by M. R. Hall
‘This was new to us, Mrs Cooper,’ Mrs Hassan continued. ‘We knew he had the right values underneath – we had spent eighteen years giving them to him.’ For the first time, her voice cracked. ‘We assumed we had simply to wait for him to come back . . .’
‘You didn’t go to anyone for advice?’
Both shook their heads.
‘Did Rafi ever mention any other friends or associates by name, anyone at the mosque, perhaps?’
‘No,’ Mrs Hassan said. ‘He was very secretive on the matter. He talked a little about his studies, and he had a tutor, Tariq Miah, whom he mentioned once or twice.’
Jenny made a note of the name.
‘Is there anything else I should know about your son – his hobbies, interests? Was he a sportsman?’
Mrs Hassan looked at her husband, then got up from the table and went into the next room. She came back with a folder which she handed to Jenny. She opened it to find a collection of examination certificates. Rafi Hassan had scored top marks in his A levels: Latin, Greek, Arabic and History.
‘He was a gifted scholar,’ Mrs Hassan said. ‘Since he was eight years old he spent all his spare time studying and reading. He played cricket, but not like his brothers. No, not like them. Rafi was an intellectual.’
‘Which must have made the change in him all the more shocking?’ Jenny said.
Neither parent replied.
As she was leaving, Jenny overhead Mr Hassan whisper comfortingly to his wife that he would spend the rest of the afternoon at home. Making her way out between the stone lions, Jenny turned left and headed back towards Kings Heath.
Pulling into the forecourt of Mr Hassan’s store for the second time that day, she saw the young assistant carrying a heavy load of shopping to the car of an elderly customer. Her memory was correct – he did look like the photograph of Rafi she had in her files. She caught him on his way back inside.
‘Excuse me.’ He turned with a polite smile. ‘Hello again. Could we have a word?’
He pointed inside. ‘I’m due to go on the till.’
‘It won’t take a minute.’
‘I can’t—’
‘Do you know what a coroner is?’ Jenny said. ‘You can talk to me now or receive a summons to come to court. Your choice.’
The assistant glanced nervously through the shop window at a colleague who was busy serving a customer. ‘I can’t talk here.’
‘No problem. We’ll go to my car.’
His name was Fazad, one of Mr Hassan’s many nephews. He was eleven when Rafi went missing and said the family hardly mentioned him after that. He had never heard anything about his cousin’s disappearance other than the official explanation that he’d gone abroad, nor had he ever been aware of any of his relations speculating where he had gone to, or with whom. The subject was off-limits, he said, as if it were somehow shameful. He remembered how as a kid Rafi was always held up as the model student, the kind of young man he and his other cousins should aspire to be.
Jenny asked if he knew what had happened during the Christmas vacation.
A queasy look came over Fazad’s face. ‘I don’t want to disrespect my uncle. He’s my boss, too.’
‘Just between us,’ Jenny said. ‘It won’t go any further.’
With another nervous glance into the shop, Fazad said, ‘Rafi gave me a ride in his car when he came back from college, it was a little Audi A3. A few years old but tidy. I asked did his dad buy it for him. He said no, he’d bought it himself with his savings, but he didn’t pay insurance or register it in his name because those were all kafir rules that didn’t apply to Muslims.’
‘Kafirs are non-believers, right?’
‘Yeah . . . I thought it sounded kind of cool, but looking back it was strange. He had the beard and the prayer cap, but he was driving like a maniac, seeing how many cameras could flash him because he wouldn’t get a ticket.’
‘What did his father say?’
‘That’s what the fight was about.’
‘Fight?’
‘It’s what I heard from my cousins – my uncle didn’t like the way he was driving and took the keys away. Rafi beat him up so bad he broke his jaw and busted three of his ribs. His two older brothers took the car down the road that afternoon and set fire to it . . . That was the end of Rafi’s car.’
