The Horse Dancer (5 page)

 

Mac. She stared at the little screen and everything around her stilled.
Mac
.

She had no choice.

 

she typed back, and shut her phone.

Once, this corner of the City had been stacked with solicitors’ offices, side by side in Dickensian buildings, their gold-painted ‘partners’ signs promising representation of the business, taxation and matrimonial variety. Most had long moved to new commercial premises, glossy glass buildings on the outskirts of the City, architect-designed spaces that their occupants felt properly reflected their twenty-first-century outlook. So far, Davison Briscoe had resolutely failed to join this trend, and Natasha’s cramped, book-stuffed room in the rickety Georgian building that housed her and five other lawyers bore more of a resemblance to an academic’s tutoring room than a commercial enterprise.

‘Here’s the paperwork you asked for.’ Ben, a gangly, studious young man whose fair, determinedly smooth cheeks belied his twenty-five years, placed the pink-ribboned file in front of her. ‘You haven’t touched your croissants,’ he said.

‘Sorry.’ She flicked through the files on her desk. ‘Lost my appetite. Ben, do me a favour. Dig out the file for Ali Ahmadi, will you? Emergency judicial review from about two months ago.’ Then she glanced at the newspaper she had bought on her way from the station in a vain attempt to persuade herself that what she had read had been a hallucination, perhaps brought on by lack of sleep.

The door opened and Conor entered. He was wearing the blue striped shirt she had bought him for his birthday. ‘Morning, Hotshot.’ He leant across the desk and kissed her lightly on the lips. ‘How’d it go last night?’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Really good. You were missed.’

‘My night for having the boys. Sorry, but you know how it is. Until I get more access I daren’t miss an evening.’

‘Did you have a nice time?’

‘It was wild. Harry Potter DVD, beans on toast. We sure rocked the joint. That enormous hotel bed too big without me?’

She sat back. ‘Conor, desperate as I am for your company, I was so shattered by midnight I could have slept on a park bench.’

Ben came in again and, with a nod to Conor, laid the file on her desk. ‘Mr Ahmadi,’ he said.

Conor peered at it. ‘Wasn’t that your deportation case from a couple of months ago? Why are you digging him out?’

‘Ben, go and get me a fresh coffee, will you? From the shop, not Linda’s brown water.’

Conor tossed a bank note at him. ‘And me. Double-shot espresso. No milk.’

‘You’ll kill yourself,’ she observed.

‘But by God, I’ll do it efficiently. Okay,’ he said, noting that she was waiting for Ben to leave. ‘What’s up?’

‘This.’ She handed him the paper, pointing at the story.

He read it quickly. ‘Ah. Your man there,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes.’ She stretched out her arms, letting her face fall briefly on to the desk. Then she reached over and picked at an almond croissant. ‘My man there. I’m wondering if I should tell Richard.’

‘Our senior partner? Oh, nonononono! No need for a hair shirt, Hotshot.’

‘It’s a pretty serious crime.’

‘And one you could not have predicted. Let it go, Natasha. All part of the job, sweetheart. You know that.’

‘I do. It’s just that it’s . . . so grim. And he was . . .’ She shook her head, remembering. ‘I don’t know. He just didn’t seem the type.’

‘Didn’t seem the type.’ Conor actually laughed.

‘Well, he didn’t.’ She took a swig of cold coffee. ‘I just don’t like having been part of something so awful. I can’t help feeling responsible.’

‘What? You forced him to attack the girl?’

‘You know that’s not what I meant. I put up a good case for him to stay in the country. I’m responsible for him being here.’

‘Because nobody else could have made that happen, could they?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Get over yourself, Natasha.’ Conor tapped the file. ‘If Ravi had been here it would have been him. Let it go. Move on. I’ll see you for a quick drink tonight. Are we still on? Fancy the Archery? They’ve started doing tapas, you know.’

But Natasha had only ever been good at giving advice, not taking it. Later that day she found herself opening Ahmadi’s file for a second time, searching for clues, some reason why this boy, who had cried, had held her hands so gently, had been capable of such a random act of violence. It didn’t make sense. ‘Ben? I need you to find me an atlas.’

