The Disappeared (10 page)

She
walked back across the campus, taking the opportunity to observe the students
and absorb the atmosphere. The first group she passed were dressed in stylish
casual clothes, carried laptops and had cellphones pressed to their ears. Young
men and women seemed to mix easily with one another and the political meetings
advertised on the student noticeboards were far outweighed by announcements for
parties and happy hours at local bars. Hedonism, not idealism, was the order
of the day. She couldn't pretend that things had been that different during her
time at Birmingham. She'd marched for the striking miners and CND, but in truth
had been more interested in her guitar-playing boyfriend and cadging drinks in
the student union. She and her friends had been a little less hung up about
money, career and possessions perhaps, but apart from the odd spell of pre-exam
cramming, it had been three years of more or less non-stop partying.

Then
she saw something which made her change her mind. A group of ten or so young
women, all wearing identical niqabs - the black robes and veils which revealed
only their eyes - crossed the quadrangle in a tight huddle. When they passed a
group of boys, they looked away or at the ground. Their separateness was
absolute. Masked and impenetrable, they had cut themselves off from the public
realm. When Jenny was a student she'd had lots of Muslim friends, girls who
came from strict orthodox families but who were only too keen to cut loose and
behave and dress like everyone else. Twenty years on, the next generation were
adopting clothing more conservative than their grandmothers'. Faced with a
bewildering and hostile world they had chosen religion as their crutch. They
weren't being made to do it: it was a choice.

A
black hybrid saloon drew up silently behind her and slid into a space as she
approached the front door of her office. She was reaching for her keys when a
suited woman and a male colleague, both barely over thirty, climbed out and
stepped towards her.

'Mrs
Cooper?' the woman said.

'Yes?'

The
woman, dark, attractive, but tired around the eyes, offered her hand. 'Gillian
Golder. This is my colleague, Alun Rhys.'

Rhys
said a polite hello. He was a solid, stocky young man who could have come
straight from a college rugby field.

Gillian
Golder said, 'This is just a friendly visit. We're intelligence officers with
the Security Services. Have you got a moment?'

'Sure,'
Jenny said lightly, and led them along the dim hallway.

Jenny
couldn't decide if Golder and Rhys's relaxed pre- business chit-chat was
reassuring or sinister. She had met enough government officials of various
stripes to know that the modern way was to give the appearance of approach-
ability and reasonableness, even if the underlying agenda hadn't changed.
Coolness, in the teenage sense, had replaced uprightness as the common virtue.
Body language was to remain open, language euphemistic and non-confrontational.
If you played by these rules, you were considered an insider. If you exhibited
signs of aloofness or appeared too starchy, you had 'issues' and weren't to be
trusted.

'I
suppose you've guessed why we're here?' Gillian Golder said, taking the lead,
Rhys adopting the role of observer.

Jenny
smiled, straining not to appear threatened or defensive. 'I assume it concerns
Nazim Jamal.'

'Yeah.
We obviously heard about the judge's ruling last week and presumably Mrs Jamal has
been to see you about holding an inquest.'

Jenny
knew full well that they knew. DI Pironi would have lifted the phone the moment
she had asked to meet him. It was all part of the dance, Golder trying to see
if Jenny would adopt an attitude.

'She
has.'

'Uh-huh.
Well, it's hardly surprising. It's got to be tough for her.'

'Sure.'

'So
. . . how do you feel about that?'

'How
do
I
feel?' Jenny was thrown by the question. 'I'm just doing my job,
compiling a report to go the Home Secretary, who has to authorize the holding
of an inquest.'

'Do
you think it will happen?'

'I've
no idea.'

'For
what it's worth, we think you'll get the go-ahead. It would only look as if
there was something to hide if permission were refused.' Rhys nodded in
agreement. 'And we're all obviously trying to do our best to build bridges with
the Muslim community.'

There
was a pause in which Jenny felt as if she were expected to respond. Growing
confused and more than a little irritated by Gillian Golder's obliqueness, she
asked, 'Is there something specific you wanted to discuss?'

Golder
said, 'Obviously this is a case in which sensitive issues will come up. And we
all know the media have a tendency to pounce on stories like this and
sensationalize . . .' She glanced at her colleague, 'But from our end we feel
that if we could head off any potential mistrust at the outset, we can avoid
setting off major hysteria.'

'Mistrust?'
Jenny said, pretending to be confused by the notion.

'Yes.'
Gillian Golder shifted in her chair. 'Clearly Mrs Jamal is very upset, anyone
would be in her position, but she might be tempted to see an inquest as an
opportunity to vent her more irrational feelings in public ... It would be
unfortunate if a perfectly proper inquiry were to be hijacked in that way,
especially as we've worked so hard to earn the trust of young British Asians in
recent years.'

'I
can't stop her talking to the press, if that's what you mean.'

'Of
course not. The thing is, what we'd like to avoid is her making unwarranted
allegations against the Security Services. We'll cooperate as much as we're
able, but we might as well tell you now that we know virtually nothing about
what happened to Jamal and Hassan. Really, we've looked through all the files -
the trail went dead.'

'Will
I be able to see them?'

'That'll
be decided higher up. Sometimes we'll seek a public interest immunity
certificate to cover our working files - to protect our methods and what have
you - but we'll certainly provide you with a witness who can speak to the facts
of our investigation.'

'What
about the police records? I assume you've looked at those, too.'

'Not
much of interest in those, either, what's left of them.'

