Strangers (23 page)

After the police had gone, Roisin sat at the table in the stillness of shock. The police had come looking for Joe because they had ‘more information’ about the woman who had drowned in the Thames. All these months later, they had come to talk to her about Joe’s involvement, even though they knew he was dead.

Did you know that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the UK?

They were investigating a murder.

She went to the box room where their cases, still full, were stacked against the wall. Joe’s shirt, the one she’d found the last time she tried to unpack, was draped over a chair. She hadn’t been in here since that day.

The cases had been packed by someone from the Embassy. She’d told them not to bother, to get rid of everything, but instead they’d packed up all their belongings, hers and Joe’s, and now she had cases full of books, boxes full of bric-a-brac–relics
of a life she wanted to leave behind. The only thing she had wanted to keep from her life in Riyadh had been taken away from her. Nothing else mattered.

She started going through the cases, pulling out all the clothes and stuffing them into a bin liner. They could all go to a charity shop. She lifted out her abaya, light, silky and black. She could see the dark shapes of the women in the streets, hear Najia’s voice saying,
The law forbids me an education if my brother withdraws his permission
. The men who wanted these laws, enforced these laws, had killed Joe. She was sure of it. She gripped the fabric and tried to rip it down the seams, but the garment was tough, and all she succeeded in doing was making herself breathless and angry. She screwed it up and pushed it down into the bin liner.

At the bottom of the second case, she found what she was looking for. There were two folders full of papers that had come from the desk and the small filing cabinet in the study. She took out the first folder and flicked through the contents: teaching materials she’d been putting together for Souad, that last weekend when she’d had to work instead of going out with Joe. She threw them away.

Then she opened the second folder, slipped out the papers and began to go through them. The photo jumped out at her. It was the one she’d found that last day, Joe and a man she now knew
was Haroun Patel. Joe smiled at her out of the picture, lost and gone. She looked at him, her fingers touching the surface, two men, friends, casual, carefree, sharing a joke. And now they were both dead.

Why?

She started going through the papers more carefully. They seemed to be notes relating to some kind of research Joe had been undertaking. She knew how he worked; he jotted down his ideas at random, then he started sorting them into groups, looking for connections and gaps that needed filling. She could picture him, sitting in the reclining chair in the evenings, a notepad on his lap, staring into the distance and then scribbling things down as they occurred to him. And she could remember his smile of triumph as the route through some intractable problem suddenly became clear.

But whatever problem Joe had been working on here, he hadn’t got beyond his first ideas:
Ghatghat, Manfuha, Ad Diriyah
. She stared at them, frowning, trying to catch the fleeting familiarity. For a moment, the memory eluded her, then she realized they were names of small towns and villages on the outskirts of Riyadh. Places Joe had worked in? Intended to visit?

There was also a list of numbers that looked like times of day:
09.30, 11.30, 12.15, 13.00
. There were lists that looked like names of proprietary drugs–she recognized a few–and then some
random jotting:
Memo–Muharram 20? 21?–check.
INSPECTION DATE????
She sat back on her heels, staring into space. She couldn’t make any sense of it. She held the sheets of paper in her hands for a few minutes, trying to picture Joe, his pen moving quickly across the page, the irritation on his face when he scratched the words
INSPECTION DATE
in angry capitals, the pen digging into the paper.

At the bottom of the pile, there were two forms. They looked like photocopies of application forms–job applications, visa applications? She couldn’t tell. They were written in Arabic. Each form had a photograph that had come out dark and blotchy on the copies. She looked at the first one. A young man with a carefree grin looked back at her. She knew him now: Haroun Patel. It was the same photograph that had appeared with the newspaper article she’d found in Joe’s luggage.

Haroun is dead
…

There was a second form, only this one was for a woman–a girl. Her face, pretty despite a rather tense expression, was framed by the tightly bound hijab. Her eyes looked at the camera nervously. Once again, the script was Arabic. Joe had been able to read it without too much difficulty, but Roisin was still barely able to distinguish the individual letters; full texts were just meaningless scrawl to her.

She sat and studied the paper as if staring at it
for long enough would force it to give up its meaning. Eventually the photograph became no more than shapes in grey and white, a meaningless blur on the page in front of her.

The Parisian sky was a brilliant blue, but the winter cold cut through Damien as he walked briskly along the broad avenues. The trees, that had been in full leaf the last time he had walked these streets, were bare, their branches dark lines against the sky. The street was busy. The cafés were packed, couples wandered in and out of the shops, and roller-blading teenagers wove through the crowds.

He had last been here seventeen years ago. He’d come here with Catherine in a futile attempt to rescue their marriage from the pit of mistrust and anger it had fallen into. He had been young enough to be drawn to her fragility and her beauty, and to call that feeling love, but that hadn’t been enough to make her feel safe and secure, and whatever love he felt for her–and he had felt some–had not lasted the course. He had left her shortly after they returned to England.

