by Sam Hepburn
Greg sprang to his feet. Aliya stood up, her eyes fixed on the photo, her chest heaving. ‘Yes, I am Aliya Sahar. But please, you must believe me. Behrouz is innocent. We—’
Zahra backed away as if we were contaminated, screaming at us to get out. Greg was yelling too. We didn’t hang around. We were out that door and down the steps, running across the road on to the High Street.
Aliya was shaking and stumbling, dry sobs ripping through her chest. I pulled her into a doorway. ‘Come on. Don’t let it get to you.’
‘It’s not only their anger that has upset me. It’s the photo of my family. Someone must have stolen it from our house in Kabul and sold it to the newspapers. Why can’t the press leave us alone?’
‘Who cares what they write or what they think?’
‘I do.’ She sniffed. ‘How can I look for the truth if everyone knows who I am?’
She was wiping away her tears and scanning the street. ‘I must hurry before the whole world sees that photo. I need to use a computer.
‘Over there,’ I said. ‘The library.’
ALIYA
When I first arrived in England, a big old library built of stone the colour of honey, full of rows and rows of books waiting to be read, would have filled my heart with joy, but now the beauty of the building and the sight of all those books meant nothing to me. All I could think about were the questions humming, fizzing and overheating in my brain. While the boy was at the desk getting a ticket, I slunk over to the computer desk with my cap pulled right down and my hand over my face, flinching every time someone looked up and wishing I could make myself invisible. As we logged on a youngish man in a grey puffa jacket sat down at a table nearby. The sight of the newspaper in his hand made my body tremble. The photo of our family picnic was probably on the front page. I caught his eye. He looked away. I tensed, ready to stand my ground if he started to shout.
‘OK, what are we looking for?’ the boy whispered.
‘The connection between Hamidi and Behrouz.’
We’d only had four very old computers in my school in Kabul, shared between thirty girls, so I didn’t get to use one very much and I could feel the boy’s frustration as I tapped carefully at the keys. But I shrugged away his offers of help and after a few minutes I found what I was looking for: a photo of ten swarthy, weather-beaten fighters perched on a rocky mountainside, their weapons slung from their shoulders.
‘Who are they?’ the boy said.
‘Hamidi and his gang at their roadblock. Look, he is there at the end.’
Hamidi looked younger and wilder in the photo but he had the same hooded eyes, hard features and rough, pockmarked skin. The boy leant towards the screen, his eyes sparking excitement as he turned to look at me. ‘The roadblock he commanded was at Sarobi. That’s the place Connor heard Behrouz mention to Arif.’
My hand gripped the mouse and I gasped. ‘That does not matter. This is what matters.’
‘What?’
‘This man! The warlord Hamidi worked for. His name was Farukh Zarghun. That is him.’ I circled the cursor around the face of a man with a mass of curly black hair and a thick beard who was sitting in the middle of the group, holding a huge rifle above his head. There was something chilling about his staring eyes and the way he was sneering, as if he truly believed he was invincible. No wonder he was arrogant. The website said he’d made millions and millions of dollars growing opium poppies, setting up heroin labs all along the Pakistan border and running a distribution network that reached out to sellers on the streets of almost every city in the world.
The boy looked very worried and said slowly, ‘What’s he got to do with Behrouz?’
‘A year ago my brother was one of the interpreters at Zarghun’s trial.’
A hiss of ‘Yes!’ burst from his mouth and his fingers clenched into a fist. Our eyes met and held. For a moment I thought he might tell me why he cared so much but he just blushed and lowered his voice. ‘Did he talk about it?’
‘Of course. He worked on three or four trials for the British, but this one was a very big case that went on for weeks and we were proud that Behrouz had been chosen for this job. Every night when he came back, he’d tell us which important people he had seen in the court and what the judge had said. Sometimes our neighbours came round to drink coffee and listen to his stories.’
‘What happened to Zarghun?’
‘The judge said he must be hanged. But he had clever lawyers who got the punishment changed to his whole life in prison. People were angry about that and they held demonstrations outside the court. But after a few months he died anyway, and many people said that was justice.’
