The Disappeared jc-2

by M. R. Hall

  Steve said, 'It's cold. I should be getting you home.'

  He walked her as far as the gate and headed off without pausing for the customary moment in which she might have invited him in. She was confused. He had come calling for her, but at some point during their walk she had come to feel as if she were imposing on him. She thought she'd learned how to read him, how to lift him from his occasional melancholy and make him laugh. Nothing had worked tonight.

  Ross wasn't yet home and the house was cold and still. Standing in the silence, she could hear its ancient fabric creak and contract, noises that even now, in her fifth decade of life, her imagination turned to ghosts. A faint tapping in the hot- water pipes became the lost spirit of the Jane Doe, wandering listlessly, looking for an earthly soul to tug at and whisper her secrets to.

  She retreated to the smallest, most secure room - her study at the foot of the stairs - and closed the door securely behind her. She switched on a fan heater, as much for its reassuring rattle as its feeble heat, and fetched the legal pad from the bottom drawer of her desk which was to serve as the journal Dr Allen had asked her to keep. She closed her eyes for a moment, allowing her emotions to rise as fully into consciousness as she could safely let them, then wrote:

  Monday, 26 January

  You asked me if I had faith. I'm not sure what that means. Do I have a religion? No. Do I believe in good and evil? Yes. Heaven and hell? I think so. Why? Because I know about the place in between, I know about limbo. That's the place I'm frightened of. The empty space, oblivion, where souls wait, and wait, unable to feel, not knowing how or why. I hate the fact that I know. I wish I could draw everything back to the here and now, live in the present, be happy and ignorant. But for some reason I've been allowed a glimpse beyond, and I wish I could shut the door.

  Chapter 4

  Alison put down the phone abruptly as Jenny entered the office. She seemed edgy.

  'Everything all right?' Jenny said.

  'Fine.'

  She could tell that it wasn't and knew that Alison wouldn't welcome her probing any further. From snatches of overheard phone calls, Jenny had gathered that Alison and her husband, Terry, were going through a difficult patch. Also a retired detective, he bumped between temporary jobs that always seemed to disappoint. Most recently he'd been working for a private investigator contracting for an insurance company. His task was to spy on personal-injury litigants. Alison thought it tacky, following a man with a video camera to try to catch him out playing football with his kids when he was signed off sick, but Terry had aspirations to a condo on a Spanish golf course and didn't much care how he paid for it.

  'Mrs Jamal left you some messages,' Alison said tersely. 'Five actually.'

  'Oh? What about?'

  'The police mostly - how they're all liars and criminals and like to intimidate defenceless women. If she wasn't Muslim, I'd say she'd had a few.'

  Ignoring Alison's snipe, Jenny went through to her office and played them back. They were each preceded by a time code. Mrs Jamal had first called at ten p.m. and had left her last message after midnight sounding tired and tearful. Jenny didn't think she sounded irrational, just lonely, grief-stricken, and needing to share her tormented thoughts. At the heart of her anguish was a belief that the police knew far more about her son's disappearance than they were prepared to reveal. Jenny sympathized, but her instinct was that Mrs Jamal's suspicions were ungrounded. It was difficult enough to get the police to investigate a missing persons case thoroughly at the best of times. Two Asian boys who'd flirted with extremism and left the country were two potential problems off their hands. After a cursory search, their files could have been shelved marked 'No Further Action', and with no suggestion that more should have been done.

  Jenny prevaricated about whether to phone back then decided she ought to, if only to lay down some ground rules.

  She dialled Mrs Jamal's number and reached an answer- phone. She started to leave a message: 'Mrs Jamal, this is Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner. Thank you for your calls. I can assure you your son's case will get my full attention, but if you could bear in mind the fact—'

  The receiver was snatched up at the other end. Mrs Jamal spoke in an urgent whisper. 'They've been watching me, Mrs Cooper. I know they have. They can see my flat from over the road. There are men in a car. One of them tried to break in last night. I heard them trying the door.'

  'I know this is a very anxious time for you, Mrs Jamal, but you really will have to trust me to —'

  'No, Mrs Cooper, it's true. They went away for years, and now they're back. I can see them from my window. Two of them. They're out there now.'

  Dismissing her would do no good and probably provoke another flurry of calls. Jenny decided to humour her. 'OK.

  Maybe you could go to the window and tell me what they look like, or what kind of car they're driving.'

  She heard the receiver being set down and the sound of feet shuffling across the room, a curtain sliding back, then an exclamation of mild surprise.

  Mrs Jamal returned to the phone. 'They've gone. They must have heard us.'

  'I see,' Jenny said patiently. 'This is what I want you to do. By all means contact me with any piece of evidence that you think I should have which you haven't already given me, and as soon as I've carried out a few inquiries I'll open an inquest.'

  'When?'

  'I can't say exactly. Soon. In a week or two. But in the meantime, if there's anything else that's bothering or frightening you, you must call the police.'

