The Disappeared (8 page)

'Any
idea what happened to him?'

Pironi
studied his well-kept hands. 'I agreed to meet you this morning because
Alison's a good friend of mine. We worked out of the same station for fifteen
years. She took her fair share of risks and this isn't the time of life for her
to be taking on any more. I'd be grateful if you didn't send her out to talk to
these people.'

'I
wouldn't make her do anything she's uncomfortable with.'

'That's
not what I asked.'

He
looked into her eyes. She felt like a suspect.

'Fine.
Understood.'

'Good.'

He
reached a scrap of paper out from his pocket and tucked it under his saucer.

'Nice
meeting you, Jenny.' He got up from the table.

'One
more thing,' Jenny said. 'Is this case still of any interest to anyone?'

'You
won't have to scratch far to find out.'

He
moved off towards the door.

She
watched him jog across the road and jump into an unmarked squad car that was
parked opposite, a junior detective at the wheel. She reached the folded
message out from under his saucer and opened it. Printed on it was the name
Anwar Ali and an address in Morfa, south Wales.

It
was late in the afternoon before she had processed the most urgent files on her
desk. Among the mountain of paper had been Dr Kerr's report on the Africans in
the refrigerated trailer. He'd found traces of paint under their nails, suggesting
they'd tried to scratch their way out before succumbing to the cold. The
youngest of the three was a fifteen-year-old boy dressed only in a Manchester
United football shirt. None had any papers or documents to identify them by.
They too would now be stored in the mortuary until the police, at some indeterminate
time, decided they had exhausted their inquiries.

She
chose her moment - while Alison was caught up in another tense, whispered phone
call with her husband - and slipped out of the office. Alison still coveted her
role as the investigator in their professional partnership, treating any
attempt by Jenny to speak to potential witnesses without her as an act of
trespass on her territory. It was true that most coroners chose to operate
largely from their desks, preferring to send their officers to collect
statements and gather evidence on the ground, but there was no reason - apart
from a misplaced sense of propriety - why they couldn't pursue their search for
the truth as far as they were able. According to centuries-old law, the
coroner's duty was to determine the who, when, where and how of a death. Jenny
had never understood how that was possible without getting your hands dirty.

Morfa
was a 1960s housing estate on the outskirts of Newport, thirty miles to the
north-west of Bristol on the Welsh side of the Severn; a neglected corner of a
largely forgotten city. Conceived at a time when coal mines and steel works
still employed the bulk of men in south Wales, the estate was a sprawl of
identical prefabricated concrete boxes built to house the workers and their
families. It now housed the non-workers. Groups of shaven-headed boys and
pasty- faced, overweight girls stood at corners; broken-down cars sat
wheel-less on bricks; a stray dog scavenged on a patch of litter-strewn
wasteland that had once been a park. It wasn't a neighbourhood, it was a
holding pen.

To
add to the estate's problems, it had also become a dumping ground for asylum
seekers. Here and there, as she drove through a disorientating network of
similar streets, Jenny saw Middle Eastern, Asian and occasional African faces.
In an arcade of shops there was an Indian takeaway protected by heavy steel
shutters, and next to it a burned-out and boarded up former off-licence.

She
drew up outside the address in Raglan Way, which, being near the end of a
terrace, at least had the benefit of a view of distant mountains. In contrast
with the neighbouring houses, the path and patch of grass at the front were
clean and swept and the front door had been recently painted. A small oasis of
pride in a sea of apathy.

She
rang the bell. There was no answer, though she thought she heard sounds of
movement from inside. She tried again and was met with silence. She looked for
a letter box to call through and found that it had been screwed shut. Resigned
to having to return later, she was turning to leave when she noticed a twitch
of one of the heavy net curtains in the upstairs windows. A veiled woman
retreated quickly behind it. Jenny returned to the front door and called
through. 'Is that Mrs Ali? My name's Jenny Cooper - I'm a coroner. I'd like to
speak to your husband. He's not in trouble, it's just a routine inquiry.'

She
waited for a response and thought she heard hesitant footsteps on the stairs.

'What
do you want?' a frightened female voice said from behind the door.

'I'm
investigating the disappearance of a young man in 2002. His name was Nazim
Jamal. I understand Mr Ali knew him.'

'He's
not here. He's still at work.' She sounded young, her accent a fusion of
northern British and Pakistani.

'When
will he be home?'

'I
don't know. He's got a meeting.'

'Is
this his wife I'm talking to?' There was no reply. Jenny took a visiting card
out of her wallet and fed it under the door. 'Look, this is my card. You can
see who I am. I'm not a police officer, but you are obliged by law to cooperate
with my inquiry. All I need to know is where I can find your husband to talk to
him.'

She
could feel the woman's panic and indecision. Eventually the card was pushed
back out again, a phone number written on it.

The
refugee centre was housed in a two-storey concrete building in the centre of
the estate. It had once been a pub. Foot-high letters had been unscrewed from
the front, leaving their ghostly impression in a lighter shade of grey: The
Chartists' Arms. Through the partially closed blinds covering the ground-floor
window, she could see a stick-thin Asian man with a wife and two small children
in tow gesticulating across the desk at a tired-looking white woman. Oblivious
to his remonstrations, the woman was straining to make sense of a large
envelope stuffed with papers he had handed her. The walls were lined with
ex-civil service filing cabinets, and there were steel bars at the windows to
protect the few shabby computers and an elderly photocopying machine.

Anwar
Ali answered the door himself. She placed him in his early thirties, though his
full beard and suit and tie made him look older. He uttered a brief greeting
and ushered her upstairs to a small, tidy office. Directly across the narrow
corridor was a classroom in which a language class was taking place, the
students chanting, 'Pleased-to-meet-you.' She glanced at the tidy shelves and
noticed a collection of books both in English and what she assumed was Urdu.
Among them were several political biographies of Middle Eastern figures whose
names she didn't recognize.

