Strangers

by Carla Banks

  He told himself it had been therapeutic for her to talk, that getting drunk might help to relax the edgy tension that had marked her every move and every action. But he knew himself too well for that trick to work. He had used all the skills he brought to his professional work, and he now knew a lot of things that Amy had never told him. Like where she might be.

  And it might just be enough to help him find her.

  34

  Roisin sat up, squinting her eyes against the hard light that poured in through the window. The blinds were half open. No wonder the light had kept her awake. She crawled out of bed and stood looking out at the new day. She must have drunk the best part of the bottle of wine Damien had opened. She was just glad she hadn’t made a complete fool of herself. Or she hoped she hadn’t. Her memories of the last part of the evening were a bit hazy.

  The living room was still a mess from the night before: glasses on the table, the smell of cooking in the air. She cleared up quickly, noting as she did that Damien’s glass was barely touched. Not only had she got drunk, she’d got drunk in front of someone who was stone-cold sober.

  She threw open the windows to freshen the air. The flowers he’d brought gleamed in a dark corner and she moved them into the light. The winter sun shone through the window, turning the petals gold. Dust danced in the sun, and the air from the open windows smelled clean and fresh.

  Her doorbell rang. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She pressed the intercom button. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mrs Massey?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Police.’

  She felt a lurch of alarm as she pressed the buzzer to release the lock and waited in the doorway. Her mother? Had something happened to her mother? She’d sounded fine on the phone the previous day. After a few seconds, she saw a man and woman coming up the steps. They weren’t wearing uniform. Detectives?

  They produced ID before she could ask. The man introduced himself as DC Lovell, and the woman as DC Syed. ‘Can we come in?’ the woman said. She must only be in her early twenties, but she had an air of self-possession beyond her years.

  Roisin led them through into the living room and faced them anxiously. ‘What’s wrong? It isn’t my mother…’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ the woman said, and Roisin felt the tension inside her relax slightly. ‘May we sit down?’

  ‘Please.’ She gestured to the armchairs.

  The man remained standing, and she sat down slowly, feeling suddenly at a disadvantage. She could see his eyes make a quick sweep round the room, observing the empty bottle and the two glasses. Her head ached, making it hard to concentrate. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘We’re investigating a death that occurred last year,’ the woman said. ‘Last September. A young woman drowned in the Thames. Dr Massey was a witness.’

  Roisin looked from one to the other, her sense of bewilderment growing. ‘September?’ In September, Joe had asked her to marry him. In September, they’d made their plans–ill-fated plans–to move to Saudi for a year. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘He gave evidence at the inquest,’ the man said. ‘Didn’t he tell you about that?’ His eyes weren’t friendly.

  Joe had never mentioned a drowned woman, or an inquest. ‘I think you must have the wrong person,’ she said. ‘Whatever you want to know…’

  ‘We’re sorry about your husband, Mrs Massey.’

  ‘Yes. Me too.’ She heard the break in her voice, and could feel her eyes stinging. She sat very still, her head carefully erect to stop the tears spilling out. She didn’t want them to see her cry. There was a moment of silence.

  ‘Can I get you anything? Would you like a cup of tea?’ The woman’s sympathy had a detached professionalism that allowed Roisin to pull herself together. She excused herself to go and wash her face. When she came back, the two detectives were waiting for her. The man was studying the framed photograph of their wedding, the only thing she had retrieved from the cases that still remained unpacked in the box room…

  ‘I’d rather you left that alone,’ she said sharply. He put it down without comment.

  It was the woman who spoke. ‘I’d like to ask you some questions, if you wouldn’t mind.’ She paused briefly, then said, ‘Dr Massey returned from Saudi Arabia in spring 2004, is that correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And how long had you known him then?’

  ‘I didn’t. We met that April.’ A tall man with dark hair, running towards her on the tow path…

  ‘You got married a few months after you met?’ This was the man with the unfriendly eyes.

