‘But I have,’ you say to yourself. And he watches motionless as you drive away.
Chapter 33
Justin was sitting with Iona when Laura’s phone call came. Somehow, after Laura’s departure, the habit of cooking supper had stuck with him. He often cooked for Iona, who had the knack of distracting him from his worries with worries of her own. And her worries were great. Following the Haycraft affair an official enquiry had been set up into the abuse of girls in Council care, and the disappearance of Sharon Williams from the Council home had turned a spotlight on Iona’s department. Suspended on full pay for the duration of the enquiry, her first concern had been that Sharon should be found, and found in a condition to testify against the charge of negligence. Now, after nearly three weeks with no news, Iona was convinced that Sharon was dead.
It was ten o’clock. They had opened a second bottle of Rioja. They were not gloomy, but the conversation, which veered always around to the Shahin family, pressed on their several wounds. The coroner’s open verdict on the death of Muhibbah, the disappearance of the younger brother, the arrest of the older brother as he attempted to flee to Amsterdam, the fact that the father, two wives and cousin had decamped as suddenly as they came, leaving no trace other than verses of the Koran painted in Kufic script all over the doors of their flat – these facts went around in their minds, reminding them that they had been allotted minor parts in a complex drama, and that in so far as there was a role for either of them it was to be horribly damaged by events that they could neither influence nor predict.
It was exactly at such moments that Justin most regretted Laura’s departure, and her phone call caused him to sing out her name. She had important news, she said, and was coming on the first train next day so that they could act on it. Her voice was not happy but radiated what she most represented in Justin’s mind, which was the determination to put things right. Maybe the process of healing had advanced, and he would once again meet the beautiful self-confident woman who was to put the image of Muhibbah in the shade.
As he drove her from the station, however, Justin listened with astonishment to Laura’s story. He concluded that she was imaginative, clever, intrepid, but after all slightly crazy. He took her to Iona’s office, where the narrative, neatly summarised under Iona’s poster, with the ginger beard of James Hetfield melting into Laura’s hair, sounded like a quiz test for social workers – what would you do if? That, in any case, was how Iona took it. You would shop Yunus to the police, give up on Sharon and find Stephen a safe job as caretaker in an old people’s home: such was her answer.
‘I mean,’ she said, ‘you can’t honestly say that we go out and look for that kid on the moors, on the off chance that Yunus Shahin didn’t kill her? Since when has he disobeyed his brother’s orders? Anyway, the police have combed the moors from North to South and East to West, including all the spots where bodies tend to accumulate. They are as keen to find that kid as I am. I reckon it’s too late to bother now.’
Worry had not been kind to Iona’s face, and the worse her face became the more she berated it with make-up, expensive make-up that reinforced the contrast between what she was and what she could not be. Justin remembered the other Iona, whose lively, confident features had a speaking charm of their own. But that Iona had retreated behind a mask, and the mask spoke words of defeat. Iona was telling them that they were all out of their depth, and all refusing, each for a personal reason, to move on. Laura especially, who had morphed into Sharon Williams.
One good thing about Sharon, Iona noted, was that she took seriously the collective view that she was a mistake and should never have existed. But Laura was intent on doing all the existing for her, making Sharon stay alive long past her sell-by date, which was the point when, as Iona had put it, she had seen the opportunity to lay down her life for her friend.
‘But you are not seeing it with her eyes, Iona,’ Laura said, and her face lit up with passion. ‘Just imagine: she is lifted from that home by one of her abusers, gagged, taken on to the moors, sure in her heart that this is the end. She has one thought, which is that she will never again set eyes on the person she loves. Even if this love is only calf-love, a pupil’s crush, it is still the only love she has known. And then as she is taken from the car to stare speechless at the man who is about to murder her, he turns away and drives off. What then does she do? Just think. She has only known one home and that is her teacher’s home. Let’s suppose he gave her the key by way of a pledge. It would be the only thing of his that she has, so she would keep it close about her, always pressed against her body. So of course, she goes to his flat.’