'How
can I help you, Mrs Cooper?' Ali said, his anger at her presence covered by
only a thin veneer of politeness.

'Your
name was given to me as someone who was associated with Nazim Jamal and Rafi
Hassan before their disappearance.'

'By
whom?' He spoke precisely, his bearing that of a man with a sharp analytical
mind: the kind of person who made Jenny feel anxious. Ali was prickly and she'd
have to tread carefully.

'The
police. Apparently you went to A1 Rahma mosque with Jamal and Hassan in the
months beforehand and ran a halaqah at your flat in Marlowes Road - I hope I
pronounced that correctly.'

'Your
pronunciation is fine. The police are still peddling this story?'

'They
certainly had you marked down as a radical at the time. How they feel about you
now I've no idea.'

'Thankfully
we've had very little to do with each other. My brief spell in unlawful custody
was sufficient. I still don't know if it was the police or the Security
Services holding me. I was punched, kicked, deprived of food and sleep, not
permitted to wash, disturbed at prayers, forced to urinate on the floor. They
found no evidence against me, I was not charged, nor have I ever been.' He
leaned forward in his chair. 'I should be extremely wary of taking notice of
what people who behave in this way tell you, Mrs Cooper. They were not
concerned with guilt or innocence, or even with the truth. All they wanted was
to put Muslims behind bars.'

'They
told Mrs Jamal you were a member of Hizut-Tahrir.'

'You're
sounding very much like them. I thought the coroner's functions were separate
from the police?'

He
sat back, regarding her calmly, waiting for her explanation.

'Nazim
Jamal has been pronounced legally dead. My function is to find out how that
happened.'

'I
thought he was only
presumed
dead? That's not sufficient grounds for an
inquest.'

'This
is a preliminary inquiry. Mrs Jamal has spent many years in limbo; I feel it's
the least I can do for her.' She affected what she hoped would appear a genuine
smile. 'I presume that you were close to the two of them, friendly even?'

'Yes,
for a while.'

'Is
there anything you'd like their families to know?'

'There's
nothing to tell. We went to mosque, studied a little together. That's it.'

'Would
you mind telling me what you studied?'

'Facets
of our religion.'

She
nodded towards his bookshelf. 'Would these discussions have had a political
slant?'

'We
were students. We discussed all sorts of things.'

'Seven
years is a long time. I expect you've changed.'

He
shook his head. 'You really have missed your vocation,

Mrs
Cooper. I am not - ' he paused for emphasis - 'nor have I ever been, an
advocate of violence.'

'Do
you know where they went, Mr Ali?'

He
held her gaze, unblinking. 'Do you honestly think I would not have told their
families if I did?'

'Did
they ever they mention going abroad to you, to Afghanistan perhaps?' 'No.'

'You
know they were allegedly seen on a London train the next morning.'

'If
that was so, I knew nothing about it.'

'The
police think you were some sort of recruiter, that you hooked in idealistic
young men and passed them down the line to dangerous fanatics.'

'They
think a lot of things, but understand very few.'

'So
tell me. You must have a theory.'

He
glanced down for a moment, considering his response carefully. 'I've had many
years to think, and I can conclude only two things. Firstly, that even those we
believe we know we may not; and secondly, that even in this country a Muslim
life is cheap.'

'Are
you telling me the whole truth, Mr Ali?'

'Those
two young men weren't just friends to me, they were my
brothers
. Why
would I lie?'

For
all sorts of reasons, she thought, but knew there was little point in forcing
the issue. The best she could do was appeal to his conscience and leave it with
him. 'I'll ask just one thing of you,' she said, 'that you'll think about Mrs
Jamal. Nazim was her only child.' She took out a business card and placed it on
his desk. 'She has a right to know even if the public doesn't.'

He
didn't get up to show her out. As she laid a hand on the door, he said, 'Be
careful whom you trust, Mrs Cooper – when a friend cuts your throat, you don't
see him coming.'

Ali's
parting words remained with her. She hadn't known what to make of him, except
that he inhabited a world she didn't understand and that he had made her
slightly nervous. She could believe that he had been a young radical, a fanatic
even, but she struggled with the thought that a Muslim mother would not have
been told by someone on the inside, even anonymously, if her devout son had
volunteered to fight for a religious cause. And if Nazim and Rafi hadn't gone
to fight or train with the mujahedin, where else could they have gone? They
were scarcely more than schoolboys, only nine months into their university
careers. Several dark scenarios presented themselves to her: perhaps they were
lured to London and press-ganged into an organization against their will?
Perhaps they were still very much alive, zealous and fanatical; or perhaps
they were fugitives, living underground, running scared.

Only
one thing was now certain: if Ali was connected with their disappearance,
whoever he was involved with would already know about her and her
investigation. Common sense told her to pull back now while she still could,
but every time she entertained the thought something deep inside her rebelled.

She
had felt like this before. It was as if she had no choice.

In
order to obtain the Home Secretary's permission to hold an inquest into the
case of a missing person presumed dead, Jenny needed to convince him that there
was at least a strong likelihood that Nazim Jamal was in fact deceased.
Strictly speaking, she also needed reason to believe that the death had
occurred in or near her district - which could be impossible to prove - but she
hoped to argue by analogy with bodies flown home from abroad, that if the body
were ever to be repatriated it would be to within her jurisdiction. It was a
weak argument, and viewed in the cold light of day the arguments against
holding an inquest seemed even flimsier. It was clearly within the public
interest to know why two bright young British citizens had vanished. To refuse
to inquire would smack of official cover up, and the one-and-a- half million
British Muslims were too big a constituency for any government to risk
alienating.