Liz Carlyle - 06 - Rip Tide (19 page)

Then, just half a mile down from the former village, they examined a number of shapes bunched closely together. They sat under a high rolling dune which half-disguised them from the normal perspective of the MOD aerial cameras. But zoomed in on and looked at carefully, they revealed a suspiciously orderly arrangement, with a central blob that could have been the block house Luckhurst had mentioned, surrounded by a thin line that might have been a wall. A dusty square sat next to it, and at its far end was a long dark rectangle.

‘The pen you were kept in,’ asked Peggy, ‘was it roofed?’

‘Part of it was. With plywood covered by tar paper – to keep us warm,’ Luckhurst said ironically.

Peggy laughed and increased the magnification by a notch. The blob sharpened slightly, and she could see that, yes, it was a structure – nature didn’t like straight lines. ‘What about this? Have we found it?’

Luckhurst peered closely at the scene. Finally he nodded. ‘It must be. There’s the wall, and the compound, and the pen next to the patch of ground where they let us out to exercise and where the food was cooked. There’s something else inside the compound wall . . .’

‘They look like huts,’ said Peggy.

‘Probably – that’s where Khalid’s men would stay, I suppose. But what are those?’

He pointed to some small triangular shapes that sat at the bottom of the square. ‘Can we look at them from a different angle?’ he asked hopefully.

‘You mean, like Google View?’ Peggy said, referring to the perspective showing scenes at street level. ‘Not very likely,’ she said, and laughed at the thought of a Google representative venturing out to the camp with a video camera. She looked back at the screen and suddenly said, ‘I know – they’re tents. Lots of tents. There must be a dozen of them.’

‘Taban said there had been visitors.’

‘And now we know exactly where they were staying.’  The next step, thought Peggy, was finding out who they were.

Chapter 27

It had taken Tahira six months to persuade her father that the shop needed more than one till. Always cautious, always suspicious even of his own family, Mr Khan had resisted all her efforts to install another cash register, ignoring the queues that formed as a result, sometimes halfway to the shop’s front doors. It was only when he had seen with his own eyes two customers leave one evening in disgust, not prepared to wait ten minutes to pay for a bag of crisps and a bottle of Sprite, that he had relented.

In the same way, Tahira had managed to change the stock – gradually adding more staples for people who’d run out and didn’t want to make the journey to the big supermarkets; and more high-end items, like ready-made curries and sauces, for the increasing number of young singles living in the area. It seemed to be working. Not that her father gave her any credit for the way sales and profits were holding up, even in the middle of a recession.

She sighed, hearing yet again in her head the constant paternal reminders that she wouldn’t be working in the shop for long, that marriage was the next step in life for her – as far as she was concerned, marriage would be the grim last step, the end of everything she enjoyed. She liked business and working; getting married could wait . . . and wait some more. But she saw trouble ahead, for she knew her father was in touch with the extended family in Pakistan to find her a suitable husband. A plan she was determined to resist.

Now she was getting ready to cash up, just waiting for her cousin Nazir to flip the sign on the front door to closed. There was a solitary customer still in the shop, someone moseying around the magazines at the far end. She heard him moving down the aisle and, peering at the monitor which showed the images from the video camera set in the corner above the ice-cream cabinet, she could make him out clearly. A man in a parka – a white man, unusual in this neighbourhood in the evening. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, dressed in smart jeans and trainers – clearly not a builder. During the day this was quite a mixed area – many of the people working nearby, in other shops and in offices, were white – but those who shopped in the evening, the residents, were almost all Asians.

There was something familiar about his figure, and she wondered if he’d been in earlier in the day. Her mild suspicions went away when he came up to the counter and put down a copy of the
Birmingham News,
paying for it with a pound coin. When she gave him his change, he said thank you very politely and smiled at Tahira – a nice smile, and he had a pleasant face. Good-looking, she thought, if a little old for her. Not that it would ever be a possibility – her father wouldn’t dream of letting her go out with a white boy, and while she continued to live under his roof she was obliged to obey. The man in the parka left the shop and Nazir flipped the sign and turned the key.

Silly to distrust the man, she thought. Though you couldn’t be too careful. They hadn’t been robbed recently, not since the nasty incident three years before when two young men wearing balaclavas had rushed in, one brandishing a knife, the other a hammer. Thank God her father hadn’t been there; with his hot temper, he might have tried to resist. Tahira had just held up both hands and let them empty the till – no life, much less her own, was worth £74, the amount the robbers had gone off with. They didn’t realise that the register was checked every hour, so that only relatively few takings were ever held inside.

It was now that she saw the piece of paper. It was lying on the counter, folded in two. It must have been left by the man in the parka – otherwise she would have noticed it before. She looked around but of course the shop was closed, and Nazir was busy pulling down the window grilles. She unfolded the paper quickly and her eyes widened as she read:

Could we have a word, please? It’s about your brother Amir. If you walk home via Slocombe Avenue we could talk in private.

Her hands were shaking. She took the note and ripped it in two, then four, then eight. Pushing the strips deep down into the rubbish bin that stood behind the counter, she tried to concentrate on the closing up routine. Methodically she emptied the two tills and rang up the day’s takings. Good, better than the day before; better than she would have expected twelve months before as the recession took hold.

She wondered what to do. Should she walk home by Slocombe Avenue and see what this man wanted? But what if he was luring her there, by the lime trees and the small park, because he had something else in mind? How could a white man know anything about her brother Amir? Unless . . .

Nazir called goodnight and she followed him out a few minutes later, turning out the lights by the shop’s entrance, then tapping in the numbers to activate the alarm before closing the heavy door behind her. She set off along the street, noting that Kassim’s newsagent’s was still open as usual. I work hard, she thought, but Kassim seems never to sleep.

