Strangers (26 page)

In the days that followed, Roisin found that something had changed. When she opened her eyes in the morning, she wasn’t escaping any more from the flickering light of the fire. The days no longer seemed like a void she had to fill to stop her mind from falling into it. She started walking by the river again, and even went jogging by the canal, shocked by the way her fitness had deteriorated.

Joe’s absence was a sharp, deep pain, but it felt like a clean pain, as though a wound that had been infected was no longer festering and was beginning the long, hard process of healing. She missed him with an aching regret. He was the first thing she thought about when she woke up and the last thing before she fell asleep at night. She still felt the lurch of recognition when a tall, dark-haired man came into view, still watched with irrational hope until the familiar figure became a stranger who looked at her with puzzled unease. But the dreams had changed.

Now, she dreamed about him, dreamed about their life together, dreamed about the life they would never have, and often woke up with the glad realization that he was still alive, only to face the bleak reality once more. But the flickering flames and the pale face glimmering in the night had gone to wherever it was that nightmares went.

Damien phoned to tell her he would be away from London for a few days. ‘How are you?’ he said.

‘Surviving.’

Someone had survived. She just wasn’t sure who it was.

A week after Damien had left, Roisin was sitting at the small breakfast bar in her flat. She was drinking coffee and talking to Joe, a conversation that had started when she came back to London, and ran through her head in a constant flow.

Do you mind? That he stayed? I love you
.

And I can’t be here
.

I know. And I’ve got to keep going. Somehow
.

She went through to the living room and turned on her computer, intending to do an internet search for teaching work overseas. Instead, she found herself typing in the URL of the King Saud University web site. She’d had no contact from the university, and had made no attempt to contact any of the people she had got to know. The thought of Yasmin, still without her baby, tugged at her.

She explored the familiar pages, the photos of buildings she knew, the road her taxi used to
follow to take her to the women’s college, the map of the campus, the names of the staff. She saw that Souad was about to have another book published on the problems of translation, and was due to speak at a conference in Dubai. But there was a name missing. Yasmin’s name was no longer on the list of staff in the English Language Department.

She hesitated, then entered her password. She logged on to the discussion forum. Yasmin might have posted something there. And she wanted to know if Najia now had any contact with the university at all, or if she was condemned, like her mother, to become a woman whose life was confined to the home and the false freedom of the shopping malls under the watchful eyes of her guardians.

The topics flashed up on to the screen:
Help with essay writing; English idioms
. The thread she’d started herself,
Life in the UK
, was still attracting visitors. She moved on to the
Social interaction and discussion
site. The topics seemed to range from the devout to the banal:
Hey, it’s my birthday; I need the advise; Blessings on our great ruler
. There was nothing posted by Red Rose, and the threads that had been there were gone. There was nothing to show that political discussion had ever occurred on the site.

She scrolled through her address book until she found Yasmin’s home e-mail. She thought for a minute, then wrote:
Dear Yasmin, I have been thinking about you a lot since I left the Kingdom. I heard
the terrible news about your baby. I’m so very sorry. With much love, Roisin
.

She couldn’t ask about the missing girl, Jesal. Not now. She clicked
send
, then remembered that she still had Najia’s e-mail address as well. She could ask Najia. She wasn’t sure how private it would be, so she kept the content anodyne:

Dear Najia, I hope you are well. I am back in the UK. I’m not sure what I am going to do next. I heard the news about Yasmin’s baby. If there’s anything I can do, let me know. Are you still concerned about the person we discussed that day at the mall? With much love, Roisin
.

Then she went back to the university site. For some reason, her log-on had expired. She tried to log on again. A message flashed up on the screen:
Incorrect login and password
. She tried again, in case she had mistyped it, but the response was the same.

Her visit to the site had been observed, and in the brief time since she had left it, someone had revoked her password.

The computer chimed to tell her that she had new mail. She looked in her inbox.
Undeliverable
. Her e-mail to Yasmin had been returned.

The recipient’s name is not recognized
.

Damien was leaving for Newcastle later that day. Before he set off, he decided it was time to check in with Rai. He looked at his watch. It would be late morning in Riyadh. He keyed in the number
and stood by the window watching the people walking past in the street as he waited.

‘Damien?’ Rai sounded anxious. ‘I expect to hear from you.’

