Strangers (17 page)

Later that afternoon, Damien headed towards the hospital exit. He had been distracted through the meeting, his mind only half on what they had been discussing. He couldn’t get his conversation with Majid out of his mind. Majid’s insistence that there was something wrong, something odd or underhand going on, was making alarm bells ring in his head. He couldn’t ignore it. Majid was a policeman, he had an instinct for these things.

He needed to make some discreet enquiries. For a moment, he thought about asking Amy, but she was a professional to the bone. Even though she was leaving, she wouldn’t discuss details of a hospital case with him. He hesitated, thinking, then he followed the signs to the pathology department where he found one of the junior technicians, a man he knew, filling in report forms. Everything was quiet and orderly. This place had been chaos a few weeks before. Joe Massey had done a good job.

Damien and the technician exchanged greetings and the usual small talk. Damien wasn’t sure if this young man would do what he asked, but it was worth a try.

‘I’ve got a query about one of the infants in the neo-natal ITU,’ he said. ‘He was born earlier this week. He was moved to the ITU–this morning, I think. Apparently the blood tests came back showing there were problems. Can you give me some idea…?’

The technician looked puzzled. It was an odd thing for Damien to ask.

‘There’s just some potential for trouble. I’m covering my bases,’ Damien said. This vague excuse seemed to work. The man’s face cleared.

‘What do you want to know?’ he said.

‘Just the reason for the concern–do they know what’s wrong with the child?’

‘Hang on.’ The man went and checked through a pile of reports in a document tray and pulled one out. ‘OK.’ He read through it, frowning slightly. ‘For some reason, the oxygen levels aren’t right. That suggests problems with the lungs, or the heart.’ He looked uncertain, and the alarm bells started ringing in Damien’s head.

‘Is something wrong?’

‘No…I can’t understand why they didn’t put the kid in an incubator at once. Problems like this don’t just…’ He was leafing through the papers. ‘The first set of results don’t seem to be—’ He stopped abruptly and put the report back into
the folder. ‘Maybe you should talk to the consultant.’

‘Maybe I should.’ If someone had made a mistake, missed a serious health problem when the child was born, and as a result it died, then Majid would turn the hospital upside down in his search for the person who was responsible for the death of his son. He looked at the technician. ‘The child–is it going to survive?’

The technician shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I can’t answer that. I can call the senior pathologist for you. He could tell you better than I can.’

Joe Massey. ‘It’s OK. I’ll get on to him later. Thanks.’

Damien left, still unsatisfied. Majid’s story had disturbed him in more ways than simply his sadness for his friend’s looming tragedy. All his unease had found its focus at the hospital. It was at the hospital that Haroun Patel had been arrested. It was here that Joe Massey–or someone–had started stirring up the Patel case. It was here that Amy had started asking questions about things that were perhaps best left alone. And now Majid and Yasmin’s baby was seriously ill, and there was some indication that all wasn’t well in the laboratory. Damien had been able to complete the sentence the technician had started. The early reports on Majid’s baby, the ones that should have detected the problem immediately, were missing. Someone had made a mistake–a mistake that
could have serious consequences–and the evidence had gone.

The problem filled his mind as he drove to the airport, and acted as some distraction when he put his arms round Amy for the last time. Her eyes were shiny with tears. ‘Goodbye, Damien. I’ll…miss you.’

He managed a smile. ‘I’ll miss you too.’

There was no sign of Nazarian. Whatever farewells she’d planned with him, they had already happened.

It was the weekend of the party. Roisin spent the whole of Thursday writing her lectures. She resented the task because Joe was at home–one of the first weekends he’d been able to take off. He didn’t seem to mind that they couldn’t do anything together. She could hear his music playing as he worked round the house. He brought her tea and fruit juice at regular intervals, and stayed to talk. ‘How are you doing?’ He leaned over her shoulder to have a look.

‘I’m nowhere. I’ll be at it for hours yet.’

‘Why bother? We’re leaving anyway.’

‘I know.’ But it was a matter of pride. She was a professional, and she was going to behave like one until she left. Joe understood. He was the same about his work. ‘I just wish this hadn’t come up.’

‘She’s protecting her turf.’

‘Right. Doesn’t mean I have to like it.’

The phone rang. ‘I’ll get it,’ Joe said. She heard his feet on the stairs, and his voice, ‘Joe Massey.’ She smiled as she turned back to her work. He was so different–it was as if the news from Melbourne had woken him from some dark place the Kingdom had taken him to. Suddenly he was the Joe she knew, the man she loved and had married.

