‘Well, you know Tom. He doesn’t open up. He’s always been good at disguising when things are wrong – in public, I mean. He can seem so lovely and so normal to everyone else, but at home he’s a complete nightmare. His behaviour has been so extreme.’
I wanted to see Tom but it was late and Tara said there was no chance of visiting until the morning.
‘But couldn’t we try and ring to see how he is?’ I said. ‘I need to know he’s all right, at least . . .’
‘The problem with mobile phones is that they confiscate the chargers in case the patients use the electrical cord to hang themselves. So I don’t know . . .’
‘But if he has his mobile on him, surely there will be enough battery for us to talk to him, won’t there?’
I rang Tom’s number, not really expecting a reply. He answered after a dozen rings. His voice sounded tired and distant, but his manner was disconcertingly normal.
‘Oh, hiya. Are you ringing me? I’m not at home, you know . . .’
I slept in the spare bedroom of my brother’s house. Before I switched out the light I looked around the room, which doubled as Tom’s study. The walls were lined with his paintings and with photographs of our parents. One showed Dad in his khaki uniform somewhere in the Middle East and there was a display case with his dog tags and medals. I loved my father and mother and I was sad when they died five years ago; but it struck me that Tom’s sense of loss was a continuing one, an ongoing absence in his life. I dreamed of my brother that night and in my dream I resolved to hold him close, to see him more and to hug him to me.
In the morning there was a text from Ayesha on my phone, apologising for her behaviour after the meeting at the Foreign Office. ‘I was ill-mannered,’ she wrote. ‘It wasn’t your fault and I shouldn’t have burdened you with all my problems. I think it’s because I miss my father and I’m finding it hard to come to terms with him being dead. In any event I’ve decided you are right. We need to go to Pakistan.’
CHAPTER 17
Tara gave me directions to the hospital and I drove through the rain-spattered countryside. The thought of my brother confined against his will stirred memories of our dying father in hospital, vainly pleading to go home. I thought of what Ayesha had been through since the death of hers. I resolved to be more understanding of her concerns and her volatile behaviour.
The psychiatric unit was NHS modern; functional and depressing. I pressed the bell, glanced at the CCTV camera. A voice asked who I was and I gave my name.
‘Thomas is here,’ said the voice. ‘Come in, walk straight down the corridor and wait in the day room.’
The door buzzed open; I was enveloped by a smell of detergent, stale cooking and sweat. A male nurse showed me into a linoleum-floored common room with Formica tables and plastic chairs, a drinks machine and a payphone. A few couples were already chatting, a mother visiting a son, a daughter come to see her father. A young man came in, picked up the receiver of the payphone and listened intently for thirty seconds before replacing it. He left the room disappointed, then returned and repeated the same ritual. A large, muscular patient with tattoos on his arms and neck peered in at the door, making the sign of the cross over us. An orderly watching through an observation window met my eye with a smile.
Tom came in. I embraced him, felt him return my hug then pull away and glance around the room.
‘Hiya, Martin,’ he said. ‘You didn’t need to come, you know . . .’
‘Fucking hell, Tom. What are you doing in this place?’
Tom shrugged.
He saw the tears in my eyes, hastened to reassure me.
‘It’s all right, you know. It’s all right in here. I’m all right.’
I nodded. He seemed a little slower, more deliberate in his speech; but he wasn’t noticeably distressed.
‘Are you sure? Are you sure you’re all right? What the hell were you doing trying to kill yourself?’
He smiled. ‘I wasn’t. I was just in the shed having a ciggie.’
‘You’d lit a barbecue. You were breathing in toxic fumes. And you’d taken pills.’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘You have a wife. And the children. You can’t do things like that to them.’
‘Things like what? I haven’t been feeling well; I’ve been unhappy. Why am I locked up here? I’m not a dangerous lunatic.’
‘No. True. But you might be dangerous to yourself . . .’
‘I’m not. I told you, I was just unhappy. And now the police are going to charge me with assault and affray because I didn’t want them to take me away.’
‘I don’t think they are, Tom. The police know what you’ve been through and Tara says they aren’t going to take any action. But the main thing is to get you well and get you out of here. What have the doctors said?’
‘They’re all very nice. I saw the main doctor this morning and he says they’ve given me a mild sedative. I don’t think he’s too worried; I’m an easy case compared to most of them in here.’
Tom could be moody, but it was true that he didn’t have a violent or aggressive side.
‘The doctor said they’ll have to observe me and assess me before they decide if I can go home. They want to figure out if I’m suicidal. But it’s not hard to know what answers they want you to give them; if you want to get out, you just give them the answers they want to hear.’
‘Yes, of course. But the doctors want to help you, Tom. You want to get out of here and I don’t blame you. But will you promise me at least that you won’t do anything stupid when you get out . . . or that you’ll talk to me if you’re thinking about doing anything?’
Tom shrugged. ‘I suppose so. In any event I won’t be getting out for a while. They have to do all their enquiries before they can let me go.’
I drove back to London feeling sad, reassured and alarmed by turns.
