Strangers

by Carla Banks

  BRITISH STUDENT ‘ABANDONED’ IN SAUDI JUSTICE

  Supporters of a man who was executed in Saudi Arabia last week, today accused the government of failing to intervene. Haroun Patel, a Pakistani national who was a student in the UK in 2003, was convicted of smuggling heroin in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. A spokesperson said, ‘Her Majesty’s government is unable to intervene in cases involving nationals from other countries.’

  She could still remember their conversation that evening when she first began to realize that there was something wrong. She’d asked him:

  Was it someone you knew?

  And he’d shaken his head. I told you, I don’t know why I kept it.

  Looking at her from the newsprint, faded along the lines where it had been folded, was the smiling face of the young man who had died. It was the same man who was laughing with Joe in the photograph from…She turned the picture over. Scribbled on the back was the date: October 2003.

  Haroun Patel, five months before his death.

  Riyadh Central Hospital, Neo-natal ITU

  It was night time and the lights were dimmed. The room was filled with the low hum of machines, the beep of heart monitors, the rhythmic pulse of the respirators. The cots were lined up down the centre of the ward, each one an enclosed environment in which children who had been born too early began their struggle to survive.

  The infants themselves seemed strangely out of place among the clear plastic and the gleaming steel. They were messy, human, flesh and bone. Someone had made an attempt to soften the atmosphere, placing colourful pictures above the cots, but the infants couldn’t see them, or interpret them if they could. They were there to comfort the families.

  It was the start of the evening shift. The nurse, coming on duty, checked through her list of charges. There had been a new admission earlier in the day, a boy just a few days old whose condition had deteriorated unexpectedly. She read through the notes: the child had been healthy when he was born but had suddenly, inexplicably, become ill. He’d been taken for a scan just before the shifts had changed over.

  She looked at the notes again, checking the time the child had been taken. They must have run into problems–the scan was taking a long time. There would be someone from the ITU down there with him–someone who was having to do overtime now. She ticked the child off on her notes to indicate that she was aware of his current location and condition, and moved on to the next cot.

  25

  Roisin sat quietly in the car as Joe negotiated his way through the city traffic. She listened with half an ear as he explained the reason he’d been called out. ‘They wanted me to review a death,’ he said. ‘A baby died–he was very premature, born a few days ago. The family asked for a post mortem. That’s unusual here.’

  A sick baby. ‘Joe, my friend at the university–Yasmin. Her baby was ill.’

  He glanced at her quickly. ‘I didn’t think of that. Was it premature?’

  ‘Not by much.’

  ‘OK. Do you know the family name?’

  She shook her head. ‘She’s just Yasmin.’

  ‘OK. I’ll check, tomorrow. Don’t worry. This baby was definitely premature. And that hospital takes sick babies from across the Nadj–there’s no reason to think it was your friend’s.’

  ‘I know.’ She thought about the way Souad had seemed almost pleased that Yasmin’s baby wasn’t well. ‘Why did it die, this baby?’

  ‘From being born too soon. Some are strong enough to make it and some aren’t.’ Like life, Roisin thought. Some of us are strong enough and some of us aren’t. Joe was saying something else, and she pulled her attention back: ‘…there’s something that I should…Oh, shit. This fucking country. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing. Don’t worry,’ Joe said again.

  There was silence in the car, then he said, in a clear attempt to change the subject, ‘We ought to feel pretty good about being asked to this do.’ He switched lanes to avoid a swerving truck. ‘Apparently, these are the real Riyadh A-list.’

  ‘That’s good.’ She was aware of his quick glance. ‘Sorry, I was thinking about something else.’

  He squeezed her hand. ‘I thought you were looking forward to this. We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.’

  ‘I know.’ She stared out of the window. The streets were brightly lit but the road was strangely empty. There was a car ahead and a car behind, but nothing else in sight. She watched as the car behind them pulled out to pass. It drew alongside then kept pace with them. She could see the driver’s face turned towards her. She realized that another car was closing behind, and the car ahead was slowing down.

