by M. R. Hall
Dani gave an uncertain shake of her head.
'Are you sure?'
She glanced from Jenny to Mrs Jamal, then back to Jenny again. 'I don't find it surprising - he was quite macho, the way he held himself. . .' Another flick of the eyes to Mrs Jamal. 'But what his mother said about him changing . . .' She paused and swallowed, the colour leaving her face.
'Yes?'
Dani opened her mouth to continue, but stalled, startled, as the door opened at the back of the hall and a tall man dressed in a long coat entered. Jenny recognized McAvoy immediately. He picked her out with those still blue eyes and gave a lawyer's nod before finding standing room among the young men lining the back wall.
Jenny drew her gaze away from him. 'You were about to say, Miss James?'
'I think a lot of it might have been posing,' she said, her voice shaky. 'He wasn't as religious as all that . . . not in late June, anyway.'
'What makes you say that?'
Dani turned her face away from Mrs Jamal. 'It was on the night of 2.6 June, a Wednesday. Nazim came into the bar and we got talking. He wasn't drinking, obviously, but he was fun, more like his old self. . .' She paused, then lifted her eyes. 'We spent the night together.'
A whisper went around the room. The journalists crouched over their notebooks. Jenny noticed McAvoy give a bemused shake of his head. Mrs Jamal wiped away a bewildered tear. Jenny felt a burst of excitement. At last, a revelation.
'You slept with Nazim on the night of the 26th?'
'Yes, I did.' Dani seemed relieved to have made a public confession. 'There was no relationship or anything, it was just impulsive. Only the one night. He left my room early next morning and that was fine with both of us.'
'Did you talk?'
'Not really.'
'Did you get any insight into his state of mind?'
'He was laughing, cracking jokes . . . like someone who was demob happy. And I was quite far gone, to be honest. I don't think I put up too much resistance. It just sort of happened.'
'Did you see him again?'
'No. Never.'
'And you've no idea why he chose that night to approach you?'
'I was nineteen and partying. It didn't matter enough to ask.'
'Wait there, Miss James.'
Fraser Havilland and Martha Denton had their heads together in animated conversation. Seeming to reach an agreement, Havilland stood and addressed the witness.
Sleek and polished, he gave her a disarming smile. 'You didn't tell the police about this night together at the time?'
She shook her head.
'Because?'
'It didn't seem relevant.' She let out a breath, her face twisted in a frown. 'And I suppose I felt guilty somehow . . . There was no reason to, but I didn't know what was going on in his mind.'
Havilland glanced down at his notes. 'You said he seemed "demob happy"?'
'Yes.'
'Demobbed from what?'
'I don't know. It was just his mood.'
'He wasn't wearing traditional dress at the bar, I take it?'
'No. He'd stopped that. I'd noticed a few weeks before.'
Havilland drummed his fingertips thoughtfully on the table as he searched for a suitable form of words. 'Did it occur to you that this elation of his might have had something of the final fling about it?'
'Not at the time. Later, when I heard what was being said — '
'Thank you, Miss James,' Havilland said, cutting her off, and sat down with the look of a man satisfied that he'd made a powerful point.
Martha Denton rose. 'Do you not think it dishonest of you not to have told the police this at the time?'
Dani looked to Jenny. 'Can I please finish what I was going to say?'
'Go ahead,' Jenny said.
Martha Denton rolled her eyes impatiently.
'I've thought about it a lot, again and again ... I don't believe Nazim was going off somewhere. It felt exactly the opposite - it was as if he was coming back.'
'It certainly seems dishonest of you not to have told the police that,' Denton fired back.
'It's not easy to talk about those things, especially when you're that young.'
'It doesn't sound as if you were particularly inhibited.'
Stung, Dani said, 'Believe me, it's easier to go to bed with someone than to talk to the police.'
'Miss James, whether or not you slept with Nazim Jamal, you have no idea whatsoever where he went, do you?'
