One hundred and fourteen

The prison van was constructed from armoured steel, the kind used in bullion trucks. It had a bullet-proof glass windscreen, and a sealed compartment for the convict. There was even a spray nozzle mounted on the ceiling, through which nerve gas could be piped in the event of an attempted break-out.

The van made its way through the gauntlet of security checks, but never once were the doors opened, for fear that the prisoner would try to escape.

Hicham Omary spent the entire journey crouched on the floor, his hands still cuffed behind his back. Thankfully, the blindfold had been untied at the last minute, before he was loaded in.

For the move, Omary had been dressed in fluorescent orange overalls. In the unlikely event he managed an escape, it would be easier for a sniper to spot him and to bring him down.

But escape was the last thing occupying Omary’s thoughts.

Incarceration had taught him to mind-wander. Staring at a fixed point on the floor or the wall, he would begin the spiral down through layers of interwoven memory. The technique tended to take him to the bedrock of his youth, played out in the carefree streets of Casablanca’s downtown.

All of a sudden he was playing marbles in the dust.

There were three of them – Adil, Hassan and he. For an entire summer they spent almost every minute together. How old could they have been?

Omary squinted to see the detail. Seven? Eight?

They always went to the same place – a disused cinema across from the old Christian church, not far from the Hyatt. Through that long scorching summer they had made it their den.

They called it Dar Majnoun, ‘House of the Possessed’.

Sometimes they used to rip up the floorboards and set fire to them, or smoke cigarettes cadged from the old winos in the nearby bars, or scrawl their names on the walls with sticks blackened in the fire.

For Omary, the den was part of his own fantasy, of being a Berber warrior, protecting the family’s homestead in the centuries before the Arabs came.

One night they all cut their forearms with a penknife and pressed the wounds together, swearing an oath of life-long fraternity, a friendship bonded by blood.

The van hit a bump and Omary’s memory was jolted fast-forward.

He was much older now – twenty-two or -three.

He had a little office in Derb Omar, not much more than a lean-to up on the roof of a disused warehouse. But to him it was the beginning of great things.

He could see himself in there as though it were yesterday.

Piles of papers from deals he had already done. There were boxes of stock – plastic toys from Hong Kong and women’s lingerie from southern Spain. And there were half a dozen tea crates packed with vials of cheap perfume.

They were minuscule, holding no more than a few drops of the precious liquid, and so were affordable to the middle class. Omary, who had dreamt up the scent himself, called it l’Eau de Topaz. The fragrance was a massive hit – so much so that the black market price was ten times what he sold it for.

The van took a sharp turn and the floor rattled hard.

Where were Adil and Hassan right then, he wondered? Where were his blood brothers in his time of need?

Omary frowned, then let out a slow sigh. He knew the answer but had somehow suppressed it, forcing it to the back of his mind.

Hassan had been arrested for stealing a Frenchman’s car, and gone to jail, so beginning a career of petty crime. Their paths had crossed from time to time in the early years, Hassan begging for cash or imploring him for a job. Each time he turned up he was more derelict, ravaged by the woes of drugs and drink.

And Adil?

He had stowed away on a cargo ship to Copenhagen, and had sent a smudged postcard from Vladivostok a year or two later. He claimed to have found true love with a girl from the Ukraine, a girl with emerald green eyes. Omary had written back to the address at the bottom of the card. But he never heard anything more.

There was a rumble of thunder in the distance.

Then the rain started as a light shower, but quickly turned torrential. The clatter of it on the roof was somehow comforting, as though it was a link with nature, a reminder that there was more to life than incarceration in cell blocks conjured from concrete and steel.

The road descended a steep incline, the tyres whirring as they corkscrewed down through a series of sharp turns.

Concentrate hard and Omary could just about hear the guards up front.

They were discussing a local soccer team, their accents from the villages in the hills outside Marrakech. He struggled for a deep breath and coaxed his head down towards the sheet steel floor.

The lower down he crouched, the less strained his breathing.

For a long while the vehicle rumbled down an even stretch of road. It sounded like a highway. But, as far as Omary could tell, they hadn’t stopped at a tollbooth.

Suddenly, an alarm sounded in the distance, a high-tech electronic buzz. It was followed by a grating noise, a series of clunks, a thud, and by a whistle sounding off.

The brakes were jolted hard, and the prison van stopped.

Then the ritual of opening the doors and securing the prisoner followed.

It took an age.

And each time it was acted out, Omary laughed to himself. If the recent experience had taught him one thing, it was that prison was nothing like it was in the movies.

In reality there was none of the James Bond bravado, the death-defying stunts to win freedom, or the sarcastic one-liners spat at the guards.

Real incarceration was an agony of uncertainty and jaw-dropping boredom, tempered with zeal... the zeal to go unnoticed.

Omary was taken straight to a holding cell. It was spacious, very cold, and smelled of sulphur.

On the far wall were arranged half a dozen wooden batons. They were well-worn but good quality – imported – with nylon straps to allow them to be swung from the officer’s hand.

A guard with a wart-ridden face took the prisoner’s fingerprints. After that he made him sign five or six blank sheets of paper. Omary assumed that they were for producing false confessions, if needed at a later date.

An hour later, he was in his new cell.

It was large, fifteen feet square, with a squat toilet in the corner, and a broken wooden packing crate, a piece of furniture that could be used as a stool, or almost a bed.

Best of all though, there was a view on the outside world. It wasn’t much – not more than three or four inches across. But if he pressed his nostrils up to it, Omary could breathe pure air.

Breaking down in tears, he fell to his knees.

‘Thank you, thank you!’ he whispered over and over. ‘Thank you for this luxury!’