Strangers (29 page)

The storm caught Damien as soon as he stepped out of the hotel. The rain was bouncing up from the cobbles and the wind seized him as he moved away from the shelter of the bridge. He gritted his teeth and braced himself against it as he ran to the car park. His raincoat, a heavy riding mac that he’d bought in anticipation of the British weather, barely protected him. By the time he was behind the wheel, his hair was dripping and the bottoms of his trousers flapped wetly against his legs.

He put the car into gear and then hesitated. He remembered that day in Paris when Nazarian had found him. Was he leading the people Amy was afraid of straight to her? But she was making no effort to conceal her location. She’d been strolling about openly, making no attempt to hide. Besides, she had questions to answer. He had to talk to her. Now.

He kept his eyes on the road as he drove, watching the mirror, watching the cars around
him. The traffic was light. The storm had kept a lot of people indoors. The road was wet and the water splashed up under his wheels. The light from the street lamps wavered and shattered. His headlights picked out the pillars of a flyover, blocks of flats looming darkly out of the night, and gone.

The Byker Wall presented a blank face to the city, a wall in reality, not just in name. Its massive presence was ominous and forbidding. He didn’t want to risk his car in the estate so he left it outside a nearby supermarket. He crossed the wide road where heavy lorries threw the spray in great sheets as they ran their cargoes through the night, and went in through the wide entrance.

And the world around him was transformed. The noise of the traffic was silenced by the wall. He was in a wide basin where the flats tiered up around him. Lights illuminated paths and walkways, and he could see the shapes of trees, and the shadows of creepers tumbling from balconies. He had a feeling that in daylight, there would be bright colours. It was almost as if he’d left the dark city and stepped into a Mediterranean hill village, except the cutting edge of the wind and the sharp needles of the rain were there to disabuse him.

And there were other reminders that destroyed the fleeting illusion. Litter blew around on the ground. Discarded fast-food containers were tangled in the creepers. There was graffiti on the fences, and jagged gaps where the timber had been pulled away.

He followed the path through the estate, looking at the numbers. The housing consisted of apartment blocks, maisonettes and houses. Amy’s flat was in one of the blocks, on the first floor, not far from the entry point he’d used. He found the door to the stairwell, noting as he went in that the security locks had been recently vandalized–he could see the fresh marks on the metal. The door swung open.

The steps were bare and functional. Here, the lights had all gone and he had to feel his way up in the darkness, his hand on the gritty brick of the walls. When he reached the first level, he found that the lights were also out along the walkway. The clouds must be thinning, because there was a glimmer of moonlight through the slatted timbers of the roof.

He became aware of the stillness around him. Music was playing from somewhere close by, a dull
thump
of bass that sounded insistently. Dogs barked in the distance and voices shouted, but here, there was no sign of life apart from the music that beat out almost below the threshold of hearing. As he moved along the walkway, he passed the front doors that were firmly shut, windows with the curtains pulled across and no glimmer of light showing, as though the inhabitants had decided to hide themselves away from the night.

Like animals who knew there was a predator abroad.

The music drew him on.

Amy’s flat was at the far end of the walkway. He was moving carefully now, stepping quietly, his senses alert. The door of her flat was a dark shadow, closed like all the others. He reached out and pushed it gently.

It swung open and the heavy beat poured out into the night.

He hesitated on the threshold. He wanted to call for help, but he didn’t know who might answer, or what secrets Amy was hiding. He stepped inside and pulled the door shut. There was no key, but there was a bolt. It wasn’t damaged. He pulled it across. He didn’t want anyone coming into the flat behind him.

He moved along the corridor, registering the doors and the layout. Room to his right, door open, check, empty. Room to his left, in, check, out. At the end of the corridor was the main living room. He could see the bulk of furniture against the faint light that came from the window. The music was louder.

He pressed the light switch, and the window became a black square. If anyone was watching in the night, they now knew he was here. He crossed the room and turned off the CD player that stood on a low table.

Silence.

He took in the room in one moment of perception: a closed door at the far side of the room, a settee, an armchair, a TV. A book lay open on the
floor. There was a coffee table in the window. The drawers on the small sideboard were half open, and papers were scattered across its surface.

As his ears adjusted, he became aware of an electronic sound that glided between two notes, persistent and penetrating. The phone had been left off the hook. He picked up the handset and hung up, then out of curiosity checked the last caller. The number was familiar. He ran it through his mind and came up with a name.

Roisin. Roisin had called Amy earlier that evening.

He crossed the room to the sideboard. He wanted to check through the papers that had been scattered there. There were two framed photographs that he glanced at, then looked at again as what he had seen clamoured for his attention. He picked them up.

