Strangers

by Carla Banks

  And it had been posted in Saudi Arabia.

  She stared at it blankly. It was Joe’s writing. She knew it so well. And it was postmarked for…A terrible hope began to grip her as she studied the envelope. She squinted her eyes as she tried to read it, knowing that what she saw must be a mistake. It was postmarked for three days after he had died.

  And then the hope faded. She knew what had happened. He must have put it in the hospital mailing rather than post it from their usual mail centre, and it had made its slow way through the system, ignored and unnoticed. And days after Joe had written it, it had been despatched.

  She didn’t want to open it. This was the last of him. She’d thought that the moment in the car when they said goodbye outside the party was the last, but here was something else, another communication. Once she had opened it, that would be that.

  She looked at it again. The writing was an untidy scrawl–she had teased him often enough about his doctor’s handwriting. Careful! I can almost read that! It looked as though he’d made a sudden decision to send this, and he hadn’t remembered to put on an airmail sticker–or he hadn’t had one, because it had made its way slowly by surface mail. And then it had been delayed further by being delivered to the wrong flat.

  For a while she sat, holding the envelope, listening to the silence in her head where Joe had been a moment before, then she slipped her finger under the flap and opened it. A sheaf of papers fell out, and a small notebook.

  She went through everything carefully, but there was no letter, no note. She’d hoped that maybe there would be one last message, but there was nothing.

  As soon as she started looking through the papers, she recognized them. They were the papers that she and Damien had gone through to piece together the story of Haroun Patel, but these were neatly typed up, carefully headed, with explanatory notes added. The timetable of the drugs inventory was there, a list of all the ways in which Haroun Patel would have known about this, the timetable of his last delivery run with the clearly marked return time of 22.30, checked against the records of the van he’d been driving. Joe had even referenced the records of the garage where the hospital vans were kept.

  It was the kind of meticulous investigation into someone’s movements that the police should have carried out, but, according to Damien, they probably hadn’t. They’d relied, instead, on the location of the drugs and the confession that they had obtained from Patel.

  This was Joe’s final write-up of what he had been doing. She remembered that day when he’d come back from work, suddenly the old Joe, the Joe she knew. He’d been relaxed and happy, and eager to get them both out of the Kingdom as soon as possible. This was why he’d been happy–he’d done what he’d set out to do. This copy, mailed to himself, was probably just a failsafe in case his originals went missing.

  He’d also written a report that would go with the tabulated and meticulously compiled evidence. Damien had identified what Joe was doing–demonstrating that Haroun Patel’s conviction was wrong. But Damien had had no idea why Joe was doing this when there was no possibility of the conviction being overturned, no question of an admission of error.

  And that wasn’t what Joe had been after. As she read what he had written, she realized that Joe was putting together a case that would allow Haroun Patel’s family to claim compensation–if not from the Saudi government, then from their own. One thing that hadn’t been in the papers she and Damien had looked through was the fact that Patel had been a father: he had an infant daughter in Pakistan.

  Incontrovertible proof of his innocence would give his family some chance of claiming any outstanding money owed on his wage, of claiming compensation for the fact that his government had not pursued his case sufficiently. It was as simple as that. Nothing strange, nothing sinister. No reference to drowned women or missing babies, nothing that would have caused anyone much concern.

  When she’d finished reading, she sat there with the papers spread out in front of her. Was everything else coincidence? Had Joe been an unlucky bystander, as he had claimed, when the woman fell into the river? And in the end, had Joe been simply the victim of a robbery that she and Damien had turned into a conspiracy because their own needs had made it impossible to accept what had really happened?

  She picked up the small notebook and flicked through the pages. There were lists ticked off or crossed out, jottings that looked random and isolated, and then, towards the back of the book, were four pages filled with Joe’s loose, untidy scrawl.

  What follows is speculation. I can’t offer proof of it. When I began this investigation, I had assumed that the original thief had panicked and placed the stolen drugs in Haroun Patel’s locker. However, having looked into this more closely, I don’t believe it is the case. These lockers are in an obscure location in the hospital. Anyone leaving material in a locker would have had to know where they were, and go out of his way to reach them. Also, they are locked with security codes, and it is unlikely anyone would have been able to leave the drugs there by chance. They can only have been left there by someone who knew they were there and who had access to the door codes.

  This suggests strongly that the locker was not the place chosen by a panicking thief but was deliberately targeted. This puts the drug theft in a new light. It is possible that the drugs were stolen specifically on this date because of the impending police inspection.

  In this case, the entire theft may have been an attempt, successful as it turned out, to implicate Haroun Patel. Given the known penalties for drug crimes in the Kingdom, this would be tantamount to murder.

  Murder.

  Joe had been right, more right than he knew. There was a killer walking the streets of Riyadh, and Joe had been on his trail. Now, Joe was dead.

  She turned back to the beginning of the notebook and tried to make sense of what Joe had written there:

  Refugee and Asylum-seeker Support

  And then a list of cities, with names and addresses:

  Cambridge, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Newport…RAM project…One by one, they were ticked off and crossed out. Then the list changed into London boroughs: Hillingdon, Stockwell, Hackney, Marylebone, Westminster…There were names and addresses, telephone numbers, times, locations. And next to some were cryptic notes:

  Maybe? Edgy, doesn’t want to discuss. Meet?

