The Lost Letter from Morocco

About the Author

About the Publisher

Prologue (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)

Marrakech, Morocco – March 2009

Addy steps away from the window and runs her hand through her short red hair. She looks in the mirror and rubs a finger along the downy gingery growth of her eyebrows. She’ll need to pencil them in, but she’s used to that now. An expert.

The hotel room could be in London, Montréal or Philadelphia, the walls yellow-white, the furniture cheap wood, the bedcovers brown nylon. Only the framed desert print of a palm tree and a camel hints at the exotica outside in the Marrakech streets. Addy grabs her new digital camera off the chest of drawers and leans on the windowsill. Several storeys below, the hotel’s swimming pool shines like a turquoise kidney in the spring sunshine. A hotel is going up next door, the steel frame silhouetted against the blue sky. Men lean from scaffolding and shout as they haul up plastic buckets and pieces of metal. Addy focuses her lens and snaps several photos. Warming up. Getting into the groove. So many more images to capture in her camera before her visa expires in three months’ time. Then the book will be done and it’s back to London, God help her.

Chapter One (#u7f6f9bce-79cc-52de-a56f-637c5f0780c9)

London, England – January 2009

Addy watches the crimson poison run down the plastic tube that loops like a roller coaster through the disinfected air. Over the green vinyl arm of the chair, over her father’s old navy cable-knit jumper that she’s pulled on, until it disappears down the roll-neck to a tube inserted in her chest. She’s named it the Red Devil. Killing everything in its path. Good cells and bad cells. Hopefully more bad than good.

The chemo room is full today. The girl, Rita, lies back in her chair and watches a nurse insert a cannula into her hand. Her long curly black hair twists around her earbud wires and bunches on her shoulders where she leans against the beige vinyl. Addy grimaces and turns her face away. She raises her arms and examines the purple bruises yellowing like spilt petrol on her arm. Collapsed. Every single vein. They’ve had to insert a Hickman into the veins leading to her heart. She hides the tubes inside her bra. So much easier than the cannula. She’d recommend it to anybody.

‘Jesus fuckin’ Christ!’ Rita howls. ‘That fuckin’ hurt!’

Rita is only nineteen. Breast cancer sucks.

‘God, the lift was out again. I mean the one for normal people. Visitors aren’t allowed in the sick people’s lift, apparently. Where do they get these orderlies, anyway? Rude little bastards.’

Addy’s half-sister, Philippa, drops her Louis Vuitton sample bag onto the mottled green linoleum and dumps a stack of magazines onto Addy’s lap as she leans in to air kiss Addy’s cheeks.

‘You’re wet, Pippa.’

‘Yes. Blasted English weather.’

Philippa shrugs out of her Burberry raincoat and flaps it around, spraying Addy with the winter damp. She drapes the raincoat over the back of Addy’s chair and drags a metal-legged stool across the linoleum. She perches on the stool, her slender knees neatly together.

Philippa rifles through the magazines on Addy’s lap. She folds over a page of House & Garden and hands it to Addy.

‘I’m in it this month. That place I did for the Russians in Mayfair? God, what a trial. Your photos don’t look too shabby either.’

Addy examines the plush interiors – an artful mix of bespoke English sofas, pop art, Gio Ponti originals and Georgian antiques.

‘Well done, Pips. It’s good publicity for you.’

Philippa wrinkles her elegant nose. ‘Don’t call me that. You know I hate it. Your pictures are in House & Garden, Addy. Do you know what that means? It’s a fresh start. You should thank me. That little photo shop of yours was bogging you down. Just as well it went bust. I don’t know how you could stand doing those dreadful kiddie and doggie pictures.’

‘We can’t all be David Bailey.’

‘Well, indeed. I don’t understand why you feel so terrible about it closing. It’s a bloody recession. Everyone’s going bust. Even my dentist is downsizing, which tells you something. He’s had to sell his Porsche and buy an Audi. Not even a sports model.’

Addy stares at her sister. ‘It’s hard out there.’

‘Absolutely,’ Philippa says, missing the sarcasm in Addy’s voice. ‘There’s no shame in your business going bankrupt, so I wish you’d stop fretting. Frankly, it’s getting on my nerves.’

Addy drops the magazine into her lap and picks up Heat. She flips through the flimsy pages trying to spot a celebrity she’s heard of.

‘It’s easy for you to say, Pippa. You’ve got Alessandro’s divorce settlement to live off.’