‘An atlas?’

He had found one within twenty minutes, scuffed and fabric-bound, the spine missing in patches. ‘It’s probably very much out of date. It has – ah – references to Persia and Bombay,’ he said apologetically. ‘You might do better looking up whatever you need on the web. I could do it for you.’

‘I’m a Luddite, Ben,’ she said, flicking through the pages, ‘you know that. I need to see it on paper.’

Almost on a whim, she’d decided to look up where the boy had come from; the name of the town had stuck in her mind.

It was then, as she stared at the map, tracing the names of the places with a finger, that she realised none of the care workers, the legal team, his foster-mother had asked Ali Ahmadi the obvious question. But there it was – staring up at her: how could anyone walk nine hundred miles in thirteen days?

That evening Natasha sat in the bar and cursed herself for not being thorough. She told Conor the story, and he laughed, a short, wry laugh, then shrugged. ‘You know these kids are desperate,’ he said. ‘They tell you what they think you want to hear.’

She saw them every day, refugees, ‘problem’ children, young people who were displaced or neglected, teenagers who had never known a word of praise or a supportive embrace, their faces prematurely hardened, their minds already hard-wired to survival at any cost. She believed she could usually tell the ones who were lying: the girls who claimed their parents were abusive because they no longer wanted to live at home; the asylum-seekers who swore they were eleven or twelve, even when you could make out the thick stubble of adulthood on their cheeks. She was used to seeing the same young offenders, in an endless cycle of misbehaviour and alleged repentance. But she had been
moved
by Ahmadi.

Conor gave her his full attention. ‘Okay. Are you sure you got the place right?’

‘It’s in the statements.’ She asked a passing waiter for mineral water.

‘And he really couldn’t have walked that far?’

‘In less than two weeks?’ Her voice was sarcastic. She couldn’t help it. ‘Seventy miles a day. I calculated it.’

‘I don’t know why you’re so upset. You’re protected by privilege. You knew nothing of this while you were representing him, so what does it matter? You don’t have to say anything. You don’t have to
do
anything. Hell, it happens to me all the time. I have to tell half my clients to shut up at first meeting before they tell me something I’m not supposed to hear.’

But if she had checked his story herself, Natasha wanted to say, she might have guessed earlier on that Ahmadi was lying. She might have excused herself from the case – cited ‘embarrassment’. That was often enough to get people looking at the facts a little harder. She could have saved that woman, that unknown sales assistant, 26. But she had skimmed the notes. And she had let the boy go, allowed him to disappear between the cracks of London’s landscape, assuming that he was one of the good ones who wouldn’t reappear in court some day.

If he had lied about how he’d got here, he could have lied about anything.

Conor leant back and took a long sip of his wine. ‘Ah, let it go, Natasha. Some desperate kid managed to avoid being sent back to some plague-infested hell-hole. So what? Move on.’

Even when he was dealing with the most high-profile cases, Conor had a deceptively sanguine air, beaming outside court, glad-handing, as if it was of no consequence to him whether he won or not. He patted his pockets. ‘Will you get me another? I’ve got to nip to the cashpoint.’

She checked in her bag for her wallet and found her fingers entangled in something. She pulled it out. It was the little amulet, the roughened silver horse, that Ahmadi had given her on the morning she had won his case. She had resolved to send it to his home – he had too few possessions to give anything away – and had promptly forgotten. Now it was a reminder of how she had failed. Suddenly she remembered the unlikely vision of that morning, an unearthly apparition in urban surroundings.

‘Conor – I saw the strangest thing this morning.’

The train had stopped for fifteen minutes in a tunnel outside Liverpool Street station, just long enough for the temperature to rise to a point at which people shifted restlessly in their seats and a low murmur of discontent rippled along the train. Just long enough for Natasha, shielded from telephone calls now, to stare out at the inky nothingness and think about an ex-husband who wasn’t yet ex enough.