She heard him coming back up the stairs. His footsteps were slow. ‘I’ve got to go into work,’ he said. ‘There’s a PM they want me to check.’ He made a reluctant face. ‘Great stuff for the weekend. Do you want to come in with me? I’ll be an hour. We could go for a walk round the market afterwards.’

‘I’ve got to get this finished.’ She stood up and stretched, and followed Joe into the bedroom where he was getting changed. He pulled off his shirt and threw it at the linen basket. It fell on to the floor. ‘Changed your mind?’ he said when he saw her standing there.

‘No. I just needed a break.’

‘Poor love. If I didn’t have to do this…Wait. I’ve got something to make you feel better.’ He rummaged in the wardrobe and came out with a small packet. ‘Here. I was going to give you these tonight.’

It was the first present he’d bought her for ages. She looked at him, and then she carefully unwrapped the package. Inside, there was a box and, when she opened it, she saw a pair of gold earrings with long, delicate chains.

She swept her hair up and held one of them against her face. The chains sparkled and glittered. Joe stood behind her as she turned her head, admiring the effect in the mirror. ‘Bling,’ he murmured into her hair. ‘I got them at the gold market. For tonight. It kind of felt right, you know?’ He looked at his watch. ‘Shit. I’d better go.’

She heard the door close and the sound of the car starting up and fading into the distance. She could hear the sounds of the weekend afternoon around her: children playing in the gardens, voices calling, laughter, the
snip, snip
of secateurs. She could smell the first smoke of the day’s barbecues.

She could be in her mother’s house on a Sunday in Newcastle listening to the neighbours. The TV would be on downstairs, and her mother would be clattering pots around in the kitchen and keeping up a vague, unfocused barrage of chat:
Can I get you some tea, pet? Have you seen what they’ve done to the house on the corner? Did I tell you about
…?
You’ll never guess what
…

Her fingers slowed on the keyboard and she let her mind drift. She was looking forward to showing Newcastle to Joe. He had never been there. It would be grey winter, but it didn’t matter. They could walk along the Tyne under the seven bridges. They could cross the gossamer arc of steel that was the Millennium Bridge to Gateshead. They could go to North Shields and watch the fishing boats bringing in the catch in the icy wind,
then walk back along the river to the ferry eating fish and chips…

She’d lost her place again. She read through the notes she had been writing, and found she had no idea what she was doing. What had seemed like a good idea a couple of hours ago had faded into an irretrievable memory.

The phone rang. She picked it up, glad of the distraction. ‘Roisin Massey.’

‘Roisin, it’s Amy.’

‘Amy!’ She had been expecting this call since she’d left the message a few days before. ‘How are you?’

‘Fine. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you. I got your message.’

‘That’s OK. I wondered if you wanted to get together. There was something I was going to…’

‘That would be great, but listen, I’m not in Riyadh. I’m calling from Paris.’

‘Paris?’
A railway station, and Amy, hanging out of the train window as it pulled away, calling and calling
…No wonder she hadn’t been able to make contact. ‘Is it your sister?’ She tried to remember the name. ‘Jassy?’

‘Yes. I left in a rush. The baby’s due any day. I wondered if–is Joe there? I wanted to ask him something.’

‘Joe? Is everything all right?’

‘Everything’s fine. It isn’t about Jassy. There was something at the hospital before I left. I just thought he might be able to…’

‘He’s at work. Do you want him to call you?’

‘No, it’s OK. I’ll try and get him at the hospital. Tell him I called.’

‘I will. When will you be back?’

There was silence for a moment. ‘I’m not sure,’ Amy said slowly. ‘I’ve got things to sort out. I’ll see after the baby’s born.’

‘You’ll be an aunt. Amy, I’m so glad for you. E-mail me lots of pictures. And we’ll celebrate when you get back.’

There was that same silence, then Amy said, ‘I’ll do that. Listen, Roisin, I’ve got to go.’

‘OK. Keep in touch. Let me know how you get on–and don’t forget the photos.’

‘I won’t.’

The phone clicked into silence, leaving Roisin feeling unaccountably alone. She felt almost as if her only ally in the Kingdom had gone, which was crazy. And she hadn’t had a chance to ask Amy about Jesal, about where a runaway migrant worker might go if the police were looking for her. Maybe it didn’t matter now. Yasmin would have other things on her mind. She had her baby to worry about. But Roisin couldn’t forget the tension on Yasmin’s face as she had asked about the missing woman.

Unable to face doing any more work, she put her notes back in the proper files and the books on the shelves. There were papers piled up on the window sill gathering dust. She picked them up and flicked through them. They were the
papers from Joe’s work file that she’d tipped out by accident the day Amy had turned up on the doorstep and had never got round to clearing up.

