The Disappeared (29 page)

‘I know where you might find him,' Justin said, and he recounted the events that led from Laura's disappearance to the discovery of Muhibbah. The Superintendent criticised Justin for not reporting Laura's disappearance immediately to the police, but he let the matter drop when Justin reminded him that he had reported a missing person once before, only to be brushed aside by the Superintendent.

The decision was taken to leave Laura with Wendy Pinsent, while Justin accompanied the Superintendent and another officer to the village of Buckton.

It was late morning when they reached Falkin's Yard, under grey skies and a faint but persistent drizzle. The rubbish had not been removed from Muhibbah's holiday home. The curtains were drawn, there was no car parked outside, and the place had an abandoned air. Justin assumed that she and Yunus had left for Yemen and that Hassan would soon be following them if he could escape whatever net the police were laying. He was surprised, therefore, that the door was swinging on its hinges.

‘Bad sign', said the Superintendent. ‘Better get the gloves. And you, Mr Fellowes, had better wait outside.'

Justin protested, but to no avail. The two officers, wearing latex gloves, examined the lock of the door before they entered. After a minute Justin donned a pair of gloves that they had left on the driver's seat and followed them. It was dark inside, the grey daylight barely making it through the curtains to lie like a dirty crust on the cluttered furniture. A faint odour lingered in the sitting room, like the smell of a wild animal's lair, an odour of dead and dismembered things. All the curtains were drawn, and all the windows closed.

The officers turned on the wall lamps in the adjoining room, and a band of yellow light shot across the dirty white carpet from wall to wall. Cushions were heaped up in one corner and this, he saw, was Muhibbah's corner, with a neat pile of books, one on top of the other, including all the novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot, as well as poems in Arabic. There was a notebook too, in which she had written remarks in English and Arabic: he put it quickly back on the pile, respectful of her fiercely defended privacy. In the opposite corner was a television, the floor around it littered with DVDs. The walls were bare except for a framed text in ornamental Arabic script, picked out in green and gold.

The silence was strange, as though it had been stored there, and he wondered why there was no noise from the adjoining room. An oppressive grief descended on him, long shadow of his love. In this secret place she had been alone except for her brother's visits, trapped by the futile imperatives of a culture that she could have escaped at any time if she had reached a gentle hand to him. Loneliness lingered there, the loneliness of Muhibbah and her pride. He remembered her kisses, three of them, each more needful than the last. And he wondered whether she would ever kiss again, when she had been bartered away in the Yemeni desert. A stream of regretful love sped from his heart towards that distant place, and he sadly whispered her name.

His thoughts were interrupted by the Superintendent, who stepped in from the adjoining room.

‘Ah, I didn't intend you to come in. Hope you haven't touched anything. You are wearing gloves I see, which is good. If you could just come in here a moment. Tell me if you recognize this woman.'

She was wearing a pale blue nightdress and lying on the floor beside the unmade bed. Her eyes were wide and staring, and dark blood from a wound in her neck had soaked the carpet.

‘Muhibbah!' he cried, and dropped to his knees beside her.

‘Don't touch!' the Superintendent ordered.

‘Muhibbah! Darling! Why?'

The officer took him beneath the armpits and lifted him away from the body.

‘Is she dead?'

‘Stone dead,' the Superintendent replied. ‘For several days already, if you ask me.'

‘Muhibbah!'

‘I'm sorry, Mr Fellowes. I realise she meant a lot to you. But it's what we expect in the people-trafficking business. The rewards are great, and the punishments likewise. We can leave Sergeant Meredith here to wait for the pathologist. I'll drive you back to town.'

Nothing in the trial of his teacher surprised Farid Kassab. And if it were true, as the tweets and blogs repeated, that the Shahin brothers were the culprits, this too he had half foreseen. Why had their sister fled, if not to escape their pollution? He knew in his heart that Mr Haycraft was good, knew that he had diverged from the path of illumination and righteousness only because a weak human being had appealed to him for help, hoping to recover her purity through his need for it.

Of course, Farid didn't put it quite in that way, but that is how the puzzle came together in his mind, and he resolved to write words of comfort to his teacher. His father also wished for this, and had already begun a letter headed with the
fatiha
, and beginning ‘Esteemed Mr Haycraft'. Through the Prison Service they were given an address and a prisoner's number, and Farid spent several evenings at the living room table, writing, tearing up, and writing again. When at last he felt able to sign the letter it was much shorter than he had hoped. But his father approved, and the sheet that they put in the envelope read as follows:

Dear Mr Haycraft
,

You are always in my thoughts and in my father's thoughts too, and we dearly hope that this letter reaches you. I want to say how sad I am that you have been sent to prison for helping Sharon Williams. It was because you are a good person that you did it, and my father agrees. Also you were the best teacher I had last year and I am going into the sixth form now without you to teach me, which is such a shame for me. Perhaps one day you will come back to St Catherine's, and maybe we can go on reading together. I have been writing more poetry and taking your advice seriously, you will be pleased to learn. I hope you will come to visit, and my father hopes so too. When you come I would like to show you my poems and you can correct them
.

Yours sincerely, Farid
.

Mr Kassab put his letter too in the envelope. It said merely ‘I hope you are well, and that you will let us know if there is anything we can do for you.' To which Abdul added a verse from Rumi:
Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us. We taste only sacredness
.

Farid felt better after writing his letter. The downfall of his teacher, first in his affections, and then in the eyes of the world, had been blows as great as the disappearance of Muhibbah Shahin. But by seizing the chance for kindness he had set himself on an upward path. Maybe in a year or two it would be as though nothing very bad had happened.

But then came another blow. It was from the small print in the local newspaper that they learned that a woman, a refugee from Afghanistan, had been found dead in one of the villages, that her name was Muhibbah Shahin, and that the police suspected suicide.