  Sumira, KFC, Oxford St, 10.30.

  And then: Oriental escorts: speciality: Omega Health, Penthouse Sauna, Venus Sauna, Handy Sauna…The list of dubious venues filled the page.

  As she read, Roisin noticed that the entries were dated between April 2004 and the end of August. All the time they had been together, Joe had been conducting a search of refugee organizations across the country, then he had narrowed his search to London and the brothels that operated as massage and sauna parlours, offering ‘exotic’ girls to men who didn’t know–and possibly didn’t care–that the woman who entertained them was there by coercion.

  And at the end of August, a dead woman had been pulled out of the river, a woman who had been seen walking with Joe shortly before her death.

  Joe had started a letter to Haroun’s parents, a scrawl of crossings out and places where the pen had dug into the paper, before the draft petered out. She wondered if he had ever completed it and sent it.

  It began with Joe introducing himself, giving an account of his friendship with their son, and his deep regret at Haroun’s death. It continued: I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your daughter Jesal is also dead. After all this time, Roisin thought, they must know this. But a letter would permit them to give up that last, destructive hope.

  The story Joe told was a sanitized version of the search outlined in the notebook:

  She had gone to work in London. I went to the address that I had been given to tell her the sad news about her brother. We were walking by the river when I told her. The shock was too much for her and she stumbled and fell into the water She told me she liked to walk by the
river, and she must have had an accident, because

  She was working in London, and she fell into the river. I saw this happen. It was an accident. The police who death with her death can be contacted

  She was walking

  You can contact

  She could work out the story now. Jesal Rajkhumar Patel had been taken out of Saudi–had probably paid the people-smugglers to bring her to England, the country where her brother had contacts and where he had been happy. But the plan for Jesal was not a new beginning, or not as far as the traffickers were concerned. She represented an investment and they expected a high return.

  It wouldn’t have been hard to coerce a woman as vulnerable as Jesal into prostitution. Any threat to turn her over to the authorities would imply a return to Saudi for flogging and imprisonment, or a return to disgrace at home. The casual rape and brutality that marked the breaking in of a prostitute would have been enough to confirm her fate. After that, all her choices were gone.

  And then Joe had come and taken away her last hope.

  Roisin thought about the newspaper cutting she’d found, the one that identified the dead woman as ‘probably’ an illegal immigrant, and speculated about prostitution. How could Joe tell her deeply traditional parents that their daughter had been working as a prostitute and had committed suicide in the icy waters of the Thames? She looked at the crossings out in the letter as he tried to tell them what they had to know, without telling them the rest. She could understand now why he had never told the police that he knew who she was. Maybe Jesal’s parents would be better off with the cruelty of hope.

  Joe.

  She carefully gathered the papers together and put them on the sideboard desk. She would show them to Damien when she saw him again.

  Damien’s eyes burned with fatigue as he drove up the Ml. The rain was relentless, the spray thrown up by the wheels of the HGVs he passed obscuring the windscreen for heart-stopping moments before the wipers cleared it. Their rapid scrape scrape became the music that carried him through the night.

  Once he’d realized that Amy was dead he’d moved fast. She was beyond whatever help he might have been able to give her, but there were other people who were still alive. With his senses alert for the sound of the ambulance arriving–and he had a feeling that ambulances took their time before they came on to the Byker estate–he’d moved through the flat, wiping anything his fingers might have touched. Then he’d searched it, taking anything that looked as though it might be relevant. Someone had been there before him, but there were things they had left.

  He’d taken the photographs, scooped up the papers that lay scattered across the sideboard. He’d pocketed the mobile phone that lay on the table. He’d hesitated for a moment when he found Amy’s passport, then left it, after checking the pages carefully. They confirmed Rai’s story. Amy had left the Kingdom via Bahrain, the night of the bomb, the night that Joe Massey had died.

  Amy.

  Do you still…?

  Love you? Of course. Always, Amy.

  He kept his emotions firmly shut away. Whatever he felt had to wait. His hand was throbbing unbearably and was clumsy and unwieldy on the gear stick. Everything around him had an odd distance and clarity. He knew that he needed to get to a doctor, but he had things to finish first.

  The speedometer was flickering around the 120 mark. He eased off. He couldn’t afford to get caught on a speed camera. He couldn’t afford to get picked up by the police, and he couldn’t afford to kill himself driving at ludicrous speeds in the icy rain. Three lives hung in the balance, and he had to get there in time to do something about it.

  48

  It was gone midnight. Roisin realized she had been sitting there for over an hour, the papers clutched in her hand. And still there was no sign of Amy. She should be here by now. She checked the phone in case she’d missed a call, but there was nothing. Just for a moment, she thought she smelled cigarette smoke, and wrinkled up her nose in distaste. The window was slightly open at the top, and she got up from the settee and closed it. Someone must have been smoking in the street.

