The Disappeared

by Roger Scruton

  This response baffles the barrister, but you understand it at once. ‘Yes,’ you say beneath your breath, ‘that’s how it is, how it must be.’ You start forward in your seat, Justin restraining you with an anxious hand on your arm. You speak the girl’s words, and think the thoughts that she does not speak. Again you are she, as she spells out the ordeal that you have undergone.

  You have been divided in two by what has happened. You have been trapped, beaten, cajoled and threatened into becoming someone else – some thing else, an object to be played with, a toy made of flesh. How do you respond to this? There is only one way: to leave behind the thing that has been battered and bartered, to remake yourself as a gift. But a gift for whom? All your efforts have been devoted to that question, and at last they were rewarded, when knowledge, poetry and grace appeared before you in the person of a kind young teacher, with whose predicament you alone could sympathize.

  All this you understand through the girl’s quirky idiom. But Defence Counsel wants more. He wants to force that other thing to speak. He wants to impress on the jury that you had no choice but to seek help from your teacher and that he had no choice but to offer it.

  ‘T’other thing,’ you say at last, ‘is Hassan’s bitch.’

  ‘And who, Sharon, is Hassan?’

  ‘Canna tell you, sir.’

  Yes, but you must. You must begin your revenge, our revenge. Prosecution objects that the question is irrelevant. But the judge allows it nevertheless. Counsel for the Defence resumes.

  ‘Listen, Sharon. The future of my client depends on your testimony. I need to know why you went to live with him. There are before us two answers to that question. One is that my client, in order to satisfy his sexual desires, enticed you into his home and kept you there. The other is that you had been targeted by people who abused you, and begged my client to take you in. Which answer is the true one?’

  ‘The second one, sir.’

  ‘So now you must tell me something about those who abused you. If you do not, how can I persuade the jury that my client took you in because he had no moral alternative?’

  The girl allows her eyes to wander from those of her teacher. She is trembling. You are trembling. The assembled morons are leaning forward with intent and greedy faces, and there is a hush in the courtroom. Suddenly you burst out with a sob:

  ‘They done it, sir, Hassan and his brother down on the eighth floor. It was them done it to me like they done it to Moira Callaghan.’

  No exoneration for Yunus: you clench your fists against him. The teacher sits with his face in his hands. He too is weeping. Only one thing in the ensuing story surprises you. While the sister was at home the boys behaved correctly. ‘She was Yunus’s idol, like you dinna touch her or use bad language in front of her or speak about those dirty things.’ She was holy; even Hassan was different around her, like he was secretly wanting her to bless him. But the sister ran away. Then, bit by bit though you fought against it with every weapon you had, you became two people: Hassan’s bitch, and Sharon. Sharon was pure as Muhibbah: she was going to be someone’s wife, the wife of a poet. You had your girlish dreams, just as Catherine had.

  By the time they take the girl away you are sobbing uncontrollably. Justin wants to leave but you shake your head. Sympathy has veered towards the teacher. But the judge instructs the jury to convict him of abduction if they believe he has made improper use of his position in order to entice the girl from her home. Following the guilty verdict the judge accepts Defence Counsel’s Plea in Mitigation, agreeing that there had been no sexual exploitation of the child, and also that the teacher had been under a clear moral obligation to protect her from the abuse that she suffered. But Stephen’s failure to alert the police casts a dim light upon his actions, and the judge therefore has no alternative but to sentence him to a year’s imprisonment, with a recommendation that the Prison Service consider, for his own safety, a secure unit for sexual offenders.

  You watch as the teacher is led away, face white, eyes staring, a policeman at either elbow. You turn to Justin. He too has been weeping.

  ‘So, Justin, if you’ll come with me, it’s time for me to go to the police.’

  He takes your hand and squeezes it.

