The Disappeared (32 page)

'And
this contamination was on her skin, right?' Jenny said. 'Her body was found
naked.'

'I'm
not sufficiently expert to tell you whether or not she was clothed or not when
she was exposed,' Sonia said. 'We'd have to bring in specialists.'

Jenny's
mind raced through a number of equally baffling possibilities. None of them
seemed credible. All of them pointed to Amira Jamal having a far more complex
connection with her son's disappearance than Jenny could ever have imagined.

'We'd
better inform the police,' Alison said.

Andy
reached for the phone on the wall.

Jenny
stopped him. 'Hold on. I'd like to go to her flat first. It's only a few
minutes away.'

Sonia
said, 'This is a radiological incident. We're under a legal duty—'

'I
know. But let's find out how big the incident is first, shall we? Could you come
with us?'

Sonia
and Andy traded an uncertain glance.

'He
can make the call in half an hour. Meanwhile I'm gathering evidence for my
inquest into her son's death - I'll explain on the way. Bring whatever you need
to take measurements, but we'll have to be quick.'

Alison
held fire until they were marching back out across the car park. Sonia,
following behind, was on the phone offloading the day's domestic duties to an
evidently disgruntled husband.

Alison
said, 'Would you mind telling me what you think you're doing, Mrs Cooper? We
have a duty to report this incident immediately.'

'It
was you who told me that the Security Services put pressure on the police to
shut down their investigation in Nazim and Rafi's disappearances before they
wanted to.'

'I
told you there was talk, that's all,' Alison said defensively.

'That's
not how I remember it . . . Look, I know Pironi's your friend—'

'He
did everything he could.'

'He
could have resigned.'

'Why
are you bringing him into this?'

'Why
wouldn't I? He's part of it.'

'He's
a decent man.'

'That's
not what I'm hearing.'

'Oh,
from McAvoy—'

Jenny
stopped abruptly next to her car. 'You may trust a man who allowed himself to
be silenced. I don't, and I'm the one running this inquiry. So which horse are
you going to ride?'

Alison
met her with a flinty glare as Sonia's arrival brought their exchange to an
unresolved end.

'Your
call,' Jenny said.

Jenny
drove Sonia the three miles to Mrs Jamal's flat in her Golf, repeatedly
checking her mirrors for Alison's Peugeot.

There
was no sign of it. She felt an unexpected pang of sadness verging on betrayal.
Relations with Alison had always been bumpy, but until this week she had never
truly doubted her loyalty. In the space of a few days it appeared to have all
but dissolved.

It
took three long blasts on the doorbell to rouse the irritable Mr Aldis, the
caretaker, who growled over the intercom that he didn't work on weekends so
could they kindly get lost. Jenny responded with another extended ring which
finally drew the hefty, bulldog-faced Mrs Aldis hobbling to the front door on a
single crutch. She shoved a set of keys at Jenny telling her to help herself,
then limped back indoors.

Sonia
Cane produced a sensitive dosimeter the size of a small cellphone. It was
fitted with a Geiger-Muller counter, she explained, and was able to
differentiate between different categories of radiation. She held it discreetly
in her hand so as not to alarm any passing residents and took a reading in the
front hall. There was an electronic crackle - each blip an electron firing
through the dosimeter's sensors like a microscopic shotgun pellet. It was a
similar reading to that she'd found on Mrs Jamal's body - fifty milliSieverts.
It petered out towards the stairs, but spiked alarmingly to eighty when they
entered the lift.

'We're
going to have to get this building cleared,' Sonia said anxiously.

'Five
minutes,' Jenny said. 'Let's just sweep the flat.'

Sonia
moved quickly, not wanting to take a fraction more radiation than she had to.
The trail cooled to twenty-five milliSieverts along the stretch of landing
between the lift and the front door of Mrs Jamal's apartment; once inside the
front door the dosimeter erupted like dry twigs on a bonfire.

'Je-sus,'
Sonia said, poking the meter around the living- room door. 'Ninety-three.'

Jenny
pointed to where Mrs Jamal's clothes and the whisky bottle had been found. 'She
was sitting just about there.'

Sonia
hastened into the room, pointed the meter at the spot, then swiftly drew it in
a circle around her. She stepped towards one of the two armchairs and swept the
meter over it.

'A
hundred and ten.' She headed for the door. 'That's enough. We're going.'

Sonia
was reluctantly persuaded to sweep the remaining four landings of the building
before reaching for her phone, but found only slightly higher than background
levels. It confirmed that the trail led from the front door directly to Mrs
Jamal's flat. The fact that the fabric of an armchair had the highest reading
suggested that someone or something contaminated had come into direct contact
with it. It was only a matter of a few particles - a faint dusting, Sonia
called it - but it screamed to Jenny that in her final hours Mrs Jamal had had
a visitor.

Sonia
refused to take the lift and hurried ahead down the stairs, making a call to
the Health Protection Agency. Within the hour the building would be evacuated
and sealed off. A team of operatives in post-apocalyptic white overalls would
search for and suck up every last radioactive crumb. The neighbourhood would
never have witnessed a more incongruous sight.

Descending
the penultimate flight of steps, Jenny heard voices in the lobby below. She
turned the corner to see Alison standing on the doorstep of the caretaker's
flat talking to Mrs Aldis. Sonia was already outside the building, phone
pressed to her ear as, with much gesticulating, she explained the situation to
an incredulous official at the Health Protection Agency.

Leaning
on her crutch, Mrs Aldis nodded gruffly towards the lift. Jenny heard her say,
'Tall fella, slim.'

'Colour?'

'White.
Fiftyish, I'd say. Baseball cap on. Shoved straight past me. No sorry or
nothing.'

Alison
said, 'Did you tell the police this?'