Farid kept to his room for several days, refusing food and staring gloomily through the window at the drab green panels and dirty lace curtains of Block A. There were rumours that Muhibbah Shahin had been involved in some shady business with her brothers. But nothing was proven. And no such information interested Farid. When, at last, he was able to accept her death, it was because, after days of prayer and fasting, he had been granted a vision.

Muhibbah appeared one night, dressed in a long robe of green silk and gold braid, like the angels in the Persian book of hours that was Abdul's proudest possession, and which had no doubt been burned with the rest of his belongings on the day of their flight. She was looking down on him from a place above his bed. She did not smile, but in her eyes he saw that she was withholding nothing from him. She thanked him graciously for his love, and said ‘I died for my purity, Farid. This they could never take from me.' And then she vanished.

A week later there was a notice, placed in the local newspaper by someone called Justin Fellowes, who invited friends and relatives to attend the cremation of Muhibbah Shahin. Farid wondered greatly at this. Why no Islamic burial? Why the week's delay? And why was an Englishman in charge? He prayed for guidance, but the cloud that descended in his feelings would not be dispelled. There was one thing however that he could do for her. Farid began to rehearse, as he did each year for his mother, the Surah Ya Sin.

You wanted revenge on Muhibbah, but not this kind of revenge. Now it is Justin who lies awake at night, sometimes crying out in distress, sometimes weeping like a child. It has not helped that the police found no fingerprints on the knife except her own. There was no sign of a struggle other than the forced lock on the door, and that could be explained in many ways. Justin is convinced that she killed herself, and that he himself is to blame.

They have caught Hassan Shahin, but not his brother, who is presumed to be in Yemen. They have investigated your claim of kidnap and attempted rape, but Shahin denies everything, arguing that he had no knowledge of your presence on that ship or how you got there, and that he was engaged in his legitimate business of advising asylum seekers from Afghanistan who wish to move from the Russian Federation to the United Kingdom. According to his story his injury resulted from a fight with his brother.

As for the ship itself, it has disappeared, taking Captain Krupnik and all his crew. It might indeed have been a painted ship upon a painted ocean, for all the credence that it will be accorded in a court of law. Only one person's testimony can help to nail Shahin and that is Sharon's. But Sharon has vanished from the children's home where Iona placed her and nobody knows where she is. In the hope of finding her, Superintendent Nicholson has charged Shahin on two counts of rape and attempted rape, and is holding him in custody awaiting trial. His force's reputation has been damaged by the girl's testimony in court, and by subsequent cases that have come to light in which the police turned a blind eye to sexual abuse for fear of the ‘racist' label. The Superintendent has therefore put all his resources into the search for Sharon.

Perhaps, in these circumstances, it is not surprising that things between you and Justin are less than perfect. You are stronger now, but with a residue of anger, and sometimes you take it out on him. Soon, when your report is finished, you will move back definitively to Camden Town. They are wanting you at the office, with two new cases that they hope to place on your desk. If ever Hassan Shahin is brought to trial you can make the journey north to serve as a witness, and maybe you can get together with Justin then, when your anger has abated.

Or is it so simple? Are you still the person who made clear decisions and changed course when things went wrong? Often, in the evenings, as you sit side by side with Justin on the sofa that will shortly be your bed, holding hands in silence, listening to music, or just letting the minutes slide by, you feel that you belong to him. And when, for no other reason than to be alone with yourself, you make the journey to London, you gravitate instantly back to him, returning within days. A single leviathan swims in both your seas, a monster that has taken peace and love from both of you. No one else will understand this – unless it is that girl, your alter ego, who is the latest one to disappear.

One evening you confront him.

‘Look, Justin, we have both been through hell, we both need to move on. What are we doing about it?'

‘It takes time, Laura. Maybe, when they bring that bastard to trial, some kind of closure will come.'

You don't like the word ‘closure'. Everything lies open for you, the past as much as the future. Only in music is there closure, and then only in the music you like. And how can there be a real transition for any of you, until your alter ego is found, arising cleansed from the pool of her tears, which are your tears too?

Always she is there in your thoughts. You imagine her conversations with her teacher, their words imbued with a tenderness that you do not know from real life, but which you guess from the music of Schubert. Sometimes, in Justin's presence, you feel hopelessly retro. You don't like pop music, and the more advanced it is the less you like it. You don't like films and – apart from
The Wind in the Willows –
you like only serious literature. You are funny about sex – not screwed up, but waiting for a self-confidence that has been crushed within you and which must grow again.

‘I am sorry, Justin,' you reply. ‘I am not what you need right now.'

‘Nor am I what you need right now, Laura. But right now is unimportant. There is the future. Our future.'

‘Maybe,' you say. And ‘maybe' is how you proceed from day to day.

When the time for parting comes Justin drives you to the station in silence. There is pain in his face. You too are tense and unhappy. At the station you embrace. You promise to return as soon as you are able. Next time, you say, we will have sorted ourselves out. He kisses your lips and for the first time you feel desire for him. You turn away before it can express itself.

Through friends at the criminal bar you easily trace the whereabouts of Stephen Haycraft. To gain the right to visit him is not so easy. You must ask him to put you on his list, and he must apply to the prison governor for a visitor's order. You take the direct approach.

Dear Stephen
, you write,
please forgive my use of your Christian name. I can think of you in no other way. I attended your trial, lived through what you felt, and saw that you were technically guilty but in reality innocent. I would like permission to visit you. Can you arrange it?

Yours, Laura Markham
.

The reply comes back within a week.

Dear Miss Markham, I will arrange for a Visitor's Order number. Thank you for thinking me to be innocent. I wish I could agree with you
.