The Disappeared (24 page)

Thinking of this, however, a measure of courage returns. You won that battle. And you won it because the human being in you awoke the human being in him. You are not, after all, without weapons. You smarten up the face that you see in the mirror. You go quietly into the bedroom and change into a clean cotton skirt and blouse. You pick up your mobile phone, ready to make an emergency call, and you walk noisily through the bedroom door, out into the corridor and into the living room. A man starts up in astonishment from the table in the window and swings round with a gasp.

‘Laura! Thank God!'

‘Justin! What in Heaven's name…'

‘I do apologize. I let myself in, I kept the other set of keys in case we needed, in case the work required, you never know…'

He peters out, stares at you for a moment, and then resumes.

‘I was so worried about you, when you didn't turn up this morning, so I came round to see where you were. Obviously you had other things to do. I have given you a terrible shock. How awful.'

You look at him as the words tumble out in disarray; for a moment you feel you might faint. He comes across quickly and hands you to an armchair.

‘Thanks,' you whisper.

‘Thank God!' he says again. ‘I can't tell you how worried I've been. I thought you had been kidnapped or something!'

He laughs hysterically. And you laugh with him. The very idea! You, Laura Markham, kidnapped! All of a sudden the images of your ordeal flood back: the hands on your ankles, your mouth, your breasts. The slime of Hassan's sex on your neck. You get up and rush to the bathroom. You retch into the bowl but no vomit comes, only a thread of white saliva. And then you lie on the bed, exhausted, eyes closed, trying to turn your mind away from the horror. You remember Catherine again. She used to sing the Willow Song from Verdi's
Otello
. And in those days you played the piano well enough to accompany her. How stupid to have given up, just for the sake of the law exams.

‘Are you alright?'

Justin is standing in the door of the bedroom, looking down on you with concern. He has fine blue eyes, a slightly receding brow, but a clear, honest, manly expression. This is a man you could like. You nod, and try to smile.

‘A bug,' you say. ‘But I'll be OK in a minute.'

He retreats and after a while you get up, take a quick shower, drink some water, and return to the living room, where he is reading through the file on the table.

‘Sorry this day has been a write-off,' you say. ‘But we start properly tomorrow.'

‘Not a write-off at all,' he replies. ‘God knows how you put your hands on this file, but you have solved the problem.'

He gives you a questioning look. You must try to be normal, look as though nothing untoward has happened. For whose sake you have to do this you do not know. But it is significant that your thoughts return to Yunus and the image of his slender fingers on the knife with which he kept that Polish captain at bay. And then there is Justin: the last thing you want is to appear in his eyes as a victim, a degraded object of a stranger's lust. He is to see you as a clean, competent professional woman, and one who is free, should she choose, to bestow her heart on a man.

‘I picked it up from your office yesterday – it was under some books and papers in a corner, as though someone had wanted to hide it. I meant to work on it this morning, but I wasn't feeling too good – went out for a walk, must have missed you when you let yourself in. I tried to ring,' you lie, ‘but you were out of the office.'

He begins to relax.

‘Yes, I was out all day, as a result of this file. But maybe I had better leave you now, Laura. I am sure you need to get some rest.'

‘Actually I could do with some food. If you haven't eaten could we go out somewhere?'

Normal courtesies, normal appetites, normal business dealings, normal surroundings – how necessary they are, and how soon you feel normal too, as you sit in the little Italian restaurant with a plate of pasta and a glass of Frascati. For a blessed moment it is as though it never happened, a nightmare with no roots in reality. When, from time to time, the black thoughts return, they take a vengeful form, urging you to complete what you began with the monkey wrench. And one day you will.

Justin's story is like a picture that has been clipped round the edges, so that the shadows are cast by absent people and the expressions are without a visible cause. Was Justin in love with this Afghan girl who worked for him? Is he hoping to excuse her conduct, by explaining that she never intended to cheat the firm, but only to find a legal route for her family's dodgy business? You cannot tell. All you know is that Justin has more emotion invested in this case than he ought to have, and that someone – himself, perhaps, or the girl – is going to get hurt. Still, you agree to meet her next morning, and to see whether it would be possible to rewrite last summer's accounts with the alien transfers removed from them.

