The Disappeared (18 page)

Alison
was frantically dealing with a hitch in the jury's catering arrangements - the
promised sandwich delivery had failed to arrive and she was organizing a
convoy to the nearby bird sanctuary's waterside restaurant. Outside, at the
front of the hall, clusters of angry young Asian men were courting the media
pool gathered incongruously in the quiet village lane. Two television news vans
had appeared and make-up girls were busy powdering faces. The lawyers hurried
through the melee, refusing to answer any questions, and took off in a posse of
expensive cars. A cluster of puzzled locals watched the chaotic scene from a
safe distance, wondering what could have brought such madness to their quiet
corner of the countryside.

Feeling
suddenly drained, Jenny slipped out of the back door and found a damp plastic
bench which looked out over a field. A tractor was ploughing, a swarm of
assorted birds followed after it, fighting over the worms thrown up in the
freshly turned earth. Huddled in her thin raincoat, she ate the chocolate bar
Alison had dredged up for her, and sipped coffee tasting vaguely of detergent
from a cracked mug.

She
attempted to process the morning's events and unravel the various parties'
competing agendas. She understood that the police mainly wanted to cover their
backs, and she presumed that the Security Services were keen to vindicate their
theory that Nazim and Rafi had gone abroad. Yusuf Khan and his friends, who
appeared to include Anwar Ali, were harder to fathom. Khan's mention of agents
provocateurs entrapping young radicals had caught her attention, but on
reflection it struck her as another baseless conspiracy theory. Khan was
representing a lobby with a positive message to sell - that young British
Muslims were good, responsible citizens - and this didn't sit well with the
proven fact that a few of their number had taken up arms against their country.

'Is
this the best those stingy bastards can do for you?'

She
looked up to see McAvoy rounding the corner of the building. The sound of the
tractor had masked his footsteps.

Alarmed,
she said, 'You're a witness, Mr McAvoy. I can't talk to you before you give evidence.'

His
face creased into a smile that managed to be both boyish and menacing. Trying
to avoid the blue eyes which looked straight into her, she noticed his hair was
starting to kink at the back where it needed a cut, and that he wore a dark
green silk paisley scarf inside his upturned coat collar.

'I
don't think you can afford not to talk to me.'

'Look,
this really isn't—'

'I'd
have got to you before, but you kicked off faster than I expected. I've been up
to my neck in a trial.' He brought a battered soft pack of Marlboros out of his
pocket and offered it to her. 'Something to warm you up.'

'You
know the rules . . .'

'Fuck
'em. Anyway, I thought these things were different from criminal trials. You're
a coroner, you can talk to who you like.'

He
tapped out a cigarette, struck a match in cupped hands and leaned back against
the wall. He took a slow, full draw and slowly exhaled, letting the breeze
carry the smoke from his lips.

'Did
Mrs Jamal tell you that I was solicitor for both families for four months?'

Annoyed,
Jenny said, 'I'd rather you kept what you've got to say for the witness box.'

She
got up and tossed her half-eaten chocolate bar into a rusting wire waste bin.
The damp on the bench had soaked through to her skin.

'No,
you wouldn't. It'd only screw it up, put those bastards so far out of reach
you'll never get to the truth.' He took another draw and glanced lazily towards
her, 'Maybe you don't care either way.'

'Which
bastards are we talking about, precisely?'

'I
don't know. They put me away before I got the chance to find out.' He gave a
hint of a smile. 'Would you like to hear about it?'

'How
about writing a statement and handing it to my officer? That's the usual
practice.'

'Screw
that. This case has already cost me one marriage and a perfectly good career.'
He strolled across the weedy concrete slabs towards the pig-wire fence
bordering the field. 'Are those seagulls? We're miles from the bloody sea.'

'The
estuary's almost the sea.'

'I
suppose . . . Look at them, kicking the other ones out of the way.' He stared
out at the field. 'They pecked that poor girl's guts out, didn't they? That's
what I read in the paper.'

'Then
it must be true.'

'Didn't
dare look that far down myself . . . Heard anything about where the body went?'

'Not
yet.'

'Madness.
What's anyone going to do with it? You always see on the TV - the bad guys dig
a hole in the woods. Have you ever tried putting a spade in the ground where
there are trees? It's all roots. It'd be as easy to get through concrete.' He
sucked hard on the cigarette and flicked the butt over into the field margin.
'It's not as if I don't know villains, but that's a new one on me . . . right
out of the morgue.'

He
stood and watched the tractor stop at the end of the row, lift its gear and
turn around. A sudden change in the wind carried the sound of the birds to
them: a raucous, vibrant, strangely beautiful cacophony.

McAvoy
smiled. ' "I could scale the blue air, I could plough the high hills, Oh,
I could kneel all night in prayer, To heal your many ills . . . My Dark
Rosaleen" . . . My God. Where did that come from?' He laughed and shook
his head. 'Schoolmaster for a father - drilled all sorts of stuff into me.' He
turned, walked several steps towards Jenny and stopped. 'I thought you weren't
going to talk to me, Mrs Cooper.'

'Mrs
Jamal said you went to prison.'

'I
had that pleasure.'

'What
was your offence?'

'Being
a nuisance. My record says perverting the course of justice. Cops set me up
with an undercover wearing a wire. Spliced it all together, made it sound like
the alibi she was offering my client was all my idea.' He shrugged. 'Not that
it wouldn't've happened eventually. Show them up too many times they'll skewer
you in the end.'

'You
were a criminal defence solicitor, right?'

'Solicitor
advocate
. I wasn't going to trust any bastard barristers to do my
talking for me. Couldn't fight sleep most of them.'

'And
Mrs Jamal came to you after her son disappeared?'