  Chapter 30

  After a week or so Justin had begun to be much in awe of Laura. Her courage, her ability to confine her terrors to the night, her uncomplicated appeal to him for affection and comfort, her honesty in all that concerned her – those virtues commanded so much admiration that he did not dare to move things forward for fear of looking cheap. But nor were they just good friends. They were joined by something huge, subliminal and dangerous and they were side by side in knowing this.

  Dealing with the effects of Muhibbah’s trickery was not always easy. He tried to excuse the girl; Laura tried not to accuse her. And often they had to move around each other carefully, like boxers feinting in the ring. But difficult though the day might be, they were entirely at one in the evening, Justin cooking, Laura listening to music or reading his books.

  He was surprised how much he could appreciate classical music, which filled the space that Laura made for it. He felt no need to pluck the strings of his guitar; he was happy to forget the iPod and only rarely, when she was asleep or out, did he listen to his favourite Metal songs. Metal expressed, it is true, a cherished ideal of manliness, and he still played his Thursday gig at the Crustafarian. But he left his manhood there, as a costume to be donned for the crowd. On other evenings he was a kind of housewife, appreciating Laura’s beauty from his place at the stove.

  Once he caught himself singing ‘The Disappeared’. But when he got to the H on Habibah he stopped. ‘Don’t go there,’ he said aloud. And he went back to Laura’s supper, which involved h’s of a less blood-stirring kind: hake, halibut and haddock, in a sauce of egg yolks and cream.

  He understood her reluctance to go to the police. Reliving the event would be difficult. Explaining her assault on Hassan could open her to criminal charges. But there could be no healing until she had seen her abuser punished and his criminal network exposed. Gently he urged her to lay a complaint. Iona likewise wanted this, though she too was reluctant to press Laura too hard. And so things continued for two months, during which time Laura would often go to London, as though to recapture a life of which he was not a part. But always she came back to him, with the look of one returning home, quietly to resume her place on the couch.

  One Thursday, after his gig at the Crustafarian, Justin went with Iona for a drink. It was the day after the trial of Sharon Williams’s teacher, and he was curious to know why Iona’s evidence had been so reticent, and why she had veered away from the crucial fact of Sharon’s persecution.

  Iona became pensive, and her face assumed a puffy appearance, as she half closed her eyes. She pushed her gin and tonic to one side and leaned forward on the table, her chin in her hands.

  ‘It’s like this, Justin,’ she said. ‘Everything in that world is governed by a code of honour. Girls who have sex have lost their honour, and are therefore the property of the man who mastered them, even if he did so by force. I have been through this, and I know. And honour codes are not enforced as our codes are enforced, by legal sanctions. Defence Counsel thought he was doing his client a favour, by trapping that poor girl into naming her abusers. Now of course it will be all over the papers and the police will have to step in.’

  ‘So? Isn’t that what we want?’

  ‘Eventually yes. But only when that girl is safe. I don’t have much time for Jesus, though when it comes to the treatment of women I give him a bit more credit than Muhammad. However, he did say one true thing, which is “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend.” That, I fear, is what Sharon Williams has done. There is a whole network of criminals out there who depend on her silence: one reason for packing her off to Russia. A lot, you see, has become clear to me over the last couple of weeks. When that teacher first came to see me I have
to admit that he got up my nose, talking to me as though I hadn’t had to deal with case after case of this kind of thing. So I dithered until you told me about Muhibbah, and the pieces began to fit together in my mind. I realised we are dealing with a full-scale business of people trafficking. Of course there is not a lot we can do now, but it would help if Laura went to the police, so that Sharon’s evidence isn’t the only evidence they have.’

  ‘It’s exactly what Laura decided, when she saw what the girl was going through.’

  ‘Then she must act quickly. And that means now, before that girl is killed.’

