The Disappeared

by M. R. Hall

  Revving the engine to crank up the sluggish heater, she started to make calls. She checked in with Ross and told him she'd be back late. She caught Alison as she was leaving the office and told her to record Mrs Jamal's surviving messages to tape and pass a copy to the police. She already had. Lastly she called directory enquiries and tried to track down Zachariah Jamal. She got hold of the number of his dental practice: her call was answered by a machine. She tried the emergency number it gave out and reached the off-duty receptionist, who was dealing with a crying baby. The woman refused to give out Mr Jamal's private number and would only agree to pass on her details.

  Waiting for his call back, Jenny checked her own messages. There were two from consultants at the Vale asking if death certificates had been issued for their respective deceased patients - second only to being sued, the prospect of their professional competence being scrutinized in a public inquest was the most frightening prospect a doctor could face - and one from McAvoy. Sounding apologetic, he said, 'Sorry you can't make it - I'll have one for you. You know where to find me if you change your mind.' She was fighting the temptation to call him back - but to say what? - when a beep indicated an incoming call.

  Zachariah Jamal sounded as if he was phoning from outside his home: there was traffic noise in the background, his voice was brittle and uncertain. She wondered if he had even broken the news of his first wife's death to the new Mrs Jamal and children. Drunk, naked and very publicly dead, they'd know soon enough.

  'What is it I can do for you?' he said. 'I've had very little contact with Amira in recent years.'

  Jenny said, 'It looks as if she might have taken her own life. Would that surprise you?'

  He sighed. 'I don't know. She was a very complicated woman. Emotional, but. . .'

  She waited for him to articulate his thoughts.

  '. . . determined. Long after I had resigned myself to Nazim's death, she kept on.'

  'Why do you say death?'

  'Of course he died. Probably in Afghanistan. I know my own son. If he were alive he would have made contact.'

  'But your wife, your ex-wife, didn't want to believe that?'

  He paused for a moment. She could feel the force of his suppressed emotion. 'No. She didn't want to believe that.'

  'I suppose it's possible that the inquest into your son's disappearance was confronting her with having to accept that.'

  'Yes . .

  'I think we might be having the same thought, Mr Jamal. Maybe you could give me your version?'

  'Our contact has been entirely businesslike. I don't know what was in her mind.'

  You don't want to get involved, Jenny thought, too many painful memories, guilt layered upon guilt. Shut the door and bolt it. Forget that she or Nazim ever existed.

  Jenny said, 'I've met her a few times in the last two weeks. She was emotional, maybe even a little paranoid, but I wouldn't say depressed. Depressed people go into themselves, shut off from the world. She'd forced an inquest, she was being dynamic. Wouldn't she have wanted to hear the jury's verdict?'

  'I really can't say.'

  'I can imagine a bereaved mother killing herself in the belief that she might be reunited with her son. Is that possible?'

  Mr Jamal didn't answer.

  'Was your ex-wife a religious woman?'

  'Very much so.'

  'Excuse my ignorance, but doesn't Islam consider suicide a serious sin?'

  'It does,' he said quietly.

  'I wouldn't expect someone who feels suicidal to think logically—'

  'She must have been ill,' he said, and then, with a catch in his voice, 'she must have been very ill . . .'

  'The post-mortem showed that she'd been drinking whisky shortly before her death. Quite a substantial amount.'

  At this Mr Jamal fell completely silent. Jenny could hear the wind over his handset, a car pass by.

  'I'm just trying to get a picture of what it would mean. Alcohol, suicide - even if she were ill, certain taboos can be more powerful even than the disease. I was with her yesterday, she wasn't psychotic.'

  Faintly, Mr Jamal said, 'I agree with you, Mrs Cooper. I don't know what to say. It doesn't make any sense.'

  'I'll let you go now,' Jenny said, 'but there's one more thing. Has your wife ever told you anything about Nazim's disappearance, about his friends, anything she might not have wanted to be publicly known?'

  'No. There was nothing. That's what drove her - the need to know.'