Philippa folds her arms across her chest. ‘Money isn’t everything, Adela. Status and reputation are much more important.’ She draws her groomed eyebrows together. ‘Well, at least as important as money.’

‘I’ll tell that to the supermarket cashier next time I try to pay for my groceries with my reputation.’

Philippa takes the magazine out of Addy’s hands and places it neatly on top of a tin of Cadbury’s Roses chocolates someone has left on the metal table beside Addy’s chair.

‘I was reading that.’

‘Don’t be absurd. There’s nothing in there but tat.’ Philippa brushes a stray hair out of her eye with a pink lacquered fingernail. ‘Didn’t I tell you I’d set you on the right track, Addy? What good are strings if you can’t pull them?’

Philippa perches on the stool, straight-backed and attentive like a fashion editor in the front row of a catwalk show. Her grey tweed suit hugs her yoga’d and Pilate’d body, every dart and seam tweaked to perfection. How is it possible that they share the same DNA? Addy wonders. The pale, curvy, ginger-haired Canadian and the stylish English gazelle.

Addy taps her chest. ‘I was the one who got us the House & Garden gig, Pippa. I’m the one who sent the photos in on spec.’

Philippa’s eyebrows twitch. ‘Oh. Did you?’

‘I did.’

Philippa purses her lips, fine lines feathering up from her top lip to her nose. ‘Well, anyway, you’re finally getting somewhere with this photography lark.’ She picks up the House & Garden and pages through the article. ‘I do have a knack though, don’t I? I’m not one of Britain’s top-fifty interior designers for nothing. My psychic told me the Russians would be good for me. Thank God someone’s got money in this godforsaken recession. All it took was blood, sweat and tears.’

‘Your blood or your clients’?’

‘Mostly the curtain-maker’s this time. The builder told me they call me Bloody Philly.’

Addy shakes her head. At forty-six, Philippa is six years older, a successful interior designer, a short-lived marriage to an Italian investment banker behind her, a tidy divorce settlement in the bank. A stonking big house in Chelsea. On all the charity ball committees. In with the ‘in crowd’. Busy, busy Philippa. Nothing like herself – the gauche one at the party in a cheap dress from the vintage stall in Brick Lane and flat shoes from Russell & Bromley hanging out by the kitchen door to grab the canapés. The grit in Philippa’s oyster.

Their father, Gus, couldn’t leave Britain behind fast enough after his divorce from Philippa’s mother, Lady Estella Fitzwilliam-Powell. The ‘Ethereal Essie’ as Warhol christened her in the Sixties when she’d become a fixture at Warhol’s Factory in New York after the divorce.

Her father had told her once that he’d met Essie on a July afternoon in the Pimm’s tent at the Henley Regatta in the summer of 1962. Addy had seen pictures of him at that age – handsome in the fair-skinned, black-haired Black Irish way. Like Gene Kelly or Tyrone Power. Essie was eighteen, famous for her boyish figure and pale beauty. You could find pictures of her online now. Impossibly slender in minidresses and white go-go boots, her thick dark hair in a geometric Vidal Sassoon cut. Their father was fresh out of Trinity College with a degree in geology, the first of his working-class family to earn a degree. Philippa came along six months after the wedding. The marriage lasted a year. After the divorce, their father headed to Canada to find oil for a big multinational. By forty, Essie was dead on the bed of her rented flat in New York. Drugs overdose. Withered and desiccated. No longer ethereal.

Now their father was dead, too. Alone in his garden on the coast of Vancouver Island, on a bed of his favourite dahlias.

‘Pip, I’ve been thinking—’

‘Thinking? What do you mean, you’ve been thinking, Addy?’ Philippa waves the magazine at the plastic bag of Red Devil hanging from its drip stand. ‘You’ve got enough on your plate right now with all this palaver. Nigel’s chosen a wonderful time to run off on you. You have to stop expecting men to be there for you. They’ll always let you down.’

‘Don’t go there.’

Philippa holds up her hands. ‘Sorry.’

Philippa’s words stick into Addy like pins in a voodoo doll. She hasn’t told Philippa that she’s been scrabbling to cover Nigel’s half of the mortgage as well as her own share for the past four months while he ‘recovers from the cancer trauma’. Didn’t they say disasters come in threes? They were wrong. A break-up, a bankrupt business, cancer and her father’s heart attack – four things. More than her fair share.

Addy rubs her hand over the short red wig, reaching a finger underneath to scratch her sweaty scalp.