Strangers (25 page)

‘Haroun was his friend,’ Roisin said. ‘I think Joe felt responsible for him. He knew Haroun in London when he was a student here. It was Joe who suggested he look for work in Saudi.’ Joe had cared. He’d cared enough to go back, to go over all the evidence, to…what? ‘What about these?’ She pushed forward the two forms. She hadn’t been able to decipher them because they were written in Arabic.

‘They’re applications for visas to Saudi. I know what the first one is. It’s Haroun Patel’s.’ He picked it up and skimmed it. ‘I’d forgotten that…’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing there that’s secret. His age, his sponsor, where he came from…’ He looked at the photo of the smiling young man. ‘Haroun,’ he said. ‘I knew him. He was one of those people who gets to know everybody. He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.’

He picked up the second form. ‘This is just the same. And from the same source, I suspect. Was Joe into computers?’

Roisin nodded. ‘He was pretty good. He liked to play around with them, and he took computing as an extra course at uni.’

Damien nodded, as if this had confirmed something he already suspected. ‘But it’s just the same kind of information–name, date of birth…’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘Oh, Christ.’

‘What?’

‘Her name’s Patel. She gives Haroun as–she’s his sister.’

Just for a moment, relief flooded over her. It wasn’t Jesal Rajkhumar. Whatever Joe had been doing, it was nothing to do with the woman Yasmin had been looking for.

And then Damien spoke again and she was pushing her chair away from the table, jumping to her feet as the cold lump formed in her stomach.

‘Her name’s Jesal,’ he said. ‘Jesal Rajkhumar Patel.’

There is a girl who is missing–we want to know where she is, but we haven’t been able to find her
.

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

Damien’s voice seemed to come from miles away. ‘Roisin!’

She blinked and she was back in the flat. Damien was on his feet, looking at her in alarm. ‘OK, come and sit down. You’ve gone white.’ He steered her across to the settee and sat her down. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

‘Yasmin. She asked me…just before she had her baby, she asked me to look for this woman.’

She felt his hand on her arm tense. ‘You’re sure? Yasmin asked you to look for Jesal Patel?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. No…not quite. She asked me to find Jesal Rajkhumar.’

‘Rajkhumar isn’t a family name. A lot of Gujratis take their father’s name as a second name. Or women take their husband’s. What did
Yasmin say, Roisin? As closely as you can remember.’

She closed her eyes. She was back there, sitting in the incongruously familiar Starbucks in the middle of the glittering opulence of the mall. ‘Yasmin said…there was a girl who was missing. She had been a maid, I think. She’d been accused of stealing from her employer before she ran away. Yasmin hinted that there had been something going on, some kind of abuse. The dead woman–I think this is her. Jesal Rajkhumar.’

‘Oh, Christ.’ His voice was calm, but she could hear the underlying tension. ‘Did Yasmin say who this woman was working for?’

She shook her head. ‘No.’

‘Was it her family?’

‘I don’t remember. I don’t think so. What’s this about, Damien?’ If she’d said something to Joe, would everything be different?

He didn’t reply at first, then he said, ‘How much do you know about the immigrant labour system in Saudi?’

‘Not much.’

‘The first thing you need to know is that Saudi is a country that hasn’t long revoked its slavery laws. And the Saudis–the urban ones, the middle-class ones, the wealthy ones–they think they’re a chosen people. As if the world hasn’t got enough of those.’ His smile contained no humour. ‘Non-Saudis count for nothing. They employ a lot of domestic staff from the third world and they don’t
look after them well. The life of a domestic employee is hard. They work long hours, they get treated badly, their employers sometimes abuse them. Saudi is a very repressed society–it isn’t uncommon for the women to be raped. Often, the employers hold their documents so the women are pretty much trapped.’

‘Slaves,’ she said.

‘More or less. Yasmin’s father makes his money by bringing women like this into Saudi. If this girl wanted to get away, if she was being abused, it would have been difficult. She wouldn’t have her passport, she wouldn’t have an exit permit. To get that, she’d have had to pay back everything she owed, which would have been a lot of money–that may be why she stole in the first place. Once she’d been convicted of theft–and if her accuser was a Saudi, she would have been convicted–she would have faced jail and a flogging.’

‘They’d have flogged her? But she wasn’t even a Saudi!’

