The Disappeared

by Roger Scruton

  They sat quietly after supper, he at his desk, she at the table. And later, when she emerged from the bathroom in pyjamas and settled beneath the blankets on the couch, he went across to kiss her on the brow. She moved her face as he did so, and their lips met. Only with the greatest effort did he draw away.

  So it was for a week. Each day he set out to write his letter of resignation, but each day something arose to prevent it. Each morning he made the decision to ring Iona Ferguson and each afternoon he revoked it. And each evening he cooked for her and read to her, trying to turn the conversation in the direction he sought. If she would go with him to the police, make the kind of statement that a prosecutor would need from her, and allow him to say what he knew, then everything would be above board and his happiness would be perfect. But each time he approached the topic she veered away in panic. After a while he valued the peace between them so much that he refrained from questioning her. And then the Easter vacation came, and it began to seem as though everything in his life apart from Sharon was unreal. All was beginning to fall away, leaving the two of them as though caught in a spotlight on a wholly darkened stage.

  Cut off from his old routines, however, Stephen experienced the occasional twinge of apprehension. It was too late now to visit Iona Ferguson. To have rescued the girl and offered lodging for a day or two would have been an understandable act of kindness. To have kept her secretly at home for two weeks would be construed as a crime. Meanwhile the Williams boys would be sure to relay the news that she was no longer at home. He was irremediably committed to her, and yet had only half decided on a plan. He composed his letter of resignation, ready to give to the Headmistress at the beginning of term. And he spent days in the local library in order to convey to Sharon the provisional nature of their arrangement, which he knew in his heart not to be provisional at all.

  She fretted when he was absent and would not leave the flat. He returned home in the evening to find her at the table in the window, a pen in her hand, a book open in front of her, and an expression of joy as though she had given up hope of seeing him again. She still called him ‘sir’, and seemed to have forgotten entirely the delirious declaration of love addressed to Stephen. But she was beginning to talk to him in the same idiom as her letters, adjusting her grammar to his, and giving voice to her impressions.

  Once, when they took the bus out of the city, and walked for several miles across the moors, she entertained him with a version of Wuthering Heights. She spoke in a whisper, her sentences coming from somewhere behind her mouth. In the story she was Catherine, roaming in search of her Heathcliff across ‘grassy pillows, buttoned down with sheep’. And when she found him, they sat in silence together ‘like two dolls on a shelf’. ‘That’s you and me, sir,’ she added, and there the story stopped.

  Often, in the evening, she would be writing, and he longed to know what it was, and especially to see the change that might have occurred, now that she was happy.

  For that she was happy he did not doubt. As the days of the vacation drew on it became apparent that Sharon was not by nature the taut, withdrawn and half-crazy waif who had first made her appeal to him, but a normal and life-affirming girl, who – but for the experiences that she had undergone – would have been advancing through life with the minimum of trouble. She had implored him to respect her, had held out for his respect against all the odds, and had laid bare her soul in those extraordinary spasms of honesty that burst the shackles of her despair. And now she was free.

  He saw the result in her face. The look of withdrawn astonishment gradually faded, and in its place came an eager alertness, as though she were discovering the world of human relations for the first time. She would sit at the table, her little pile of books beside her, a sheet of paper in front, and look across to where he worked, frequently putting her elbows on the table top and the fingers of one hand in her mouth. She asked questions about books, about student life in Oxford, about the kind of music he liked, which she was beginning to like as well. And although she still clammed shut should he make a personal enquiry, she listened intently to all the stories of his past.

  He told her about his parents – his mother a high-flying business woman, who had begun life as an actress but now ran a head-hunting agency of her own; his father a good-for-nothing who had tried and failed at many trades, eventually becoming a peripatetic teacher of cartoon drawing at the London art-schools. He described the trauma of his parents’ divorce, visiting feelings that he had never expressed before to another person: his sense that he, an only child, was to blame for his father’s black moods and his ever-increasing absence from the house; that his mother’s tears were a response to his failings as a son and his inability to be cheerful in the long evenings of their mutual discontent. He wondered whether she had felt anything like this, but she merely shrugged her shoulders and said ‘dinna have no parents, dinn’ I?’, urging him instead to keep going with his story.

  He told her of his father’s death, which occurred during his last year at Oxford. Mr Haycraft had been found with a broken neck, at the foot of the steep stairs leading to a private club in Soho where he was in the habit of drinking. Foul play was not suspected, and the funeral was attended by a large number of people, almost none of whom Stephen knew. The trauma of this event meant that he did not gain the first class degree that was expected of him, so that he had to relinquish his hopes of an academic career.

  Sharon listened intently to Stephen’s stories, always looking at him with wide-eyed sympathy and once getting up from the table and coming across to lift his hand to her lips and kiss it. He was emerging from his shell, as she had emerged from hers, and he experienced, in her presence, a sweet feeling of peace that filled his heart as nothing had filled it before. As a result he constantly put out of mind the urgent need to report Sharon’s whereabouts to the Department of Social Work, and to arrange his resignation from her school.

