The Disappeared (20 page)

‘And in your eyes, Iona, that makes her worthless.'

‘I wouldn't say worthless. Just a waste of time.'

‘Yes, I got the point. So are you going to pursue this daft line of enquiry?'

‘I might. After all, I promised to find her.'

‘But I no longer want you to find her. I have moved on.'

‘I doubt it, Justin. But you see, I don't believe what they said to Millie, that she is back in Afghanistan. I think she is close by and dangerous.'

Justin was glad when the conversation shifted to Metal. Someone had transcribed the two guitar parts of ‘Cloud Constructor' and placed the result on the Internet. He was amazed by what he read: two measures of 4/4 and then lost in the rhythmic jungle, with fifteen, eighteen, even twenty one equal notes to the bar. He told Iona he would make variations of his own, find some better words than those that Spiral Architect provided: it would be a new song. Maybe he would dedicate it to her.

‘Surely you should dedicate it to Millie,' she said with a wry smile.

‘Oh, that…'

In truth things had not worked out with Millie. It had been a solace after months of tortured isolation to spend time with an honest and plainspoken English girl. It had been flattering to be asked to explain his former life as an environmental activist and to show how she could follow in his footsteps at the end of the year, when she had her degree in chemistry. He had enjoyed talking to her about his music, playing endless riffs while she watched admiringly from the black leather sofa in his flat. He had felt a surge of protective affection, as he gently reproved her taste for the Pixies and the Kooks, and explained the difference between routine and rhythmical drumming. But when, after what he assumed was a normal prelude of contrived hesitations, she yielded to his kisses, and slipped all hot between the sheets of his bed, he felt, in the moment of pleasure, a strange, bleak loneliness. Afterwards he rolled over and sat for a long moment staring at the carpet from the edge of the bed. She was sweet, concerned and affectionate, but she suspected he was thinking of Muhibbah and the offense went deep. From that moment onwards Justin and Millie were just good friends, a fact that he was too embarrassed to explain when Iona insisted on treating them as a couple.

He knew that he was drifting. He avoided his flat, often, on leaving the office, going directly to a pub, to spend whole evenings drinking with people whose names he had forgotten by the next day. He sometimes went alone to the cinema, and apart from his Thursday gigs and Sunday rehearsals he lost contact with his former friends. Once a week he and Iona would go out to dinner, or eat a Chinese takeaway in his flat. And from time to time he would meet up with Millie, when they would exchange erotic kisses and look at each other quizzically before making vague arrangements to meet again.

The worst part was the day in the office. With Muhibbah at his side, spurred on by her lively curiosity, he had contemplated from his desk the serene landscape of their mutual future. He was going side by side with this woman into a new world. They were making plans for a carbon neutral society; and also for their own carbon neutral, nation neutral, religion neutral home. His eyes turned to the desk she had abandoned and which he did not dare to touch. And he was overcome by a sense of hopelessness and unreality. New projects came to him, accumulating in piles of half read documents. There was a contract to install solar panels on all the municipal housing in the north of the city; a scheme to introduce a first degree in environmental management into the university, with Copley Solutions PLC as consultants; a request for a water-flow assessment and contamination tests for a suburban sewage system – and all such projects, which would once have kept him at work eagerly and late in the search for the right solution, seemed overcast with dreariness and futility. Yet, as his interest declined, so did his responsibilities increase, since he alone could get results, and no one at Copley Solutions had the authority to take the work elsewhere.

It was in mid-April that things began to change. The financial year had ended, and the CEO in Amsterdam raised questions about the accounts that Justin could not answer. Before an audit was done, the CEO told him, a proper investigation should be undertaken, and Justin was to find a reputable firm of financial investigators who could act quickly to stem any leaks or to identify sources of dishonesty. After a day of searches Justin came across the website of Milbank and Company, with the profile of their junior partners. Looking at him demurely from the screen, blond hair neatly parted across her brow and blue eyes sparkling with humorous intelligence, was a girl whose beauty was the equal and opposite of Muhibbah's. His enquiries suggested that no one was more suited to the job than Laura Markham, and arrangements were quickly made to bring her to Yorkshire.