'No, I just have an instinct. I don't believe he was ever a religious fanatic, not truly.'
'You're in the legal profession, you know an instinct's not evidence.'
Dani's face hardened. 'Devout Muslims don't sleep around. I caught chlamydia from Nazim. I suffered severe inflammation and ended up in hospital a month later. I suffered permanent damage and may not be able to carry a child.' She turned to Jenny. 'You can check my medical records.'
Rattled, Martha Denton said, 'Perhaps you just don't like the idea that he used you.'
Dani didn't answer; Jenny didn't press her to.
'Or perhaps we can't trust your evidence at all. Keeping quiet on such a matter for eight years, then coming forward with a story which you know full well would kick up all sorts of dust—'
'It's the truth.' She looked at Mrs Jamal. 'I'm only sorry I didn't say this before.'
Martha Denton glanced sceptically at the jury. 'I'm sure we all are.'
Yusuf Khan, who had appeared embarrassed at the turn Dani's evidence had taken, offered no cross-examination, and requested only that she give permission for her medical records to be made available to the court. She consented.
Before releasing her, Jenny asked Dani if she'd had other sexual partners before Nazim. She admitted to one, a boy she had slept with during the first term, but insisted they had used condoms. With Nazim she'd taken a chance. There was no doubt in her mind that it was he who had infected her.
Jenny asked Alison in open court to make copies of both Nazim and Rafi's medical records available to the lawyers and told the jury that from what she'd seen there was nothing to suggest Nazim had an STD or any health problems at all. According to his GP's notes he hadn't visited the doctor in three years.
Dani James left the witness chair and walked out of the hall, drawing a mixture of admiring and suspicious looks. Jenny was impressed with her. She was a successful lawyer with a reputation to uphold. It had taken a lot of courage to give the evidence she had.
There was time for one more witness before breaking for lunch. She decided to call Simon Donovan and use the recess to plan her questions for McAvoy. She had a long list accumulating.
Donovan was a fifty-three-year-old managing accountant for a Ford dealership. He was married and lived in the suburb of Stoke Bishop. A man remarkable only for his overwhelming blandness, he told the court that several weeks after Nazim and Rafi's disappearance he had seen their photographs in the Bristol Evening Post. He immediately recognized them as the two young Asian men who had been sitting across the aisle from him on the ten a.m. train from Bristol Parkway to London Paddington on Saturday, 29 June. He had been en route to a football match, as had many of his fellow travellers, and had noticed them mainly because they seemed not to approve of the sometimes boisterous fans. As far as he could recall they were both dressed in smart casual clothes and had only small items of luggage with them.
Jenny said, 'You remembered the faces of two strangers that clearly after three weeks?'
'They were different, I suppose,' Donovan said. 'Maybe it was because they were young lads with beards. And we were all pretty jumpy about terrorists at the time, weren't we? You notice these things on a train.'
'Is this a polite way of saying their presence made you anxious?'
'I'm not a racist,' Donovan said. 'I haven't got a racist bone in my body. But you just can't help wondering, can you? Especially when they're looking so serious.'
Jenny said, 'I see. Thank you, Mr Donovan.'
Havilland asked only a
few soft questions designed to shore up Donovan's credibility as a reliable and concerned member of the public with no axe to grind. Martha Denton delved a little further and managed to prompt him into saying that both young men seemed worried or apprehensive. Jenny pointed out that this detail was missing from his statement made three weeks after the event. Donovan replied that the police officer who took his statement had been in a hurry and seemed only to want the bare facts. Jenny wasn't convinced by his explanation.
Yusuf Khan looked at Donovan for a long moment, his head cocked thoughtfully to one side, before asking how many bearded young Asian men he came across in his daily life at that time. Very few, Donovan had to admit.
'But the newspapers at the time were full of them, weren't they? We all remember the hysteria. Every time you caught a train or a plane, the media would have had you believe, you took your life in your hands.'