  ‘We had to be married for me to get my visa to Saudi,’ she said. But it hadn’t been like that. They’d been happy. Joe had brought champagne and forgotten to bring glasses. They’d drunk it out of the bottle, the wine foaming up out of the neck and spilling over them as they tilted it, laughing until they could barely swallow.

  The woman took up the questioning. ‘Do you know why he came back to the UK?’

  ‘Because his contract had ended.’

  ‘Yes, but why the UK?’

  ‘Because he could get work here.’ Joe had never said exactly why he’d come back–just that he didn’t want to stay.

  ‘His decision to go back to the Middle East was very sudden.’

  Roisin looked at them both, wondering how they knew that. ‘He’d applied for a job in Canada. He didn’t get it, and they made him a good offer to go and work in Riyadh. It was just a year’s contract.’ She realized she was starting to sound defensive. ‘Why are you asking?’

  The woman flicked through some papers she was carrying. ‘After Dr Massey gave us his statement, he told us that his plans would involve him leaving the country in the near future. He gave us a contact at McMaster University in Ontario in case we needed to talk to him again. We tried to contact him there…’ She passed Roisin a letter.

  Roisin looked at it. It was on headed paper from McMaster University, and it said that Dr Massey had been offered an appointment starting in October 2004, but he had turned it down as his commitments made it impossible for him to take up the post. She kept her head bent over the paper so that the two detectives wouldn’t see her face. Her head was spinning with confusion. Joe had wanted that job. It had meant everything to him. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

  ‘It’s quite clear.’ The man had moved closer and was standing above her as he spoke. ‘Your husband turned this job down in favour of one in Saudi Arabia.’

  ‘Doug…’ The woman said.

  Roisin looked at him. ‘What does it matter now?’

  ‘He never mentioned it to you? That he saw a woman drown?’

  ‘No.’ But Joe knew about drowning in the river. He’d talked to her about the bodies brought to the mortuary at the hospital where he used to work. She’s dead if she does…And she was by the river on a cold spring day, standing on the embankment with Joe watching a tour boat go past.

  DC Syed consulted her notes. ‘We don’t know the woman’s identity, but we do know she was working as a prostitute. We’re working on the assumption she was an illegal immigrant.’ Her gaze met Roisin’s for a long moment. ‘When Dr Massey gave us his statement,’ she said, ‘he told us he saw the woman standing on the wall by the river walk. He said he called out to her, and then she fell. Or jumped. The problem is, a witness has now come forward who says she saw Dr Massey walking along the river path with an Asian female whose description matches the woman who drowned. She said the woman looked upset, or possibly frightened. We’d very much like to know why Dr Massey didn’t tell us that. Can you shed any light on it?’

  Roisin felt as though all the air had been knocked out of her. There was nothing she could say.

  DC Syed put a sheet of paper on the table in front of her. ‘Do you recognize this?’ It was a photograph of a ring. It was metal, and looked heavy. Underneath the photo, there was an inscription in Arabic, and beneath that, a translation: Take what is here now, let go of a
promise. The drumbeat is best from far away.

  Roisin looked down at the photograph, glad of the chance to hide her face. Her mind was spinning. She made herself focus on the inscription. It was tantalizingly familiar, and then she realized what it was. ‘“Ah take the cash and let the credit go, nor heed the music of a distant drum.’” The two detectives looked at her, and the woman tilted her head in query. ‘It’s from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,’ Roisin said. ‘I only know the Fitzgerald poem–it was translated in the nineteenth century. But that text must be from the original.’

  Roisin couldn’t tell if the woman knew this already. ‘And the ring–do you recognize that?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t.’

  The man chipped in. ‘It was part of a collection of jewellery that was stolen from a family in Riyadh, about eighteen months ago. Whoever stole it probably thought it was gold, but it isn’t. It’s just brass. Sentimental value. Your husband would have been on his first contract then, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Yes.’ It came out as a whisper. Her mouth felt stiff and frozen. There is a girl who is missing–we want to know where she is, but we haven’t been able to find her. She couldn’t trust her voice. She waited, dreading what he was going to say next.