  It was an evening in mid-April that everything changed. They had eaten their supper and cleared away the dishes. They had read for a while from The Merchant of Venice. A blackbird had just ceased to sing in the car park, and a quiet, placid dusk was veiling the suburb in shadow. When she asked if she could have a bath he nodded without moving from his desk. It was only the second time she had made this request, baths being a luxury in the Angel Towers. But he studied to take no special note of it. For that, he assumed, was how to put her at ease. He listened to the bath water running, noted a cry as she tried the temperature, and then went back to the Sonnets to Orpheus, closing his ears to her splashes.

  He stopped reading, sensing that she was standing in the doorway of the bathroom, looking in his direction. And when he turned to confront her, she let the bathrobe fall from her shoulders onto the floor. Looking back at this moment across all the ensuing grief, he remembered it as the last moment of happiness in a life which had been properly happy only this once.

  ‘This is yours, Stephen,’ she said. ‘I kept it for you.’

  Chapter 22

  Justin rang the number from the office telephone. A man’s voice answered, with the word ‘tak?’ rudely spoken.

  ‘I’m ringing about Lesprom business,’ Justin said.

  There was a silence.

  ‘It’s about a shipment,’ he added. ‘One between Kaliningrad and Hull. The reference is squirrel.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘OK, so you tell them no shipment, OK?’

  The accent was Polish.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No shipment without money.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  ‘I don’t know about any girl. We want compensation. Otherwise no shipment. Two days lost because of this girl you talking about.’

  ‘There was a mistake,’ Justin said. His mind was racing, and he saw the whole scenario clearly before him, the abused girls going one way, the robbed refugees the other, and Iona left with the wreckage. The only unexplained detail was Laura: why should they have p
icked on her? And, worse thought, was he not to blame, having placed her in that block of temporary lodgings instead of a proper hotel?

  ‘A mistake, ya. But that’s not our business, see. The ship off-shore any time now. Zdenko come collect the money.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘It’s gotta be twenty grand.’

  ‘Twenty! Far too much.’

  They haggled for a bit, until Justin got the sum down to fifteen.

  ‘So where will he come?’ he asked.

  ‘The same place,’ came the reply. Justin listened for suspicion and heard none.

  ‘Sometimes we use a new address.’

  ‘Fuck that. Buckton not safe?’

  ‘Of course it’s safe.’

  ‘So Falkin’s Yard, tomorrow midday, we collect the cash.’

  ‘OK,’ said Justin and rang off. Should he report Laura Markham as a missing person? His experience argued against it. It was more important to go at once in search of her kidnappers. He rang Iona, told her what had happened, and where he was going. She was to come looking for him if he was not in touch by seven.

  ‘I hope you know what you are getting yourself into, Justin?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ he replied.

  ‘Well I do. People trafficking is a nasty business. And I advise you to be careful.’

  It was Iona’s way of saying that she supported him. And he trusted her, because she was as disillusioned as he was.

  Buckton was a small village on the edge of the moor. The rhythms of the city were barely audible here. There was a church of grey stone with a spire and Perpendicular windows and next to it an old rectory half hidden by beech trees and surrounded by lawns with bright borders of spring flowers. ‘Home Farm’ and ‘Manor Farm’ both abutted on a neat village green, where three serene Georgian houses in weathered brick competed for eminence along the edge. A pub, ‘The Wild Boar’, elbowed its way into a street of stone cottages, and a village shop, with a Victorian glazed façade, was conducting its precarious trade with a few respectable pensioners. The scene was studiously English, as preposterously idyllic as any backdrop to an Agatha Christie murder. And Justin reflected with sinking heart on the possibility that he had stepped into just such a story.

  He parked the car in a little square, where a central plinth surmounted by a war memorial bore a plain cross of stone. Falkin’s Yard, he was told, lay on the edge of the village, and consisted of the defunct buildings of Falkin’s Brewery, one side of which had been renovated and converted into holiday lets. The building was Victorian. There was a cobbled yard in front of an industrial façade of stone, into which had been inserted four attractive dwellings, each presenting two windows and a door. It was outside the season, and three of the dwellings were vacant, with shutters across the windows and padlocks on the doors. The fourth, at the far end of the yard, had a forbidding appearance, with drawn curtains and sacks of uncollected rubbish against the wall.

  There was a frosted glass panel in the door, which revealed only more darkness. When Justin rang the bell it was some time before a light went on in the hallway, and a figure swayed in the glass. The door opened, and she stood as though dazzled by the light.

  ‘Muhibbah!’

  She backed away from him with her fingers bent against her mouth and her eyes wide with astonishment.

  ‘So it was you!’ she said.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Yes. No. Bismillahi, how did you know?’

  ‘How did I know what?’

  ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  She turned quickly away from him, took a canvas jacket from a peg and threw it over her turtle-neck and trousers, the same outfit that she had always worn, as though nothing in Muhibbah could change until everything changed. Soon they were walking out of the village and on to the moor. But no, something had changed. He had never seen her cry before, and he put out an arm to comfort her. She did not remove it, but leaned just slightly towards him.

