Chaudhry shook his head. ‘No, miss. It was not Shafik. The person who was also interested in the land your father bought was much closer to home . . . it was his brother Ahmed.’
Ayesha looked deflated. ‘Ahmed? But Ahmed’s interest could have been completely innocent. It could have been two brothers trying to secure the ancestral family lands . . .’
Chaudhry said nothing, but I had a sense that he was puzzled by Ayesha’s response.
‘Can I ask you something, Chaudhry sahib?’ Ayesha was following her own train of thought. ‘Did my father mention me by name?’
‘Yes, young lady, he did. And he also mentioned one of your brothers – with the name of Tariq, if I remember correctly.’
‘Yes, that’s right, Tariq. And what did he say about us? Can you remember?’
‘It was some time ago and I have a lot of people coming through these doors. Your father did not speak very much, but I sensed he was anxious, perhaps even scared about the business he was engaged in. I had the impression that he was involved in a task of considerable importance; and that it had your safety and your brother’s safety at the heart of it.’
Ayesha blinked. ‘Our safety? How could buying land out here in Karachi have anything to do with our safety? I live in London and Tariq lives in Burnley. That doesn’t make sense . . .’
‘I told you, young lady, my memory is not clear. I can recall nothing more from the conversations I had with Mr Rahman; but one thing that does not fade is the written evidence. I have checked these files and I was not mistaken. Look, here are the fards relating to your father’s land purchases and here are the signatures on them. The land is owned jointly, by your father . . . and Javed Shafik.’
‘But that can’t be true!’ There was pain in Ayesha’s voice. ‘There’s no way my father and Shafik could have been working together! . . . Did you forge the fards because Shafik told you to? Did he bribe you, or blackmail you into putting his name on my father’s land?’
The patwari smiled. ‘Oh no, Ms Rahman; far from it. I fear your explanation that Shafik quarrelled with your father is mistaken. Javed Shafik and your father came in here together; they were the best of friends . . .’
High above Karachi, storm clouds unleashed the restive energy that had been stirring within them; the current crackled in thunder claps that shook the walls and rain that lashed the zinc of the patwari’s roof.
CHAPTER 24
Karachi stumbled. Street drains, clogged with the ubiquitous rubbish that disfigures Pakistani cities, blocked within minutes. Water filled the carriageways and spilled onto the pavements. Buses, rickshaws, cars snarled into citywide gridlock as exhausts filled with moisture and motorcycles backfired. Outside the patwari’s office a stalled yellow Toyota had halted the traffic; the driver was kicking the car, trying to push it aside as lorry-drivers yelled abuse. Pedestrians leapt precariously from one island to the next, seeking to avoid the snakes in the ankle-deep water. A cow wandered disconsolately amid the traffic.
We crawled through the rainstorm. The driver took shortcuts and diversions, threading down alleyways, driving through gardens. But a mile from our hotel, the traffic congealed. Dusk was falling. Ayesha, who had said little since we left the patwari’s office, lost patience.
‘Can you ask the driver where the nearest bar is?’ she said to Imran. ‘And I don’t mean some side of the road tea and Pepsi place. I need a drink.’
‘I’m not sure that would be very safe, Ayesha. This is not a lovely neighbourhood. And all the bars with alcohol are run by bootleggers, inevitably connected to criminal elements. They can spot you are from abroad . . .’
‘For God’s sake, Imran, just do what I say! We aren’t your mates, or little children you have to look after; we are paying you to do what we tell you to do!’
Imran lowered his eyes and addressed the driver in Urdu. After a brief conversation he reported that there was a bar with alcohol two blocks off the main road; we would need a password, which the driver provided, and prices would be steep.
‘At last! Thank you!’ Ayesha gathered up her belongings and turned to me. ‘I don’t suppose Mr Teetotal Imran is going to join us, but what about you, Martin? Are you going to come and keep an eye on me?’
Illicit alcohol in a rain-soaked Karachi bar was a meagre attraction; but I was concerned for Ayesha’s safety and I knew that abandoning her would deepen the friction between us.
