The Disappeared (19 page)

He begins to lift his brother on to a flight of stone steps that you can just discern, and which lead up from the water to an old stone platform. The sailor watches you, and in the fading afternoon light his eyes take on a violet hue, seeming to shine from his skull like lamps. Suddenly you are afraid of him. You must get off this boat at once. Yunus is calling to you.

‘Catherine, for fuck's sake, give me a hand.'

The thought of touching Hassan fills you with loathing. But once the brothers have disembarked, the old sailor will take the boat straight back to the ship, with you on board. You have no choice; you are attached to Yunus, and without him you are lost. You go across, and together you lift Hassan out of the boat and on to the steps. Hassan scowls at you, but says nothing. There is that smell of engine oil; you recall the impatient jabbing of his sex against you and again there is the image of a terrier, poking the hole of a rat. You almost succumb to nausea and stumble as Yunus turns back to the boat.

‘See you here, Marcin. Tomorrow midday. At this place, OK?'

‘No speak English.'

‘Yeah, yeah, that's what you say. Just be here tomorrow midday, OK?'

The old sailor shrugs, and remains sitting in the middle of the boat. Yunus leads you away from the water, his brother leaning against him, along a path beside the warehouse. He has taken a mobile phone from his pocket and is giving instructions in a language that you do not recognise. You emerge onto a main road through derelict warehouses, where two taxis are waiting. Yunus manhandles his brother into one of them and turns to you.

‘OK you hit my bro, and I dunna like that. But he's a moron and a bastard. I apologize for him. You and me, we could be friends see. Here.'

He reaches into his pocket and takes out a mobile phone and a set of keys.

‘These are yours. And this too.'

He hands you the wallet that had been pressed against
The Wind in the Willows
in your pocket. You look at him in silence. In the yellow light of the street lamp his smooth shadowless face seems curiously vulnerable, like the face of a child. You notice the difficulty he has with eye contact. He looks at you as though you were not revealed in your face but hidden somewhere behind it. You see that he wants to touch you, but doesn't dare. Maybe it is the first time in his life that he has been caught in this dilemma.

‘Look. You had a fucking bad time and I apologize. If you tell anyone then that's going to mean big trouble for me and my bro. I'm not threatening, see. I'm too fucking scared, man.'

Still you look at him in silence. He takes a piece of paper from his pocket and hands it to you.

‘I wrote my number on this. You can ring me when you want. I gotta go now. Dunna say nowt, OK?'

He opens the taxi door and tries to take your hand as you slip inside, but you shake him off. A hurt expression crosses his face.

‘You tell him where you wanna go. He wunna charge.'

The taxi draws away and you watch as Yunus shakes his head sadly and then goes to join his brother. You give the address from which you were abducted; the taciturn driver nods and drives into the night. Two hours later you are back on the concrete staircase of the block of flats, letting yourself in to the poky foyer with shaking hands. You are in the bedroom, lying on the bed and sobbing violently, your face pressed into the pillow. And yes, there is another person in the flat.

It was several minutes before Millie was able to explain herself. Perched on the edge of the sofa, with her hands gripping the fabric, she searched the ceiling with outraged eyes for the words she needed, and her lips trembled over the inadequacy of what they found. The floor was covered with CDs and magazines, scattered from the shelves that had harboured them. The Picasso reproduction had been taken down and propped against the wall. Cushions had been flung from all the chairs. And on the window seat where he had watched as Muhibbah wove her spells around him, was a heap of files, their lever-arches opened and their pages scattered. They were the notes she had made for her course on accountancy.

‘Yale locks are no obstacle to professionals, and there was this guy with them, Polish or Bulgarian or something, who looked as professional as they come. I came home to this: the three of them just standing there like they were the landlords. There was the one who was with her when she picked up her things. And another, older and taller, with coarse black hair and a squint. No apologies of course. Simply angry stares, as though
I
were to blame for trashing the place.'