  The last members of the forensic team were dribbling out of the building and climbing into their minibus. A single constable was winding up the plastic cordon tape. Business appeared to be nearly over for the day. The front door was propped open with an upturned broom. Jenny stepped inside and took the lift up to Mrs Jamal's floor. DI Pironi and a younger plain-clothes officer with patchy stubble and his hair in corn rows were locking up the apartment as she approached along the landing.

  Jenny said, 'Hi. Any objection to me having a look around?'

  The detectives exchanged a look. 'Mrs Cooper, the coroner,' Pironi said to his subordinate. 'I think we should christen her Mrs Snooper.'

  The young guy smiled and ran his eyes over her, thinking - she could read his mind - just about.

  Jenny snapped angrily, 'Have you got a problem with that or not?'

  Pironi looked at his fancy watch and sighed. 'As long as you're quick.'

  'Mind if I catch a smoke, boss?' the younger man said. Pironi waved him on and drew out a set of keys, sorting through them laboriously as if she were asking a huge and unreasonable favour of him.

  'Have you taken anything away?' Jenny said.

  'Some prints, a pile of clothes and a whisky bottle. Looks like she swallowed about half of it - enough to send anyone out the bloody window.' He found the key, unlocked the door and held it open for her. He might as well have said, 'After you, your ladyship.'

  Jenny stepped inside. It looked and smelled just as it had yesterday, a vaguely exotic scent in the air: herbs and spices. She pushed open the bathroom and bedroom doors. Both were spotless and tidy. The bedspread was drawn tight across the single bed, chintz cushions arranged against the headboard. The kitchen, too, was in perfect order. There was a single dirty cup in the sink, breakfast crockery sitting clean on the drainer. A shopping list was stuck to the fridge with a quaint, floral-patterned magnet.

  'Mind if I look in the drawers?' she said to Pironi, who was waiting impatiently in the doorway.

  'Go ahead.'

  She pulled several open: cutlery, tea towels, utensils. Everything clean and in its proper place.

  'Any sign of prescription medication?'

  'Nope.'

  She opened an overhead cupboard and found the source of the smell: bunches of dried thyme and outsize jars of spices. 'No booze in the house apart from the whisky?'

  'Not a drop.'

  'No note?'

  Pironi shook his head.

  Jenny stepped past him and went into the sitting room where she had sat yesterday morning. It was precisely as she remembered it, only stiller. There was an inertia about the rooms of the recently deceased, as if the air had ceased moving. She could smell the carpet and the fabric of the furniture: the place, rather than the person who had inhabited it. Her eyes circled the room a second time. Something had changed.

  'Has anything been moved in here?' she said.

  'Just that chair.' He pointed to the wooden upright chair which yesterday had been at the desk in the corner. It was now on the opposite side of the room next to the French window leading to the balcony. 'It was where you're standing. Her clothes were in a heap next to it with the bottle.'

  'With the top screwed on?'

  'Who are you trying to be, Miss fucking Marple?'

  Jenny let his remark pass without comment. 'Were the curtains open? What about the French window?'

  Pironi rolled his eyes. 'The curtains were closed and there was one lamp on in the corner. She sat there drinking, took her clothes off then
jumped out of the window.'

  'It's only three storeys down.'

  'If you're having a brainstorm, you don't fetch out the plumb line and measuring tape,' Pironi said. 'Seen enough? I'm expecting a call from my lad in Helmand.'

  'Won't be a moment.' She moved over to the French window and tried to picture a naked Mrs Jamal climbing over the railings. It wouldn't have been a graceful exit. She turned and took one last look around the room. The photographs of Nazim were all arranged as she remembered them, as were the ornaments on the shelf unit: fussy china figurines and several shiny sporting trophies.

  She was walking back to the door when she noticed - the two shelves above the desk. The day before they had held half a dozen grey box files. Now there was a stack of magazines on the top shelf and a few paperbacks on the bottom.

  'Did you take any files from here?' Jenny said. 'There was a whole row of them on that shelf when I was here yesterday. All her paperwork to do with her son.'

