The Disappeared

by Roger Scruton

  ‘There are flowers in the desert, blooming suddenly when there is rain, otherwise buried, hidden and impossible to destroy. Our love was like that.’

  And then she whispered of her desolation, a twelve-year old refugee, struggling with the language that she and Yunus had begun to learn from the television, going each day to St Catherine’s Academy, and coming home to that grim cave where her father sat motionless like a deposed god, and she was shut away with frightened females. She begged and begged for them to bring Yunus to her. She threatened to kill herself. She refused all food. And so at last he came.

  It costs a fortune to smuggle people from Yemen to the drained marshes of Iraq, from there through Turkey to Azerbaijan, through the Russian Federation to the Baltic coast and thence to England, social housing and benefits. To achieve it they had to work closely with the Poles who had been housed by the Council in the Angel towers, and also with Afghan and Iraqi families who were prepared to pay for their relatives to be brought across. By the time Yunus and his troublesome half-brother arrived the Shahin family were well into the business of people smuggling, in conjunction with a Polish ship operating out of Kaliningrad.

  ‘I’m telling you something, Justin, that you shouldn’t know. And I have lost every right to swear you to secrecy.’

  She looked at him and again the two perfect tears welled up in her perfect eyes and stayed like pearls on her cheeks until he quietly removed them with his finger. And when he had done so he leaned forward and kissed her on the lips. She did not move, did not close her mouth or open it further than it had opened from her flow of words. But her eyes narrowed slightly as he moved away.

  ‘I don’t know why I did that,’ he said, embarrassed.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  He looked down in silence. Why was she telling him this story? And why was he listening, when he should be actively searching for Laura, the girl who was to rescue him from Muhibbah’s malevolent charms, and who was now in danger? And yet he listened. He heard of the trouble caused by Hassan, and his gang of Iraqis who picked up vulnerable English girls, promised marriage, and then sold them on to the highest bidder. She whispered the verse of al-Baqara in which it says that there is nothing wrong in any allusion to marriage you make to a woman, and that Allah knows that you will say things to them. But the verse does not permit the things that Hassan did, and which he encouraged Yunus to do as well.

  Yunus was a failure. He left St Catherine’s Academy without any GCSEs; he had tried for jobs and never held one for more than a week; and he clung to Hassan as his guide. Together they could live on the edge of this decaying society, exploiting the residue of doubt, guilt and repudiation that made the English in general, and their girls in particular, such easy prey. He had said that England was no place for a decent Muslim girl and that she should return to a country where girls were respected. He repeated the message several times, saying that it was a matter of honour. And then he wept for an hour on Muhibbah’s shoulder, telling her that he hated what they had done to a girl called Moira and that nothing like that could happen to this hard jewel from the desert, which he had polished for year upon year.

  ‘And that,’ she said, ‘is why Yunus would not help me, when the marriage offer came from that bloke in Afghanistan.’

  So that was when she had fled, and Justin had saved her, she did not deny it. She owed everything to Justin, and if she had not loved him as he wanted then he must recognize that she could love only the person to whom she belonged. But to belong she had to be given, transferred, as Yunus might have transferred her.

  ‘I am not something to be bought and sold,’ she told the sun. ‘I am a gift or nothing. That is how I have always been and nothing can change it.’

  After she left, she kept contact with Yunus, whom she had never ceased to love and whom she wished to detach from her family, and from Hassan in particular. Hassan, she whispered, had joined a group of madmen with beards who called themselves muhajjiroun, the ones in exile, who were going to install the reign of the Prophet in these kafr lands. What is it with psychopaths? For most of the time they act as though they had no conscience at all, needed no-one’s forgiveness, not even Allah’s, and then suddenly they get religion and decide that their relationship with Allah is the only thing that counts.

  He started dressing up in a jalabiya and a chequered ghutra on his head. He let his beard grow into a tangled worm-infested bush, and the sight of him, with his loose blind eye and his mop of thick black hair in a dirty dishcloth, would be enough to cause any passing policeman to call immediately for reinforcements. He made trouble everywhere, organised protests about Iraq and Afghanistan, protests about the schools, protests about the Council. And then overnight he changed back to his hooligan persona, shaved off the beard, dressed in leather and a big black overcoat, and took up again with girls. Always Muhibbah was beseeching Yunus to get away from this madman, to set up house with her, and one day she saw how it could be done.

  The people business was precarious. Some of the Iraqis were blackmailing the Shahins, saying they would report the whole thing to the police if their families weren’t brought in for free. And the deals were in cash, with no documents to explain them, or to explain what a Polish ship was doing anchored offshore at the mouth of the Humber. Muhibbah loved her work at Copley Solutions, because it was so neat, so clean, and so perfectly accounted for, with files of letters explaining every deal, and figures balancing each other in double-entry books. And that gave her an idea.

  She whispered to the earth how she and Yunus, together with the Polish captain called Bogdan, had set up the bogus firm of Lesprom, which made shipments of wood to Hull and was paid by Copley Solutions. And the money that Copley paid was secretly collected by Yunus and passed through the accounts by Muhibbah. Often there would be a real delivery of wood, but Muhibbah worked things out so that nothing would be noticed. Soon they had their own business going, the three of them, of which the Shahin family knew nothing, and Yunus promised to leave as soon as was reasonable and move in somewhere with Muhibbah. And then they would make the business entirely legal, offering a package deal to refugees, with an EU passport, easily obtainable in Poland, a passage to England and the chance of social housing.