‘Died? How?’
‘He was stabbed by another prisoner. Behrouz heard a rumour that the authorities paid the man to kill him, because Zarghun’s people were still loyal to him and he was running his drugs business from inside the prison.’
We sat for a moment gazing at the face of the dead man, Farukh Zarghun. I knew in my heart that I had found an important piece of the puzzle, but far from explaining anything it had only deepened the mystery. The boy pulled his tuft of hair and said thoughtfully, ‘Maybe Hamidi set Behrouz up as a terrorist to punish him for helping at the trial.’
I wanted the answer to be that simple but it just didn’t make sense. ‘Behrouz translated for Zarghun and his lawyers as well as for the prosecutors. He did not take sides, and anyway if Hamidi wanted to hurt him, why didn’t he just beat him up, like he did with Greg Parkin?’
The boy nodded. My mind was spinning, trying to make shapes out of shadows, but nothing fitted. Nothing made sense. The library was filling up, old people mainly, wandering in out of the rain to read the papers. The computer next to ours became free. The man in the grey puffa jacket folded away his newspaper and came over to use it. I hid my face from him and asked the boy if we could print the web pages about Hamidi and Zarghun before we left.
‘Sure.’ He tapped the keys and went over to the desk to pay for the copies.
While the boy was at the desk, I gave in to a yearning. I couldn’t help it. I searched the internet for the photo of our picnic. For a moment it made me feel strong to see Baba’s face smiling in the sunshine, with a sticky piece of baklava glistening in his fingers, Mor looking young and happy, cradling Mina in her arms, and Behrouz leaning back, laughing at one of his own silly jokes. More memories flickered through my head. Baba reading my school report, nodding approval. Mina learning to walk, proud and wobbly. Behrouz coming home from his first day at university. Baba’s rusty old car wheezing and rocking on its springs. Women playing tabla drums at my cousin’s wedding, my aunts dancing to the beat of the music. My heart pounding faster as I crawled along the beams to the bakery, the drop into nothingness, the Talib at our window. Merrick running towards us, reaching for Mina. Coming to England. So much hope and relief, all destroyed by Behrouz’s fear and the photos of Hamidi on his phone. It all came back to that. The photos of Hamidi. Why would Hamidi want to kill Behrouz for taking his photo? Hamidi was here legally, everyone at his work knew who he was, and if he was going around attacking strangers with crowbars and getting dragged off by the police, he obviously wasn’t at all worried about keeping a low profile.
I reached for my phone to go through the photos again. The battery was low. Too low to use. The boy had left his phone on the desk. I glanced up. He was at the back of the queue, shifting impatiently from foot to foot while a group of mothers jiggled wailing toddlers and handed in piles of picture books. I slid my fingers on to the screen, searching for his photo gallery. I skimmed through the thumbnails, curious about his life, and saw shots of his father holding hands with a pretty blonde woman with pink lipstick who must be his mother. They were laughing and happy. I felt a pang of grief for the parents I had lost, angry that my father’s death had destroyed them both.
Through a shimmer of tears I tapped on photos of a group of boys pulling faces, the same boys in a park, shy and awkward with some girls with high hee
ls, tight trousers and pouting lips. An older woman with glasses, smiling down at a frosted cake alight with candles. Feeling guilty, I flicked on quickly to his copies of the photos Behrouz had taken and slid them across the screen, working backwards. The blurred pictures of Hamidi with another man outside Hardel Meats, the clearer shots of Hamidi on his own, puffing on a cigarette, scowling at the sky. I slid to the next photo. My heart grew hot.
It was a shot of Hamidi I’d never seen. He was with a shorter, fair-haired man on a scrubby stretch of waste ground, and it looked as if they were transferring parcels from a red van to a white one. I spooled through two, three, four more pictures of the same scene. They’d been taken from far away in the grainy grey light of early morning or evening, which made it difficult to see much detail except for a smudge of yellow down the side of the red van. It wasn’t much but it was enough to blow away the last wisps of doubt that this was a Hardel Meats van. Each of the parcels they were carrying was the size and shape of a brick. Given Hamidi’s history and all the money we’d found in his house, I was sure they contained drugs. I checked the date. These photos had been taken the day before the ones outside the meat factory. Questions shrieked in my head. Why had the boy deleted these pictures from my phone and kept copies of them for himself? Why didn’t he want me to see them? I watched him in silence as he turned away from the printer and walked towards me. He laid the printouts on the table.