  It clearly did not please Superintendent Nicholson that Justin, who had been placed in the mental file for problems solved, was once again sitting on the other side of his desk, this time with a lovely woman beside him. The Superintendent was already agitated on account of the Haycraft trial, which had been all over the newspapers and the local radio. The suggestion was being widely made that political correctness had caused his force to turn a blind eye to cases of sexual abuse. But as Laura’s story unfolded, she meanwhile gripping Justin’s hand and dabbing away tears with a crumpled handkerchief, the Superintendent’s expression changed from bewildered resentment at this new intrusion to grim recognition that the day of judgment had come. At a certain point he raised his hand to interrupt the story.

  ‘You can pass over all the details Miss Markham. If they are relevant you can tell them to Sergeant Wendy Pinsent. All I need from you now is a specific complaint against specific persons.’

  But when the names turned out to be those blurted out by Sharon Williams in the Haycraft trial, brothers of the girl whose disappearance he had refused to investigate when Justin had requested it, the Superintendent’s face registered his disturbance. He dropped his eyes, which had until that moment been outlining Laura as though to store her in digital format, and focused instead on the photographs of his wife and children. By the time Laura reached the end of her story he had covered two sheets of paper with notes, and was on the telephone to colleagues in Hull, asking them to take a statement from a patient admitted to hospital two months earlier with a life-threatening head injury. The message came back that the patient had left the day before, without waiting to be discharged. An officer sent to Angel Towers reported that Block A flat 8/1 was now unoccupied, the family having moved out a week ago, in response to an order from the Council.

  ‘I know where you might find him,’ Justin said, and he recounted the events that led from Laura’s disappearance to the discovery of Muhibbah. The Superintendent criticised Justin for not reporting Laura’s disappearance immediately to the police, but he let the matter drop when Justin reminded him that he had reported a missing person once before, only to be brushed aside by the Superintendent.

  The decision was taken to leave Laura with Wendy Pinsent, while Justin accompanied the Superintendent and another officer to the village of Buckton.

  It was late morning when they reached Falkin’s Yard, under grey skies and a faint but persistent drizzle. The rubbish had not been removed from Muhibbah’s holiday home. The curtains were drawn, there was no car parked outside, and the place had an abandoned air. Justin assumed that she and Yunus had left for Yemen and that Hassan would soon be following them if he could escape whatever net the police were laying. He was surprised, therefore, that the door was swinging on its hinges.

  ‘Bad sign’, said the Superintendent. ‘Better get the gloves. And you, Mr Fellowes, had better wait outside.’

  Justin protested, but to no avail. The two officers, wearing latex gloves, examined the lock of the door before they entered. After a minute Justin donned a pair of gloves that they had left on the driver’s seat and followed them. It was dark inside, the grey daylight barely making it through the curtains to lie like a dirty crust on the cluttered furniture. A faint odour lingered in the sitting room, like the smell of a wild animal’s lair, an odour of dead and dismembered things. All the curtains were drawn, and all the windows closed.

  The officers turned on the wall lamps in the adjoining room, and a band of yellow light shot across the dirty white carpet from wall to wall. Cushions were heaped up in one corner and this, he saw, was Muhibbah’s corner, with a neat pile of books, one on top of the other, including all the novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot, as well as poems in Arabic. There was a notebook too, in which she had written remarks in English and Arabic: he put it quickly back on the pile, respectful of her fiercely defended privacy. In the opposite corner was a television, the floor around it littered with DVDs. The walls were bare except for a framed text in ornamental Arabic script, picked out in green and gold.

  The silence was strange, as though it had been stored there, and he wondered why there was no noise from the adjoining room. An oppressive grief descended on him, long shadow of his love. In this secret place she had been alone except for her brother’s visits, trapped by the futile imperatives of a culture that she could have escaped at any time if she had reached a gentle hand to him. Loneliness lingered there, the loneliness of Muhibbah and her pride. He remembered her kisses, three of them, each more needful than the last. And he wondered whether she would ever kiss again, when she had been bartered away in the Yemeni desert. A stream of regretful love sped from his heart towards that distant place, and he sadly whispered her name.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the Superintendent, who stepped in from the adjoining room.

