The Inquiry Read online

  ‘But you survived, Sami. And now you’ll always be safe.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ He sounded almost hostile.

  ‘I promise you.’

  ‘No one can promise.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘Sometimes feels like yesterday to me.’ The remark, a return to a sort of reality, seemed to restore him. Sara seized the moment.

  ‘Did you keep in touch with the others after that? Your friends.’

  He smiled ruefully. ‘Nah. I never wanted to see them again. I kept looking for them on the streets so I could duck out of the way.’ He reflected, as if reminding himself of something important. ‘Actually, a few days after I did bump into Asif. Sort of. He was walking towards me on the pavement the other side of the road. It was too late to run or hide. He saw me and yelled, “Hey, Sami.” I sort of waved at him and looked away. That was it. He didn’t come after me. He knew something had happened. But he wasn’t part of it. Not Asif. He was never serious.’

  ‘Part of what?’ She tried not to sound like an interrogator.

  ‘I dunno. But it can’t have been for nothing, can it? Not if they thought I was snitching on them.’

  ‘After the woman left you and before they came to take you away, you said two more hours passed. Did anything else happen?’

  ‘Nah.’ His tone had changed, as if he was now bored.

  ‘You’re sure.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And you saw no one else.’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Do you know anything of what happened to the others?’

  ‘Nah.’ He paused, squinting his face. ‘Not really anyway.’ He seemed more interested again.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

  She laughed. ‘Sorry!’

  ‘I did hear a few years ago Asif’d gone down to Birmingham and was training as a chef. Poisoning the customers probably.’ He smiled with a tinge of fondness and regret. ‘Dunno about the others. Never saw them.’

  She had got all that would be of any use – time to move on. She stretched back her shoulders. ‘I’d love to stay here talking, Sami, but I’d better go.’

  ‘Yeah, suppose you had.’ He stood up alongside her. ‘I’ll get your coat.’ She’d expected him to want her to stay and chat more but it seemed he was drawing a line too. ‘So what you do next?’ he asked, handing her the coat.

  ‘You mean after what you told me?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Nothing. I’ll make a private note just for myself, no names or places or dates. It all sheds some light.’ She locked eyes with him. ‘I told you, Sami, I’d never do anything without your permission.’

  ‘Yeah, but I was thinking something. If you had that file, why didn’t you just come and knock on the door and ask to speak to me.’

  ‘If I’d done that, do you honestly think you’d have let me in? Didn’t we have to get to know each other first? To like each other the way I like you now? To trust each other?’

  ‘Yeah, but what you did wasn’t trusting, was it? How can I be sure?’

  ‘You can be sure, I’ve given you my word.’ As she put on the coat, he brushed past her to open the door. She turned onto the pavement, never looking back, niggled by the realisation that it hadn’t gone the way she expected. She felt the heat of Sami’s eyes on her back as she retreated up Gent Street.

  Patrick was waiting around the corner. Sara checked behind, then joined him in the car.

  ‘Productive?’

  ‘Yes. After a sticky start.’ She explained Sami’s initial interrogation of her and gave him the headlines of his story. ‘Quite a charge sheet,’ she concluded, ‘kidnapping, false imprisonment, actual bodily harm.’

  ‘But just his account,’ he said.

  ‘Still, it doesn’t feel like a one-off. There was a team. It was organised.’

  ‘Sure. But what for? Why?’

  Sara hesitated, reminding herself what was their shared knowledge and what was hers alone. Patrick now knew about the five Muslim files, Sami’s story, and a deserted place with a man called ‘the Adviser’. He did not know that the files were MI5 KV2 sourced, nor the existence of Sayyid, nor Sayyid’s indication that they were the first step to revealing something cankerous within the secret state. And neither of them knew what that canker was, nor what lay further on the route towards it. Who was ‘the Adviser’? Who was the woman? Above all, why the need now to rake over these coals?

  ‘You’re cogitating,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she smiled. For the moment, she would leave those pieces of knowledge where they stood. ‘I was thinking I wished I knew the answer to your question.’

