl is found dead, her body dumped in a handcart. Investigating, Karim uncovers a world of shadowy predators and ancient secrets hidden behind the high walls of the medina.

Release date: August 1, 2019

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

The man stopped pushing and stood up to catch his breath. Despite the fierce afternoon heat he was wearing a black jellaba, the hood over his head, and sweat was dripping from his chin. He glared at the handcart. The wheels were of unequal size and the constant effort of pushing harder on the left side was giving him a blister. He had half a mind to leave the cart where it was but, with a sigh, he grasped the handles and set off again. He collided with a lamppost, dislodging the stack of cardboard in the cart and causing some of the sheets to slide off. Swearing, he walked around, rearranged the cardboard and started up again.

At the traffic lights he stared at the ground as a bus came to a halt. The passengers, pressed against the windows, were too hungry or exhausted to give him a second glance. He crossed the road carefully. It took him three hard shoves to get the wheels onto the kerb on the other side.

The rush hour traffic had dwindled by the time he reached the city walls. It was half an hour before sunset and the white-belted policeman who usually directed traffic had gone home. The man pushed the cart along an alley of high, windowless buildings. He had got used to the odd-sized wheels by now and the cart only scraped the walls of the alley once. Two boys ran out of a house ahead of him, laughing and pulling on each other’s T-shirts, and disappeared into another house a few doors up. Passing the open doorway, he heard the clatter of plates and a woman’s voice, ‘Ara al-hobz a Yasmina oo l-qahwa! Fetch the bread, Yasmina! And the coffee!’ The smell of freshly baked bread reminded him that he hadn’t eaten since daybreak.

When he emerged at Bab Taghzout the square was deserted. There were no motor scooters, street traders or donkeys to break the silence. The grocery and household goods stores were closed, a broom laid across the entrance to signal that the owner’s absence was only temporary. Quickening his pace, the man pressed on through the archway at the end of the square then turned left through two rows of shuttered workshops and through a final arch with a woodwork and stucco facade. Here, a few yards from the mosque, he halted. He wiped his eyes, then, as an afterthought, ran the sleeve of his jellaba over the cart handles. He lifted his palm to examine his blister and cursed.

A sudden crackle made him jump. The call to prayer had started. A moment later the call was taken up by the other mosques in the city.



Ten hours earlier

The first day is the hardest. Karim tried to swallow but swallowing requires a modicum of saliva and he had none. In a few hours, his lips would crack. By afternoon the griping pains would begin. He had only himself to blame. His mother had shaken him at dawn with a jug of water and said, ‘Shrob! Drink!’ Instead he had rolled over and gone back to sleep. By the time he woke again the sun had risen.

A fly buzzed on the windowsill. Karim watched it crawl up the pane, fall off, then crawl up again. The neighbourhood was full of flies. It was nothing to do with the rubbish – there wasn’t any rubbish nowadays, not with those shiny new cleaning vehicles that came whirring into the Jemaa with their jets and brushes – but as long as there were juice carts and fried food stalls and barrows piled with sticky dates, there would be flies. And it was only a few hundred yards from the square to the commissariat.

The desk to his right was empty. Abdou was spending Ramadan with his family in the Ourika Valley. The trees by the river would be heavy with figs. Karim imagined funnelling the soft flesh into his mouth, the juices running down his chin. ‘Astaghfiru Allah,’ he said quietly. I seek God’s forgiveness.

Down in the forecourt he could see the parking attendant covering the windscreen of the captain’s car with a piece of cardboard. It had been over forty degrees for twenty-six days now – the hottest, they said, since records began. Karim remembered that when he was a small boy he had seen a man collapse and die in the heat. It turned out that the man was diabetic and didn’t have to fast, but he had fasted anyway. Karim had asked his father, ‘What’s the point of fasting if he dies as a result?’ ‘Because he will go to heaven,’ his father answered. He said the words without conviction.

