Free The Moses Stone by James Becker Page A

much further.
    He ducked left, then right, but all the time his pursuers were slowly eroding his lead, catching him up. As Bronson reached a main road, he slowed slightly, scanning the traffic, looking for one particular kind of vehicle. Then he took off again, and ran into the road, weaving between slow-moving cars and trucks.
    Perhaps a hundred yards in front of him, a taxi had stopped to let out two passengers, and the instant before the driver pulled away, Bronson wrenched open the back door and leaped inside. He met the man’s startled gaze in the interior mirror.
    “Airport,” he gasped. “Quickly.” For good measure he repeated the request in French.
    The driver pulled out and accelerated, and Bronson slumped in the seat, sucking in great gulps of air, then looked back through the rear window. About forty yards behind, two figures were running along the pavement, but slowing down as the taxi gathered speed.
    Then they started speeding up. Bronson looked through the windscreen to see half a dozen stationary vehicles blocking the road in front. If the taxi stopped, he knew the men would catch him.
    “Take the next turning,” Bronson said, pointing.
    The driver glanced back at him. “That’s not the way to the airport,” he said, his English good but heavily accented.
    “I’ve changed my mind.”
    The driver swung the wheel. The side-street was mercifully almost empty of other traffic, and as the taxi sped down it, Bronson saw his pursuers stop at the end of the road to stare at the retreating vehicle.
    Ten minutes later, the taxi pulled to a halt in a street close to his hotel, and Bronson paid the fare, adding a generous tip.
     
    About ninety minutes later, in the security of his room in another Rabat hotel—he’d decided to move just in case his pursuers had followed him from his original lodging—he picked up his mobile and rang Maidstone police station.
    “What have you found, Chris?” Byrd asked, once Bronson was connected.
    “I’ve just been chased through the streets of Rabat by a gang of thugs who definitely didn’t just want my autograph.”
    “What? Why?”
    “I didn’t stop to ask. But I don’t believe that the O’Connors’ accident was quite as accidental as we thought it was.”
    “Oh, shit,” Byrd said. “That’s all we need.”
    Quickly, Bronson outlined his concerns about the accident and the damage to the Renault Megane, and then explained Margaret O’Connor’s habit of snapping anything that moved.
    “Kirsty Philips gave me copies of all the photographs her mother took here, and I spent an hour or so going through them. What really bothers me is that one of the men she photographed in the souk turned up as the only eyewitness to the accident on the road outside Rabat, and according to Kirsty another man in the same picture was found dead just outside the medina with a stab-wound in his chest. I think she photographed an argument in the souk that led to murder, which means the killer was almost certainly one of the people in the pictures she took.
    “And that,” Bronson finished, “is a pretty good motive for knocking off the two eyewitnesses and stealing the camera.”

14
     
    MYSTERY OF THE MISSING TABLET was the title of the short article on page thirteen of the Daily Mail . Bronson was able to read it thanks to Dickie Byrd and one of the fax machines at the Maidstone police station. Below the headline, the reporter asked the question: “Were British pensioners killed to recover priceless object?”
    The story was pretty much a straight rehash of what had appeared in the Canterbury evening paper, with a single addition Bronson was sure had been carefully incorporated in the text to give it an importance it didn’t deserve. Toward the end of the article, when the reporter was discussing the value of the clay tablet, he stated that a “British Museum expert” had been unavailable for comment, but managed to imply this was slightly sinister, as if the “expert”