  Boxed in. They were boxed in…. In traffic, always try to leave space in which to manoeuvre. Do not get boxed in; always leave yourself an exit…

  It was on journeys like this that people had been pulled from their cars and butchered.

  ‘Shit!’ Joe had seen it as well and was braking hard. Her stomach lurched in panic, and then the road cleared and the vehicle behind them pulled out and overtook with an impatient blast on the horn. She could feel her heart hammering in retrospective fright. The threat had arisen so suddenly, and receded just as quickly.

  ‘Stupid bastards!’ Joe’s anger was a mark of the shock they had both had. His face was white. ‘Jesus! You can’t tell the difference between terrorism and bad driving.’ He shook his head. ‘This place is making me paranoid.’ He kept his eyes on the road as he spoke, watching to make sure that the traffic had cleared around them. The road was busy again, the moment of quiet over. Cars shot past in a maze of weaving lights. They were an anonymous vehicle on a busy freeway. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m fine–but God, that was scary.’

  ‘We’ll be out of here soon.’

  She wasn’t sure if he meant the road, or the Kingdom itself.

  ‘I know.’ There was silence for a moment, then she said, without thinking or planning, ‘Joe, who was Haroun Patel?’

  She felt the car swerve as he reacted to her question. He straightened the wheel, swearing as the horns sounded around him. ‘Christ, Roisin, what kind of time is it to ask me that?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was that kind of question,’ she said.

  ‘Why do you want to know? Who’s been talking to you?’

  ‘No one. I read about him in that cutting I found, remember?’

  He checked in the rear-view mirror. ‘I can’t talk about this while I’m driving.’ He took the car across a couple of lanes, ignoring the outraged horns, and began to slow. They were passing one of the strip malls that lay on the outskirts of the city, and he pulled off the road into the car park. It was busy with families packing goods into the boots of cars, or heading in disorganized groups towards the entrances of the market. The light from the store fronts reflected in green and red and gold, the richness of the old ornamentation transformed into commercialized razzmatazz.

  Anycity, Anyplace.

  Joe turned to her. A flashing light from one of the shop fronts illuminated the inside of the car: red, blue, yellow, and then darkness. She studied his face, but the changing lights made it impossible to read his expression.

  ‘I found a photograph–you and Haroun Patel. Joe, you told me you didn’t know him.’

  He looked away across the car park. The muscles in his jaw tightened. ‘I didn’t want you involved in this, Roisin. Yes, I knew Haroun. I’d known him for about eighteen months before I came out here. That photograph–I was working out in the villages, and my car broke down. Haroun fixed it. He was a genius with engines.’ In the turning lights, his face looked sad. ‘He’s dead now.’

  ‘I know. I saw the article.’

  ‘He worked as a technician, and he moonlighted as a hospital driver. He did the deliveries round the clinics. I was working in the villages then, and he’d turn up two or three times a week with supplies. The trouble started a couple of months before my last contract ended. I was working in the hospital
here by then. The police did a drugs check–they came at short notice. There’d been some pilfering going on. We knew about it; it was no big deal, just antibiotics and minor painkillers. We had a pretty good idea where the stuff was going. Only this time, something serious had gone missing. Some morphine. A lot of morphine. The police went berserk. They were going to drag the hospital administrator off and put him through the third degree. He had friends, otherwise he would have been in serious trouble.

  ‘They questioned me. It was frightening. They were looking for someone to blame and they’re not fussy about how they get their information. I could have ended up in jail so easily, and once they get you there…Anyway, we knew the stuff must have been taken in the last twenty-four hours, because we’d done our own inventory before the visit. But then it was as if they’d been given a tip-off. They decided to search the hospital.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the person who’d taken it get it out of there at once?’