‘Yes, I’m sorry. I’ve been busy. Is there any news?’

Rai’s voice sounded grim. ‘There is news. After you go, I look at everything, you understand?’

‘Yes.’ This was Damien’s own method of dealing with intractable problems: go back to the beginning. He listened as Rai went over it again. Joe Massey had not arrived at the meeting to which he had been summoned, but he must have made it to the hospital. His jacket had been found in the laboratory where he customarily worked. Massey must have arrived at the hospital and gone to the lab to collect his notes for the meeting. Or maybe he’d never had any intention of attending that meeting. Maybe there was something in those notes that had to be kept secret. Whatever had happened, they had vanished. Then…

Massey had been seen leaving the hospital. The security camera had picked him up in the car park. And then one of the traffic cameras had filmed his car travelling west out of the city, and there had been a passenger travelling with him. Whoever that person had been, he had not come forward. So far, nothing Rai had told him was ‘news’–certainly not the kind of news that Rai’s dark tone had intimated. He waited.

‘But now there is something else. The missing
reports–they find one on Joe Massey’s desk. And he was doing some work on it they don’t understand. But what the report tells them–the blood group. Your friend Majid, he cannot be the father of that child.’

Damien felt everything freeze inside him.
Cannot be the father
…Jesus Christ! He thought about Majid’s phone call the night the baby was born, and about the way happiness could burn away to ashes. And Yasmin…In the Kingdom, adultery was considered a serious crime, on a par with murder. ‘Where’s Yasmin? Where’s Majid’s wife?’

Rai’s voice was sombre. ‘No one has seen her.’

Nazarian. His influence might protect her for a while. But Majid was not a political man, he was a man of convictions. If he thought that his wife had committed adultery, and then had planned to pass off another man’s child as his…He wouldn’t wait for the courts, and no court in the country would convict him for that. Why wasn’t Nazarian there to protect his daughter?

He rested his head against the cool of the glass. Majid was his friend. And yet Majid would do this thing–he had no doubts about that. He thought about the face he had seen in the window that day. That face had haunted him from the moment he had first glimpsed her at the window.

Yasmin.

He wondered if she had known even then that she was going to die.

The main road into Newcastle swept over the river on a high iron bridge. Damien almost missed his turning, a small road that took him down to the level of the river, across a low swing bridge that stood in the shadow of the Victorian behemoths that carried the road and the railway.

He had booked into a small hotel on the riverside. It was on a narrow cobbled street, one of a row of buildings that had probably been offices and warehouses once, old with warped timbers and small, low-ceilinged rooms, converted now into bars and restaurants.

This was the city where Amy had grown up. She’d talked about it to him, not so very long ago.
Sometimes I can’t wait to go home. But the trouble is I don’t know where home is any more…The place I dream about? It doesn’t exist, not now
.

If she wanted to get away, this was where she would come. Roisin had talked with a wistful nostalgia about the days that she and Amy had
spent here together, and even allowing for the large quantity of red wine she had drunk that evening, there had been the ring of authenticity to her story. Damien thought that maybe Amy had been happy here. He wasn’t sure she had been happy anywhere else.

He checked in to his hotel, then walked along the quayside to look at the restoration of one of the glories of industrial England.

As he came out of the shelter of the bridge, the wind battered him. High above, sea birds screamed. The river flowed past, glittering in the winter light. The heavy stone stanchions of the iron bridge loomed over him. Down the river, he could see the new bridge, a thread of steel arcing across the water to the far side where a square, four-towered building stood. It was bleak and beautiful.

But he wouldn’t locate Amy here. He left the river, and walked up a steep hill into the city centre. The road wound round under the high arches of one of the bridges, unexpected passageways and flights of steps leading away, a city of narrow alleyways and dark passages, the forbidding northern version of the old cities of the Gulf.

He was here to track down Amy’s sister, the elusive Jassy–Jesamine for short. The recollection made him smile. He had a feeling that, wherever Jassy was, Amy would be close by, but in order to find her, he needed to know her name. His first port of call was the Register Office. He could have done this by phone, but he only had
one starting point: Amy’s name and her date of birth. Anything else would depend on what he found. It was quicker to come here himself than to play the game of telephone to-and-fro that would use up the little time he had.

