Strangers

by Carla Banks

  He raised an enquiring eyebrow.

  ‘I drank too much. I hope I didn’t…’

  ‘You were fine. It probably did you good.’

  The kettle was boiling. She made the coffee Arab style, crushing some cardamom seeds into the jug before she poured in the water. The fragrance of the spice filled the room and, for a moment, she was back in the house in Riyadh. Her hand shook as she poured the coffee.

  They went into the living room and he sank down into one of the armchairs. He looked drained–worse than he had done when she’d seen him before, when he was straight off the plane.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell me about this police business.’

  She told him about the two detectives, about the woman Joe had seen fall into the river, about what the detective had said. She told him about the ring that had been on the dead woman’s finger, and the connection with Riyadh, but she didn’t tell him about Yasmin’s disturbing request. He listened without commenting, a line appearing between his eyes.

  ‘I went to the library and copied the newspaper articles,’ she said. ‘And I went through Joe’s papers.’

  She held out the sheaf of papers she’d found in the suitcases the morning the police came. ‘These…These are the papers Joe was working on.’

  Damien took them and flicked through, frowning. She saw him stop when he saw Haroun Patel’s photo, and again when he saw the one with the photo of the girl. ‘I’ll need a bit of time with these,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll make some more coffee.’

  She left him reading as she put the kettle on and tidied up the kitchen. When she came back, Damien was sitting at the table with the papers spread out in front of him. He looked up, his face serious.

  ‘What have you found?’

  ‘I’m trying to put this together,’ he said. ‘You were right about what your husband was doing. All this stuff–it’s from around the time of the drugs theft, the one that got Patel into trouble. He put together a timeline. I’ve been trying to follow it. Look—’ He moved his chair and she came and sat next to him and looked at the papers spread out in front of her. ‘This is a driver’s schedule.’ He pointed to the top of the page. ‘That’s Patel’s itinerary. He took the hospital van out the day before the drugs went missing to take deliveries to the clinics in the villages, OK?’

  She nodded.

  ‘It looks as though your husband spent some time making sure those deliveries actually took place–he’s confirmed them all. Judging from the time of the last delivery, Patel would have got back to Riyadh around ten that night, at the earliest.’ He looked at her to make sure she was following what he was saying. ‘Here, we’ve got the inventory of the drugs stock. They completed it at eight thirty that evening, the day before the check was due. All present and correct. But by eight the next morning, the morphine has gone.’ He looked into the distance, his eyes narrowed in thought. ‘So unless the thief was a key holder–and Haroun Patel certainly wasn’t–the morphine vanished sometime after eight thirty but before the pharmacy was closed for the night, which would have been about nine, nine thirty–more or less immediately after the late drugs round. So it can’t have been Patel who stole the drugs.’

  ‘But…the police would have looked at this, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘I doubt it. They found the drugs in his locker and they got their confession. They’d just say that Haroun stole the security codes or had an accomplice. It could have happened like that, I suppose, but it’s unlikely. It had all the signs of an impulse theft. If it had been that well planned, the thieves wouldn’t have left the stuff lying around. Besides, why touch anything the day before an audit? Everyone knew it was going to happen. You don’t mess around with the Saudi police.’

  ‘So they executed an innocent man?’

  He shrugged. ‘Any country that has the death penalty executes innocent men. It’s par for the course. That’s not what this is about. The authorities wouldn’t have been worried about this. As far as they were concerned, Patel got due process. What I don’t understand is why…’

  ‘You’re saying Joe was killed for this? Someone killed him because of this?’

  He rubbed the back of his head. ‘That’s what I don’t see. Why would they? If Joe had taken this to the authorities, no one would have been interested. They lost some drugs. They had a culprit. End of story. Another thing I don’t understand is why he was chasing it. He must have known it was pointless. There was no way the authorities were going to reopen the case. No way they’d even look at it. The Saudi courts don’t make mistakes.’