He shrugged. ‘Nationality doesn’t come into it if you’re a third-worlder. They’re a bit more circumspect when the government has more power, but they’ve flogged Westerners too. They just haven’t executed any–yet.’

She looked at him. ‘Civilized of them.’

‘That’s the way it’s done, Roisin. Don’t pretend you didn’t know. If you take the money, you subscribe to the system.’

She couldn’t answer that. ‘Why didn’t she go
to her brother? If she was being abused–Christ, if she was being raped–he was there. He could have helped her.’

He frowned. ‘Sex…it’s hard for us to understand the kinds of attitudes that exist around it in other cultures. In Pakistan, in the rural communities…I came across a case a few years ago. A man thought his wife had been unfaithful, so he strung her up from the ceiling, beat her, cut off her nose and ears and gouged out her eyes with a piece of wire. He scraped his fingers round the inside of the sockets to make sure there was nothing left. No one in the village took any action against him. She was the one who became a pariah. The only reason it ever came to trial was because a government minister, a woman, took up the case.’

Roisin swallowed her nausea. ‘And you think that Haroun…?’ She had never met him, but he had been Joe’s friend. She couldn’t equate that level of cruelty and barbarism with the smiling face she had seen in the photograph.

‘No. Haroun was an educated man, a reformer. He would have tried to help his sister. But it would explain why she couldn’t go back.’ He was frowning as he looked at the papers. ‘You’ve just given him the most believable motive I’ve seen so far for taking the drugs, but these papers show that he didn’t.’ He put his face in his hands, then looked at her. His eyes were weary. ‘There’s something else. The Haroun Patel case–it was investigated by Yasmin’s husband.’

‘Her husband’s a police officer?’

‘She never told you?’

‘It never came up.’ They’d never discussed their homes or their families. They’d talked about work, about politics, about the status of women.

Damien was studying the papers again. She could tell by his slight tension that there was something else he wanted to say. She waited.

‘Roisin, do you think…Shit, I hate to ask you this, but I’ve got to. Do you think that Joe could have been involved in the kidnapping of Majid’s baby? Some kind of revenge thing because his friend had been killed? Or…’ He shrugged as he met her gaze. ‘There has to be a connection.’

She shook her head at once. Not Joe. ‘No. Never.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had to ask.’

The Saudi police had thought Joe might be involved as well. And so had the consulate. She understood, now, the reason for the haste when she was rushed out of the country. ‘You’re not the only one,’ she said. Her voice sounded dull in her ears. Joe the killer, Joe the kidnapper–how easy it would be to pin it all on one dead man.

‘I’m sorry,’ Damien said again.

‘You didn’t know him.’ They sat in silence for a while, then she said with an effort, ‘Is there any news about Yasmin’s baby?’

He shook his head.

‘I should contact her. She was a good friend to me.’

‘Maybe you’d better leave it. For the moment.’

She looked at him, but his expression gave nothing away. ‘I bought the baby a present. A cashmere shawl. It’s probably here, somewhere.’

He gestured at the papers in front of him. ‘Did Yasmin say why she wanted to find this woman?’

Yasmin had looked tired and stressed that day. ‘I don’t know. She said she was worried about her, that’s all. I’m trying to remember.’ All that was clear in her mind was the way the colour had drained out of Yasmin’s face. ‘She said she’d vanished “last year”, but she wasn’t any more specific than that.’

‘Haroun died in April 2004. That would have been…’ he closed his eyes as he worked it out ‘…Safar or Rabi Al-Awaal.’ He saw her incomprehension. ‘The Hegira year has twelve months like the Gregorian calendar, but it starts in Muharram, which is around February, and ends in Thw al-Hijjah which is January-February. So “last year”,…depending which calendar she meant…’

‘Could be either before or after Haroun was executed.’

‘Right. Or even arrested. That may have been the trigger that made her run. But, whatever happened, it happened long before Yasmin approached you. Why did she come to you then?’

‘I didn’t ask.’ And she should have done. She could see that now. Now she could see all the questions she should have asked Yasmin.

‘I can’t get a clear picture. I need to get some distance from it.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t have a lot of time. I didn’t find what I was looking for in Paris.’

‘Amy,’ she said. ‘You were looking for Amy.’

‘That was the plan. She’d been there, but I have no idea where she is now. Amy and I had a bust-up before she left. I think she might be lying low.’