Jenny
sat back in her chair and tried to see through the fog. She had the feeling
that this was an attempt to gag and control her from the outset, but the
messengers seemed so benign she couldn't be sure.

'Just
so I've got this straight,' Jenny said, 'you're telling me that if I do get to
hold an inquest, you'll provide one witness from the Security Services but I
won't get to see your records.'

Gillian
Golder nodded. 'Pretty much.'

'And
you're asking me not to push for any more documentary evidence or to plant the
thought in Mrs Jamal's head that there might be secret information to which I
won't have access.'

Rhys
cut in. 'We're not trying to clip your wings, Mrs Cooper, we just need to get
two things clear. First off, the chances of any of our internal notes or
records being released to a public inquest are zero. The most you can hope for
is that you'll get to look at them in private. Second, we're asking you to
trust us when we say we have absolutely no clue what happened to Nazim Jamal
and Rafi Hassan. Apart from reviewing the papers, we've spoken to the retired
officer who was heading up the case at the time. These two just vanished - I
mean, off the face of the earth. OK, so the investigation was only live for a
month or so, but there wasn't one solid lead after the sighting on the train.'

'So
what do you people think happened to them?'

'We
assume they went abroad. Plenty of others did at the time.'

'No
other theories?'

'None
that stand up. They were just a couple of Muslim boys flirting with radicals,
who were most likely shipped off to be fighters.'

'Is
it really that easy to escape the country undetected? I don't buy it.'

Both
officers smiled at once. 'You'd be amazed,' Rhys said. 'Just because you've got
CCTV doesn't mean the picture's any good, or that some klutz hasn't taped over
it.'

'I
hear the army have routinely taken DNA from dead insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Has any attempt been made to trace them that way?'

'They're
both on a database. We'd have been told if anything had turned up.'

Jenny
sighed. Something niggled. 'One more question: why was the police inquiry so
short-lived? I've heard some officers felt it was closed down prematurely.'

Gillian
Golder fielded the question without hesitating. 'Because they vanished so
completely it was felt they might be in hiding. A decision was taken to tone
things down and concentrate on picking up intelligence. It was thought that if
we smoked them out too soon we might miss out on being led to something
bigger.'

Jenny
nodded, but if the meeting was intended to dispel her mistrust it hadn't
succeeded. Golder and Rhys were young, but knew how to go about their business.

They
had dangled the possibility of an inquest in front of her, but on condition
that she played by their rules. They wanted it low key, not to ask too many
questions of the Security Services, to appear to appease the Muslim community
and above all to avoid inflaming it.

She
considered her dilemma, then decided on the only course she could square with
her conscience. 'I don't want my inquest descending into a media circus any
more than you do,' she said, 'and I've no intention of providing a platform for
wild, unfounded allegations. But as you've driven all this way to see me, you
ought to know that I won't tolerate any outside interference in my inquiry. If
it's done, it's done properly, thoroughly and independently and in accordance
with the law. '

Gillian
Golder said, 'We wouldn't expect any less. Honestly, Mrs Cooper, we're as keen
to find out what happened as you are.'

Jenny
couldn't tell if she had won or lost the encounter; whether she had guaranteed
that an inquest would never happen or whether her display of honesty had marked
her down as sufficiently naive to be trusted. Nor could she decide if she had
been brazenly lied to or if there was more than a grain of truth in Golder and
Rhys's claim that the Security Services were clueless as to what had happened
to Rafi and Nazim. All she could be certain about was that she was entering a
world of which she had no experience.

Fending
off Alison's attempts to extract a verbatim account of her conversation with
the two intelligence officers, she locked herself away for the rest of the
afternoon to write her report to the Home Secretary. She kept it tight and
uncontroversial, cited case law sparingly and strove to give every impression
of reasonableness. Her conclusion was a model of restraint, arguing that while
legally the Home Secretary would be perfectly entitled to conclude there were
insufficient reasons to hold an inquest - not least the absence of a body - the
interests of justice tipped in favour of a formal inquiry.

'Finally,'
she wrote, allowing herself one rhetorical flourish,

while
other agencies of the Crown are frequently accused by the deceased's relatives
of pursuing self, or political interest, the coroner is a truly independent
judicial officer whose only duty is to unearth truth. Although in this case the
chances of that occurring are slim, a non-finding is surely preferable to no
attempt having been made at all
.

She
had the report sent to London by motorcycle courier. As it went, she found
herself mouthing a silent prayer.

Mrs
Jamal had somehow managed to get hold of Jenny's home number. She arrived back
to Ross's announcement that a mad woman had been calling every ten minutes.
The answerphone was jammed with messages. In ascending degrees of hysteria,
they all rehearsed the same allegations: that she was being watched, followed
in the street, that her post was being intercepted and that secret cameras had
been placed in her apartment. 'I am a prisoner in my home,' was a phrase she
repeated many times. The final call was so tearful Jenny could barely make it
out.

Personal
contact with the next of kin should be kept on a formal footing: to enter into
a relationship with surviving family members could only lead to trouble.
Relatives seldom understood that the coroner was acting purely in the public
interest, and that any appearance of friendliness was out of courtesy and a
desire to make the process as painless as possible for those left behind. The
correct way to deal with Mrs Jamal would have been to write her a letter
politely explaining that it was inappropriate for her to behave in this way and
asking her to desist. To respond to such behaviour by phoning back would risk
creating expectations she could never fulfil. But what sort of person could
ignore such desperate pleas for help?

Mrs
Jamal snatched up the phone on the first ring. 'Yes. Who is it?' She sounded
fraught.