  ‘Knowing there was a police check coming? Of course they would. In fact, they wouldn’t have touched anything until after. It was crazy. The whole thing was crazy. Unless that person didn’t know. Anyway, they searched, and they found the missing stuff. It was in the hostel where the hospital drivers lived, in Haroun’s locker. It was such an obvious plant, but they didn’t see it that way. They said that the drivers wouldn’t have known about the drugs check because they weren’t told directly. But everyone knew. And I know that Haroun did because I’d told him myself.’

  He looked at her. ‘He was a good friend. I first met him in London–he was a student in London at the School of Pharmacy. I was working at Barts and I got to know Haroun when I did some teaching. He was one of those people everyone knew. But he got thrown out for a visa violation; it was nothing, but they were having one of their illegal immigrants scares, and Haroun got caught up in the middle of it all. It was a disaster for him and his family. I tried to help–shit, we all did–but the papers were screaming their heads off about immigration, the government was in trouble over Iraq, so Haroun had to go. I kept in touch with him, and when I came out here, I told the hospital pharmacy about him–he wasn’t qualified, but they were short-staffed and he knew his stuff. I contacted him, told him to bung in an application. He’d make some money, maybe get a chance to finish his qualifications. I gave him the professional reference he needed to work at the hospital, and it all worked out fine. He kept saying thank you to me–his good friend Joe Massey who had helped him out.’ In the changing light, his face was bleak.

  ‘When I heard he’d been arrested, I thought maybe he’d taken a stupid chance. He was desperate to get enough money to cover his university fees. He was married by then, with a child on the way. But, when I thought about it, I knew it wasn’t him. Haroun wasn’t stupid, he wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. But they took him away and three days later, we heard he’d confessed.’

  Three days…‘And then they executed him?’

  Joe nodded. ‘These things happen fast here, but in Haroun’s case, it was really quick. We tried to do something, the people who knew him. We tried to get the Foreign Office to take up his case, but they didn’t want to know. I went there. The day they…It was the only thing left I could do for him. We all knew about as-Sa’ah Square. O’Neill was right–it’s like a Roman circus. Word gets round when there’s going to be an execution, and people go. You visit the fort, you drive through the desert, you watch a beheading, and you’ve done Saudi. I’d never been near it. But I wanted Haroun to have one friend in the crowd. Sometimes I wish…’

  She remembered his reaction when she’d got lost that first day in Riyadh, when she’d found her way to the blue-tiled square. ‘Joe, why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I didn’t want you to have this thing in your head. I see it all the time. First there was the empty square. Then there was a van, a prison van. It drove into the square so slowly.

  ‘It seemed to take for ever before they brought him out. He was blindfolded, and I think he was drugged. I said his name–when they took him out of the van, I said his name. Maybe he heard. Maybe it helped. I’ll never know.’ His face looked haunted. ‘Roisin, what I can’t stop thinking about is–I’m a doctor. I know how the human body works. I know that the brain, that consciousness, can survive for minutes without oxygen. It doesn’t shut down at once. I tell myself that the shock would do the trick, but I don’t know. I keep thinking, what would it have been like, those last few seconds, after…?’

  Images she didn’t want invaded her mind. ‘Oh God. Joe…’ She took his hand.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She shook her head. ‘After all that…why did you come back?’

  ‘When they arrested Haroun, I thought they were just going for the easiest target. That’s how crimes get solved here: grab a likely-looking suspect and make it stick. But then I began to wonder…’ The sound of his pager interrupted them. ‘Shit. Not again. I’m off duty, for fuck’s sake.’

  He checked the number, and picked up his cell phone. ‘Joe Massey. Yeah, I…Look, I’m not on duty now, you’ll have to…Oh hell. Can’t you get…? Well, who…? Where?…? OK, I’ll be there…When I get there, all right?’ He slammed the phone on to the dashboard. ‘Fucking hell…’ He looked at her. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, there’s an emergency at the hospital and they need me in.’

