Free A House in Fez: Building a Life in the Ancient Heart of Morocco by Suzanna Clarke Page B

that?’
    I hadn’t. I’d arranged for them to be changed after the final payment to the vendors, but Larbi had had my keys since then.
    ‘If your keys have been in Larbi’s possession, it’s safe to assume he has copies,’ David said. ‘It’d be a good idea to change them before you have any kind of dispute with him.’
    It was good advice. The last thing I wanted was to be involved in a conflict, but unless I was willing to pay up and shut up, it seemed inevitable. It was possible Larbi would simply come and remove what he thought he was owed.
    ‘I think you need to insist on a meeting with the guardian and the translator, without Larbi,’ David said. ‘Don’t pay unless you meet him and are satisfied he was actually there.’
    This was along the same lines I’d been thinking, but it was reassuring to have it confirmed. I valued David’s good sense and support.
    I had never met anyone so wonderfully obsessive about old things as he was. He had started collecting antiques at the age of seven, going to auctions, fairs and antique shops with his mother. When I met his sister some months later she told me he’d been an odd child, always wanting to hang out with the old people across the road and hear their stories of days gone by, instead of playing with the other kids. I found this endearing. Even David’s mobile phone had an old-fashioned ring-tone.
    Next day, I called Larbi and said I wanted to meet the guardian. He didn’t miss a beat, although not surprisingly he wasn’t willing for the meeting to go ahead without him. I turned up at the appointed time, waited half an hour, but no one showed.
    A few nights later, I was in bed reading when there was a knock on the back door. At first I ignored it. It was around ten p.m. and I wasn’t expecting anyone at that hour. I wasn’t about to open the door at night to someone I didn’t know. But the knocking continued, louder and more insistent.
    ‘Who is it?’ I called out in French.
    There was no answer, just more knocking, so I called out again. This time a male voice said something about wanting to come in and look at my house. What the hell for, at this time of night? I didn’t think so.
    ‘No,’ I shouted. ‘I don’t know you.’
    The knocking stopped and I breathed a sigh of relief. But a couple of minutes later it began on the front door. Since getting there required going round several alleys, the man obviously knew the layout of the house. This time I didn’t answer. Then I heard Khadija calling.
    ‘Madame?’ Khadija and Abdul were having a conversation with whoever was outside.
    ‘
Non
,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know this man.’
    Some time later I thought I heard someone climbing the scaffolding in the back alley, where neighbours were having their wall painted. I knew the scaffolding wasn’t high enough to enable anyone to climb over my wall, if that was what he was trying to do, but I did not sleep well that night.
    I was still wondering who it could have been in the morning. The ghost guardian, come to claim his money? The creep who’d threatened me the other day? Some bored teenager with nothing better to do than go scare the bejesus out of the weird foreign woman? There were no other foreigners in this part of the Medina; they usually bought property in the more touristy areas at the top of the two tala’as. The mystery was never solved.

    A few days after this incident, my houseguests arrived. John and Nicole were travelling minstrels in a folk duo called Cloudstreet and were going from festival to festival in the United Kingdom during the summer. This was their first visit to Morocco, and was a good excuse to do some sightseeing myself.
    Fez, like all Islamic cities, is centred around the souks. We went first to the food souk in R’Cif, where hundreds of tiny stalls are piled with vibrantly fresh vegetables, fish, meat, olives, coffee, spices, sweets. The meat stalls often display the heads of camels or goats, and I had got in