She had shifted slightly on her feet as, with a harsh squeal of overheated metal, the train edged forward and out into daylight. She wouldn’t think about Mac. She wouldn’t think about Ali Ahmadi, who had proven so depressingly removed from the person he had presented to her.

And it was at that moment she saw it, so fast, so unlikely, that even as she cricked her neck to look back, she wasn’t sure she had registered it correctly. Gone in a flash, swallowed by the blurred streets and backyards, grimy balconies and lead-specked lines of laundry.

But the image had stayed with her all day, long after the train had carried her towards the hazy centre of the City. In a quiet cobbled street squeezed between high-rise blocks, flanked by lorry yards and parked cars a young girl had stood, her arm raised, a long stick in her hand – not in threat but instruction.

Above her, in the middle of the road, perfectly balanced on glossy, muscular haunches, a huge horse reared.

Natasha dropped the silver pendant into her bag, barely suppressing a shiver. ‘Did you hear what I just said?’

‘Mm?’ He was reading the newspaper. He had already lost interest. Move on, he always told her. As if
he
ever could.

She stared at him. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I’ll go and get the drinks.’

 

 

 

Boo was not a horse you might usually find in the back-street yards of East London. He was neither a heavy, feather-legged dray nor a ewe-necked thoroughbred pacer, the kind backed rapidly into a sulky so that illegal races could take place on the dual-carriageway, trotting their way into private record books and prompting the transfer of thick wads of illegal betting cash. He was not a well-mannered riding-school hack from Hyde Park or one of the many varieties of short, stout pony, black and white or mulish, which tolerated, with varying degrees of good humour, being ridden down steps, scrambled over beer barrels, or taken into lifts so that, with shrieks of laughter, their owners might canter along the balconies of their blocks of flats.

Boo was a Selle Français, a large-boned thoroughbred, his legs sturdier and his back stronger than that breed might suggest. He was athletic but sure-footed. His short-coupled back made him good at jumping and his sweet, almost doglike, nature made him tolerant and friendly. He was unfazed by the heaviest traffic, and a fool for company. He was also easily bored, and Papa had hung so many balls from ropes in his stable to entertain him that Cowboy John would mutter that the old man must be trying to get him a place in the basketball leagues.

The other kids at Sarah’s school or on the estate got their highs in little paper wraps or plastic bags, skidding stolen cars around shrinking patches of wasteland or spending hours dressing up like celebrities, studying their magazines with far more attentiveness than they ever did their schoolbooks. She didn’t care about any of it. From the moment Sarah put on the saddle and breathed in the familiar scent of warm horse and clean leather, she forgot everything else.

Riding Boo lifted her away from everything that was annoying and grubby and depressing. It helped her forget that she was the skinniest girl in her class, and the only one with little justifiable reason to wear a bra, that only she – and Renee, the Turkish girl nobody spoke to – didn’t have a mobile phone or a computer. She forgot that it was just her and Papa.

This was what she felt for her horse on their good days: awe at his majesty, the sheer power beneath her, and what he would do for her. He behaved badly only when she failed to ask him properly – her mind still lodged in school, or thirst, or tiredness – and the sweetness that radiated from him when they got it right brought a lump to her throat. Boo was hers, and he was special.

Papa told people who didn’t know about horses that he was like a Rolls-Royce after a tractor: everything was finely tuned, responsive, elegant. You communicated quietly, rather than flapping and shouting. You achieved a communion of minds, of wills. She asked Boo: he collected himself, his quarters gathering under him, his great head dropping into his chest, and he gave. His only limits, said Papa, were Sarah’s limits. He said Boo had the biggest heart of any horse he had ever known.

It hadn’t always been like that: Sarah had two moon-shaped scars on her arm from where he had bitten her, and when they had broken him there had been days when he would snap off the lunge rein and go tearing across the park, his tail up like a banner, while the mothers shrieked and bolted with their prams and Papa prayed aloud in French that he wouldn’t hit a car. Papa told her every time that it was her fault, to the point at which she wanted to scream at him, but now she knew a little more and understood that he had been right.