She tried to stack them so she could put them into a folder out of the way, bumping the edge of the pile against the desk to make the papers line up, but they were different sizes and refused to slip neatly into order.

Taking a few at a time, she started putting them away. She picked one up that had fallen on to the desk, her eye going over it automatically. She’d put it in the file before her brain registered what she had seen. She took it out again and looked at it more closely.

It was a photograph of Joe and another man. They were standing together by a car in a dusty landscape–somewhere on the edge of the desert by the looks of things–grinning triumphantly at the camera. The car bonnet was raised and Joe was holding up a piece of machinery–part of a car engine, maybe–in the manner of a hunter holding up a trophy.

It was a good photo, but that wasn’t what had caught her attention. The man with Joe, a small, dark man, looked very familiar. She stared at the photo for a moment, then went to the filing cabinet where Joe kept his papers. After a quick search, she found what she wanted: the newspaper cutting that had been in the case she’d unpacked, weeks ago.

She could still remember their conversation that evening when she first began to realize that there was something wrong. She’d asked him:

Was it someone you knew?

And he’d shaken his head.
I told you, I don’t know why I kept it
.

Looking at her from the newsprint, faded along the lines where it had been folded, was the smiling face of the young man who had died. It was the same man who was laughing with Joe in the photograph from…She turned the picture over. Scribbled on the back was the date:
October 2003
.

Haroun Patel, five months before his death.

Riyadh Central Hospital, Neo-natal ITU

It was night time and the lights were dimmed. The room was filled with the low hum of machines,
the beep of heart monitors, the rhythmic pulse of the respirators. The cots were lined up down the centre of the ward, each one an enclosed environment in which children who had been born too early began their struggle to survive.

The infants themselves seemed strangely out of place among the clear plastic and the gleaming steel. They were messy, human, flesh and bone. Someone had made an attempt to soften the atmosphere, placing colourful pictures above the cots, but the infants couldn’t see them, or interpret them if they could. They were there to comfort the families.

It was the start of the evening shift. The nurse, coming on duty, checked through her list of charges. There had been a new admission earlier in the day, a boy just a few days old whose condition had deteriorated unexpectedly. She read through the notes: the child had been healthy when he was born but had suddenly, inexplicably, become ill. He’d been taken for a scan just before the shifts had changed over.

She looked at the notes again, checking the time the child had been taken. They must have run into problems–the scan was taking a long time. There would be someone from the ITU down there with him–someone who was having to do overtime now. She ticked the child off on her notes to indicate that she was aware of his current location and condition, and moved on to the next cot.

Roisin sat quietly in the car as Joe negotiated his way through the city traffic. She listened with half an ear as he explained the reason he’d been called out. ‘They wanted me to review a death,’ he said. ‘A baby died–he was very premature, born a few days ago. The family asked for a post mortem. That’s unusual here.’

A sick baby. ‘Joe, my friend at the university–Yasmin. Her baby was ill.’

He glanced at her quickly. ‘I didn’t think of that. Was it premature?’

‘Not by much.’

‘OK. Do you know the family name?’

She shook her head. ‘She’s just Yasmin.’

‘OK. I’ll check, tomorrow. Don’t worry. This baby was definitely premature. And that hospital takes sick babies from across the Nadj–there’s no reason to think it was your friend’s.’

‘I know.’ She thought about the way Souad had
seemed almost pleased that Yasmin’s baby wasn’t well. ‘Why did it die, this baby?’

‘From being born too soon. Some are strong enough to make it and some aren’t.’ Like life, Roisin thought. Some of us are strong enough and some of us aren’t. Joe was saying something else, and she pulled her attention back: ‘…there’s something that I should…Oh, shit. This fucking country. I don’t know what to do.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Don’t worry,’ Joe said again.

There was silence in the car, then he said, in a clear attempt to change the subject, ‘We ought to feel pretty good about being asked to this do.’ He switched lanes to avoid a swerving truck. ‘Apparently, these are the real Riyadh A-list.’

‘That’s good.’ She was aware of his quick glance. ‘Sorry, I was thinking about something else.’

He squeezed her hand. ‘I thought you were looking forward to this. We don’t have to go if you don’t want to.’

‘I know.’ She stared out of the window. The streets were brightly lit but the road was strangely empty. There was a car ahead and a car behind, but nothing else in sight. She watched as the car behind them pulled out to pass. It drew alongside then kept pace with them. She could see the driver’s face turned towards her. She realized that another car was closing behind, and the car ahead was slowing down.