It was a crazy feeling, that he might, by falling in love with this unknown girl, cure himself of his fatal attachment. But he hoped for some such result, and if, through her investigations, Ms Markham were to implicate Muhibbah in wrongdoing, and perhaps even confirm Iona's suspicions about the Shahin family, then would that not make it all the simpler finally to transfer his affections, and to start life again?

So it was that when he met Laura Markham from the London train on a pleasant afternoon in April Justin was, for the first time in many months, in a state of eager anticipation. He had invented a story about the need for a place that would be secure against the leaks and breaches that arise in hotel guestrooms. And he had found a furnished flat not far from the office, in a pleasant suburb blighted only by the two stark blocks of concrete panels known as the Angel Towers, which you could just see from the kitchen window. He had asked for two sets of keys, only one of which he intended to pass to Laura, not knowing whether he would find a use for the other set, but hoping nevertheless that something would happen to give him the right of entry into her space.

Laura Markham did not disappoint him. Her pretty girlish features shone with a ready intelligence, and she seemed as interested in him as he in her. Not that she was forward: there was a demure quality to her enquiries, and when she smiled at him it was with a little flutter at the corners of the mouth, as though she were awaiting his permission. But they were immediately at ease together, and as he showed her round the office his enthusiasm for his work suddenly returned. He steered past Muhibbah's vacant space without a qualm, and explained the project for the carbon neutral houses without withholding any relevant fact, even confessing that one member of staff had, on leaving, taken her office computer with her, so making it difficult to trace the transactions that she had placed on it.

The hour spent with Laura over a glass of wine was the best he had spent in many months. She was interested in music, preferring classical in general and Mozart in particular, and her taste in modern poetry – Yeats, Larkin, Hughes – coincided with Justin's. She loved her work for both its human contact and its intellectual problems. She was self-confident, optimistic and yet with a poetic streak that was withheld from ready exposure. Justin was sure that she had been much loved as a child, had retained the indelible image of home and happiness, and was working to find them both again. By the time he dropped Laura off at the front door of the block of flats, he was half in love. He went cheerfully home and did as he had once been in the habit of doing: he picked up groceries from the corner store, cooked himself a meal of lamb chops and peas, and opened a bottle of Rioja.

When she did not appear at the office next morning he rang the mobile number she had given him. There was no reply. By midday he was seriously concerned, and drove round to the flat, sounding the buzzer without eliciting a response and finding a use for his spare set of keys that he had not anticipated. He called her name into the silence. There was a disconcerting hospital smell, suggesting the aftermath of a serious accident. But he found no trace of Laura.

The suitcase flung on the bed in the bedroom looked as though it had not been opened, and the only clear sign that she had installed herself in the flat was a file from Copley Solutions, lying open on the table in the living-room window. He was surprised by this, since he had not seen her take the file from the archive. It dated from the weeks before Muhibbah's departure, and dealt with a consignment of wood from Lithuania, delivered via Lesprom. He came across the little illiterate note, inserted between its pages – ‘complete off-shore until delivery. MS advise. Reference Squirrel', followed by a mobile phone number, beginning 0048, which he knew already as the code for Poland. And the narrative that then unfolded before his mind filled him with fear.

There was only one place that Stephen could begin his search for her and that was the Angel Towers. He took the stairs to the fifteenth floor of Block A, with the faint hope that he might find her in a corner somewhere. From behind the doors came shouts in many languages and the sounds of loud TVs. But on the stairs and in the corridors there was an eerie emptiness. At one point he passed two urchins in a corner of the stairs, who scowled at him. On the twelfth floor a woman in a burqa appeared from a half-open door and then hastily withdrew. But elsewhere there was only absence, the absence that was Sharon.

He stood outside the door inscribed with the names of Williams and Krupnik. A TV was relaying the six o'clock news. Someone was hitting a pan with a spoon. A deep male voice cried ‘Ya fuckvits, you stop zat noise'. And then he rang the bell.