  'Huh! Do you think I haven't? I call them all the time, and always the same answer: name, address, crime number. What good is it calling the criminals?'

  Jenny held the phone away from her ear while Mrs Jamal launched into a lengthy tirade. When, after some time, she showed no sign of letting up, Jenny spoke calmly over her, promising to be in touch as soon as she had anything to report.

  Alison came through from the outer office wearing a wry smile. 'I'll screen her out if you like.'

  'She'll calm down.'

  'Are you sure you want to take this one on, Mrs Cooper? It's not that I'm unsympathetic, but there are some you just get a feeling about.'

  'And what is your feeling?'

  Alison wore a pained expression. 'We're both mothers, you know what it's like - if someone told you something you didn't want to believe about your child, how would you feel?'

  It was one of the few times Alison had mentioned Bethan, her daughter and only child. All Jenny knew about her was that she was twenty-three and lived in Cardiff. Sensing that she was speaking from personal experience, Jenny said, 'I'll catch her in a lucid moment and try to explain that a coroner's inquiry is impartial, not there to validate her theories.'

  'Good luck.' Alison handed her a note containing a name and telephone number.

  'What's this?'

  'DI Dave Pironi, an old friend and colleague of mine,' Alison said, implying that it was a relationship not to be sullied or betrayed. 'He was heading up the obbo at the Al Rahma mosque.'

  'Thanks. Anything I should know about him?'

  'He's a good man, lost his wife to breast cancer a couple of years ago. His boy's a corporal in the Rifles. Just started his third tour in Afghanistan.'

  Jenny nodded. She got the message.

  They arranged to meet on neutral territory - a coffee chain halfway between the office and New Bridewell, the police station at which Pironi was currently based. Jenny arrived first and found a table as far away as possible from the stereo speakers that were pumping out an old Fleetwood Mac number.

  From his abrupt telephone manner, she had expected DI Pironi to be gruff and taciturn with a detective's jowly face and dead, unshockable eyes. The man who wandered over with an espresso and a tumbler of water looked more like a businessman who'd just signed off an unexpectedly lucrative deal. He was in his early fifties and trim. His smart-casual clothes looked Italian and stylish: black knitted polo shirt beneath a wool blazer. She noticed hi
s nails - filed and buffed.

  'Mrs Cooper?' He had a light Welsh accent.

  'Yes.' She half-rose from her chair and shook his hand.

  'I've only got a few minutes, I'm afraid.'

  'No problem. Anything exciting?'

  'I'm giving evidence at Short Street. Heard of Marek Stich? He's Czech. Shot one of the uniform lads late last year. Real piece of work.'

  'I know. Owns a nightclub?'

  'That's one of his interests. Our boy was fresh out of training college - pulled him over for jumping a light, and pop.'

  'Is he going down?'

  'I'd like to think so. All on forensics, though - not one single decent witness with the balls to come forward.' He shook his head as he stirred a sweetener into his coffee. 'You know what really turned the public off the police? Roadside cameras. Machine as judge, jury and executioner, no discretion involved. Makes people despise all authority.'

  'You're a benefit-of-the-doubt man?'

  'Always have been.' He smiled as he raised his cup to his lips.

  Jenny tried to marry the smart-dressing modern detective with what little she knew of the reality of life in the force. What did it say about a policeman near the end of his career that he'd maintained such studied self-control? What was he hiding?

  She cut to business. 'Alison tells me you were in charge of the observation on the A1 Rahma mosque.'

  'Uh-huh.' He set his cup back on its saucer with measured precision.

  'Can you tell me what you were looking at?'

  'We had some intelligence that extremists were operating inside it, setting up cells to try to recruit young men to Hizbut-Tahrir and other organizations. We weren't tooled up with informers at the time; we had to sit and watch for three months, get to know names, times and places.'

  'Are you allowed to say where this information was coming from?'

  'Let's say we were one of the partners in the operation.'

  'With the Security Services?'

  'I'm just a humble DI, Mrs Cooper. I'd get into all sorts of trouble for giving straight answers to questions like that.'

  That was more like a policeman: letting her know but pretending he wasn't, thinking the way he did it was clever.

  'Let's imagine a hypothetical situation,' Jenny said. 'Say MI5 had a tip-off and wanted a mosque looked into. They'd hook up with the local force and get them to do the sitting around in cars, right?'

  'They've taken on a lot more staff in recent years. These days they might run it all themselves.'

  'But back then?'

  'We were all a lot greener, weren't we?'

  'Meaning what - that things were missed that shouldn't have been?'

  'I'm just saying - we'd do it differently now. We'd have insiders, hook onto things more quickly. Pre-empt trouble before it happened.'

  Jenny pushed her hair back from her face and held him in an innocent gaze she thought might pique his interest, throw him off guard a little. 'Nazim Jamal and Rafi Hassan were two of the young men you were watching, presumably?'

  'Yes.' His eyes traced her neck down to the open top of her blouse.

  'How long for?'