The fly careered around the room, bumped into the open door of the filing cabinet, zigzagged upwards and settled on a blade of the fan. When Karim had arrived at the commissariat eighteen months ago, fresh out of police college, he’d put in a request for the ceiling fan to be repaired. He’d filled out three forms, one for the captain’s secretary, one for the quartermaster and one for the maintenance department. Abdou and Noureddine had laughed, whether because getting anything fixed in the Sûreté was a joke, or because they scorned his need for womanly comforts, Karim still wasn’t sure.

Apart from the buzzing of the fly the only sound was the clack-clack-clack from Noureddine’s keyboard. The old man took Ramadan in his stride. He didn’t sigh,r fall asleep, or lose his temper. Was he hardened after years of practice? Or did he guzzle in secret? Karim immediately felt ashamed at the thought. Nour was a good man, a devout man, not like those so-called believers who closed their shutters during daylight and stuffed their mouths. If they did that in the street they would go to jail. He would see to it personally.

He opened his drawer and rummaged through an assortment of new-looking pens and watches. He took out one of the watches, adjusted the time, opened the ring binder on his desk and started reading.

1. Assess its weight

Both the head and the band of a Breitling chronograph are made from stainless steel. Because of this Breitling chronographs are usually heavy. In contrast, a fake Breitling may have a head or band that is quite light.

Karim’s eyelids drooped. The fly droned . . . the keyboard clacked . . . his thoughts drifted to Ayesha and Lalla Fatima. They would be chopping vegetables in the kitchen. How did they manage to prepare such delicious food without testing the seasoning? Perhaps, when evening came, everyone was in such a hurry to eat that they didn’t notice details like seasoning. When a hungry lion tore into the flesh of a gazelle did it stop to ask for salt?

There was a clatter: the watch had fallen on the floor. Karim opened his eyes. He checked to see if the old man had noticed but he was still clack-clack-clacking away.

Tomorrow, God willing, the fast would get easier. At least he wasn’t alone. All over the Maghreb, all over the ummah, men and women were abstaining from eating, smoking, drinking and engaging in profane activities. Of course, there would be accidents. Last year there had been nine hundred traffic accidents in Marrakech alone. But there would be few crimes. Who has the energy for crime when they have to fast for sixteen hours a day?

He heard laughter from the staircase. Women’s voices . . . British – or American? Despite taking English classes for two years Karim found it hard to tell the difference. He slipped the watch on his wrist then got to his feet. Too hasty! He clutched the side of his desk to steady himself. There was a knock at the door.

‘Bonjour?’

Without waiting for a reply, a girl stepped into the room. She was European, brown-haired, about twenty, with large sunglasses and baggy cotton trousers. Her shoulders were sunburned and there was a half-full bottle of water in her hand. Two other girls followed. One was tall – taller than Karim – and wore a cowboy-style hat and tight-fitting T-shirt. The other had long blonde hair tied in a bunch, bracelets on both wrists and a purple sarong around her hips. Karim recognised the type. They came on the cheap flights from Europe, haggled for trinkets in the souks then swept off to Essaouira or the mountains.

‘Parlez-vous anglais?’ The brown-haired girl looked from one policeman to the other.

Noureddine pointed at Karim and carried on typing. Karim was thrown into confusion. Elsewhere in Marrakech Western women with bare thighs and plunging necklines were nothing special, but in the commissariat they were almost unheard of. Like exotic animals escaped from their natural habitat, their features were magnified, heightened. Karim’s gaze was drawn to the hips of the tall girl, to her bronzed midriff, the tattoo of a cat chasing a mouse down towards her—

‘Do you speak English?’ the girl repeated.

Karim blinked. ‘A little. Please sit. Let me . . .’ He fetched three tubular metal chairs, wincing with pain as one of them banged his shin, and placed them opposite his desk. The brown-haired girl sat down and took a drink.

‘I want to report a theft. They stole my bag, my wallet, my phone, my passport, everything.’

‘You need to report it to the police judiciare, the tourist police on the square Jemaa.’

‘There was a queue,’ the girl said curtly.

Karim gave the slightest of nods. He unscrewed his fountain pen, wondering if the girls could tell the difference between a real Mont Blanc and a fake.

‘What is your name?’

‘Melanie Murray.’

