The Disappeared (26 page)

‘I can reassure you, Laura.'

It is Muhibbah who speaks, whispering still.

‘Yes, but who was she, who is she?'

Yunus is spluttering. There are tears in his eyes as he rises.

‘She is Hassan's bitch inna she? Like he decided to punish her, dinn'e, for going with that teacher guy.'

‘And is she still going to be punished?'

‘Depends if she talks dunnit? Is none of my business, man. Bogdan'll have it in for her though.'

‘Tell me how I can get hold of her.'

‘She's with that teacher guy, in the place where you live. Must be the flat above or maybe below, otherwise how could Zdenko make such a stupid fucking mistake?'

The girl is pulling at her brother's sleeve.

‘I'm sorry,' she whispers. She has got him to the door. With a sudden movement she takes the sleeveless coat that is hanging there and reaches into one of the pockets.

‘Justin,' she says, ‘I meant to give you this months ago. And this, Yunus, is for you.'

She hands a piece of paper to each of them, one with what looks like a poem in English, the other densely covered in Arabic script. And she runs sobbing from the office. Yunus stands for a moment in the doorway, and then stumbles after her. Your legs are giving way beneath you, but Justin is beside you now, handing you to the chair that Yunus has vacated. The tears flow silently down your cheeks, and he stands beside you, stroking your hair.

‘Laura, my God, Laura. What have you been through?'

You lean towards him, and you sense that healing has begun.

Sharon's body is translucent, lit from within like a lamp of alabaster. On her small breasts the nipples glow blood red, and young life shines from her skin as though surfacing from sleep. Her eyes sparkle and her parted lips speak in silence the lingua franca of desire. Even the little scar beside them plays its part, as though she had bitten herself in her hunger. And the blond hair falling on her shoulders makes a soft cushion for her jewel-like head. Stephen approaches in fear and trembling. Never in his life has a girl made so complete and ingenuous an offering of herself, and he strives to put out of mind all that Sharon has been through in order to lay the gift finally before him. Love, he believes, can heal all wounds, restore all innocence and resurrect all hopes. It is love that he is offering, and a warm stream of tenderness flows to his fingertips. She draws his hand to her breast, slotting the nipple between his fingers, and runs her moist tongue along his upper lip.

‘Bin wanting to do that for ages. You taste of knowledge, Stephen.'

Then she presses her mouth to his. Stephen's body is aflame. All barriers have been burned away. He nods towards the bedroom door, turning her in that direction, as footsteps sound on the stairs.

It is the first time the doorbell has ever rung during his residence. There is consternation in Sharon's face, and he steps away from her, holding a finger to his lips. The bell rings again, this time accompanied by a beating on the panels of the door. A loud male voice resounds on the stairwell.

‘Open the door please. This is the police.'

Sharon snatches up the bathrobe and flees into Stephen's bedroom. Someone is trying keys in the lock. The wisest thing, Stephen realises, is to open the door before it is forced.

Two uniformed officers are on the threshold; one holds a bunch of keys; the other is a young woman with a tidy face, carrying a small suitcase. Behind them in the half light is a figure in a lime green tunic.

‘I am Inspector Vines, and this is Sergeant Pinsent. With us is Iona Ferguson from the Council's department of social work. May we come in please?'

Stephen steps silently aside for them. The inspector sweeps the room with his eyes before resuming his prepared speech.

‘Stephen Haycraft? We are investigating reports that a child has been abducted. She is Sharon Williams, a pupil at St Catherine's Academy, where you are a teacher. We have reason to believe that you have knowledge of the child's whereabouts.'

All formalities have become instantly pointless in Stephen's mind. The ground has gone from beneath him and he is falling. Without the letter of resignation, without the open dealings with Iona Ferguson, which he has delayed for no reason that he can now recall, he will fall until he breaks in pieces on the ground. Best to bark out the truth from the void. He stutters a little as he does so.

‘Sharon is here. She has been living with me for the last two weeks. Not as a lover I should say, but there is nothing that will convince you of that.'