  'A number of weeks as far as I recall.'

  'Have you any idea what happened to them on the night of 28 June 2002?'

  'After they left their meeting? No.'

  'Nobody followed them?'

  'My officers saw them leave, but their job was to stay put and watch who came and went from the building, not to follow those two across the city.'

  'Do you think they went back to their rooms in the hall of residence that night?' ,

  'I'm sure you've seen my team's reports, Mrs Cooper. We don't know for sure, but they were seen on the London train the next morning.'

  'Any idea where they went after that?'

  'The CCTV tapes at Paddington had been overwritten by the time we got to them. The trail went cold. We got as far as finding out that there were rat-runs through France, Italy and the Balkans, but there was no positive sighting. If they made it to Turkey, they could have caught a flight out to Kabul, Islamabad, wherever.'

  He swallowed the last drops of his coffee and carefully dabbed his lips with the paper napkin.

  Jenny said, 'Am I right in assuming that your partners took the lead role once it was known they'd disappeared?'

  'We did what we could, within our resources. Whether others looked further, I wouldn't know. We didn't receive any more information.'

  'There are very few police statements in the papers Mrs Jamal handed me. I presume your officers made detailed observation logs.'

  'We did the job we were asked to,' he said and glanced at his expensive gold watch. Jenny imagined him letting villains see it across the interview table, showing them that a cop didn't have to go without.

  'So how about some names - people who knew these boys? They must have had friends and associates you were looking at.'

  Pironi glanced out through the window. She knew he was treading a fine line. While conducting a joint operation with the Security Services he and his officers would have been warned time and again that secrecy was paramount, but she sensed his vanity wouldn't let him leave her with nothing.

  Pironi said, 'You know the form. All I can tell you is which of the names in the statements we made at the time we considered the most important. There was a mullah, Sayeed Faruq - must've been about thirty at the time - disappeared to Pakistan a couple of weeks later. Never spoke to us. Never came back. And there was another guy, a radical we think set up this halaqah. His name was Anwar Ali. He was a regular at the mosque, and held smaller meetings at his flat. I investigated him myself, couldn't pin a thing on him, but I had a hunch he was drawing kids in and passing them on to others. He was a post-grad at the university . . . politics and sociology, something like that.'

  'Any idea what happened to him?'

  Pironi studied his well-kept hands. 'I agreed to meet you this morning because Alison's a good friend of mine. We worked out of the same station for fifteen years. She took her fair share of risks and this isn't the time of life for her to be taking on any more. I'd be grateful if you didn't send her out to talk to these people.'

  'I wouldn't make her do anything she's uncomfortable with.'

  'That's not what I asked.'

  He looked into her eyes. She felt like a suspect.

  'Fine. Understood.'

  'Good.'

  He reached a scrap of paper out from his pocket and tucked it under his saucer.

  'Nice meeting you, Jenny.' He got up from the table.

  'One more thing,' Jenny said. 'Is this case still of any interest to anyone?'

  'You won't have to scratch far to find out.'

  He moved off towards the door.

  She watched him jog across the road and jump into an unmarked squad car that was parked opposite, a junior detective at the wheel. She reached the folded message out from under his saucer and opened it. Printed on it was the name Anwar Ali and an address in Morfa, south Wales.

  It was late in the afternoon before she had processed the most urgent files on her desk. Among the mountain of paper had been Dr Kerr's report on the Africans in the refrigerated trailer. He'd found traces of paint under their nails, suggesting they'd tried to scratch their way out before succumbing to the cold. The youngest of the three was a fifteen-year-old boy dressed only in a Manchester United football shirt. None had any papers or documents to identify them by. They too would now be stored in the mortuary until the police, at some indeterminate time, decided they had exhausted their inquiries.

  She chose her moment - while Alison was caught up in another tense, whispered phone call with her husband - and slipped out of the office. Alison still coveted her role as the investigator in their professional partnership, treating any attempt by Jenny to speak to potential witnesses without her as an act of trespass on her territory. It was true that most coroners chose to operate largely from their desks, preferring to send their officers to collect statements and g
ather evidence on the ground, but there was no reason - apart from a misplaced sense of propriety - why they couldn't pursue their search for the truth as far as they were able. According to centuries-old law, the coroner's duty was to determine the who, when, where and how of a death. Jenny had never understood how that was possible without getting your hands dirty.

  Morfa was a 1960s housing estate on the outskirts of Newport, thirty miles to the north-west of Bristol on the Welsh side of the Severn; a neglected corner of a largely forgotten city. Conceived at a time when coal mines and steel works still employed the bulk of men in south Wales, the estate was a sprawl of identical prefabricated concrete boxes built to house the workers and their families. It now housed the non-workers. Groups of shaven-headed boys and pasty- faced, overweight girls stood at corners; broken-down cars sat wheel-less on bricks; a stray dog scavenged on a patch of litter-strewn wasteland that had once been a park. It wasn't a neighbourhood, it was a holding pen.

  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.'