Karim put the pen to paper but no ink came out. He shook the pen and tried again. He replaced the pen on his desk and booted up his ancient computer. ‘Melanie . . .’

‘Murray. M-U-R-R-A-Y.’ The girl stood up and stared at the computer screen. ‘No, not Murray Melanie. Melanie is my first name.’

Karim ignored her. He turned to the other two girls. ‘Your names, please.’

‘Emma Stephenson.’

‘Julie Stassinopoulos,’ said the tall girl with the cowboy hat. ‘S-T-A-S-S-I-N-O-P-O-U-L-O-S.’

‘Passports?’

‘Mine was stolen. Like I told you,’ Melanie snapped.

The other girls handed over their documents to Karim. The passports felt warm and damp. He wedged one in the back of his keyboard and started tapping. ‘Do you have photocopies?’

‘Why would we have photocopies of our passports?’ Julie asked irritably.

‘Look, is this really necessary?’ said Melanie. ‘You’ve put the information into your computer. Plus – it was my things that were stolen. You don’t need their details!’

‘If you report an incident you must show proof of who you are.’

Melanie leapt to her feet. ‘Hello! That’s me! It’s nothing to do with them. They didn’t have their stuff nicked!’

Karim took the passports and stood up. ‘Please wait here.’ He walked out of the room and down the steps, glad to be away from the troublesome women with their revealing clothes and loud voices.

In the ground-floor office the heat was even more oppressive. The smell of sweat caught in Karim’s nostrils. A civilian in a short-sleeved gandora robe was talking in a low voice to an officer. Another policeman with pockmarked cheeks was slumped in a nearby chair, asleep.

‘Salaam ou alikum,’ said Karim. No one stirred.

While he waited for the photocopier to warm up he leafed through one of the passports. There were stamps from India, Vietnam, the United States, Australia and Indonesia. Karim didn’t know anyone who had been outside the Maghreb apart from his cousin Majid who lived in France. He checked the time on his chronograph. The word chronograph appealed to him. He liked the weight it added to his wrist. It felt heavy, reassuring. He made two copies of the documents and turned off the machine. As he left the room he was aware of the other men watching him.

When he got back to the office Nour had left. Perhaps the old man had gone to pray. Or he had felt uncomfortable being alone with three Western girls. Karim handed back the passports, sat down and flexed his fingers. ‘Please continue.’

‘It happened last night,’ Melanie said. ‘We were walking across the Jemaa el-whatsitsname –’

‘Jemaa el Fna,’ Karim said, typing the location and ‘31 July’.

‘It was quite late, about one o’clock.’

Karim deleted ‘31 July’ and typed ‘1 August’.

‘We were a bit drunk.’

Karim frowned. He knew that Western women drank alcohol. But on their own, after midnight?

‘It was my hen party,’ said Emma.

‘What is hen party?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Hen – like chicken?’

Julie threw back her head and laughed, a rich, hearty laugh that welled up from her belly. Karim had never heard a woman laugh like that before.

Emma explained. ‘When a girl gets married – in England – she has a hen party. She invites all her girlfriends and they have a night out. I thought it might be fun to go to Marrakech for the weekend, just the three of us.’

‘You come to Marrakech to do your chicken party?’

‘It’s called a hen party – Jesus Christ!’ Melanie jumped up, knocking over her chair. ‘Can we get this done? We’re in a hurry! We have to go to the airport!’

‘Of course.’ Karim returned her stare. What were her problems compared to his? ‘Which riad you stay at?’

‘Dar Zuleika. The staff gave us a map but we got lost.’

Karim nodded. When he was a boy he used to guide tourists out of the medina for a dirham or two. Now the local kids asked for twenty. He had even heard a boy demand sixty – more than most Moroccans earned in a day!

‘We were on our way home after a night out at a club. A young guy asked if he could help. We said yes.’

‘This guy – what he look like?’

‘All Moroccan men look the same,’ muttered Julie.

‘He had a blue Italia football shirt,’ said Melanie, ‘and bad teeth.’

Karim ran his tongue reflexively over his upper teeth. ‘How old this guy?’