Immediately the TV was turned off, the banging stopped, and there was silence. Even before the door was opened it was clear that he was an intruder into a space that had no open dealings with the outer world. He had the image of her tormented face as she struggled with the noise and commotion in that prison. For three months now he had known of her suffering and done nothing to relieve it, expecting her to make a clear statement of her case when nothing was more wounding to her pride than a clear statement of her case. He rang the bell again, clutching his brow in bitter self-reproach.

The door opened to reveal a thin, sallow woman in a flowery cotton dress, who stared at him from large grey eyes. Her brown hair was pinned up above her brow, and she held a pale right hand across her chest. Her demeanour was anxious and fugitive, and she addressed him with the one word ‘yes?' behind which ‘no' upon ‘no' could be heard to resonate. Some trace of her girlish attractiveness remained, but it was clear to Stephen that Mrs Williams had been a lifelong loser in her encounters with the opposite sex, and that the broad-shouldered, pot-bellied man in a denim suit who sat at the kitchen table and turned slit-like eyes in the direction of the door had had no difficulty in imposing his will on her.

‘Mrs Williams?'

‘Yes,' she answered, though he felt again the reverberating ‘no'.

‘I am Stephen Haycraft, Sharon's teacher.'

‘Oh, Sharon. She's not here. What's happened?'

‘Do you know where she is?'

The man had risen from the table and was advancing to the door.

‘No. Bogdan, you saw her, dinna you?'

‘Ya, I come home, she in corner writing, then out she go, not say a vord. So vot's your problem?'

It was not a threat, merely a recognition of Stephen's profound insignificance in the life of Bogdan Krupnik.

‘Have you any idea where she went?'

Stephen addressed the question to Mrs Williams, who looked at Bogdan apprehensively.

‘She willna tell us where she goes, will she, Bogdan? But what's wrong, Mr…'

‘Haycraft. Stephen Haycraft. She is – well she seems worried by something. She left a note for me. I need to discuss it with her.'

Lame excuses. And clearly there was nothing to be got from standing there in the doorway, listening to Bogdan Krupnik.

‘Zat girl she make trouble everywhere. Around here come ze social worker, fat cow, now ze teacher, and to us she say nothing. Vot's going on I like to know?'

Mrs Williams accompanied Bogdan's diatribe with frightened looks, waiting until he suddenly swung round and marched out of the kitchen into the interior of the flat. Then, without looking at Stephen, she quietly closed the door in his face.

As he stepped off the bottom stair into the foyer he saw Mrs Williams, emerging from the lift. She came shiftily across to him, and addressed him with a fragile look, as though begging to be treated kindly.

‘I know things's not right for Sharon here,' she said. ‘I canna do nowt. She's no' mine, see. And there are the boys and Bogdan. It worries me. She's frightened of Bogdan, stays out late when he's here, but there's no need to worry see. That's what I told Mrs Ferguson from Social. But they could put her somewhere else. That would be best see. She'd be happier too. I wanted to say all that, only Bogdan gets mad at me. Maybe you can do something.'

He took two leaves of paper from his diary and wrote on one of them.

‘Here is my phone number. Let me know as soon as you have news of her. And give me your number too.'

‘Do you think something's happened?'

If Mrs Williams was anxious, it was on her own behalf. She was begging him for the thing that Sharon was too proud to ask for. She was begging him to take the girl away.

‘Where does she go when she is out?'

‘We dunna know, see. She dunna have no friends to speak of. She just picks up her books and goes out, see, and then comes back when the kids are in bed. If you can do summat, get them to put her with another family like, get her away from this place…'

‘Well… I'll make some enquiries… That's to say…'

Across the concrete yard, in a patch of scrubland behind the ramps where the kids were skateboarding, there was a figure running: Sharon! He set out after her. He sped through some trees, which were struggling to survive in a patch of trodden earth. A twisted bike wheel crowned a bush of hawthorn on which the first buds were appearing. Food wrappings and shopping bags clogged the railings behind the trees, and in the dusk their shapes were like a gathering of curious animals. He was running towards her and also away from her, fleeing what was now inevitable, racing through a dream, and the shouts of the children came from a space that did not contain him. He ran through an iron gate that had come off its hinges, on to the street that led northwards away from the Angel Estate.