The Disappeared (3 page)

There is someone standing in the car park, looking up at the window of the flat. He is thin, dark, maybe Indian. With sudden resolve you wave to him, raising your arm high above your head, and pushing yourself up from the desk. But your arm is gripped from behind and a cloth is pressed over your mouth and nostrils, filling your lungs with a hospital smell. You struggle, but to no avail. A numbness seizes you, your limbs fold and dissolve, and your eyes grow dim. Soon there is no sensation. You hear a voice saying ‘Done. That's it.' Then all is dark.

Justin Fellowes joined the firm of Copley Solutions PLC immediately after completing a Masters course in environmental management at a Northern university. He was committed to ‘sustainability' as a cause, a policy and a way of life. And his good fortune in finding a secure place in the most successful green energy company in Yorkshire convinced him that he was fully launched on his path through life. His job was to explore the sites on the edge of the moors where wind turbines could be installed, to find out who owned the land, and to begin the negotiations that would turn unprofitable acres of poor grazing into a lucrative source of clean energy. Copley Solutions received a large subsidy from the government to offset the capital cost of the turbines, and the profits from the sale of electricity were divided between Copley and the farmer. It filled Justin with contentment, that he was making profit for his firm, and a share of it for himself, in ways that helped the planet. For seven years he had been happy in his job, living a bachelor life, indulging his taste for Heavy Metal, and playing bass guitar in a Rock band which had acquired a certain following in the Northern city where he lived and worked. From time to time he nurtured the ambition of forming a Heavy Metal group of his own, and playing to the local metallurgists, as he called them, who formed a small but devoted sect.

Then he met Muhibbah Shahin and everything changed. Muhibbah was 20, eleven years his junior, and worked in a boutique in the city centre. She was from a migrant Afghan family, which had come to Britain eight years before from Yemen, to which country they had fled from the conflict in Afghanistan. Unlike her parents she had adopted the British way of life, running away from home aged 19 to avoid the marriage that had been arranged with a distant cousin in Waziristan, and sharing a flat in a run-down part of the city with two university students, both of them girls. After she took up her place behind the counter in Amanda's Fashion Boutique she was spotted by a member of the Afghan community; her father appeared the next day with two accomplices, and seized her. Muhibbah screamed, spat, scratched, gripped, kicked and clung to whatever she could, and soon members of the public – including Justin, who was passing by – intervened. Someone called the police. The three men were arrested, and Justin volunteered to take Muhibbah to her home. She raised her perfect almond eyes in her perfect oval face, swept back her perfect black hair with perfect smooth fingers from her perfect olive features and looked at him. She did not smile. She did not speak. But she gave a condescending nod in his direction, and he received it as a command.

He called each day at the flat that she shared in order to walk with her to work; he came to the boutique at the end of each afternoon ready to take her home. He went with her to the police station to give evidence against her family. The police were reluctant to act. Ever since the MacPherson Report, which issued a general accusation of ‘institutional racism' against the British police, they had been confidentially advised to steer clear of all involvement with the immigrant communities. Nevertheless, by dint of persistence, Justin secured a restraining order, a promise of protection and a safe number for Muhibbah to call. He kept watch over her, took her flowers and presents, encouraged her to read and write in English, and tried to pronounce her name in the way she liked, with the full-throated H of the Arabs, though she was not exactly an Arab and her parents often spoke Pashto at home. Muhibbah, she explained, looking at him curiously, comes from Hubb, the verb for love, and he practised the sound again and again until she rewarded him with a smile.

‘So what does Muhibba mean?' he asked.

‘It means love, or the thing loving, or the thing loved, depending how you take it.'

‘And how do
you
take it?'

‘I don't,' she said coldly. ‘It's other people give you your name. Usually so as to trap you into doing things their way. I do things
my
way.'

Doing things her way marked Muhibbah out as a singular person who belonged to no category that Justin had previously encountered. It was not long before he recognised that she was no ordinary intimidated refugee, but an intelligent, wilful and ambitious girl, who would use whatever opportunities came her way for her own advantage. To win her he must be useful to her, and he studied how it might be done.