She turned on to a side street and began the long uphill walk that would take her to her father’s house. Funny, she realised, she never thought of it as her mother’s. Whatever happened to her, she was determined not to follow her mother’s path; Tahira vowed to have a life of her own.

At Slocombe Avenue she hesitated, realising she had been putting off the decision. She turned round abruptly to see if she was being followed. No one. Then she turned into the street.

‘She’s on her way. All clear,’ said a voice in Dave’s ear as he waited under cover of a line of tall trees outside the gate of the small park further up the street. The A4 surveillance van parked in Slocombe Avenue was monitoring Tahira’s walk from the shop and Dave was ready to abort the meeting if any sign of danger was observed.

Tahira walked on, passing a line of semi-detached houses, lights on in their sitting rooms, the noise of televisions plainly heard in the street, until the houses gave way to the park, a favourite of mothers with toddlers, now gloomy and deserted, its gate shadowed by the line of trees set back from the street. At the gate she hesitated.

‘Tahira.’ The voice was soft and English. It startled her. She turned and there was the man in the parka again, standing ten feet in from the pavement, under the branches of one of the lime trees. He was still smiling and looked entirely unthreatening, but she felt frightened nonetheless. How did he know her name? What did he want? She looked around, but there was no one nearby, and the light was fading now that the sun had set.

‘Can I have a word, please?’ the man said.

‘Who are you?’ Tahira demanded, trying to project an air of confidence she didn’t feel. Then a woman emerged from the shadows behind the man. Tahira recognised her at once – it was the same woman who’d come to her father’s house to tell them about Amir. Tahira had liked her directness. She relaxed slightly, though she still wondered what they wanted from her.

The Englishwoman said, ‘Tahira, there’s a bench over here, behind me. If you go in and sit there, I’ll join you in a minute.’ When Tahira didn’t respond, she added, ‘My friend here will keep watch. No one will see us, I promise you.’

Tahira thought hard. It was all very well to say there was no danger, but she knew that was nonsense. If she were spotted talking to this woman, word would get around right away – if not to the young men from the mosque, then to her father, who would be furious that she’d met the officials who had come to see him, off on her own. There would be no explanation for it that he would accept.

But the note had said they wanted to talk about Amir. Her adored younger brother Amir. She realised now how worried she had been about him, how much she had wanted to know where he was, how fearful she had grown that something had happened to him. It had been a relief to learn he was being held in Paris – at least he was alive – but a new wave of worries had set in then. He was alive, but she had no confidence she would see him again soon.

Concern and plain curiosity won over caution. Tahira took a deep breath and turned into the park through the open gate. She went to sit on the bench, trying to slow down her breathing.

She heard a step behind her, then the woman was sitting on the bench beside her. ‘It’s quite safe, Tahira,’ she said soothingly. ‘There’s no one else around.’

‘What has happened to Amir?’

‘He’s fine. Still in Paris, but there’s a good chance he will be coming back to this country. Then it might be possible for you to visit him.’

‘Really?’ she asked, hope overcoming the suspicion in her voice. ‘When?’

‘Soon. I can’t tell you an exact date. Weeks rather than months. But you can help him before then.’

‘Me? How?’

‘We need to know what happened to your brother. Someone got to him; someone persuaded him to leave home. We think it might have been at the mosque.’

‘Of course it was at the mosque,’ hissed Tahira crossly. There wasn’t any doubt in her mind. ‘He should never have switched.’

‘To the New Springfield Mosque?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did some of his friends switch as well?’

‘Not that I know of. But he made new friends there. That was part of the problem – none of us knew any of them, or their families. Suddenly he was with a different set.’

‘Did they go to Pakistan as well?’

‘Yes.’ She had learned two names and said them aloud now.

‘What happened to them?’

‘I don’t know for sure. But neither has come back to Birmingham.’

‘Were they students of the same imam?’ The woman’s voice was calm but insistent.

‘There is only one imam at that mosque. Abdi Bakri. He sent them all to Pakistan. My father doesn’t realise that – he still thinks Amir went to see the family there and work for our cousin.’ She frowned, thinking of her father’s naiveté.

‘Do you know anything about this Abdi Bakri?’

Tahira shook her head. ‘Only that he hasn’t been in Birmingham more than a few years.’

‘Was he in Pakistan before that?’

‘Pakistan? I don’t think so. He’s North African. But why, is that important?’

‘It could be very important.’

‘I suppose I could try and find out.’

And as Tahira spoke the words, Liz knew she had a new agent. Did Tahira realise what she’d volunteered for? She would soon find out.

Chapter 28

Berger was on edge, though he did his best not to show it in the office. It had been a shock for everyone when the police had arrived on Monday afternoon and told them that Maria Galanos had been found murdered in her flat. Apparently her parents had spent the weekend trying to reach her on the telephone; the concierge had finally relented on Monday morning and used her key to open the poor girl’s door. With Greek efficiency, it had taken the police most of the day to contact her employers.

Falana had fainted when she’d heard the news, and Berger had sent her home right away. But he knew that her alarm was felt by everyone else in the office, and even now, three weeks later, the atmosphere remained tense as well as mournful. In his experience, sudden deaths were upsetting; a murder had the added effect of being frightening.

Katherine Ball was due out in a couple of days, and Berger was looking forward to her arrival – her imperturbable confidence might rub off on his edgy staff. He wished it could rub off on him as well. Unlike the staff, he didn’t think Maria’s murder had anything to do with her personal life, or was the random act of some homicidal psychopath. He was sure that her real role in the office had been discovered, either because she had asked too many questions or because she had found something out which she hadn’t been able to tell anyone in time – Berger’s secretary said that Maria had been looking for him on the day he had gone away for a long weekend.