  ‘Haroun was his friend,’ Roisin said. ‘I think Joe felt responsible for him. He knew Haroun in London when he was a student here. It was Joe who suggested he look for work in Saudi.’ Joe had cared. He’d cared enough to go back, to go over all the evidence, to…what? ‘What about these?’ She pushed forward the two forms. She hadn’t been able to decipher them because they were written in Arabic.

  ‘They’re applications for visas to Saudi. I know what the first one is. It’s Haroun Patel’s.’ He picked it up and skimmed it. ‘I’d forgotten that…’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing there that’s secret. His age, his sponsor, where he came from…’ He looked at the photo of the smiling young man. ‘Haroun,’ he said. ‘I knew him. He was one of those people who gets to know everybody. He was a good guy. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.’

  He picked up the second form. ‘This is just the same. And from the same source, I suspect. Was Joe into computers?’

  Roisin nodded. ‘He was pretty good. He liked to play around with them, and he took computing as an extra course at uni.’

  Damien nodded, as if this had confirmed something he already suspected. ‘But it’s just the same kind of information–name, date of birth…’ There was a moment’s silence. ‘Oh, Christ.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Her name’s Patel. She gives Haroun as–she’s his sister.’

  Just for a moment, relief flooded over her. It wasn’t Jesal Rajkhumar. Whatever Joe had been doing, it was nothing to do with the woman Yasmin had been looking for.

  And then Damien spoke again and she was pushing her chair away from the table, jumping to her feet as the cold lump formed in her stomach.

  ‘Her name’s Jesal,’ he said. ‘Jesal Rajkhumar Patel.’

  38

  There is a girl who is missing–we want to know where she is, but we haven’t been able to find her.

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

  Damien’s voice seemed to come from miles away. ‘Roisin!’

  She blinked and she was back in the flat. Damien was on his feet, looking at her in alarm. ‘OK, come and sit down. You’ve gone white.’ He steered her across to the settee and sat her down. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Yasmin. She asked me…just before she had her baby, she asked me to look for this woman.’

  She felt his hand on her arm tense. ‘You’re sure? Yasmin asked you to look for Jesal Patel?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes. No…not quite. She asked me to find Jesal Rajkhumar.’

  ‘Rajkhumar isn’t a family name. A lot of Gujratis take their father’s name as a second name. Or women take their husband’s. What did Yasmin say, Roisin? As closely as you can remember.’

  She closed her eyes. She was back there, sitting in the incongruously familiar Starbucks in the middle of the glittering opulence of the mall. ‘Yasmin said…there was a girl who was missing. She had been a maid, I think. She’d been accused of stealing from her employer before she ran away. Yasmin hinted that there had been something going on, some kind of abuse. The dead woman–I think this is her. Jesal Rajkhumar.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’ His voice was calm, but she could hear the underlying tension. ‘Did Yasmin say who this woman was working for?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Was it her family?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I don’t
think so. What’s this about, Damien?’ If she’d said something to Joe, would everything be different?

  He didn’t reply at first, then he said, ‘How much do you know about the immigrant labour system in Saudi?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘The first thing you need to know is that Saudi is a country that hasn’t long revoked its slavery laws. And the Saudis–the urban ones, the middle-class ones, the wealthy ones–they think they’re a chosen people. As if the world hasn’t got enough of those.’ His smile contained no humour. ‘Non-Saudis count for nothing. They employ a lot of domestic staff from the third world and they don’t look after them well. The life of a domestic employee is hard. They work long hours, they get treated badly, their employers sometimes abuse them. Saudi is a very repressed society–it isn’t uncommon for the women to be raped. Often, the employers hold their documents so the women are pretty much trapped.’

  ‘Slaves,’ she said.

  ‘More or less. Yasmin’s father makes his money by bringing women like this into Saudi. If this girl wanted to get away, if she was being abused, it would have been difficult. She wouldn’t have her passport, she wouldn’t have an exit permit. To get that, she’d have had to pay back everything she owed, which would have been a lot of money–that may be why she stole in the first place. Once she’d been convicted of theft–and if her accuser was a Saudi, she would have been convicted–she would have faced jail and a flogging.’