Boxed in. They were boxed in….
In traffic, always try to leave space in which to manoeuvre. Do not get boxed in; always leave yourself an exit
…

It was on journeys like this that people had been pulled from their cars and butchered.

‘Shit!’ Joe had seen it as well and was braking hard. Her stomach lurched in panic, and then the road cleared and the vehicle behind them pulled out and overtook with an impatient blast on the horn. She could feel her heart hammering in retrospective fright. The threat had arisen so suddenly, and receded just as quickly.

‘Stupid bastards!’ Joe’s anger was a mark of the shock they had both had. His face was white. ‘Jesus! You can’t tell the difference between terrorism and bad driving.’ He shook his head. ‘This place is making me paranoid.’ He kept his eyes on the road as he spoke, watching to make sure that the traffic had cleared around them. The road was busy again, the moment of quiet over. Cars shot past in a maze of weaving lights. They were an anonymous vehicle on a busy freeway. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes. I’m fine–but God, that was scary.’

‘We’ll be out of here soon.’

She wasn’t sure if he meant the road, or the Kingdom itself.

‘I know.’ There was silence for a moment, then she said, without thinking or planning, ‘Joe, who was Haroun Patel?’

She felt the car swerve as he reacted to her
question. He straightened the wheel, swearing as the horns sounded around him. ‘Christ, Roisin, what kind of time is it to ask me that?’

‘I didn’t know it was that kind of question,’ she said.

‘Why do you want to know? Who’s been talking to you?’

‘No one. I read about him in that cutting I found, remember?’

He checked in the rear-view mirror. ‘I can’t talk about this while I’m driving.’ He took the car across a couple of lanes, ignoring the outraged horns, and began to slow. They were passing one of the strip malls that lay on the outskirts of the city, and he pulled off the road into the car park. It was busy with families packing goods into the boots of cars, or heading in disorganized groups towards the entrances of the market. The light from the store fronts reflected in green and red and gold, the richness of the old ornamentation transformed into commercialized razzmatazz.

Anycity, Anyplace.

Joe turned to her. A flashing light from one of the shop fronts illuminated the inside of the car: red, blue, yellow, and then darkness. She studied his face, but the changing lights made it impossible to read his expression.

‘I found a photograph–you and Haroun Patel. Joe, you told me you didn’t know him.’

He looked away across the car park. The muscles in his jaw tightened. ‘I didn’t want you involved
in this, Roisin. Yes, I knew Haroun. I’d known him for about eighteen months before I came out here. That photograph–I was working out in the villages, and my car broke down. Haroun fixed it. He was a genius with engines.’ In the turning lights, his face looked sad. ‘He’s dead now.’

‘I know. I saw the article.’

‘He worked as a technician, and he moonlighted as a hospital driver. He did the deliveries round the clinics. I was working in the villages then, and he’d turn up two or three times a week with supplies. The trouble started a couple of months before my last contract ended. I was working in the hospital here by then. The police did a drugs check–they came at short notice. There’d been some pilfering going on. We knew about it; it was no big deal, just antibiotics and minor painkillers. We had a pretty good idea where the stuff was going. Only this time, something serious had gone missing. Some morphine. A lot of morphine. The police went berserk. They were going to drag the hospital administrator off and put him through the third degree. He had friends, otherwise he would have been in serious trouble.

‘They questioned me. It was frightening. They were looking for someone to blame and they’re not fussy about how they get their information. I could have ended up in jail so easily, and once they get you there…Anyway, we knew the stuff must have been taken in the last twenty-four hours, because we’d done our own inventory
before the visit. But then it was as if they’d been given a tip-off. They decided to search the hospital.’

‘Wouldn’t the person who’d taken it get it out of there at once?’

‘Knowing there was a police check coming? Of course they would. In fact, they wouldn’t have touched anything until after. It was crazy. The whole thing was crazy. Unless that person didn’t know. Anyway, they searched, and they found the missing stuff. It was in the hostel where the hospital drivers lived, in Haroun’s locker. It was such an obvious plant, but they didn’t see it that way. They said that the drivers wouldn’t have known about the drugs check because they weren’t told directly. But everyone knew. And I know that Haroun did because I’d told him myself.’