CHAPTER 18
Tom remained in the psychiatric ward. The doctors were worried about discharging him and their assessments dragged on. I went to visit half a dozen times, driving up and down from London, and found my brother generally in good spirits. He had made a lot of friends among the nurses and patients and he told me about them with a glint of amusement in his eye. I asked him if he would be okay if I went away to Pakistan and he said of course he would.
Preparations for the trip were protracted. Ayesha kept adding and removing names from the list of people we were planning to interview, to the point that I wondered if she was serious about going. She agreed we should talk to the local police in Kahin Nahi and to Inspector Iqbal, the man she suspected of leading the cover-up of her father’s murder. She said her great-uncle Guddu would be the best source of information, and she thought that Masood Jilani, the private detective who was making a painfully slow recovery from the bullet that had damaged his spine, might be willing to meet us if we promised him complete confidentiality.
I suggested we should also try to speak to her uncle Ahmed and to the men Ayesha believed to be behind the murder – the crime boss Javed Shafik and his two brothers. At first she agreed but then changed her mind, saying to do so would be too dangerous. I argued that there was little point in flying all the way to Pakistan if we weren’t going to pursue the investigation to its logical conclusion. She was unconvinced. I set out to find a way round her objections.
In my days covering politics in London I had reported on several stories involving Pakistani exiles, ranging from human rights campaigners and billionaires to benefit fraudsters and criminals. One of the men I had interviewed was a politician called Mohammed Asif, who had been forced to flee Pakistan when his party, the United Front, was defeated and banned by the new government. Granted political asylum in Britain, Mohammed Asif had lived for ten years in north London, until the UF’s fortunes revived and he returned to Pakistan in triumph. He had become the Governor of Sindh Province, with a palatial residence in the capital Karachi and considerable influence over the province’s affairs. I wrote to him and he replied tha
t he would be happy to put his authority at our service; he would provide us with the security we needed to visit and interview whomever we wished.
But when I told Ayesha, she frowned and shook her head.
‘There’s no way we can accept this, Martin. You need to write back to him and turn him down. I’m disappointed you did this without consulting me; I would have told you straight away not to do it.’
‘What do you mean? You asked me to help you find out what happened to your father, and that’s what I’m doing.’
‘Well, I’m not prepared to go along with it.’
Tensions that had grown silently between us were crystallising; our personal dramas had left us both on edge. I should have held my tongue, but I didn’t.
‘So is this about control? Are you vetoing this because it was me who came up with it?’
‘Not at all . . .’
‘Then what reason can you possibly have for turning down an offer that’ll help us get to the men who might have killed your dad? I can’t understand that for one minute.’
‘Okay, I’ll tell you why. Pakistanis who offer help like that are all the same – they make promises, they’re as friendly and as helpful as can be, but they’re all devious. They always end up demanding money or asking for favours. They don’t do anything for nothing. They’re out for themselves.’
‘Hang on. Who are “they”? Are you saying all Pakistanis are devious and out for money?’
‘Pretty much. I wouldn’t trust any of them.’
‘Well, I’m astonished, Ayesha. If I had said that, I’d be in court on a charge of inciting racial intolerance. Yet you say these things about the very country your family comes from . . .’
‘I say it because it’s true. Pakistanis in Pakistan see us Brits as a source of money. That’s all. So don’t believe their promises; they’ll end up fleecing you . . .’
If Ayesha really didn’t want to accept the Governor’s help, there was little I could do about it. Part of me suspected she was right about the money-grabbing; part of me wondered if there were other, more complex reasons for her anger.
I went to see Aled Parry-Jones. He had recently returned from Islamabad and was making a documentary on the Pakistani Taliban for the BBC World Service. We met in a café close to Broadcasting House.
‘So how did your joust with the Foreign Office go?’ he asked as we sat down.
I told him the story of our meeting with the minister and he laughed.
‘Oh, so just the tea and sympathy, then? No practical help? Par for the course, I’d say. What’s your next step?’
‘That’s what I wanted to ask you about. Ayesha has finally agreed to come to Pakistan, but there are all sorts of things bothering me. On the most practical level, what should I do about a visa? If I get a journalist visa, do you think they’ll start asking what story I’m working on? Ayesha doesn’t want the authorities to know we are digging into things like police corruption and cover-ups.’
‘She’s probably right. You’d be better off going as a tourist. If you get a journalist visa, you’ll have the ISI tailing you day and night . . .’
‘The ISI?’
‘Military intelligence – they run the country. People forget that Pakistan exists in a constant state of emergency. The terrorist threat is so huge that the place has become a police state.’
‘But why would military intelligence be interested in someone investigating a family murder?’
‘Because you’re foreign. Because all murders are suspect. Can you be sure Ibrahim’s death wasn’t linked to terrorism? Organised crime, if that’s what he was involved in, has close links with the terrorists over there. It’s just like Northern Ireland, where the IRA and the UVF run the smuggling and extortion rackets.’
‘Well, I can’t be certain. I don’t know what Ibrahim was up to, if anything. But when I mentioned terrorism to Ayesha she was furious.’