‘Did they think Muhibbah had come back here?' Justin asked. For a brief moment he allowed the image of Muhibbah fleeing from her captors: the hair swept back, the dark eyes set on the road, her hopes fixed on Justin.

‘Not a bit of it,' said Millie with a shake of the head. ‘They were asking whether I had seen an unmarked CD she had left behind. I asked them why they had broken in. They said they were her brothers and were within their rights. After all, she had paid rent she had never used.'

‘And did they tell you where she is?'

‘Yes, because I asked. And the reply (expletives deleted) was Afghanistan, and none of your business. The taller guy began to ogle me, and that really bugged me. He had a disgusting leer, and for a moment I thought of calling the police. But I dropped the idea, thinking that maybe this information would be useful to
you
.'

‘Not exactly useful,' Justin said grimly. ‘Except in the way that unwelcome truths are useful.'

Millie looked at him softly.

‘I confess I never believed your story about kidnapping,' she said. ‘Now I am not so sure. But God what a rotten lot you have got yourself mixed up with. The secretive Muhibbah was bad enough, but when you discover the world she was concealing you can begin to understand why she took so much trouble to hide it.'

Justin sat through this narrative in a state of resigned disengagement. It was the final humiliation to learn that Muhibbah had not, after all, escaped the fate from which he had tried to rescue her, and perhaps had been preparing for it all along. Of course the other men in her life were not lovers but brothers, spreading the seed of their migrating tribe sideways through the host community, treasuring their sister as the price of new alliances, roaming the world with predatory indifference to the pleasures snatched along the way. He resolved to rid himself of his obsession, and to look for the person who would replace Muhibbah in his feelings – Millie for instance, who had such a practical and neatly presented allure, and whose breasts, bubbling at the lip of a low cut blouse, reminded him of the many months of abstinence that his futile love had caused.

‘Ah well, Millie,' he responded, ‘I guess I knew. Thanks for telling me, and please…'

He began putting the lever-arch files together while Millie gathered up the CDs and the copies of
Rolling Stone
. At the sight of Muhibbah's virginal handwriting he suffered a pang. But she had abused him and abused his love. She was to join his rank of villains, along with the rest of her family. At the end of twenty minutes, when the flat had been restored to order, he felt bold enough to ask Millie for a date.

‘Phew,' she said, ‘rebound at last. We could go somewhere now, if you like. I want to get out of this place.'

Iona approved of Millie, when she met her at one of Justin's Thursday gigs. Most of all she approved of the change that came over him, as the image of Muhibbah receded. But she had news for him too. They were sitting together in the Horse and Trumpet in the city centre, which was near to her office and had a young and modern clientele among whom Iona felt at home. She was treating Justin to her opinions in the matter of the Sharon Williams case, concerning which she now had a substantial file. As Iona saw it the girl was a target for sexual abuse, and there were three people about whom she had her suspicions.

‘Isn't this a matter for the police?' Justin asked.

Iona laughed cynically.

‘For Superintendent Nicholson? Don't make me laugh. Remember his attitude to Muhibbah? Is he going to risk a charge of racism, just because of a rumour? He needs evidence, and the evidence must be so overwhelming that he can say that he had no alternative but to act on it.'

‘Are you going to tell me that the Shahin family are involved?'

‘One of my suspects is the elder brother, Hassan, the one with the squint. He has been making a fuss lately on behalf of the Koran and the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, demonstrating in front of St Catherine's Academy, and threatening the teachers. Methinks he doth protest too much, if you get my meaning. Though I'm not sure what he is trying to cover up. Maybe sexual abuse is only a side-line. We have served notice on the family that they are not entitled to Council accommodation. And this means that he has been round to our offices too, accusing us of racism, Islamophobia, human rights violations, insulting the Prophet, eating pork, shaking hands with women and so on and so forth. It brought back some poignant memories.'