  ‘Ah, I didn’t intend you to come in. Hope you haven’t touched anything. You are wearing gloves I see, which is good. If you could just come in here a moment. Tell me if you recognize this woman.’

  She was wearing a pale blue nightdress and lying on the floor beside the unmade bed. Her eyes were wide and staring, and dark blood from a wound in her neck had soaked the carpet.

  ‘Muhibbah!’ he cried, and dropped to his knees beside her.

  ‘Don’t touch!’ the Superintendent ordered.

  ‘Muhibbah! Darling! Why?’

  The officer took him beneath the armpits and lifted him away from the body.

  ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Stone dead,’ the Superintendent replied. ‘For several days already, if you ask me.’

  ‘Muhibbah!’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Fellowes. I realise she meant a lot to you. But it’s what we expect in the people-trafficking business. The rewards are great, and the punishments likewise. We can leave Sergeant Meredith here to wait for the pathologist. I’ll drive you back to town.’

  Chapter 31

  Nothing in the trial of his teacher surprised Farid Kassab. And if it were true, as the tweets and blogs repeated, that the Shahin brothers were the culprits, this too he had half foreseen. Why had their sister fled, if not to escape their pollution? He knew in his heart that Mr Haycraft was good, knew that he had diverged from the path of illumination and righteousness only because a weak human being had appealed to him for help, hoping to recover her purity through his need for it.

  Of course, Farid didn’t put it quite in that way, but that is how the puzzle came together in his mind, and he resolved to write words of comfort to his teacher. His father also wished for this, and had already begun a letter headed with the fatiha, and beginning ‘Esteemed Mr Haycraft’. Through the Prison Service they were given an address and a prisoner’s number, and Farid spent several evenings at the living room table, writing, tearing up, and writing again. When at last he felt able to sign the letter it was much shorter than he had hoped. But his father approved, and the sheet that they put in the envelope read as follows:

  Dear Mr Haycraft,

  You are always in my thoughts and in my father’s thoughts too, and we dearly hope that this letter reaches you. I want to say how sad I am that you have been sent to prison for helping Sharon Williams. It was because you are a good person that you did it, and my father agrees. Also you were the best teacher I had last year and I am going into the sixth form now without you to teach me, which is such a shame for me. Perhaps one day you will
come back to St Catherine’s, and maybe we can go on reading together. I have been writing more poetry and taking your advice seriously, you will be pleased to learn. I hope you will come to visit, and my father hopes so too. When you come I would like to show you my poems and you can correct them.

  Yours sincerely, Farid.

  Mr Kassab put his letter too in the envelope. It said merely ‘I hope you are well, and that you will let us know if there is anything we can do for you.’ To which Abdul added a verse from Rumi: Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us. We taste only sacredness.

  Farid felt better after writing his letter. The downfall of his teacher, first in his affections, and then in the eyes of the world, had been blows as great as the disappearance of Muhibbah Shahin. But by seizing the chance for kindness he had set himself on an upward path. Maybe in a year or two it would be as though nothing very bad had happened.

  But then came another blow. It was from the small print in the local newspaper that they learned that a woman, a refugee from Afghanistan, had been found dead in one of the villages, that her name was Muhibbah Shahin, and that the police suspected suicide.

  Farid kept to his room for several days, refusing food and staring gloomily through the window at the drab green panels and dirty lace curtains of Block A. There were rumours that Muhibbah Shahin had been involved in some shady business with her brothers. But nothing was proven. And no such information interested Farid. When, at last, he was able to accept her death, it was because, after days of prayer and fasting, he had been granted a vision.

  Muhibbah appeared one night, dressed in a long robe of green silk and gold braid, like the angels in the Persian book of hours that was Abdul’s proudest possession, and which had no doubt been burned with the rest of his belongings on the day of their flight. She was looking down on him from a place above his bed. She did not smile, but in her eyes he saw that she was withholding nothing from him. She thanked him graciously for his love, and said ‘I died for my purity, Farid. This they could never take from me.’ And then she vanished.