The Disappeared

by M. R. Hall

  'I was thinking we might go through the police - they're hooked up to the Swansea computers, aren't they?'

  'They're snowed under already. Believe me, I've used up all my favours, Mrs Cooper, and more. It's got so even my ex-colleagues are dodging my calls.'

  'It's probably best Bristol CID don't know about this one, seeing as they were so closely involved in the original investigation.' She could sense Alison's hackles rising. 'I'll call DS Williams over in Chepstow, see if I can't persuade him to give us a hand.'

  'I'm sure he will,' Alison said with feeling. 'He'll leap at any chance to do down the English police.'

  'Who said anything about doing them down?'

  Alison looked up from her computer screen. 'I told you what I think of Alec McAvoy. He went to prison for fixing witnesses - he made a career out of it. You can't expect me to believe someone he suddenly pulls out of a hat.'

  'Madog seemed very sincere to me.'

  'Do you really believe he wouldn't have gone to the police if what he told you was true?'

  'What possible interest could McAvoy have in interfering with this inquest?'

  'Do you want my honest opinion, Mrs Cooper?'

  'Fire away.'

  Alison unleashed. 'Before he was struck off he was cock of the walk, the flashiest, richest criminal lawyer in town. He didn't only think he was above the law, he thought he was the law. When we caught him out he happened to be representing the missing boys' families. It suited his purposes to say his arrest was political - they were his only clients who weren't hardened villains with form longer than a donkey's dick, as we used to say. Now he's using this inquest. Think about it: he'll dredge up evidence to support his claim that he was the victim of a conspiracy, get the media behind him, and before you know it the Law Society will be pressured into letting him back on the roll.' Alison looked at her imploringly. 'He's a clever man, Mrs Cooper, but rotten to the core. He doesn't give a damn what happened to those boys - this is someone who built his reputation representing gangsters, rapists, murderers.'

  'All right,' Jenny said. 'Point taken. But I have to check the car story. And I need you to take a formal statement from Madog.'

  She retreated to her office with renewed doubts about McAvoy. Alison's outburst began to explain some of the unease she'd felt in his company. There was something about his powerful aura that frightened her. It wasn't just the uneasy fragility of a disgraced man clinging to tattered shreds of dignity, it was his cast of mind, the unnerving sense that there was a part of his humanity missing. The business with the bollards and the truck: he was reckless, inviting trouble and not giving a damn for the consequences. But when he'd looked at her . . . there'd been an eruption of heat in her chest and a sensation that shot straight down between her legs. It almost shamed her to admit it.

  Burying these thoughts, she reached for her address book and turned up the numbers of DS Owen Williams, her contact across the border. She caught him during his mid- morning break. They'd spoken maybe three or four times since the Danny Wills case and on each occasion he'd been delighted to hear from her. He listened carefully as she explained that a witness 'had come to light', neglecting to mention McAvoy, and asked whether he could help trace all black Toyota MPVs that may have been in the vicinity of the Severn Bridge on a June night eight years ago.

  'I'd be ab-so-lutely delighted,' Williams said in his exaggerated Welsh lilt. 'Anything to help my favourite coroner, especially - as I presume - you can't trust the Bristol police not to do an honest job for you.'

  'Some of the officers involved in the original investigation are still in place.'

  'You don't have to tell me any more, Mrs Cooper. You know I'd trust a Bangkok brothel keeper sooner than any one of those English bastards.'

  Jenny had barely put the receiver down when the phone rang and Alison came on the line saying she had Mrs Jamal on hold.

  'OK, put her through.'

  Jenny braced herself. She was greeted by the sound of inconsolable sobs.

  'Mrs Jamal? This is Mrs Cooper. What can I do for you?'

  The sobbing continued, Mrs Jamal unable to speak except to mumble something that sounded like, 'I don't know ... I don't know.'

  Jenny wanted to ask about McAvoy's memory of her mentioning a girlfriend, but the moment wasn't right. She seemed simply to need to have her grief heard and acknowledged.