'She
and the Hassans both. October '02. The cops had stopped answering their calls.
Hired me to rattle their cage. Three months later I was behind bars. Didn't
even get bail.'

'And
you don't want to talk about this in evidence?' Jenny said.

'Look,
I applaud your efforts getting this thing on so quickly, but let's be realistic
for a moment. You'd think that with all their resources they could have found
out the truth by now if they'd wanted to. No offence, Mrs Cooper, but in my
humble opinion they're pimping you out. An honest woman like you wouldn't want
that, surely?'

'You've
a charming way of putting things.'

'Tell
you what - why don't you call off this afternoon and talk to me instead?'

She
looked at him, astonished. Arrogant prick, telling to tell her how to run her
inquest.

'I
don't think so. I'll see you inside.'

She
headed for the back door of the building.

'You
won't. And if you send me a summons I'll stand mute. I've got sod all to lose,
and now it's come round again I think I've probably got more interest in
finding out what happened than you have.'

'Oh,
really?'

'Yes,
really. You see, I'm a man with not a few past sins that still need atoning
for, Mrs Cooper - my alleged offence not one of them, by the way. So there's no
way I'm going to put my hand on the Holy Bible and swear to tell you the whole
truth when this inquest you're conducting's a fucking sham.'

She
fought an involuntary urge to hit him, hard.

McAvoy
said, 'I'm hungry. I'll be down the road at that bird place. Took the ex-wife
there once, I recall - pink flamingos.'

'This
had better be good.'

She
found him in a corner of the restaurant by the floor-to- ceiling window
overlooking a large, shallow pond in which a flock of flamingos huddled against
the cold. On a dismal February afternoon the large dining room was almost
empty.

McAvoy
pushed aside his empty plate and reached for his coffee. 'You want something?'

'Just
to know what the hell this is about.'

'What
d'you tell the jury?'

'That
they could have the afternoon off.'

'You'll
be popular. How's Mrs Jamal?'

'She
followed me all the way to my car insisting that Dani James was a whore who'd
been put up to blacken her son's name.'

'Have
her arrested for contempt. Can you imagine anyone barracking a Crown Court
judge like that?'

'Yeah,
right.'

McAvoy
said, 'She always was a pain, poor woman. I expect she's right round the bloody
bend by now.'

'She
has her moments.' Jenny's eyes skipped around the room, checking no one was
watching them. The tension of a court day had worn her medication thin. It
wasn't yet three o'clock and she was feeling jumpy and raw.

'She
should be grateful the poor wee bastard had a shag before he went. She'd have
had him hanging off her teat until he was forty.' He nodded out of the window
towards a clutch of chilly looking flamingos. 'D'you know they still don't know
why those things stand on one leg. One of the great unsolved mysteries of
science.'

'I
heard it was so they still had one left if they got bitten by a crocodile.' She
fetched a legal pad out of her case. 'Can we get on now?'

'I'm
not making a statement.'

'Fine,
we'll call it notes.' She uncapped her fountain pen. 'But this was your idea,
remember?'

He
grunted as if he'd rather forget. 'We can deal with Simon Donovan for a start.
The cops were all over him from April '02 in a fraud investigation. He was a
personal accountant back then: used clients' tax cheques to buy rental property
and borrowed off the equity to pay the Inland Revenue. In a rising market it
worked like a dream until he bought six flats off plan that never went up. One
of my partners was defending his co-defendant, a mortgage broker. It was set
down for trial in August. Next thing he knows Donovan's a witness for the
prosecution against four of his tax-evading clients and he's made his statement
about the missing boys. All the charges against him and the broker were
dropped.'

'So
he cut a clever deal on his case - why would IDing the boys be part of it?'

'Have
you any idea how lazy coppers are? I've known them piss in a pint pot to save a
walk to the gents.'

'Donovan
just happened to be down at the station in the right frame of mind?'

'More
than likely. Plus they'd have been desperate to get it off their patch. Get a
statement putting them in London and it was someone else's problem.'

'What
about the Security Services?'

'The
police hate them - they make them do things.'

'You
really think they'd give them a false statement?'

McAvoy
grinned. 'What are you, born again every morning? I thought you'd bloodied
your knuckles as a lawyer.'

'I
was mostly involved with childcare proceedings.'

'Then
there's nothing you shouldn't know about the shitty side of human nature. What
you've got to remember about cops, Mrs Cooper, is that lying gets to be a way
of life. They start off gilding the lily when they write up their first arrests
and end up framing innocent lawyers.'

Jenny
made a note, though she wasn't hopeful that it would be of much help. Neither
Donovan nor the police were likely to admit to fabricating evidence, and
Donovan's ID statement was disconnected enough from the fraud charges not to be
obviously linked.

'Tell
me about your involvement in this case,' Jenny said.

McAvoy
told her that Mrs Jamal and Mr and Mrs Hassan - shopkeepers from Birmingham -
came to see him early in the October. They'd had moderately regular contact
with the police in the first few weeks after their son's disappearance, but by
early autumn it had tailed off. They'd written to MPs and councillors for help,
but were referred back to the police, who wouldn't even pay for a missing
poster. They had come to him in desperation. He wrote to the police and four
weeks later obtained copies of the witness statements they'd taken. He picked
up on Dani James's sighting of the possible intruder and wrote again asking
what they were doing to follow it up. He never received a reply.

In
December both families received their letters from DS Owens stating that the
investigation was being shelved. McAvoy wrote back to protest and got nowhere.
Over the Christmas holiday Mrs Jamal took to phoning him all hours of the day
and night, obviously having some kind of breakdown; then at the start of the
new year the Hassans wrote to say they had decided to end their retainer.