  ‘So it was you,’ she said again. ‘You who made that phone call.’

  ‘Isn’t it time you explained things to me? I can’t believe you are mixed up in this business.’

  ‘Oh, Justin, you rescued me once. You won’t want to rescue me again.’

  ‘Just tell me one thing, Muhibbah. The girl who was kidnapped, is she safe?’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘The girl who came to investigate our accounts.’

  ‘No idea about that. Did this happen recently?’

  ‘Yesterday, I think.’

  She shook herself free of his arm and looked at him. Her face was tight now, self-contained, resisting him.

  ‘I don’t think they would do such a thing,’ she said emphatically.

  ‘They? Who do you mean?’

  ‘My brothers. Allah yaghfiru lihum!’

  They walked on in silence. Justin felt fear in his stomach, certain now that the worst had happened and that he would never see Laura again, certain too that this woman who walked at his side was as dangerous as Iona thought her to be. After a while they sat on a lichen-covered boulder. Beside them was a five-bar gate, mounted with iron hinges on a gatepost of stone. The sunlight of a spring afternoon danced in the breeze-blown grass. A flock of sheep grazed in the meadow at their feet, and in the distance rose the grey-green hills of the moorland, with their dry-stone walls and sheep pens. Here and there a cottage was sheltered among pine trees.

  It was a scene of pastoral beauty, such as had drawn him years before into the fight for the earth. And he had lived in defiance of this thing that he so much loved. He had campaigned against sheep, which reduce the landscape to a monoculture of grass and parasites. He had fought against the nimbys who protect their beloved fields from wind farms and who see modernity as a livid scar. His passion for a sustainable environment had cut across his life, turning everything in a new direction. And this woman too had cut across his life. She sat there, as alien to this landscape as any metal wind turbine, her perfect beauty aimed at his heart.

  ‘So they didn’t send you to Afghanistan?’

  ‘You rescued me. Remember?’

  ‘But you are with your family again. It was your brother, was it not, who took you from our office?’

  ‘He didn’t take me. We left together.’

  ‘But there were signs of a struggle.’

  ‘Yes. I tried to stop him taking the computer. But he is stronger than me.’

  ‘So tell me what this is about.’

  She looked at him. Her eyes were still, the irises like black olives, but with a light of their own, a light shining from regions as remote as her soul. Slowly tears formed in each of them and ran down her cheeks. He wiped them away with his forefinger, and she did not resist.

  ‘Please, Justin, you tell me. Then perhaps I will know what to say.’

  He told her about Laura Markham, commissioned to examine the discrepancies in the firm’s accounts. He told her about Laura’s disappearance, about the file on the table and the note with the phone number lying loose in it. He reported on his conversation with the Polish man who had inadvertently given the address at which he had found her. And he suggested that Muhibbah could cast light on all these things, and especially on the question whether Laura had been kidnapped, and if so by whom. She shook her head, which she had buttoned down from behind as was her defensive tactic. He could find no expression there, no corner that he could peel away to reveal the vulnerable woman beneath the perfect integument of skin.

  ‘I know nothing about this girl who disappeared. But I do know about the file, about the phone number, and about the holes in your accounts.’

  ‘Then tell me that at least.’

  She began a story. She did not look at him but either stared at the earth so as to whisper into its ear, or looked up at the sky to blurt out some note of self-justifying triumph to the sun.

  It was a curious story, about her two brothers, one by her father’s first wife who was an unruly psychopath, the other, by her father�
��s second wife and her own mother, whom she loved more than anyone in the world. She whispered of her childhood in the old Yemeni town of Tarim, where her father had brought them from Afghanistan. She evoked her first years with images one after the other like pictures in an album. There was the beautiful old house with its cool courtyard and tinkling fountain. There were the two mothers, creating peace, halwa and wisdom in some dark recess. There were trips to the rocky desert for worship in the open air among men with guns. There were formal visits from tribesmen who looked at the Afghan visitors as though trying to settle whether to kill them or to die for them, and who always left with the question unresolved.

  ‘But we had come as fighters, Justin, as mujahidin,’ she said, addressing the sky. ‘We were the elite, the zahrah.’

  Somehow it had gone wrong. The money ceased to come, and her father left with his wives and daughter for England, waving his Afghan passport and claiming asylum for some fictitious cause. The boys, however, who had Yemeni passports, were left behind. And that is why everything changed for her. In all the troubles of a Muslim girl – the threat to send her back to Afghanistan, the offers of marriage from disgusting old men, the moment when she was taken away from the Tarim Girls’ School and locked for a week in her room – her brother Yunus had fought for her. She was a stone of the desert, pure, clean, dry and hard, and he would not let that stone belong to anyone except the man who could mount it in gold. And she had fought for Yunus too, had kept him at home when their father and Hassan had left with their gaggle of gun-toting tribesmen to take paltry revenge on the world as it is, the world made in America. Again she raised her eyes to the sky.