‘I suppose so. But can we agree that we aren’t going to stay all evening? A couple of drinks and then back to the hotel, okay?’
Ayesha shrugged and opened the car door. I told Imran to go home; we would meet as usual for breakfast in the morning.
We found the bar easily enough. It resembled most Pakistani cafés, with billboards advertising Coke and Fanta and crates of indeterminate liquid in plastic bottles stacked around a few folding tables and chairs. The owner seemed surprised when Ayesha spoke the password the driver had given us, but we didn’t look like policemen so he waved us through to a room behind the counter. There were half a dozen customers, all men, with glasses in their hand, puffing on the dark Morven cigarettes that give public places in Pakistan their indelible aroma. The looks we received told us we were interlopers.
Ayesha ordered without asking me what I wanted; a boy brought us two tumblers with cheap whisky. She downed hers in a gulp and motioned me to do the same, a ritual repeated once then once again. The alcohol infused us with a warmth we hadn’t shared since the days of our first meetings; the other’s opinions no longer seemed so offensive, so unpardonably wrong. But we remained wary. We spoke of the rain, the traffic, the hotel, the dirt and smells, avoiding the issues that divided us. Gradually Ayesha relaxed. She mentioned Peter, fleetingly, but I knew she wanted me to pick up on a topic she had avoided since our vexed discussion weeks ago. She was pressing ahead with wedding plans. There would be autumn ceremonies in both church and mosque to cater to each of the happy families.
‘So how do you like that?’ she said.
‘Very much. I’m pleased for you.’
‘I can’t invite you, of course.’
She was teasing now, confiding but prickly, looking to provoke a response. She did.
‘Oh, really? Why can’t you invite me?’
‘Because people would talk. They’d think we’d been having an affair.’
Ayesha had placed her hand on my wrist. I should have pushed it away.
‘I hardly think people would say that,’ I said. ‘We are working together.’
‘Yes, but we have been spending a lot of time together. That’s unusual for my community, at least without a chaperone . . .’
Ayesha laughed then grew serious.
‘I have been lonely, you know. And scared. There haven’t been many people who’ve understood that. To the world I appear so . . . self-sufficient. I know we’ve argued, but at least you have thought about me as a person. And you’ve engaged with all this . . . instead of just sweeping it under the carpet.’
‘Well, I’m doing my job. I can’t write your story if I don’t try to understand you. Although it hasn’t been easy.’
Ayesha smiled. ‘At first I didn’t like you; you seemed so arrogant. But I’ve got to know you now. And I think you have taken a genuine interest in me. It’s the first time I’ve had that since my dad died.’
A show of empathy can be a powerful tool. So many people are starved of it that even a little compassion unblocks many things. I pushed her hand away.
‘Come on; let’s go. I think the rain’s easing. And you’re getting drunk. We need to eat something.’
‘Oh, okay . . .’ She looked surprised. ‘Can I just ask why you are saying that? Why don’t you want to have a drink with me?’
‘We’ve had a drink, Ayesha. And it’s getting late.’
She shook her head. ‘Is it because you believe what DSP Iqbal and patwari Chaudhry have been saying?’
‘No, it’s not that . . .’
‘I think it is . . . I
think it’s because you’ve decided my dad’s guilty, so I must be guilty too . . .’
‘That’s nonsense, Ayesha. Even if all those things were true about your father, how could that make you—?’
‘I think you hate me, Martin. I think you’ve decided I’m a liar.’
‘No, it’s not that—’
‘I think you only signed up for this because you want to make money out of me!’
Ayesha’s eyes had glazed; her voice was raised. The men in the bar were looking at us.
‘You want to write some crap book and make a lot of money! Well, if you want my help you’ll need to pay me a fee. You’ll need to pay me for all the help that I’ll be giving you in your research . . .’
I wanted to point out that she had been insisting on paying me a fee. I tried in vain to calm her.
‘Otherwise, don’t count on me to carry on “working with you”, as you so dismissively put it. I’m not “working” like you are, Martin . . . This is my bloody life we’re talking about!’
