Denial
By
Paddy Magrane
Fahrenheit Press 2016
For Kimmo Evans
1972–2014
‘Security is mostly a superstition.’
Helen Keller
Chapter 1
Creech Hill Immigration Detention Centre, Essex – 11am
For one brief, blissful moment, Zahra Idris understood what it was like to feel free.
She and ten other women had been selected for what the governor called ‘a special treat’ – to try out a recreation room in the new wing of the detention centre while a group of important people were shown around. They’d been chosen, he said, because they weren’t trouble makers and could be trusted to enjoy the room’s facilities, if only for an hour, without the need for guards.
The room was huge and – bar the noise of ping pong balls hitting the table as two burly women in hijabs played a clumsy game, and the surging music and quick-fire dialogue of the soap opera the Nigerian girls had found on the Africa Channel – quiet, at least by Creech Hill standards.
Zahra was used to people screaming or crying out in anguish, arguments between detainees and guards interspersed with vile language, heavy metal doors slamming shut and keys turning in locks.
Here, you might have imagined you were in a hotel. In the corridor the signs that read ‘LOCK IT, PROVE IT’ had been removed and all the doors were wedged open. Inside the room, instead of the posters depicting happy, photogenic guards and the slogan ‘The Team That Works Together Succeeds Together’, there were prints of abstract paintings. Bright, cheerful blocks of colour.
The Nigerian girls were grinning insanely at the prospect of watching an entire episode of Tinsel without another detainee grabbing the remote and swapping the channel, and the ping pong players were giggling like schoolchildren at every dropped shot.
But the cheery, holiday mood had not infected all the detainees in the room. An olive-skinned girl with lank greasy hair who was taking advantage of the wifi – a signal that was clear and, compared to the main building, almost exclusively hers – to tap and swipe furiously at her phone looked as miserable in here as she did on any other day. And a Russian girl, her hair cropped and bleached, who was using one of the brand-new computers, was wiping away tears as she caught up with her emails.
Zahra returned to the screen. She’d sat with the Nigerian girls before, watched snippets of the soap opera. From what she could gather, it centred on two rival movie studios in Abuja. The men were tall and handsome, the women slim and glamorous. Everyone wore designer clothes. Given their present situation, Zahra could see why the girls loved it so much.
When she looked back on that morning later and thought about what made her turn, she concluded that all humans carry in them an innate instinct that responds to the proximity of threat, even if that threat cannot be seen or heard. It was certainly not a noise. And it wasn’t a change in the light. Winter sun poured into the room from floor-to-ceiling windows on the opposite side, so there was no disturbance in that way. No, what made Zahra turn was a feeling of dark dread placing its cold hand firmly on her shoulder.
At first, she was bewildered by the gut sensation. There before her was the promised group. Smartly dressed men and women quietly assembled at the open door. They were glancing around the room, jotting down notes on pads.
All except one man, who was staring right at her.
Zahra blinked then narrowed her eyes to focus on him. And as she did, the gut feeling became something solid, a lump of hard terror in the pit of her stomach. Terror so pure, she felt she might pass out.
Chapter 2
Creech Hill Immigration Detention Centre
As their eyes met, Sir Harry Tapper, CEO of Tapper Security, felt his throat go dry. His torso prickled with sweat, gluing his shirt to his chest and back.
She had recognised him, he was certain.
He turned to edge out of the room, the group he was showing round the new wing of Creech Hill Immigration Detention Centre – a mix of hacks, charity workers and local councillors – taking his lead and following.
He moved down the corridor, trying to walk at a normal pace even though he wanted to sprint, convinced that at any minute the woman would scream out.
They passed the base of a staircase.
A female voice spoke out. ‘Excuse me.’
Tapper froze.
‘What’s that for?’
He turned and saw a woman pointing up to a blue net that hung just below the first floor to the wall opposite. Tapper remembered being introduced to the woman at the start. She was dumpy, dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, and worked for a charity that supported refugees and asylum seekers.
Tapper swallowed hard, attempting to moisten his dry mouth. ‘Very occasionally, detainees, when faced with the prospect of being sent back to their country, try to harm themselves.’ His voice, with its faint trace of Essex, was normally soft and deep, but it sounded cracked and high-pitched to him now. ‘We do everything we can to ensure the vulnerable ones are supported. But the most determined are hard to stop. So we’ve taken some precautionary measures.’
A murmur of approval rippled through the group. Tapper ran a sweaty hand through his thick grey hair. He’d chosen a white shirt and pale blue tie that morning to highlight his tan, but he imagined his skin was ghost-like now. Surely someone would notice?
‘Shall we?’
He led on, reaching the starting point of their tour. It was time to say goodbye. He stood as they filed past him. Some of them shook his clammy hand. There was a peck on the cheek from a journalist at The Mail. He tried to smile – to maintain the façade. The CEO in a tailored suit from Richard James – a suit that accentuated a trim figure for a man in his early fifties. A man of health and success. A man who’d built a security empire from scratch.
