The door opened and Ayesha was surprised to see her Uncle Ahmed. She hadn’t seen Ahmed for years, not since he and her father had fallen out so angrily that years of silence had followed, more than two decades of smouldering resentment between the brothers and chilly estrangement between the two branches of the Rahman family. Like Ibrahim, Ahmed had lived in Burnley, but they barely acknowledged each other’s existence. Ayesha and her brothers were told to look away if they encountered Ahmed’s children in the street.
Ayesha stared at her uncle, trying to square his presence with the events of the past twenty-four hours.
‘Uncle Ahmed?’
The swarthy man with a waxed moustache stepped forward from the shadow of the doorway. Ahmed was wearing a shalwar kameez, with a prayer cap on his head. Ayesha, who had only ever seen him in English shirt and trousers, found his appearance disconcerting. When he leaned towards her she caught the smell of curry on his breath.
‘My child.’ Ahmed ushered her into the house. ‘Come and rest.’ He clicked his fingers to a serving boy. ‘Tea for the memsahib. Serve it in the public room. Bring the armchair.’
Ahmed fussed over his niece, full of condolences. His sympathy was unnerving. She asked where her grandmother was and Ahmed spread his hands. ‘My mother is old; this tragedy has upset her mind. I have sent her to the house of her brother, Guddu, so he can care for her until her son is buried.’
Ayesha strained to take in what her uncle was telling her. ‘Where is my father, Uncle Ahmed?’ she said. ‘What happened to him? How did he die?’
Ahmed tilted his head to the side, concern on his face. ‘Ibrahim has been washed and anointed as the Qur’an enjoins us. He has been wrapped in the funeral sheets and will be buried before the sun goes down. As for the nature of his demise, the police station commander has recorded the death as suicide. I was not in Kahin Nahi when my brother passed. I have no further information.’
Ayesha put her hands to her face, hunched in the armchair in the public room. ‘Uncle Ahmed,’ she said, ‘this has been such a shock. I had no idea Daddy was unhappy. I never ever suspected he would think of killing himself. Why would he do such a thing?’
‘I repeat: I was not here when Ibrahim died, so I have no insight into his state of mind. If I may say so, you also have been living away from him. You did not know Ibrahim was unhappy, but perhaps you did not keep in touch with him as you should have. If you had stayed close, perhaps you would have known what was troubling your father. Perhaps you could have helped him.’
Ahmed’s words stung her. The thought that she had neglected her duty as a daughter had been in Ayesha’s mind since she learned of her father’s death. But it was hard to hear it from an uncle who had never been his brother’s keeper, whose coldness might have contributed to Ibrahim’s despair. Ayesha was about to say as much, but kept silent. It was a shared tragedy; recriminations would help no one.
‘You are right,’ she said. ‘I didn’t do as much for him as I should have done. I know he wanted to see me more and hear more about what I was doing. But I had my job in London; my life was in London – that’s why I couldn’t be there for him in Burnley. It’s not an excuse. I should have been a better daughter and now it’s too late . . .’
Ayesha burst into tears. Ahmed soothed her. ‘Don’t cry, my child. Things happen in this world. People despair of life and it is no one’s fault. We must trust in Allah. Life must take its course . . .’
Ayesha composed herself. It felt uncomfortable to share her grief with a man she hardly knew and whom her father had taught her to avoid. It struck her as strange that her grandmother would not be present at her son’s funeral; and she wanted to speak to Guddu, who seemed to know the most about her father’s death. But when she asked Ahmed to take her to Guddu’s house, he shook his head. ‘You must excuse me, my child. I have arrangements to make for Ibrahim’s burial. Sunset is not far off and there is still much work to do.’
When Ahmed left, Ayesha rang Guddu’s number on her mobile. Fifteen minutes later he was beside her, his old man’s eyes bleary with tears. His narrow, veined hands were shaking with sorrow. When he embraced her she felt the fragility of his emaciated body. As a girl in Pakistan and on her later childhood visits Ayesha had always loved Guddu and she sensed that he loved her. He had the same openness of character and emotional frankness as his sister, Ayesha’s grandmother, and her younger son, Ayesha’s father. Guddu motioned her into the garden. They walked through the long grass that scraped their legs, scattering the goats, seeking out the shade of the jacarandas.