  ‘How could you do that without me knowing?’ Justin asked in astonishment.

  ‘Because you were looking straight at me and not asking yourself what I was doing,’ she replied quickly.

  ‘And do you think you had the right to put my business at risk for the sake of you and your good-for-nothing brother?’

  Muhibbah gave a tight, thin smile.

  ‘It was for your sake too, Justin.’

  ‘For my sake? How come?’

  A lark sang high above them. A west wind was driving fluffy clouds across the sun, and shadows danced on the meadows like dolphins on the surface of the sea. And here beside him was the hard dry spirit of the desert.

  ‘How would it be possible for us to marry, if I had no brother to make the gift?’

  ‘I see,’ said Justin in astonishment. ‘So what happened?’

  ‘Hassan, of course. Yunus couldn’t keep our secret from him. Hassan insisted Yunus take me away from you, destroy all the records of what I had been doing through your office. The business was to go on as before, as a secret thing, full of shady corners. And I was to have nothing more to do with you, since that way lay danger.’

  ‘And you let this happen?’

  ‘I let it happen, Justin. Which is why you won’t want to rescue me now, from the mess I have got into.’

  ‘I don’t understand what the mess is.’

  ‘When you made that phone call our Polish contact got immediately in touch with Yunus. So my brother knows there has been a leak. He rang me to say that Hassan has had an accident, hit his ear on a metal spike, and that the ship has turned back. He had to threaten Bogdan, and the whole deal has been put at risk. It is likely there’ll be scores to settle and attempts to settle them coming our way from Russia
and Afghanistan. You don’t really think we have fifteen grand in ready money do you? Yunus was frightened, Justin, and so am I. If we don’t get out of this somehow it is either gaol or something worse.’

  ‘And you want me to help you get out of it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that, Justin. No, I just felt that I owe you the truth.’

  He looked at her, a long, searching look that she returned. And a deep trouble stirred within him.

  ‘In the Surah al-Imran,’ she said, ‘God blesses those who are sabin, you have a good word for it, yes “steadfast”, and those who look for forgiveness before the dawn. I am one of those who look for forgiveness before the dawn, one of the mustaghfirin al-asHari, and there’s that ‘Ha’ again that you can never pronounce. That’s all that’s left of my religion. You used to play that R.E.M. song in the office, you remember? ‘Losing my Religion’. I thought of that verse from the Koran whenever I heard it, and I think of it now.’

  ‘Do you miss your religion, Muhibbah?’

  ‘I have not made a good job of life without it.’

  ‘Would you have made a better job of life with it?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  They sat for a while in silence, as the sun began to go down. Then she turned to him, her face alive as though with a sudden idea.

  ‘You know something, Justin? Until a moment ago I had never kissed a man on the lips.’

  ‘I apologize,’ he said, and again the trouble stirred in him.

  ‘What is there to apologize for? I wanted you to do it.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sat still, her face turned to his, waiting without excitement for whatever he might do. When he pressed his lips to hers she raised her arms slowly to his neck and buried her fingers in his hair. She drew gently away with downturned eyes.

  ‘Justin,’ she said. ‘I’ve been so stupid.’

  It was getting late and he knew he must telephone Iona. But they lingered side by side and silently as they returned to the village. It was dark when they entered Falkin’s Yard. A blue Volkswagen was parked outside Muhibbah’s holiday cottage.

  ‘My brother!’ she said.

  ‘Which brother?’

  ‘Yunus of course. He’s back already. Quick, you must go.’

  ‘When will I see you?’

  ‘Why should you see me?’

  ‘Many reasons, Muhibbah. But one in particular. Together we could sort out those accounts. Then there would be one thing less you have to worry about.’

  She gave him a long and steady look. Again the tears welled up, and again he wiped them away.

  ‘Thanks, Justin. I’ll come to your office tomorrow morning. You’d better get hold of that file.’

  He rang Iona from the village square, and she insisted that they meet at once. Nothing that he recounted surprised her. But the only advice she would give was to go to the police and get the whole bloody lot of them arrested, Muhibbah included. He didn’t dare suggest that he had formed the opposite intention, and that he would do what he could to save her.

  ‘And Laura?’ Iona asked.

  Yes, and Laura, what of her?

  Chapter 23

  You stifle the impulse to scream. Someone has just let himself in to the living room, there is the sound of a chair moving, as though he were sitting down at the table. It must be nine o’clock. Fear stifles your sobs, and for a moment your body makes a secret of itself, like the body of a hunted animal. You find you are tip-toeing to the bedroom door and shutting it quietly. You find you are supporting yourself on the wall, sliding around the room on trembling legs, until you are in the bathroom, locking the door behind you and staring at a blanched face in the mirror above the sink. Whose face is it? Not yours. Not the face of that ambitious, clever girl who was on the verge of a career as an investigative accountant, whom so many men had wanted as a lover and who had re-made herself after two stupid mistakes. The face you see belongs to a brutalised victim, one who has not yet taken her revenge, and who owes the salvaged remains of her body to a confused slob of a boy who had been unable to take her by force because some spark of love had been suddenly lit in him. Maybe it is Yunus in the next door room. Maybe he cannot stay away from you. Maybe you have to repeat the whole miserable dialogue, to point out to him yet again that, whatever chance a vulnerable immigrant without education might have had with you was lost at once when he thought of possessing your body without your soul.

  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.