He notices that the female officer has opened the bathroom door where Sharon's clothes lie scattered on the floor – a cream-coloured skirt and blouse (yesterday's purchase), a cardigan, underclothes, two endearing white socks.

‘So where is she, Stephen?'

It is Iona who speaks. Her assumption of familiarity – as though it is he and not Sharon who is the abducted child – arouses him. Now that he is to be stripped of all honour and dignity can he not retain his surname at least?

‘She is in the bedroom, Miss Ferguson, where she fled from the bathroom when you lot started bashing the door. You can see for yourself.'

He nods towards the bedroom. Iona glances at the female officer and together they advance to the door and gently knock on it. There is no response, and Stephen's heart goes out to the child who trembles there in silence, her brief hope of happiness now utterly lost.

‘Bastards!' he mutters quietly.

The two women open the door, advancing behind a shield of soothing words.

‘It's all right, Sharon. We've come to collect you. You'll be OK. We're going to take you somewhere safe. Just let's get you dressed. There's no hurry.'

Suddenly the girl comes running into the living room, clutching the loose bathrobe to her chest.

‘No!' she screams. ‘This is home. You canna take me away!'

She clings to Stephen, who does his best to hold her at arm's length. After all, he says to himself, they must not get the wrong idea. And he utters a bitter laugh.

‘It's OK, Sharon. You had better go with them. There's no future for you here. Or for me either.'

Sharon stares at him wildly.

‘I'm no going back there, Stephen, not never. It's them that done this, Mum and Bogdan, innit?'

She turns on Iona.

‘Innit?'

Iona greets the question with professional softness, reaching a hand to the girl's arm, and murmuring quietly.

‘Exactly where the information came from is a matter for the police, Sharon. Just be assured that we won't be taking you back to Angel Towers. You'll be in a new place, with other girls of your age. You'll be completely safe.'

‘No without Stephen I wunna.'

She throws her arms around Stephen and he pats her hair. He is crying now, and Inspector Vines looks away in embarrassment. His colleague has placed the suitcase on the table next to Sharon's books and papers. She opens it and looks shyly in Stephen's direction.

‘I need to collect her things, Mr Haycraft. The things that are hers which she'll need.'

‘There they are,' he says through his tears, and points to the little pile of books that the girl had built, the altar to knowledge at which she prayed each day.

‘And her clothes?'

‘She keeps them in the drawer of the sofa, where she sleeps. Don't you, Sharon?'

She is pressing her head into his side, silent, her hands fiercely clinging to his body.

‘Don't you, my darling?'

Often Laura broke down as she recounted her story, and some details she hurried past since they were clearly too painful to recall. But Justin was struck by her way of describing Yunus, who appeared in the character of her rescuer, the one who had fallen into this hell from a better place, where people reach hands of succour across the void. And just as Laura made a protective wall around Yunus, so Justin made a wall around Muhibbah, so that it was tacitly agreed between them that neither Yunus nor Muhibbah would be singled out for punishment.

Meanwhile, Laura insisted, the other girl must be rescued. Justin recalled the case of Sharon Williams, as Iona had described it. Almost certainly it was Sharon Williams whom they had to rescue. Almost certainly Iona would be aware of what must be done, and was probably already doing it. The first move, therefore, would be to get through to Iona and impart what she needed to know of Laura's story. That afternoon he tried several times to ring her, but was told always that she was out on a case and would probably not return to the office until next day. The case clearly required Iona's complete attention, for her mobile phone was also switched to the answer service.

In a few hours, Justin reckoned, Yunus would be out of the country, taking Muhibba with him, not to safety indeed, but to the rock hard discipline of the desert, and a marriage that would protect her honour by killing her love. So it had to be, and she herself had decided it. He looked with the remains of his love at the poem that she had given him: Yeats at his most vapid and sentimental, and Muhibbah likewise. For all those months, the poem said, she had looked at Justin and sighed, and for all those months he had been to her like wine: intoxicating, attractive, but forbidden. Such was the meaning of the poem as he now read it. And yet he lacked the surgical skills to remove her from his heart.

