by Simon Conway
‘I eat like a horse,’ Leyla told her.
The woman raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry but I don’t think I can offer you any work.’
There was a pause.
Leyla smiled, grimly. ‘You agreed to drink tea with me, Nadifa.’
‘How silly of me, of course I did.’ She clapped her hands. It was an ungainly gesture, with her talons spread and only the heels of her palms making contact. ‘Please sit down.’
They sat opposite her. An unnervingly young girl in a child’s pink pyjamas brought in a tray with tea things.
‘What can I do for you?’ Nadifa asked.
‘Tell me your story,’ Leyla said, placing her iPhone on the coffee table with its recorder app on.
Nadifa laughed. ‘Are you going to make me into a celebrity?’
‘No real names will be used.’
‘It’s not a fairytale. Though I was a beautiful girl once, full of promise like Amal here,’ she pointed at the child pouring them tea, ‘but more innocent.’
‘What happened to you, Nadifa?’
‘My parents were very poor and couldn’t afford to feed me so they sold me to a man in Mogadishu. I was sent there in a suitcase. When I got to the house I was raped. First by the man and then by his sons.’
Leyla closed her eyes.
Nadifa chuckled. ‘Why so sad? It is the way of these things.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘The man told me that he could not afford to keep me and I could never return to my village because I had shamed my family. He said that my father or my brothers would kill me. Of course, I was terrified. He said the only hope for me was to go to Europe to be adopted. How could I say no? A mixed Italian-Somali couple that had children of their own flew with me to Rome. They did it all the time, passing children off as their own. You see, you didn’t need a photograph of children under the age of ten on a passport in those days. When I got to Rome I was told that the best chance for me was in England with a man from Bosaso and I travelled here in the back of the truck. But when I arrived in Newham the man told me I was too old for adoption and I would have to pay back the cost of my transport. I was made to have sex with men to pay my debt. I did it for ten years. I was fortunate that the man from Bosaso was fastidious in certain matters. He insisted on the use of condoms.’
Ed looked at Leyla but she didn’t acknowledge him. The two women were staring at each other.
‘Go on.’
‘The man from Bosaso became sick in his liver. It is a common sickness with people from my country. He could not work and someone had to run his business. He could not trust his family. It was natural that he put me in charge. I soon discovered that I have a talent for this work. The girls respect me and so do the clients. Here I am.’
‘And the man from Bosaso?’
She chuckled. ‘He died, of course, although not before he married me. He died in the bed beside me. Some people say I smothered him with a pillow.’
Ed sat in silence while the interview continued. Nadifa was explaining to Leyla how many girls she had working for her, in this flat and in others locally. Ed looked through the curtain of beads at the bouncer standing just the other side. It was clear from the sounds coming through the walls that business was being conducted as usual. Once a man emerged from one of the other rooms and was shown to the door. After a short interval the intercom buzzed and the bouncer answered it. ‘Name?’
‘It’s Hussein for Nadifa.’
‘Let him in,’ Nadifa called out. A few minutes later, a man knocked on the door and was admitted. She smiled at Ed. ‘I prefer to deal with established clients …or their relatives.’
When the interview was over, Nadifa clapped her hands again and the child collected the tea things. Nadifa’s eyes met Ed’s for a moment and she said, ‘Do you want her?’
‘No.’
‘What about your father?’
‘No.’
‘I haven’t decided on the price yet but I can tell you she is going to be very expensive the first time.’
The girl carried the tray back into the kitchen and closed the door behind her.
#
Neither Leyla nor Ed said anything until they were on the Romford Road heading west. She was driving too fast, shifting up through the gears and overtaking slower traffic. He almost told her to slow down but mastered the urge.
‘Thanks for coming,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t sure how safe it would be.’
Soon they were back in Banglatown, near his house. He wanted to say something about the young girl in pyjamas but nothing he could say seemed adequate.
She pulled up in front of his father’s house. They stayed like that for a moment, without moving. But then a car turned into the narrow one-way street behind them and flashed its lights. He had to get out. He was reaching for the door handle when she gave him a quick, darting kiss on the cheek. She looked away immediately afterwards. He got out of the car. They didn’t say goodbye.
He watched the taillights of her car flash red at the end of the street and then she turned out of sight. He was standing still but it felt like he was falling.
24. An impulsive act
‘It’s Rifaz for Nadifa.’
The door clicked open. Ed steered his father up the stairs and along the corridor with the crowbar hanging loosely at his side. He crossed in front of the door to Nadifa’s flat at a crouch and pressed himself against the wall on the far side. He raised the crowbar and nodded to his father.
Rifaz stepped up to the door and knocked. He stepped back a pace and stood there, trembling.
Ed was counting, a snake of sweat sliding across his temple.
One, two, three…
The door opened. Ed pivoted and swung the crowbar down like an axe on the bouncer’s forehead. He crashed to the ground.
‘Police!’ Ed shouted.
He jumped over the body and advanced down the hall, banging the crowbar against the walls and shouting. He pushed through the bead curtain and crossed the living room without pausing to look at Nadifa. He kicked open the door to the kitchen.
