The Disappeared (26 page)

Waiting
for his call back, Jenny checked her own messages. There were two from
consultants at the Vale asking if death certificates had been issued for their
respective deceased patients - second only to being sued, the prospect of their
professional competence being scrutinized in a public inquest was the most
frightening prospect a doctor could face - and one from McAvoy. Sounding
apologetic, he said, 'Sorry you can't make it - I'll have one for you. You know
where to find me if you change your mind.' She was fighting the temptation to
call him back - but to say what? - when a beep indicated an incoming call.

Zachariah
Jamal sounded as if he was phoning from outside his home: there was traffic
noise in the background, his voice was brittle and uncertain. She wondered if
he had even broken the news of his first wife's death to the new Mrs Jamal and
children. Drunk, naked and very publicly dead, they'd know soon enough.

'What
is it I can do for you?' he said. 'I've had very little contact with Amira in
recent years.'

Jenny
said, 'It looks as if she might have taken her own life. Would that surprise
you?'

He
sighed. 'I don't know. She was a very complicated woman. Emotional, but. . .'

She
waited for him to articulate his thoughts.

'.
. . determined. Long after I had resigned myself to Nazim's death, she kept
on.'

'Why
do you say death?'

'Of
course he died. Probably in Afghanistan. I know my own son. If he were alive he
would have made contact.'

'But
your wife, your ex-wife, didn't want to believe that?'

He
paused for a moment. She could feel the force of his suppressed emotion. 'No.
She didn't want to believe that.'

'I
suppose it's possible that the inquest into your son's disappearance was
confronting her with having to accept that.'

'Yes
. .

'I
think we might be having the same thought, Mr Jamal. Maybe you could give me
your version?'

'Our
contact has been entirely businesslike. I don't know what was in her mind.'

You
don't want to get involved, Jenny thought, too many painful memories, guilt
layered upon guilt. Shut the door and bolt it. Forget that she or Nazim ever
existed.

Jenny
said, 'I've met her a few times in the last two weeks. She was emotional, maybe
even a little paranoid, but I wouldn't say depressed. Depressed people go into
themselves, shut off from the world. She'd forced an inquest, she was being
dynamic. Wouldn't she have wanted to hear the jury's verdict?'

'I
really can't say.'

'I
can imagine a bereaved mother killing herself in the belief that she might be
reunited with her son. Is that possible?'

Mr
Jamal didn't answer.

'Was
your ex-wife a religious woman?'

'Very
much so.'

'Excuse
my ignorance, but doesn't Islam consider suicide a serious sin?'

'It
does,' he said quietly.

'I
wouldn't expect someone who feels suicidal to think logically—'

'She
must have been ill,' he said, and then, with a catch in his voice, 'she must
have been very ill . . .'

'The
post-mortem showed that she'd been drinking whisky shortly before her death.
Quite a substantial amount.'

At
this Mr Jamal fell completely silent. Jenny could hear the wind over his
handset, a car pass by.

'I'm
just trying to get a picture of what it would mean. Alcohol, suicide - even if
she were ill, certain taboos can be more powerful even than the disease. I was
with her yesterday, she wasn't psychotic.'

Faintly,
Mr Jamal said, 'I agree with you, Mrs Cooper. I don't know what to say. It
doesn't make any sense.'

'I'll
let you go now,' Jenny said, 'but there's one more thing. Has your wife ever
told you anything about Nazim's disappearance, about his friends, anything she
might not have wanted to be publicly known?'

'No.
There was nothing. That's what drove her - the need to know.'

The
last members of the forensic team were dribbling out of the building and
climbing into their minibus. A single constable was winding up the plastic
cordon tape. Business appeared to be nearly over for the day. The front door
was propped open with an upturned broom. Jenny stepped inside and took the lift
up to Mrs Jamal's floor. DI Pironi and a younger plain-clothes officer with
patchy stubble and his hair in corn rows were locking up the apartment as she
approached along the landing.

Jenny
said, 'Hi. Any objection to me having a look around?'

The
detectives exchanged a look. 'Mrs Cooper, the coroner,' Pironi said to his
subordinate. 'I think we should christen her Mrs Snooper.'

The
young guy smiled and ran his eyes over her, thinking - she could read his mind
-
just about
.

Jenny
snapped angrily, 'Have you got a problem with that or not?'

Pironi
looked at his fancy watch and sighed. 'As long as you're quick.'

'Mind
if I catch a smoke, boss?' the younger man said. Pironi waved him on and drew
out a set of keys, sorting through them laboriously as if she were asking a
huge and unreasonable favour of him.

'Have
you taken anything away?' Jenny said.

'Some
prints, a pile of clothes and a whisky bottle. Looks like she swallowed about
half of it - enough to send anyone out the bloody window.' He found the key,
unlocked the door and held it open for her. He might as well have said,
'After
you, your ladyship
.'

Jenny
stepped inside. It looked and smelled just as it had yesterday, a vaguely
exotic scent in the air: herbs and spices. She pushed open the bathroom and
bedroom doors. Both were spotless and tidy. The bedspread was drawn tight
across the single bed, chintz cushions arranged against the headboard. The
kitchen, too, was in perfect order. There was a single dirty cup in the sink,
breakfast crockery sitting clean on the drainer. A shopping list was stuck to
the fridge with a quaint, floral-patterned magnet.

'Mind
if I look in the drawers?' she said to Pironi, who was waiting impatiently in
the doorway.

'Go
ahead.'

She
pulled several open: cutlery, tea towels, utensils. Everything clean and in
its proper place.

'Any
sign of prescription medication?'

'Nope.'

