“The pregnant illegals you asked about. Both claimed to be orphans.”
Forbes still hasn’t lit his cigarette. It rests between his lips, wagging up and down as he talks. He glances over his shoulder at the ferry.
“About the other night.”
“What night?”
“When we had dinner.”
“Yeah?”
“Did I conduct myself in a proper fashion? I mean, did I behave?”
“You were a perfect gentleman.”
“That’s good,” he mumbles. “I mean, I thought so.” After a pause. “You took something that didn’t belong to you.”
“I prefer to think that we shared information.”
He nods. “You might want to reconsider your career choice, DC Barba. I don’t know if you’re what I’d call a team player.”
He can’t stay. There is a debriefing to attend, which is going to be rough. His superiors are going to want to know how he let Pearl get away. And once the media get hold of this story it’s going to run and run.
Forbes looks at my clothes. “If he’s not on the ferry, how did he get off?”
“He could still be on board.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“No. What about the crew?”
“You think he took a uniform?”
“It’s possible.”
He turns abruptly and strides back toward the waiting police cars. The CCTV footage will most likely provide the answer. There are cameras on every corner of the dock and every deck of the ship. One of them will have recorded Pearl.
“Eat bananas,” I yell after him.
“Pardon?”
“My mother’s remedy for a cold.”
“You said you never listened to her.”
“I said almost never.”
There have been too many hospitals lately. Too many long waits on uncomfortable chairs, eating machine snacks and drinking powdered coffee and whitener. This one smells of boiled food and feces and has grim checked tiles in the corridors, worn smooth by the trolleys.
Ruiz called me from Hull, after his ferry docked. He wanted to come and get me but I told him to go home and rest. He’s done enough.
“Are they looking after you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Samira?”
“She’s going to be OK.”
I hope I’m right. She’s been asleep for ten hours and didn’t even wake when they lifted her from the ambulance and wheeled her to a private room. I have been waiting here, dozing in my plastic chair, with my head on the bed near her shoulder.
It is mid-afternoon when she finally wakes. I feel the mattress shift and open my eyes to see her looking at me.
“I need the bathroom,” she whispers.
I take her by the elbow and help her to the en suite.
“Where am I?”
“In a hospital.”
“What country?”
“England.”
There is a nod of acceptance but no hint of a journey completed or sense of achievement.
Samira washes her face, ears, hands and feet, talking softly to herself. I take her arm again, leading her back to bed.
Motioning to the window, she wants to look outside. The North Sea is just visible over the rooftops and between buildings. It is the color of brushed steel.
“As a child I used to wonder what the sea looked like,” she says. “I had only ever seen pictures in books and on TV.” She gazes at the horizon.
“What do you think now?”
“I think it looks higher than the land. Why doesn’t the water rush in and sweep us away?”
“Sometimes it does.”
I notice a towel in her hand. She wants to use it as a prayer mat but doesn’t know which direction to face toward Mecca. She turns slowly round and round like a cat trying to settle.
There are tears in her eyes and her lips tremble, struggling to form the words.
“They will be hungry soon. Who will feed them?”
BOOK THREE
Love and pain are not the same. Love is put to the test—pain is not. You do not say of pain, as you do of love, “That was not true pain or it would not have disappeared so quickly.”
—WILLIAM BOYD,
“The Blue Afternoon”
1
In the nights since the twins were born I have drowned countless times, twitching and kicking at the bedclothes. I see tiny bodies floating in fields of kelp or washed up on beaches. My lungs give out before I can reach them, leaving me choking and numb with an obscure anguish. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a swollen heart?
Samira is also awake. She walks through the house at 3:00 a.m. moving as though her feet have an agreement with the ground that she will always tread lightly in return for never encountering another path that is too steep.
It has been five days since the twins went missing. Pearl has soaked through the cracks of the world and vanished. We know how he got off the ferry. A CCTV camera on Deck 3 picked up a man in a hard hat and reflective jacket who couldn’t be identified as one of the crew. The footage didn’t show his face clearly but he was seen carrying a pet traveling cage. The square gray plastic box was supposed to contain two Siamese cats but they were found wandering in a stairwell.
Another camera in the Customs area picked up the clearest images of the unidentified man. In the foreground trucks are being scanned with heat-seeking equipment designed to find illegals. But in the background, at the edge of the frame, a pumpkin-shaped caravan attached to an early-model Range Rover can be seen. Mr. and Mrs. Jones of Cardiff are seen repacking their duty-frees and souvenirs after being searched. As the car and caravan pull away, a square gray pet cage is visible on the tarmac next to where they were parked.
The Welsh couple were pulled over a little after midday Sunday on the M4 just east of Reading. The caravan was empty but Pearl’s fingerprints were lifted from the table and the aluminum door. The couple had stopped for petrol at a motorway service center on the M25. A cashier remembered Pearl buying bottles and baby formula. Shortly afterward, at 10:42 a.m., a car was reported stolen from an adjacent parking area. It still hasn’t been found.