The girl, Amal, was curled up in a dog crate. She was awake and watching him.
‘Don’t worry,’ he told her. He jimmied the door open and helped her out. ‘This way.’
He led her back into the living room.
‘You’re right, you’re not like your father,’ Nadifa said. She hadn’t moved since earlier.
He pointed the crowbar at her. ‘The girl is mine.’
She stared impassively back at him. ‘You think you can just walk in here and damage my property and then steal my property?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think you are foolhardy and stupid.’
‘No.’
He turned his back on her and guided the girl through the bead curtain and along the hall past the bouncer. Ed’s father was still standing in the corridor outside.
‘It’s done,’ Ed told him.
#
He felt strangely liberated. They were sitting on a bench outside the entrance to A&E, at the Royal London Hospital. Amal was wrapped in a blanket and curled up beside him. His father was standing some way off smoking a cigarette.
A police car parked at the end of a rank of ambulances in the forecourt, as far from the entrance as possible. Two men got out of the back and moved as swiftly as possible away from the vehicle, as if embarrassed by it. Ed recognised them both. One was Jonah and the other was Rat-face, one of Leyla’s attackers. He was wearing a plaster cast on his arm and it was Ed that had broken it.
Jonah crossed over to the bench.
‘May I?’
Ed nodded. Jonah sat on the bench. He looked down at the sleeping girl, then around the forecourt. It was relatively quiet.
‘I hate hospitals,’ he said, eventually. ‘Too many cameras.’
He seemed at a loss for anything else to say and then he noticed Rat-face hanging back, with a sullen expression on his face.
‘That’s Carl,’ J
onah told him, ‘one of the lost boys. Carl thinks you’re a sociopath.’
Ed met the young man’s gaze and saw there a mixture of fear and defiance.
‘It’s just injured pride,’ Jonah said. ‘You were supposed to hurt him. After all it was part of the plan. You remember the plan, right? Burrow you into J&K Cargo and Travel, make you an invaluable member of their team, and get yourself sent to Pakistan.’
Ed nodded. ‘I remember the plan.’
‘So what is this? What the hell is going on?’
‘I need you to take this girl into care.’
Jonah. ‘Who is she?’
‘Her name is Amal. She’s Somali. I rescued her from a brothel in Newham.’
‘You did what?’
‘You heard me. Get her adopted.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Pull some fucking strings.’
Jonah shook his head. ‘You’re out of control.’
‘Yes I am. And that’s what you wanted. Parade your impulsive side were your exact words.’
‘What kind of mess have you left behind in Newham?’
‘A fractured skull, a concussion and maybe a broken bone or two. Nothing that hasn’t already been done in the name of this operation.’
‘You’re a piece of work,’ Jonah said.
‘That’s what people say about you. If you want me to do this thing for you you’d better get this girl taken care of, you can tell Queen Bee that’s my condition.’
‘You’re pushing your luck.’
‘There’s something else,’ Ed told him. ‘If you don’t want a war with me at the centre of it, you better explain to the brothel keeper the futility of any kind of response. Her name is Nadifa. I’d make it very clear to her if I was you.’
25. Rolling with the punches
Leyla didn’t show up for work the next day. She came at night though, this time without her laptop. She was wearing track pants and trainers, and a white V necked T-shirt under her coat.
‘I want you teach me how to punch someone.’ The expression on her face left him in no doubt she was serious.
‘Sure.’ He hung up her coat and asked her to sit at the kitchen table. ‘Show me your hands.’ He turned them over, hesitant when he touched her, because he didn’t want it to seem like a caress.
‘I got a call from my contact in the Met,’ she said, her tone of voice giving nothing away. ‘Apparently someone went in and broke up the brothel in the early hours of this morning. The bouncer is in hospital with a fractured skull and Nadifa has disappeared. An eleven-year-old girl has been taken into care.’
‘I’ll wrap your hands,’ he told her, not sure if she was looking at him or not because he was staring into the corner of the room.
He got up and went to the counter. He took a rolled-up hand-wrap from a drawer and returned to kneel in front of her, head down, concentrating on her hands, trying not to look at the slice of exposed cinnamon-coloured skin between her track-pants and her T-shirt. He slipped a loop over her thumb, and wrapped her left hand, covering her knuckles and binding her fingers together before tying off the ends. Next he did the right hand. Then he reached for his gloves and put them on her.
‘Stand up.’
He folded away the table and hung his old heavy bag on a hook attached to one of the roof beams.
‘I’ve worked out what you are,’ she said.
He turned around. He kept his voice as level as hers. ‘Spread your legs slightly and bend your knees.’
‘I’ve been investigating you.’
‘Get up on the balls of your feet,’ he told her. She glared at him but complied. ‘That’s right. Now raise your hands higher.’ She squared her shoulders and raised the gloves. He tapped her left glove. ‘That’s your lead hand.’ He tapped her right glove. ‘That’s your rear hand. You’re going to use your lead hand to punch the bag and your rear hand to guard your jaw. You swivel and punch, bringing your fist into the horizontal.’
