The Disappeared

by M. R. Hall

  'We've gathered a list of possibles,' she said.

  'Well done. I was worried the cops would stymie you.'

  'I've got ways round them.'

  'I'd like to hear.'

  'Trade secret, I'm afraid.' God, what did she sound like?

  As she stepped out onto the pavement she dimly heard the office phone start ringing again: Mrs Jamal refusing to take no for an answer.

  McAvoy said, 'I was wondering if you might let me buy you that drink later, toss around a few ideas.'

  'Oh? What drink was that?' She couldn't help herself. She was flirting with him like a simpering schoolgirl.

  'The coffee you didn't have time for, but come evening it'll be a wee glass of something I shouldn't wonder.'

  She got a grip. 'Thanks, but I really shouldn't until you've given evidence.'

  'It's a bit late to stand on that rule, isn't it?'

  'Alec, you know the issues — '

  'I've been reading my law books, come up with a few ideas for you - like how to make those MI5 bastards cough up their files. If you get before the right High Court judge you might just swing it - there are still a few good ones left.'

  'Friends of yours, are they?'

  'I have my methods too.'

  Jenny imagined the brown paper bag passing to the minor official in the Court Service in exchange for a favourable listing. McAvoy would take the credit and doubtless call in the favour. And what would he want in return? she wondered.

  She knew she should put him off, have nothing to do with him until after the inquest, but couldn't summon the words to turn him down. Ignoring the chorus of warning voices in her head, she agreed to meet him at five-thirty in a wine bar by the law courts.

  'I promise I'll behave myself,' he said.

  Tariq Miah met Jenny outside the School of Law and took her behind the building into a formal garden - stark and bare in early February with a hint of frost still hanging in the air - but free from prying eyes. He was in his late thirties, the first threads of grey showing in his black hair and closely trimmed beard. His features were Middle Eastern: copper skin and dark eyes. From a brief glance at the faculty's website Jenny had learned that he was working his way steadily through the hierarchy. A specialist in constitutional law, he had joined as a junior research fellow in the late 1990s.

  As they strolled along the narrow gravel paths, she explained that she was looking for an insight, anything to shed light on who or what Rafi Hassan and Nazim Jamal had become involved with. She mentioned Anwar Ali and the elusive mullah at the A1 Rahma mosque, Sayeed Faruq, and asked if he knew them.

  'Only by reputation,' he said, speaking in the overly precise manner of academic lawyers shieldeded from the day-to-day stresses of practice.

  'And what was that?'

  'I heard it said the mosque was a recruiting ground for Hizb ut-Tahrir. You're familiar with that organization?'

  'I've read a little, but I'm still confused. The Security Services seem to associate it with terrorism, but it claims to be peaceful.'

  'It doesn't advocate violence, but individuals within it obviously do.'

  'Are you thinking of anyone in particular?'

  'No. It's just to say that I wouldn't be surprised if the A1 Rahma mosque acted as a conduit to others without a public profile.'

  'You think it was a base for recruiters?'

  'Perhaps.' He stopped to admire a bank of snowdrops. 'I would be surprised at Jamal and Hassan being assimilated so quickly, however. Hizb tends to indoctrinate new members over several years before asking them to swear an oath of allegiance.'

  'Allegiance to what, exactly?'

  'The organization. The cause of bringing into existence a global caliphate. It's not a conventional political party working for the short term, it sees itself as doing God's will over as many generations as it takes. It has a three-stage plan: to establish cells and networks of members, to build opinion amongst the Muslim population in favour of an Islamic state, and finally to infiltrate the institutions and governments of target countries to effect a revolution from within.'

  Jenny said, 'One thing that puzzles me is why young men, let alone women, are drawn to these ideas. I mean, who'd want to live in Iran?'

  'We all fantasize about removing the mess from our lives, cutting a swathe through the chaos and replacing it with certainties,' Miah said. 'What more fearful time is there in life than the threshold of adulthood? If someone were to offer you a free pass to status and security and make you feel morally superior into the bargain, it would be hard to resist, would it not? And if you already believe yourself to be a stranger in your own land it would become almost impossible not to be seduced: all men are conquerors by instinct, it's in our DNA. One's own seed must prevail. All our complex Western political institutions have evolved out of the need to check such impulses.'

