I don’t know where that came from, but it certainly shut me up.
I’m disappointed that she didn’t come to today’s meeting. I think she’d be impressed with how my standing has grown.
I asked her several times but she insisted she had somewhere else to go.
I turn my body slightly so that I am no longer answering only the teacher but addressing the congregation.
‘Think of Chechnya, Palestine, Kashmir,’ I say. ‘Would Allah really expect us not to take action?’
After the meeting is over I don’t need to hover for a word with the teacher. Instead he greets me warmly.
‘You spoke well,’ he says. ‘With passion and conviction.’
‘I feel very strongly,’ I say.
He touches my arm with his hand. I feel the pressure from his fingers and the absence of his thumb.
The woman who spoke earlier approaches us. I want more time alone with the teacher but it would not be fitting to exclude her. The teacher shows a generosity of time and spirit that I would do well to emulate.
‘I listened to everything you taught us,’ she speaks quickly, ‘and I’m convinced that we do need to take action.’
I want to point out that it was me and not the teacher who made that point. But I don’t.
‘I’m glad you have re-examined this, sister,’ says the teacher.
I notice that the woman’s hijab is not pinned neatly, that chestnut-coloured hair is peeping out.
‘But what do you suggest?’ she asks. ‘What action can we take?’
He smiles at her, always so warm. ‘We can pray, sister,’ he says. ‘Live our lives as Allah intended.’
‘Don’t we have a responsibility to do more than that?’ she asks.
His smile is still intact. ‘Some of us will be called upon to do more. Some of us will get involved in campaigns, take part in demonstrations.’
‘Yes, yes.’ She is excited. ‘I can do those things.’
His eyes flick towards me. Briefly, but I catch it.
‘And there are those of us who will be called upon to take more action still.’
Taslima watched Lilly wiping the smears of chocolate cake from the kitchen wall.
‘Dirty protest?’
Lilly threw the dishcloth at her.
She’d asked Taslima to come round and discuss the PTF. Jack had left so early this morning Lilly hadn’t had the chance to roll out of bed, let alone tell him her theory that the same men were involved in Yasmeen’s murder and Aasha’s disappearance.
To be fair, it would be better to work through it with Taslima before she presented it to Jack. And it would give her an excuse to avoid the issue of MB’s text.
She stepped back to admire her handiwork. The paintwork was fucked.
‘So you think the PTF took this girl?’ asked Taslima.
Lilly rummaged under the sink for a tin of magnolia. After the cottage had been redecorated she’d insisted on keeping all the unused supplies. The bloody thing was right at the back and there was no way Lilly could reach.
‘The only people interested in this girl were her family,’ Lilly huffed, ‘and apparently they had nothing to do with it.’
Taslima nudged Lilly out of the way and extracted the tin, together with a paintbrush.
‘That doesn’t mean it was the PTF,’ she said.
‘But it makes sense, you’ve got to admit,’ said Lilly.
Taslima wrenched off the paint tin lid with a knife, dipped in the brush and made large rainbow strokes across the cake-stained wall.
‘Are you sure you don’t just
want
it to be the PTF?’
Lilly cocked her head to one side, taking in Taslima’s artistic talents.
‘Well, of course I want it to be them,’ she said, ‘and I want there to be evidence that they killed Yasmeen as well.’
Taslima laughed. ‘All very neat.’
Lilly opened her arms to take in the mound of dishes in the sink, a pile of ironing Widow Twankey would be proud of and the stains on the wall. ‘Welcome to my world,’ she laughed. ‘It would be nice if occasionally things went according to plan.’
Taslima finished the painting and put away the tin. She rinsed the brush under the warm tap.
‘Then let’s go and talk to the only person who seems to connect both crimes.’
Half an hour later they waved to Mohamed. If he was pleased to see them he certainly didn’t show it.
‘Another girl has been attacked,’ said Lilly.
Mohamed busied himself cleaning a meat slicer, the circular blade already pristine and razor sharp.
‘Her name is Aasha Hassan,’ said Lilly. ‘We think the PTF may have kidnapped her.’
Mohamed ran a cloth round and round the edge of the blade, his hand getting faster and faster. ‘Why are you telling me this?’
‘We wondered if you’d heard anything?’ asked Lilly.
‘Haram.’ Mohamed ran the pad of his thumb against the blade, a thin line of blood immediately rising to the surface. ‘I don’t know anything.’