Forbes is running the investigation, liaising with Spijker in Amsterdam, combining resources, pitting their wills against the problem. They are cross-checking names from the IVF clinic with the U.K. immigration records.
There has been a news blackout about the missing twins. DI Forbes made the decision. Stolen children make dramatic headlines and he wants to avoid creating panic. A year ago a newborn was snatched from a hospital in Harrogate and there were 1,200 alleged sightings in the first two days. Mothers were accosted in the street and treated like kidnappers. Homes were raided needlessly. Innocent families suffered.
The only public statement has been about Pearl, who has a warrant out for his arrest. Another one. I have taken to carrying my gun again. As long as he’s out there, I’m going to keep it with me. I am not going to lose Samira again.
She has been staying with me since leaving hospital on Wednesday. Hari has moved out of the spare room and is sleeping downstairs on a sofa bed. He seems quite taken by our lodger. He has started wearing a shirt around the house because he senses that she disapproves.
I am to face a Police Disciplinary Tribunal. Neglect of duty, deliberate falsehood and abuse of authority are just three of the charges. Failing to show up at Hendon is the least of my worries. Barnaby Elliot has accused me of harassment and arson. The investigation is being supervised by the Police Complaints Authority. I am guilty until proven innocent.
A toilet flushes along the hallway. A light switch clicks off. A few minutes later comes the hum of a machine and the rhythmic suction of a breast pump. Samira’s milk has come in and she has to express every six hours. The sound of the pump is strangely soporific. I close my eyes again.
She hasn’t said anything about the twins. I keep wondering when she is going to crack, fragmented by the loss. Even when she identified H
assan’s body at Westminster Mortuary she held it all inside.
“It’s OK to cry,” I told her.
“That is why Allah gave us tears,” she answered.
“You think God played a part in this?”
“He would not give me this suffering if he did not think I could endure it.”
How can she be so wise, yet so accepting? Can she really believe this is part of some grand master plan or that Allah would test her so cruelly?
Such faith seems positively medieval, yet she has an appetite for learning. Things that I take for granted she finds fascinating, like central heating, dual flush toilets and my washer/dryer. In Kabul she had to carry water upstairs to their flat and the power failed almost daily. London has lights along every street, burning through the night. Samira asked me if perhaps we British are scared of the dark. She didn’t understand why I laughed.
I took her shopping for clothes at Canary Wharf yesterday. “There is not so much glass in all of Afghanistan,” she said, pointing to the office towers that shone in the morning sun. I could see her studying the office workers queuing for coffee and “skinny” muffins: the women dressed in narrow skirts, tight tops and jackets, flicking their short hair, chatting on mobile phones.
The clothing boutiques intimidated her. The shop assistants were dressed like mourners and the shops felt like funeral parlors. I told Samira there was a better place to find clothes. We left and went to Commercial Road where garments were crammed on racks and spilling from bins. She chose two skirts, a long-sleeved blouse and a cardigan. It came to less than sixty pounds.
She studied the twenty-pound notes.
“Is this your Queen?”
“Yes.”
“She looks like she has been dipped in plaster.”
I laughed. “I guess she does.”
The Christmas decorations were up. Even the bagel bakery and halal butcher had fairy lights and fake snow. Samira stopped and peered into a lobster tank in the window of a restaurant.
“I am never going to swim in the sea.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to meet one of them.”
I think she had visions of lobsters crawling over one another in the same density as in the tank.
“This must be like science fiction to you.”
“Science? Fiction?”
“It means like a fantasy. Unreal.”
“Yes, unreal.”
Seeing London through Samira’s eyes has given me a different perspective on the city. Even the most mundane scene takes on a new life. When I took her underground to catch the Tube, she clutched my hand as an approaching train roared through the tunnel, sounding like a “monster in a cave” she said.
The casual wealth on display is embarrassing. There are more vets in the East End than there were doctors in Kabul. And the animals are better fed than the orphans.
The breast pump has stopped. She had turned on Hari’s TV and is flicking between channels. Slipping out of bed, I tiptoe along the hall and knock on her door. She’s wearing my old dressing gown, the one with an owl sewn onto the pocket.
“Can’t you sleep?”
“No.”
“I’ll make us a sleeping potion.”
Her eyes widen.
She follows me down the stairs, along the hall into the kitchen. I close the door and take a bottle of milk from the fridge, pouring it into mugs. Two minutes in the microwave and they’re steaming. Breaking up pieces of dark chocolate, I drop them in the liquid, watching them melt. Samira uses a spoon to catch the melting shards, licking it clean.
“Tell me about your family.”
“Most of them are dead.”
She licks the spoon. I break off more pieces of chocolate and add them to her mug.
“Did you have a big family?”