He looked at her. ‘He was a good friend. I first met him in London–he was a student in London at the School of Pharmacy. I was working at Barts and I got to know Haroun when I did some teaching. He was one of those people everyone knew. But he got thrown out for a visa violation; it was nothing, but they were having one of their illegal immigrants scares, and Haroun got caught up in the middle of it all. It was a disaster for him and his family. I tried to help–shit, we all did–but the papers were screaming their heads off about immigration, the government was in trouble over Iraq, so Haroun had to go. I kept in touch with him, and when I came out here, I told the hospital pharmacy about him–he wasn’t
qualified, but they were short-staffed and he knew his stuff. I contacted him, told him to bung in an application. He’d make some money, maybe get a chance to finish his qualifications. I gave him the professional reference he needed to work at the hospital, and it all worked out fine. He kept saying thank you to me–his good friend Joe Massey who had helped him out.’ In the changing light, his face was bleak.

‘When I heard he’d been arrested, I thought maybe he’d taken a stupid chance. He was desperate to get enough money to cover his university fees. He was married by then, with a child on the way. But, when I thought about it, I knew it wasn’t him. Haroun wasn’t stupid, he wouldn’t have made a mistake like that. But they took him away and three days later, we heard he’d confessed.’

Three days
…‘And then they executed him?’

Joe nodded. ‘These things happen fast here, but in Haroun’s case, it was really quick. We tried to do something, the people who knew him. We tried to get the Foreign Office to take up his case, but they didn’t want to know. I went there. The day they…It was the only thing left I could do for him. We all knew about as-Sa’ah Square. O’Neill was right–it’s like a Roman circus. Word gets round when there’s going to be an execution, and people go. You visit the fort, you drive through the desert, you watch a beheading, and you’ve done Saudi. I’d never been near it. But I wanted
Haroun to have one friend in the crowd. Sometimes I wish…’

She remembered his reaction when she’d got lost that first day in Riyadh, when she’d found her way to the blue-tiled square. ‘Joe, why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I didn’t want you to have this thing in your head. I see it all the time. First there was the empty square. Then there was a van, a prison van. It drove into the square so slowly.

‘It seemed to take for ever before they brought him out. He was blindfolded, and I think he was drugged. I said his name–when they took him out of the van, I said his name. Maybe he heard. Maybe it helped. I’ll never know.’ His face looked haunted. ‘Roisin, what I can’t stop thinking about is–I’m a doctor. I know how the human body works. I know that the brain, that consciousness, can survive for minutes without oxygen. It doesn’t shut down at once. I tell myself that the shock would do the trick, but I don’t know. I keep thinking, what would it have been like, those last few seconds, after…?’

Images she didn’t want invaded her mind. ‘Oh God. Joe…’ She took his hand.

‘I’m sorry.’

She shook her head. ‘After all that…why did you come back?’

‘When they arrested Haroun, I thought they were just going for the easiest target. That’s how crimes get solved here: grab a likely-looking
suspect and make it stick. But then I began to wonder…’ The sound of his pager interrupted them. ‘Shit. Not again. I’m off
duty
, for fuck’s sake.’

He checked the number, and picked up his cell phone. ‘Joe Massey. Yeah, I…Look, I’m not on duty now, you’ll have to…Oh hell. Can’t you get…? Well, who…? Where?…? OK, I’ll be there…When I get there, all right?’ He slammed the phone on to the dashboard. ‘Fucking hell…’ He looked at her. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, there’s an emergency at the hospital and they need me in.’

‘It’s OK. I don’t feel much like a party now anyway.’

He gave her a mirthless smile. ‘Me neither, but I haven’t got time to take you home. Look, we’re almost there. I’ll drop you off at the house, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can–I don’t think it’s going to take long. They just need someone in there to get them organized.’

‘Kick ass, you mean?’

‘Exactly. Kick ass is exactly what I’m going to do.’

‘OK. Drop me off. I’ll keep the side up with this lot. We don’t want to lose our A-list status.’

His smile was grim. ‘Fuck our A-list status.’

She laughed. ‘I’m with you on that one.’

Joe edged the car out into the traffic and ten minutes later they were driving through an affluent suburb. Joe stopped at the gates of a compound that looked far larger than the one
where Roisin and Joe lived. She could see the high concrete walls and the razor-wire along the perimeter.

The security checks took longer than usual as the guards went through their documentation, checked their numbered invitation and phoned through to verify their credentials. They asked for photo ID and studied it minutely. Finally, the gates opened and they were inside the compound.

They drove through wide streets. The houses were invisible from the road, set back behind high white walls over which oleander and hibiscus tumbled. Cameras followed them as the car crept towards a high metal gate, which swung silently open to admit them. A uniformed man opened the car door. Before she got out, Roisin leaned across to Joe. He put his arms round her. ‘Don’t be long,’ she said.

‘I won’t.’ He released her and the man helped Roisin out, and spoke quickly into a hand-held radio. She looked back at Joe. ‘I’ll see you later,’ he mouthed.

She watched him drive away.