Bronson was hot and irritated, but he was also puzzled. Although the bend was quite sharp, it was nothing that a reasonably competent driver couldn't have coped with. And the road was clear and open. Despite the bend, visibility was excellent, so any driver approaching the spot should have been able to see the curve well in advance and been able to anticipate it. But the two parallel skid marks that marred the smooth tarmac, their course heading straight for the point where the Renault had left the road, showed clearly that Ralph O'Connor hadn't done so.
Down below the road, the place where the Mégane had finally stopped rolling was obvious. A collection of bits and pieces of the vehicle – glass, plastic, twisted pieces of metal and torn sections of ruined panels – lay scattered in a rough circle around a patch of discoloured sand.
Apart from its location, some thirty feet below the edge of the road, it was typical of dozens of accident sites Bronson had been called to over the years, a sad reminder of how a moment's inattention could reduce a perfectly functioning vehicle to nothing more than a pile of scrap metal. Yet something about this accident site didn't quite ring true.
He bent down and looked at the line of rocks, roughly cemented into the very edge of the tarmac which, according to Talabani, the O'Connors' car had hit. The Renault, he'd noted back at the garage, was a silver-grey colour, and he could clearly see flakes and scrapes of grey paint on the rocks. Two of them had been dislodged from their concrete bases, presumably by the impact of the car as it slid sideways off the road.
It all seemed to make sense – yet why had the accident happened? Had Ralph O'Connor been drunk? Had he fallen asleep at the wheel? It was, he noted again, glancing up and down the road, a sharp bend, but it wasn't that sharp.
'You've explained what you think happened here,' he said to Talabani, but the Moroccan police officer interrupted him.
'Not so, Sergeant Bronson. We know exactly what happened. There was a witness.'
'Really? Who?'
'A local man was driving along this road in the opposite direction, towards Rabat. He saw the Renault come around that corner, much too fast, but he was far enough away to avoid being involved in the accident. He was the first on the scene and summoned the emergency services on his mobile phone.'
'Could I speak to him?' Bronson asked.
'Of course. He has an address in Rabat. I'll call my people and tell him to come to the station this evening.'
'Thanks. It might help when I have to explain what happened to the O'Connors' family.' Breaking the kind of news that irrevocably wrecks lives was, Bronson knew, one of the worst things a police officer ever had to do.
He looked again at the stones and the road at the apex of the bend, and noticed something else. There it was – a scattering of small black flakes, at the very edge of the road and barely visible against the dark of the tarmac.
He glanced around, but Talabani was again talking to the police driver, and both men were facing the other way.
Kneeling down, Bronson picked up a couple of the flakes from the verge and slipped them into a small plastic evidence bag.
'You've found something?' Talabani asked, moving away from the police car and coming back towards him.
'No,' Bronson replied, slipping the bag into his pocket and standing up. 'Nothing important.'
Back in Rabat, he stood by himself in the parking area of the police garage and stared again at the wreck of the O'Connors' Renault Mégane, wondering if he was seeing things that simply weren't there.
Bronson had asked Talabani to drop him at the garage so he could get some photographs of the remains of the vehicle, and the Moroccan had agreed. Bronson used his digital camera to take a dozen or so pictures, paying particular attention to the left-hand-side rear of the car, and the driver's door, which he pulled out of the wreck and photographed separately.
The vehicle's impact with the rock-strewn floor of the dried-up river bed – the wadi – had been so massive that every panel on the Renault was warped and dented, with huge scrape marks caused either by the accident itself or by the subsequent recovery operation.
Talabani had explained the sequence of events. Because it was perfectly obvious to everyone that the two occupants of the car were dead, the Moroccan police officer sent to the accident site had ordered the ambulance crew to wait, and had instructed a photographer to record the scene with his digital Nikon, while he and his men hadexamined the vehicle and the road above the crash site. Talabani had already supplied copies of all these pictures to Bronson.
Once the bodies had been cut out of the wreck and taken away, the recovery operation had started. No crane had been available at the time, and so they'd been forced to use a tow-truck. The wadi was inaccessible to vehicles anywhere along that stretch of highway, so they'd parked the tow-truck at the very edge of the road and used the power of its winch to pull the car over onto its wheels. Then they'd dragged the Renault up the steeply sloping bank of the wadi to the road, and finally hauled it onto the back of the low-loader.
Bronson had no idea what damage had been caused by the crash itself, and what by the subsequent recovery. Without specialist examination – and that would mean shipping the car to Britain for a forensic vehicle examiner to check it, and God knows how much that would cost or how long it would take – he couldn't be certain of his conclusions. But there were a number of dents in the Renault's left-hand-side doors and rear wing that looked to him as if they could have been caused by a sideways impact, and that didn't square with what Talabani had told him, and what the witness had apparently reported seeing.
Bronson reached into his pocket and pulled out the evidence bag containing the flakes of very dark paint he'd picked up at the bend in the road. They looked fresh but that, he realized, meant nothing. There might have been a dozen fender-benders along that stretch of road, and the paint flecks could have come from any accident. In Britain, the rain would have washed them away in a matter of hours or days but in Morocco rain was an infrequent event.
But in just one place on the driver's door of the Renault he'd found a dark scrape, possibly blue, perhaps black.
Bronson was just walking into his hotel when his mobile rang.
'Have you got a fax machine out there?' DCI Byrd asked, his voice loud and clearly irritated.
'This hotel has, I suppose. Hang on, and I'll get you the number.'
Ten minutes later, Bronson was looking at a poor quality fax that showed an article printed in a Canterbury local paper, with a dateline of the previous day. Before he could read it, his mobile rang again.
'You've got it?' Byrd demanded. 'One of the officers at Canterbury spotted it.'
Bronson looked again at the headline: KILLED FOR A LUMP OF CLAY? Underneath the bold type were two pictures. The first showed Ralph and Margaret O'Connor at some kind of function, smiling into the camera. Below that was a slightly fuzzy image of an oblong beige object with incised markings on it.
'Did you know anything about this?'
Bronson sighed. 'No. What else does the article say?'
'You can read it yourself, and then go and talk to Kirsty Philips and ask her what the hell she and her husband think they're playing at.'
'You mean, when I get back to Britain?'
'No, I mean today or tomorrow. They should have arrived in Rabat about the same time you did. I've got her mobile number for you.'