THIRTEEN
ANNA ROSE CROSBY WAS OFFICIALLY a missing person. Her picture was on page two of the Post, together with an article stating that the ‘brilliant young nuclear scientist’ had been missing for a little over a fortnight. Her mother was described as having been tearful and desperate as she made a moving plea from the front steps of her exclusive Cheltenham home. Jenny found herself unwittingly sucked into the dark, yet somehow thrilling, fantasy the picture editor had created. The colour photograph showed Anna Rose beaming, blonde and innocent: the perfect, unsuspecting bait for a violent sexual predator.
A document landed on her desk. ‘The Toyotas,’ Alison said. ‘Forty-three of them registered in the areas you were interested in. What do you want to do with them?’
‘I’ll have a look through, tick the ones I’d like you to follow up.’
‘The police haven’t got anywhere with those poor Africans in the refrigerated trailer. That’ll be back here tomorrow needing a full inquest. I can’t imagine how I’m going to manage – all the witnesses in Nigeria or wherever they came from.’
‘We’ll cope. Did you get a statement from Madog yet?’
Alison raised her eyebrows.
‘Well, could you do it today?’ Jenny said, straining to remain calm.
‘I can try, but if you remember I’ve got a meeting today – I did tell you.’
‘You did?’
‘Last week. It’s a church event.’
‘Oh—’
Alison said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not deserting you. I’ll be back by two.’
Curiosity got the better of her. Once Alison had left the room, Jenny clicked onto a search engine and typed in New Dawn Evangelical Church, Bristol. She followed the link and brought up an expensively produced website complete with a news ticker: ‘Over four hundred attend family Eucharist – a new record!’ The church proclaimed itself ordained by the Holy Spirit to carry God’s word to the people of Bristol. Beneath his grinning photograph, Pastor Matt Mitchell wrote that New Dawn had been newly anointed to perform the ministry of healing. A number of miracles had taken place in recent months: a heroin addict had been made clean, a woman with multiple sclerosis had risen from her wheelchair, a child with leukaemia was in remission and a teenage schizophrenic had been completely cured. Dedicated healing services were being held every Sunday evening and Thursday lunchtime.
At the foot of Pastor Matt’s inspiring message was a link to a page on which church members were invited to leave their prayer requests. Jenny clicked. One of the posts leaped out at her the instant the page appeared. It read: ‘Please pray for my daughter, who has fallen into a “relationship” with a woman. Her father and I love her very much.’
She heard Alison’s footsteps on the other side of the door and fumbled with her mouse to collapse the page. Her cheeks were flushed with embarrassment as her officer reappeared in the doorway.
‘Rafi Hassan’s law tutor emailed back,’ Alison said. ‘He’s on study leave. He can see you at one.’
Jenny was pulling on her coat and heading out for her appointment at the campus when the phone on Alison’s desk rang. She craned round to glance at the caller display on the sleek new console: Mrs Jamal. Jenny hovered in an agony of indecision, struggling with her conscience. Alison had already left for church, so it was down to her. Resolving to make it quick, she was reaching for the receiver when her mobile chimed. An instinctive reflex made her answer it first.
‘Hello?’
‘Mrs Cooper,’ a familiar voice said. ‘I was wondering how you were getting on looking for that car.’ It was McAvoy.
‘Oh, hi,’ Jenny said, surprised at the flutter sh
e felt on hearing his voice.
The landline stopped ringing. Relieved, Jenny went out into the hall and locked the door behind her, fielding the call on the move. Mrs Jamal could leave a message.
‘We’ve gathered a list of possibles,’ she said.
‘Well done. I was worried the cops would stymie you.’
‘I’ve got ways round them.’
‘I’d like to hear.’
‘Trade secret, I’m afraid.’ God, what did she sound like?
As she stepped out onto the pavement she dimly heard the office phone start ringing again: Mrs Jamal refusing to take no for an answer.
McAvoy said, ‘I was wondering if you might let me buy you that drink later, toss around a few ideas.’
‘Oh? What drink was that?’ She couldn’t help herself. She was flirting with him like a simpering schoolgirl.