At first Muhibbah would not invite him into her retreat. She lived in a long street of terraced Victorian houses with abbreviated front gardens, most of which had been paved over as carports. When he rang the bell for the upstairs flat there would be a drumming of feet on the carpeted staircase before she opened the door with a quick pull on the latch. She did not greet him but began walking immediately, her bust tightly pressed into a turtle-necked jumper, her narrow waist contained by a flimsy skirt over loose Indian trousers. The colours she chose were dark shades of blue and grey and her black hair was drawn back and pulled through a wooden ring at the nape of her neck. It was as though an injunction had been granted against her body, and only the face was allowed.

When they had turned the corner towards the city Muhibbah would engage him in conversation. She had no small talk, and she held her face away from him, as though studying the sky as they walked. Always she spoke correctly and grammatically, without the Yorkshire accent that had been the lingua franca at St Catherine's Academy, where she had gone to school. She was eager to learn new words, and would practice them as soon as she picked them up. She wanted to know about universities and what you learn in them; about his career and how he got into it; about his kind of music and whether it was hard to play; about how you save money and whether it is wise to invest it. She did not say much about herself, although what she said was intriguing. She was an atheist, a free thinker, a modern person. She counted her escape from family, religion and the ‘stink of the
mzrab
' as a necessary first step to becoming herself. He asked what the word meant.

‘It's Arabic,' she said. ‘Means stream of dirty things.'

‘Gutter?'

‘Maybe. Gutter. That's a good word.'

She laughed suddenly, as she sometimes did at the sound of unfamiliar words. In those moments she seemed to him like a child, delighting in discoveries. But she kept her laughter to herself, and showed no desire to share it with him: she was laughing at him, not with him.

It was a warm evening in October, two months after their first meeting, when she invited him in. There was something she wanted to show him, about which she needed his advice. A strange trepidation seized him as they entered. In the past, invited home by a girl, he would not hesitate to seize the advantage. With Muhibbah this was inconceivable. He must put on a mask of reserve, and forbid his eyes to stray to anything that might be part of her privacy or proof of her sex. She opened the door to the upstairs flat with a key that she took from her trouser pocket, and went in without a word of invitation, as though into a place of work. They were in a large sitting room with a bow-fronted window overlooking the street. Three doors led from it and she pointed to them one after the other.

‘That's Millie,' she said, ‘and that's Angela. And through there is the kitchen, the bathroom and me.'

He nodded and looked down at his hands, afraid that they might reach out to touch her, without permission from his soul. It was the first time that he pictured himself in those terms, as a creature with a soul. And he wondered at Muhibbah, that she had placed this antique concept in his thoughts.

‘Sit down. I'll make some tea and bring you the things I want to show you.'

She went quickly into the kitchen, closing the door behind her. Justin sat in a loose-covered armchair in the window. He tried to fix his eyes on the street, but they strayed over the room, looking for traces of Muhibbah. He saw a television in one corner, and a sofa lined up for watching it. There was a glass-topped coffee table between the two, bearing a thumbed issue of
Rolling Stone
. Above a blocked Victorian fireplace there hung a reproduction of Picasso's
Les Saltimbanques
in a frame of brushed steel. A CD player and a telephone stood on a bookcase beside the kitchen door. There were no books in the bookcase, just a few magazines lying flat and two shelves of CDs.

The space had an institutional air. He assumed that the girls kept to their rooms, and that communal life was minimal. There was no sign that anyone worked in this room: it was neat, clean, transitional. And that was true too of Muhibbah: such was his thought as she came through the door with a folder of papers in one hand and two earthenware mugs in the other. She placed the mugs on the coffee table and came across with the folder.

‘Please look at these while I make the tea.'

The folder contained brochures for courses: one in accountancy, another in law, a third in secretarial skills and information technology. They were aimed at adults with a few school certificates, who were hoping to better themselves in whatever way they could. Muhibbah came through the door with a teapot and he raised his eyes to her with a feeling of tenderness. She met his glance for a moment and then looked away.

‘It is mint,' she said. ‘
Na'na'
. I hope you like it.'

‘So, Muhibbah. You wanted my advice.'

She poured the tea, and brought one of the mugs to him where he sat. She drank from the other on the sofa. The taste of mint was innocent and clean.