Later, in bed, the unpurged images of day do not recede. But you wrestle them under the pillow. For a while you get by with
The Wind in the Willows
. Then you try singing ‘Tambourine Man', which brings a flood of sudden tears. You think about Justin, picture his bachelor life, and wonder whether there is room in it for a real woman, or whether he will always feel safer with some buttoned up refugee determined to cheat her way past the normal barriers. Towards morning you fall into a restless sleep, and start awake at eight, your dream-hand groping for a monkey wrench, your memory telling you that it was not just a dream.

Justin lay on the leather couch, with ‘Insect' in his ears. He could not make sense of anything – of Muhibbah, of Laura, of himself – and the crazy lyrics mimicked his mood. ‘Insect spawning, hybrids crawling/ In spinning cluster skies we're soaring'. He reached down for the tumbler on the woollen carpet and raised it to his lips. To drink the whisky he had to sit up straight; the iPod earphones fell from his head and were swallowed by the silence. It was past midnight, and the sleeping city emitted only a few motorised snores. He went back again over the day's events. Something was missing, some vital piece of information that would tie the narrative together and show what it really meant. Was Muhibbah's story the truth? He doubted it. And her kiss, the first that she had ever bestowed: did it have some other motive than desire? He recalled the image that had flashed through his mind as he made that phone call: the image of a kidnapped girl, shipped in misery and humiliation to a life of sexual slavery. In some way slavery and honour were connected in Muhibbah's world. Her rock-hard purity had to be paid for, and not paid for by her. ‘I am a gift or nothing' she had shouted at the sun. But gift-giving cultures depend on covert deals, and in covert deals Muhibbah and her tribe were experts, not troubling to distinguish between the deals that were legal and those that were crimes.

Once he had wanted to fight for her against every threat. But maybe, as Iona said, the real threat was not to Muhibbah, but from her. It was in such terms that he should interpret that kiss. In itself it was a sign only. But it promised something vast and engulfing in its fullness. It was the avatar of a complete bodily entwinement, a nuptial melting together from which there would be no return. Did he want that? Once, perhaps, he had wanted it. But only because, in his infatuation, he had not examined what it meant.

And then there was Laura, whose beauty was the opposite of Muhibbah's and who had seemed, at the first encounter, exactly what he hoped for – honest, open and engaged, with none of Muhibbah's secret corners: the one who unravels mysteries, not the one who creates them. But meeting her again, after the strange and only partly explained day of her disappearance, he hardly recognized her. She was nervous, distracted, uncertain of herself. Her face had a bruised and slightly swollen look, as though she had been taking drugs. Yes, she was beautiful, exquisite in her way. But she seemed to have lost all interest in the job for which he had hired her. It was as though she were warning him off. Maybe she suffered from some debilitating disorder – bipolar syndrome, perhaps, which would send her plummeting to the depths of a familiar and dreaded depression. Yes, perhaps that was it. He felt sorry for her, but not so sorry as he felt for himself, who had invested his hopes in Laura, and once more lost them all at a go.

He woke with a start, his head befuddled by whisky, his body on fire from a dream of Muhibbah's kiss. It was eight o'clock and his mobile phone was ringing beside the bed, into which he had heaved himself six hours before. The voice that spoke in his ear was Muhibbah's.

‘I've got to see you right away. It is urgent, I'll come to the office. Please be there, Justin. Please, as soon as you can.'

She was waiting in the street outside the office, the knuckle of one finger in her mouth, her thin shoes drumming on the pavement. They went in silence to the lift. As the door closed she uttered a dry sob and fell into his arms. He felt her hair on his cheek, her breasts against his body; he smelled her dry sandalwood smell. But they had reached the third floor and the door had opened before he could kiss her. As they went across to the office she averted her face.

‘I have no right to ask you for anything, Justin. I owe you already so much.'

