The Disappeared (28 page)

Thus it is that, on the day of the trial, you are alongside Justin in the public gallery, amid a crowd of vindictive morons who are hissing beneath their breath at the teacher who sits with bowed head on the bench below them, like Orestes before the Furies. You are shaking with fear, not for him only, but for yourself. There, summoned by Counsel for the prosecution, is Mrs Williams, a wan housewife in a flowery cotton dress, who looks shiftily from side to side as she responds to Counsel's promptings. There is no doubt that you, Sharon, have become a thorn in her flesh since Krupnik came on the scene. You are acutely aware that for Krupnik you are Hassan's bitch, and therefore should have been part of the deal. That is one reason, but not the only reason, for your punishment.

According to your adoptive mother Mr Haycraft would often hang around the Angel Towers. It made Mrs Williams very uncomfortable, she could certainly say. The teacher even came knocking on the door with a feeble excuse, but suddenly ran away when he caught sight of you fleeing in the distance. Yes, it was clear that Sharon was stressed, was under pressure, was trying to escape from something. Mrs Williams couldn't rightly say that Sharon was fleeing from Mr Haycraft's pestering, but it is more than likely.

Counsel for the Defence makes short shrift of Mrs Williams, who leaves the witness box shame-faced and shaking, no longer the adoptive mother of Sharon but the manipulated mistress of a criminal seadog, who had his own reasons for shopping the girl to the police. Called by the Prosecution, Iona Ferguson gives her even-handed version, emphasizing your vulnerability, and the many attempts that the social workers have made to ascertain whether you are the target of abuse.

You were attracted to the teacher, Iona concludes, because he offered so much that is lacking in your adoptive home. This tempted him to overstep the mark, inviting you to his flat, and then deciding to keep you there. Whether this amounts to abduction she leaves it to the court to decide. But in Iona's view you were certainly under emotional pressure to stay in the place to which he had enticed you.

You listen with a measure of surprise to Iona's account of things. Why does she not mention the abuse from which you were fleeing? Is Iona protecting someone? You cannot tell, but when she leaves the witness box, her reputation as a wise and impartial helper undented by the opposing Counsel's few respectful questions, you accept that her testimony, offered on behalf of the Prosecution, is also a kind of defence.

You watch from the gallery as your alter ego is handed by Iona into the box. Once before you had glimpsed the girl, as she was coaxed as though unconscious down the stairs of your block. You too had been carried unconscious down those stairs, to the fate that was hers in intention, but yours in fact. Now you can study her more completely.

Her hair is blond like yours but disordered, falling over her forehead and into her eyes. Her dress – white blouse and cream skirt, white socks and Mary Jane shoes – is the dress of a child. Across the edge of her mouth is a slight scar, the only blemish on an angel face worthy of a Sienese fresco. Her expression is solemn, as though she has stepped into the witness box from a place where truth has already been established, and no discussion remains. As she walks forward to take the oath she looks resolutely across at her teacher. It is him and not the court that she addresses. Prosecuting Counsel asks her to confirm that it was true that she left home on the fourth of April, to live with her teacher.

‘No, sir,' she says. ‘I dinna leave home then. I come home then.'

The barrister rephrases the question.

‘There be two o' me, sir, one in prison, t'other free. The free one, sir, answering your question, she belongs with Stephen, Mr Haycraft there. T'other one dunna answer no questions never.'

This response baffles the barrister, but you understand it at once. ‘Yes,' you say beneath your breath, ‘that's how it is, how it must be.' You start forward in your seat, Justin restraining you with an anxious hand on your arm. You speak the girl's words, and think the thoughts that she does not speak. Again you are she, as she spells out the ordeal that you have undergone.

You have been divided in two by what has happened. You have been trapped, beaten, cajoled and threatened into becoming someone else – some
thing
else, an object to be played with, a toy made of flesh. How do you respond to this? There is only one way: to leave behind the thing that has been battered and bartered, to remake yourself as a gift. But a gift for whom? All your efforts have been devoted to that question, and at last they were rewarded, when knowledge, poetry and grace appeared before you in the person of a kind young teacher, with whose predicament you alone could sympathize.

