Strangers (31 page)

Snapshots.

Two girls, both in their late teens, outside a club. They are excruciatingly dressed in Goth style–pale faces, dark lipstick, black dresses. One, the smaller one, has ornamented her fair hair with beads and feathers, the other, tall and thin, has a blaze of red hair that hangs around her shoulders. Something has shattered their hard-won cool, and they are both laughing, their arms round each other.

A girl leaning out of a train that is pulling away. She is waving and calling to another girl who stands alone, her hand raised in a forlorn farewell.

A view from a high bridge, a study in shades of grey, the heavy girders making dark lines across the mist that rises from the water. The only colour is the faint glimmer from a warehouse sign.

I remember that
…

A couple stand in the middle of a celebratory group. The woman is small, with fair hair, and
the man, tall and dark-haired, has his arm round her. They are laughing. Fragments of bright colour are scattered on the ground around them and some have caught in the woman’s hair.

Is this your wedding? He looks like a nice guy
.

A garden at night, lit by flames in an eerie silence.

The light flickers as the flames climb up, a sickly orange against the shadows. There is no sound. Only the girl’s eyes are visible. Her face is veiled. The orange light reflects off the leaves. She reaches out to lift the veil…

…Amy’s face looks back at her from the darkness.

And Roisin was awake. It was daylight. She’d fallen asleep in her chair, and the TV was hectoring her with the morning news. Her head was fuzzy with confusion as the impossibly bright faces of the presenters turned serious, as if someone had pressed a button, and a photograph appeared on the screen. It was a portrait of a woman. Her head and shoulders were draped with the hijab, but even without the distinctive red hair, Roisin could recognize her. Amy.

…the woman found last night in her flat in Newcastle’s Byker estate has been identified as Amy Seymour, a nurse who has recently returned from working in the Middle East
…

She turned up the sound, and the TV suddenly blared out.
Police were shocked by the brutality of the attack
…

Amy. Her dream came back to her, a girl leaning dangerously out of the window of a train, waving, calling out as the train pulled out of the station and faded into the distance.

Gone.

Damien was in hospital. She’d driven him there the night before through a ghost London of empty streets where the night people moved in the shadows, as he tried to talk to her, his voice rambling incoherently through some narrative that was haunting him, but that she couldn’t understand….
burned her…I had to let him go…for now…She didn’t
…

She’d waited anxiously in the A & E which, in the small hours, was relatively quiet. Just her, Adam, asleep at last in the snug warmth of his carry-cot, and the few remaining drunks of the night. Damien had been admitted suffering from exhaustion, with an infection in his injured hand. It had been after three when she got back.

She got wearily to her feet and went to check Adam. He was still sleeping, but as she stood over him the blue eyes opened and he looked at her. She lifted him out of the cot. Her phone rang and she fumbled for it one-handedly. It was Mari. ‘I’ll be home in a couple of hours,’ she said. ‘I’m just waiting for the doctor.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah. It’s just a bad sprain. I can walk on it in a day or two. Is he OK? Was he any bother?’

Roisin opened the curtains. The sky was clear
and the sun was shining. It was as if the night before had never happened. She looked out on to the street. The white van had gone.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No bother at all.’

Damien’s legs felt leaden as he dressed himself in the clothes he’d worn the night before. They were crumpled and stained. He wondered if the police investigating Amy’s death would track him back from Newcastle. He was probably safe. The precautions he’d taken against Nazarian’s people may have failed, but they should still protect him from the police investigation.

His name might be among Amy’s papers, but he doubted it. She’d left her past behind. Someone might discover that a hunt had been done for Amy’s birth details the day of her death, but among all the people who used those records, would anyone remember him?

He suspected that the police would come to Roisin though, and he needed to get to her first. Amy’s body, crumpled on the kitchen floor, was suddenly in front of him.

Do you still
…

Love you? Of course
.

Always
.

‘…feeling all right?’

A nurse was looking at him with professional concern and disapproval. Damien was discharging himself against medical advice. He made an effort and smiled at her. ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘I’m going home to rest. I’ll look after myself.’

‘You do that. I don’t want to see you back in here.’

