The Disappeared (25 page)

'I
think what you're trying to tell me is that you think those boys went abroad to
fight.'

Miah
exhaled, his breath a heavy cloud of vapour. He stopped and turned to face her,
fixing her with a look that was both pained and profoundly serious. 'When they
disappeared I was only beginning to understand the nature of the problem. But
now I can tell you, if I were to draw a template for the ideal recruit to the extremist
cause, both of them would fit it perfectly. Middle class, highly intelligent,
ambitious, culturally displaced and as emotionally vulnerable as any young
person. They were there for the taking. Eight years on it's not just one or two
or even tens, it's hundreds and thousands.' He was fired by a tortured passion.
'We live in a country that doesn't know itself, Mrs Cooper. We keep moving, but
beyond the base struggle for survival we have no idea why.'

Having
said his piece, Miah retreated to his academic shell. He told Jenny that both
MI5 and police officers had questioned him extensively at the time, but little
of note had emerged. He denied that they had been in touch recently. Any faith
he once had in the ability of the state to address these problems, he said, had
long since evaporated. He no longer sat on policy-making committees or wrote
papers to inform government departments; he wrote books and articles and tried
his best to inspire the students who passed through his classes with values that
would inoculate them against extremism.

'But
the fundamentalists do have a point,' he said as they neared the garden gates
and the end of their meeting. 'Without a story to explain ourselves, we are
nothing.'

Miah's
words lodged stubbornly in her mind as she walked back through the thin drizzle
to the office. They had pierced her defences and unsettled the waters that her
medication struggled to still. Storyless herself, searching for the pieces of
her childhood that might explain what lay in her threatening, still unexplored
recesses, he had loosened her grip on solid reality a little further. Every
face in the street, lined or fresh, bright or dulled, seemed confident in its
history, rooted in a certainty she had long since lost.

Walking
past a florist's, she glanced at her reflection in the window and for a brief
second didn't recognize herself. It was a ghostly, transparent, semi-being that
looked back at her. A surge of panic tightened her chest and throat. She
quickened her pace, focusing on the strength in her limbs, the breath in her
lungs, the life in her. Her state, she realized, was due to being
aware
of the part that was missing. Rafi and Nazim hadn't been. Their voids had been
filled before they had even become conscious of them. Darting across the road,
dodging the traffic, a phrase surfaced from long-forgotten school days:
nature
abhors a vacuum
. If nature forbids an absence to occur, it must, as she had
always suspected, be perverted and unnatural forces that opened up fissures in
the fabric of reality, and untethered nascent souls from their moorings.

Hurrying
past a row of scruffy shops, turning her head away from their plate-glass
fronts, her spiralling thoughts spewed up yet another realization: that the
evil she touched in her dreams was such an absence, a nothingness into which
innocence was easily seduced.

Nazim
and Rafi had passed through the vortex, evaporated with a trace, and it fell to
her, to her of all people, to follow them.

Jenny
leaned heavily against the reassuringly heavy and cumbersome front door and
made for the sanctuary of her office. Her brief interview with Miah had
disturbed her to an extent which felt out of all proportion. Here was where she
made sense of things, surrounded by her books and the trappings of office, the
objects that told her who she was and all that she stood for.

Alison
looked up with a start as she entered. She was sitting at her desk in her
overcoat, her face drained of colour. An answerphone message was playing: Mrs
Jamal pathetically pleading for someone to answer,
please
. She was
frightened, she said, there had been more phone calls in the night. Wouldn't
somebody help her? She lapsed into sobs and sniffles.

'I
thought she was going to stop that,' Jenny said.

'She
left three like it. Claimed she was being watched —’

'I'll
call her,' Jenny said and started towards her office.

'She's
dead, Mrs Cooper.'

Jenny
stopped midway across the room. 'What?'

'I
called her back,' Alison said, 'just now. A young constable answered. A
neighbour found her body in the front garden about fifteen minutes ago. She'd
fallen from her balcony.'

Numb,
Jenny glanced at her watch. It was a quarter past two. It had been an hour and
a half since she had left the office.

'When
did she make her last call?'

'Just
after one,' Alison said. 'I feel dreadful . . . You can never see it coming,
can you?'

Jenny
left a message on McAvoy's phone telling him she wouldn't be able to meet him,
something - she didn't say what - had come up. She replaced the receiver and
reached for her pills, shook out one of each and swallowed. She doodled
agitatedly on a legal pad while waiting for them to dull the frantic thoughts
that were crowding her mind. She felt nauseous with guilt that she hadn't
answered Mrs Jamal's call. An irrational part of her blamed McAvoy for phoning
when he had. A second later and she would have answered Mrs Jamal's call, and
perhaps ... It didn't bear thinking about.

A
police cordon had gone up across the street, attracting a small crowd of
onlookers eager for a glimpse of the corpse. Jenny pushed through them and
caught sight of DI Pironi leaving the front of the building. It was his patch.
New Bridewell police station was less than half a mile away. She caught up with
him as he stood on the pavement pulling off latex gloves and the elasticated
plastic bags that covered his shoes.

'David-'

'Jenny.'
He didn't seem pleased to see her. 'You can't go in, I'm afraid. Forensics have
got to sweep it first.'

'What
happened?'

'Looks
like she fell from the balcony.'

She
looked up at the building. 'How could she fall? Those railings must be waist
high.'

He
balled up the plastic bags and gloves and tossed them into the gutter. 'She
could have jumped, I suppose.'

'Why
would she do that?'