All this you understand through the girl's quirky idiom. But Defence Counsel wants more. He wants to force that other thing to speak. He wants to impress on the jury that you had no choice but to seek help from your teacher and that he had no choice but to offer it.

‘T'other thing,' you say at last, ‘is Hassan's bitch.'

‘And who, Sharon, is Hassan?'

‘Canna tell you, sir.'

Yes, but you must. You must begin your revenge, our revenge. Prosecution objects that the question is irrelevant. But the judge allows it nevertheless. Counsel for the Defence resumes.

‘Listen, Sharon. The future of my client depends on your testimony. I need to know why you went to live with him. There are before us two answers to that question. One is that my client, in order to satisfy his sexual desires, enticed you into his home and kept you there. The other is that you had been targeted by people who abused you, and begged my client to take you in. Which answer is the true one?'

‘The second one, sir.'

‘So now you must tell me something about those who abused you. If you do not, how can I persuade the jury that my client took you in because he had no moral alternative?'

The girl allows her eyes to wander from those of her teacher. She is trembling. You are trembling. The assembled morons are leaning forward with intent and greedy faces, and there is a hush in the courtroom. Suddenly you burst out with a sob:

‘They done it, sir, Hassan and his brother down on the eighth floor. It was them done it to me like they done it to Moira Callaghan.'

No exoneration for Yunus: you clench your fists against him. The teacher sits with his face in his hands. He too is weeping. Only one thing in the ensuing story surprises you. While the sister was at home the boys behaved correctly. ‘She was Yunus's idol, like you dinna touch her or use bad language in front of her or speak about those dirty things.' She was holy; even Hassan was different around her, like he was secretly wanting her to bless him. But the sister ran away. Then, bit by bit though you fought against it with every weapon you had, you became two people: Hassan's bitch, and Sharon. Sharon was pure as Muhibbah: she was going to be someone's wife, the wife of a poet. You had your girlish dreams, just as Catherine had.

By the time they take the girl away you are sobbing uncontrollably. Justin wants to leave but you shake your head. Sympathy has veered towards the teacher. But the judge instructs the jury to convict him of abduction if they believe he has made improper use of his position in order to entice the girl from her home. Following the guilty verdict the judge accepts Defence Counsel's Plea in Mitigation, agreeing that there had been no sexual exploitation of the child, and also that the teacher had been under a clear moral obligation to protect her from the abuse that she suffered. But Stephen's failure to alert the police casts a dim light upon his actions, and the judge therefore has no alternative but to sentence him to a year's imprisonment, with a recommendation that the Prison Service consider, for his own safety, a secure unit for sexual offenders.

You watch as the teacher is led away, face white, eyes staring, a policeman at either elbow. You turn to Justin. He too has been weeping.

‘So, Justin, if you'll come with me, it's time for me to go to the police.'

He takes your hand and squeezes it.

After a week or so Justin had begun to be much in awe of Laura. Her courage, her ability to confine her terrors to the night, her uncomplicated appeal to him for affection and comfort, her honesty in all that concerned her – those virtues commanded so much admiration that he did not dare to move things forward for fear of looking cheap. But nor were they just good friends. They were joined by something huge, subliminal and dangerous and they were side by side in knowing this.

Dealing with the effects of Muhibbah's trickery was not always easy. He tried to excuse the girl; Laura tried not to accuse her. And often they had to move around each other carefully, like boxers feinting in the ring. But difficult though the day might be, they were entirely at one in the evening, Justin cooking, Laura listening to music or reading his books.

He was surprised how much he could appreciate classical music, which filled the space that Laura made for it. He felt no need to pluck the strings of his guitar; he was happy to forget the iPod and only rarely, when she was asleep or out, did he listen to his favourite Metal songs. Metal expressed, it is true, a cherished ideal of manliness, and he still played his Thursday gig at the Crustafarian. But he left his manhood there, as a costume to be donned for the crowd. On other evenings he was a kind of housewife, appreciating Laura's beauty from his place at the stove.