  'Both these boys came from good families. Integrated, established, English-speaking—'

  'The parents were under no illusions about who they were - outsiders. It's their offspring, neither outsiders or insiders who have to fight for their identity.'

  'Did you see that in Rafi Hassan?'

  Having had his fill of the snowdrops, Miah resumed his meander. 'I had very little to do with him. I make clear to Asian students that I'm there for them if they need me, but he never approached me privately.'

  Jenny tried to read him. There was something coded in his careful manner, a vague sense that he was inviting a conclusion that he wasn't prepared to spell out.

  'I don't know if you've read about my inquest,' Jenny said. 'I've granted rights of audience to an outfit called the British Society for Islamic Change. I think Anwar Ali's involved with them.'

  Miah nodded. 'Essentially the same organization as Hizbut-Tahrir, or a branch of it. They're very clever. They seduce the government into believing they're moderates providing for the needs of disaffected Asian youth, and inculcate themselves into the Establishment. It becomes racist to question them. But the philosophy remains the same: Islam is the one and only truth and it must prevail.' He gave a slight shake of his head, his eyes suddenly those of an older man, telling the story of long years of fruitless struggle. 'We are at a bad juncture in history, Mrs Cooper. Life has become too fraught and complex for most of us to understand our place in it. The forces of liberal progression offer only more uncertainty, more competition, more casualties. Is it any wonder that fundamentalists emerge, saying we should drop anchor and stop the ship before it dashes on the rocks?'

  'I think what you're trying to tell me is that you think those boys went abroad to fight.'

  Miah exhaled, his breath a heavy cloud of vapour. He stopped and turned to face her, fixing her with a look that was both pained and profoundly serious. 'When they disappeared I was only beginning to understand the nature of the problem. But now I can tell you, if I were to draw a template for the ideal recruit to the extremist cause, both of them would fit it perfectly. Middle class, highly intelligent, ambitious, culturally displaced and as emotionally vulnerable as any young person. They were there for the taking. Eight years on it's not just one or two or even tens, it's hundreds and thousands.' He was fired by a tortured passion. 'We live in a country that doesn't know itself, Mrs Cooper. We keep moving, but beyond the base struggle for survival we have no idea why.'

  Having said his piece, Miah retreated to his academic shell. He told Jenny that both MI5 and police officers had questioned him extensively at the time, but little of note had emerged. He denied that they had been in touch recently. Any faith he once had in the ability of the state to address these problems, he said, had long since evaporated. He no longer sat on policy-making committees or wrote papers to inform government departments; he wrote books and articles and tried his best to inspire the students who passed through his classes with values that would inoculate them against extremism.

  'But the fundamentalists do have a point,' he said as they neared the garden gates and the end of their meeting. 'Without a story t
o explain ourselves, we are nothing.'

  Miah's words lodged stubbornly in her mind as she walked back through the thin drizzle to the office. They had pierced her defences and unsettled the waters that her medication struggled to still. Storyless herself, searching for the pieces of her childhood that might explain what lay in her threatening, still unexplored recesses, he had loosened her grip on solid reality a little further. Every face in the street, lined or fresh, bright or dulled, seemed confident in its history, rooted in a certainty she had long since lost.

  Walking past a florist's, she glanced at her reflection in the window and for a brief second didn't recognize herself. It was a ghostly, transparent, semi-being that looked back at her. A surge of panic tightened her chest and throat. She quickened her pace, focusing on the strength in her limbs, the breath in her lungs, the life in her. Her state, she realized, was due to being aware of the part that was missing. Rafi and Nazim hadn't been. Their voids had been filled before they had even become conscious of them. Darting across the road, dodging the traffic, a phrase surfaced from long-forgotten school days: nature abhors a vacuum. If nature forbids an absence to occur, it must, as she had always suspected, be perverted and unnatural forces that opened up fissures in the fabric of reality, and untethered nascent souls from their moorings.