  She hadn’t eaten since lunch time. She wasn’t hungry, but she felt strangely light-headed. She went into the kitchen and hunted through the fridge for something she could eat quickly. She was just spreading butter on a slice of bread when she heard a sound. She listened again. It was a soft knock on the door of the flat. Amy. At last. She went quickly down the corridor before Amy could knock more loudly and disturb Adam. ‘Amy?’

  The voice was muffled at the other side of the door. If she hadn’t been so tired, she wouldn’t have released the lock. She realized her mistake at once. Her fingers fumbled with the security chain, trying to slot it in, but the opening door knocked it out of her hand. She jammed her shoulder hard against the wood and, for a moment, she thought it was closing, then she staggered back as the door was shoved open, hard.

  There were two of them, pushing her back into the flat before she could shout out, grabbing her wrists and spinning her round, squashing her face against the wall.

  ‘You’re expecting Amy?’ The voice was an angry whisper.

  She didn’t answer. She could hear footsteps move along the passageway and she struggled against the hands that were holding her. Adam was in there, sleeping peacefully.

  ‘She isn’t coming.’ The man who was holding her turned her round, not releasing his grip. His face was hard and his mouth was tight with anger. ‘We finish this,’ he said. ‘Tonight.’

  The face was etched in her mind, though she’d only met him once, the night of the party, the night that Joe died. Arshak Nazarian.

  She heard a triumphant shout, quickly suppressed, from the other man, and the uncertain wail of a baby. She wrenched herself away from Nazarian and tried to run down the corridor, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back. His hand swung and caught her across the face, and her head snapped back, hitting the wall with a crack. ‘You’re responsible for this,’ he said, his voice low and hard. He looked at her, making sure that she was subdued, then pulled her along the corridor to where the other man was.

  She recognized him at once–the driver of the van, the man who had been sitting there, the light of his cigarette glowing in the darkness. He was holding Adam up like some kind of trophy. Adam’s eyes were wide open. Shock and surprise seemed to have silenced him, but she could see his face starting to collapse into misery.

  ‘He’s frightened,’ she said. ‘You’re frightening him.’

  Nazarian was watching her, his eyes narrowed in calculation. ‘Give her the child,’ he said, after a moment. The other man looked uncertain but then reluctantly handed Adam to her. Adam started crying in earnest as she took him, and she held him close, rocking him, trying to steady her breathing so he wouldn’t feel her own terror. Her head was ringing and there was a dull ache in her cheek where Nazarian had hit her.

  The other man looked at Nazarian. ‘What now?’

  ‘Nothing. We have the child. We go.’

  ‘Her? We can’t risk leaving her.’

  Nazarian looked at her. ‘What can she say? Without putting herself behind bars?’

  One phrase was lodged in Roisin’s mind: We have the child. For some reason, somehow, Nazarian wanted Mari’s baby. She held the small body close. He was rigid with fear, and his cries were stopping her from thinking clearly. She had to get help.

  Nazarian was still watching her with that slightly uncertain calculation. Then he seemed to come to a decision, and spoke to her directly. ‘Roisin, if you want no harm to come to…anyone here, then you will do what I say. You will make the child ready, and then you will let us leave. It will be done quietly so there will be no more upset.’

  ‘I’m not…’ Roisin shut her mouth on the words. Verbal defiance would do her no good. She had to get them off their guard, find some way of making contact, some way of getting help.

  ‘Can’t you shut him up?’ The other man had been checking the kitchen and he looked at Adam in irritation as
he came out. She could remember the way he’d snatched Adam up out of his cot like a hunter brandishing a trophy, not a living, breathing child.

  ‘What did you expect him to do?’ she said. ‘He’s frightened and he’s hungry. He won’t quieten down until he’s fed.’

  ‘We haven’t got time for that. It’ll have to wait.’ The man looked at Nazarian for confirmation, but Nazarian was still watching her with that slightly puzzled frown. He took out his phone and started speaking into it rapidly and urgently. He was speaking in Arabic, and she couldn’t understand what he was saying.

  She carried Adam into the kitchen, not waiting to see what the response would be. She was aware of the man’s gaze following her. Once she was in the kitchen, she closed the door and leant against it, her eyes closed. She had no phone in here, the window was tiny and looked out into the air well–there was no chance of escaping and no chance of attracting anyone’s attention. But she needed to be on her own to think. Away from the men, Adam’s cries began to quieten. She rocked him gently, making soothing noises in his ear as she tried to work out what she could do.

  They were going to take him. For some reason, some purpose she didn’t understand, they were going to take Mari’s baby. Her hand was shaking as she tried to open the packet of baby milk she’d brought up with her from the flat. Brave resolutions were fine–but she had nothing to fight with. If they took Adam and left her, she could phone the police at once, she could run into the road and get the number of their car, try and see which way they went–but they would know she could do that–would do that. So they weren’t going to give her that option. ‘Oh, baby,’ she breathed.

  Adam stirred against her shoulder and made a noise of complaint. He could feel her fear. She forced herself back into control. No panicking. Panicking wouldn’t help. Her gaze leapt round the kitchen: the window–too small. The door. It led nowhere, just back into the main room. The knife block…The knife block.