But at that point he felt as if he were sixteen again. And in the dock.
He had to do something. He couldn’t just stand there.
Tapper had the beginning of an idea.
The last of the tour shuffled past and he turned to his PA, Jenny. ‘Change of plan. Need to talk to the governor.’
Jenny, dressed in a black skirt and jacket, hair tightly arranged like an airline stewardess, tilted her head. ‘Are you OK, Sir Harry? You look a little poorly.’
‘I’m fine,’ he said, already leading the way back to the administrative wing, Jenny and their escort of two guards trailing in his wake.
The governor’s secretary waved Sir Harry and Jenny through the door. The governor, a tall wiry man, stood to greet them.
‘Sir Harry,’ he said, ‘I thought you were heading straight back to London. How did it go?’
‘Well,’ said Tapper tersely.
‘They saw the healthcare wing, gym, library, garden and vegetable patches, and all those large windows bringing in the light?’
The tour had been designed to dampen recent criticism from a number of human rights organisations that immigration detention centres were nothing more than glorified prisons. So they’d specifically avoided the Heron Wing, where violent detainees were locked in soft-walled cells.
‘Yes, all of that,’ said Tapper. ‘The thing is, I want to see more.’
He heard Jenny tapping on a tablet behind him.
‘I’m not here often. Might as well see a working day.’
‘You have a 2pm appointment, Sir Harry,’ said Jenny.
‘Then shift it.’
The Governor signalled to his secretary through the open door.
‘Pauline, can you get some lunch in here? Anything you’d like, Sir Harry?’
Tapper, who could not stomach the thought
of any food, said: ‘A sandwich is fine. And water.’
They had lunch in the office. Tapper took two bites of his tuna sandwich but the fish tasted like bile. They talked about Creech Hill, Tapper half disengaged as he racked his brains for a way forward.
It was her, he was sure of it.
The woman, her curly hair drawn back in a ponytail, had the same sculpted face. The same scar above her left eye.
He had to discover her name.
‘So, Sir Harry,’ said the governor, as Pauline brought in a tray of coffee, ‘what would you like to see? I guess the big event this afternoon is visiting time.’
Tapper saw an opportunity. The woman might just show her face, though if she was talking to anyone, that wasn’t good.
‘Is there any way I can observe from a distance? Don’t want to intrude.’
‘Know just the place,’ said the governor.
Tapper felt a tiny trace of hope before it quickly drowned in despair.
Seeing the woman brought that terrible night last summer crashing to the front of his mind in hideous clarity. Bar the occasional nightmare from which he’d wake, heart hammering so hard he thought he might have a massive coronary, he thought it was in the past.
But now it was back.
There was a witness.
Alive and well. And she’d been staring right at him.
Chapter 3
Creech Hill Immigration Detention Centre – 1.10pm, the same day
From the moment Sam Keddie spotted Zahra enter the room, he could tell that something was different today. That something was wrong.
She shuffled quickly past the other tables, her head darting from side to side, as if wary of being watched.
The cavernous, high-ceilinged space echoed with the sounds of dozens of conversations in as many languages. Guards in white shirts and black trousers, bunches of keys hanging heavily from their belts, shuffled between rows of tables occupied by detainees and their visitors – counsellors, healthcare professionals, social workers, solicitors, barristers, family members, translators.
Zahra perched on the edge of her chair, as if ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. Her eyes were bloodshot. She looked around the room agitatedly.
Such evident change, as Sam had been warned by his supervisor at Creech Hill, was not uncommon. A letter from the Home Office, bad news from home. It didn’t take much to upset the delicate status quo of the detainees.
‘Are you OK, Zahra?’ he asked.
A hand shot across the table and grabbed one of his, gripping with surprising strength. Sam felt a shot of electricity up his arm. Other than a shake of hands when they’d first met, they’d never touched. And then the voice, normally soft and even despite her worries, uttered words that made him swallow hard.
‘I have seen someone,’ she whispered. ‘A face I remember. I feel scared.’
The hand slowly slipped from his, as if the emphasis it had provided were no longer needed.
Sam edged forward in his seat. He’d seen her stressed or worried about things before – twists and turns in her asylum claim, hassles at the centre, sadness and longing for the child she’d left behind in Eritrea, the husband from whom she’d become separated on the boat trip from Africa – but this was different, a fear that had contorted her face.
‘Has this person done something to you?’
‘I think so,’ she said. Her face crumpled up in pain and confusion. ‘But I’m not sure.’
When Zahra had emerged from the back of a Polish lorry full of cabbages at Dover and been screened at the port after claiming asylum, there was one part of her story that had not impressed the interviewing officers. When asked how she’d entered Europe, and whether she’d been fingerprinted anywhere else (which would make her the responsibility of the country in question), she stated that, while she remembered leaving Libya in a boat, she had no memory of the next stage of her journey until she found herself wandering the streets of Catania in Sicily. It was this flaky answer that had landed her in Creech Hill, her detention considered a fast-track case that would result in deportation. But as the medical staff at Creech Hill had discovered, Zahra Idris’s case was by no means cut and dry.