  Jenny offered what few words of comfort she could and heard herself say, 'I promise, I won't rest until I've lifted every stone to find out what happened to your son.'

  With the sharpening of her symptoms over recent days, Jenny was beginning to dread the long hours between office and sleep with no alcohol or tranquillizing drug to soothe the mental sores. As the adrenalin subsided, the intangible fear ascended as surely as if the two were balanced on a pair of old-fashioned scales. Her desire not to let Ross see how she was feeling intensified the pain. She had staked her relationship with him on a promise that she could cope; that what she wanted more than anything else was to have him share her home until he went away to university. It hadn't been easy for him to move out of his father's house - David's disapproval had been largely silent, but all the more crushing for it - and his decision to trust her left her feeling that their cohabitation was a long, drawn-out test of her ability as a mother and of the truth of her recovery from emotional collapse.

  She pulled up outside Melin Bach and sat in the darkness summoning strength. She knew she could hold it together, at a push, but she lacked the energy to be light or joyful. Her weakness infuriated her. She'd been better off with tranquillizers; at least they'd allowed the illusion of control. Part of her wished she could just go inside and go straight to bed, sleep through it and wake to her pills next morning, but there was dinner to cook, conversations to be had. Suddenly she felt as if she had an impossible mountain to climb. She reached for her beta blockers, snapped one in half with her teeth and swallowed.

  Thank God for drugs. Thank God.

  The tightness in her chest had already begun to loosen a little as she entered the house. She opened the living-room door to find Ross and Steve sitting side by side on the sofa eating sandwiches.

  'Oh, hi.' Steve levered himself to his feet. 'Called by on my way down to the pub - got waylaid.'

  Jenny turned to Ross, whose eyes were glued to the screen. 'I guess you won't be wanting any dinner.'

  'No thanks. I'm going to Karen's.'

  'On a Tuesday?'

  'Why not?'

  She couldn't think of a reason that wouldn't make her sound like the kind of mother she'd already sworn to him she wasn't. She compromised. 'All right, just make sure you're back by eleven. You don't want to be exhausted tomorrow.' She headed for the kitchen.

  Steve said, 'Can I do anything?'

  Jenny said, 'No. I'm fine.'

  She was searching through the dregs in the fridge - it seemed to empty as soon as she'd filled it - when she heard Steve come in behind her. He set his empty plate on the counter and put an arm around her waist.

  'Rough day?'

  She wished he'd stop touching her. It was one more thing to deal with. 'No more than usual.'

  Ross called out from the living room: 'See you.'

  Steve was silent for a moment, his hand on the small of her back while she rummaged for a three-day-old lettuce, a tomato and a scrap of cheese. The front door opened and closed. They were alone.

  'You're tense,' Steve said.

  'Just tired.'

  She slipped away from him and grabbed a plate from the cupboard, feeling self-conscious with him watching her fix her meagre supper.

  'Ross mentioned you'd been fraught lately.'

  'Oh, did he?'

  'It's tough on your own.'

  There was no answer to that. She tipped the last of a bottle of French dressing onto her plate and looked at the half-dead salad with no enthusiasm. She wasn't even hungry.

  Steve stepped up close behind her, brought both hands around her middle and held her un
til she relaxed enough to lean into him. She felt the hard contours of his body through her clothes.

  'You never ask me for anything,' he said quietly. 'You're not on your own, Jenny . . .' He kissed her neck. 'I'm here.'

  She turned to face him and let him kiss her face and eyes and mouth, trying to submit to the moment, to let their closeness overwhelm her and push the intruding, chaotic thoughts from her mind. She let him take her hand and lead her upstairs; without speaking a word, she went with him to her bed and for a short while managed to lose herself.

  Afterwards, she huddled close to him. The bedroom radiator never managed more than a tepid heat and there was hardness to the cold tonight, their breath almost visible in the frigid air. She slipped in and out of a restless doze, a carousel of faces passing in front of her eyes.

  She vaguely heard Steve say, 'Are you awake?'

  She forced her eyes open. 'Sorry . . .'

