CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mohammed Sharif knocked at his uncle’s front door before his young cousins had left for school that morning. Faisel let him in without a word, almost as if he had been expecting him to call. Sharif glanced at Jamilla and Saira, coats already on over school navy blue shalwar kameez and headscarfs pulled over their hair.
‘I need to speak to you privately,’ he said to his uncle. The girls glanced anxiously at their father but obeyed as he waved them out of the front door before closing it firmly behind them.
‘I’ve been to Lahore,’ Sharif said without preamble as he followed his uncle into the living room. He could hear his aunt in the kitchen but knew she would not interrupt if he closed the door on their discussion. His uncle looked gaunt and distant but he said nothing in reply.
‘I was very disturbed by what I discovered there,’ Mohammed said quietly. ‘I was very unhappy, in fact.’
Faisel stared impassively at his nephew, still saying nothing, his deep-set dark eyes blank, waiting for the younger man to continue, but Mohammed hesitated himself, unsure where to begin. Finally he decided he had to tackle Faisel head on.
‘Did you know that Imran Aziz was a homosexual when you persuaded Faria to marry him?’
Faisel glanced away but Mohammed could see no sign of the shock that might have been expected if the allegation had come as news to him.
‘Did you know?’ he repeated, more angrily this time. ‘Did you knowingly marry Faria off to a homosexual to get him out of Pakistan? Or what, exactly?’
‘No,’ Faisel said hoarsely. ‘She was married for the reasons I explained to you before. She was married as had been arranged when she was a child, for family reasons. Her grandfather and his brother, my uncle, wished it. She agreed. She met Imran and she agreed to marry him.’
‘So did she discover his tastes later and tell you about them? His previous wife was under no illusions about his preferences when I spoke to her the other day. Though she seems to have been deceived into marriage as well. And abandoned by our family afterwards. I found her in prison after working as a prostitute. Did Faria find out as well?’
‘No, Faria never said anything to me about her marriage. She seemed happy enough.’
Mohammed Sharif got to his feet and walked angrily from one end of the room to the other, his unbandaged fist clenching and unclenching as his uncle watched him apprehensively.
‘But you knew about Imran?’ he asked. ‘You weren’t surprised when I told you?’
‘I found out later,’ Faisel admitted. ‘I was told quite recently by someone from the mosque in Milford. Aziz had made approaches to a young man…he was outraged and told the imam.’
‘The imam said nothing of this to me,’ Sharif objected. ‘I spoke to him last week.’
‘There is a new imam. He may not have known. It was the previous imam who told me.’
‘And what did you do about it? It’s not illegal in this country.’
‘I told Faria what I knew and then I spoke to Imran privately. I asked him to divorce her. To set her free. God willing, she could start again. We could find her another husband. Perhaps she could go to university, which is what she had wanted earlier…I tried to put things right.’
‘Did you really not know she was pregnant? That would make your plans for her more difficult, to say the least.’
‘No, I didn’t know that,’ Faisel said. ‘Not until Jamilla told me, after her body was found.’
‘Did you tell DCI Thackeray any of this, about Imran?’ Sharif asked.
His uncle shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I was too ashamed.’
Sharif flung himself into a chair with a groan.
‘Did Faria agree to this plan? Did she find this acceptable? You spoke to her about it?’
‘She did not object when I asked her if that was what she wanted. She seemed happy to divorce.’
‘And even then she didn’t tell you about the baby?’
‘No,’ Faisel said.
‘And Imran? Do you know where Imran is now?’
Faisel shook his head and Mohammed sighed.
‘The imam said that under sharia law…well, you know what would happen.’
‘Is that what’s happened?’ Sharif asked, his face betraying his horror.
‘I don’t know,’ Faisel shouted. ‘I don’t know what’s happened to Imran. He deceived us all but I don’t know what’s happened to him.’
His nephew took a deep breath to calm himself before he felt able to continue.
