The Disappeared (27 page)

Laura shook her head silently, and Justin was glad. Any police response to Laura's story would lead to enquiries about the Shahin business, and therefore about Muhibbah and her role in Copley Solutions. Besides, both of them had invested emotions in the Shahin children that they would rather not openly confess to. And there was something else too. Justin was uncertain what it was, but he saw that Laura was concealing her wounds, and had some reason for not exposing them, even if healing required it.

‘Of course,' Iona said with a sympathetic nod, ‘there is the matter of sex. Even if she has reached the age of consent he can still be charged with exploiting a relation of trust for sexual purposes.'

‘But if she were just staying with him, as he said, sleeping on the sofa?'

Iona laughed.

‘Do you believe that? A pretty girl with a crush on her teacher, all ready and willing to be used? Do attractive girls stay overnight with attractive men on the sofa next door? Besides, we found her in his bedroom, dressed in nothing but a bathrobe. Mrs Williams testifies that he had been hanging around the Angel Towers, obviously in wait for her, that he had even come knocking at the door on some excuse, hoping to find her. And of course he had twice come to see me, hoping I would prize her loose from her adoptive family and make it that much easier for him to take her under his wing.'

When Iona had left them Laura turned to Justin with a worried look.

‘You know, Justin, I don't want to stay in this place. I shall lie awake shaking as I did last night. If I were to sleep on your sofa, assuming you have a sofa?'

‘Do attractive girls stay overnight with attractive men on the sofa next door? Of course, I don't mean to imply that you find me attractive.'

‘Oh but I do,' Laura replied. ‘However I still want to lie on the sofa, and to sense you sleeping next door.'

Justin's sleep was disturbed by a dream. In the dream Muhibbah was crying, imploring him to help her. A strange hand was on her shoulder and a knife was held at her throat. He explained carefully that the time had come to play by the rules, and that her past behaviour must be taken into account when deciding what it would be permissible for him to do. ‘Please, Justin!' she cried, ‘I love you, will be good to you, will never leave you!' He consulted the file of correspondence with Lesprom, in which he was sure he could find instructions as to how he should respond to her. But the pages were written in Arabic script and he couldn't read them. There must be some other source that he could consult and he hastily searched his desk for it. Then she reached across to him. In her hand was a piece of paper, on which she had written ‘I look in your eyes and I sigh'. He looked in her eyes. And they stared steadily into his as the knife speared her throat.

With a cry Justin awoke. A figure in a white nightdress stood above him, shimmering in the twilight that seeped through the curtains.

‘Perhaps Iona was right after all,' Laura said. ‘I don't want to do anything. But would you mind just holding me for a while?'

Justin pulled back the bedclothes and guided her in beside him. She was warm, soft, with a clean smell like a freshly bitten apple. She put her head on his shoulder and her arms around his body. And she sobbed herself to sleep.

Stephen's arrest, which hit both the local and the national newspapers within a day, coincided with one of the periodic panics over paedophilia. The letters pages were full of the topic, and while no accusations could be directly printed since the case was
sub judice
, the commentators made a point of emphasizing the risks that children were exposed to from figures in authority, and especially from priests and schoolteachers.

One argued in mildly exonerating terms that paedophilia lacks a precise definition and that a girl of sixteen is, after all, no longer a child in law. One commentator even dared to suggest that the presumption of innocence should favour the teacher rather than the pupil. For in our sexualised culture, he wrote, in which young girls are routinely dressed as whores and larded with make-up, in which pornography circulates freely in the classroom, and children as young as twelve are in the habit of texting provocative photographs of themselves to the boyfriend or girlfriend of the day, it can hardly be expected that a teacher should remain unmoved when a sixteen-year-old makes a pass at him. But the writer of that piece was promptly fired, and things returned to the norm, which was one of guilt-ridden hysteria, among people who know that they have lost all influence over the sexual lives of their children and are in deep need of someone – someone else – to take the blame.