  He was the one who now hesitated. ‘Any suggestion – hint even – that it was more than threats and scares? That they actually did away with anyone?’

  She detected an uncharacteristic anxiety – as if he’d rehearsed the question. She frowned. ‘No. Not from him. Why?’

  ‘Just wondering.’ He paused. ‘’Cos that would be a different level.’ As they stopped at red lights, he turned to her. ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes, fine. Feels like you’re the twitchy one.’

  He grinned. ‘No, not at all. Just drifting.’ The lights changed, he accelerated decisively away. ‘Would you mind something?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s my boy’s football night and I always try to be there.’

  ‘Your boy?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He grinned. ‘Nathan, he just turned nine.’

  ‘You never said.’

  ‘Well, it’s not part of this, is it?’ He seemed uncertain whether to go on.

  ‘You can’t stop there.’

  ‘It’s my regular day of the week. And every other weekend.’ He went silent; she waited. ‘He lives with his mother. Well, mainly with the nanny as far as I can see.’

  ‘She works?’

  ‘When she feels like it.’ Sara saw she’d scratched a sore. ‘She went off a long time ago. No shortage of money her side.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘You keep the car, I’ll get a taxi to Preston station. Be back on the first train in the morning. Will you be all right?’

  ‘Of course I’ll be all right, Patrick.’ The words came out more acerbically than intended.

  His grin broadened. ‘Someone said you don’t tolerate idiotic remarks.’

  ‘Only when they’re made by clever people. I’ll drive you to the station. You can sit in the back if you want and I’ll wear a chauffeur’s cap.’

  After dropping Patrick off, Sara felt oddly irritated by her pleasure that he had no wife in tow – but, unless she’d misread him, puzzled by that trace of anxiety. It seemed a long way to come and go for a kid’s football night.

  This time Sami watched from the bay window. After she’d disappeared he went upstairs to his bedroom, slid down his jeans and unstrapped the miniature recorder taped to his right thigh. He switched off the record button and carefully placed the chrome rectangle inside the top drawer of his chest beneath the pile of underpants.

  Task completed and the woman gone, he slumped with exhaustion. He felt faint and nauseous, and crossed the narrow landing to the bathroom. His mother below would be listening to his footsteps. He kneeled and leant over the bowl, trying to retch. Nothing came – the wave of sickness slowly passed and he gulped two mugs of water. A forced belch released air and his chest began to clear.

  Had he saved his skin? Nine hours after the phone call he’d decided to make following her first visit, a man had been there waiting for him when he’d arrived for his shift at the Rovers. A man he’d never seen before – no resemblance, not even in colour, to the two men on that platform twelve years ago, let alone the beautiful blonde woman with the sweet smell and clean warm breath.

  He could only hope, perhaps even pray for once, that when he met the man again, and they sat in his car while he listened to the recording – as he’d promised they most definitely would – the man would
say he’d carried out the instructions right. With a reward to come. He thought of what might happen if he hadn’t. The nausea returned.

  9

  The request from Sayyid threw Morahan; it had never occurred to him that he’d actually want to meet. Was it a trap? Might he reveal himself? Whatever the motive, he had to risk it and go. This time there was a difference in protocol. Instead of offering the opportunity to agree or decline a request, Sayyid had simply named a time and place.

  11 p.m. Morahan waited in the appointed churchyard with an apprehension he again felt too old for. Nothing. The noises of the night seemed unnaturally loud. Breaths of wind rustling leaves, scurryings in the undergrowth, distant sirens. He looked around, half-expecting a black-coated man stalking him, awaiting the moment to stick a revolver in his back. Suddenly he was blinded by a flash of headlights. They went twice from full to dip – a summons. As he approached, there was something familiar about the shape of the car – and the circular green sticker it displayed. He understood; nerves dissolving, he opened the passenger door.