‘You must go to DCI Thackeray and tell him the truth, the whole truth,’ he said. ‘If Imran was known to be gay there are enough angry young men at that mosque to try to do something about it. To be honest, I think I’ve run into some of them myself.’ He nursed his bandaged hand thoughtfully before going on. ‘We’ve been assuming that Imran disappeared because he was involved in some way in Faria’s death. But perhaps he’s in danger too. Perhaps he’s been murdered. You must talk to Mr Thackeray and be completely honest with him. You could be arrested yourself for concealing information. Do you understand me, Uncle? You must do it and do it now, or you will find yourself a suspect in Imran’s disappearance, or even Faria’s death. They will think the worst.’
‘Will you come with me?’ Faisel asked and Mohammed knew how hard the question was to ask. But he shook his head vehemently.
‘I am not involved in this case,’ he said. ‘I have been told that I can’t be involved. Nor did I know anything about this deception. I don’t want my officers to think that I knew anything about it. You must take the responsibility. It’s nothing to do with me.’
‘It is a family matter,’ Faisel Sharif said angrily. ‘Your family. You have a duty.’
‘No,’ Mohammed snapped back. ‘I want nothing to do with it. I’ll tell Mr Thackeray later what I discovered in Lahore. That duty I can’t avoid. But I won’t take any responsibility for what the family did to Faria, and your involvement in it, tricking her into that marriage. It may not have been illegal but it is shameful and I’ve no doubt that it has something to do with her death.’
He got up and moved towards the door. He felt cold and sick and he knew that he would not be forgiven for what he was about to say.
‘I will ask to see Mr Thackeray this afternoon,’ he said. ‘If you haven’t been to see him by then I will tell him everything you’ve told me this morning and everything I discovered in Lahore. I don’t know what the consequences will be for you. But I do know what the consequences would be for me if I remained silent. I have no choice. I’m sorry.’
And he closed the door behind him quietly, and left the house. He was unlikely, he thought, ever to be invited into it again.
Sharif met DS Kevin Mower in a coffee shop close to the central police station that lunchtime. Mower had called him on his mobile soon after he had left his uncle’s house and insisted on the meeting. Sharif had not been surprised to discover that DCI Thackeray wanted to talk to him at two, regardless of his own intentions, and was grateful that the sergeant was prepared to fill him in on what had been happening while he had been away.
‘You look rough,’ Mower said as the younger man joined him at a corner table with an espresso in his good hand and a pack of sandwiches tucked awkwardly under his arm.
‘Jet lag,’ Sharif said dismissively. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Yes, I heard you’d been away. Interesting trip, was it?’
Sharif shrugged.
‘Not the word I’d choose,’ he said. ‘I uncovered stuff about my family that I can still barely believe.’
‘You’ll tell the boss?’
‘Oh yes, I’ll tell him,’ Sharif said heavily.
‘You must,’ Mower said. ‘Your uncle came in this morning and passed on a lot of stuff about Imran that he hadn’t bothered to mention before. Mr Thackeray wasn’t best pleased.’
‘Well, at least he turned up. He wouldn’t have done if I hadn’t threatened to shop him earlier this mo
rning.’
Mower looked at Sharif appraisingly. He knew very well how hard that conversation must have been for the DC.
‘You’ve burnt your boats with the family, then?’
‘I don’t think my uncle will ever speak to me again,’ Sharif said. ‘I don’t know about my own parents. I haven’t seen them yet.’
‘You have to know which side you’re on in this business,’ Mower said. ‘There’s no room for divided loyalties.’
‘I never thought mine were divided until this case,’ Sharif said, still uncertain how far he was willing to go to help locate the men who had assaulted him. ‘I had no idea what was going on with Faria and Imran. I’m appalled.’ He pushed his sandwiches away with his bandaged hand after a single mouthful.
‘You may have difficulty persuading the boss you knew nothing about it,’ Mower said. ‘The spooks are already asking why you shot off to Pakistan so suddenly. They didn’t miss that.’