'No
idea. You can take a look at her if you like. She's still there.' He gestured
to a female constable who didn't look old enough to be out of school. 'Show the
coroner the body, would you? Don't get too close.' He aimed a key fob at a pool
car that was double-parked in the street. 'We've booked her in for a
post-mortem early this afternoon. I thought you'd appreciate a swift
turnaround, what with the inquest and everything. I expect we'll talk in the
morning.' He gave her a flat smile and left.

Jenny
followed the constable, stepping over the cordon tape and crossing a damp patch
of lawn around to the side of the building. Two more uniforms stood guard in
front of a temporary screen made from black plastic stretched between two
poles. The constable said she was permitted to look around the edge but not to
go beyond the barrier. Jenny moved towards it, reminding herself that it was
just a body behind there, an empty shell, and took another step forward.

The
corpse was naked and the legs soiled. It lay in a contorted heap: bent in the
middle, partially kneeling, a dislocated arm twisted under the torso, face
planted in the grass. Jenny was surprised at how little shock she felt.

'Did
anyone see it happen?' she said.

The
constable said, 'No one's come forward yet. A neighbour thinks he might have
heard a scream.'

'What
happened to her clothes?'

'In
a heap on the sitting-room floor - next to a whisky bottle.'

'
Whisky
?
She's a Muslim.'

'The
man who found her said she reeked of it.'

A
sense of loyalty and a large measure of guilt propelled Jenny to the mortuary.
Next of kin - her ex-husband and a sister in Leicester - had been informed.
According to the detective sergeant she had spoken to, neither had showed any
inclination to get involved. Both, apparently, had listened to the news in
silence and merely thanked the officer for letting them know. He had gained the
impression that Mrs Jamal's apparent suicide hadn't come as a shock to either
of them.

Jenny
sat and waited by the defunct vending machines in the empty reception area. It
was nearly six p.m. and all but one of the technicians had left for the night.
The only sound in the building was the whine of the surgical buzz saw, which
she pictured Dr Kerr carefully tracing around Mrs Jamal's skull, not forgetting
the little v-cut at the back to stop the excised portion slipping when
replaced.

In
the silent thirty minutes that followed Jenny couldn't help but imagine the
procedure being conducted on the other side of the wall. The brain would be
lifted free of the skull and cut into slices on the stainless-steel counter. A
small sample would be taken for analysis, and the remainder would be stuffed
unceremoniously into a polythene bag along with the rest of the carved-up
internal organs and pushed back into the abdominal cavity. She could tolerate the
dissection of liver and kidneys, even heart and lungs, but there was something
about the treatment meted out to the brain that felt sacrilegious.

Andy
Kerr came out to meet her already washed and scrubbed. The smell of soap only
partially obscured that of sickly disinfectant, which, after a day in the
autopsy room lodged deep in a pathologist's pores.

'It's
pretty much as per the police report,' he said rapidly, eager to finish up and
get home. 'There was a dislocated shoulder, neck fracture and broken ribs.
Those alone wouldn't have been fatal - cause of death was cardiac arrest,
probably caused by the shock of the fall. Judging from the photographs of the
body at the locus I'd say it was pretty much instantaneous. It didn't look as
if she moved after impact.'

'What
about alcohol?'

'We'll
know in the morning, but there seemed to be a large amount of what smelled like
whisky in the stomach.'

'Could
you tell if she was a regular drinker?' Jenny said.

'Her
liver was perfectly healthy. No scarring. I've asked for tests that'll tell us
if it was an unusual occurrence or not.

Anyone
who consumes alcohol regularly develops certain enzymes to digest it.'

'Was
there anything else in her stomach - had she taken any tablets?'

'No.
Apart from the alcohol it was virtually empty.'

Jenny
nodded, her uneasy sense of being personally responsible for Mrs Jamal's death
intensifying. How much had Mrs Jamal drunk after she'd dodged her call? Could
anything she might have said stopped her, or would she have snapped at her to
calm down and merely hastened the end?

'Are
you all right?' Andy said, 'You look—'

'I
knew her. Her son—'

'The
police told me. I'm sorry. But I don't have to tell you, we see a lot of
suicides like this. Drunk, naked. There's always something that's tipped them
over the edge. I guess it was the inquest.'

'She
fought for it for eight years,' Jenny said.

Andy
shrugged. 'Maybe the fight was the one thing that kept her going.'

'Surely
she would have waited for a verdict?'

'What
if it turned out to be the wrong one?'

The
Coroner's Rules obliged the coroner to step aside while the police investigated
a suspicious death, but Jenny was in no mood to wait. She knew her motives were
partly selfish - the urgent need to absolve herself of blame - but there was
also something else, a niggling fear that Mrs Jamal's emotional phone calls
weren't entirely the product of delusion after all. Painful experience had
taught her how easily irrational thoughts could take hold, but what if she had
been far saner than she appeared? What if someone bad been watching her? Or
what if she had been lying and hiding evidence vital to the inquest all along?

By
the time she had crossed the hospital car park Jenny had convinced herself of
the need to trespass on police territory. She imagined Pironi's foot soldiers,
lumbering and incompetent, knowing nothing of Mrs Jamal's state of mind or
history. Whatever they could do, she could do better and faster.

Revving
the engine to crank up the sluggish heater, she started to make calls. She
checked in with Ross and told him she'd be back late. She caught Alison as she
was leaving the office and told her to record Mrs Jamal's surviving messages to
tape and pass a copy to the police. She already had. Lastly she called
directory enquiries and tried to track down Zachariah Jamal. She got hold of
the number of his dental practice: her call was answered by a machine. She
tried the emergency number it gave out and reached the off-duty receptionist,
who was dealing with a crying baby. The woman refused to give out Mr Jamal's
private number and would only agree to pass on her details.