‘If she doesn’t want to see you, then why…?’

‘I’m worried about her.’ His eyes met hers. ‘Amy was asking questions about Haroun Patel too.’

‘Oh, Christ.’ She sat down on the settee. She could remember Joe, that night after the party when she’d told him about Amy, and he’d said,
Why stir it up? If I were you, I’d leave it
. He’d known what he was doing was dangerous. He’d tried to keep her away from it. She felt her eyes sting, and kept her face down as she spoke. ‘When Amy called me to tell me she was in Paris, she sounded…’ In her recollection, Amy’s voice had been high and…what? Excited? Edgy? The words had seemed to spill out and she hadn’t seemed fully in control of her breathing. She looked up at Damien. ‘Frightened,’ she said.

He was silent. The lamplight cast shadows across his face. She could see the hollow in his throat, his skin brown against the white shirt. ‘Then I still need to find her. I’m pretty sure she’s left Paris.’

‘If she came to the UK,’ Roisin said slowly, ‘she might go back to Newcastle.’ Amy, leaning out of the carriage window, calling out, over and over.
What had happened on that trip to London to make her stay away all those years, and what had happened now to make her vanish again? She felt as though her world was crumbling away around her, turning to dust in her fingers as she tried to hold on to it. Her parents were dead, her sister was dead. They didn’t even live on in her memory, just as a moment of laughter and someone pushing her as she sat on a pile of leaves in a wheelbarrow, just a hand in hers as a camera clicked, and a line from a song
Between the salt water and the sea sand
…Her father, her adopted father, was dead. Joe was gone. And now Amy had faded away into silence.

‘What is it?’ Damien had moved beside her and was brushing her hair off her face.

She shook her head. There weren’t any words. The orange lights were starting to flicker in her mind, trying to take her to a place where she didn’t want to go. She was too tired to fight. ‘I just can’t make it stop,’ she said.

He kissed her gently, then put his arms round her and drew her in closer as he kissed her again. He smelled warm and male and his closeness was healing against the wounds of the past few weeks.

‘Stay,’ she said. ‘Tonight. Stay with me.’

He drew back slightly. ‘Are you sure? Is that what you want?’

‘It’s what I want. I need to know that I survived.’

‘You survived, Roisin.’

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You do. You know.’ He ran his fingers down her neck, then ducked his head to kiss her throat. He unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it down off her shoulders. His hands felt warm on her skin. He pushed the sleeves down her arms, freeing her breasts from the fabric. His fingers stroked her nipples, then pinched them gently as they stood erect. ‘See? Do you believe me now?’ His hands were still caressing her as he spoke.

‘No. No, I don’t. I need you to show me more.’

He kissed her again. When he spoke, his mouth was close to hers. ‘Roisin, you know that I’m leaving soon. I’ve only got this to give you.’

‘I know. This is what I want.’

The past stepped back into a distant place that it would return from later, but now, here and now, it was giving her respite. The future was nothing, just a blank, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the moment.

When she woke up, the room was dark. The green light from the radio told her it was six. She could remember Damien waking her an hour before, his mouth pressing down on hers and his voice whispering, ‘Roisin, I have to go.’ Then she had sunk back into a dreamless sleep.

She could just make out the shapes of the rumpled sheets, the indentation in the pillow where his head had been. She slid across the bed and put her face against it. It had to be her imagination, but it felt warm, as though the occupant
had left the bed just the moment before. She closed her eyes.

Roisin? Hey, babes
…

She was sitting bolt upright, her hand groping for the light switch. In the sudden brightness, the window was a black square of night. The room was empty. There was just her, sitting up in the rumpled bed.

‘Joe?’ she whispered.

But there was only silence.

Damien left Roisin in the early morning. He tried not to think about her, her face warm and sleepy on the pillow as she roused herself to kiss him goodbye, but she lingered in his mind. For Roisin, it had been a break from the exhausting struggle out of the depths of grief and chaos; for him, a sweet and memorable interlude in the emptiness that seemed to be his life these days.

He and Amy had always clashed against the emotional barriers they both hid behind. It was as if they could only make contact when those barriers were ablaze with their need, and afterwards they had to negotiate their way through the ashes.