‘That period you cannot remember,’ said Sam. ‘Does it feel as if you might have met him then?’
Zahra nodded.
‘Can you describe him?’
There was a visible shudder, as if revisiting the man’s face caused genuine revulsion.
‘He’s white. He was wearing a suit. He came into the new recreation room with some others. He has grey hair. About your height.’
Her eyes had glassed. She was shaking.
‘You can’t remember what he did to you. But you’re scared.’
She looked up. Face stony. ‘When I saw him, I felt terror. Like he’d done something evil.’
Sam’s heart had begun to beat faster, as if over-empathising with Zahra. Beneath this anxiety was a sadness for her. He thought of all she’d been through. And now she was facing this.
‘Evil,’ he repeated.
Zahra’s mouth opened but the sound that came out was a dry croak. As if her brain were not able to formulate the words.
‘Have you told the guards?’
Zahra broke her stare and looked at her hands resting on the table, the fingers splayed wide. Her head moved rapidly from side to side.
‘Do you want me to talk to someone about it?’
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Help me.’
Then, in a sudden movement, she was on her feet. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, looked at Sam one last time, then moved as swiftly out of the room as she’d entered.
Chapter 4
Creech Hill Immigration Centre
Watching them through a one-way mirror that looked down on the visitors’ hall, Tapper felt his heart pound against his ribs like a jackhammer. He couldn’t be sure, but he had the horrible feeling that the woman had told her visitor.
She was now walking away, her face stricken. Tapper glanced at the man. He looked like he’d seen a ghost.
Fuck, thought Tapper.
The one-way mirror looked down on a hall and several rows of tables, most occupied by detainees and visitors.
The governor was wittering on about confidentiality, and how tables were spaced sufficiently to allow a degree of privacy.
‘All the tables are pre-booked,’ he added. ‘Otherwise it would be a right bloody bun-fight.’
‘I see,’ said Tapper, his body cold.
Some naively optimistic part of him had begun to wonder whether he hadn’t simply locked eyes with a paranoid detainee who happened to look like the person from his darkest nightmare. But then a woman had walked into the room below, her back to them. She was black, a ponytail of curls bouncing as she moved, shoulders hunched. She wore jogging bottoms, trainers and a t-shirt. She sat down at a table, opposite a white man. It was then she looked to her side and behind, and Tapper realised, with a stabbing sensation in his stomach, that his initial impression had been absolutely right. It was her. A face he could never forget.
To his side, a guard was sitting in front of a pair of monitors. Tapper noticed that one screen was filled with row upon row of columns and boxes, each filled with names and times.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, though he’d already guessed the answer.
The governor nodded to the guard. ‘It corresponds to the booking system,’ said the man. ‘Tells us who’s at which table.’
Tapper looked down at the hall. The man was pulling on his coat, readying to leave. Tapper made a mental note of the table’s location.
‘Interesting. May I have a look?’ Tapper was already resigned to the prospect of never discovering her name. Her meeting was over, after all.
Another nod from the governor. The guard shifted his seat a little so that Tapper could move closer. He rested his palms on the desk and leaned in to look at the screen.
‘This is excellent,’ he said. His eyes scanned through the
columns till he found the box that corresponded with the woman’s table.
‘We have to allot thirty minutes for each meeting but they’re often over quicker than expected,’ explained the guard. ‘Even if the table is empty, it remains booked and we can’t use it.’
‘Another human rights issue, I’m afraid,’ muttered the governor. ‘Wastes so much time.’
Tapper stared at the information in the box. Zahra Idris, it read. And Sam Keddie, psychotherapist. 1.10pm – 1.40pm.
He looked down at the hall. The table was empty. He glanced at the time in the corner of the screen. 1.16pm.
So that was her name. Zahra Idris. And she’d told her shrink, he was sure of it.
His mind raced. Who else might she tell? Other detainees was one thing – they were less credible – but what about professionals?
‘I’m interested in how you vet visitors,’ he said, winging it. ‘Presumably you don’t let anyone in.’
‘There’s an assessment process,’ said the governor. ‘Professionals tend to sail through. Family members can take a bit longer. Often we discover people are not who they claim to be.’
‘I can well imagine.’
The guard by Tapper’s side spoke up. ‘You can hover over the detainee’s name for a full list. Look.’
The guard moved his cursor slowly across the screen. As it passed over the detainees’ names, boxes containing anything between two and ten names appeared.
‘This is marvellous,’ said Tapper. ‘May I?’
The governor laughed. ‘Be my guest, Sir Harry. Glad you’re impressed. We try and keep a tight ship.’
Tapper leaned in again and began moving the cursor across the screen. Feigning general interest, he paused three times before he reached Idris. Touching her name with the cursor, he hoped to God the list was small. There was only so much he could remember and Christ, if she was telling the world, then he was truly fucked.
Denial (Sam Keddie Thriller Book 2) Page 1