The Disappeared (7 page)

Monday,
26 January

You
asked me if I had faith. I'm not sure what that means. Do I have a religion?
No. Do I believe in good and evil? Yes. Heaven and hell? I think so. Why?
Because I know about the place in between, I know about limbo. That's the place
I'm frightened of. The empty space, oblivion, where souls wait, and wait,
unable to feel, not knowing how or why. I hate the fact that I know. I wish I
could draw everything back to the here and now, live in the present, be happy
and ignorant. But for some reason I've been allowed a glimpse beyond, and I
wish I could shut the door
.

Alison
put down the phone abruptly as Jenny entered the office. She seemed edgy.

'Everything
all right?' Jenny said.

'Fine.'

She
could tell that it wasn't and knew that Alison wouldn't welcome her probing any
further. From snatches of overheard phone calls, Jenny had gathered that
Alison and her husband, Terry, were going through a difficult patch. Also a
retired detective, he bumped between temporary jobs that always seemed to
disappoint. Most recently he'd been working for a private investigator contracting
for an insurance company. His task was to spy on personal-injury litigants.
Alison thought it tacky, following a man with a video camera to try to catch
him out playing football with his kids when he was signed off sick, but Terry
had aspirations to a condo on a Spanish golf course and didn't much care how he
paid for it.

'Mrs
Jamal left you some messages,' Alison said tersely. 'Five actually.'

'Oh?
What about?'

'The
police mostly - how they're all liars and criminals and like to intimidate
defenceless women. If she wasn't Muslim, I'd say she'd had a few.'

Ignoring
Alison's snipe, Jenny went through to her office and played them back. They
were each preceded by a time code. Mrs Jamal had first called at ten p.m. and
had left her last message after midnight sounding tired and tearful. Jenny
didn't think she sounded irrational, just lonely, grief-stricken, and needing
to share her tormented thoughts. At the heart of her anguish was a belief that
the police knew far more about her son's disappearance than they were prepared
to reveal. Jenny sympathized, but her instinct was that Mrs Jamal's suspicions
were ungrounded. It was difficult enough to get the police to investigate a
missing persons case thoroughly at the best of times. Two Asian boys who'd flirted
with extremism and left the country were two potential problems off their
hands. After a cursory search, their files could have been shelved marked 'No
Further Action', and with no suggestion that more should have been done.

Jenny
prevaricated about whether to phone back then decided she ought to, if only to
lay down some ground rules.

She
dialled Mrs Jamal's number and reached an answer- phone. She started to leave a
message: 'Mrs Jamal, this is Jenny Cooper, Severn Vale District Coroner. Thank
you for your calls. I can assure you your son's case will get my full
attention, but if you could bear in mind the fact—'

The
receiver was snatched up at the other end. Mrs Jamal spoke in an urgent
whisper. 'They've been watching me, Mrs Cooper. I know they have. They can see
my flat from over the road. There are men in a car. One of them tried to break
in last night. I heard them trying the door.'

'I
know this is a very anxious time for you, Mrs Jamal, but you really will have
to trust me to —'

'No,
Mrs Cooper, it's true. They went away for years, and now they're back. I can
see them from my window. Two of them. They're out there now.'

Dismissing
her would do no good and probably provoke another flurry of calls. Jenny
decided to humour her. 'OK.

Maybe
you could go to the window and tell me what they look like, or what kind of car
they're driving.'

She
heard the receiver being set down and the sound of feet shuffling across the
room, a curtain sliding back, then an exclamation of mild surprise.

Mrs
Jamal returned to the phone. 'They've gone. They must have heard us.'

'I
see,' Jenny said patiently. 'This is what I want you to do. By all means
contact me with any piece of evidence that you think I should have which you
haven't already given me, and as soon as I've carried out a few inquiries I'll
open an inquest.'

'When?'

'I
can't say exactly. Soon. In a week or two. But in the meantime, if there's
anything else that's bothering or frightening you, you must call the police.'

'Huh!
Do you think I haven't? I call them all the time, and always the same answer:
name, address, crime number. What good is it calling the criminals?'

Jenny
held the phone away from her ear while Mrs Jamal launched into a lengthy
tirade. When, after some time, she showed no sign of letting up, Jenny spoke
calmly over her, promising to be in touch as soon as she had anything to
report.

Alison
came through from the outer office wearing a wry smile. 'I'll screen her out if
you like.'

'She'll
calm down.'

'Are
you sure you want to take this one on, Mrs Cooper? It's not that I'm
unsympathetic, but there are some you just get a feeling about.'

'And
what is your feeling?'

Alison
wore a pained expression. 'We're both mothers, you know what it's like - if
someone told you something you didn't want to believe about your child, how
would you feel?'

It
was one of the few times Alison had mentioned Bethan, her daughter and only
child. All Jenny knew about her was that she was twenty-three and lived in
Cardiff. Sensing that she was speaking from personal experience, Jenny said,
'I'll catch her in a lucid moment and try to explain that a coroner's inquiry
is impartial, not there to validate her theories.'

'Good
luck.' Alison handed her a note containing a name and telephone number.

'What's
this?'

'DI
Dave Pironi, an old friend and colleague of mine,' Alison said, implying that
it was a relationship not to be sullied or betrayed. 'He was heading up the
obbo at the Al Rahma mosque.'

'Thanks.
Anything I should know about him?'

'He's
a good man, lost his wife to breast cancer a couple of years ago. His boy's a
corporal in the Rifles. Just started his third tour in Afghanistan.'

Jenny
nodded. She got the message.