Lilly watched Mohamed put the wound to his mouth, covering his lips in a deep crimson stain.
‘That looks deep,’ she said.
He waved her away with his other hand and moved to the sink.
‘Please,’ he ran his thumb under the cold tap, ‘just leave.’
The water ran red then pink into the basin until at last it ran clear.
‘If you hear anything at all,’ said Lilly, ‘will you let us know?’
Mohamed reached for a box of tissues and began layering them onto his thumb.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Now go.’
As Lilly and Taslima got into their car, a delivery van screeched to a halt outside the butchers.
‘Didn’t Mohamed say a delivery man was involved?’ hissed Taslima.
Lilly nodded. They watched as he jumped out and made his way inside.
‘Ouch,’ said Taslima.
‘Ouch indeed,’ said Lilly.
The man had three strips of tape stuck to the bridge of his swollen nose and both eyes were black.
‘How’s the boy?’ The chief super’s tone was gentler than during their last encounter.
Jack had got up at six and spent two hours at Ryan’s bedside before coming to the station this morning. He couldn’t get Ryan’s face out of his mind. His nose and mouth were nothing more than purple pulp, his eyes completely closed. The rhythmic wheeze of the ventilator mocked the boy this living corpse had been.
‘He’s still unconscious, sir.’
The chief fiddled with his cuffs. They were starched, white, perfect.
‘And the girl?’
‘No sign,’ said Jack.
The chief puffed his cheeks and blew out the air. ‘I don’t need to tell you, Jack, that this hasn’t gone quite the way we would have liked it to.’
No, thought Jack. You would have loved it if Ryan had been at fault and I could have returned Aasha to her loving family. The police could have been publicly seen solving a crime against a Muslim girl—conveniently offsetting the case they were pursuing against a Muslim boy.
‘I don’t think anyone wanted it to turn out this way,’ said Jack.
‘No.’
The chief looked at Jack expectantly. Jack didn’t know what he wanted. There was nothing to tell. No leads. No clues. Just a half-dead kid and a missing girl.
‘You’re sure the family had nothing to do with this?’ asked the chief.
‘Alibi,’ said Jack.
The chief looked relieved. Two honour attacks might just finish him off.
‘But that doesn’t mean they’re not behind it,’ said Jack.
He enjoyed watching the chief squirm.
‘Then do whatever you have to do.’ The chief straightened his tie. ‘Double check, then triple check those alibis. Speak to everyone and anyone who had contact with these children during the last week.’
‘That’ll take a while, sir,’ said Jack.
‘I’ll assign a couple of bodies to you,’ said the chief.
Jack was astonished. He’d assumed the case would immediately be handed over to a DI.
‘Are you putting me in charge, sir?’
The chief gave a curt nod. ‘Let’s find this girl.’
As Jack left the chief’s office he shook his head to clear it. An attempted murder and a kidnapping. His time had come. In different circumstances he would have been over the moon, called up Lilly to crow and taken a bottle of wine home to celebrate. But Ryan’s mangled features robbed the moment of any pleasure. Jack knew what he had to do. He would find whoever had done this to Ryan and Aasha and put them away, for a very long time.
When he reached the car park and unlocked his car his mobile bleeped. It was a text from Mara.
What happened last night? I thought we had a date.
Funny, Jack hadn’t given Mara a second thought yesterday night or this morning. In the light of everything that had happened, his infatuation was beginning to look pretty juvenile.
He’d need to speak to her, explain that though he was flattered by the attention of such an attractive woman, their relationship was purely business.
He deleted her text. He’d call her later when he got a chance.
Aasha lies down on the floor of the van, hovering somewhere between asleep and awake.
The stench of the rotting birds is now mixed with urine. Aasha hung on for as long as she could, her bladder aching as she tried to hold it in, but hours ago she wet herself.
When the doors are finally opened, she’s blinded by daylight flooding in and puts her hands over her eyes.
‘Get out,’ a man shouts at her.
She lifts her head slowly. She feels weak with fear and thirst. She hasn’t had anything to drink since she left Ryan’s and her tongue is thick in her mouth.
‘Get out now or I’ll shut the doors again,’ he orders.
Aahsa pulls herself onto her knees. She still can’t see his features, her vision is too blurred, but she crawls her way to him.