‘Okay. So look out for the intelligence wallahs. They’re hot as mustard and they’re leery of any foreigner who doesn’t have a transparent reason for being there. The ISI and the army are the only organisations that function properly in Pakistan. All the rest – politicians, businessmen, judges, police – are riddled with crime and corruption. Talking of which, did you check out the taxi driver connection I mentioned to you? Could Ibrahim have been mixed up in any of that stuff?’
‘I’m not sure. But Ayesha seems pretty worried what we might discover. I came up with a way for us to get to the crooks Ibrahim may have been involved with, but she told me to forget it.’
‘Well, again, she might be right. You don’t want to be poking these guys – they can bite!’
‘Sure. But I got a promise from the Governor of Sindh that he’d provide us with security, that we’d have full protection . . .’
Aled shook his head.
‘You mean you’ve been in touch with Mohammed Asif? Can I ask what you know about the guy; about his reputation, I mean?’
‘Only that I interviewed him once back in the day, when he was living in London. He was meant to be a political exile, but it seems he was claiming housing benefit for a house in Edgware that was owned by his brother. I never really got to the bottom of his politics.’
‘I think you might have made a blunder there, Martin. Mohammed Asif is one of the biggest beasts in the United Front party and they’re definitely not people you should fool around with. The UF are a real power in Karachi – Amnesty says they’re up to their necks in summary killings and torture and abuse. But the biggest problem for you is that you’ve probably just tipped off the guys who are the political patrons of the thugs you suspect of murdering Ibrahim . . .’
‘What? The UF and organised crime?’
‘Sure. The phoney public works schemes that Javed Shafik and mafiosi like him are awarded are all set up by the UF. They’ll be helping Javed cream off public funds and taking their cut, too. If you’ve told them what you’re going over there to investigate, I think you might have put yourself in serious danger . . .’
CHAPTER 19
I had researched the death of Kelly Stafford in Burnley, scouring the records for any mention of local taxi driver Ibrahim Rahman. But it was a historical case and beyond the newspaper reports there was little to go on. I rang the Burnley police, who wouldn’t or couldn’t comment. The officers who worked on the investigation had left the force and I didn’t have enough time to go looking for them in their bungalows and retirement homes. I thought about raising it again with Ayesha – I wondered if she too harboured suspicions of her father and if this were the reason for her fear of what our probing might unearth. But I decided against it. We were about to spend a lot of time in each other’s company and I didn’t want the atmosphere to be any more difficult than it already was.
I didn’t tell her what Aled had said about Mohammed Asif and the UF. There seemed little point in further inflaming matters. I went to the Pakistani High Commission in Lowndes Square and got my tourist visa. We booked flights to Karachi with an open return and made a hotel reservation for the first ten days of our stay. We agreed we would see how events played out before deciding how long we would need to be there.
Our flight was booked for 9 a.m. on Thursday. On Tuesday evening Tom emailed to say that his mental health tribunal, the psychiatric assessment that would determine his fate, had been fixed for the following afternoon, Wednesday. But there was a lot to do in the day and a half before I left for Pakistan; I emailed to ask if he would be okay without me. His reply was reassuringly unequivocal.
Thanks, Martin. You definitely do not need to come tomorrow. I am certain the tribunal will go in my favour and they will let me out. I have spoken to all the doctors and they confirm I am completely safe. I have a good Mental Health Advocate who says he cannot see anything going wrong. I am so looking forward to getting back to my own home.
I am really grateful to you for all your help, for supporting me and for liaising with Tara and the children. I just want to tell you t
hat the hug you gave me before you left last time meant a very great deal to me xx
Relieved, I wrote back:
Thank you, Tom. I haven’t done much except to keep the conversation going between you and Tara, but I think that is the most important thing at the moment, yes?
I love you, bro, and I want things to be good for you.
Martin xxx
I packed for the flight with a fretful heart, waiting for the news that would stop me going. On Wednesday evening a text pinged on my phone. I knew it would be Tom telling me his application had been refused.
‘I am out! Hooray! Love, Tom xxx’
On Thursday morning I woke refreshed.
Ayesha and I had agreed to meet at check-in so we could get seats together, but I was early and went to get a coffee in the airport terminal. I was at the cash register when my phone rang.
‘Martin, I can’t go home.’
‘What do you mean, Tom? Of course you can go home.’
‘I can’t. I’m not allowed within 500 yards of the house . . .’
The options flashed before me. I knew the right thing to do; I should cancel my trip and go to rescue my brother. But other thoughts crowded in.
‘Okay. Where are you now, Tom? Can you find a café and sit there until I ring you back?’
I called Tara but there was no reply. Tom picked up as soon as I rang his number.
‘Listen, Tom. This is some cock-up. I have to get on a plane to Karachi. Could you go and stay with Rick Taylor tonight? You’ve probably got no money, right? So here are the Internet codes for my bank account.’ I read them out to him. ‘Take as much cash as you need. If this isn’t sorted by the weekend and you can’t carry on imposing on Rick, you should go and see Rob Butcher, the estate agent who sold Mum and Dad’s house. I’ll ring him and say you might need a short-term let. You can use my bank account for the deposit and the rent. When I get back from Pakistan we can figure out what to do about a longer-term solution. In the meantime, don’t drink, Tom. And please don’t do anything foolish, okay?’
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