The Moses Stone by James Becker Read Free Book Online

get out of your way.”

8
     
    Bronson stood on the dusty, unmade verge of a road about ten miles outside Rabat.
    Above him, the sun marched across a solid blue sky, not the slightest wisp of cloud anywhere, the air still and heavy. The heat was brutal after the air-conditioned cool of the police car, now parked some twenty yards down the road. He’d discarded his jacket, which had helped a little, but already he could feel the sweat starting to run down his body inside his shirt, an uncomfortable and unfamiliar feeling. He knew he didn’t want to be out there any longer than absolutely necessary.
    It was, Bronson reflected, looking up and down the road, a pretty desolate place to meet one’s maker. The ribbon of tarmac stretched arrow-straight in both directions from the bend beside the wadi . On both sides of the road, the sandy desert floor, studded with rocks, stretched out in uneven ripples and waves, devoid of any kind of vegetation apart from the occasional stunted bush. Below the road, the narrow chasm of the dried-up riverbed looked as if it hadn’t seen a drop of moisture in decades.
    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 Megane 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 discolored 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-gray color, and he could clearly see flakes and scrapes of gray 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, toward 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