‘Don’t be daft, Laura. The police would have searched the place just as soon as she disappeared.’
‘Sure. But not three days later, which is the time it would take to get there on foot from Buckton.’
‘So what do we do?’ Justin asked. ‘Are we going to take your story to the police?’
‘And reveal that I have had a secret meeting with someone they are trying to arrest?’
‘So what do we do?’ Iona echoed. ‘Go ringing at the intercom and shout “we know you are there”?’
‘Justin took a six month lease on the flat beneath Stephen’s, of which a few weeks remain. I still have the key to the building. I shall knock on the door of Stephen’s flat. It’s worth a try.’
As they pulled in to the car park behind the block, and looked up at the smashed windows of the teacher’s flat, Justin reflected on the consequences of his decision to rent accommodation for Laura rather than place her in a local hotel. He made a mental list of them: Laura’s kidnap and the ordeal that had destroyed her happiness; the rediscovery of Muhibbah and the fatal rebirth of his feelings for her; the revenge on Sharon; the arrest and ruin of her teacher; Muhibbah’s death. It was as though he were the true kidnapper, the one who had set this whole stream of disasters in motion. And for what? In order to seduce a girl who would have come to him in any case, and come as the healthy, confident, therapeutic person he had picked from the website of her firm, and not as this half-crazy obsessive who had somehow mingled her identity with that of an abused and abandoned child.
And he too was half crazy; his mourning for Muhibbah was formless, random, like the lowing of a herd of cattle. Anger, remorse, grief, resentment all fought in him and nothing resolved. As he climbed the stairs with Laura he began to be alarmed by himself: he was the sheepish conscript of a fruitless obsession, an obsession that he did not even share. What was this ruined child doing in his life, and why was it she, and not he, who had brought Laura back to Whinmoore?
They were outside the teacher’s flat. Someone had managed to get into the block and spray the door with graffiti: ‘Perv’s Paradise’ was the kindest of them; others made Justin feel sick. It looked as though someone had tried to force the door. The Yale lock was bulging from its socket, and there was a crack in the wood beside one of the hinges. He stepped forward to administer a push. Laura put out a hand to restrain him and held a finger to her lips.
She knocked and listened. There was no sound save the gentle gurgling of a dove that was trapped on the stairwell beneath the roof. Laura knocked again.
‘Are you there, Sharon?’
There was a faint scraping within.
‘I’ve come from Stephen,’ Laura said. ‘He was hoping you’d be here.’
Silence.
‘I’m Laura, by the way, a friend of his.’
The scraping resumed: a mouse maybe. Justin shrugged his shoulders at Laura, who shook her head.
‘Sharon, please let me in. It’s about Stephen, something you can do to help him.’
There was a faint gasp, and then again silence.
‘Let me in, Sharon. There will be more trouble for Stephen otherwise. Believe me, I want to help.’
Another silence. And then a voice spoke faintly, like the voice of someone dying.
‘I canna.’
‘You mean you won’t open the door?’
> ‘I canna,’ came the reply, yet more faintly. Justin understood. She did not have the strength. He pushed against the door and it moved a fraction, showing that the lock had been forced. But it was held fast by a piece of furniture wedged under the handle. It was ten minutes before the three of them, pushing together, were able to open a gap wide enough for Laura to squeeze through and pull the teacher’s desk from the door.
The girl was lying on the sofa, emaciated, pale, bloodless. There was a clinging acetone smell in the room, the smell of starvation. She turned her eyes to them, looked startled at Iona and then accusingly at Laura.
‘I inna going back there,’ she whispered.
Laura went across to her, propped her against the sofa, and took one pale wasted hand between both of hers.
‘Of course you’re not going back there. Stephen sent me to look after you. These are my friends.’
Justin beckoned to Iona to come away. She was in a state of shock, and for a while just walked beside him silently in the car park. Justin had his mobile phone in his hand and was ringing for the ambulance when Iona began to speak.
