Strangers (24 page)

Roisin couldn’t get the visit from the police out of her mind. She could still see the detective standing in her doorway asking,
Did you know that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the UK?

If they were investigating a murder, and if they thought that Joe was implicated, would they continue the investigation now that he was dead? She could remember reading about cases where the prime suspect had died, and the bland comment:
The police are not looking for anyone else
. It was tantamount to an accusation of murder, and one that the accused had no way of refuting.

She needed to know more about the death, more about the inquest where Joe had given evidence. It was several days before the obvious solution occurred to her and she took the tube out to Colindale in the bleak suburbs of North London to visit the British Library newspaper archive.

She presented herself at the desk and after a short wait was issued with a day pass. She’d made notes on her journey out there, and after a quick search through the catalogues, accessed back issues of the
Evening Standard
which were available electronically for the previous eight months. The
Standard
should have reported the incident in some detail. The nationals, she wasn’t sure about.

The sheer volume of information was so vast, and the bit she was looking for so tiny, she felt daunted. The detectives had said the woman had died in September the year before. So…she tried searching using woman, drown, Thames and different combinations of the words, but she got no useful hits. Then she started on the sections recording the findings of the Coroners’ Courts in September and October.

There were two records of people drowned in the Thames in September. One was recorded as suicide, the other was the death of an unknown woman in her early twenties. The verdict had been an open one.

Armed with a date, she began hunting for news reports, and at last she found them. There was the first report of the body being washed up, and then, a couple of days later, a much briefer report noted that a woman had died from drowning. Roisin kept going, now having to resort to a page-by-page search. She almost missed the story, though it had been given more prominence than either the discovery of the corpse or the cause of
her death:
DEAD WOMAN ‘ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT
’ screamed the headline.

The opening two paragraphs were devoted to the dead woman in the river. She was probably from the Indian subcontinent. She carried the marks of a recent beating. She was wearing a distinctive ring. No one had reported her missing and no one had claimed her.

But most of the story was devoted to the number of illegal immigrants in the country, how they came here and the problems they caused. It went on to discuss the problem of trafficking, and the way that women from poor countries were lured to the UK by promises of work, only to find themselves forced into prostitution when they got here.

Roisin sat back in her seat, massaging her temples. The woman had died in the first week of September. The inquest had been towards the end of the month. The dates were etched in her mind. She had a memory for dates that could be her curse: a year ago today, we met. A year ago today, we first made love. A year ago…She didn’t have to check the date of the inquest again to know it happened a few days before Joe had told her about his plans to return to the Gulf, and had asked her to marry him.

Did you know that Saudi Arabia doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the UK
…?

She printed off the article. She didn’t know where to go now with the information she had. All the way on the long tube journey back to the
flat, she swayed to the movement of the train, hanging on to the overhead rail, oblivious to the people crowding on and off at each station. It was the rush hour. She could almost be back a year ago, heading home from work, looking forward to an evening with friends, a glass of wine, a shower–nothing too much on her mind.

She was pushed and jostled as she fought her way through the crowds at King’s Cross and headed up the road towards the flats. ‘Goddammit, Joe, I need to talk to you!’ She was angry with him for being dead, for leaving her with all of this to plague her and no answers to be found. She didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until she heard a voice saying, ‘What?’

It was Mari, the woman who had moved into George’s flat, who must also just have fought her way out of King’s Cross, hampered by a heavy pushchair. ‘Nothing,’ she said quickly. Then, because that seemed abrupt, she said, ‘How are you? I haven’t seen you lately.’

‘Yeah.’ Mari’s voice sounded clogged. Her nose was red and as Roisin watched she fished a tissue out of her pocket and blew it resoundingly. ‘I’ve got a cold,’ she said unnecessarily. She joggled the pushchair by way of illustration. ‘This one’s been keeping me up.’

Roisin made a sympathetic face. She could remember when a friend of hers, talking about her own new baby, had said,
Happiness just means getting enough sleep
. ‘He’ll grow out of it.’

They started to walk up the road together. She could hear Mari’s snuffling breath. ‘Do you want me to push him for a while?’

‘OK.’ Mari handed over the pushchair with relief.