‘The coffee you didn’t have time for, but come evening it’ll be a wee glass of something I shouldn’t wonder.’
She got a grip. ‘Thanks, but I really shouldn’t until you’ve given evidence.’
‘It’s a bit late to stand on that rule, isn’t it?’
‘Alec, you know the issues—’
‘I’ve been reading my law books, come up with a few ideas for you – like how to make those MI5 bastards cough up their files. If you get before the right High Court judge you might just swing it – there are still a few good ones left.’
‘Friends of yours, are they?’
‘I have my methods too.’
Jenny imagined the brown paper bag passing to the minor official in the Court Service in exchange for a favourable listing. McAvoy would take the credit and doubtless call in the favour. And what would he want in return? she wondered.
She knew she should put him off, have nothing to do with him until after the inquest, but couldn’t summon the words to turn him down. Ignoring the chorus of warning voices in her head, she agreed to meet him at five-thirty in a wine bar by the law courts.
‘I promise I’ll behave myself,’ he said.
Tariq Miah met Jenny outside the School of Law and took her behind the building into a formal garden – stark and bare in early February with a hint of frost still hanging in the air – but free from prying eyes. He was in his late thirties, the first threads of grey showing in his black hair and closely trimmed beard. His features were Middle Eastern: copper skin and dark eyes. From a brief glance at the faculty’s website Jenny had learned that he was working his way steadily through the hierarchy. A specialist in constitutional law, he had joined as a junior research fellow in the late 1990s.
As they strolled along the narrow gravel paths, she explained that she was looking for an insight, anything to shed light on who or what Rafi Hassan and Nazim Jamal had become involved with. She mentioned Anwar Ali and the elusive mullah at the Al Rahma mosque, Sayeed Faruq, and asked if he knew them.
‘Only by reputation,’ he said, speaking in the overly precise manner of academic lawyers shieldeded from the day-to-day stresses of practice.
‘And what was that?’
‘I heard it said the mosque was a recruiting ground for Hizb ut-Tahrir. You’re familiar with that organization?’
‘I’ve read a little, but I’m still confused. The Security Services seem to associate it with terrorism, but it claims to be peaceful.’
‘It doesn’t advocate violence, but individuals within it obviously do.’
‘Are you thinking of anyone in particular?’
‘No. It’s just to say that I wouldn’t be surprised if the Al Rahma mosque acted as a conduit to others without a public profile.’
‘You think it was a base for recruiters?’
‘Perhaps.’ He stopped to admire a bank of snowdrops. ‘I would be surprised at Jamal and Hassan being assimilated so quickly, however. Hizb tends to indoctrinate new members over several years before asking them to swear an oath of allegiance.’
‘Allegiance to what, exactly?’
‘The organization. The cause of bringing into existence a global caliphate. It’s not a conventional political party working for the short term, it sees itself as doing God’s will over as many generations as it takes. It has a three-stage plan: to establish cells and networks of members, to build opinion amongst the Muslim population in favour of an Islamic state, and finally to infiltrate the institutions and governments of target countries to effect a revolution from within.’
Jenny said, ‘One thing that puzzles me is why young men, let alone women, are drawn to these ideas. I mean, who’d want to live in Iran?’
‘We all fantasize about removing the mess from our lives, cutting a swathe through the chaos and replacing it with certainties,’ Miah said. ‘What more fearful time is there in life than the threshold of adulthood? If someone were to offer you a free pass to status and security and make you feel morally superior into the bargain, it would be hard to resist, would it not? And if you already believe yourself to be a stranger in your own land it would become almost impossible not to be seduced: all men are conquerors by instinct, it’s in our DNA. One’s own seed must prevail. All our complex Western political institutions have evolved out of the need to check such impulses.’
‘Both these boys came from good families. Integrated, established, English-speaking—’
‘The parents were under no illusions about who they were – outsiders. It’s their offspring, neither outsiders or insiders who have to fight for their identity.’
‘Did you see that in Rafi Hassan?’