Stephen was refused bail, partly for his own protection. His address was freely circulating among the residents of Angel Towers and stones thrown from the car park soon broke the windows of his flat. Although the school issued a notice to all parents explaining that Stephen Haycraft had been dismissed from his post, this did not prevent a new series of protests, many initiated by the local mosques.

Muslim girls, the imams said, were exposed to a licentious way of life, propagated through schools in which the culture, the curriculum and even the teachers themselves conspire against their chastity. St Catherine's Academy was a prime example of this, and they called not only for its closure but for the establishment of an Islamic secondary college that would serve the local community and enjoy exemptions from the National Curriculum as required by the Faith.

Meanwhile Stephen, held on remand in a Midland city, where he was housed in a unit reserved for sexual offenders, was treated to a continuous stream of abuse from the officers who guarded him, and required several stitches in his wrist after being attacked by another prisoner, who screamed ‘kid fucker' in his face while swinging a broken bottle against the hand Stephen raised to protect himself.

Conditions for prisoners on remand are little better than those for convicted offenders, and although Stephen had a cell to himself, and was allowed visits from a solicitor, contact with the outside world was minimal. Sharon had been placed in secure Council accommodation, and all communication between her and Stephen was strictly forbidden while the case was being prepared. In the two months that led to his trial, therefore, Stephen was isolated, threatened and suicidal.

It was especially difficult at night, when his fellow prisoners, most of them habituated to their status as social outcasts, joined in a chorus of welcome, accompanying themselves by sounding spoons on the heating pipes and mounting a crescendo of obscene abuse that ended only when stopped by threats from the supervising officers. In the silence that ensued, Stephen sat in darkness on the edge of his bunk, his hands fallen between his thighs, knowing that there was nowhere downhill from the place he had got to.

His career was over – so what? It was only because of Sharon that he had taken any joy in it. What did it matter that he would be punished for conduct that was more stupid than criminal? But Sharon! The girl had lost her only protector; she would be dragged back into the sewer from which he had tried to lift her. The one moment of happiness, when her body glowed before him and her face was radiant with joy at his approach, would be the last that she would know. He regretted many things, but most of all that he had never told her that he loved her.

He tried to guess what she was feeling. Guilt at having dragged him down. Fear for him and for herself. Terror at what awaited her, when her tormentors finally got her from the children's home. Despair too, recognizing that the vision of a shared future, in which his knowledge and her poetry would flow together in a single creative stream, was no more than a hallucination.

On the day before his trial Stephen was notified that one of the charges – abusing a position of trust for sexual purposes, as defined by the Sexual Offences Act 2003 – had been dropped. Expert examination of the abducted girl had shown that there had been no sexual relations with the accused. Stephen felt only desolation on hearing this news, for it brought to mind the humiliating tests that Sharon would have been forced to undergo, polluting the body that she had washed in so many tears to make a gift for him. He wished that the trial were over now. Perhaps some other man, less stupid and less besotted than himself, would stumble across this pure soul and strive to rescue her. Let him only be a man with a heart!

All that night Stephen prayed for her in those terms, not knowing to whom, not knowing how, but chasing the thought before him into the future, begging the world to make a place for it. In a brief sleep before dawn he dreamed of her: she came to him, naked as he had seen her in their last moment of joy. She held a lighted candle above her head. She spoke to him as though reading aloud from one of her essays, with only the trace of a Yorkshire accent. ‘I am young, Stephen, like Juliet or Iphigenia. I chose you because you are there, like a mountain. Send me soon your letter of acceptance. And please include your knowledge.' She smiled at him, and the scar across her mouth was clearly visible. ‘Who did it to you Sharon?' he asked. ‘It's a secret, Stephen. I'll tell you though, when we're married.' He reached out to her, and a breath of wind issued from his body, extinguishing the candle. She vanished, and he awoke with the conviction that Sharon would soon be dead.