Roisin had no barriers, or maybe she hadn’t needed them. She had opened herself to him without any restraints, to his hands, his mouth, his tongue–to all of him. When he had left her, her face on the pillow was relaxed in sleep as if their night together had swept away the demons
that were haunting her. He had woken her with a kiss to tell her he had to leave, and she had kissed him back, warmly. He had had to fight the impulse to stay.

He took a taxi back to his flat. There was information he wanted to check. One thing he had forgotten until Roisin had talked about it was that Patel had completed almost two years of study at the University of London, in the School of Pharmacy, before he had been made to leave because of visa violations. This had been just two years before his death.

And Massey’s connection with Haroun Patel was of longer standing than he had realized. Patel had been not just Massey’s friend but his protégé. He let his mind wander over the possibility that he had broached to Roisin, and that she had so emphatically dismissed. Something had been wrong at the hospital. The diagnosis of the infant’s serious condition had been delayed, and then the blood tests and the lab results had vanished with the child. Had Massey taken a terrible revenge for Patel’s death? But he had found Roisin’s dismissal of that idea convincing. He hadn’t much liked Massey, but he couldn’t see the man he had met, the man who had conducted that meticulous investigation into Haroun Patel’s death, engineering the murder of an innocent child.

But he was now convinced that Majid’s child was dead.

University colleges and schools were vast places,
and tutors probably had little recollection of their students, two years down the line. But events had made Haroun memorable. He had been getting good grades when his course had been abruptly terminated, and the manner of his death could hardly have been missed by the people who had known him.

Later that morning, he headed back towards King’s Cross. He walked away from the chaos of the station, down Gray’s Inn Road towards Brunswick Square where the School of Pharmacy was based. Barts Hospital was nearby.

The School of Pharmacy edged on to an area of parkland where grass fought with mud in the damp ground. The trees were bare now, but in summer, the place would be leafy and attractive.

He’d phoned beforehand, so when he gave his name at the reception desk it wasn’t long before a brisk-looking man in a white coat appeared and began shaking his hand with enthusiasm. He introduced himself as Paul Halloran. ‘It was a dreadful business,’ he said, without preamble. ‘I’m glad that people are starting to do something about it. Far too late, of course.’

‘How well did you know Haroun when he was a student?’

‘Oh, quite well. He was in my labs sessions. He wasn’t one of the brilliant ones. To be honest, most of those go for the courses that will lead to research. Haroun was bright, and he was a hard worker. That’s the big secret. Hard work will get
you a lot further than genius. He was thinking of switching to a medical degree, if he could afford it.’

‘He knew one of the doctors at Barts, right?’

Halloran looked taken aback. ‘Amazing you knowing that. Yes, one of the visiting lecturers–not someone I knew. He was the one who persuaded Haroun to switch to medicine–thought he had the ability. Haroun was keen, but there were cost implications. I was going to look into grants for him.’

‘It was a waste that he couldn’t finish.’

Halloran made a sound of disgust. ‘It was a disgrace. They should just have given him a rap on the knuckles. All he was doing was working longer hours than his visa allowed. OK, he shouldn’t have done it, but plenty do. They need the money. Where’s the harm? And Haroun was in love, God help him.’

‘In love?’ Damien kept his voice casual, but suddenly he was alert. Haroun Patel came from a traditional family–his marriage arrangements would have been in the hands of his parents. He’d married not long after he’d returned to Pakistan. ‘He had a girlfriend? A local woman?’

‘No. She was a student who was over here from Europe to improve her English. But she wasn’t European. Her family were from Saudi Arabia, I think.’

Saudi. Damien could see the glimmer of his quarry, far in the distance, as the light caught, just
for a second, something that was supposed to be hidden. ‘Saudi Arabia?’

Halloran cast him a quick look. ‘Yes. Her father whisked her off PDQ, once he knew what was going on. Next thing we heard, Haroun had lost his visa. There was some speculation afterwards. Dirty work at the crossroads and all that. But I’m afraid I can’t help you any more than that. I don’t
know
anything.’

‘It was two years ago. Students who studied with him must still be here. Would any of them know?’

‘I’ll ask. Is there somewhere I can contact you?’

Damien left his e-mail and his mobile number. He wasn’t sure how long he’d be staying in London. But the timing was clear in his mind. Two years ago, Nazarian had brought his daughter Yasmin home. Not long after that, she had married Majid. Just over a year later, the man who had been in an illicit flirtation in London with a Saudi girl had died at the instigation of the man Yasmin had married.