  ‘It’s OK. I don’t feel much like a party now anyway.’

  He gave her a mirthless smile. ‘Me neither, but I haven’t got time to take you home. Look, we’re almost there. I’ll drop you off at the house, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can–I don’t think it’s going to take long. They just need someone in there to get them organized.’

  ‘Kick ass, you mean?’

  ‘Exactly. Kick ass is exactly what I’m going to do.’

  ‘OK. Drop me off. I’ll keep the side up with this lot. We don’t want to lose our A-list status.’

  His smile was grim. ‘Fuck our A-list status.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m with you on that one.’

  Joe edged the car out into the traffic and ten minutes later they were driving through an affluent suburb. Joe stopped at the gates of a compound that looked far larger than the one where Roisin and Joe lived. She could see the high concrete walls and the razor-wire along the perimeter.

  The security checks took longer than usual as the guards went through their documentation, checked their numbered invitation and phoned through to verify their credentials. They asked for photo ID and studied it minutely. Finally, the gates opened and they were inside the compound.

  They drove through wide streets. The houses were invisible from the road, set back behind high white walls over which oleander and hibiscus tumbled. Cameras followed them as the car crept towards a high metal gate, which swung silently open to admit them. A uniformed man opened the car door. Before she got out, Roisin leaned across to Joe. He put his arms round her. ‘Don’t be long,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t.’ He released her and the man helped Roisin out, and spoke quickly into a hand-held radio. She looked back at Joe. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he mouthed.

  She watched him drive away.

  26

  Damien didn’t know what had made him accept the invitation to the party. Ever since he’d said goodbye to Amy at the airport, he had felt restless and unsettled. He’d made several attempts to contact Majid, but his calls had gone unanswered. And everything had gone quiet–ominously quiet–on the Haroun Patel front.

  He cast a quick, professional eye over his surroundings. The house was a temple to the gods of conspicuous consumption. The room in which the party was held was vast, two storeys opening up to a glass roof with a gallery running round above. Picture windows opened on to the garden where the swimming pool was already in use.

  The noise was rising as the guests took advantage of the availability of champagne. The consultant’s wife–he checked his mental inventory and retrieved her name: Cordelia–greeted him effusively. Damien returned
her kiss, reflecting that his avoidance of much ex-pat socializing and his integration with the Saudis gave him novelty value. Cordelia Bradshaw clearly saw his presence as some kind of coup and kept him with her for a while, introducing him to various guests. ‘Damien has been here longer than any of us. If you want to know what’s really going on, he’s the man to ask,’ she said.

  Damien turned down the offer of champagne and politely disengaged himself. He moved through the room, greeting people, checking out the groups, getting the feel of the place. The party looked sedate enough, which was a relief.

  In the days when ex-pats could party with impunity, young, rootless people with more money than they had ever dreamed of indulged themselves with a contemptuous disregard for the mores of their hosts. And, to be fair, the wealthy among the hosts partied too. The parties, fuelled by drugs and alcohol, spiralled into excess until death brought everything to a sudden halt.

  A young woman had died in, it was claimed, a drunken fall from a balcony, but darker stories of rape, murder and cover-up had circulated, and even now, a quarter of a century later, the scandal lingered. The dead woman remained unburied, her cadaver stored in a morgue in the UK, as her father searched fruitlessly and hopelessly for the truth of what had happened.

  Then Damien saw someone he hadn’t expected to see: Arshak Nazarian. He was deep in conversation. Damien moved round to see who he was talking to.

  Roisin Massey. There was no sign of her husband.

  The house amazed Roisin. She had thought their own house was large, but now she realized that she and Joe had been slumming it by Saudi standards. The front door led on to an atrium with a high glass ceiling and an expanse of wooden floor. There was an open staircase with wrought-iron balustrades. Carefully tended houseplants tumbled over the railing. At the far side of the atrium, double doors opened on to a huge room with a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out on to the garden where the pool reflected the evening sky.