They
arranged to meet on neutral territory - a coffee chain halfway between the
office and New Bridewell, the police station at which Pironi was currently
based. Jenny arrived first and found a table as far away as possible from the
stereo speakers that were pumping out an old Fleetwood Mac number.

From
his abrupt telephone manner, she had expected DI Pironi to be gruff and
taciturn with a detective's jowly face and dead, unshockable eyes. The man who
wandered over with an espresso and a tumbler of water looked more like a
businessman who'd just signed off an unexpectedly lucrative deal. He was in his
early fifties and trim. His smart-casual clothes looked Italian and stylish:
black knitted polo shirt beneath a wool blazer. She noticed his nails - filed
and buffed.

'Mrs
Cooper?' He had a light Welsh accent.

'Yes.'
She half-rose from her chair and shook his hand.

'I've
only got a few minutes, I'm afraid.'

'No
problem. Anything exciting?'

'I'm
giving evidence at Short Street. Heard of Marek Stich? He's Czech. Shot one of
the uniform lads late last year. Real piece of work.'

'I
know. Owns a nightclub?'

'That's
one of his interests. Our boy was fresh out of training college - pulled him over
for jumping a light, and
pop
.'

'Is
he going down?'

'I'd
like to think so. All on forensics, though - not one single decent witness with
the balls to come forward.' He shook his head as he stirred a sweetener into
his coffee. 'You know what really turned the public off the police? Roadside
cameras. Machine as judge, jury and executioner, no discretion involved. Makes
people despise all authority.'

'You're
a benefit-of-the-doubt man?'

'Always
have been.' He smiled as he raised his cup to his lips.

Jenny
tried to marry the smart-dressing modern detective with what little she knew of
the reality of life in the force. What did it say about a policeman near the
end of his career that he'd maintained such studied self-control? What was he
hiding?

She
cut to business. 'Alison tells me you were in charge of the observation on the
A1 Rahma mosque.'

'Uh-huh.'
He set his cup back on its saucer with measured precision.

'Can
you tell me what you were looking at?'

'We
had some intelligence that extremists were operating inside it, setting up
cells to try to recruit young men to Hizbut-Tahrir and other organizations. We
weren't tooled up with informers at the time; we had to sit and watch for three
months, get to know names, times and places.'

'Are
you allowed to say where this information was coming from?'

'Let's
say we were one of the partners in the operation.'

'With
the Security Services?'

'I'm
just a humble DI, Mrs Cooper. I'd get into all sorts of trouble for giving
straight answers to questions like that.'

That
was more like a policeman: letting her know but pretending he wasn't, thinking
the way he did it was clever.

'Let's
imagine a hypothetical situation,' Jenny said. 'Say MI5 had a tip-off and
wanted a mosque looked into. They'd hook up with the local force and get them
to do the sitting around in cars, right?'

'They've
taken on a lot more staff in recent years. These days they might run it all
themselves.'

'But
back then?'

'We
were all a lot greener, weren't we?'

'Meaning
what - that things were missed that shouldn't have been?'

'I'm
just saying - we'd do it differently now. We'd have insiders, hook onto things
more quickly. Pre-empt trouble before it happened.'

Jenny
pushed her hair back from her face and held him in an innocent gaze she thought
might pique his interest, throw him off guard a little. 'Nazim Jamal and Rafi
Hassan were two of the young men you were watching, presumably?'

'Yes.'
His eyes traced her neck down to the open top of her blouse.

'How
long for?'

'A
number of weeks as far as I recall.'

'Have
you any idea what happened to them on the night of 28 June 2002?'

'After
they left their meeting? No.'

'Nobody
followed them?'

'My
officers saw them leave, but their job was to stay put and watch who came and
went from the building, not to follow those two across the city.'

'Do
you think they went back to their rooms in the hall of residence that
night?'   ,

'I'm
sure you've seen my team's reports, Mrs Cooper. We don't know for sure, but
they were seen on the London train the next morning.'

'Any
idea where they went after that?'

'The
CCTV tapes at Paddington had been overwritten by the time we got to them. The
trail went cold. We got as far as finding out that there were rat-runs through
France, Italy and the Balkans, but there was no positive sighting. If they made
it to Turkey, they could have caught a flight out to Kabul, Islamabad,
wherever.'

He
swallowed the last drops of his coffee and carefully dabbed his lips with the
paper napkin.

Jenny
said, 'Am I right in assuming that your partners took the lead role once it was
known they'd disappeared?'

'We
did what we could, within our resources. Whether others looked further, I
wouldn't know. We didn't receive any more information.'

'There
are very few police statements in the papers Mrs Jamal handed me. I presume
your officers made detailed observation logs.'

'We
did the job we were asked to,' he said and glanced at his expensive gold watch.
Jenny imagined him letting villains see it across the interview table, showing
them that a cop didn't have to go without.

'So
how about some names - people who knew these boys? They must have had friends
and associates you were looking at.'

Pironi
glanced out through the window. She knew he was treading a fine line. While
conducting a joint operation with the Security Services he and his officers
would have been warned time and again that secrecy was paramount, but she
sensed his vanity wouldn't let him leave her with nothing.

Pironi
said, 'You know the form. All I can tell you is which of the names in the
statements we made at the time we considered the most important. There was a
mullah, Sayeed Faruq - must've been about thirty at the time - disappeared to
Pakistan a couple of weeks later. Never spoke to us. Never came back. And there
was another guy, a radical we think set up this halaqah. His name was Anwar
Ali. He was a regular at the mosque, and held smaller meetings at his flat. I
investigated him myself, couldn't pin a thing on him, but I had a hunch he was
drawing kids in and passing them on to others. He was a post-grad at the
university . . . politics and sociology, something like that.'