Jenny Cooper 02 - The Disappeared

by M. R. Hall

  To add to the estate’s problems, it had also become a dumping ground for asylum seekers. Here and there, as she drove through a disorientating network of similar streets, Jenny saw Middle Eastern, Asian and occasional African faces. In an arcade of shops there was an Indian takeaway protected by heavy steel shutters, and next to it a burned-out and boarded up former off-licence.

  She drew up outside the address in Raglan Way, which, being near the end of a terrace, at least had the benefit of a view of distant mountains. In contrast with the neighbouring houses, the path and patch of grass at the front were clean and swept and the front door had been recently painted. A small oasis of pride in a sea of apathy.

  She rang the bell. There was no answer, though she thought she heard sounds of movement from inside. She tried again and was met with silence. She looked for a letter box to call through and found that it had been screwed shut. Resigned to having to return later, she was turning to leave when she noticed a twitch of one of the heavy net curtains in the upstairs windows. A veiled woman retreated quickly behind it. Jenny returned to the front door and called through. ‘Is that Mrs Ali? My name’s Jenny Cooper – I’m a coroner. I’d like to speak to your husband. He’s not in trouble, it’s just a routine inquiry.’

  She waited for a response and thought she heard hesitant footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘What do you want?’ a frightened female voice said from behind the door.

  ‘I’m investigating the disappearance of a young man in 2002. His name was Nazim Jamal. I understand Mr Ali knew him.’

  ‘He’s not here. He’s still at work.’ She sounded young, her accent a fusion of northern British and Pakistani.

  ‘When will he be home?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s got a meeting.’

  ‘Is this his wife I’m talking to?’ There was no reply. Jenny took a visiting card out of her wallet and fed it under the door. ‘Look, this is my card. You can see who I am. I’m not a police officer, but you are obliged by law to cooperate with my inquiry. All I need to know is where I can find your husband to talk to him.’

  She could feel the woman’s panic and indecision. Eventually the card was pushed back out again, a phone number written on it.

  The refugee centre was housed in a two-storey concrete building in the centre of the estate. It had once been a pub. Foot-high letters had been unscrewed from the front, leaving their ghostly impression in a lighter shade of grey: The Chartists’ Arms. Through the partially closed blinds covering the ground-floor window, she could see a stick-thin Asian man with a wife and two small children in tow gesticulating across the desk at a tired-looking white woman. Oblivious to his remonstrations, the woman was straining to make sense of a large envelope stuffed with papers he had handed her. The walls were lined with ex-civil service filing cabinets, and there were steel bars at the windows to protect the few shabby computers and an elderly photocopying machine.

  Anwar Ali answered the door himself. She placed him in his early thirties, though his full beard and suit and tie made him look older. He uttered a brief greeting and ushered her upstairs to a small, tidy office. Directly across the narrow corridor was a classroom in which a language class was taking place, the students chanting, ‘Pleased-to-meet-you.’ She glanced at the tidy shelves and noticed a collection of books both in English and what she assumed was Urdu. Among them were several political biographies of Middle Eastern figures whose names she didn’t recognize.

  ‘How can I help you, Mrs Cooper?’ Ali said, his anger at her presence covered by only a thin veneer of politeness.

  ‘Your name was given to me as someone who was associated with Nazim Jamal and Rafi Hassan before their disappearance.’

  ‘By whom?’ He spoke precisely, his bearing that of a man with a sharp analytical mind: the kind of person who made Jenny feel anxious. Ali was prickly and she’d have to tread carefully.

  ‘The police. Apparently you went to Al Rahma mosque with Jamal and Hassan in the months beforehand and ran a halaqah at your flat in Marlowes Road – I hope I pronounced that correctly.’

  ‘Your pronunciation is fine. The police are still peddling this story?’

  ‘They certainly had you marked down as a radical at the time. How they feel about you now I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Thankfully we’ve had very little to do with each other. My brief spell in unlawful custody was sufficient. I still don’t know if it was the police or the Security Services holding me. I was punched, kicked, deprived of food and sleep, not permitted to wash, disturbed at prayers, forced to urinate on the floor. They found no evidence against me, I was not charged, nor have I ever been.’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘I should be extremely wary of taking notice of what people who behave in this way tell you, Mrs Cooper. They were not concerned with guilt or innocence, or even with the truth. All they wanted was to put Muslims behind bars.’

  ‘They told Mrs Jamal you were a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir.’

  ‘You’re sounding very much like them. I thought the coroner’s functions were separate from the police?’

  He sat back, regarding her calmly, waiting for her explanation.

  ‘Nazim Jamal has been pronounced legally dead. My function is to find out how that happened.’

  ‘I thought he was only presumed dead? That’s not sufficient grounds for an inquest.’

  ‘This is a preliminary inquiry. Mrs Jamal has spent many years in limbo; I feel it’s the least I can do for her.’ She affected what she hoped would appear a genuine smile. ‘I presume that you were close to the two of them, friendly even?’

  ‘Yes, for a while.’

  ‘Is there anything you’d like their families to know?’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell. We went to mosque, studied a little together. That’s it.’