The men in the bar were transfixed by the foreigners fighting in their space. Two of them stood up and walked towards us. I thought they were offering to intervene, but one asked for a light while the other leaned over the table between me and Ayesha. Almost too late I realised he had picked up her handbag. As I rose to my feet the man with the cigarette pushed me, but I avoided him and set off after the fellow with the bag. He too was clearly worse for drink, because I caught him and he didn’t resist. I grabbed the handbag, went back to the bar.
Ayesha looked bewildered. I pulled her to her feet then out into the street. The rain had stopped. We flagged down a tuk-tuk for the mile or so back to the hotel. In the cramped seat behind the driver I felt Ayesha’s shoulder nestle into mine. She mumbled a thank you.
‘But I think you don’t understand what I’ve been through since my father died. For me it’s not just a detective story. You want to find out who killed him, like Sherlock Holmes or something. But I need to know why . . . and who he was. Because that changes everything – the way I look at him, at my life, at myself. Right now I don’t know who I am or where I’m coming from, Martin . . . You don’t understand, because nothing like that – nothing so massive that it shakes you right to the core – has ever happened to you. You’ve been lucky . . .’
When I got back to my room I found an envelope pushed under the door. The handwritten message from the hotel reception was timed at 12.32, when we were on our way to the patwari’s:
Mrs Tara has telephoned. Tom has killed himself.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 25
After Tom’s death I stopped work on Ayesha’s book. The hours spent in Karachi waiting for a flight home had been interminably lonely. Watching the sun rise then set through the drawn curtains of my hotel room I had felt life crowding in on me with fears and reproaches. I tried to put my brain into sleep mode; I had been trying to do so ever since. But the mind turns willy-nilly, churning over what has been and what is to come. Reminders of the past said ‘it wasn’t too late then; you still could have done something’. On the plane home I found the seat I’d sat in for the outward journey; I remembered who was sitting near me, what I’d eaten, what film I’d watched, and the wrenching, tearing in my gut said, ‘Tom was alive; it still wasn’t too late.’
Back in England I devoted myself to the feverish, nagging imperative of uncovering what had happened. Perhaps knowing would help explain. Or perhaps I just needed to be doing something, anything to escape the circling, self-embedding regrets.
I heard intermittently from Ayesha – texts, emails, voicemails – with messages that swerved from sympathy to anger and rebukes. She wanted me to contact her; she wanted to tell me how sorry she was about Tom and about our quarrel in Karachi; she wanted to share some new, important facts she had discovered after I left Pakistan; she wanted me to promise I would write her father’s story.
I didn’t reply. But her voice was in my ears; in my dreams her story mingled with memories of Tom, her dead father shading disconcertingly into the image of my dead brother. I spent my days investigating my brother’s death, my nights dreaming of Ibrahim’s, until the narratives became entangled in my mind. I was looking for answers about two deaths, in two places, in two minds about resuming contact with Ayesha.
I learned that Tom had tried to see Tara. He had gone to the house and been arrested for breaching the restraining order against him. Tara had made a statement to the police and agreed to testify in court. Tom was facing a criminal record that would disqualify him from working in any job that meant mixing with people or, absurdly, with animals. He couldn’t work in shops, in schools, in parks or even as a volunteer dog walker. It was this last one that upset him the most. When he was five he founded a society called the Be Kind to Animals Club, the BKTA, and went knocking on people’s doors asking if they had any pets, checking they were being nice to them.
I know that all marriages are a mystery and rarely does fault lie solely on one side. But I found it hard to accept that Tara had had my brother arrested. I felt anger and sorrow. I couldn’t bring myself to talk to her. I struggled to imagine Tom’s thoughts and feelings in the days that led up to his suicide. Tracing his movements, where he had been and whom he had met, seemed a way to scratch at the conundrum. Tom had left the solicitor a contact address that I didn’t recognise. I checked with Rob Butcher the estate agent and discovered that it was a rental property, a small furnished house whose owners were away and wanted a short-term let. Tom had taken it on a rolling contract with a four-week notice period. Rob gave me the keys.