In the few hours of their re-meeting he had come close to loving her, close even to marrying her. He had suffered through her humiliation, had burned inwardly with shame as she was shamed, had sought in every corner of his mind for the excuses that she needed and the ways of healing her wound. And when she had fled – fled because honour required it, and only love could hold her back, a love that he had so veiled in hesitation that she could no longer rely on it – he saw the gesture as wholly admirable. She was saving him from her disgrace, and taking it with her into the void. She would disappear now, and this time finally. And he was never to know, never to enquire, what became of the girl he had so much loved.

Laura was adamant that she could not take her story to the police. There were no witnesses to what she had suffered save Yunus, but what kind of a witness was he, whose side was he on, and where would they find him? Besides, she would have to face up to her own behaviour: self-defence? Attempted murder? Maybe murder by now. She longed to be released into a purer world, where things like this could not happen. To be part of a police investigation, to revisit the foul sewer that she had escaped from – how could she do this now? And what would it mean for her rescuer?

But they should explore the block of flats, Laura said, where she was staying, to see if the other girl were really there. Maybe this story of a mistake was invented for the occasion, by way of scraping together what few morsels of blamelessness might have dropped from between their criminal fingers.

Two police cars were parked in the street outside, a driver sitting in each of them. The first person they encountered on the stairs was Iona. She had her arms around a young girl, whose blanched and tear-stained face Justin had seen once before, on the staircase of the Angel Towers, during his ill-fated visit to Muhibbah's family. Iona looked up in astonishment.

‘Justin!' she cried. ‘How strange. Busy now, but I will ring you tonight.'

And she turned again to the girl, whom she was coaxing step by step down the stairs, and into one of the parked police cars. A woman in uniform followed them, carrying a small suitcase, which she stowed in a business-like way in the boot of the car. As Justin and Laura turned the key in the door of her flat another police officer passed, leading a young man in a tattered sports-jacket, grey flannel trousers and an unbuttoned shirt. The young man was thin, good-looking, with a crown of dark hair slightly receding at the brows. His brown eyes were bloodshot, as though he had been crying, and there was a nervous tremor around his mouth. He was carrying a plastic holdall in one hand, and a book in the other, and he stumbled slightly as he passed them so that the officer reached out to support him, only to be shrugged away.

That evening, as Justin, Iona and Laura sat together in Laura's flat, over a magnum of Justin's favourite Rioja, they each rehearsed their separate pieces of the story. Laura objected violently to the arrest of the teacher, saying that he might be the best thing, the only good thing, that had ever entered the life of that poor girl, and the only obstacle between her and a life of slavery.

‘That may be true,' Iona said. ‘But when the adoptive mother comes to us with a tale of abduction, saying that the girl has been absent from home for two weeks, we have to act by the rules. Sure Mrs Williams was put up to it by that vile seaman she lives with who, because he couldn't have the girl, decided to punish her instead. But that doesn't alter the case.'

‘But she clung to the teacher, wanted nothing but to stay with him!'

‘Listen Laura, that's how it always is. The girls in our care are vulnerable, needy, desperate for affection, and easily tricked into giving it. We have tens of abduction cases every year. And usually, when we come to collect the girls, they cling to their seducers and tell us to fuck off and leave them alone.'

‘So will he go to jail?'

‘That depends on the girl's testimony. Usually they clam up, and say nothing. Wendy – Sergeant Pinsent – has to get her to talk, and it won't be easy. Also it depends on you.'

Iona leaned back in the armchair and sipped from her glass, looking across at Laura in the way she had, when she put her mind on display.

‘Why on Laura?' Justin asked.

‘If Laura tells her story to the police they will have to investigate Bogdan Krupnik and Hassan Shahin. They will come up with the real tormentors of that poor girl, and why she fled to her teacher. His behaviour will appear in quite another light, and it is unlikely that a jury will convict him.'