The Disappeared (30 page)

Yours, Stephen Haycraft
.

The man who is conducted into the visitor's centre is a wasted remnant of the one whom you saw on the stairs of your block and later, bowed in defeat, in the courtroom. He approaches with stooping gait. His hair has receded further, his eyes have sunk into pools of shadow, and his mouth is pressed tight between dark wrinkles at its edge. He is thin, and his hands emerge from the sleeves of a prison jacket like the hands of a Guy Fawkes dummy, sewn onto the cloth.

You have used your charm on the staff, and the allotted officer stands at a respectful distance, as though you were lovers. It is clear that few of the prisoners are visited: most are being protected from a form of justice in which their own relatives would be happy to join. You shake Stephen's hand: it is limp and cold. He does not smile but merely nods at you, brushing your eyes with a sad, questioning glance, as though noticing someone else who is flitting beyond the place where you stand. He is reminding you that you belong to a world of illusions that he can no longer share.

‘I want to talk about Sharon,' you say.

‘That makes one of you.'

‘I want to find her.'

‘You mean that she is lost?'

‘Did they not tell you?'

‘Of course I knew she had been taken away. She was my life, Miss Markham, and I did not protect her. How could she not be lost?'

‘I mean that she has disappeared from the children's home where they placed her.'

A blank look comes across Stephen's features. He seems like some senile patient striving to recall the name of the person visiting him, who happens to be his wife.

‘I cannot see why you have come to visit me, unless it is to torment me.'

‘I think I can find her, and I want to know whether you will meet her, when all this is over.'

He is sitting now on one of the chairs provided, his hands in his lap, his head sunk on his chest.

‘In this place, Miss Markham, you learn what happens to those accused of paedophilia. They have no future in society. They have no chance to make amends. They are hounded from place to place, forced to live alone, ostracised and shamed. For Sharon to be with such a person would be the end of all her hopes. She had one chance of rescue, and I spoiled it.'

‘But you love her, Stephen. You love her properly, and not just as the child she was.'

This causes him to raise his head and look at you intently.

‘That is true,' he says, after a pause. ‘But it's also why I should leave her alone.'

‘Others won't leave her alone, Stephen. Think of that.'

‘I think of nothing else,' he says. ‘Of all the torments I suffer in this place, that is by far the greatest.'

He drops his head into his hands with a moan of pain. For a moment you are overcome by pity, and reach across to him. The invigilating officer steps forward, however, and you withdraw your hand.

‘Listen, Stephen. With remission for good behaviour you will be out of here in a few months. Suppose I have found Sharon by then, provided her with what she needs. Will you at least meet her?'

‘Why are you doing this for me, Miss Markham?'

‘I am not doing it for you. I am doing it for her; and also for me. One day I will explain.'

‘You must forgive me. I am shut away here with monsters. I have to share my cell with a man whose only topic of conversation is the kind of sex that landed him in gaol for fifteen years. I will carry the pollution of this place around with me wherever I go. How can I face that pure soul again?'

‘As you are facing me.'

He returns your look, not quite grasping your sincerity, not quite understanding that you know from the inside what it is that Sharon will feel, or that you have found a way of healing yourself through her. After a moment Stephen's face softens.

‘When Sharon came to me,' he says, ‘it was as an angel, who had fallen into a nasty place but was drying her wings. She was always proud, seeking respect, never cheap. I think you are the same, Laura. By what miracle you picked on me I don't know. But you are the first good thing that has entered my life since they took her away.'

When, ten minutes later, you leave Stephen, his demeanour has changed. He stands upright, looks at you directly, not smiling but nevertheless with a kind of openness that suggests he is striving to recover his dignity. He nods goodbye, still looking into your eyes, and you nod in turn.

You had never intended to make use of the number that Yunus gave you. But your instinct to arm yourself against the future has led you to retain the piece of paper on which he wrote it down. You key in the number with a hunch that you are reluctant to make explicit to yourself. The ringing stops and there is silence.

‘Is Yunus there?'