He’d known her by her married name, Seymour, but she’d been born Amy Fenwick–something else he had found out from Roisin. He knew her birthday, so it was easy enough to get a copy of her birth certificate.

The information didn’t get him much further. Amy’s mother was Marguerite Fenwick, née Johnson. Her father was Martin Fenwick. It wasn’t hard to track down the marriage certificate. Marguerite Johnson had married Martin Fenwick when she was eighteen and he was twenty. They’d married three months before the birth of their daughter.

The marriage had ended when Amy was still a small child. As for Marguerite’s second marriage, he had no time for a painstaking trawl through the records based on what little information he had. But he did know that Amy had been ten when Jesamine was born, which gave him a twelve-month period in which to look for Jesamine’s birth records.

He waited until one of the clerks was free, then went and gave her the details he had. ‘I’m trying to find a distant relative,’ he said. ‘Family history.’

The woman smiled her comprehension. Tracing family history had become a popular hobby for
large numbers of people; it was as if a realization had dawned that everyone’s family went back ultimately to one absolute root, and people were trying, in an insecure world, to anchor themselves as closely as they could to that one sure point.

‘I don’t have much information,’ he said. ‘She was born in 1981. Her mother was called Marguerite. I don’t have the father’s surname. Her given name is Jesamine. Any chance of finding her in the records?’

The woman leaned over the paper he’d given her. ‘Do you have the mother’s maiden name?’

‘It’s Johnson, and she was married to a man called Martin Fenwick before she married Jesamine’s father.’

‘You don’t know which area?’

He shook his head.

The woman bit her lip as she thought. ‘We could do a search, but it’s going to take us a bit of time. We’re very busy. And we might not find anything.’

‘I’d be grateful for any help you could give me.’ He smiled at her, and she smiled back.

‘I’ll find it,’ she said. ‘If it’s here.’

He filled in the application form she gave him and paid the required fee. He remembered the ease with which Nazarian had tracked him through the streets of Paris, and left the name ‘David Johnson’. The clerk wanted postal details, but he explained he was a visitor who would be moving around. ‘I’ll be back in a week,’ he said. ‘I’ll call in then.’

‘If we don’t find it,’ she said, ‘you could try the Family Records Centre. They would do a search for you. I’m not saying they’ll have more success, but…’

‘Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.’ He made a note to do that when he got back to London, and left the building. He walked briskly towards the main shopping area, aware of the chill cutting into him. His arm was aching and his hand was starting to throb with pain. He needed to get out of the cold. He found a café–one of the ubiquitous chains that had sprung up all over the country–and ordered the smallest cup of coffee he could. It came in a huge, heavy mug, a bucket of indifferent grey fluid. He sat down by a window, looking out at the street. The window was partly obscured by condensation, and every time someone came in to the café, a blast of cold air cut through the dank humidity. The British had no talent for comfort.

The café was quiet enough. He took out his phone and checked his messaging service. There was one message for him from Rai, an impenetrably cryptic reference to ‘revolver doors going round and round’, and something about ‘more people than you see’. He tried returning the call, but there was no reply. He’d have to try later.

Roisin had asked him a good question:
If she doesn’t want to see you, then why
…? Why was he looking for Amy? Because she had left Riyadh so
suddenly, because Roisin had said she sounded frightened, because Nazarian was looking for her–and because he had things he needed to say to her. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry for the way things had been, and he wanted to tell her that, if what she had said was true, if she had really wanted it to work, then that was what he wanted too. They could go somewhere else, somewhere they could make a life together. They could give it a chance.

And if she said
No?
Then at least he would have tried. For once in his life he wouldn’t have walked away from something that could have been valuable.

But in the meantime, he had to make sure she was safe. She had got herself involved with Nazarian. She knew something or she had found something out, something that had driven her out of Riyadh, shortly before an attempt was made on the lives of the other people involved in the Patel case. And whatever it was, it was keeping her away not just from the Kingdom, but from her friends and her work.

He stared out through the misted window, letting his mind work through the problem. But in all his calculations, he had forgotten the one crucial thing about the northern cities. You could lose yourself for ever in London, in Paris, in New York, if that was what you chose to do. But Newcastle was a village by comparison. As he pushed aside his unfinished coffee and stood up,
he could see the street outside more clearly. And there, looking into a shop window, veiled in scarves against the cold, her bright hair a beacon in the grey day, was Amy.