The Man Between: The gripping new spy thriller you need to read in 2018. Charles Cumming
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he had gleaned from the letter, no dark conspiracy playing out on the streets of Casablanca. But it was impossible. He knew, in the way that you know that a friendship is doomed or a love affair coming to an end, that something was not quite right. He was sure that he was being manipulated. He was certain that he had been sent to Morocco for a purpose that had not yet been made clear to him. The chances of finding Bartok were so remote that the words of warning contained in Mantis’s letter – ‘IT IS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME BEFORE THEY FIND YOU’ – seemed to Carradine as vague and yet as terrifying as lines from a work of fiction. So why had he been handed such a task?
The taxi stopped at a set of lights. An elderly beggar came to the window, pressing his face against the glass. The driver swore in Arabic as the beggar knocked on the window, imploring Carradine to give him money. He dug around in his trouser pocket for some loose change and was about to roll down the window and pass the money to the beggar when the taxi accelerated down the street.
Carradine turned to see that the man had fallen over.
‘Stop!’ he shouted. ‘Problème! Arrêtez!’
The driver ignored him, made a right-hand turn and headed north towards the sea. Through the back window, Carradine could see the beggar being helped to his feet.
‘He fell,’ he said in French, thinking of Redmond and his failure to act.
‘They all fall,’ the driver replied. Ils tombent tous.
‘Pull over!’
Again Carradine’s request was ignored. ‘I want to go back,’ he said, lamenting the fact that his French was not good enough to make himself properly understood. ‘Take me back to the old man.’
‘Non,’ the driver replied. He wanted his fare, he wanted to take the tourist to the Corniche. ‘You don’t go back, mister,’ he said, now speaking in English. ‘You can never go back.’
By the time Carradine had persuaded the driver to stop, it was too late. They had driven too far from the fallen man. As an expression of his annoyance, Carradine paid him off without a tip and covered the remaining mile on foot.
He found a restaurant on the Corniche where he continued to drink. On top of the two martinis, he bought a bottle of local white wine followed by successive vodka tonics at a bar across the street. Falling in with a group of businessmen from Dijon who knew a place nearby, Carradine found himself at a table in a packed nightclub on the oceanfront drinking Cuba libres until five in the morning. He eventually stumbled back to his hotel at dawn, his mind cleared of worry, his doubts put to rest.
He woke up at midday and ordered room service, necking two ibuprofen with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice followed by three black coffees courtesy of the Nespresso machine in his room. There was a spa on the third floor of the hotel. Carradine booked a hammam
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