‘Laura’s right,’ she said. ‘This thing we’ve been living through. It’s not about people trafficking, immigration, community relations; it’s not about racism, multiculturalism, and all the things I am supposed to put at the top of my agenda as a social worker; it’s not even about forced marriage, honour killing or the enslavement of women. It is about that girl and how to give her back her life.’
Justin had never before seen tears in Iona’s eyes. Pity was not her line: she didn’t think anyone more worthy of pity than herself, had forbidden self-pity, and ergo pitied no one. But Sharon had touched something in her, and Justin guessed what it was. There was, in that broken fugitive on her teacher’s sofa, the vestige of a hard-won dignity. Time and again she had been dumped in shit, kicked into a corner, run up against a wall, and yet her default position was pride, like a baited lion always turning to its tormentors.
And then, as they watched the girl lifted on to a stretcher and taken to the ambulance, Laura still holding one of her hands in both of hers, something else became clear to Justin. It was through Sharon that Laura was being healed. This girl, who had suffered the extreme of degradation, had also safeguarded what was most precious to her. She was proof that you could be raped, humiliated, treated as a thing, and still able to give yourself freely. If Sharon could do it, so could Laura. And thinking that maybe this was what Laura intended, he felt something stir in himself.
Chapter 34
Looking back on that summer nothing embarrasses you so much as your failure to prevent Justin from being fired. True, Muhibbah was his responsibility, and he had turned a blind eye to what she was doing. True, he had lost interest in the project for carbon-neutral houses, allowing the materials that Muhibbah had purchased and stored to rot away unused. Nevertheless your report was carefully phrased to protect him, and there were signs that he could take a renewed interest in working for the firm. For a man like Justin to lose his job, after devoting ten years to becoming the best at it, is not easy. For a while you could not console him; not that he reproached you, of course, though he was aware – how could he not be? – that it was you, your expertise and your honesty that had caused his downfall.
But there was a good side to it too. Going to that office each day, staring at the desk that Muhibbah had vacated, tinkering with the plans that she had drawn, and remembering the endless enquiries with which her eager young mind had filled his days, he was tempted to dwell on his loss. Things were particularly bad at the time of her cremation. None of her family had come forward to take charge of the obsequies: all had disappeared apart from the brother who was being held on remand and who would merely weep when her name was mentioned.
The mosque would have nothing to do with her. There had been angry teenage displays of contempt towards the imam and the faith. And there had been the notorious tantrum over the marriage, to which the imam had devoted much time and energy, only to discover that the girl had disappeared, leaving nothing behind her save her curses. The elders did not consider it appropriate to stage a funeral for such a person, who had in any case killed herself as such a person should, and therefore lost her right to a religious burial.
When, after the inconclusive investigation, the police released her body from the morgue it fell to Justin to dispose of it, and there was no quick way save cremation. This was not the way of her people. But ‘I do things my way’, she had said to him. She had described herself as an atheist, a free thinker and a modern woman, and Justin believed that those lonely and fruitless ambitions should be honoured in death, even if she had never achieved them in life. He therefore chose cremation, and stood silent and grieving as the coffin was placed on the chute. You and Iona were the only other mourners apart from a young Arab boy who appeared unannounced, recited some verses of the Koran as the coffin slid through the curtains, and then fled in tears.
After that Justin was subdued for a while. Once or twice he played a gig at the Crustafarian. But it was only the shock of his dismissal that awoke him to what he was becoming – a limp puppet who had bequeathed his manhood to a bass guitar and his heart to a fiction. But you had stuck it out, making the journey to Yorkshire on every free weekend. When he decided it was time to move on you were there, and he moved on to you. Crazy, of course, to have fallen in love with a dreamer, an idealist and a Heavy Metal fan. But you had shared something big, and that thing gradually sank to the depths in both of you, so that a kind of troubled calm came over the surface of your lives, and they began to flow together. It helped of course that he was invited to apply for the lectureship in environmental planning at the North London University. And it helped – you could not deny it – that he had you, the reborn, renewed and reprogrammed you, who were going forward because there was nowhere else to go.