The first one he looked at was of two girls–the older one was in the leggy, awkward stage of early adolescence. He recognized her at once as a young Amy. The other girl was a child, small, plump, with dark chestnut hair. Even given the difference in ages, there was an uncanny similarity between the faces. Amy’s sister, Jassy.

He looked at the second photograph. It was hard to tell where it had been taken–against an anonymous background of a modern street. Amy, the Amy he knew, looked back at him. The young woman with her was unmistakably the child of the earlier photograph, now grown up. She was wearing
a long coat and the hijab. He’d only seen this face unveiled once before, but he had never forgotten it, looking out from an upstairs window, staring at him for a long moment as their eyes met.

Yasmin.

Yasmin was Amy’s half-sister. Yasmin was Jassy, the sister Amy had lost and then found. That was what had haunted him about the face at the window. His subconscious had recognized the similarity that his conscious mind had missed. But Amy had left Riyadh for this woman, to be with her when she had her baby…He began to realize the significance of what Rai had told him.

He had seen Amy at the airport, but he hadn’t seen her leave.

Amy had been in Riyadh the night of the party.

Arshak Nazarian was her stepfather.

Oh, Jesus
.

And now, as a cold finger crept up his back, he became aware of the flat around him. It was freezing. Even with the door shut, there was no warmth building up. He touched the radiator. It was on. There was a faint smell–as if someone had been cooking and something had burned. And the silence wasn’t absolute. There was a sound almost below the threshold of hearing, a low roar like the sound of a central heating boiler.

His eyes moved to the closed door at the far side of the room. The kitchen.

Slowly, unwillingly, but irresistibly drawn, he went towards it and pushed it open.

The sound immediately became louder. It was the noise of a kitchen fan, turned up to full blast. The window was wide open, the cold air pouring in. He could see water on the floor from the rain. His eye was drawn to the old-fashioned hob where a metal coil glowed, the dull red fading in places to a grey, ashy bloom. There were bits caught on the metal, charred black by the red hot iron. A pan lay on its side by the stove.

He took another step into the room, his foot losing traction as he stepped on something that had been spilled on the floor. He put his hand against the wall to keep his balance. The smell was stronger here.

And then he saw the figure crumpled on the floor. He could see the frill from a sleeve, the drape of a long skirt. And the blaze of red hair.

Amy.

‘Amy!’ He was across the room and kneeling down beside her almost before he was aware of what he had seen. ‘Amy!’

Her hand, curled up against her body, had been burned almost to the bone. The flesh was blistered, red and oozing in places, blackened in others, clenched by the burning into a claw. ‘Amy. Jesus…’He brushed the hair back from her face and swallowed the bubble of nausea that rose in his throat. Her face was a battered, contused mass, her visible eye swollen shut, her lip torn and crusted with dried blood.

He could see Amy standing by the shutters in
his house in Riyadh, could see the line of her jaw, the fine, delicate skin gleaming as the light and shadows moved across her. ‘It’s Damien. It’s OK, love. I’m here now.’ He was barely aware of what he was saying as he let his hand touch her shoulder, gently, but firmly enough that she would feel it. As he spoke, he was keying the number of the emergency services into his phone. ‘Ambulance. Fast.’

He looked at her, his mind trying to fight its way through the priorities that were clamouring for his attention. Her arm was cold, and the flesh had that same dusky tinge that he saw on his hand, the tinge that said that the blood wasn’t flowing properly.

He couldn’t find her pulse. That didn’t mean anything–it must be so faint with shock that he couldn’t detect it. He held his hand over the mess that was her mouth. Nothing. Her airway must be blocked. CPR. CPR would keep her alive until help got here. He knew how to do that. Two breaths and thirty chest compressions, two breaths and thirty chest compressions.

Clear fluid seeped from her hand. There was a smell in the air that drew him back to summer evenings, to people calling to each other, laughter, music, the fragrance of cooking…

…and the hiss of raw flesh as it was pressed down over the red hot coals.

Amy
.

He needed to clear her airway first. She might
be able to breathe on her own. Compressions and breaths, compressions and breaths. CPR saved lives. He moved her carefully on to her back and kept the optimistic litany running in his head as the ache of what had happened to her twisted in his stomach and gripped at his throat. But as he moved her, he saw what hadn’t been clear before, the angle at which her head was twisted, the impossible angle that told him everything he needed to know.

Amy’s neck was broken. She was dead.

Roisin had settled Adam to sleep. She tried to get on with what she had been doing, but kept stopping to check on him. It must be like this bringing a new baby home for the first time, the sudden awareness that she was the sole carer for this child, overwhelmed by his vulnerability and fragility. She realized that all the jokes about new parents hanging over their babies’ cribs to see if the child was still breathing were simply true.

She could hear the faint snuffle of his breath. His face was serene and his tiny fists were close to his face. She resisted the temptation to pick him up again. It wouldn’t be fair to disturb him just to satisfy a need in her that was deep and growing.