When she gets to the open door she feels a cool breeze on her face and the damp patter of rain. Without thinking, she sticks out her tongue, desperate for any liquid.
‘Don’t mess me around,’ grunts the man, and pulls her out. She can feel grass under her feet instead of metal
and she leans against the man, knowing if she doesn’t she will fall.
He grunts again and leads her down a gentle slope. The grass is wet from the morning and it slicks her bare feet. She has to force herself not to bend down and lick it.
They reach a building. Aasha still can’t see properly, her eyes are all grey and fuzzy, but it seems long and made of old-fashioned stone. Everything seems quiet. No traffic rushing past, just the scrape of the man’s shoes on the doorstep and her own panic.
He unlocks the door and nudges her inside. Without the dazzle of daylight Aasha begins to regain her sight. In the hallway are a couple of pairs of muddy boots. A single waterproof jacket is hung on a peg. Everything else is space and silence.
Through the hallway and down a corridor the man jerks his head at a door. She sees now he is the man with the strange eye. The one who dragged her from Ryan’s flat.
‘Bathroom,’ he says.
She goes straight to the sink, cups her hand under the tap and brings it to her mouth, sucking it down in noisy slurps.
After four greedy handfuls she turns to the man, unsure what to do now.
‘You stink.’ He wrinkles his nose at the dark stain at her crotch and thigh. ‘Get cleaned up.’
Aasha looks around the room. It’s empty apart from the sink, a chipped bath and an old toilet, brown with lime scale and worse.
‘I don’t have anything to wash with,’ she says.
He pulls down his lip and surveys the room as though he were half expecting it to be full of scented candles and fluffy bathrobes.
‘Wait here,’ he says, then adds with a growl. ‘Don’t move.’
‘OK,’ she whispers.
She doesn’t think she could move if she wanted to. Her head is banging and her arms and legs ache as if she has the worse bout of flu.
Moments later he returns with a bar of soap and an old towel, ripped at the edges and rough with age. Her mum turns linen in this state into floor cloths. ‘Waste not, want not,’ she says.
Tears spring into Aasha’s eyes. She wishes Mum were here now, with her tired face and lined hands. She would give her daughter a hug and Aasha would smell the almond oil she uses in her hair.
‘Why am I here?’ she asks the man.
He snorts through his nose. ‘You know full well what you’ve done to your family.’
She knows how angry her brothers will be. The terrible rage Imran whipped up on the day she ran away will have turned over and over in his mind until he will be ready to kill her. Ismail will join in, like he always does. Imran’s shadow, that’s what he is. That boy can’t think one of his own thoughts.
What she can’t understand is what she’s doing in this place; why they haven’t taken her home. Is this part of the punishment? And how long will it go on for?
‘What happens next?’ she asks the man.
His left eye spins uncontrollably. ‘That’s not up to me.’
The fingernails were laid in a line across the arm of the sofa. They stood out like tiny crescent moons against the brown leather.
Mum was always nagging Ismail about biting his nails. ‘What girl will marry a man who wears his worry on his hands?’
He was tempted to point out that the girls round here were more bothered about the size of a man’s BMW then the state of his cuticles.
‘Women like a man they know will take care of them,’ she said.
Ismail shook his head and laughed. Dad was bald, fat and frightened of his shadow. Wasn’t that the reason Imran had had to take charge?
He tapped each nail with his knuckle and arranged them in a circle.
Imran sloped into the room and slouched at the other end of the sofa. He was wearing only jeans, his torso and feet naked.
‘Are you stressed, bro?’ he laughed.
Well, of course Ismail was stressed. They’d asked some specialist kind of nutters to grab Aasha and as if that wasn’t bad enough, they hadn’t actually brought her home. Ismail had spent most of last night tossing and turning, waiting for them to arrive. What could have kept them this long? He flicked the nails onto the floor.
‘You need to learn to chill,’ said Imran, and rubbed his bare chest. ‘Or you’re going to end up with a haircut like Dad’s.’
Ismail was in no mood for teasing. ‘Don’t take the piss, Imran. You know full well what the problem is.’
Imran kissed his teeth and sauntered to the kitchen. His jeans were so low, the back pockets were almost at his knees. His Calvins glowed white against his hairless hips and back. He said he didn’t wax but Ismail didn’t believe him. Brothers on chemotherapy had more body hair that.