Guddu was anxious to tell her something and it was easier to communicate now face to face. In a mixture of Urdu and English he consoled her, squeezed her hand, shared her grief. Then he spoke about the night her father died. Ibrahim had been in Kahin Nahi for several weeks, he said, staying at his mother’s house ‘while he was carrying out his business’. The house was large and rambling; Ibrahim slept in a ground floor bedroom that opened onto a terrace overlooking the garden.
‘I cannot be certain,’ Guddu said, ‘but now that I ponder upon it I recall several days on which unknown persons came to my attention in the vicinity of my sister’s home. I paid no heed. But last night I was sitting with my sister in the public room, Ibrahim had retired and I was about to leave for home. At that point it seems to me that I heard voices whispering in the garden and they were speaking not Urdu or Sindhi but Pathan. I say again that I may be mistaken, but with the benefit of hindsight it appears to me that I heard several bangs or blows emanating from the part of the house where Ibrahim was quartered.’
Guddu glanced at Ayesha, trying to gauge the impact his words were making.
‘My sweet girl,’ he said, ‘I do not wish to nurture unfounded suspicions, but subsequent events have given me food for thought. My sister became aware of Ibrahim’s fate when she went to his room with his late-night cocoa. Finding him on the floor, she despatched the serving boy to alert me. I telephoned to the police station and spoke to the Station In-Charge, Inspector Iqbal Hafiz. I was surprised to learn that the police already knew of Ibrahim’s death. Iqbal told me not to concern myself, that this was a case of suicide and his men were on the scene. When I hurried to your grandmother’s house I found men in uniform already there. I asked to see my nephew’s body, but was told that the bedroom had been sealed and Ibrahim’s remains taken to the morgue.’
‘But Guddu,’ Ayesha said, ‘how could the police have known that Daddy was dead? You had only just rung them . . .’
Guddu frowned. ‘That has puzzled me. And there are other things. The police showed uncharacteristic efficiency in compiling their First Investigation Report, to the extent that they had it ready when I arrived. As the closest literate relative, I was told to sign the FIR on behalf of the family, confirming that Ibrahim had committed suicide. They would not listen when I spoke of the Pathans whispering in the garden or the noise I heard coming from Ibrahim’s bedroom. It felt as if the policemen had their story fixed.’
‘But that can’t be right. The police wouldn’t lie. What reason would they have? If they say it was suicide, then surely it must be.’
‘Perhaps I am mistaken; I dearly hope I am. But Pakistan is not England, my love. Not everything here is done the way it is over there.’
It was less than twenty-four hours since Ayesha had learned of her father’s death. To hear now that he may have been murdered and the police were somehow covering it up added pain that felt too cruel to bear. Perhaps it would be best to ignore what Guddu was saying, to let events take their course? That would be the simplest way, the easiest for her . . . But the thought of her dead father and the ordeal of his final moments would not leave Ayesha. She had failed him in life, she told herself; she must not fail him in death. Letting matters drop, simply accepting whatever might have happened to him would be a betrayal. She was not going to do that.
‘So how do we find the truth?’
‘There is a way,’ Guddu said. ‘It will not
be pleasant. But if the police are unwilling to help, we must do things for ourselves. We must see your father’s body. When I went to the morgue they refused to let me in. But even they would not have the effrontery to deny a daughter the right to see her father.’
Ayesha looked doubtful, but Guddu insisted. ‘It is our only chance. You must open up the winding sheet and discover what state your father’s body is in. We must not let them get away with this – for Ibrahim’s sake . . .’
At the entrance to the morgue Ayesha and Guddu found a group of men with cigarettes in their mouths and guns in their hands. Ayesha recognised one of them as the man who had opened the door of her grandmother’s house. When she asked Guddu who they were, he frowned. ‘They are the ones who kept me away from Ibrahim’s body. I don’t know who they work for, but they are powerful men, more powerful than the police.’
