The Disappeared (12 page)

Justin gave the address of Copley Solutions, and the policeman referred him to the neighbourhood police station, which was open for public consultation every weekday between 9 and 5. He promised to alert the staff, and advised Justin to ring them to make an appointment the next morning.

Lying on the black leather sofa that occupied the centre of his living room, piecing together what he had learned from this conversation and from Millie, Justin came to the conclusion that he alone was concerned by Muhibbah's disappearance, and that he alone could rescue her. He clenched his fist and beat hard against the back of the sofa, shouting ‘I will do it!' But he had neither the knowledge nor the weapons for the task, and the harder his blows the more hollow and desolate they sounded. He would never have imagined that he could be reduced to helpless grief by losing someone whom he had never possessed. Yet the thought of Muhibbah, staring in stoical revulsion, as the unwanted flesh of an unloved man left slug-tracks of desire all over her sweet body, caused him to cry out in jealousy and rage.

After a brief attempt to drown his grief in whisky Justin lay sleepless on the sofa, sometimes listening to Spiral Architect on his iPod, taking a small amount of comfort from ‘Black Sabbath' with its tale of ‘fictional seduction on a black snow sky', but ending in the early hours writing Muhibbah's name again and again in his notebook.

Arriving for his appointment with Chief Superintendent Peter Nicholson he felt haggard and grim. To his consternation he was shown at once into the Superintendent's office, which was at the rear of the building, overlooking a small garden of shrubs. He had hoped to be held at bay by a secretary, so as to work up resentment towards the person who was keeping him waiting. But the unsmiling officer who rose to meet him put Justin at once in his place, as someone with a heap of qualifications and not an ounce of power. It was not only the round youthful face above the smart jacketless uniform that spoke of Peter Nicholson's rapid rise to the position of Chief Superintendent. There was a brisk application of manner, a way of making prepared statements and impeccable summaries, that revealed a perfectly digitised mind, an advanced piece of office software that was able to replace the fallible human in every conceivable bureaucratic task. Superintendent Nicholson had already absorbed all that there was to know of the case of Muhibbah Shahin, had put together a summary of the relevant law and best practice, and was busily ticking boxes almost before Justin had accepted his invitation to sit down.

‘You will appreciate, Mr Fellowes, that our powers in matters of this kind are strictly limited,' he said after giving his expert review of the facts. ‘Whether or not you agree with the report of Sir William MacPherson, which accused us of being ‘institutionally racist', you will understand that we must now take special care that no well-meaning member of the public can use this charge to make our job impossible. We live in a multicultural society, Mr Fellowes, and we are committed to sensitive policing. Different communities and different cultures among us see things in different ways. You will remember the headmaster of a school, not so far from here, who insisted that Muslim children should obey the same rules as whites, and that the alternative to integration was disintegration. Well, it caused quite a stir in its time, and the imams united in calling for his resignation. Muslim children were, in their view, Muslims first, and British only by adoption. The Headmaster, you will recall, was condemned as a racist and eventually dismissed from his post. Naturally we don't want any of that on our watch.'

‘Does multiculturalism mean accepting forced marriage, abduction, honour killing, and slavery?'

‘You misunderstand me, Mr Fellowes. We have already cautioned Ms Shahin's family about this. We cannot assume that a crime has been committed, however, until there is sufficient evidence to warrant an investigation. A quarter of a million persons go missing every year, and most turn up in the end. Meanwhile our rule is sensitive policing. The Afghan community has customs concerning marriage and the family that we, or some of us, do not share. You say that there were signs of a struggle when Ms Shahin left your office, and it is of course significant that she left her coat with her mobile phone behind. But you also say that she appeared later at her rented accommodation, in the company of a man, to collect her belongings. For us to assume on such slender and conflicting evidence that she is being abducted would be to invite the charge of gross prejudice. Of course, we can send someone to inspect your office, and to give a professional opinion as to whether a struggle occurred. But there are struggles and struggles, Mr Fellowes. An embrace can seem very like a fight, if you get my meaning.'