‘Twenty-four? Twenty-five? I don’t know! I was tired!’

‘And then what happen?’

‘He took us along one alley, then another, until we came to a dead end. I said, “This isn’t Dar Zuleika.” He grabbed my shoulder bag – he was gone in a second.’

‘What was in your bag?’

‘My phone – a white iPhone – my passport, my boarding pass and all my credit cards.’

‘I understand, you want to make insurance claim.’ Karim’s tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. He felt as if his saliva glands had been removed by a malicious djinn.

‘No!’ wailed Melanie. ‘Well, yes, I suppose I do – but that’s not the point! I want my phone back. It’s got all my pictures, the pictures of our last night together! And I’ve lost my passport!’

Emma checked her watch. ‘We should go.’

Melanie gave Karim an angry look. ‘I’m going to be stranded in this effing city without money or passport for days! Do you understand?’

Karim made a mental note to look up the word effing in his dictionary. He loaded a sheet of paper into his printer. ‘You need to buy a timbre, a stamp. Twenty dirhams.’

‘What then?’

‘Go to consul, get new passport.’

‘How long will that take?’ Melanie cried.

Karim shrugged. He passed the paper across his desk. ‘Please sign.’



Marrakech Menara Airport was quiet. The week before, the terminal had hummed with middle-class Marrakchis keen to escape Ramadan. Now the place was quiet apart from a handful of tourists, porters and desk clerks. The doors of the arrivals lounge opened and a smartly dressed woman with dark hair and sunglasses came out into the blinding sunlight.

The taxi drivers sprang into action. Où allez-vous, madame? Palmeraie, Guéliz, Hivernage?

A scuffle broke out between two of the drivers. An officious-looking man with a walkie-talkie walked through their midst, took the woman’s suitcase and escorted her with an air of authority to the taxi at the head of the queue. He placed the case in the boot of the car, opened the rear passenger door and held out his palm with a smile. The woman ignored him as she took her seat.

The driver grinned in his rear-view mirror. ‘First time Marrakech?’

‘J’habite ici. Bab Taghzout. Je connais le tarif – soixante dirhams. If you ask for more I’ll report you to the police.’ The driver’s smile faded.

Kay McKenzie gazed happily out of the window. Her shopping trip to Cairo had been a success. She had acquired two Byzantine crosses, an inlaid mother-of-pearl box, an eighteenth-century candleholder, a Coptic textile and a portfolio of 1920s gelatin photographic prints. Sébastien had been right. The political turmoil had created a once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity. Even the antique dealer in Zamalek had been in no mood to haggle.

She had her hands full in the week ahead: close the riad for the holidays, start arranging the boutique, meet a client, organise Sébastien’s birthday party. But that was how she liked it. She needed projects, as she told her friends, preferably several on the go at once.

Her phone pinged. It was a text from a guest unable to make the party. That was the downside of holding a party in the hottest month of the year: everybody who was anybody had left town.

The familiar sight of the Koutoubia came into view. It was so simple, so stately, compared with the minarets of Cairo. As they drove towards it, the roses along the roadside were a sea of colour. On the horizon the Atlas mountains shimmered in the haze. Yes, she was glad to be back. This was her town.

She noticed a billboard promoting a condominium development. L’appartement de vos rêves à partir de 100,000 Dhs! Photoshopped on the poster was a woman with a plunging neckline, a glamorous actress whom Kay recognised from an American TV show. She shook her head in disbelief. The new development was aimed at a mainly Muslim clientele. Which marketing genius had decided that the best way to woo them was with an image of a woman showing off her tits?

Ten minutes later the taxi dropped her at Bab Taghzout. The square was empty in the afternoon heat. The merchants had retreated into the dark interiors of their shops. An onion seller was asleep under his barrow. In a butcher’s hatch flies swarmed around an unrecognisable hunk of flesh. The only sign of life came from two boys crouched under the bzar trees, poking a dead bird. They looked up when they saw Kay step out of the taxi and half-heartedly asked for un dirham.