He pulled his mind away from a past that he
would rather forget. Now, he was here to find Amy. She’d told Roisin she was in Paris, and that much, at least, was true.

Visitors to France had to register at the hotels where they stayed. He assumed that Amy would be staying with her sister, but he decided to check. He still had contacts at the British Embassy, and after a few phone calls and some reminders of overdue favours, the first of his anxieties was removed. He was able to confirm that Amy had arrived safely in Paris. She had stayed in a small hotel off the Boulevard de Port Royal, close to the cemetery of Montparnasse.

He left the café and took the Métro to Les Gobelins. Amy’s hotel was a short walk away. The streets were quieter here, more sheltered from the cutting wind that blew up the river. The hotel itself, as the location suggested, was a small budget establishment. Amy, with an underused Saudi salary under her belt, was still economizing. Maybe she was planning for leaner times ahead. Damien had a quick chat with the concierge and showed her a photograph of Amy. A folded note, for more Euros than the information was probably worth, confirmed the dates of Amy’s stay: she’d arrived at the hotel a week after she’d left Riyadh and stayed for a few days. The concierge also told Damien that Madame had spent some time at L’Hôpital Cochin St Vincent de Paul. She’d left the hotel after a few days.

He took the Métro back across the river, where
he found a café. He sat down at a table, ordered some coffee and lit a cigarette while he let his mind wander over what he knew. His own knowledge of Amy’s past was minuscule. She’d never talked about it, and he’d never asked her. All he knew was that she came from Newcastle.

Where do you think of when you dream about home?

The North East. I grew up in Newcastle
.

But now, thanks to Roisin, he knew that her mother was dead, her father…he had no information about her father. She had a half-sister and a stepfather who had apparently abandoned her, as she had been left in care after her mother’s death. The sister’s name was Jassy.
Jesamine for short
. He smiled, remembering Roisin laughing helplessly as she tried to negotiate her way through the sentence.

He knew where she had been born and where she had grown up. He knew a bit about her family, about when she’d left her home city, and he knew that leaving had been fraught with some kind of difficulty.

She was away from the Kingdom now. Whatever the threat was, they’d left it behind them. Or had they?

The people who had planted the bomb were still free, as were the people who had murdered Joe Massey. He didn’t buy the story of Joe Massey’s murder being a robbery that had gone wrong. And after talking to Majid, he was no more convinced by the theory of a terrorist attack. Terror went for
maximum targets. The people who had got a car bomb through the security at the party could have killed scores of people. Instead, it had exploded some distance from the house, claiming only three casualties.

Somewhere in that complex equation was Haroun Patel and the questions Joe Massey had been asking. Someone didn’t want the details of that story known. Had that someone achieved what he wanted by driving them all out of the Kingdom, or was there more to come?

He decided to call Rai, who had promised to monitor developments in Riyadh. He sounded cheerful when he answered Damien’s call. ‘You are well?’ he said.

There had been developments in the Massey case. The police investigating the case were able to confirm that Massey had made it to the hospital. The jacket his wife said he had been wearing was in his office in the pathology department. And they had a witness who had seen his car driving away from the hospital car park. It had been picked up later by a camera on the main road from Riyadh.

The map of Riyadh was still clear in Damien’s head as Rai explained where the car had been spotted. Massey had been heading west, on the side of the city where the party had been held, but the route that Rai was describing wouldn’t have taken him to the suburb where the Bradshaws lived. It would have taken him towards the city’s outer limits.

‘There is something else…’ Rai was warming to his story. ‘He has fellow traveller.’

‘Fellow…?’

‘There is someone in car with him.’

Damien sat in thought for a while once he had put the phone down. Joe Massey had gone some-where after he’d talked to his wife. The last known sighting of his car had been on the road out of Riyadh, the road that led to the desert where his body had been found. And there had been someone in the car with him. Joe Massey had driven his killer to the place of his death.

Suddenly he felt himself come alert. During his time in Riyadh, he had got used to the constant watchfulness that was necessary to survival. It had become second nature. He was used to monitoring the behaviour of people around him, to knowing who was there, who was changing places, who they were talking to and what they were doing. Something had aroused his subconscious watchman.

He picked his phone up again, and keyed in the number for rail enquiries. As the automated system ran him through a series of options, he spoke briefly, letting his gaze wander around the café. No one seemed to be paying any attention to him, no one was suddenly interested in the menu or their newspaper, no one turned their face away.