  Hurrying past a row of scruffy shops, turning her head away from their plate-glass fronts, her spiralling thoughts spewed up yet another realization: that the evil she touched in her dreams was such an absence, a nothingness into which innocence was easily seduced.

  Nazim and Rafi had passed through the vortex, evaporated with a trace, and it fell to her, to her of all people, to follow them.

  Jenny leaned heavily against the reassuringly heavy and cumbersome front door and made for the sanctuary of her office. Her brief interview with Miah had disturbed her to an extent which felt out of all proportion. Here was where she made sense of things, surrounded by her books and the trappings of office, the objects that told her who she was and all that she stood for.

  Alison looked up with a start as she entered. She was sitting at her desk in her overcoat, her face drained of colour. An answerphone message was playing: Mrs Jamal pathetically pleading for someone to answer, please. She was frightened, she said, there had been more phone calls in the night. Wouldn't somebody help her? She lapsed into sobs and sniffles.

  'I thought she was going to stop that,' Jenny said.

  'She left three like it. Claimed she was being watched —’

  'I'll call her,' Jenny said and started towards her office.

  'She's dead, Mrs Cooper.'

  Jenny stopped midway across the room. 'What?'

  'I called her back,' Alison said, 'just now. A young constable answered. A neighbour found her body in the front garden about fifteen minutes ago. She'd fallen from her balcony.'

  Numb, Jenny glanced at her watch. It was a quarter past two. It had been an hour and a half since she had left the office.

  'When did she make her last call?'

  'Just after one,' Alison said. 'I feel dreadful . . . You can never see it coming, can you?'

  Jenny left a message on McAvoy's phone telling him she wouldn't be able to meet him, something - she didn't say what - had come up. She replaced the receiver and reached for her pills, shook out one of each and swallowed. She doodled agitatedly on a legal pad while waiting for them to dull the frantic thoughts that were crowding her mind. She felt nauseous with guilt that she hadn't answered Mrs Jamal's call. An irrational part of her blamed McAvoy for phoning when he had. A second later and she would have answered Mrs Jamal's call, and perhaps ... It didn't bear thinking about.

  Chapter 14

  A police cordon had gone up across the street, attracting a small crowd of onlookers eager for a glimpse of the corpse. Jenny pushed through them and caught sight of DI Pironi leaving the front of the building. It was his patch. New Bridewell police station was less than half a mile away. She caught up with him as he stood on the pavement pulling off latex gloves and the elasticated plastic bags that covered his shoes.

  'David-'

  'Jenny.' He didn't seem pleased to see her. 'You can't go in, I'm afraid. Forensics have got to sweep it first.'

  'What happened?'

  'Looks like she fell from the balcony.'

  She looked up at the building. 'How could she fall? Those railings must be waist high.'

  He balled up the plastic bags and gloves and tossed them into the gutter. 'She could have jumped, I suppose.'

  'Why would she do that?'

  'No idea. You can take a look at her if you like. She's still there.' He gestured to a female constable who didn't look old enough to be out of school. 'Show the coroner the body, would you? Don't get too close.' He aimed a key fob at a pool car that was double-parked in the street. 'We've booked her in for a post-mortem early this afternoon. I thought you'd appreciate a swift turnaround, what with the inquest and everything. I expect we'll talk in the morning.' He gave her a flat smile and left.

  Jenny followed the constable, stepping over the cordon tape and crossing a damp patch of lawn around to the side of the building. Two more uniforms stood guard in front of a temporary screen made from black plastic stretched between two poles. The constable said she was permitted to look around the edge but not to go beyond the barrier. Jenny moved towards it, reminding herself that it was just a body behind there, an empty shell, and took another step forward.

  The corpse was naked and the legs soiled. It lay in a contorted heap: bent in the middle, partially kneeling, a dislocated arm twisted under the torso, face planted in the grass. Jenny was surprised at how little shock she felt.

  'Did anyone see it happen?' she said.