Justin squeezed her hand, as he always did when the conversation turned to their two disasters, the one that had closed her heart to the opposite sex and the other that had done something comparable to him. But he did not want to hear more about Muhibbah's family. He no longer visited the sanctuary that he had erected around her image, and if from time to time he paused at the entrance, it was only to notice the cobwebs that now hung over every part.

‘So who are your other two suspects?' he asked.

‘Oh, there is the Polish guy who has moved in with the adoptive mother. And then…'

‘And then?'

‘And then there is her teacher, who to my mind has an interest in the girl that is not, you might say, healthy. To put it simply, he is hooked on her. A pretentious bastard too: imagines that he lives in some poetic universe, way above types like you and me, and that she has somehow managed to join him there. He wants her body, so he has invented her soul.'

‘Poor sod. So what's the girl like? Does she justify all this attention?'

‘She is pretty, slight, frail, vulnerable – just made for abuse. And she is clever too. The bore is I shall have to interview her, and I know she'll clam shut, with a few tantalising snippets hanging out of the shell. But back to the Shahin family…'

‘Must we talk of them?'

‘Have you not asked yourself why they were so anxious to find the CD that they were looking for in Millie's flat?'

Of course he had asked himself. And he had veered away from the question, as he had veered away from so much else that had happened in the wake of Muhibbah's departure. The hole that had emerged in Copley Solutions' accounts, for instance; the collapse of the scheme for the carbon-neutral houses, following erratic deliveries of Lithuanian timber; the growing awareness, as he spent his days staring from his desk at the place where she should have been, that his projects were in disarray, and that the green agenda no longer had any appeal for him – all these things seemed connected. But to think of them was to think of Muhibbah, and that was not allowed.

‘Well,' Iona said, dropping her chin into one hand and resting her elbow on the beer-splashed table, ‘here is what I reckon. That girl and her slimy brothers were all along in cahoots. Maybe she tried to run away from them at a certain stage. And maybe she was serious in wanting to live as a modern woman. But something drew her back, and that thing was business. Not legitimate trade, but a shady business involving her brothers, for whom she was keeping accounts. Why else should she have walked off with the office computer, when her brother came to collect her? Have you thought of that?'

‘Listen, Iona, I have thought of every explanation, and none of them casts credit on Muhibbah. So all I can do is forget about it. And that's what I am trying to do. If there is something shady going on, then that's not my problem.'

Iona laughed again.

‘What I am telling you, Justin, is that it
is
your problem, as much your problem as Sharon Williams is my problem. And it could even be – who knows? – that the two problems are connected.'

‘How so?'

Iona's eyes were shining, with the inner glow that he had often seen, and which entirely transfigured her so that she became, in her own way, almost beautiful. When her face came alive like this it was as though she were taking electricity from some transcendental source and passing it on. For a few months now Justin had been plugged in to her, dependent upon Iona for the energy that kept him alive. He nodded, not wanting to hear what she was about to say, and also wanting her to say it.

‘Look at it this way. There is the perfect sister, the shining treasure shut away in its box, to be exchanged only for something beyond price – for instance, for an alliance of families, a tribal bond, a source of indefinite social power. All around there are the abused and frightened girls, who cost nothing more than lying promises, and who exchange on the market at the going rate. And then there is the Prophet, PBUH, who in their view ratifies both types of exchange, the priceless and the priced, and who provides the perfect cover for all transactions.'

‘The perfect cover?'

‘Yes. When deals are authorised in that way the guys who make them have no motive to question them. And we cannot question them either, since for people like Superintendent Nicholson and me that would be political suicide. In short, here is a girl brought up to believe that human beings, women especially, divide into the priced and the priceless, and who puts herself in the latter class. Wouldn't she go along with her brothers, when they ask her to apply her brain, her contacts and her knowledge to the profitable business of people trafficking? What obstacle would she see?'

‘The obvious one: that she herself will be a victim.'

‘Not if she adheres to the one conviction that you discovered in her, which is that she is beyond price.'