I braced myself for the company of death – no one had said how long it had been before Tom’s body was found – but the odour in the hall was not of decay. It was a stinging, oily presence and it hung heavy in the air. I opened the curtains; the lounge was littered with papers. In the kitchen a sleeping bag was crumpled on the tiles; beside it, a whisky bottle and a charred disposable barbecue. Tom had lain in this kitchen; his parents gone, his brother continents away, his wife lost; and this is what remained. Out in the street a dog barked; a baby cried; the sun poked in.
I sat in Tom’s chair and arranged his bank statements and bills in date order. I counted receipts for beer, for cigarettes, for whisky. I found the chit from the Co-op for two disposable barbecues and wondered where the other one had gone.
In Tom’s bedroom the shirts on the rail, the shoes by the bed, the old Soviet propaganda posters on the wall were unnervingly familiar. I picked up a faded black jacket and found it fitted. In a drawer were sleeping pills, some opened, some intact, with names that sounded like characters from a Tolkien fantasy – Lunesta, Zolpidem, Ambien, Rozerem. There were receipts from unregulated Internet websites accompanied by advertisements for painkillers and antidepressants. It jarred that Tom, depressed and a risk to himself, was able to buy such quantities of pills when high-street chemists refuse to sell customers a second jar of mini aspirins.
A half-unpacked rucksack lay in the corner, filled with his camping gear – waterproofs, woollen socks and shirts, well-worn hiking boots. It looked as if he had been rummaging in it, perhaps pulling out the sleeping bag that he’d taken to the kitchen and drawn tight over his head to trap the fumes. But if he was unpacking the rucksack, wouldn’t that mean he had been using it? Had he returned from a trip? I unzipped a pocket and found an Ordnance Survey map of the Llyn Peninsula. As children we had spent summer holidays there, in remote cottages outside Llanbedrog or Bodwi Bach, hiking in the mountains with our parents, swimming in the sea, shopping in the market at Pwllheli. Had Tom been looking for the memories of our childhood, seeking solace in the past?
I found his car outside. In the glove compartment was a petrol receipt from Abersoch and a postcard of the church on the beach at Aberdaron. A wave of memories swept over me like a rip tide drawing me back to a shared past that now I shared with no one. I sank into the driver’s seat and it felt right; neither it nor the mirrors needed adjusting. I coul
d smell him in the car – the aroma of his cigarettes, of his outdoors apparel, his tent and anorak. I remembered the last time he had driven down to see me, pictured the car turning into the drive. When he came in he smelled of fields and grass. We sat on the couch and spoke about what we should do with our parents’ house; Tom asked if I would edit some short stories he had been writing. He was looking to the future. I gave him the dates I would be in Pakistan and he put them into his phone. Now I wonder if he took my absence into account when deciding when to kill himself. We spoke about the problems in his marriage and discussed what would happen if it fell apart. He sounded sanguine, but I should have pressed him. Looking back, I think his optimism was forced. He was still the scared six-year-old who told the policeman to ‘ask him’.
I returned to the house. I wanted to take our father’s medals that Tom had hung on the wall and I needed a bag to put them in. Tom was a Labour Party supporter who shopped at the Co-op, so I wasn’t surprised when I found Co-op bags-for-life in the kitchen. He hadn’t overtaxed them.
CHAPTER 26
‘So how are you coping? How has it been?’ There was something in Denise’s tone; it took me a moment to realise she was addressing me not as a colleague but as a patient.
‘Numbing,’ I said. ‘I talk to him a lot. There are things I don’t understand. Things only he can explain.’
‘Yes,’ Denise said. ‘The suicide of someone close raises questions we can rarely hope to answer. And that knocks us off balance. Can you tell me how your feelings have evolved? Is that something you’re able to do?’
‘Most of all I feel great sorrow and great pity for Tom. I feel deep sadness and loss for myself. Regret and guilt about the past. Anger with some people’s behaviour. And terrible bewilderment about the whole thing. That’s where I’ve got to.’
‘I think we discussed this when you asked me about your friend whose father was killed. We spoke about the unanswered questions that make death so painful to cope with.’
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