  ‘They’d have flogged her? But she wasn’t even a Saudi!’

  He shrugged. ‘Nationality doesn’t come into it if you’re a third-worlder. They’re a bit more circumspect when the government has more power, but they’ve flogged Westerners too. They just haven’t executed any–yet.’

  She looked at him. ‘Civilized of them.’

  ‘That’s the way it’s done, Roisin. Don’t pretend you didn’t know. If you take the money, you subscribe to the system.’

  She couldn’t answer that. ‘Why didn’t she go to her brother? If she was being abused–Christ, if she was being raped–he was there. He could have helped her.’

  He frowned. ‘Sex…it’s hard for us to understand the kinds of attitudes that exist around it in other cultures. In Pakistan, in the rural communities…I came across a case a few years ago. A man thought his wife had been unfaithful, so he strung her up from the ceiling, beat her, cut off her nose and ears and gouged out her eyes with a piece of wire. He scraped his fingers round the inside of the sockets to make sure there was nothing left. No one in the village took any action against him. She was the one who became a pariah. The only reason it ever came to trial was because a government minister, a woman, took up the case.’

  Roisin swallowed her nausea. ‘And you think that Haroun…?’ She had never met him, but he had been Joe’s friend. She couldn’t equate that level of cruelty and barbarism with the smiling face she had seen in the photograph.

  ‘No. Haroun was an educated man, a reformer. He would have tried to help his sister. But it would explain why she couldn’t go back.’ He was frowning as he looked at the papers. ‘You’ve just given him the most believable motive I’ve seen so far for taking the drugs, but these papers show that he didn’t.’ He put his face in his hands, then looked at her. His eyes were weary. ‘There’s something else. The Haroun Patel case–it was investigated by Yasmin’s husband.’

  ‘Her husband’s a police officer?’

  ‘She never told you?’

  ‘It never came up.’ They’d never discussed their homes or their families. They’d talked about work, about politics, about the status of women.

  Damien was studying the papers again. She could tell by his slight tension that there was something else he wanted to say. She waited.

  ‘Roisin, do you think…Shit, I hate to ask you this, but I’ve got to. Do you think that Joe could have been involved in the kidnapping of Majid’s baby? Some kind of revenge thing because his friend had been killed? Or…’ He shrugged as he met her gaze. ‘There has to be a connection.’

  She shook her head at once. Not Joe. ‘No. Never.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had to ask.’

  The Saudi police had thought Joe might be involved as well. And so had the consulate. She understood, now, the reason for the haste when she was rushed out of the country. ‘You’re not the only one,’ she said. Her voice sounded dull in her ears. Joe the killer, Joe the kidnapper–how easy it would be to pin it all on one dead man.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Damien said again.

  ‘You didn’t know him.’ They sat in silence for a while, then she said with an effort, ‘Is there any news about Yasmin’s baby?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I should contact her. She was a good friend to me.’

  ‘Maybe you’d better leave it. For the moment.’

  She looked at him, but his expression gave nothing away. ‘I bought the baby a present. A cashmere shawl. It’s probably here, somewhere.’

  He gestured at the papers in front of him. ‘Did Yasmin say why she wanted to find this woman?’

  Yasmin had looked tired and stressed that day. ‘I don’t know. She said she was worried about her, that’s all. I’m trying to remember.’ All that was clear in her mind was the way the colour had drained out of Yasmin’s face. ‘She said she’d vanished “last year”, but she wasn’t any more specific than that.’

  ‘Haroun died in April 2004. That would have been…’ he closed his eyes as he worked it out ‘…Safar or Rabi Al-Awaal.’ He saw her incomprehension. ‘The Hegira year has twelve months like the Gregorian calendar, but it starts in Muharram, which is around February, and ends in Thw al-Hijjah which is January-February. So “last year”,…depending which calendar she meant…’

  ‘Could be either before or after Haroun was executed.’