Once he caught himself singing ‘The Disappeared'. But when he got to the H on
Habibah
he stopped. ‘Don't go there,' he said aloud. And he went back to Laura's supper, which involved h's of a less blood-stirring kind: hake, halibut and haddock, in a sauce of egg yolks and cream.

He understood her reluctance to go to the police. Reliving the event would be difficult. Explaining her assault on Hassan could open her to criminal charges. But there could be no healing until she had seen her abuser punished and his criminal network exposed. Gently he urged her to lay a complaint. Iona likewise wanted this, though she too was reluctant to press Laura too hard. And so things continued for two months, during which time Laura would often go to London, as though to recapture a life of which he was not a part. But always she came back to him, with the look of one returning home, quietly to resume her place on the couch.

One Thursday, after his gig at the Crustafarian, Justin went with Iona for a drink. It was the day after the trial of Sharon Williams's teacher, and he was curious to know why Iona's evidence had been so reticent, and why she had veered away from the crucial fact of Sharon's persecution.

Iona became pensive, and her face assumed a puffy appearance, as she half closed her eyes. She pushed her gin and tonic to one side and leaned forward on the table, her chin in her hands.

‘It's like this, Justin,' she said. ‘Everything in that world is governed by a code of honour. Girls who have sex have lost their honour, and are therefore the property of the man who mastered them, even if he did so by force. I have been through this, and I know. And honour codes are not enforced as our codes are enforced, by legal sanctions. Defence Counsel thought he was doing his client a favour, by trapping that poor girl into naming her abusers. Now of course it will be all over the papers and the police will have to step in.'

‘So? Isn't that what we want?'

‘Eventually yes. But only when that girl is safe. I don't have much time for Jesus, though when it comes to the treatment of women I give him a bit more credit than Muhammad. However, he did say one true thing, which is “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend.” That, I fear, is what Sharon Williams has done. There is a whole network of criminals out there who depend on her silence: one reason for packing her off to Russia. A lot, you see, has become clear to me over the last couple of weeks. When that teacher first came to see me I have to admit that he got up my nose, talking to me as though I hadn't had to deal with case after case of this kind of thing. So I dithered until you told me about Muhibbah, and the pieces began to fit together in my mind. I realised we are dealing with a full-scale business of people trafficking. Of course there is not a lot we can do now, but it would help if Laura went to the police, so that Sharon's evidence isn't the only evidence they have.'

‘It's exactly what Laura decided, when she saw what the girl was going through.'

‘Then she must act quickly. And that means now, before that girl is killed.'

It clearly did not please Superintendent Nicholson that Justin, who had been placed in the mental file for problems solved, was once again sitting on the other side of his desk, this time with a lovely woman beside him. The Superintendent was already agitated on account of the Haycraft trial, which had been all over the newspapers and the local radio. The suggestion was being widely made that political correctness had caused his force to turn a blind eye to cases of sexual abuse. But as Laura's story unfolded, she meanwhile gripping Justin's hand and dabbing away tears with a crumpled handkerchief, the Superintendent's expression changed from bewildered resentment at this new intrusion to grim recognition that the day of judgment had come. At a certain point he raised his hand to interrupt the story.

‘You can pass over all the details Miss Markham. If they are relevant you can tell them to Sergeant Wendy Pinsent. All I need from you now is a specific complaint against specific persons.'

But when the names turned out to be those blurted out by Sharon Williams in the Haycraft trial, brothers of the girl whose disappearance he had refused to investigate when Justin had requested it, the Superintendent's face registered his disturbance. He dropped his eyes, which had until that moment been outlining Laura as though to store her in digital format, and focused instead on the photographs of his wife and children. By the time Laura reached the end of her story he had covered two sheets of paper with notes, and was on the telephone to colleagues in Hull, asking them to take a statement from a patient admitted to hospital two months earlier with a life-threatening head injury. The message came back that the patient had left the day before, without waiting to be discharged. An officer sent to Angel Towers reported that Block A flat 8/1 was now unoccupied, the family having moved out a week ago, in response to an order from the Council.