Justin did get his meaning, and his gorge rose at the implication. Everything about Muhibbah could be put in question, but not her purity, not the thing she had wrapped up so completely in herself that no one could take it without taking all of her. But behind this vivid thought came another: that Muhibbah belonged indeed to another culture, that all her eager sallies into the modern world had not broached the inner sanctum where the gods of honour and purity reigned. In this the Superintendent was right: to assume that Muhibbah had been abducted was to assume that she had been removed from a place and a life where she belonged. But she had belonged to nothing and to no one around her. Always, even in the most intimate moments, when she had allowed her eyes to rest on Justin and a brief flutter of tenderness had appeared in their depths before plunging back into darkness, even in those moments the real Muhibbah was elsewhere, beyond his reach and unobtainable.

He stared at the photographs on Superintendent Nicholson's desk: the smiling face of a pretty wife, the teenage son in a rugby shirt holding a silver trophy high above his head, the clumsy looking daughter in her graduation gown, the incontrovertible testimonies to success in the art of belonging. Justin had never achieved that success: had never wanted it. And his love for Muhibbah was the proof.

Sensitive policing, the Superintendent reassured him, meant dealing sensitively with Justin too. The police would certainly keep an open eye and mind, would welcome any information that Justin might from time to time acquire, and would be ready to take action as soon as there should be an indication of foul play. In proof of his impeccable intentions, the Superintendent gave Justin a telephone number, which he could call at any time. And as he shook hands he looked glaringly into Justin's eyes, as though challenging him to find fault with anything that had been transacted between them. Then, for the first time, he smiled – a quick, theatrical flash of good humour, which signified ‘problem solved'. And the problem was Justin.

All the rest of that day Justin sat at his desk, the plans for the carbon-neutral houses spread before him. He stared gloomily at the chair in the corner from which Muhibbah had gone, rehearsing every possible interpretation of her mysterious behaviour. Only at the end of the afternoon did he recall the clinching piece of evidence, which was that her computer too had vanished. Why had this slipped his mind? He reached for the telephone, and began to dial the number that Superintendent Nicholson had given him. But he quickly replaced the receiver, arrested by a disturbing thought. Would he be reporting a theft? And would the police be looking for her now, not as the victim but as the perpetrator of a crime? From this too he must protect her.

The two grey-green blocks of Angel towers stood in an arena of bare concrete, in one corner of which was the remains of a children's playground. Struts that had once supported a metal slide were twisted together like crossed fingers, and the sawn-off remnants of a climbing frame stood vigil over a heap of litter. All the ground-floor flats had been boarded up and sprayed with graffiti. The wheel-less frame of a bicycle lay across the path between the towers, and heaped against the walls were black rubbish bags, plastic bottles, a grease-covered cooker and a disembowelled mattress from which the rusting springs hung out like entrails. Outside the entrance to Block A two shopping trolleys were jammed against the wall in a close embrace. Justin had to hold them back with one hand while pushing on the wired glass door with the other.

The afternoon sun shone into the hallway, glinting on a bank of vandalised letterboxes. Next to them was an intercom with a hundred buttons, five for each floor. Beside each number was a space for a name. One or two of these had been filled in, but most were blank. Muhibbah had once said how nice it was to live with Angela and Millie, after five years on the eighth floor of a Council block. Her family were unlikely to have moved, so Justin had only ten addresses to explore. The first four of the eighth-floor bells in Block A produced no response, while the fifth awoke a male voice that shouted in a language that Justin guessed to be Polish. The five 8th-floor flats in Block B all responded to his call in Yorkshire English, and none had heard of a family called Shahin.

Justin returned to Block A and took the lift to the eighth floor. A corridor ran the length of the building from North to South. On the side next to the lift and stairwell were the two doors of larger flats, which faced the three doors of smaller accommodation across the corridor. It was to the first of the larger flats – number 8/1 – that Justin, after a moment of doubt, addressed himself. The door, which was scuffed and smeared and looked as though it had been repeatedly kicked, was without a nameplate. The bell was broken and made no sound. Justin bent down to peer through the letterbox, but it had been blocked up from inside. He was about to turn away when he heard a slapping noise inside the flat, and a faint sound of music. He knocked hard with his knuckles on the door.