Whether you will ever make love to a man again you do not know. Justin is gentle and considerate. As you work together in the office, discovering more of that girl's intrusions, he constantly engages you in conversation, always expressing himself with a kind of nuptial tenderness that you never experienced from Mick. In the evenings you enjoy each other's company over wine and music – though not
his
music, which sounds to you like the croaking of a desiccated frog. He seems to feel no resentment when you describe Spiral Architect as narcissistic and Metallica as pseudo-poetry, and this is amazing since Metal is a part of his life and the thing that he and Iona share. He seems really interested in your taste, and happy to dig up the Beethoven quartets in the Guarneri performance, which he has not listened to for years.

At night, too, when you start awake in terror as the sack on top of you begins to squirm and you climb for comfort into Justin's bed, he is ready at once to put his arms around you, to stroke your hair and soothe you back to sleep. Perhaps it is through pure good nature that he makes no attempt to arouse you, or perhaps he has not recovered from that witch, who has poisoned his manhood.

At times you are almost jealous of the girl, who captured Justin's heart without deserving it. If you were to make love to him, maybe it would be to take revenge on her. But then you think of Yunus. You wonder what has happened to him, and the strange murmur begins again in your heart, the murmur of the voice that says ‘forgive'.

After a week or two it is clear that things are not yet getting better for you. Of course, you are bright, efficient, professional. You are good company too, so long as you can keep your mind occupied by normal things. But the work of healing is slow and tortuous. And somehow your case becomes entangled in your thoughts with that of Sharon Williams. Iona is working with Wendy Pinsent on the testimony, and she does not hesitate to pass on the details.

The girl will say nothing about the ordeals from which she fled to her teacher. She refuses to see her adoptive mother, and goes white at the mention of Bogdan Krupnik. Medical tests suggest that there was, after all, no sex between her and the teacher, and the only charge to be brought is one of abduction and false imprisonment.

The Crown Prosecution Service will rely on the girl and Mrs Williams in evidence. But the real crime – and here Iona agrees with you – is the one from which Sharon fled. Superintendent Nicholson refuses to investigate the Shahin family. He has had too much trouble from the anti-racists and besides the Shahins are well connected throughout the Afghan and the Iraqi communities, and connected too with the Mosque. The Superintendent will act only on clear proof of a crime.

You can give that proof – or you thought you could. But now the nightmare has taken over. You are no longer certain of what happened. You owe your life to a confused boy who wanted to rape you and couldn't go through with it. You attacked the one who almost succeeded where his brother failed. But all this occurred because you were not the person you should have been.

You dream of that person, dream that you
are
her after all. You are the abused girl they sought to punish. You had fled to your teacher, the one who would provide culture, knowledge, language, ease of manner – all those things that guaranteed, in the world of Laura Markham, a life in the open, and which rendered kidnap, abduction, rape and slavery inconceivable.

You recall the teacher's looks as he stumbled past you on the stairs – spectral, other-worldly, seeming to consult some distant vision that made him blind to his immediate surroundings. You imagine his loneliness and his defiance of the world. You are his sole raison d'etre, the pure soul that he will rescue from corruption. How could you not love him, and what purer longing could there be than yours – the longing to bring peace and hope to the person who brought peace and hope to you?

At night you imagine him as he prepares himself for sleep. You rehearse the goodnight kisses, which are all that the two of you allow, since the restoration of purity is more precious than the transports of desire. You settle on the pillow and a tranquil breeze of affection wafts about you. Gradually your nightmares recede, and the image of the teacher comes in place of them.

You are sometimes in London now, searching the flat in Camden town for your former self, but meeting always someone else in the bathroom mirror. And each time you return with relief to Justin, as an adolescent returns to the parental home. By the time of the trial you rarely need to take up your allotted place in Justin's bed, and he, being the decent person you have come so much to like and respect, is pleased by this, imagining that you are at last on the mend. In fact you have acquired another person's peace by acquiring her fears.