  ‘Back seat,’ said a muffled voice. It seemed to be coming through some sort of box. ‘We will talk on the move.’ The driver was sporting a cap, thick-framed glasses, a checked scarf wrapped round the face and a high black polo-neck sweater which rose above the collar of a black leather jacket. Morahan had imagined Sayyid in an office suit and tie, his natural habitat a corridor of power – or, at least, of information. ‘It’s better you cannot see what I look or sound like,’ the distorted voice continued. ‘For you, I mean.’

  ‘I’m hardly experienced in these things,’ said Morahan.

  ‘I am not accustomed to giving senior judges classified documents.’

  ‘You’re acting in the public interest.’

  ‘There are not many in your position who would see it that way. They would have reported the approach and been done with it.’ Morahan noted the precision and lack of animation in his speech – more than just the product of the digital device. He was a man who chose his words carefully. ‘They are the innocents,’ Sayyid continued in his monotone, ‘who put a cuckoo in the nest.’

  He drove along the Embankment at a steady thirty miles an hour, waiting at Chelsea Bridge for the filter light to change. He turned right across the river, passed bikers stopping for coffee and burgers at the night stall, and turned right again into Battersea Park where he drew up in the shadow of a clump of trees.

  ‘The young woman is on board, yes?’ he said, his head making a quarter turn.

  ‘Yes.’ Morahan stopped, wondering what Sayyid knew or didn’t know. One way to explore. ‘She’s gone North, following those files.’

  No reaction, not a flicker. He passed a brown A4 envelope to the back. ‘Now that she has arrived, I can give you a third folder. It contains a photograph and an audio cassette. It will replay on your dictaphone.’ Morahan thought to ask how he knew what dictaphone he possessed but restrained himself. ‘With this information,’ continued Sayyid, ‘you will detect a link. When you think the time is right, let her see it – the sooner the better.’

  Morahan hesitated; he wished to appear neither stupid nor over-eager. ‘A link that ends where?’

  ‘That’s for you and the woman to work out. As I told you, those files are the tip – and the beginning – of the iceberg.’

  ‘Continuing the metaphor,’ said Morahan languidly, trying to match Sayyid’s tone, ‘if the iceberg is man-made, who commissioned it? And controlled its size and temperature?’

  ‘Let us cut the metaphor,’ the voice snapped, ruffling the calm. ‘That is why I wanted to see you in person.’ Sayyid shuffled in his seat but didn’t turn. ‘Because that is what I do not know. There are people who think they know. But only one, possibly two, truly does.’

  ‘I find that hard to interpret.’

  ‘I understand.’ The voice softened. ‘They used to call it the wilderness of mirrors. Remember Golitsyn.’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘Our master spy, the double agent inside the KGB. Finally, he defects – they are onto him, he says. When he arrives, he tells us we are penetrated from top to bottom. The head of MI5 is a KGB mole – even a future British prime minister is a place man for the Russians. The head of CIA counter-intelligence believes him, as does a faction inside MI5. For the next decade we can hardly move because we are so scared of our own shadow. In a game of deception, how do you know whose side anyone is really on? How do you see into a conscience? Into a heart? And it matters because lives can depend on it. Thousands of lives.’

  ‘What are you saying? There’s some kind of traitor at the heart of MI5’s operations against Islamist terror?’

  ‘I am not saying anything. It is you who has just said that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Sayyid,’ said Morahan gently, ‘or whatever your name is – I can’t play this game.’

  ‘It is not a game.’

  ‘Investigating these matters is not within my terms of reference.’

  ‘It is. Look at them. Why did we once succeed? Why did we then fail? I do not know the answer. You raise the suggestion of treachery.’

  ‘What else then?’

  ‘Remember extraordinary rendition? What follows?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I cannot. You started your journey by hiring the woman. It is for you to decide whether to continue.’

  Morahan looked through the car window from their darkened space across the broad tarmac of the park’s concourse. A figure wearing a beret was stubbing out a cigarette underneath a lamp. He whistled; a dog came running. ‘I think I should leave now.’

  ‘Yes.’ Sayyid turned on the ignition. ‘I will drop you somewhere less isolated.’