He smiled at the waitress, the phone still to his ear, and opened his hand slightly to show her the
bank note he was holding. She nodded. He tucked it under his plate in her sight, and stood up. He walked straight out of the door, his senses alert for someone getting hurriedly to their feet, and crossed the road. He went down the steps into the Métro, then placed himself where an information screen shielded him while still allowing him to see who was coming down from the street. He was being paranoid, he knew, but the habits of Riyadh were hard to break.

People streamed down the steps and past him through the ticket barriers. He waited for a while, then walked back up the steps. The feeling of unease had gone.

Paranoia.

He decided not to go back to his hotel but to stay with the crowds heading along the river towards the Louvre. The wind tugged at his scarf and cut into the exposed skin on his face.

The gallery itself was closed. The courtyard opened up around him, a few people wandering across the expanse, looking up at the walls that surrounded them. A small crowd had gathered around the pyramid entrance, talking and gesturing. Plane leaves skittered across the ground as the wind caught them then died away. The last time he’d been here, it had been a bright spring day, and the stone that now looked grey and forbidding had looked golden in the sun. For that short afternoon, he and Catherine had been able to pretend they were happy.

An intermittent sound echoed across the courtyard, and he looked round, trying to locate it. There was something familiar, something evocative about it. He scanned the courtyard trying to locate it, and then the walls, up and up.

High on the wall, impossibly balanced on a ledge below a balcony, a small child sat playing his drum. His serious eyes gazed into the distance, his neat, dark hair undisturbed by the breeze that carried the leaves across the ground. Damien moved closer, curious and alarmed by the almost surreal image of a child drumming high on the walls of the Louvre. Then, as he looked, he saw the repetitive movements of the tiny wrists as they wielded the drumsticks, saw the blank stare of the face, and realized that he was looking at an automaton.

‘Realistic, isn’t it?’

He turned round. A man was standing behind him, contemplating the drummer. He was wearing a heavy coat and a fedora hat. A scarf muffled his ears. Despite the cold, he looked debonair and jaunty.

Arshak Nazarian.

‘Nazarian.’ Damien felt a bleak satisfaction that he’d been right. Someone had been watching him. He hadn’t been careful enough. ‘Last I heard, you were in Damascus.’

Nazarian’s eyes were on the automaton. ‘It would be easy to mistake it for a real child,’ he said. His gaze moved to Damien. ‘No, Damascus
was just a port of call. I felt the need to be out of the way for a while. I see you have made the same decision. That was probably wise.’

‘What brings you to Paris?’

‘Business,’ Nazarian said shortly. ‘You?’

‘Nostalgia.’

Nazarian’s eyebrows raised in polite incredulity, but he didn’t pursue the topic. ‘I heard you were looking up old friends.’

‘Only the kind you find in places like this. Buildings, statues, memorials…’ Damien looked up at the automaton again, and waited to see what Nazarian wanted.

‘You’re not the only one who needs to talk to Amy Seymour, O’Neill. If you find her before I do, tell her to contact me. Tell her it’s important.’ He slipped a card out of his wallet and handed it to Damien.

As Nazarian spoke, his eyes moved briefly to Damien’s injured hand. Damien resisted the impulse to conceal it in his pocket. ‘If I see her, I’ll pass the message on.’

Nazarian registered the non-intent in his voice. ‘I don’t know if Amy has any plans to return to the Kingdom,’ he said. ‘She would be well advised to talk to me first.’

‘If I see her, I’ll pass the message on,’ he said again. ‘Are you staying in Paris?’

Nazarian’s eyes travelled over the bleak courtyard. ‘Not much longer. You?’

‘The same.’

‘Then I was lucky to run into you.’ He nodded a curt farewell.

Damien watched Nazarian walk away. Luck had nothing to do with it. Nazarian had known he was in Paris all along. He had a bad feeling that the only outcome of his own search would be to lead Nazarian closer to Amy.

The cold had penetrated to his bones. After years of living in the Kingdom, his body had no defences against it. He took the Métro back to his hotel. His injured hand felt heavy and clumsy; when he looked at it, he could see the skin had a bluish tinge.

Once he was back in his room, he logged on to the internet and did a quick search for the hospital Amy had visited during her stay.

It was a world-renowned centre for maternity and neonatology. So maybe Amy had told Roisin the simple truth. She had left Riyadh to be with her sister who was about to give birth. He wondered why, in that case, she had chosen to stay in a hotel rather than with her sister. Family tensions? And then she’d signed out, leaving no forwarding address.

Arshak Nazarian was looking for her as well. Amy’s dealings with Nazarian, whatever he might think of them, weren’t his business, but he wasn’t going to help Nazarian to find her.

Joe Massey had been cut, viciously cut. His death had been ugly. And the people who had killed him were still out there. Damien didn’t like
knives and he didn’t like the people who wielded them. If he kept on digging around in Amy’s life, he might do more harm than good. But he knew he wasn’t going to stop.