She
opened an overhead cupboard and found the source of the smell: bunches of dried
thyme and outsize jars of spices. 'No booze in the house apart from the
whisky?'

'Not
a drop.'

'No
note?'

Pironi
shook his head.

Jenny
stepped past him and went into the sitting room where she had sat yesterday
morning. It was precisely as she remembered it, only stiller. There was an
inertia about the rooms of the recently deceased, as if the air had ceased
moving. She could smell the carpet and the fabric of the furniture: the place,
rather than the person who had inhabited it. Her eyes circled the room a second
time. Something had changed.

'Has
anything been moved in here?' she said.

'Just
that chair.' He pointed to the wooden upright chair which yesterday had been at
the desk in the corner. It was now on the opposite side of the room next to the
French window leading to the balcony. 'It was where you're standing. Her
clothes were in a heap next to it with the bottle.'

'With
the top screwed on?'

'Who
are you trying to be, Miss fucking Marple?'

Jenny
let his remark pass without comment. 'Were the curtains open? What about the
French window?'

Pironi
rolled his eyes. 'The curtains were closed and there was one lamp on in the
corner. She sat there drinking, took her clothes off then jumped out of the
window.'

'It's
only three storeys down.'

'If
you're having a brainstorm, you don't fetch out the plumb line and measuring tape,'
Pironi said. 'Seen enough? I'm expecting a call from my lad in Helmand.'

'Won't
be a moment.' She moved over to the French window and tried to picture a naked
Mrs Jamal climbing over the railings. It wouldn't have been a graceful exit.
She turned and took one last look around the room. The photographs of Nazim
were all arranged as she remembered them, as were the ornaments on the shelf
unit: fussy china figurines and several shiny sporting trophies.

She
was walking back to the door when she noticed - the two shelves above the desk.
The day before they had held half a dozen grey box files. Now there was a stack
of magazines on the top shelf and a few paperbacks on the bottom.

'Did
you take any files from here?' Jenny said. 'There was a whole row of them on
that shelf when I was here yesterday. All her paperwork to do with her son.'

'We
didn't take anything.'

'Has
anyone else been here? You know who I mean.'

'Straight
up. There weren't any files.' He scratched his head. 'I don't know . . . Maybe
she put them out with the rubbish?'

Pironi
left Jenny to deal with the caretaker, Mr Aldis, an irascible old man irritated
at being dragged away from the football match he was watching on television.
The communal dustbins were in a locked cupboard on the outside of the building.
They hadn't been emptied for five days and he swore that the police hadn't
asked for access to them. Jenny borrowed a pair of rubber gloves and spent a
cold and unpleasant hour sifting though garbage. There was no sign of any box
files.

'Why
didn't you tell me?' McAvoy said. 'It's a cop in here who tipped me off. Dear
God. Dead . . .' Glasses clinked in the background. He sounded as if he'd made
a night of it.

The
hands-free cradle in her car had snapped and she had the phone wedged on her
shoulder as she drove homewards, praying she wouldn't meet a police car.

'The
police think she jumped,' Jenny said.

'She'd
be going straight to hell, then,' McAvoy said. 'Like my crew - no messing.
Suicides are roasted in fire "which is easy for Allah", is what it
says in the Koran. Guy inside lent it to me one time.'

'Her
files were missing. All her papers connected with the case.'

'The
cops would have had those, no danger.'

'Pironi
denies it.'

'St
Peter denied our Lord three times and still got to be Bishop of Rome.'

'He
looked me in the eye. I believed him.'

'That's
because you're an untainted soul, Mrs Cooper . . . Fucking dead. Why?'

'She'd
been drinking. Half a bottle of whisky.'

'Poor
soul . . . Poor wretched soul.'

She
was clear of the bridge and skirting around Chepstow. She'd soon be past the
racecourse and into the gorge of the valley out of radio contact.

'I'm
about to lose my signal. I'll update you soon as I hear anything.'

McAvoy
said, 'I know what you're doing, Jenny. I understand you want to stay above
board, but I could help you . . . If you really want to dig down to the shit,
you're going to need a man like me.'

It
was six steeply winding miles through dark woods between St Arvans and Tintern,
the ancient village with its ruined abbey at which she would turn up the narrow
lane and climb the hill to Melin Bach. Since the night the previous June, when
- in the thick of the Danny Wills case and suffering from acute anxiety - she
had pulled up in the forest car park and wrestled with desperate impulses, she
dreaded this stretch of her journey. This late in the evening there was little
or no traffic. A skin of water lay over the surface of the road and the bends,
always sharper and longer than they appeared on approach, forced her to slow to
a crawl or risk plunging down the steep embankment. Each year they claimed
several lives.

She
switched on the radio to distract her imagination from turning shadows into
listless ghosts, and tried to lose herself in the gentle classical music. She
conjured a pastoral scene of fields and wild flowers, attempting to engage all
the senses as Dr Allen had advised her, but the purer she made the image, the
sharper the point of her unprompted fear became. It was a cold, menacing,
tangible presence, an entity that clung to her.

Go
away, go away, she repeated in her head, trying to force herself back to her
idyll. Then out loud, 'You're not real. Leave me alone . . . Leave me alone.'

There
was a sudden noise, a sniff, a stifled sob of rejection. Jenny's eyes flicked left
to the passenger seat. Mrs Jamal's wide, black, desolate eyes looked
momentarily back at her then vanished. Jenny forced a long, deep breath against
her pounding heart and pushed the throttle down as far as she dared. She had
been battered with all manner of symptoms, but she'd never seen things before.

She
hurried from the car to the house, rationalizing that her imagination had been
playing tricks. The eyes were flickers of reflected light, the face a fleeting
shadow. It was only natural for the mind to make pictures out of darkness.