The men demanded Guddu and Ayesha’s identification documents. They tried to bar their path. But Guddu spoke to them with an air of authority. When he told them that Ayesha was Ibrahim’s daughter come to see her father the men exchanged hurried whispers. One of them took out a mobile phone and began tapping in a number, but Guddu forced the issue. ‘Have you people no shame? She must be allowed to see her father. The Prophet, peace be upon him, will curse those who turn away an orphan!’
The men moved aside to let Ayesha into the building, but when Guddu made to follow they pushed him away.
It was dark in the morgue, the only sliver of light from a ventilation grille in the external wall. Ayesha’s eyes grew used to the gloom. A row of shrouded corpses made her gasp. She forced herself to step forward, examining the tags on the bodies until she found the one marked Ibrahim Rahman. Pity, revulsion and awe washed through her. This final meeting with the father she had adored, fought with and consoled could not have been more unsettling. She needed time to make peace with him, but there was none; she craved the dignity of a measured farewell, but events were rushing her on.
She felt the contours of her father’s body beneath the tightly wound shroud, placed her hands on his chest, his arms and shoulders. But she could not bring herself to unwrap the cloth; the whiteness of the funeral sheet was all that lay between her and the horror beneath. She was turning away when she heard Guddu’s voice. In the silent morgue it startled her; she couldn’t see where it came from until she spotted a shadow at the ventilation grille. ‘Ayesha, you must hurry. The men are phoning their bosses. Have you unwrapped him?’
Ayesha shook herself. ‘I’m trying, Guddu. But it’s not easy. I don’t know what I’ll find . . .’
‘I know, love; I know. But you must do it. Do it for his sake!’
She located the loose end of her father’s winding sheet and tugged at it. The material began to unravel. She made out the top of Ibrahim’s head with the little bald patch he had taken such care to disguise with his Brylcreem and comb-overs. The familiarity of it jolted her; the thought that she would never see him again, never tease him about his hair, his paunch, his self-mocking pretence at manly vanity.
She pulled again at the cloth. Ibrahim’s face was visible now, his eyes closed, his features serene. But there was something odd about the side of his head. She pulled away more of the shroud and saw it was covered in blood. Ayesha wanted to scream, but Guddu was whispering through the grille, urging her to press on.
To release the next fold of cloth she had to lift her father’s head. She slid her hand under his neck, but it sank into his flesh. The back of his head was missing. Ayesha vomited on the floor. She counted the gashes that could have been caused only by the most violent of blows; she noted the weal around her father’s throat where a noose of wire had buried itself in his flesh.
Guddu’s voice came again at the grille. ‘Ayesha! Put back the shroud! They’re coming. They will kill us if they know we’ve opened the body!’
The men were shouting to her. ‘Come out, memsahib! The sun is setting. We have to complete the burial . . .’
‘. . . or the old man won’t get his seventy-two virgins!’ shouted another, and there was a burst of laughter.
Ayesha heard the warnings. She didn’t doubt their lives were in danger. But she couldn’t bring herself to do it. The thought that wrapping her father back in his funeral sheet would be the last thing she would ever do for him was too much to bear. She stood helpless over the body.
‘Closing time, ladies and gentlemen! Drink up; we’re closing.’
The voice of the bar manager interrupted her story. Ayesha was in tears. She had spoken for nearly two hours and held herself together with dignity. But the memory of her father’s injuries, his ligatured neck and battered skull, had finally been too much. I placed my hand on her arm and she forced herself to smile.
‘You’re upset,’ I said. ‘Let’s stop, shall we?’
Ayesha shook her head. ‘I want to tell you everything. I haven’t spoken like this to anyone. I’d like another drink.’
I looked to the waiter, but he made a gesture to say the bar was closing. ‘Let me try him,’ Ayesha said. ‘I think he’s Pakistani. I can use my Urdu.’
‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I’m pretty certain he’s Spanish.’ We both laughed.