‘You won’t,’ Damien promised. She’d brought his discharge notes and his medication. He was to take an antibiotic for the next ten days to quell the infection that had started in his hand.

‘I don’t think you understand how lucky you’ve been,’ she said. ‘These things can be killers.’

He smiled at her. ‘I was born lucky.’

Outside, the day had dawned into early spring. The air was warm with a gentle breeze that brought some freshness to the streets. He found a coffee bar and called Rai. He wanted the rest of the story in place before he went to see Roisin.

Rai greeted him with anxious queries about his health. ‘I’ve been to the hospital,’ Damien reassured him.

Still dubious, Rai outlined what had happened since the call of the night before. Nazarian had arrived back in the Kingdom early that morning. He had spent a long time at the compound where Majid lived with his family, and had then returned to his own house.

‘Yasmin?’ Damien wanted to know that Yasmin was safe.

‘She has gone with her father.’

‘And the investigation, the missing child?’

‘They are saying the child is dead.’

After he’d rung off, Damien ran his hands over his face. He felt as though he’d just run a marathon and still had miles to go. It wasn’t over. He had a promise to keep, one he’d made to Amy. He took a phone out of his pocket, the one he’d picked up at Amy’s flat, and scrolled through the names in the address book. Amy had to have a secure way of contacting her sister, and it was there in the list of names:
Jassy
. Before anything else, he had to make a call. He knew enough, now, to make Yasmin tell him the truth.

‘I know about my sister,’ Yasmin spoke in Arabic, a language that must have been alien to her when she first arrived in Saudi as a child. ‘My father called my husband. They say it was the right thing to happen to someone who would kidnap a child.’

‘And you?’

‘Me? I have to sit quietly and be a good Saudi daughter and a good Saudi wife. This is what Amy would have wanted. Otherwise, she died for nothing, Mr O’Neill.’ It was the low, quiet voice of the submissive Saudi woman, but underneath, he could hear the steel. She was warning him off.

‘I know enough to guess some of it, but not enough to work it all out. If you can’t tell me, I’ll go on looking. Roisin deserves to know.’

There was silence as she thought about it. ‘How is Roisin?’

‘If she’s going to survive this, she has to understand why her husband died.’

‘And so you will endanger what my sister fought for? She told me that she loved you.’

‘And I loved her. Yasmin, I saw her the day she died. She knew you owed Roisin. Will it help if I tell you what I know? It starts with Haroun Patel, doesn’t it?’

There was silence again, then he heard the breath of a sigh. ‘All right. But it starts earlier than that. It started when my mother took me away from my father. I had been Yasmin, and I lived with my family. Then suddenly I was Jesamine and we were living in the middle of a housing estate in the north with a man I didn’t know and didn’t like, where I didn’t understand the way people talked and the way people lived. Then my mother died and my father brought me here. I was Yasmin again, but not the real Yasmin. He left me with strangers and they told me everything I did and everything I knew was wrong. I wanted my mother and I wanted my sister, but they told me they were
haram
, evil, because they rejected the faith my father showed them. It was as if the desert had stolen everything I wanted or cared about. I didn’t see England again until I was twenty. My father had left Europe by then, but he wanted his child to attend a European university. I studied in Paris, and in my last year, I took
a semester in London. In Paris, my sister found me. And in London I found…Those years brought me the greatest happiness of my life, and the worst sorrow.’

‘So Amy came to Riyadh.’ Damien thought of the other people who had been drawn, fatally, to the city: Haroun Patel, Joe Massey–and Amy. Amy had surely found her death in Riyadh.

‘Yes. She always believed I would leave Majid, and I would need her help. I don’t know. I didn’t know how to be independent like Amy, not then. That’s why I did what my father told me. But I loved Haroun, Mr O’Neill. You know that, don’t you?’

He could remember his own first experience of love, the conflagration whose brilliance outshone all rational counsel. He had been caught in it when he had first taken up with Catherine. And the fire had burned out, leaving something grey and dead where love had been, as dead as Catherine herself was now dead. ‘Yes. I know.’