  But the woman stood up. ‘Well, thank you for your time, Mrs Massey. And I’m very sorry about your husband.’

  As he stepped through the door, the man turned and looked at her. ‘Did you know that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the UK?’

  Before she could respond, he turned and followed his colleague along the walkway.

  35

  After the police had gone, Roisin sat at the table in the stillness of shock. The police had come looking for Joe because they had ‘more information’ about the woman who had drowned in the Thames. All these months later, they had come to talk to her about Joe’s involvement, even though they knew he was dead.

  Did you know that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the UK?

  They were investigating a murder.

  She went to the box room where their cases, still full, were stacked against the wall. Joe’s shirt, the one she’d found the last time she tried to unpack, was draped over a chair. She hadn’t been in here since that day.

  The cases had been packed by someone from the Embassy. She’d told them not to bother, to get rid of everything, but instead they’d packed up all their belongings, hers and Joe’s, and now she had cases full of books, boxes full of bric-a-brac–relics of a life she wanted to leave behind. The only thing she had wanted to keep from her life in Riyadh had been taken away from her. Nothing else mattered.

  She started going through the cases, pulling out all the clothes and stuffing them into a bin liner. They could all go to a charity shop. She lifted out her abaya, light, silky and black. She could see the dark shapes of the women in the streets, hear Najia’s voice saying, The law forbids me an education if my brother withdraws his permission. The men who wanted these laws, enforced these laws, had killed Joe. She was sure of it. She gripped the fabric and tried to rip it down the seams, but the garment was tough, and all she succeeded in doing was making herself breathless and angry. She screwed it up and pushed it down into the bin liner.

  At the bottom of the second case, she found what she was looking for. There were two folders full of papers that had come from the desk and the small filing cabinet in the study. She took out the first folder and flicked through the contents: teaching materials she’d been putting together for Souad, that last weekend when she’d had to work instead of going out with Joe. She threw them away.

  Then she opened the second folder, slipped out the papers and began to go through them. The photo jumped out at her. It was the one she’d found that last day, Joe and a man she now knew was Haroun Patel. Joe smiled at her out of the picture, lost and gone. She looked at him, her fingers touching the surface, two men, friends, casual, carefree, sharing a joke. And now they were both dead.

  Why?

  She started going through the papers more carefully. They seemed to be notes relating to some kind of research Joe had been undertaking. She knew how he worked; he jotted down his ideas at random, then he started sorting them into groups, looking for connections and gaps that needed filling. She could picture him, sitting in the reclining chair in the evenings, a notepad on his lap, staring into the distance and then scribbling things down as they occurred to him. And she could remember his smile of triumph as the route through some intractable problem suddenly became clear.

  But whatever problem Joe had been working on here, he hadn’t got beyond his first ideas: Ghatghat, Manfuha, Ad Diriyah. She stared at them, frowning, trying to catch the fleeting familiarity. For a moment, the memory eluded her, then she realized they were names of small towns and villages on the outskirts of Riyadh. Places Joe had worked in? Intended to visit?

  There was also a list of numbers that looked like times of day: 09.30, 11.30, 12.15, 13.00. There were lists that looked like names of proprietary drugs–she recognized a few–and then some random jotting: Memo–Muharram 20? 21?–check. INSPECTION DATE???? She sat back on her heels, staring into space. She couldn’t make any sense of it. She held the sheets of paper in her hands for a few minutes, trying to picture Joe, his pen moving quickly across the page, the irritation on his face when he scratched the words INSPECTION DATE in angry capitals, the pen digging into the paper.

  At the bottom of the pile, there were two forms. They looked like photocopies of application forms–job applications, visa applications? She couldn’t tell. They were written in Arabic. Each form had a photograph that had come out dark and blotchy on the copies. She looked at the first one. A young man with a carefree grin looked back at her. She knew him now: Haroun Patel. It was the same photograph that had appeared with the newspaper article she’d found in Joe’s luggage.