Kay’s spirits sank. The regeneration of the medina was supposed to be improving run-down neighbourhoods like Bab Taghzout. Kay wondered what her guests must think, fresh off the plane, their heads filled with notions of dreamy minarets and Arabian Nights-style palaces, when they clapped eyes on the festering rubbish and crumbling, graffiti-strewn walls. Her gloom deepened when she spotted Driss waiting by the rubbish dumper, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt. What was the point of designing uniforms for the staff if they didn’t bother to wear them?

Driss was a recent hiring, lured from a rival riad with the offer of a job as operations manager. Seeing him in casual clothes, striding ahead with her suitcase, Kay was glad that she hadn’t made him manager. He was setting such a fast pace that the back of her dress was damp with sweat. Driss glanced over his shoulder, addressing her in French.

‘A guest wants to stay on.’

‘Who?’

‘Mademoiselle Murray.’

‘Pas possible. We’re closing the riad tonight.’

‘Her bag was stolen.’

‘Not my problem,’ Kay panted.

‘She cannot move out.’

‘Pourquoi pas?’

‘She has nowhere to go. Her passport was stolen as well.’

Kay glowered. This was an inconvenience she could do without. She followed Driss past a crumbling wall, sidestepped a beggar and stopped in a tiny alleyway outside a salmon-pink frontage, forty feet high, with fretwork-covered windows. Driss rang the bell. After a few seconds, the door swung open to reveal the smiling face of the housekeeper.

‘Bonjour Samira,’ Kay gasped. ‘S’il te plaît, get me something to drink before I die of thirst.’

She walked into the courtyard, sat under an orange tree and kicked off her heels. The fountain was playing and the air was heavy with the smell of lavender. A tortoise was making its way slowly through the bougainvillea litter. A maid came out with a glass of juice and a bowl of snacks. Her spirts restored, Kay rested her feet on a chair and gazed up at the palm tree that soared towards the sky. Of all the features of the riad, Sébastien told her, the hundred-foot palm tree was the one that made it special.

Sébastien had arrived in Marrakech in the 1990s just as Europeans were starting to buy up the city’s riads. He noticed their fondness for old-fashioned Moroccan building techniques like polished tadelakt plaster, chiselled stucco, filigree grills and wooden latticework. Soon he was employing five teams of craftsmen to cope with the demand. When Kay came to Marrakech a few years later, flush with money from her divorce settlement, Sébastien was the architect that everyone recommended. It was Sébastien who encouraged her to buy the crumbling pile near Sidi bel Abbès, Sébastien who demolished the interior walls, raised the ceilings and installed an illegal plunge pool, even going to the moqaddam at the planning department with a bundle of dirhams to get the necessary permission. Shortly after the refurbishment was complete Sébastien’s wife announced that she was returning to Paris with the children.

There was a splash from the swimming pool and Melanie’s face appeared above the surface. She lifted herself out of the water and sat in the sunshine, knees hunched to her chest, while a circle of water collected around her. She saw Kay looking at her and reached for her towel.

‘Oh, hello, you must be Kay. I’m Melanie.’

‘Our reluctant stayer-on.’

‘Did Driss tell you . . .?’

‘Yes. It’s really too bad.’

Melanie stood up. ‘I’ve been to the police. The consul was closed today but I’m going to see them tomorrow. Apparently they can issue me with a new travel document, or something, although it might take a day or two.’ For a few seconds, the only sound was the drip of water onto the hot tadelakt. ‘My friends left me some money so I should be OK for a few days.’

‘You can stay until the end of the week. On Friday I’m having a party so I’ll need you out of the riad. Oh, and the kitchen is closed so you’ll have to sort out your own meals.’

‘OK.’ Melanie gave a little wave and padded off, leaving a trail of water.

Kay reached down and picked up the tortoise. ‘Have you missed me?’ she cooed.