I could have prolonged our conversation – we could have gone to another bar – but the truth is I was happy to suspend Ayesha’s tale. I had begun the evening with no interest in her story, but something had stirred. The narrative seemed to be settling into the plucky-heroine genre, a battle against dark forces with an outcome either tragic or triumphant. But perhaps not . . . Turning points are tangled things and the knots can be tricky to unpick. I knelt to examine the broken heel of Ayesha’s shoe and managed to push it back into place. I told her it should last until the taxi got her home.
CHAPTER 3
Ayesha had repelled me with her caustic manner then filled me with sympathy. I surprised myself by how completely I took her side. She had a fierceness about her; to the world she appeared tough and unfeeling, yet I felt that I understood her. The arrogance hid a wounded girl who needed help.
I was curious, too, about her father, the enigmatic Ibrahim who had gone from fond parent to torture victim in what appeared to be a sadistic murder. In life as in fiction, we are drawn into people’s stories by the lure of outcomes.
Ayesha’s flat was at the top of a Victorian mansion block overlooking the Regent’s Canal. She answered the door in jeans and a T-shirt. She was working on a pitch to the troubled Tesco group, an IT system that would fix the catastrophic glitches in their accounts reporting, boost the group’s slipping image and bolster Rahburn’s reputation. Meeting her again after the emotional intensity of the previous week’s evening in the bar was awkward. Ayesha was, if not cold, business-like. I hardly expected the same confessional ardour, but I was surprised how far she had retreated from self-revelation. She had opened up too much; now she was irked, embarrassed, distant.
I sat on her white sofa and drank her black Nespresso. She was wary about why I had come back and why I had changed my mind about wanting to write about her. I tried small talk but I couldn’t get her talking. I asked her to resume her story; she responded reluctantly.
She had succeeded in rewrapping her father’s body before the men came to carry him off. They seemed suspicious but didn’t say anything; perhaps they feared they would be blamed for letting her into the morgue. When she had tried to follow them, they pushed her away; women were not welcome at an Islamic funeral. She went with Guddu to see her grandmother, but the old woman was too distracted by grief to speak to anyone. At the funeral feast, she found some of the men who had been guarding the morgue talking to her Uncle Ahmed. When Ayesha told him she didn’t believe her father had committed suicide, he frowned and asked what evidence she had. Guddu had warned her not to tell anyone about their discoveries in the morgue, so she told Ahmed she simply could not accept that Ibrahim had killed himself.
Ahmed left her in the care of his surly friends and came back two hours later with the Police
Station In-Charge. Inspector Iqbal seemed flustered. ‘I have some news. We have determined that Mr Rahman did not commit suicide. We have determined that Mr Rahman was murdered by the administration of poison. We have two miscreants in custody who have confessed to the crime. I have now sealed this dossier.’
Her father’s death had become a murder. But why were the police talking about poison? Ayesha had found head injuries and ligature marks. Without telling anyone, she scoured the Karachi phone book and hired a private detective. Masood Jilani was a long-serving former policeman and had come across such scenarios in the past. He said the poisoning story smacked of a charade mounted by a police department bribed to cover up a crime. The arrested ‘miscreants’ would be part of the plot, paid to plead guilty to poisoning in the knowledge that when the case came to trial, months or years later, the judge would be told there had been no poison in the dead man’s body. The prisoners would be released and it would be too late for the authorities to start looking for the real culprits.
Ayesha had been in Pakistan for over a week and needed to fly back to England. There was an IT contract that needed to be wrapped up and she didn’t trust her deputy to clinch it. She told her great-uncle Guddu she would return as soon as she could, but her work kept her tied up in London for the next three months. That was the reason she came to me. A mutual acquaintance, Mike, had told her I could help with her investigation and then write about it in a newspaper or a book. Now she seemed to have cooled on the idea.
‘So there you are. I’ve told you everything. You’re up to date. There’s nothing more I can tell you.’
I had been in her apartment for barely half an hour and she was ready to be rid of me. If I left now I felt I would never see her again. I tried another approach.
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