  Haroun is dead…

  There was a second form, only this one was for a woman–a girl. Her face, pretty despite a rather tense expression, was framed by the tightly bound hijab. Her eyes looked at the camera nervously. Once again, the script was Arabic. Joe had been able to read it without too much difficulty, but Roisin was still barely able to distinguish the individual letters; full texts were just meaningless scrawl to her.

  She sat and studied the paper as if staring at it for long enough would force it to give up its meaning. Eventually the photograph became no more than shapes in grey and white, a meaningless blur on the page in front of her.

  36

  The Parisian sky was a brilliant blue, but the winter cold cut through Damien as he walked briskly along the broad avenues. The trees, that had been in full leaf the last time he had walked these streets, were bare, their branches dark lines against the sky. The street was busy. The cafés were packed, couples wandered in and out of the shops, and roller-blading teenagers wove through the crowds.

  He had last been here seventeen years ago. He’d come here with Catherine in a futile attempt to rescue their marriage from the pit of mistrust and anger it had fallen into. He had been young enough to be drawn to her fragility and her beauty, and to call that feeling love, but that hadn’t been enough to make her feel safe and secure, and whatever love he felt for her–and he had felt some–had not lasted the course. He had left her shortly after they returned to England.

  He pulled his mind away from a past that he would rather forget. Now, he was here to find Amy. She’d told Roisin she was in Paris, and that much, at least, was true.

  Visitors to France had to register at the hotels where they stayed. He assumed that Amy would be staying with her sister, but he decided to check. He still had contacts at the British Embassy, and after a few phone calls and some reminders of overdue favours, the first of his anxieties was removed. He was able to confirm that Amy had arrived safely in Paris. She had stayed in a small hotel off the Boulevard de Port Royal, close to the cemetery of Montparnasse.

  He left the café and took the Métro to Les Gobelins. Amy
’s hotel was a short walk away. The streets were quieter here, more sheltered from the cutting wind that blew up the river. The hotel itself, as the location suggested, was a small budget establishment. Amy, with an underused Saudi salary under her belt, was still economizing. Maybe she was planning for leaner times ahead. Damien had a quick chat with the concierge and showed her a photograph of Amy. A folded note, for more Euros than the information was probably worth, confirmed the dates of Amy’s stay: she’d arrived at the hotel a week after she’d left Riyadh and stayed for a few days. The concierge also told Damien that Madame had spent some time at L’Hôpital Cochin St Vincent de Paul. She’d left the hotel after a few days.

  He took the Métro back across the river, where he found a café. He sat down at a table, ordered some coffee and lit a cigarette while he let his mind wander over what he knew. His own knowledge of Amy’s past was minuscule. She’d never talked about it, and he’d never asked her. All he knew was that she came from Newcastle.

  Where do you think of when you dream about home?

  The North East. I grew up in Newcastle.

  But now, thanks to Roisin, he knew that her mother was dead, her father…he had no information about her father. She had a half-sister and a stepfather who had apparently abandoned her, as she had been left in care after her mother’s death. The sister’s name was Jassy. Jesamine for short. He smiled, remembering Roisin laughing helplessly as she tried to negotiate her way through the sentence.

  He knew where she had been born and where she had grown up. He knew a bit about her family, about when she’d left her home city, and he knew that leaving had been fraught with some kind of difficulty.

  She was away from the Kingdom now. Whatever the threat was, they’d left it behind them. Or had they?

  The people who had planted the bomb were still free, as were the people who had murdered Joe Massey. He didn’t buy the story of Joe Massey’s murder being a robbery that had gone wrong. And after talking to Majid, he was no more convinced by the theory of a terrorist attack. Terror went for maximum targets. The people who had got a car bomb through the security at the party could have killed scores of people. Instead, it had exploded some distance from the house, claiming only three casualties.