The silence continues.

‘Yunus, this is Laura, Catherine to you. There is something we have to talk about.'

‘Catherine.'

The whisperer is Yunus.

‘I will meet you wherever you are.'

‘London,' he replies, and then ‘Catherine,' with a stifled sob.

‘I know, Yunus, I know. It's one reason we should meet. I will be careful; no one need know. I am in London too.'

‘Your office, then, five o'clock. I looked it up when Muhibbah – when she told me everything.'

He chokes and rings off.

You are sitting on a stone seat in the Inner Temple, your favourite resting place in a recess at the bottom of King's Bench Walk, where no one ever comes. It is a pleasant late summer evening, with the shadows sloping across the lawn behind you and the plane trees scattering flecks of yellow sunlight on the Queen Anne facades. You are sitting with your rapist, a young man with a beautiful haunted face. He has told you he is shit-scared and now totally destroyed by his sister's murder – and yes it was murder, he has proof of it.

He cannot look at you for shame, but stumbles to speak in short phrases full of habitual obscenities. He wants you to know how everything changed for him when he came across you in the place where Muhibbah once worked and when, some time later, he read the letter that his sister thrust at him as she fled through the door. Here he breaks down and, without meaning to, you lay a hand on his arm. There is a kind of trust in the expression with which he then looks up at you and you allow your fingers to rest for a moment on his wrist before withdrawing them.

‘That was the letter she never fucking give me before.'

‘When before?'

‘Before I fucking took her away because I couldna do fuck all without her. Back at school in Yemen see I was clever like she was – but it never worked out here. I couldna write English, and I spoke only shit language,
lourat al-mzrab
, she called it. You dunna know what she meant to me. She wasna just clever, like she wrote the most beautiful fucking Arabic ever, she was always climbing up see, learning, speaking nice, being a modern woman, and when she run away I was on her side, only I was scared too, scared I'd be shit without her, because she was everything good, see.'

He broke down again.

‘Those Polish fuckers think I canna mess with 'em. But Krupnik is gonna die, see. And Zdenko too. I got proof they done it.'

You listen to this for as long as seems polite. Sure, the best use of your pet rapist's energies would be in killing those who kidnapped you. But this is beside the point. The boy is visibly crumbling before you. He clings to you, as though you are the one hope remaining in his shattered life, just as he, at a certain moment, was the one hope in yours. You too want vengeance for Muhibbah, having once wanted vengeance against her. Your destinies have become mixed in ways that only sympathy can untangle – the delicate lifting of a hungry arm, so as to place it elsewhere.

‘So tell me about Muhibbah's letter.'

‘You dunna wanna know.'

You can now look into his eyes without fear or contempt. You are equals, and he knows it.

‘You made her important to me.'

Yunus's eyes waver under the impact of yours. He breaks down again, and you wait, listening to a robin as he begins his late summer evensong from the rooftop. For three years now you have been visiting this place. Its discreet display of long-standing privilege extends an understated welcome. It tells you that it is good to be ambitious, good to be successful, and that power can be sweet, gentle and amusing too. At least, that was what it used to tell you, before your life was punctured, and your confidence flowed away.

Yunus recovers enough to resume his story. Constantly he appeals to you for sympathy, repeating your borrowed name again and again, as though you had assumed his sister's place, as the only respected woman in his life. Muhibbah's letter said she hoped to marry her boss, and that she would stay in touch with Yunus only if he had nothing to do with Hassan. She was ashamed of him, she wrote, and could not accept his proposal that they live together.

But that is what he wanted. To be side by side with her, to clean up their business, to become respectable, to fight for each other against the world, as they had fought for each other in Yemen, watching those Turkish soaps on the telly and crying out, yes, yes, we will be modern people, just like them! He weeps as he elaborates on his childish dream, how he insisted on it, took her away from the life she had planned, worked on her as he had always worked on her to get what he wanted, and then led her down into the hell from which she had tried to raise him. She was all goodness and courage, he just a worm.