  'We didn't take anything.'

  'Has anyone else been here? You know who I mean.'

  'Straight up. There weren't any files.' He scratched his head. 'I don't know . . . Maybe she put them out with the rubbish?'

  Pironi left Jenny to deal with the caretaker, Mr Aldis, an irascible old man irritated at being dragged away from the football match he was watching on television. The communal dustbins were in a locked cupboard on the outside of the building. They hadn't been emptied for five days and he swore that the police hadn't asked for access to them. Jenny borrowed a pair of rubber gloves and spent a cold and unpleasant hour sifting though garbage. There was no sign of any box files.

  'Why didn't you tell me?' McAvoy said. 'It's a cop in here who tipped me off. Dear God. Dead . . .' Glasses clinked in the background. He sounded as if he'd made a night of it.

  The hands-free cradle in her car had snapped and she had the phone wedged on her shoulder as she drove homewards, praying she wouldn't meet a police car.

  'The police think she jumped,' Jenny said.

  'She'd be going straight to hell, then,' McAvoy said. 'Like my crew - no messing. Suicides are roasted in fire "which is easy for Allah", is what it says in the Koran. Guy inside lent it to me one time.'

  'Her files were missing. All her papers connected with the case.'

  'The cops would have had those, no danger.'

  'Pironi denies it.'

  'St Peter denied our Lord three times and still got to be Bishop of Rome.'

  'He looked me in the eye. I believed him.'

  'That's because you're an untainted soul, Mrs Cooper . . . Fucking dead. Why?'

  'She'd been drinking. Half a bottle of whisky.'

  'Poor soul . . . Poor wretched soul.'

  She was clear of the bridge and skirting around Chepstow. She'd soon be past the racecourse and into the gorge of the valley out of radio contact.

  'I'm about to lose my signal. I'll update you soon as I hear anything.'

  McAvoy said, 'I know what you're doing, Jenny. I understand you want to stay above board, but I could help you . . . If you really want to dig down to the shit, you're going to need a man like me.'

  It was six steeply winding miles through dark woods between St Arvans and Tintern, the ancient village with its ruined abbey at which she would turn up the narrow lane and climb the hill to Melin Bach. Since the night the previous June, when - in the thick of the Danny Wills case and suffering from acute anxiety - she had pulled up in the forest car park and wrestled with desperate impulses, she dreaded this stretch of her journey. This late in the evening there was little or no traffic. A skin of water lay over the surface of the road and the bends, always sharper and longer than they appeared on approach, forced her to slow to a crawl or risk plunging down the steep embankment. Each year they claimed several lives.

  She switched on the radio to distract her imagination from turning shadows into listless ghosts, and tried to lose herself in the gentle classical music. She conjured a pastoral scene of fields and wild flowers, attempting to engage all the senses as Dr Allen had advised her, but the purer she made the image, the sharper the point of her unprompted fear became. It was a cold, menacing, tangible presence, an entity that clung to her.

  Go away, go away, she repeated in her head, trying to force herself back to her idyll. Then out loud, 'You're not real. Leave me alone . . . Leave me alone.'

  There was a sudden noise, a sniff, a stifled sob of rejection. Jenny's eyes flicked left to the passenger seat. Mrs Jamal's wide, black, desolate eyes looked momentarily back at her then vanished. Jenny forced a long, deep breath against her pounding heart and pushed the throttle down as far as she dared. She had been battered with all manner of symptoms, but she'd never seen things before.

  She hurried from the car to the house, rationalizing that her imagination had been playing tricks. The eyes were flickers of reflected light, the face a fleeting shadow. It was only natural for the mind to make pictures out of darkness.

  She locked and bolted the front door.

  Hostile rap music with a window-shaking bass boomed out of Ross's room. She called up to say hi, but there was no answer. It was nearly eleven, too late to eat. She needed to calm down. What she would have given for a drink. She stepped into her study, resolving to release her tension onto the page.