You know that baby we were talking about…? Want to go for it? Do you fancy having a little Aussie?

I’m sorry, sweetheart
.

She and Joe should be in Newcastle now. She should be showing him all the places she wanted
him to see, spending their days exploring the city, enjoying the elegant lines of Grey Street sweeping up towards the monument where she and Amy used to meet on Saturdays, crossing the Millennium Bridge to Gateshead, driving along the coast where the castles of old Northumbria lined the shore.

And they should be waiting for the first signs of their baby.

Maudlin, useless, pointless. None of that was going to happen.

She checked the time. It was almost eleven. Amy’s train must be delayed. She’d meant to call Damien, to bring him up to date with the things she had found, tell him about Yasmin, but it was too late now.

She looked at the pile of post that had arrived that morning. She’d dumped it on the table without looking at it. She flicked through it–a credit-card offer, a charity. Junk mail…

The letter, Roisin
.

The letter?

And suddenly she remembered the letter that Mari had given her. She’d forgotten about it–distracted by everything that was happening. She hunted through her things, trying to remember what she’d been wearing that day. She’d been carrying her large bag, the one she used when she went shopping. And the letter was there, shoved to the bottom. It was hardly surprising that the postman had made a mistake–it was a mess. The
envelope had been reused, the original address had been hastily scribbled out and the new one scrawled in. It was addressed to Joe.

And it had been posted in Saudi Arabia.

She stared at it blankly. It was Joe’s writing. She knew it so well. And it was postmarked for…A terrible hope began to grip her as she studied the envelope. She squinted her eyes as she tried to read it, knowing that what she saw must be a mistake. It was postmarked for three days after he had died.

And then the hope faded. She knew what had happened. He must have put it in the hospital mailing rather than post it from their usual mail centre, and it had made its slow way through the system, ignored and unnoticed. And days after Joe had written it, it had been despatched.

She didn’t want to open it. This was the last of him. She’d thought that the moment in the car when they said goodbye outside the party was the last, but here was something else, another communication. Once she had opened it, that would be that.

She looked at it again. The writing was an untidy scrawl–she had teased him often enough about his doctor’s handwriting.
Careful! I can almost read that!
It looked as though he’d made a sudden decision to send this, and he hadn’t remembered to put on an airmail sticker–or he hadn’t had one, because it had made its way slowly by surface mail. And then it had been delayed further by being delivered to the wrong flat.

For a while she sat, holding the envelope, listening to the silence in her head where Joe had been a moment before, then she slipped her finger under the flap and opened it. A sheaf of papers fell out, and a small notebook.

She went through everything carefully, but there was no letter, no note. She’d hoped that maybe there would be one last message, but there was nothing.

As soon as she started looking through the papers, she recognized them. They were the papers that she and Damien had gone through to piece together the story of Haroun Patel, but these were neatly typed up, carefully headed, with explanatory notes added. The timetable of the drugs inventory was there, a list of all the ways in which Haroun Patel would have known about this, the timetable of his last delivery run with the clearly marked return time of 22.30, checked against the records of the van he’d been driving. Joe had even referenced the records of the garage where the hospital vans were kept.

It was the kind of meticulous investigation into someone’s movements that the police should have carried out, but, according to Damien, they probably hadn’t. They’d relied, instead, on the location of the drugs and the confession that they had obtained from Patel.

This was Joe’s final write-up of what he had been doing. She remembered that day when he’d come back from work, suddenly the old Joe, the
Joe she knew. He’d been relaxed and happy, and eager to get them both out of the Kingdom as soon as possible. This was why he’d been happy–he’d done what he’d set out to do. This copy, mailed to himself, was probably just a failsafe in case his originals went missing.

He’d also written a report that would go with the tabulated and meticulously compiled evidence. Damien had identified what Joe was doing–demonstrating that Haroun Patel’s conviction was wrong. But Damien had had no idea why Joe was doing this when there was no possibility of the conviction being overturned, no question of an admission of error.

And that wasn’t what Joe had been after. As she read what he had written, she realized that Joe was putting together a case that would allow Haroun Patel’s family to claim compensation–if not from the Saudi government, then from their own. One thing that hadn’t been in the papers she and Damien had looked through was the fact that Patel had been a father: he had an infant daughter in Pakistan.

Incontrovertible proof of his innocence would give his family some chance of claiming any outstanding money owed on his wage, of claiming compensation for the fact that his government had not pursued his case sufficiently. It was as simple as that. Nothing strange, nothing sinister. No reference to drowned women or missing babies, nothing that would have caused anyone much concern.