'What's your question for the witness, Mr Khan?' Jenny said.
'My question, Mr Donovan, is whether you think you could have told one bearded young man with Asian features from another? That's all you recognized, wasn't it - their beards and the colour of their skin?'
'I wouldn't have called the police if I wasn't sure it was them.'
'What was your motivation?'
'I thought it the right thing to do.'
'Do you make a habit of calling the police?'
'No.'
'Were you under the impression they might be terrorist suspects?'
'Well, I ... I suppose it might have crossed my mind.'
Khan nodded calmly. 'When you first called the police, did you say to them, "I definitely saw the two missing men", or did you say, "I saw two young Asian men who might have been them"?'
Donovan moved uncomfortably in his seat, his thick neck reddening. 'I said I'd seen these two lads . . . They came round to my house with photographs. When I'd seen a few, I was sure it was them. Why would I have made it up?'
Jenny heard a sudden sharp derisive laugh from the back of the hall. She looked up, angry, and saw that it had come from McAvoy.
Chapter 10
Alison was frantically dealing with a hitch in the jury's catering arrangements - the promised sandwich delivery had failed to arrive and she was organizing a convoy to the nearby bird sanctuary's waterside restaurant. Outside, at the front of the hall, clusters of angry young Asian men were courting the media pool gathered incongruously in the quiet village lane. Two television news vans had appeared and make-up girls were busy powdering faces. The lawyers hurried through the melee, refusing to answer any questions, and took off in a posse of expensive cars. A cluster of puzzled locals watched the chaotic scene from a safe distance, wondering what could have brought such madness to their quiet corner of the countryside.
Feeling suddenly drained, Jenny slipped out of the back door and found a damp plastic bench which looked out over a field. A tractor was ploughing, a swarm of assorted birds followed after it, fighting over the worms thrown up in the freshly turned earth. Huddled in her thin raincoat, she ate the chocolate bar Alison had dredged up for her, and sipped coffee tasting vaguely of detergent from a cracked mug.
She attempted to process the morning's events and unravel the various parties' competing agendas. She understood that the police mainly wanted to cover their backs, and she presumed that the Security Services were keen to vindicate their theory that Nazim and Rafi had gone abroad. Yusuf Khan and his friends, who appeared to include Anwar Ali, were harder to fathom. Khan's mention of agents provocateurs entrapping young radicals had caught her attention, but on reflection it struck her as another baseless conspiracy theory. Khan was representing a lobby with a positive message to sell - that young British Muslims were good, responsible citizens - and this didn't sit well with the proven fact that a few of their number had taken up arms against their country.
'Is this the best those stingy bastards can do for you?'
She looked up to see McAvoy rounding the corner of the building. The sound of the tractor had masked his footsteps.
Alarmed, she said, 'You're a witness, Mr McAvoy. I can't talk to you before you give evidence.'
His face creased into a smile that managed to be both boyish and menacing. Trying to avoid the blue eyes which looked straight into her, she noticed his hair was starting to kink at the back where it needed a cut, and that he wore a dark green silk paisley scarf inside his upturned coat collar.
'I don't think you can afford not to talk to me.'
'Look, this really isn't—'
'I'd have got to you before, but you kicked off faster than I expected. I've been up to my neck in a trial.' He brought a battered soft pack of Marlboros out of his pocket and offered it to her. 'Something to warm you up.'
'You know the rules . . .'
'Fuck 'em. Anyway, I thought these things were different from criminal trials. You're a coroner, you can talk to who you like.'
He tapped out a cigarette, struck a match in cupped hands and leaned back against the wall. He took a slow, full draw and slowly exhaled, letting the breeze carry the smoke from his lips.
'Did Mrs Jamal tell you that I was solicitor for both families for four months?'
Annoyed, Jenny said, 'I'd rather you kept what you've got to say for the witness box.'