Roisin took the handle and smiled at the baby, who was awake. He was a beautiful child with a mass of fair hair. His eyes were dark blue. He still had the slightly crumpled look that babies have in their first weeks. ‘Hey, Adam,’ she said, smiling again and leaning towards him. This time he seemed to register her, and his eyes fixed on her face.

Mari was silent, so Roisin chatted to the tiny child as she pushed the buggy along the road, which sloped almost imperceptibly upwards. She tried not to puff too audibly. ‘Thanks for finding that address for me,’ she said to Mari. ‘I went to see George. He’s fine.’

‘George? Oh, the old man. Yeah. Good.’ She sneezed.

‘He said someone came looking for me, just before he left. No one’s been since you moved in, have they?’

Mari shook her head. ‘There’s not been anyone visiting at all,’ she said.

Roisin studied her covertly as they walked up the road. She looked tired and ill. Adam was only a few weeks old. Mari must have barely recovered from the birth, and now she was living on her own with full responsibility for her baby. Roisin
wondered how she would have coped at Mari’s age.

When they reached the flats, Mari opened the security gate and stood back as Roisin manoeuvred the heavy pram over the threshold.

‘If you come along to mine for a minute,’ she said, ‘there’s a letter for you. It got put through my door by mistake. I’ve been meaning to bring it up.’ She led the way as Roisin followed with the pram.

‘Home,’ she said to the baby as Mari unlocked the door. She unbuckled the straps and lifted him out, carefully supporting his head. ‘Hello, Adam,’ she said, holding him up to her face. He gazed at her with unblinking eyes. ‘Shall I take his bonnet off?’

‘It’s a hat,’ Mari said. ‘He’s a boy.’

‘His hat,’ Roisin corrected herself, carefully loosening the ties and easing it off the child’s head. She freed him from the tight wrappings, and looked round for somewhere to put him.

‘I’ll take him,’ Mari said, carefully cradling him. ‘He might go to sleep now. Here’s the letter.’ She handed Roisin a rather battered manila envelope.

Roisin took it. ‘Thanks.’ She remembered how she had got to know George through the postman’s inability to tell the difference between 13 and 31. ‘Listen, I meant it about baby sitting,’ she said. ‘Here—’ She scribbled her number on a piece of paper.

Mari studied it. ‘It doesn’t seem right to leave him,’ she said.

‘If you need to catch up on your sleep, or if you decide you want to go out, just call. Any time.’

‘OK,’ Mari said. ‘Thanks.’

Roisin stuffed the envelope into her bag as she went up the stairs. Mari’s flat, from her brief glimpse of it, looked spartan and comfortless, but there didn’t seem to be anything else she could do. She’d made friendly overtures, and she’d offered to baby sit. Anything else would be intrusive.

Besides, she had other things to think about.

Damien called her two days later to say he was back. She felt uncertain with him, remembering, but only half-remembering, her drunken confidences. His voice sounded cautious as they talked, as if he was wary of what she was going to say. Maybe he thought she regularly drank herself into oblivion to cope with Joe’s death, not knowing that, before the oblivion, the dreams came, and they were far worse than anything she endured sober.

‘Something happened the day after we met,’ she said. ‘The police came looking for Joe.’

‘The police? What did they want?’

She told him about the interview, and the disturbing remark that the man had made as they left. ‘I looked the case up in the newspaper archives. There was an inquest–they said the woman had drowned.’

‘I’ll come over,’ he said. ‘OK?’

Half an hour later, he was at the flat, shaking the rain off his mac as he came through the door.

‘You’re soaked.’ She offered him a towel.

‘I walked,’ he admitted, rubbing the worst of the wet off his hair. ‘You forget…in Riyadh, when it rains, it’s warm. Here…’ He gave her back the towel. He was dressed more casually than she had seen him, in jeans and an open-necked shirt. His hair was tousled where he’d rubbed it dry. He touched his fingers to the radiator, and gave a rueful smile when he realized she’d seen him. ‘I can’t seem to get warm.’

‘You’re what my grandfather would have called
nesh.’

‘Nesh?’