  She switched on the light and saw that the papers on her desk had been disturbed and that the drawer where she kept her journal wasn't fully closed. She wrenched it open. It was there beneath the jumble of envelopes and writing paper - the black cover clasped shut by the band of elastic - but had she left it that way, with the spine to the left?

  'Hi. You're late.'

  She spun round to see Ross in the doorway dressed in a hooded sweat top and baggy Indian trousers.

  'Have you been touching my things?'

  'No ...'

  'Tell me the truth.'

  'There was no food in the house. I was looking for money to go down to the pub and get some.'

  'Don't lie to me.'

  'I didn't touch anything.'

  'You must never go through my desk. My personal things are in there.'

  'Yeah, a lot of crap.' He turned and went up the stairs.

  She chased after him. 'Ross, I'm sorry . . .'

  'You're a mess,' he said, more in pity than anger.

  'Ross, please—'

  He crashed into his bedroom and slammed the door.

  Chapter 15

  She woke at five, drained by the fitful dreams that had disturbed her shallow sleep. Her body was exhausted but her brain was firing, making wild connections and hurling itself into crazy speculation: a confusion of police and government agents, secret deals and concealed evidence; and, hovering in the shadows, the faintly smiling figure of McAvoy. Where did he fit in? Was he genuine or was he, as Alison feared, using her? As if in answer, two images presented themselves at once: an angel and a demon. One of them was him, she was sure, but which she couldn't tell. Perhaps he was both.

  The initial shock of Mrs Jamal's sudden death had dulled to a low ache that contained within it several different sources of pain. There were guilt and pity, but beneath them a sense of the shame that she must have carried with her in the moments before her death leap. Jenny still couldn't relate the well-dressed woman who had arrived in her office, and who had sat with such quiet dignity in court, with the i rumpled remains she had viewed on the grass the previous afternoon. She climbed out of bed, pulled on a jumper over her pyjamas and went downstairs to make a pot of coffee, which she took through to her study. She sifted through the notes and papers she had brought home, now searching for another piece in the jigsaw: the thing that Mrs Jamal hadn't told, the thing that had pushed her over the edge.

  She read and reread the original police statements, then picked over every word that had been said in court. Apart from the fact that Mrs Jamal had reacted so violently to Dani James's evidence, there was no clue. She tried to recall the conversation with her at her flat, wishing now she had m
ade notes. Mrs Jamal had been distressed when she heard about Madog's evidence but mistrustful of both McAvoy and his investigator friend: there had been tears, but Madog's story had felt like more mud in the same waters. It was only when Jenny had asked her whether there had been another girl that she had reacted differently and reached a state beyond tears. She had remembered the voice of the girl who telephoned as if it were yesterday - she was Nazim's age, well spoken and white. It couldn't have been Dani James, Mrs Jamal would have noticed her Mancunian accent. Their exchange had been brief, yet it had affected her profoundly. Jenny groped for possible explanations. It was more than mere disapproval. Was there a scandal - had the girl been pregnant? Had Mrs Jamal caught them together in her apartment perhaps? Had she driven the girl away and forced such a rift with her son that he never forgave her? And if that was the case, why had the girl never come forward?

  Apart from Dani James, the only young female to have given a formal statement to the police was Sarah Levin, now Dr Levin in the department of physics. She was another pending witness, whom Jenny should not contact before the resumed hearing; her instinct told her it was a further occasion on which the rules should be stretched. Besides, she was in desperate need of a lead, anything to unlock the past.

  Too much grumbling and protest, Jenny dragged Ross from his bed at seven and dropped him at a cafe near the sixth- form college, still groaning, before eight. She had planned to apologize for her outburst the previous evening, but he had insisted on sleeping for the entire forty-minute journey. It was becoming a pattern: during their increasingly rare moments together he would do anything but communicate with her.

  Sarah Levin's home address, gleaned from a sequence of early-morning phone calls to obstructive university officials, was a second-floor apartment in a large Victorian terraced house close to Bristol Downs: an expensive piece of property for a young woman. The label next to the doorbell said Spencer-Levin, and it was a man's voice that came over the intercom.