  He pushed the hair gently back from her face. 'You were murmuring.'

  'Anything interesting?'

  'Couldn't make it out.'

  In his concerned smile Jenny saw a different man from the one she'd met the previous June. He was gentler, more straightforward, less mysterious. This familiarity made her strangely sad: their bursts of excitement together were still intense, but briefer, his touch wasn't as electric, the heightened thrill had gone. And he wanted to know her when she didn't even know herself.

  Steve said, 'I think you need a good night's sleep.' He kissed her forehead, slid out from under the duvet and pulled on his clothes.

  'I'll call you,' he said and quietly let himself out.

  Jenny listened guiltily to his footfalls on the stairs. He was a good man, she was fond of him, yet when they had been making love she had fantasized for a moment that she was with someone else. And it had unsettled her: it was as if the constant tug she felt towards the darker corners of her subconscious had found another weakness to work on. The one pure thing she had was being corrupted.

  Frightened by the places her imagination wanted to take her, she summoned the will to haul herself out of bed and find her journal. She would write down the thoughts that were preying on her in the hope that bringing them to light would exorcise them. But as she wrote: When I felt his touch on my belly, I closed my eyes and let it be Alec McAvoy, a surge of excitement passed through her.

  It was the same sensation she had felt the first time she set eyes on Steve: she had known, profoundly and without question, what would happen next.

  Chapter 12

  DS Williams had moved quickly. Jenny arrived in the office to find an emailed list of nearly five hundred black Toyota MPVs registered in the UK during 2002 together with their owners' addresses. She passed them on to Alison and asked her to pick out any registered either in the Bristol area or a fifty-mile-wide corridor to the north. It was an arbitrary approach, but they had to start somewhere. Also in her inbox was a message from another detective sergeant, Sean Murphy, to let her know that the inquiries into the missing Jane Doe and the fire at the Meditect lab were now being treated as one and the same investigation. Alison said the word inside the force was that there were no leads as yet, but that the CID was working on the theory that the dead girl had been about to inform on an organized criminal gang, possibly people traffickers.

  A further email arrived as she was clicking away from Murphy's. It was from Gillian Golder copying a link to an article on BRISIC's website. She signed off, All best, Gillian. The piece was written anonymously under the headline, 'Coroner Adjourns Inquest into the Disappeared'. The unnamed writer speculated that government agencies had been panicked by the speed at which the inquest had commenced and had stepped in to bring a halt to proceedings before any compromising evidence came to light. The author cited unsourced rumours alleging the existence of shady agents provocateurs who were said to have induced young British Asian men to go abroad, where they were secretly arrested and imprisoned. The final paragraph ended:

  Don't expect the coroner's inquest to tell us anything we don't already know. The small window of opportunity has closed. Mrs Cooper has given in to pressure and denied the grieving families and their communities their one chance of discovering the truth.

  For a brief moment Jenny toyed with the idea of trusting Gillian Golder, even with asking her to help hunt down the Toyota and its occupants. The familiarity of the brief email had disarmed her into believing they were on the same side, that she wasn't alone after all. She checked herself. Golder was a spy for God's sake, a professional deceiver. Her job was to forge false friendships and make the isolated feel loved.

  She replied tersely: Thank you. Contents noted.

  Her immediate task was to review the evidence and decide where to put her limited energies. She fetched out the legal pad on which she'd made a note of the testimony she'd heard on the first day of her inquest and read it through. She had an uneasy feeling about Anwar Ali. He was close to BRISIC and something in his demeanour had suggested that, despite appearances, he was still the Islamist he had been eight years before. Until she'd heard Madog's story, she had assumed Ali's role might have been to hook Nazim and Rafi up with a third party who had helped them to leave the country. Several more outlandish possibilities now presented themselves. One was that Ali was working for the government, spotting and informing on potential radicals. It seemed unlikely, but she was aware she was entering a world where the normal rules didn't apply.