‘Here you go,’ he said. ‘Two sets. One each.’
I held up his phone. ‘What are these pictures?’
He blinked at the screen. ‘Haven’t you seen them?’ His words didn’t fit with the misery on his face or the pain in his eyes.
‘No. You sent copies to your phone and you removed the original ones from Behrouz’s.’
He shrugged. He was always shrugging. ‘They must have got deleted by accident . . .’
‘You are lying.’
He looked down at the floor ‘I’m not . . . I . . . I thought those pictures were still on Behrouz’s phone with the others.’
I stared at his bent head and thought back to the way he’d found the meat factory, how he’d chopped and changed between running so fast that I could hardly keep up and stopping and looking round like a dog sniffing prey until we found ourselves outside Hardel’s.
‘This is how you found the wall in the other photos, isn’t it? You saw vans like the one in this picture and you followed them till they led us to the factory.’
He didn’t answer, and it was as if a little piece of me was withering away, the piece that had trusted him, the piece that had taken strength from his friendship. The piece that had liked him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say, “I saw a picture of Hamidi in a van like that one, so let’s follow it”?’
His lips were trembling as if he was about to burst out crying or shouting, I couldn’t tell which. ‘OK!’ he hissed. ‘I saw the red van, and, yeah, I followed it and we found the meat factory and Hamidi. You’d never have done that without me. So what’s the big deal?’
I stood up and whispered fiercely, ‘The deal is big because you lied to me and you hid things. Important things. Look at these parcels they are putting in the white van. I think Behrouz took these photos to prove that Hamidi is selling drugs, maybe bringing them here from Afghanistan. Maybe he went to the Hardel factory to get a better picture of Hamidi and maybe . . . I don’t know . . . to see if more of their vans were carrying drugs, and Hamidi saw him. This picture could be the reason that Hamidi tried to kill him, the motive – and you kept it from me! So now I give you one chance. This minute. Tell me why you hid these pictures.’
He wanted to tell me. I could see it in his eyes. Shame. Conflict. Weariness. His teeth biting down on his lips as if he was trying to hold back the truth. When the moment came, he said only, ‘I want to help you, Aliya. I want to prove Behrouz is innocent. You have to believe that.’
‘Why? Why do you care about me or my brother? We are strangers to you.’ My voice rose. ‘Why are you so sure he is innocent? Or are you lying about that too?’
Heads were turning. The librarian half rose from her chair, frowning hard with her finger on her lips.
‘It’s you who rang me, remember?’ he hissed. ‘It’s you who asked me to help you.’
‘And now I am telling you that I don’t want the help of a liar. Who are you working for – the police? Do they think I am a bomber? That I will lead you to the terrorists of Al Shaab?’
‘Aliya, I swear—’
‘I don’t want your swearing, and I don’t want your help!’
I snatched the printouts and ran from that place, propelled by an anger so fierce it blotted out the confusion and fear and sadness. At the door I looked back. The boy didn’t look up. He just went on sitting there, staring at the pictures on his phone.
ALIYA
I got lost going back to King’s Cross. Not lost like a stranger in this city, lost like someone who is learning to read the Tube map and can find their way back even though they’ve taken the train going north instead of south by mistake. Anger was holding back the misery and making me icy and calm. I turned off my phone and flicked through a crumpled magazine left on the seat, glad of anything to take my mind off the boy and his lies, even if it was just pages and pages of stupid gossip about singers and actors.