  ‘Would you mind telling me what you studied?’

  ‘Facets of our religion.’

  She nodded towards his bookshelf. ‘Would these discussions have had a political slant?’

  ‘We were students. We discussed all sorts of things.’

  ‘Seven years is a long time. I expect you’ve changed.’

  He shook his head. ‘You really have missed your vocation, Mrs Cooper. I am not – ’ he paused for emphasis – ‘nor have I ever been, an advocate of violence.’

  ‘Do you know where they went, Mr Ali?’

  He held her gaze, unblinking. ‘Do you honestly think I would not have told their families if I did?’

  ‘Did they ever they mention going abroad to you, to Afghanistan perhaps?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You know they were allegedly seen on a London train the next morning.’

  ‘If that was so, I knew nothing about it.’

  ‘The police think you were some sort of recruiter, that you hooked in idealistic young men and passed them down the line to dangerous fanatics.’

  ‘They think a lot of things, but understand very few.’

  ‘So tell me. You must have a theory.’

  He glanced down for a moment, considering his response carefully. ‘I’ve had many years to think, and I can conclude only two things. Firstly, that even those we believe we know we may not; and secondly, that even in this country a Muslim life is cheap.’

  ‘Are you telling me the whole truth, Mr Ali?’

  ‘Those two young men weren’t just friends to me, they were my brothers. Why would I lie?’

  For all sorts of reasons, she thought, but knew there was little point in forcing the issue. The best she could do was appeal to his conscience and leave it with him. ‘I’ll ask just one thing of you,’ she said, ‘that you’ll think about Mrs Jamal. Nazim was her only child.’ She took out a business card and placed it on his desk. ‘She has a right to know even if the public doesn’t.’

  He didn’t get up to show her out. As she laid a hand on the door, he said, ‘Be careful whom you trust, Mrs Cooper – when a friend cuts your throat, you don’t see him coming.’

  Ali’s parting word
s remained with her. She hadn’t known what to make of him, except that he inhabited a world she didn’t understand and that he had made her slightly nervous. She could believe that he had been a young radical, a fanatic even, but she struggled with the thought that a Muslim mother would not have been told by someone on the inside, even anonymously, if her devout son had volunteered to fight for a religious cause. And if Nazim and Rafi hadn’t gone to fight or train with the mujahedin, where else could they have gone? They were scarcely more than schoolboys, only nine months into their university careers. Several dark scenarios presented themselves to her: perhaps they were lured to London and press-ganged into an organization against their will? Perhaps they were still very much alive, zealous and fanatical; or perhaps they were fugitives, living underground, running scared.

  Only one thing was now certain: if Ali was connected with their disappearance, whoever he was involved with would already know about her and her investigation. Common sense told her to pull back now while she still could, but every time she entertained the thought something deep inside her rebelled.

  She had felt like this before. It was as if she had no choice.

  FIVE

  IN ORDER TO OBTAIN THE Home Secretary’s permission to hold an inquest into the case of a missing person presumed dead, Jenny needed to convince him that there was at least a strong likelihood that Nazim Jamal was in fact deceased. Strictly speaking, she also needed reason to believe that the death had occurred in or near her district – which could be impossible to prove – but she hoped to argue by analogy with bodies flown home from abroad, that if the body were ever to be repatriated it would be to within her jurisdiction. It was a weak argument, and viewed in the cold light of day the arguments against holding an inquest seemed even flimsier. It was clearly within the public interest to know why two bright young British citizens had vanished. To refuse to inquire would smack of official cover up, and the one-and-a-half million British Muslims were too big a constituency for any government to risk alienating.

  Held steady by her morning combination of beta blockers to calm her physical symptoms of anxiety and anti-depressants to level her mood, she was ready to face the world again. She wanted to write her report to the Home Office as soon as possible, but first needed to carry out the two most logical lines of inquiry: to discover what, if anything, was known about the missing boys at the university, and what other documents the police still held from their original investigation.

  She called through to the university offices during her morning commute while Ross slouched half asleep in the passenger seat plugged into his iPod. She was passed on to the office of Professor Rhydian Brightman, head of the department of physics. His none-too-helpful secretary claimed he was booked solid for the next week, but Jenny stood her ground and calmly reminded her that failure to assist with a coroner’s inquiry could land the obstructing party in jail.

  Ross looked round during this exchange and pulled out one of his headphones to catch the result: a meeting was swiftly arranged for late morning.

  He said, ‘Wow. Is that true? Can you really throw people in prison?’

  ‘If I have to.’

  ‘Have you ever?’

  ‘Last summer. Two witnesses in the same inquest. Caused quite a stir.’ She glanced over with a smile, but he was already plugged back in, his head bouncing to the music.

  Alison greeted her with the usual stack of paperwork and a clutch of requests from other families with missing daughters wanting to look at the Jane Doe.

  ‘What about the lab tests from the last lot? Shouldn’t we rule them out first?’ Jenny said.

  ‘If I know anything they’ll take at least a fortnight. Don’t worry, I’ll fix a viewing for later in the week. Probably have them queuing round the block by then.’