  The constable said, 'No one's come forward yet. A neighbour thinks he might have heard a scream.'

  'What happened to her clothes?'

  'In a heap on the sitting-room floor - next to a whisky bottle.'

  'Whisky? She's a Muslim.'

  'The man who found her said she reeked of it.'

  A sense of loyalty and a large measure of guilt propelled Jenny to the mortuary. Next of kin - her ex-husband and a sister in Leicester - had been informed. According to the detective sergeant she had spoken to, neither had showed any inclination to get involved. Both, apparently, had listened to the news in silence and merely thanked the officer for letting them know. He had gained the impression that Mrs Jamal's apparent suicide hadn't come as a shock to either of them.

  Jenny sat and waited by the defunct vending machines in the empty reception area. It was nearly six p.m. and all but one of the technicians had left for the night. The only sound in the building was the whine of the surgical buzz saw, which she pictured Dr Kerr carefully tracing around Mrs Jamal's skull, not forgetting the little v-cut at the back to stop the excised portion slipping when replaced.

  In the silent thirty minutes that followed Jenny couldn't help but imagine the procedure being conducted on the other side of the wall. The brain would be lifted free of the skull and cut into slices on the stainless-steel counter. A small sample would be taken for analysis, and the remainder would be stuffed unceremoniously into a polythene bag along with the rest of the carved-up internal organs and pushed back into the abdominal cavity. She could tolerate the dissection of liver and kidneys, even heart and lungs, but there was something about the treatment meted out to the brain that felt sacrilegious.

  Andy Kerr came out to meet her already washed and scrubbed. The smell of soap only partially obscured that of sickly disinfectant, which, after a day in the autopsy room lodged deep in a pathologist's pores.

  'It's pretty much as per the police report,' he said rapidly, eager to finish up and get home. 'There was a dislocated shoulder, neck fracture and broken ribs. Those alone wouldn't have been fatal - cause of death was cardiac arrest, probably caused by the shock of the fall. Judging from the photographs of the body at the locus I'd say it was pretty much instantaneous. It didn't look as if she moved afte
r impact.'

  'What about alcohol?'

  'We'll know in the morning, but there seemed to be a large amount of what smelled like whisky in the stomach.'

  'Could you tell if she was a regular drinker?' Jenny said.

  'Her liver was perfectly healthy. No scarring. I've asked for tests that'll tell us if it was an unusual occurrence or not.

  Anyone who consumes alcohol regularly develops certain enzymes to digest it.'

  'Was there anything else in her stomach - had she taken any tablets?'

  'No. Apart from the alcohol it was virtually empty.'

  Jenny nodded, her uneasy sense of being personally responsible for Mrs Jamal's death intensifying. How much had Mrs Jamal drunk after she'd dodged her call? Could anything she might have said stopped her, or would she have snapped at her to calm down and merely hastened the end?

  'Are you all right?' Andy said, 'You look—'

  'I knew her. Her son—'

  'The police told me. I'm sorry. But I don't have to tell you, we see a lot of suicides like this. Drunk, naked. There's always something that's tipped them over the edge. I guess it was the inquest.'

  'She fought for it for eight years,' Jenny said.

  Andy shrugged. 'Maybe the fight was the one thing that kept her going.'

  'Surely she would have waited for a verdict?'

  'What if it turned out to be the wrong one?'

  The Coroner's Rules obliged the coroner to step aside while the police investigated a suspicious death, but Jenny was in no mood to wait. She knew her motives were partly selfish - the urgent need to absolve herself of blame - but there was also something else, a niggling fear that Mrs Jamal's emotional phone calls weren't entirely the product of delusion after all. Painful experience had taught her how easily irrational thoughts could take hold, but what if she had been far saner than she appeared? What if someone bad been watching her? Or what if she had been lying and hiding evidence vital to the inquest all along?

  By the time she had crossed the hospital car park Jenny had convinced herself of the need to trespass on police territory. She imagined Pironi's foot soldiers, lumbering and incompetent, knowing nothing of Mrs Jamal's state of mind or history. Whatever they could do, she could do better and faster.