‘It’s a Yorkshire word. It means you feel the cold.’ But what he was feeling was more than that, she knew. He was still recovering from his injuries, and he had not long since come from one of the hottest places in the world. ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’

He followed her through to the kitchen and leaned in the doorway, watching her as she filled the kettle and spooned coffee into a jug. ‘I’m sorry about the other night,’ she said.

He raised an enquiring eyebrow.

‘I drank too much. I hope I didn’t…’

‘You were fine. It probably did you good.’

The kettle was boiling. She made the coffee Arab style, crushing some cardamom seeds into the jug before she poured in the water. The
fragrance of the spice filled the room and, for a moment, she was back in the house in Riyadh. Her hand shook as she poured the coffee.

They went into the living room and he sank down into one of the armchairs. He looked drained–worse than he had done when she’d seen him before, when he was straight off the plane.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Tell me about this police business.’

She told him about the two detectives, about the woman Joe had seen fall into the river, about what the detective had said. She told him about the ring that had been on the dead woman’s finger, and the connection with Riyadh, but she didn’t tell him about Yasmin’s disturbing request. He listened without commenting, a line appearing between his eyes.

‘I went to the library and copied the newspaper articles,’ she said. ‘And I went through Joe’s papers.’

She held out the sheaf of papers she’d found in the suitcases the morning the police came. ‘These…These are the papers Joe was working on.’

Damien took them and flicked through, frowning. She saw him stop when he saw Haroun Patel’s photo, and again when he saw the one with the photo of the girl. ‘I’ll need a bit of time with these,’ he said.

‘I’ll make some more coffee.’

She left him reading as she put the kettle on
and tidied up the kitchen. When she came back, Damien was sitting at the table with the papers spread out in front of him. He looked up, his face serious.

‘What have you found?’

‘I’m trying to put this together,’ he said. ‘You were right about what your husband was doing. All this stuff–it’s from around the time of the drugs theft, the one that got Patel into trouble. He put together a timeline. I’ve been trying to follow it. Look—’ He moved his chair and she came and sat next to him and looked at the papers spread out in front of her. ‘This is a driver’s schedule.’ He pointed to the top of the page. ‘That’s Patel’s itinerary. He took the hospital van out the day before the drugs went missing to take deliveries to the clinics in the villages, OK?’

She nodded.

‘It looks as though your husband spent some time making sure those deliveries actually took place–he’s confirmed them all. Judging from the time of the last delivery, Patel would have got back to Riyadh around ten that night, at the earliest.’ He looked at her to make sure she was following what he was saying. ‘Here, we’ve got the inventory of the drugs stock. They completed it at eight thirty that evening, the day before the check was due. All present and correct. But by eight the next morning, the morphine has gone.’ He looked into the distance, his eyes narrowed in thought. ‘So unless the thief was a key holder–and Haroun
Patel certainly wasn’t–the morphine vanished sometime after eight thirty but before the pharmacy was closed for the night, which would have been about nine, nine thirty–more or less immediately after the late drugs round. So it can’t have been Patel who stole the drugs.’

‘But…the police would have looked at this, wouldn’t they?’

‘I doubt it. They found the drugs in his locker and they got their confession. They’d just say that Haroun stole the security codes or had an accomplice. It could have happened like that, I suppose, but it’s unlikely. It had all the signs of an impulse theft. If it had been that well planned, the thieves wouldn’t have left the stuff lying around. Besides, why touch anything the day before an audit? Everyone knew it was going to happen. You don’t mess around with the Saudi police.’

‘So they executed an innocent man?’

He shrugged. ‘Any country that has the death penalty executes innocent men. It’s par for the course. That’s not what this is about. The authorities wouldn’t have been worried about this. As far as they were concerned, Patel got due process. What I don’t understand is why…’

‘You’re saying Joe was killed for this? Someone killed him because of this?’

He rubbed the back of his head. ‘That’s what I don’t see. Why would they? If Joe had taken this to the authorities, no one would have been interested. They lost some drugs. They had a culprit.
End of story. Another thing I don’t understand is why he was chasing it. He must have known it was pointless. There was no way the authorities were going to reopen the case. No way they’d even look at it. The Saudi courts don’t make mistakes.’