‘You see,' she said, ‘there's no future for me in the boutique. I need a career, a status; I need to be known, part of things, protected. An accountant, for instance. In a respectable job, like you.'

‘And living alone?'

She huddled up, and a shiver went down her spine.

‘Yes. Why not? I can look after myself.'

He studied her for a moment, and saw that she was blushing.

‘You don't have to look at me like that,' she said. ‘I thought you were my friend.'

‘That's why I am looking at you,' he said, with sudden boldness. ‘More than a friend, if you allow it.'

She flung back her hair and turned her face to him. She looked through him for a full five seconds, before dropping her eyes and saying ‘I don't allow it'.

‘Then I'm sorry for the suggestion,' he said, falteringly.

‘Look, Justin. You've been good to me. Very good. One day I'll repay you. But you have to help me now.'

‘I understand,' he said, downcast.

‘You see,' she went on, ‘I need a qualification and a career, and I need them soon. Tell me which of those courses I should apply for.'

He looked again at the brochures, with their cheerful promise of success. Gowned graduates clutched their rolled certificates, and in the neat interiors of modern buildings smart young people smiled above their desks. He envisaged Muhibbah among them, the target of covetous glances, alone and unprotected. And he felt a stab of jealousy. The feeling was new to Justin, who had moved easily from girlfriend to girlfriend, avoiding commitment, and rarely distressed when things drew to a close. Never before had it seemed imperative to take a woman under his wing, to protect her now and forever. Muhibbah's jewel-like physical perfection would not in itself have given rise to such a feeling. But displayed behind unbreachable defences her beauty spelled his doom.

Muhibbah told him that she had been taken away from St Catherine's Academy aged 16, but had been able to acquire A level maths and English through a correspondence course. She was good with numbers and could write clear English. Because of her childhood in Yemen and her roots in Afghanistan she knew Arabic, which was useful, and a bit of Pashto, which wasn't. And she was willing to work. Eventually they settled on the accountancy course. This promised to put students within reach of the Association of Accountancy Technicians' qualification after three years of part-time study.

‘And how will you afford it?' he asked.

‘I will work part-time. And maybe you can help me.'

‘In what way?'

‘Your firm. It sounds really interesting. And perhaps I could work there too.'

The idea had already occurred to him. His standing in the office was high; the CEO, a Dutch entrepreneur who seldom visited, had absolute trust in him, and as a rule Justin's suggestions were approved. Hadn't he recently acquired 50 acres of moorland for the business, and wasn't he working on a scheme for energy-saving houses, built from wooden sheeting, which promised to bring in profits long after the wind farms had given way to the next innovation? Surely he could make the case for an assistant, a student in accounting who would cover that side of his deals. He promised to look into it, and she smiled.

‘Meanwhile,' he added, ‘we must fill out some forms.'

‘I can do that,' she said. ‘But you must give me a reference.'

And in the box that asked for a reference she wrote down ‘Justin Fellowes, Copley Solutions PLC', followed by the address of the firm.

‘You see,' she said, ‘I looked you up. I even walked past your office, to check it out.'

And she laughed her clear, crisp self-centred laugh.

Next morning Justin sent an e-mail to the CEO, asking permission to hire a part-time assistant. Permission was granted, and within a few weeks Muhibbah had enrolled for her accountancy course. Jobs in that city were hard enough to find, and Copley Solutions PLC received nine applicants, all of them better qualified than Muhibbah, including one who had already passed the first set of accountancy exams. Still, Justin finessed the interviews, wrote painstaking memoranda about each candidate with a view to explaining why he or she was too old, too experienced, too advanced in the profession to provide the kind of undemanding and flexible assistant he was looking for, and finally, after two days of carefully faked indecision, in which he communicated to everyone in the office his doubts whether Muhibbah Shahin should get the job, or whether Julian Hepworth, the only other candidate with just two A levels and no accountancy experience, would be a safer bet, he wrote a formal letter of acceptance to Muhibbah. He greeted with relief the e-mail that came next day from Julian Hepworth, withdrawing from the race. And he spent a pleased half hour in Muhibbah's flat, dictating from his place in the window, the formal letter of acceptance that he could open with a show of impatience in a day or two's time and pass to his secretary to answer.