They were the only people in the office, and she was sitting across from him at his desk. Outside the spring sun was dusting the rooftops with gold. Her sleeveless coat was hanging on the back of the door behind her. Justin was astonished by this, and wondered whether the letter and the poem were still in the pocket. His brain was not working properly, and the most ordinary things were mysterious.

‘You owe me nothing, Muhibbah,' he said. ‘Maybe an explanation though.'

She put her hand to her mouth, stifling a sob.

‘It's Yunus,' she said. ‘Something's happened on that ship, something terrible that he won't talk about. And now he has to flee. He says he must disappear by tonight.'

‘For good?'

‘Yes, for good. And before they catch up with him.'

‘They?'

‘His partners in the business. Hassan has had an accident, a burst ear-drum and a cracked skull: he's in hospital in Hull. Likely to be there for a month or more. Hassan has ways of collecting money – he could have found the cash they are asking for. But Yunus has no, what do you call it, no leverage. He is just a boy. And there's something else too. Yunus won't tell me what it is, but something they want from him – something that he cannot give. So he's going to slip away, back to Yemen, melt into a warrior tribe as our father did. And I am to go with him. Britain, he tells me, is no place for a Muslim girl.'

‘Not possible, Muhibbah. You simply can't. And anyway, who says you're a Muslim girl?'

‘But who is to prevent me?'

‘You yourself,' he replied.

She looked at him narrowly and nodded.

‘So you haven't understood what I told you yesterday, Justin.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘You could prevent it. I cannot.'

‘Explain yourself.'

She got up and began to walk around the office. At one point she stopped by the desk she used to occupy, picked up her accountancy textbook, and gave a wry smile. Then she came across and stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder.

‘Look at me, Justin.'

He did as she commanded, and the beauty of her face disarmed him. She was watching him from a region that he could never enter, where the rules by which he had lived did not apply.

‘I am talking about people who have no standing in your society Justin, illegal immigrants, criminals, people who live in the shadows, who have to enforce their deals by means that you need never use. I am the only part of Yunus that they could punish. If he goes then no one else in my family will lift a finger to protect me. You are all that I have.'

‘You
might
have had me, but you rejected me.'

His voice trembled, and against his better judgment he laid a hand on the hand that still rested on his shoulder.

‘You are wrong, Justin. I did not reject you. I was never in a position to reject you, or to accept you either. Of course I had a chance to free myself from the world I come from, to be a modern British girl, Justin's girl, for however long he might be interested. But that would not have been right for you or for me. When the crisis came and I had to choose I made the wrong choice. I should have told my brother to back away from me. But I didn't and you don't forgive me.'

She stated it as a matter of fact, part of that world of rigid law and custom, which a solitary girl has no power to change.

‘So what are you asking, Muhibbah?'

‘Isn't it obvious? If I were to marry someone it could only be you. As your wife I would be safe; as Yunus's abandoned sister I would be punished in the normal way of the girls who have fallen foul of them. So I have three possibilities: to go with Yunus into the desert, to stay here with you, or to kill myself. Which is it to be?'

‘You make marriage sound like a move in a game of chess, like castling, or something. But I was brought up to think that marriage is about love.'

‘
Bismillahi
, Justin, isn't it obvious that I love you?'

Justin, to whom it was not obvious at all, nevertheless pressed his hand on hers, and nodded silently.

‘All these months, shut away in that place, with neighbours who looked at me as though I were a terrorist or something, keeping house for Yunus and dealing with so many mysteries, all with a single meaning which is money, can you imagine what I felt? I longed to be back in the office, listening to you talking about your music, about poetry and painting and landscapes and all those peculiar English things that I wanted to know, like whether the Queen could sack the Prime Minister or why there are two archbishops and not three or one. You know I joined the travelling library that comes twice a month to Buckton, and I read the novels that you talked about – have you not noticed how my English has improved? Well, I did that because it made me close to you again. And although I was shocked and frightened when I heard that a stranger had discovered what Yunus is up to and where he lives, it was a joy to discover that the stranger was you. At last I could put things right, and do what I should have done all those months ago, which is to join myself to you.'