'I
wasn't here, was I? I was on my way to hospital to have my knee seen to.'

'At
what time?'

'Must've
been about one-ish, maybe a few minutes after.' Mrs Aldis noticed Jenny. 'You
remembered to lock up, love? There's no way my husband's going up there today.
Lazy sod. It'd take a bomb to get him off that sofa when the football's on.'

Jenny
said, 'You might be in luck.'

They
sat for a while in Alison's car, a few moments of peace before the air would be
split by the scream of sirens. Jenny resisted any temptation to discuss her
officer's decision to step away from her friend and fellow churchgoer, DI
Pironi. She was simply grateful that she had. She hated to admit it, but it was
a childlike gratitude: there was something of the mother substitute in her
relationship with Alison. What did that say about her? She heard McAvoy's
voice: there's someone who's had the confidence knocked out of her.

'I'll
take a statement later,' Alison said quietly. 'The man who came out of the lift
sounded rather like the one Dani James saw in the student halls all those years
ago.'

'White
... I don't know why, I was expecting her to say he was Asian.'

'We
don't know he was connected with Mrs Jamal. He could have been anyone,' Alison
said, but with no conviction.

After
a moment of silence, Jenny said, 'Anna Rose Crosby worked at Maybury power
station. Our missing Jane Doe had a thyroid tumour . . .'

'You
can't start building castles in the air, Mrs Cooper. Best start with what we
know.'

Then
came the first one. A squad car screamed up behind them and screeched to a halt
outside the block. Sonia Cane rushed to meet the two constables who scrambled
out.

Alison
said, 'She may never get another one like this. We'll leave her to enjoy the
limelight, shall we?'

'Why
not?' Jenny said. 'And talking of which, I think Monday might be a little soon
to start taking evidence again, don't you?'

'Whatever
you think's best, Mrs Cooper.'

The
day had taken on a dreamlike quality, its moods shifting as swiftly as the
restless sky. She used the last of her phone's battery dialling Ross's number,
only to reach him for a few short seconds in which he announced he was staying
at his father's for the rest of the weekend, and could she drop his things off
on her way to work on Monday?

Deflated
and dejected, Jenny drove home. The roads were eerily quiet as the sun sank
towards the hilltops, briefly casting the Wye valley in a light of almost
angelic clarity. For a brief moment the whole of life seemed to stop and be
held in stark relief. She was a mere onlooker to the series of baffling tableaux
which made up her present existence: a son disillusioned by her weakness; a
disturbing and erratic man to whom she felt a visceral attraction; a case that,
as much as she tried to ignore the fact, touched her darkest fears; and the
latest bizarre composition in the city that lay a mere river's span behind her
- a trail of radiation that led to the naked corpse of a woman whose final call
for help she had ignored. She should have felt guilty, horrified that she'd
taken McAvoy's call in preference to Mrs Jamal's, but in this moment of
stillness she felt almost a selfish sense of relief. It was as if everything
that had been ominous and unseen had briefly surfaced and shown itself. Mrs
Jamal's killer - Jenny had convinced herself that was who the spectre in the
baseball cap had been - was one and the same demon who had visited on the night
of Nazim and Rafi's vanishing. Eight years ago he had left only scratch marks
on the door frames; this time he'd left a smear of hell itself.

Evil
now had a form if not a face.

There
was no time to reflect or elaborate on her theories; the phone calls came
relentlessly for the rest of the afternoon. Andy Kerr, the undertakers, various
functionaries from the Health Protection Agency, DI Pironi and even Gillian
Golder managed to obtain her supposedly ex-directory number. All wanted information
she didn't have and none of them believed her when she claimed ignorance. Both
Pironi and Golder sounded close to desperate for any lead to the source of the
radiation; both seemed convinced she was keeping critical evidence to herself.
She told them about Mrs Aldis and the man in the baseball cap, rationalizing
that in doing so she had fulfilled her duty, but made no mention of either
Madog or Tathum. They belonged to the past and that, she told herself, was
still her exclusive territory.

Between
calls Jenny sat at her desk, trying to work out her next moves. She had already
gone far beyond the accepted bounds of coronial practice by behaving like a
detective, but her gut told her there were questions that would never be
answered merely by examining witnesses in court. The stolen Jane Doe had an
early-stage thyroid tumour possibly caused by exposure to low-level radiation;
the missing Anna Rose worked in the nuclear industry; Nazim Jamal had been a
physicist. It was more than just wishful thinking, there had to be a
connection.

The
phone interrupted her thoughts for what felt like the fiftieth time. Jenny
answered with a weary hello.

Steve
said, 'That good, hey? Busy?'

Jenny's
mood lifted. 'What did you have in mind?'

Steve
said, 'I'd like to talk.'

The
Apple Tree was quiet for a Saturday. Steve was a lone figure sitting next to
the iron brazier on the flagstone patio. The snap of the fire and the rush of
the nearby stream making its final descent to the Wye were the only sounds in
the damp, chilly night.

'Can
you stand it out here?' Steve said as she climbed the uneven steps.

'I
like it,' Jenny said and took a seat next to him on one of the three rustic
benches arranged around the fire. It was throwing out a good heat, but she was
glad of her thick wool sweater and the waxed jacket which made her look like a
farmer's wife.

Steve
touched his roll-up cigarette to a lick of flame and took a draw. 'Got you a
Virgin Mary.' He handed her a glass.

'Thanks.'
She took an alcohol-free sip. 'God, it's boring being virtuous.' She reached
for his tobacco tin. 'Am I allowed one sin?'

'As
many as you like.' He gazed into the flames.

Clumsily
rolling a cigarette she said, 'I'd tell you what kind of week I've had, but I'm
not sure I'd believe it myself.'

'Ross
told me some of it,' he said, as if from a far distance.