She got up and tossed her half-eaten chocolate bar into a rusting wire waste bin. The damp on the bench had soaked through to her skin.
'No, you wouldn't. It'd only screw it up, put those bastards so far out of reach you'll never get to the truth.' He took another draw and glanced lazily towards her, 'Maybe you don't care either way.'
'Which bastards are we talking about, precisely?'
'I don't know. They put me away before I got the chance to find out.' He gave a hint of a smile. 'Would you like to hear about it?'
'How about writing a statement and handing it to my officer? That's the usual practice.'
'Screw that. This case has already cost me one marriage and a perfectly good career.' He strolled across the weedy concrete slabs towards the pig-wire fence bordering the field. 'Are those seagulls? We're miles from the bloody sea.'
'The estuary's almost the sea.'
'I suppose . . . Look at them, kicking the other ones out of the way.' He stared out at the field. 'They pecked that poor girl's guts out, didn't they? That's what I read in the paper.'
'Then it must be true.'
'Didn't dare look that far down myself . . . Heard anything about where the body went?'
'Not yet.'
'Madness. What's anyone going to do with it? You always see on the TV - the bad guys dig a hole in the woods. Have you ever tried putting a spade in the ground where there are trees? It's all roots. It'd be as easy to get through concrete.' He sucked hard on the cigarette and flicked the butt over into the field margin. 'It's not as if I don't know villains, but that's a new one on me . . . right out of the morgue.'
He stood and watched the tractor stop at the end of the row, lift its gear and turn around. A sudden change in the wind carried the sound of the birds to them: a raucous, vibrant, strangely beautiful cacophony.
McAvoy smiled. ' "I could scale the blue air, I could plough the high hills, Oh, I could kneel all night in prayer, To heal your many ills . . . My Dark Rosaleen" . . . My God. Where did that come from?' He laughed and shook his head. 'Schoolmaster for a father - drilled all sorts of stuff into me.' He turned, walked several steps towards Jenny and stopped. 'I thought you weren't going to talk to me, Mrs Cooper.'
'Mrs Jamal said you went to prison.'
'I had that pleasure.'
'What was your offence?'
'Being a nuisance. My record says perverting the course of justice. Cops set me up with an undercover wearing a wire. Spliced it all together, made it sound like the alibi she was offering my client was all my idea.' He shrugged. 'Not that it wouldn't've happened eventually. Show them up too many times they'll skewer you in the end.'
'You were a criminal defence solicitor, right?'
<
br /> 'Solicitor advocate. I wasn't going to trust any bastard barristers to do my talking for me. Couldn't fight sleep most of them.'
'And Mrs Jamal came to you after her son disappeared?'
'She and the Hassans both. October '02. The cops had stopped answering their calls. Hired me to rattle their cage. Three months later I was behind bars. Didn't even get bail.'
'And you don't want to talk about this in evidence?' Jenny said.
'Look, I applaud your efforts getting this thing on so quickly, but let's be realistic for a moment. You'd think that with all their resources they could have found out the truth by now if they'd wanted to. No offence, Mrs Cooper, but in my humble opinion they're pimping you out. An honest woman like you wouldn't want that, surely?'
'You've a charming way of putting things.'
'Tell you what - why don't you call off this afternoon and talk to me instead?'
She looked at him, astonished. Arrogant prick, telling to tell her how to run her inquest.
'I don't think so. I'll see you inside.'
She headed for the back door of the building.
'You won't. And if you send me a summons I'll stand mute. I've got sod all to lose, and now it's come round again I think I've probably got more interest in finding out what happened than you have.'
'Oh, really?'
'Yes, really. You see, I'm a man with not a few past sins that still need atoning for, Mrs Cooper - my alleged offence not one of them, by the way. So there's no way I'm going to put my hand on the Holy Bible and swear to tell you the whole truth when this inquest you're conducting's a fucking sham.'
She fought an involuntary urge to hit him, hard.