“Not so big. In Afghanistan people exaggerate what their family has done. Mine is no different. One of my ancestors traveled to China with Marco Polo they say, but I don’t believe it. I think he was a smuggler, who brought the black powder from India to Afghanistan. The king heard of the magic and asked to see a demonstration. According to my father, a thousand rockets streamed back and forth across the sky. Bamboo castles dripped with fire. Fireworks became our family business. The formulas were passed down from father to son—and to me.”
I remember the photograph among Hassan’s possessions showing a factory with workers lined up outside, most of them missing limbs or eyes, or incomplete in other ways. Hassan had burn scars on his arms.
“It must have been dangerous work.”
Samira holds up her hands, showing her fingers. “I am one of the lucky ones.” She sounds almost disappointed. “My father lost both his thumbs when a shell exploded. Uncle Yousuf lost his right arm and his wife lost her left arm. They helped each other to cook and sew and drive a car. My aunt changed gears and my uncle steered. My father’s other brother, Fahad, lost his fingers during a display. He was a very good gambler but he began to lose when he couldn’t shuffle the cards.
“I didn’t meet my grandfather. He was killed in a factory explosion before I was born. Twelve others died in the same fire, including two of his brothers. My father said it was a sacrifice that only our family could make. One hand is enough to sin, he said. One hand is enough to save.”
She glances at the dark square of the window. “It was our calling—to paint the sky. My father believed that one day our family would make a rocket that would light the way to Heaven. In the meantime, we would make rockets that drew the gaze of Allah in the hope that he would bless our family and bring us happiness and good health.” She pauses and considers the irony of such a statement. Perfectly still, she is canted forward over the table, firm yet fragile. Her stare seems to originate at the back of her eyes.
“What happened to the factory?”
“The Talibs closed it down. Fireworks were sinful, they said. People celebrated when they arrived. They were going to stop the warlords and end the corruption. Things changed but not in a good way. Girls could not go to school. Windows were painted over so women could not be seen. There was no music or TV or videos, no card games or kites. I was ten years old and they made me wear a burka. I could not buy things from male shopkeepers. I could not talk to men. I could not laugh in public. Women had to be ordinary. Invisible. Ignorant. My mother educated us in secret. Books were hidden each night and homework had to be destroyed.
“Men with beards and black turbans patrolled the streets, listening for music and videos. They beat people with whips soaked in water and with chains. Some were taken away and didn’t come back.
“My father took us to Pakistan. We lived in a camp. My mother died there and my father blamed himself. One day he announced that we were going home. He said he would rather starve in Kabul than live like a beggar.”
She falls silent, shifting in her chair. The motor of the refrigerator rattles to life and I feel the same shudder pass through me.
“The Americans dropped leaflets from the sky saying they were coming to liberate us but there was nothing left to free us from. Still we cheered because the Talibs were gone, running, like frightened dogs. But the Northern Alliance was not so different. We had learned not to expect too much. In Afghanistan we sleep with the thorns and not the flowers.”
The effort of remembering has made her sleepy. I wash the mugs and follow her upstairs. She pauses at my door, wanting to ask me something.
“I am not used to the quiet.”
“You think London is quiet?”
She hesitates. “Would it be all right if I slept in your room?”
“Is there something wrong? Is it the bed?”
“No.”
“Are you frightened?”
“No.”
“What is it then?”
“At the orphanage we slept on the floor in the same room. I am not used to being alone.”
My heart twists. “You should have said something earlier. Of course you can sleep with me.”
&n
bsp; She collects a blanket and spreads it on the floor beside my wardrobe.
“My bed is big enough. We can share.”
“No, this is better.”
She curls up on the floor and breathes so quietly that I want to make sure she’s still there.
“Good night,” I whisper. “May you sleep amid the flowers, not the thorns.”
DI Forbes arrives in the morning, early as usual. Dressed in a charcoal suit and yellow tie, he is ready to front a news conference. The media blackout is being lifted. He needs help to find the twins.
I show him to the kitchen. “Your cold sounds better.”
“I can’t stomach another bloody banana.”
Hari is with Samira in the sitting room. He is showing her his old Xbox and trying to explain what it does.
“You can shoot people.”
“Why?”
“For fun.”
“Why would you shoot people for fun?”
I can almost hear Hari’s heart sinking. Poor boy. The two of them have something in common. Hari is studying chemical engineering and Samira knows more about chemical reactions than any of his lecturers, he says.
“She’s an odd little thing,” says Forbes, whispering.
“How do you mean?”
“She doesn’t say much.”
“Most people talk too much and have nothing to say.”
“What is she going to do?” he asks.
“I don’t know.”
What would I do in her shoes? I have never been without friends or family or stranded in a foreign country (unless you count Wolver-hampton, which is pretty bloody foreign).
Hari walks into the kitchen looking pleased with himself.
“Samira is going teach me to make fireworks,” he announces, taking a biscuit from Forbes’s plate.
“So you can blow yourself up,” I say.
“I’m very careful.”
“Oh yes. Like the time you filled that copper pipe with black powder and blew a hole in the wooden siding.”
The Night Ferry Page 29