In truth Justin had no idea what to say should he stand face to face with one of Muhibbah's family. He felt no fear, only a deep desolation at the thought that he might never see her again, and a pressing need to speak of her to someone for whom she mattered, even if that person were her enemy. When the door opened at last, he found himself confronting a man whose angular face seemed to be made of hardened steel, with charcoal rubbed into the crevices. Behind him was a dark interior where two large women wearing veils of white muslin were kneading dough on a wooden table. The only words that occurred to Justin were ‘does the Shahin family live here?' to which the reply was an intensification of the man's hostile stare.

The two women looked up from their work, and a door opened in the background darkness, revealing a dishevelled young man in a T-shirt. The music came from the room behind him – a woman's voice wailing on the word
Habib
, darling, another of the love words with which Muhibbah taunted him, saying she would never allow him to use it in its feminine form,
Habibah
, unless, perhaps, he pronounced it as he should. But the guttural ‘Ha' defeated him, and from behind the screen of her impregnable language he sensed Muhibbah looking on his love with mocking curiosity.

He repeated his question and the young man came quickly forward to interpose himself.

‘Who are you?' he asked. Justin recognised the even features, the steady eyes, the smooth skin and delicate straight nose of Muhibbah.

‘My name's Justin Fellowes. Muhibbah Shahin works in my office; but she seems to have left without an explanation. I gather she used to live here; maybe she has been in touch with you?'

The older man spat disgustedly and turned away.

‘We don't know anyone called Muhibbah,' the young one said.

‘Oh? But you resemble her so closely. You could be her brother.'

In the hidden recesses two men raised their voices. Justin assumed the language to be Pashto. One of the women was eyeing him across her veil like an alarmed animal. There was a sweet smell of cinnamon in the air, and the walls were hung with lengths of cloth that flapped a little in the breeze from the doorway. The flat seemed full of objects that demanded an explanation and could not provide one. There were some spherical trinkets of silver, on a little cabinet veneered in velvet. A long stick with an ivory handle lay on a narrow table against one wall. Small cubical boxes covered in gold leaf were stacked in one corner. And on the doors, carefully painted in ornamental script, were passages of Arabic – perhaps verses from the Koran. It was an uncompromisingly inner place, a place of privacy and closure –
Haram
, as Muhibbah had taught him, forbidden, as was everything of herself that she did not explicitly give. A queer vertiginous feeling came over him, as though he stood on the edge of an abyss. He looked in silence at the young man, who returned his look with a frown.

‘We don't know her, I said. Satisfied?'

He closed the door slowly, withdrawing his face by degrees and keeping his eyes fixed on Justin, as though to memorise the features for some future use.

Justin stood without moving for a few moments, and then walked slowly away. He descended the stairs with irresolute step; their walls of greenish wash were scrawled all over with graffiti and from time to time he paused to study them, though they made no sense, having only an oblique relation to written words. On the fifth floor he passed a girl going in the opposite direction. She was slim, blonde, fragile looking, and was wearing the uniform of St Catherine's Academy. She was out of breath, and staring fixedly ahead as though in flight. He wondered why she did not use the lift. Afterwards he recalled her pale pretty features with a strange feeling of sadness, as though it were she and not Muhibbah who were asking to be rescued. And in truth he had no more grounds to think that Muhibbah was interested in his protection than to think the same of that girl.

After this visit everything in Justin's life changed. He had glimpsed in that dark interior the antidote to all his dreams. What was the purpose of cleaning the world, when the reality was Angel Towers? Why provide eco-friendly houses for the middle-classes, when the old mess fell into the hands of newcomers determined to exploit it as it was? Why litter the landscape with wind farms and the roofs with solar panels, when the only effect was to encourage the belief that resources were inexhaustible, and mankind could go on squeezing into every available corner of the earth? And why devote your heart and soul to loving and protecting a single person, when that person refused to belong to you or to the place that was yours?