My Medina

(Extract from Kay’s blog)

Ramadan Mubarak! When I arrived in Marrakech Ramadan fell in winter. The days were short and cool. Now the days are sixteen hours long and the temperature is over forty degrees. Fasting is a real effort. As a Westerner you have to make allowances for the fact that the people around you are tired and irritable and prone to accidents. If some hapless individual burns your best saucepan, simply shrug your shoulders and say: ‘C’est le Ramadan.’ I was in the kitchen just now when our maid Aziza smashed an antique ceramic bowl on the floor. She looked at me, terrified. I just laughed. C’est le Ramadan!



It was mid-afternoon in the Palmeraie. In the shade of palm trees the camel boys lay dozing. In an hour or two they would rouse themselves, saddle their camels and holler at passing tourists to come and take a ride. For now, they were content to spend the long afternoon hours asleep. In the smart hotels and country clubs guests relaxed by the pool while uniformed waiters strode back and forth with iced drinks. Occasionally one of the guests would look up from their lounger and frown. A deep rumbling noise was disturbing the peace.

Half a mile away jackhammers, bulldozers and excavating machines were grinding up four hectares of red earth. To the sound of revving engines and beeping cranes, an army of builders was lining trenches, mixing cement and welding steel.

One of the cranes stood next to a high, domed building covered with scaffolding. Five workmen were at the foot of the scaffolding, grappling with a curved brass panel which they were attempting to attach to the sling of the crane. A tall Frenchman towered over the Moroccans like the crane above the building. The panel weighed half a ton and its curvature made it awkward to handle. The workmen held it upright while Sébastien, his sandy hair plastered to his forehead, shouted instructions to a foreman who relayed them to the workmen in barks of Arabic. Finally, they succeeded in fastening the panel and the foreman waved his arm at the crane operator. Sébastien watched, shielding his eyes with his forearm, as the jib of the crane swung over to the roof, the panel turning and flashing in the strong sunlight.

While he was watching, a boy came up to him and tugged at his sleeve. He pointed at a man in a jellaba standing by the gate. Sébastien nodded. When the panel was safely in place he walked down to the gate. The man in the jellaba showed him a large cardboard box with holes punched in the side. Sébastien peered through the holes and gave a broad smile.



The square at Bab Taghzout was coming back to life. With shouts and laughter, bare-chested youths splashed water at each other from a standpipe. Street vendors laid out watermelons and prickly pears on barrows. Women in headscarves settled down on the edge of the pavement to sell flatbreads still warm from the oven. One of the women stared as a yellow Renault 4 parked in front of her. It wasn’t the colour that attracted the woman’s attention: the car had no roof.

When Sébastien told the owner of his car repair shop that he wanted to couper le toit of his Renault 4 the owner replied that Sébastien should have his own head cut off for considering such a ridiculous idea. However, when the work was finished and the car had been sprayed bright yellow the owner had to admit that it had a certain beach-buggy charm. Wherever it went motorists hooted and gave thumbs-up signs. Passers-by took selfies when it was parked at the kerb. Isabelle, Sébastien’s ex-wife, refused to have anything to do with the car, declaring that Sébastien had ruined a perfectly good quatrelle and that, en plus, driving it around the dusty streets of Marrakech made her clothes dirty. When they separated, Isabelle took the Shogun back to Paris while Sébastien was left with the quatrelle and a pile of debt.

Sébastien reached into the back seat and lifted out the cardboard box. He headed into the bustling medina, peering around the side of the box every few seconds to avoid collisions. When he’d gone halfway he stopped to rest beside a vacant lot. A group of young men was playing football. They were stripped to their waists, yelling and charging around madly. Sébastien was fascinated by these displays of manic energy during Ramadan, the way youths liked to show off their toughness, their resilience to the rigours of fasting. The ball came bouncing towards him, closely followed by one of the boys. Sweat was running down his lean brown torso. Sébastien caught the ball, gazed at the boy for a moment then let the ball roll onto the ground. A breathless ‘merci mssyoo’ and the boy was gone.

Sébastien walked on until he reached Dar Zuleika. He placed the box on the ground behind him and knocked. A maid came to the door, her face blotchy and tear-stained. When Sébastien asked her what was wrong she turned away with a mumble. A few seconds later Kay appeared, smiling, and reached up to give Sébastien a kiss.

‘Aziza loo. . .