  He started the engine, turned round and headed down Chelsea Bridge Road. At the roundabout south-east of the park, he circled twice, satisfied himself no one was following and retraced his route across the river. ‘Basic procedure,’ he said, ‘but better than nothing.’ Instead of going left onto the Embankment he continued to Sloane Square and crisscrossed the Kings Road, heading all the while in the direction of Morahan’s house. He stopped a few hundred yards short of it.

  ‘We will not meet again.’ He continued to look rigidly forwards. ‘One final word. There is a destination. It is called Operation Pitchfork. I tell you this, but you must not allow any other to know you have heard this word. Not even the woman. At least not yet… if ever. That is too dangerous for you and her. And me. Take care of her. And of yourself.’

  Morahan stepped out, easing the door shut; the car accelerated smoothly out of sight. Tucking the envelope under his coat, he walked fast, pausing briefly to make a 360-degree sweep of the street. The only sign of life was the reflection of a foraging fox’s eyes. He glared back and it scurried into undergrowth. Hunter and hunted.

  Back home, he opened the front door and from the hall heard the sounds of Iona above stepping onto the landing. He looked up.

  ‘All right?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He forced a smile. ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘I’ve an early start, so off to bed.’

  ‘I think I might work on a while.’

  ‘As you will. Don’t stay up too late.’ She retreated.

  He went into his study, sat down and placed the envelope on the desk. He pulled out the contents. First was a single murky photograph. A table with a group of what looked like diners in the foreground, hints of more tables beyond. All unidentified. Was there something about one of the faces? He studied it. Probably not, must be his imagination. Too shadowy to make out anyway.

  The second, and only other object in the envelope was a cassette tape. Remembering Sayyid’s words, he took from the middle drawer of the desk the dictaphone on which he liked to record first drafts of judgements.

  He inserted the cassette and pressed play. The tape revolved. After several seconds of hissing, he began to hear chatting against the background of what, assuming a connection with the photograph, had to be restaurant bustle. Wh
oever was recording must have been able to swing a directional microphone to eavesdrop on specific conversations. Some he could make out, others were inaudible or rendered unintelligible by background noise.

  He settled himself to listen.

  Initially, Sara was grateful for her solitary evening; time to relax, to think, to pray. Dinner at the Savoy Inn had been an unappetising prospect – not just the food but the stares of transient males freed of their wives. She’d bought a veggie wrap and a Coke from a petrol station on the road along from the hotel. Peeling off the plastic cover revealed a sogginess to the touch, and an affront to the nose like the distant whiff of a rubbish collecting lorry. She dumped it in the bathroom bin and washed her face and hands. The cure would have been the spiciest offering of Blackburn’s hottest curry house but it hardly seemed the town for a stranger sitting alone and wearing a scarf.

  She decided to go for a drive. The Blackburn of Samir’s youth had, by all accounts, been a lively place attracting crowds of young people to once-famous nightclubs like The Cavendish – the ‘Cav’ – the entire top floor of a multi-storey car park where girls came down from the mills and danced around handbags dumped inside their circle while young men lounged against walls injecting pints of Thwaites beer for late-night courage. Later, the town had hosted nocturnal raves and no one seemed to mind too much. The clientele was solidly white; this place had also been a fertile breeding ground for the National Front.

  Now the city centre was deserted – it was mid-week but hard to imagine what the attraction could be on any night. She drove past the occasional sad-looking pub with dimmed lights, and late-night stores with lonely faces slumped over motionless cash tills. On a whim, which she justified as a search for inspiration, she drove to Gent Street, parking a hundred yards down from Sami’s house. The porch light was on and the sitting-room curtains left a sufficient gap to know that someone was inside. She looked in the off-side wing mirror. A figure was approaching at a fast walk – it could be him. Of course, if he was doing the evening shift, he’d be returning home around now. It was too late to start the car and attract attention; she slid down in her seat and pulled her scarf over her face. The figure walked on past without a beat. She peered up as it crossed the road and continued along the pavement, not even casting a glance at Samir’s front door. She felt foolish, unable to conceive what enlightenment she had come in search of. Perhaps it was simply to check the reality of him; that he had lived through something that was not a fantasy.