‘Bastards,’ Sharif said. ‘What do they think I went for after being beaten to a pulp? A bit of weapons training in Afghanistan? They’re idiots.’
‘Just be careful,’ Mower said soothingly. ‘I’m sure you can put their minds at rest.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘You’d better get over there. The boss looked as if someone had pissed in his cornflakes this morning. And believe me, when he’s in a strop he takes no prisoners. Personally, I think he came back to work much too soon after he was shot, but there you go. Be warned.’
Anna Holden began to despair that morning. She and her grandmother had slept fitfully under the blankets her father had flung down for them for a second night, but they were barely adequate in the dank chill of the cellar and Anna knew that her grandmother’s constant shivering was not good for her. She tried to keep herself warm by singing and dancing around until she ran out of songs that she could remember, then spent some time trying to scramble up the coal chute and hammer on the the metal grille in the roof until she was exhausted.
‘He’ll be back soon, won’t he, Nan?’ she asked. But her grandmother, huddled under the blankets, simply shrugged.
‘He said he’d be back soon,’ Anna said firmly. ‘I’ll get us something to eat. We’ll have a picnic.’ But by now, as they had consumed the two cans of soup that opened with a ring pulls, she had to be content with dried out sliced bread, and the last of the cheese and a swig from their almost empty bottle of water. She offered food to her grandmother but she shook her head at the bread and took only a sip from the bottle.
‘You must eat, Nanna,’ the child said, pushing her disheveled hair away from her battered face. But Vanessa merely turned away from the light and pulled the blanket more tightly around her shoulders.
‘What he really should have given us was that little camping stove we used to take on picnics,’ Anna said, trying to sound cheerful. ‘Then we could have made hot drinks.’ Her voice faltered slightly as she realised that her grandmother’s eyes were closed and she did not appear to be listening. ‘Wouldn’t you think he’d have let us make hot drinks, Nan?’ she insisted. ‘I would be very careful with the stove…’
When they had first been left alone in the cellar her grandmother had taken charge of the situation but now she had subsided beneath the blankets, and this morning, as a little daylight penetrated the cracks at the sides of the boarded up area window, she seemed barely able to make the effort to speak. Anna gazed up at the single light bulb and wondered again how long it would burn for. If it went out, they would be in almost total darkness and that thought frightened her even more. She glanced at the spiders’ webs and shuddered. She went back into the small coal cellar, where the bucket her father provided was beginning to smell, and looked around her desperately for something solid to bang against the grating above her head. But someone had emptied and swept out the confined space and there was not so much as a broom handle that would allow her to push upwards. She tried shouting again but her voice sounded thin and outside there was no sound at all. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was not yet eight in the morning, and she wondered what her mother was doing now she was not there with her, getting ready for school, and the thought of the normality she had been swept away from brought tears to her eyes again.
‘Daddy, where are you?’ she cried. ‘You said you wouldn’t be long.’ At that moment the single light went out and in her sudden panic to get back to her grandmother Anna kicked over the toilet bucket and burst into tears. Finding her way blindly back towards the cushions on the floor she scrambled under the duvet beside Vanessa, but when she cuddled up against her for warmth there was no response and, rigid with shock herself, she began to wonder if her grandmother would ever wake up.
Michael Thackeray listened to Mohammed Sharif’s description of his trip to Lahore and what he had discovered there in silence. His head ached and he was distracted both by thoughts of Laura and by occasional jabs of pain from the scars his brush with death had caused so recently. But he fought off the distractions determinedly, knowing that what his anxious looking young DC was telling him was crucial not only to the murder investigation but to Sharif’s future in the police force. When he had finished Thackeray said nothing for a time and Sharif himself felt impelled to break the heavy silence.
‘Did my uncle come in to see you as I advised him to?’ he asked, his mouth dry.
‘Yes, Kevin interviewed him,’ Thackeray said. ‘You were right to encourage him to come in.’ Thackeray hesitated before going on, knowing that what he had to say would be unwelcome.