  Jenny skimmed through the list of requests. It was unbelievable how many apparently well-adjusted young people there were who had vanished from their previous lives. Where did they go? Alison assured her there were hundreds if not thousands of cases every year, mostly people who’d had breakdowns or who were escaping from debts or bad relationships. The good news was that all but a fraction turned up eventually.

  Jenny handed Alison a letter she had written to the Bristol and Avon Chief Constable. It requested that she be given access to all their archived files relating to the boys’ disappearance and their observation of the Al Rahma mosque and Marlowes Road halaqah.

  Alison glanced at it dismissively. ‘You’ll be wasting your time, Mrs Cooper. They haven’t got them any more.’

  How do you know?’

  ‘I spoke to Dave Pironi last night. A couple of suits came up from London yesterday afternoon with a certificate from the Minister and took them away.’

  ‘Do we know who these people were?’

  ‘He can’t tell me that.’

  ‘He must have given you some idea.’

  Guardedly Alison said, ‘I didn’t get the impression they were police.’

  ‘Then they’ll have been MI5.’ Jenny clicked onto her internet browser and started to search for a phone number.

  Alison stood watching her from the doorway.

  ‘What?’ Jenny said.

  ‘I wouldn’t normally say anything like this, Mrs Cooper, but Dave doesn’t think you should get involved.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ She found the number for MI5’s central switchboard and scribbled it down. ‘What’s he got to hide?’

  ‘Nothing. The fact is the police got pushed aside more or less straight after they went missing. The people who do know, if there are any, are so far up the food chain it’s pointless even trying to go after them. All you’ll do is make trouble for yourself.’

  ‘He told you this?’

  ‘Not in so many words, but if he says don’t go there, it’s for a reason.’

  ‘Maybe he’d like to share that with my inquest.’

  Alison sighed in frustration. ‘I’ll grant you there wasn’t much sympathy around for those two boys, but even in CID they weren’t happy with the way the investigation ended. I know you think all the police are closet racists, but as far as they were concerned they had a major investigation stepped on. For all they knew at the time, those lads could have disappeared to a safe house to strap bombs to themselves. They weren’t even allowed to put pictures—’ She stopped herself mid-sentence, realizing that she had said too much.

  ‘They weren’t allowed to put pictures where?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Just canteen gossip.’

  ‘Are you telling me that Pironi’s people were ordered not to carry out a normal missing persons investigation?’

  ‘He’s never said that.’

  ‘Maybe you should be giving a statement. What else were they saying in the canteen?’

  ‘I wish I hadn’t said a word. You won’t even be allowed to hold this inquest anyway.’

  Jenny looked up from her computer screen and sensed in Alison something approaching mild panic. ‘Pironi’s asked you to try to steer me away from this, hasn’t he?’

  ‘He would never ask me to do such a thing. But we all know how blame gets shifted downwards, and Dave’s a year away from retirement. He paid for his wife’s treatment out of his own pocket and he needs his pension. If you have to get into this, I’d at least ask you to accept my word that he would never have done anything wrong.’

  Alison had a history of putting men other than her husband on a pedestal – Harry Marshall, the previous coroner, eight months dead, had been one of them. Jenny didn’t doubt that Dave Pironi could be perfectly charming, but she was equally aware that when it came to men she found attractive, her officer had no judgement.

  Jenny said, ‘I’m sure you’re right, but I’d be grateful if you sent the letter anyway.’ She grabbed a legal pad and dropped it into her briefcase. ‘I’ll see you later. I’ve got a meeting at the university.’

  Rhydian Brightman was a tall, fidgety man with a permanently distracted expression. He could only have been a year
or two older than Jenny, but had already embraced middle age and wore thick glasses that balanced in a groove halfway down his nose. They met in a busy canteen on the physics department’s ground floor, Brightman claiming his office was being used by a colleague for a meeting. She assumed the real reason was that her presence had unnerved him. He looked to her like a highly strung man who was comfortable only in his own world among his own kind. That did not include prying coroners.

  They sat at a small, sticky table and drank foul-tasting cups of tea purchased from a vending machine. At the next table several boisterous undergraduates were exchanging lurid stories of drunken sexual exploits, but the professor didn’t seem to notice. He had one eye on Jenny and the other on the door.

  ‘You remember Nazim Jamal – he started as an undergraduate in the autumn of 2001,’ Jenny said.

  ‘A little. He would have been to my lectures. We probably met in the seminar room once or twice.’

  ‘You do remember his disappearance?’

  ‘Yes, of course. We all remember that. Terrible.’

  ‘I assume the police must have asked you a lot of questions at the time.’

  ‘They were very busy here for a week or two. I didn’t get the impression they found much to enlighten them. It all seemed to remain rather mysterious.’ He gave an awkward, apologetic smile. ‘The thing is, there’s not that much connection between staff and undergraduates, not on a personal level. I could recognize most of our first years, but I couldn’t tell you what they got up to outside the department.’

  ‘Who was the main point of contact for the police while they were investigating?’