  Dani James was less mysterious, but her evidence raised troubling questions. The fact that she had slept with Nazim days before his disappearance chimed with Mrs Jamal's account of the change she'd seen in her son. What didn't fit was McAvoy's memory of Mrs Jamal mentioning her suspicion of a previous relationship. Everything Mrs Jamal had told her to date suggested that Nazim had become pious and outwardly observant during his first term at Bristol. Yet his behaviour late the following June seemed to be that of a young man freshly released from doctrinal bonds.

  She needed to talk to Mrs Jamal again. Strictly speaking, the proper course would have been to recall her to the witness box to deal with McAvoy's recollection. In reality, Jenny knew that she was far more likely to open up in private. It would be easy to hide behind the rules and let the law take its course, but the same instinct which had prompted her to take the case in the first instance wouldn't let her. This was one occasion on which the law could take second place to what felt right.

  Amira Jamal lived in a modern five-storey building on a leafy, comfortable street north of the city centre. She buzzed Jenny through the main door and met her by the lift on the third floor, dressed soberly in a dark suit and long batik scarf. She led her into a small, tidy apartment, where they sat in the living room surrounded by mementos of Nazim's brief life. In her short career as coroner Jenny had already lost track of the number of homes she had visited that were maintained as private shrines to lost loved ones. The only unusual feature was a shelf lined with neatly labelled box files, all of which related in some way to Nazim's disappearance and the long slog of letter writing that had followed in its wake. A small desk was set up beneath it. On it were a laptop, assorted papers and a book entitled A Family's Guide to Coroners' Inquests.

  Mrs Jamal had made tea and set out her best china. She poured Jenny a cup with a shaky hand. 'I'm sorry for how I was on the phone, Mrs Cooper. Sometimes I just can't stop myself.'

  'I understand.'

  'I see his face when he was a little boy. It's as if I'm still holding him . . .'

  'You seem better today.'

  'I did what you told me, went to the doctor. She gave me some pills.' She shook her head. 'I've never taken drugs in my life.'

  Jenny picked up her teacup and placed it down again, finding the situation even more uncomfortable than she'd anticipated. 'Mrs Jamal, there are a couple of questions — '

  'I have one first, Mrs Cooper. Why did you stop the inquest - the real reason?'

  'It's not stopped, it's adjourned until Monday. Your former solicitor
, Mr McAvoy, told me about something I ought to investigate.'

  A look of alarm bordering on terror spread across Mrs Jamal's face. 'What?'

  'I'm telling you this on the strict understanding that it goes no further than this room. Do I have your word on that?'

  'Yes . . .'

  'You remember that, before he went to prison, he hired a private investigator who found an old lady who claimed to have seen a black Toyota outside her house along the road from the halaqah?'

  'I spoke to that man, Mr Dean - he said she was confused. She might even have got the night wrong.'

  'She didn't. Mr Dean was probably trying not to raise your hopes . . . About six months later McAvoy asked him to follow it up. He found a toll collector on the old Severn Bridge. I spoke to him yesterday. A black Toyota came past his booth on the night of 28 June 2002. He remembers two white men in the front, two young Asian men in the back. He said they seemed frightened.'

  'Who is this man? Why didn't he say any of this before?' Mrs Jamal asked, breathless with shock.

  'It seems he was intimidated. I can't be sure he's telling the truth, but he claims one of the men in the front of the car tracked him down the following week and assaulted his young granddaughter - sprayed her hair with paint.'

  Mrs Jamal held her head in her hands. 'I don't understand . . . Why now? Who was driving this car?'

  'That's what I'm trying to find out.'

  'You say Mr McAvoy knew? I never trusted that man.'

  'Only some of it. Mr Dean died when Mr McAvoy was in prison.'

  Mrs Jamal reached for a box of tissues.

  'I know it's a lot for you to deal with,' Jenny said, 'but Mr McAvoy also remembers you mentioning that Nazim might have had a girlfriend before Dani James.'

  'My son never touched her. She's a prostitute. She's staining his memory.'

  'Why do you say that?'

  'You heard what she said - she had a disease.''

  'It could be important. Did you tell Mr McAvoy about another girl?'