When she’d finished reading, she sat there with the papers spread out in front of her. Was everything else coincidence? Had Joe been an unlucky bystander, as he had claimed, when the woman fell into the river? And in the end, had Joe been simply the victim of a robbery that she and Damien had turned into a conspiracy because their own needs had made it impossible to accept what had really happened?

She picked up the small notebook and flicked through the pages. There were lists ticked off or crossed out, jottings that looked random and isolated, and then, towards the back of the book, were four pages filled with Joe’s loose, untidy scrawl.

Murder.

Joe had been right, more right than he knew. There was a killer walking the streets of Riyadh, and Joe had been on his trail. Now, Joe was dead.

She turned back to the beginning of the notebook and tried to make sense of what Joe had written there:

Refugee and Asylum-seeker Support

And then a list of cities, with names and addresses:

Cambridge, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Newport…RAM project
…One by one, they were ticked off and crossed out. Then the list changed into London boroughs:
Hillingdon, Stockwell, Hackney, Marylebone, Westminster
…There were names and addresses, telephone numbers, times, locations. And next to some were cryptic notes:

Maybe? Edgy, doesn’t want to discuss. Meet?

Sumira, KFC, Oxford St, 10.30
.

And then:
Oriental escorts: speciality: Omega Health, Penthouse Sauna, Venus Sauna, Handy Sauna
…The list of dubious venues filled the page.

As she read, Roisin noticed that the entries were dated between April 2004 and the end of August. All the time they had been together, Joe had been conducting a search of refugee organizations across the country, then he had narrowed his search to London and the brothels that operated as massage and sauna parlours, offering ‘exotic’ girls to men who didn’t know–and possibly didn’t care–that the woman who entertained them was there by coercion.

And at the end of August, a dead woman had been pulled out of the river, a woman who had been seen walking with Joe shortly before her death.

Joe had started a letter to Haroun’s parents, a scrawl of crossings out and places where the pen had dug into the paper, before the draft petered out. She wondered if he had ever completed it and sent it.

It began with Joe introducing himself, giving an account of his friendship with their son, and his deep regret at Haroun’s death. It continued:
I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your daughter Jesal is also dead
. After all this time, Roisin thought, they must know this. But a letter would permit them to give up that last, destructive hope.

The story Joe told was a sanitized version of the search outlined in the notebook:

She could work out the story now. Jesal Rajkhumar Patel had been taken out of Saudi–had probably paid the people-smugglers to bring her to England, the country where her brother had contacts and where he had been happy. But the plan for Jesal was not a new beginning, or not as far as the traffickers were concerned. She represented an investment and they expected a high return.

It wouldn’t have been hard to coerce a woman as vulnerable as Jesal into prostitution. Any threat to turn her over to the authorities would imply a return to Saudi for flogging and imprisonment, or a return to disgrace at home. The casual rape and brutality that marked the breaking in of a prostitute would have been enough to confirm her fate. After that, all her choices were gone.

And then Joe had come and taken away her last hope.

Roisin thought about the newspaper cutting
she’d found, the one that identified the dead woman as ‘probably’ an illegal immigrant, and speculated about prostitution. How could Joe tell her deeply traditional parents that their daughter had been working as a prostitute and had committed suicide in the icy waters of the Thames? She looked at the crossings out in the letter as he tried to tell them what they had to know, without telling them the rest. She could understand now why he had never told the police that he knew who she was. Maybe Jesal’s parents would be better off with the cruelty of hope.

Joe
.

She carefully gathered the papers together and put them on the sideboard desk. She would show them to Damien when she saw him again.

Damien’s eyes burned with fatigue as he drove up the Ml. The rain was relentless, the spray thrown up by the wheels of the HGVs he passed obscuring the windscreen for heart-stopping moments before the wipers cleared it. Their rapid
scrape scrape
became the music that carried him through the night.

Once he’d realized that Amy was dead he’d moved fast. She was beyond whatever help he might have been able to give her, but there were other people who were still alive. With his senses alert for the sound of the ambulance arriving–and he had a feeling that ambulances took their time before they came on to the Byker estate–he’d
moved through the flat, wiping anything his fingers might have touched. Then he’d searched it, taking anything that looked as though it might be relevant. Someone had been there before him, but there were things they had left.

He’d taken the photographs, scooped up the papers that lay scattered across the sideboard. He’d pocketed the mobile phone that lay on the table. He’d hesitated for a moment when he found Amy’s passport, then left it, after checking the pages carefully. They confirmed Rai’s story. Amy had left the Kingdom via Bahrain, the night of the bomb, the night that Joe Massey had died.

Amy.

Do you still
…?

Love you? Of course. Always, Amy
.

He kept his emotions firmly shut away. Whatever he felt had to wait. His hand was throbbing unbearably and was clumsy and unwieldy on the gear stick. Everything around him had an odd distance and clarity. He knew that he needed to get to a doctor, but he had things to finish first.