‘I asked you in for a word in private,’ he said at length. ‘That, rather than taking my worries higher, which is where they will inevitably go very soon. I can’t protect you from the implications of what you’ve done by dashing off to Pakistan like that, even less from the fact that your close family will inevitably become the focus of this inquiry now, and however much you think you’ve distanced yourself from them, you are still part of that family.’
‘You mean my uncle is a suspect?’ Sharif asked, his mouth dry.
‘Inevitably,’ Thackeray said. ‘He hasn’t been frank with us and his response to what seems to have happened will be a line of inquiry we have to follow. But he’s not the only person we will need to investigate. You must know that.’
‘You mean I could become a suspect?’
‘I hope not,’ Thackeray said. ‘But it’s possible, isn’t it? Tell me honestly what the traditional reaction might be if the circumstances of your cousin’s marriage to a homosexual man became widely known in your community? Would anyone feel bound to take some action, and if so, who? And what action would they feel impelled to take?’
Sharif gazed at the DCI for a moment in silence, aware that his whole career stood on a knife-edge and there was very little he could do to influence the course of events one way or the other. He had walked out on his uncle, and by implication, the rest of his family, but even that might not save him, he thought bitterly.
‘You must talk to me, Mohammed,’ Thackeray insisted. ‘I know it’s difficult.’
‘Yes,’ Sharif said. He took a deep breath. ‘You have to understand that it is all a question of family honour and traditional values,’ he said reluctantly. ‘There seem to be two problems here. Imran is evidently gay. That is a sin in Islam, but it is tolerated here and in the big cities in Pakistan like Lahore, so long as it is not flaunted in a way that brings disrepute on the family. He seems to have kept a low enough profile, but ran into problems in Milford where there are some zealots at the mosque who seem to have discovered his tastes and taken exception to them.’
‘Would they kill him?’ Thackeray asked. Sharif shrugged, hesitated and then made his decision.
‘I think the same people took exception to my lifestyle,’ he said. ‘I have an English girlfriend. When I was attacked someone called on Allah as they hit me. I don’t think white racists were involved at all.’
Thackeray looked at the younger officer for a moment in silence, his mind racing.
‘Now you’ve remembered that, perhaps you can add it to your statement?’ he said carefully.
‘Sir,’ Sharif said.
‘So let’s get back to these zealots from the mosque, now we’ve one more reason to interest ourselves in them. Would they kill Imran Khan when they uncovered his homosexuality?’
‘They might not kill him, but they might well threaten to expose him to the rest of the community.’
‘And that would upset your family?’
Sharif swallowed hard, and nodded.
‘That would upset my family,’ he said quietly. ‘Very much.’
‘And Faria? Who has she upset? We’ve been concentrating our attention on Imran as a potential suspect for her murder, but maybe that’s all wrong. Maybe he’s a victim too, and someone else entirely hated both of them enough to kill.’
Sharif ran his hands over his face and shrugged.
‘I don’t know what to think,’ he said.
‘You do know,’ Thackeray insisted, not unsympathetically. ‘And I need to know. Is the baby Faria was carrying likely to be Imran’s? I’m having DNA checks done but I’ve not got the results back yet, so tell me what you think. Is the reason she wanted a divorce because she was carrying a baby that was not her husband’s?’
‘A divorce?’ Sharif said, evidently shocked. ‘She wanted a divorce? I knew nothing about that. I thought that was my uncle’s idea.’
‘She made inquiries some months ago, apparently. Did your uncle not know that?’
Sharif shook his head wildly.
‘He said nothing to me, but then he would not be broadcasting the news. Divorce – for a woman – is difficult in our culture. Not forbidden but difficult. My uncle said he was considering the possibility of divorce because of Imran’s…predilections. But he implied it was his idea – and a very recent one.’
‘And he still says he didn’t know she was pregnant before she died?’
‘Jamilla says she never told him,’ Sharif said.
By Death Divided Page 21