‘A fucking worm, Catherine.'

‘So how come you left her alone in that place? And how come you didn't go with her to Yemen?'

‘Hassan was in hospital wannhe? He was shit-scared of that Polish gang. So was I. And she just sat there in the dark, saying nowt. And then other things happened. It was like this see. When I didna come back with Hassan's bitch they grassed on her, saying she'd been kidnapped. After that I couldn't grab her cause she was kept secure to be a witness in the trial of that teacher bloke. And then she come out with it, dinna she? naming names in the court and Hassan says she's gotta be fixed for good. I got her then, from the place where they keep bad kids. But I couldna do the job. It was you stopped me. I'm not a killer Catherine. That girl, OK Hassan and me, we'd done bad by her. But you made me see things different. And when I got her from that place and she just looked at me, white and quiet like someone made up her mind to die, I freaked out. I couldna touch her.'

‘So where is she now?'

‘I let her go, see.'

‘Let her go where?'

‘Fucking Hell, it's not her I wanna talk about. She's toast anyway. So I let her go on the moor at Buckton, and when I get back, the door is swinging wide open and there she is, my sister, lying dead on the carpet. Muhibbah
mayetah
! Her life all gone, gone. Muhibbah!'

All that he says is irrelevant now. That he recognized Zdenko's way of forcing a lock without making a sound, his habit of creeping up on his victims unawares so that there is never the sign of a struggle, his peculiar smell like the smell of a chicken hut that was still lingering so that Yunus knew Zdenko was there in the house; that Yunus ran away then to some Afghan relatives in London, and dithered over how to get to Yemen, dithered until Hassan was arrested and he was on his own, that he was a fucking useless worm without the only person who had ever shone a light in his life except you, Catherine – all this information, which you absorb from his sobbing form and answer with silence, is unimportant beside the knowledge that your other half was abandoned three weeks ago and left to wander on the moors.

It is dark when Yunus leaves you. You give him your phone number, in case he can tell you something more about the girl. You leave him at the bottom of Chancery Lane, and as you climb into the taxi that will take you to Camden town he leans towards you. He is pale, distraught, shaking.

‘I dinna say, Catherine, Laura, I dinna say I loves you.'

You look at him, and shake your head.

‘Nor did I say I have forgiven you,' you reply. He nods sadly.

‘But I have,' you say to yourself. And he watches motionless as you drive away.

Justin was sitting with Iona when Laura's phone call came. Somehow, after Laura's departure, the habit of cooking supper had stuck with him. He often cooked for Iona, who had the knack of distracting him from his worries with worries of her own. And her worries were great. Following the Haycraft affair an official enquiry had been set up into the abuse of girls in Council care, and the disappearance of Sharon Williams from the Council home had turned a spotlight on Iona's department. Suspended on full pay for the duration of the enquiry, her first concern had been that Sharon should be found, and found in a condition to testify against the charge of negligence. Now, after nearly three weeks with no news, Iona was convinced that Sharon was dead.

It was ten o'clock. They had opened a second bottle of Rioja. They were not gloomy, but the conversation, which veered always around to the Shahin family, pressed on their several wounds. The coroner's open verdict on the death of Muhibbah, the disappearance of the younger brother, the arrest of the older brother as he attempted to flee to Amsterdam, the fact that the father, two wives and cousin had decamped as suddenly as they came, leaving no trace other than verses of the Koran painted in Kufic script all over the doors of their flat – these facts went around in their minds, reminding them that they had been allotted minor parts in a complex drama, and that in so far as there was a role for either of them it was to be horribly damaged by events that they could neither influence nor predict.

It was exactly at such moments that Justin most regretted Laura's departure, and her phone call caused him to sing out her name. She had important news, she said, and was coming on the first train next day so that they could act on it. Her voice was not happy but radiated what she most represented in Justin's mind, which was the determination to put things right. Maybe the process of healing had advanced, and he would once again meet the beautiful self-confident woman who was to put the image of Muhibbah in the shade.