  ‘Right. Or even arrested. That may have been the trigger that made her run. But, whatever happened, it happened long before Yasmin approached you. Why did she come to you then?’

  ‘I didn’t ask.’ And she should have done. She could see that now. Now she could see all the questions she should have asked Yasmin.

  ‘I can’t get a clear picture. I need to get some distance from it.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t have a lot of time. I didn’t find what I was looking for in Paris.’

  ‘Amy,’ she said. ‘You were looking for Amy.’

  ‘That was the plan. She’d been there, but I have no idea where she is now. Amy and I had a bust-up before she left. I think she might be lying low.’

  ‘If she doesn’t want to see you, then why…?’

  ‘I’m worried about her.’ His eyes met hers. ‘Amy was asking questions about Haroun Patel too.’

  ‘Oh, Christ.’ She sat down on the settee. She could remember Joe, that night after the party when she’d told him about Amy, and he’d said, Why stir it up? If I were you, I’d leave it. He’d known what he was doing was dangerous. He’d tried to keep her away from it. She felt her eyes sting, and kept her face down as she spoke. ‘When Amy called me to tell me she was in Paris, she sounded…’ In her recollection, Amy’s voice had been high and…what? Excited? Edgy? The words had seemed to spill out and she hadn’t seemed fully in control of her breathing. She looked up at Damien. ‘Frightened,’ she said.

  He was silent. The lamplight cast shadows across his face. She could see the hollow in his throat, his skin brown against the white shirt. ‘Then I still need to find her. I’m pretty sure she’s left Paris.’

  ‘If she came to the UK,’ Roisin said slowly, ‘she might go back to Newcastle.’ Amy, leaning out of the carriage window, calling out, over and over. What had happened on that trip to London to make her stay away all those years, and what had happened now to make her vanish again? She felt as though her world was crumbling away around her, turning to dust in her fingers as she tried to hold on to it. Her parents were dead, her sister was dead. They didn’t even live on in her memory, just as a moment of laughter and someone pushing her as she sat on a pile
of leaves in a wheelbarrow, just a hand in hers as a camera clicked, and a line from a song Between the salt water and the sea sand…Her father, her adopted father, was dead. Joe was gone. And now Amy had faded away into silence.

  ‘What is it?’ Damien had moved beside her and was brushing her hair off her face.

  She shook her head. There weren’t any words. The orange lights were starting to flicker in her mind, trying to take her to a place where she didn’t want to go. She was too tired to fight. ‘I just can’t make it stop,’ she said.

  He kissed her gently, then put his arms round her and drew her in closer as he kissed her again. He smelled warm and male and his closeness was healing against the wounds of the past few weeks.

  ‘Stay,’ she said. ‘Tonight. Stay with me.’

  He drew back slightly. ‘Are you sure? Is that what you want?’

  ‘It’s what I want. I need to know that I survived.’

  ‘You survived, Roisin.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You do. You know.’ He ran his fingers down her neck, then ducked his head to kiss her throat. He unbuttoned her blouse and slipped it down off her shoulders. His hands felt warm on her skin. He pushed the sleeves down her arms, freeing her breasts from the fabric. His fingers stroked her nipples, then pinched them gently as they stood erect. ‘See? Do you believe me now?’ His hands were still caressing her as he spoke.

  ‘No. No, I don’t. I need you to show me more.’

  He kissed her again. When he spoke, his mouth was close to hers. ‘Roisin, you know that I’m leaving soon. I’ve only got this to give you.’

  ‘I know. This is what I want.’

  The past stepped back into a distant place that it would return from later, but now, here and now, it was giving her respite. The future was nothing, just a blank, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the moment.

  When she woke up, the room was dark. The green light from the radio told her it was six. She could remember Damien waking her an hour before, his mouth pressing down on hers and his voice whispering, ‘Roisin, I have to go.’ Then she had sunk back into a dreamless sleep.