She stepped up to the bag. She hit it hard.
‘That’s good.’
She hit it again.
‘Next you’re going to hit with your rear hand. You roll your hips and throw it from your chin in a straight line.’
She hit the bag like she wanted to punch right through it. As well as the jab and the cross, he showed her the hook and the upper cut. She was a quick learner. Her movements were deft and assured. She focussed on him when he was explaining and her body when she was punching. She settled into a measured pace, twisting her body to throw her shoulder into the punches. Soon the bag was swinging. She looked fierce as an Amazon, like she really meant it, and his surprise at her strength gave way to admiration for her endurance.
Eventually she stopped, shut her eyes, and wiped the sweat from her brow with her forearm. She turned and stood with her back to the bag. She was watching him, breathing steadily, her face and chest shiny with perspiration, her nipples sharp points.
‘You’re a lie, Edward Malik.’
He was half-expecting it, but when the blow came it knocked him back a step. He raised his hand to his nose and when it came away there was a smear of blood on it.
‘I have a blogger friend in Kabul. I faxed him your photo and he showed it to his cousin who works in the Human Resource Directorate at the Ministry of Finance. Nobody there remembers you.’
‘It’s a large ministry,’ he said, ‘and staff turnover is high.’
She punched him again, harder this time, driving him back against the counter. He made no attempt to resist.
‘My friend’s cousin has access to the personnel files for foreign consultants. Sure, there’s a file for you. There’s a whole stack of them for people no one’s ever seen. They call them ghosts. You’re a spook, Edward Malik.’
He looked away. ‘Stop it,’ he said.
‘I’m not the only one who thinks so. You’re out there on the web, Ed. And I’m not talking about stuff picked up by search engines. I’m talking about the deep web, the encrypted and the un-linked; Jihadis in chat rooms know your name. You need to have the right keywords in the right language but you’re not that difficult to find. You really burrowed your way into my family didn’t you?’
His voice softened. ‘What do you want me to tell you, Leyla?’
She narrowed her eyes, up on the balls of her feet, ready for the next punch. ‘The truth.’
‘I love you.’
He hadn’t meant to say it. Under the circumstances it was the most irresponsible thing to say. But it was the truth.
‘You bastard.’
She threw herself at him. He grabbed her by the wrists. She started to struggle and he held her close so that she couldn’t break free. His face next to hers, his mouth against the shell-like curve of her ear.
‘I’m sorry.’
She started to sob. He wrapped his arms around her. She reached up with her mouth and they were kissing, gently at first and then more urgently. She clung to him fiercely, pressing herself against him. His hands roved down her back, following the cord of her spine. She broke away and gasped. He pulled off the boxing gloves and flung them across the room. Then he was kissing her again, his hands on her shoulder blades, her wrapped hands cupping the back of his neck, her leg hooked around his calf.
They broke away again and he led her to the stairs. In his bedroom he unwrapped her hands. He lifted her T-shirt over her head and she kicked off her track pants. Next he removed his own clothing. Naked, they stood before each other. He was overwhelmed by the sight of her bare limbs, the dark aureoles of her nipples and her glossy black pubic hair.
She drew him to her again and down onto the narrow bed.
Making love to her, with her head on the pillow and his hands knuckling down into the mattress, he stared at her and she stared back, her mouth opened slightly, her eyes boring into him.
‘You,’ she said.
Afterwards she slept and he lay beside her while the moonlight falling through the open window dappled her skin with silver
, and he listened to the rise and fall of her breath. He had never before felt this mixture of awe and promise, the expectation that life had something to offer, which few people knew anything about, the promise of happiness with another person who felt the same way.
At around eleven he went downstairs and made two cups of tea. When he returned he found her cross-legged on the bed with the List.
‘Isn’t it just another way of saying you’re a prick or a pathological narcissist? I mean, at least twice a week I get told some man or other is on the autism spectrum. It’s like bad shorthand.’
‘Sometimes people say things they don’t mean or that they later regret,’ he told her, gently. ‘The end of any relationship is messy.’
‘She called you a thief.’
‘She said I stole her heart.’
‘Is that what you do?’ She shuddered and drew the sheet around her. ‘I always knew there was something not right about you. You’ve torn something off. What did it say?’
‘Spy.’
‘You better tell me your story.’
Over the next hour he told her what had happened since his deployment to Afghanistan, how he had recruited and run Tariq as an agent in the ISI and how the information provided had saved the lives of soldiers and civilians alike. He explained that Tariq had revealed the location of Osama bin Laden and he described Tariq’s lonely death at the hands of Khan. He shared with her his sense of anger and betrayal. He described the assault on the CIA Head of Station that had led to his disgrace. And because she had seen him angry and violent she had no difficulty in believing any of it.
He did not tell her that after he came back to London from Kabul, when Burns had finished telling him his career was over in the basement under the old War Office, she had offered him another job, an off-the-books operation with the politicians kept out of the loop. She’d graced him with her sunniest smile and said, ‘I want you to help me destroy Khan.’
And because he hated Khan more than anything he had said yes.
26. Hugging a hoodie on Petticoat Lane