And you, in your turn, had Sharon. It took only a few visits to the hospital to win her trust. Once it was clear she would not be returning to the Council home, she allowed her body to mend. Within a week she was eating solid food, and you were bringing her books, discussing what had happened and making plans for the future. She worried at first about living with Iona. But you assured her that it would be temporary. You were working with Iona on a plan to transfer her to a sixth form college in London, where she would live with you in Camden Town.
Of course, negotiations with the Council were complicated. After all, this ‘girl who cannot be named for legal reasons’ was at the centre of the scandal, the arch victim who had saved herself from one kind of abuse only to be caught up in another, and as such known to everyone through Facebook, Twitter, Internet searches and websites set up by her admirers and by the enemies of the teacher who had abducted her. She had revealed a can of worms, and the worms were visibly squirming.
All of them, that is, apart from Iona, who had kept calm throughout the enquiry and was reinstated at the end of it. Iona was happy for Sharon to convalesce in her attic flat, where they both could hide from the world.
It helped Iona’s standing to be known as the girl’s protector, who was taking every step to ensure that Sharon should not be abused again. But she left it to you to raise the topic of Stephen, and this was, during that summer, the most beautiful part of your life. You encountered the precocious, proud and independent girl whom Stephen loved. You followed her into the place you both knew, the place of withholding, where what you have forbidden to happen is happening nonetheless, and you are no longer a woman but a tattered toy. You shared your ordeals together, and by the end of the summer you were no longer afraid either of the past or of the future. She came to live with you in September, and by that time you were both ready to testify in the forthcoming trial of Hassan Shahin.
At first the girl hardly referred to Stephen, except as some remote and untouchable person, whose life she had through her clumsiness destroyed. But gradually he entered her conversation more frequently and more freely. You explained that she
could meet him again, in other circumstances, without the weight of guilt. You even promised to arrange it, suggesting that she might write to him, a letter that could be placed in his hand when he emerges from prison into the barrage of adverse publicity that is sure to greet him.
She responded enigmatically, saying that those letters, they belonged to another time. And she gave that peculiar look of hers – half wistful, half astonished – with which she reminds you that she is still a child. You wrote to him yourself, informing him that Sharon will be living with you. And you suggested a day in the New Year, when he might come to meet you on the stone seat in the recess at the bottom of King’s Bench Walk, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon.
Chapter 35
Stephen enters Middle Temple lane with short embarrassed shuffles. He is wearing a ravelled overcoat of brown wool, pulled close around the collar. It is a raw January day, and he has eaten nothing since breakfast at the St Martin’s Trust Hostel. He has been out for three weeks now. He has not yet visited his mother, whose frantic communications to him in prison he has only once or twice been able to answer, nor has he contacted old friends. He carries Farid Kassab’s letter always in his inside pocket against his heart. But still he has not answered it. The Trust provides temporary accommodation for ex-convicts, and specializes in helping those who have, for whatever reason, attracted the hostility of the public. Their hostel seemed to be the only place to go while he made – or postponed – his future plans.
He has a little money. He has a scheme to write a critical study of Nabokov’s Lolita, a study that will be, in some way that he has yet to make precise, a kind of revenge. And he has another scheme to teach in an English-language school in Turkey. His decision to respond to Laura Markham’s request for a meeting was made two months before, when he imagined he would have the strength to confront Sharon Williams and beg forgiveness for the wrong he had inflicted on her. Now he doubts everything. He casts a sideways glance as he enters the lane, expecting to be questioned by a porter and turned away. But no one notices him, and the figures in smart city clothes or legal dress stride past on confident missions that could not possibly take note of a person like him.
The Disappeared Page 24