All the women in the photographs were smiling and thin as wheat stalks, but the articles were mean and said they looked fat and unhappy. They were even unkind about Colonel Clarke and his wife, India Lambert, hinting that they might get a divorce because she preferred shooting films and travelling the world for her charity to spending time with her husband. They said it was no wonder that a beautiful woman like her had got bored with an ugly old man like him. I was sure it wasn’t true. That’s what newspapers and magazines did, they told lies. They destroyed lives. The colonel might be old and a little bit ugly, but he was good and kind, and it was sly to write such shaming things about his wife. She was shooting a movie about an English queen called Anne Boleyn at a real castle, and there was a picture of her on the set smiling up at a tall handsome man. But the caption said this man was her assistant, so of course she spent time with him. I flung the magazine on the floor, sick to my bones of lies and liars.
When I got back to the hotel, a policewoman who said her name was Sandra was sitting on the bed doing a jigsaw of a farmyard with Mina. Mina looked up. I felt a rush of love for her and kissed her and tugged her plaits. She didn’t smile back. I wondered sometimes if she’d forgotten how.
My mother sat hunched in the chair by the window, her hair straggling limp and loose on her shoulders. I went to her and kissed her hollow cheek. ‘Shall I make you some tea, Mor?’
Her eyes moved from the television and rested on my face. ‘Tell them my son is a good boy. Tell them.’
‘I know, Mor.’ As I reached for her hand her tears came, falling on to her stiff fingers.
Sandra tutted. ‘She’s been like that all day. Saying the same thing over and over again. Hasn’t eaten a thing.’
What did this woman expect? My mother had lost her husband, her country and now her son. I felt ashamed of all the angry thoughts I’d had about her being weak. My mother wasn’t weak. She was broken.
I fetched a comb from the chest of drawers, lifted a hank of my mother’s lifeless hair and began to tease out the matted strands, pulling gently at the knots. Her eyes strayed back to the television as if she expected them to announce that Behrouz was innocent. When her hair was smooth, I twisted it into a knot and pinned it. Her lovely hair, which had once been as thick as a horse’s tail and so black it shone blue in the sunlight, now sat on her neck like a little ball of grey thread.
I made tea for us all, using the plastic kettle, and tried to get her to drink just a few sips. ‘You have to keep your strength, Mor.’
She pushed the cup away like a child and looked at me angrily. ‘Tell them he is a good boy. Tell them!’ Her voice was harsh and scary, not like Mor’s
voice at all.
Mina ran over and wrapped her arms tightly around my legs. I picked her up and rubbed her back like I used to when she was a baby, and when she was calmer I sat with her, pushing cow-shaped pieces of jigsaw into cow-shaped holes while Sandra ordered in a takeaway that none of us would have the heart to eat. As I worked on the jigsaw I kept one eye on the news updates rolling along the bottom of the television screen: Police still waiting to interview suspected terrorist Behrouz Sahar . . . Doctors say his condition remains unchanged . . . MPs call for tighter checks on asylum seekers.
I finished the cow, found all the pieces of a fat, red-faced farmer, fitted a horse’s legs to its body and went back to my own room, thinking about the boy and asking myself over and over again how his lies fitted into the puzzle of Behrouz.
I’d never felt so alone. I switched on the television, just to hear human voices. The strange calm that had gripped me since I left the library had melted away and while a cartoon comedy played on the screen I curled up on the bed and buried my head in the crook of my arm, unable to hold back the waves of misery and confusion. I had nothing to cling to except anger at the boy, and I lay there stoking it with memories of his shrugs and his smiles and his endless, endless lies. An announcement of breaking news cut through the canned laughter on the television. I lifted my head.
‘Terror group Al Shaab have posted a video of Behrouz Sahar, filmed an hour before Wednesday’s explosion, in which he confesses to planning a bomb attack on the home of Colonel Mike Clarke.’
A face I barely recognized stared from the screen. The eyes were Behrouz’s but they were dazed and haunted, the nose was his too but scratched and bruised, and his lips were curled and twisted. There was writing behind him. Big red letters daubed on a white sheet, spelling out the words ‘Al Shaab’ in Arabic. The monster in my mind went crazy. Behrouz’s lips parted, showing broken teeth, and a voice came out, stiff and dry as a robot.