Having had his fill of the snowdrops, Miah resumed his meander. ‘I had very little to do with him. I make clear to Asian students that I’m there for them if they need me, but he never approached me privately.’
Jenny tried to read him. There was something coded in his careful manner, a vague sense that he was inviting a conclusion that he wasn’t prepared to spell out.
‘I don’t know if you’ve read about my inquest,’ Jenny said. ‘I’ve granted rights of audience to an outfit called the British Society for Islamic Change. I think Anwar Ali’s involved with them.’
Miah nodded. ‘Essentially the same organization as Hizb ut-Tahrir, or a branch of it. They’re very clever. They seduce the government into believing they’re moderates providing for the needs of disaffected Asian youth, and inculcate themselves into the Establishment. It becomes racist to question them. But the philosophy remains the same: Islam is the one and only truth and it must prevail.’ He gave a slight shake of his head, his eyes suddenly those of an older man, telling the story of long years of fruitless struggle. ‘We are at a bad juncture in history, Mrs Cooper. Life has become too fraught and complex for most of us to understand our place in it. The forces of liberal progression offer only more uncertainty, more competition, more casualties. Is it any wonder that fundamentalists emerge, saying we should drop anchor and stop the ship before it dashes on the rocks?’
‘I think what you’re trying to tell me is that you think those boys went abroad to fight.’
Miah exhaled, his breath a heavy cloud of vapour. He stopped and turned to face her, fixing her with a look that was both pained and profoundly serious. ‘When they disappeared I was only beginning to understand the nature of the problem. But now I can tell you, if I were to draw a template for the ideal recruit to the extremist cause, both of them would fit it perfectly. Middle class, highly intelligent, ambitious, culturally displaced and as emotionally vulnerable as any young person. They were there for the taking. Eight years on it’s not just one or two or even tens, it’s hundreds and thousands.’ He was fired by a tortured passion. ‘We live in a country that doesn’t know itself, Mrs Cooper. We keep moving, but beyond the base struggle for survival we have no idea why.’
Having said his piece, Miah retreated to his academic shell. He told Jenny that both MI5 and police officers had questioned him extensively at the time, but little of note had emerged. He denied that they had been in touch recently. Any faith he once had in the ability of the state to
address these problems, he said, had long since evaporated. He no longer sat on policy-making committees or wrote papers to inform government departments; he wrote books and articles and tried his best to inspire the students who passed through his classes with values that would inoculate them against extremism.
‘But the fundamentalists do have a point,’ he said as they neared the garden gates and the end of their meeting. ‘Without a story to explain ourselves, we are nothing.’
Miah’s words lodged stubbornly in her mind as she walked back through the thin drizzle to the office. They had pierced her defences and unsettled the waters that her medication struggled to still. Storyless herself, searching for the pieces of her childhood that might explain what lay in her threatening, still unexplored recesses, he had loosened her grip on solid reality a little further. Every face in the street, lined or fresh, bright or dulled, seemed confident in its history, rooted in a certainty she had long since lost.
Walking past a florist’s, she glanced at her reflection in the window and for a brief second didn’t recognize herself. It was a ghostly, transparent, semi-being that looked back at her. A surge of panic tightened her chest and throat. She quickened her pace, focusing on the strength in her limbs, the breath in her lungs, the life in her. Her state, she realized, was due to being aware of the part that was missing. Rafi and Nazim hadn’t been. Their voids had been filled before they had even become conscious of them. Darting across the road, dodging the traffic, a phrase surfaced from long-forgotten school days: nature abhors a vacuum. If nature forbids an absence to occur, it must, as she had always suspected, be perverted and unnatural forces that opened up fissures in the fabric of reality, and untethered nascent souls from their moorings.
Hurrying past a row of scruffy shops, turning her head away from their plate-glass fronts, her spiralling thoughts spewed up yet another realization: that the evil she touched in her dreams was such an absence, a nothingness into which innocence was easily seduced.
Nazim and Rafi had passed through the vortex, evaporated with a trace, and it fell to her, to her of all people, to follow them.