He could hear the faint breath that was Yasmin’s sigh. ‘I thought I would never see him again. But then he wrote to me. It was a long time later. He said he was sorry if he’d caused me trouble, but his sister needed help and I was the only person he knew who had contacts with people of influence. He meant my father, of course. She had run away from her Saudi employers, and she’d stolen from them. She needed to get away. I was so glad to have his letter; just to hold it, something he
had written, made me feel alive again. There was no hope, I knew that. I was married. He was married. I didn’t want to think about that. But I tried to help him. I told my father, said the girl was a friend of my maid, and he said he would do something.’ She laughed, a short, bitter sound. ‘It was like my wanting a doll when I was small or a new dress when I was a teenager–anything like that, I could always have, but the people I loved? I was not allowed those. But he did it and I felt good because I had helped Haroun.’

A road to hell that had been paved with so many good intentions. ‘Jesal Patel?’ he said.

‘Jesal. And then Haroun wrote again. I can remember when my mother-in-law gave me the letter.
A lot of letters
she said, and her eyes were hard.
Just students
, I told her.
They ask for help
. I was frightened because I thought she would insist on seeing the letter, but I was happy as well, just to see his writing. But it was bad news. His sister had vanished. He thought she had gone to London, but he had heard nothing from her. I asked my father, but he got angry so I tried to find out in other ways. I asked who I could, I asked the women in our groups, and I asked Amy. I think Amy may have guessed what had happened, but she didn’t tell me. What could I have done? Anyway, one day I was feeling unhappy so I went to her flat to see her. Majid didn’t know she was my sister, but he knew we were friends and I was allowed to visit her. But Amy wasn’t there. Instead
—I can still remember how I felt. I walked into her flat, and he was there, Haroun was there, like a dream. He was just the way he used to look, the way I always saw him in my mind.

‘Amy had given him her key so he could use her phone and her computer. He didn’t have anything like that. He started getting his things together, he said he had to go, but he…We…He hadn’t forgotten. We met there, times when Amy was working. We were happy, just for that short time we could be together.’

Damien could work out the rest, or most of it. ‘The baby–it’s Haroun’s, isn’t it?’

He could hear that same faint breath. ‘I didn’t know…then. Part of me prayed it was Majid’s, but so much of me wanted it to be Haroun’s. I was happy. I was terrified. I didn’t know what to do. I even thought–Haroun and I, we can be together. He won’t leave me. He’ll leave this wife he has in his own country, and we’ll go to Europe and…But that could never have happened. And then…Haroun was dead. The desert kingdom took him away from me. Then, when my baby was born, I looked at him and I saw Haroun looking back.’

‘Did Amy know?’

‘I didn’t tell her, not until the end. I kept hoping Majid would let me go to Europe, let me get away, but he wouldn’t. I didn’t tell her until the baby was close to being born and I knew I couldn’t escape.’

‘And she took the baby. Yasmin, I don’t understand why. Why not wait until you could just leave?’

‘Because when they took the baby’s blood–they do that to test for diseases–Majid asked them for our son’s blood group. He likes to have all this kind of thing on record and he knew we would need it for the baby’s passport.’ Damien heard the short, hard laugh. ‘I had asked so often to go to Europe. He did it to please me.’

The trap had closed on Yasmin suddenly. Amy had had to improvise, and to move fast. And she had done it. She had succeeded. But it had cost her her life.

‘She had to keep my son in hospital, and she needed him to be in the ward where she worked–she could get him away from there. She took the samples from the lab and destroyed them. Then she took the blood of another child, one who was very ill. She labelled it with my son’s name and took it to the laboratory. As soon as they saw the results, they moved him into the ITU. I was so afraid. I was afraid they would find out, or that they would give him treatment he shouldn’t have, treatment that would harm him, but Amy said she’d take care of it.’

Damien remembered the incubator that had been found with the oxygen switched off and the drip detached. Amy had done what she had promised. ‘And now? Where did she…?’

‘Please don’t ask me. I can’t tell you. He is safe.’

There was a moment of silence, then she said, ‘Now I have to tell you what Roisin has to know…’

Damien listened as she told him the story he’d already worked out, but had hoped, up to this moment, was wrong.