The Inquiry Read online

  M: You were one person I had not expected to see.

  F: Why?

  M: I never forget what you said… INAUDIBLE…

  F: If you’re speaking of 9/11, my eyes have seen what followed… INAUDIBLE… INAUDIBLE… Of which you approve, I suppose.

  M: Or perhaps of which I was prophetic… INAUDIBLE.

  She stopped, wound back and replayed. The final proof – as if it were needed by now. She recalled those words from the note Sayyid had pinned to her corporate profile.

  … This is the person you must recruit as your investigator. She has special knowledge and a connection…

  She finally had the completed answer to that initial and recurring question. This was why Morahan had wanted only her and no one else – the secret he had held back from her until, finally, it was revealed as his deathbed bequest. She, Sara Shah, was the long-haired woman in silhouette in the photograph – the connection the jet-haired man sitting beside her.

  Should she feel abused by Morahan; that his manipulation had been wrong, even immoral? Or had he felt he had no choice; that she was the person he must have to arrive at whatever truth Sayyid was driving at – and his means justified that end.

  Could she, should she, have guessed what might be in store from Sami’s account of the Adviser and the beautiful woman alongside him? No, she told herself, her time with the man had been spent four summers before – the night of that restaurant dinner was the first time she’d seen him since that ordeal. As for the woman – she’d been told about her but never set eyes on her till that evening. There was nothing from what she’d known or experienced of the man – or woman – for such scant strands to make that connection so many years later. Even if, now that she’d seen the photograph and Sayyid’s letters, and heard Sami’s story, the strands were joining up.

  A further implication was chillingly clear. Whoever had recorded and photographed that evening would have made it their business to find out more about each person who was there – including her.

  Were they tracking her now? Damn them. She crept downstairs, trying not to disturb her father – there was a weak light from the sitting room – and eased open the front door. The evening was clearing, broken clouds making patterns in the sky, the first pale show of moon flitting in and out of their animal-like shapes.

  She walked into the middle of the road, stretched her arms upwards, beginning a circle to the clouds’ rhythm, as if to say, ‘I am free no matter what happens here on earth.’ Halfway round she stopped. They were still there. She stood, staring. No reaction.

  As she neared the front door, headlights flashed on and off and an engine started. She quickened, closed and locked the door and heard a car accelerating fiercely past.

  Back in her room, she picked up the photograph and held it close to her eyes. Something was nagging her about it. She tried to remember the exact date, then realised it could be on the photograph itself. There was a tiny white scratching on the bottom right corner. 23rd June. No year; she didn’t need to be told that.

  She looked again at the three faces front on to the camera but furthest away from it. She didn’t recall being introduced to the man on the far right – she’d hardly noticed him as all her attention and conversation was focused on the man beside her. But now looking closely at that face, there was a familiarity – a connection lodged deep in her memory. She googled to check, hoping it was only a resemblance; the consequence of it not being was too horrible.

  A photograph came up on Wikipedia. She linked to two news sites which also had photographs. She manoeuvred the three photographs into three corners of the screen, isolating the face from the restaurant photograph into the fourth corner.

  There was no doubt. Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader in July 2005 of what became known as 7/7. The man who, in blowing himself up on the Circle line, had taken six other lives with him; who had led three other suicide bombers to their deaths along with a further forty-six innocent victims.

  Two weeks before, unknown to her until now, she had sat at his table and been recorded in the act.

  15

  Sara Shah was a rational being. Since settling into her legal career, she slept well at night. She wasn’t prone to detecting conspiracies; she didn’t allow suspicion or paranoia to affect her judgement. Yet, from the moment she woke after a second fretful night, she couldn’t prevent her brain and eyes wanting to assess threats from every angle.

  Her first act was to put on loose-fitting pocketed trousers and a shirt and jacket. She needed to get the contents of Sayyid’s second and third deliveries out of the house. The office might be under some scrutiny but it was safer than home. Her choice of dress gave her options.

  Her second act was to inspect the street. No sign of the car or its occupants.

  Her third act was to vary her journey to work, hailing a cab from the high street rather than summoning one to her house.

  With Morahan dead, only one other person, Sayyid, knew that her presence at a restaurant table, next to the man on her right in the surveillance photograph, was the link to a deep morass of illegal activity of which Sami’s story was only the tip. Although the audiotape indicated that she and that person had some familiarity with each other, she could not know whether Sayyid – or Morahan – had any detailed knowledge of its extent.

  Sayyid was responsible for drawing her into this, but he, or she, was an opaque mystery. Pressing the code to enter the Inquiry’s offices – with a smart of irritation that no one had yet thought to change it – and then climbing the stairs and inserting her second-floor pass – which should also have been reconfigured – she entered the open-plan area feeling a wave of irritation towards Sayyid. He was the visiting sprite who’d fired the starting gun and then retreated into some far undergrowth, invisible from the field of play but, from safe cover, watching the game unfold. Why?

  The office was silent. Rayah’s and Clovis’s eyes were fixed to their screens, refusing to be distracted by her appearance, Pamela Bailly’s office door ajar with no sign of life beyond. It still felt as lifeless as the mortuary in which Morahan’s stiff body must now be lying. The Inquiry had been an organic living being; now it was decapitated. She murmured a faint ‘Good morning’ and quickened her stride towards the corridor and the Legal office.

  Patrick stood to greet her, grin restored. ‘Coffee?’ he asked, just like that first time she’d walked over to join him by the espresso machine.

  ‘Still as the dead, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘My thoughts exactly.’ She watched him place the cup and push the button, the grinding and gurgling emitting reassuring sounds and smells. ‘Anything happened?’

  ‘No. Though I hope one thing that’s happened is our friend Buttler thinking better of his crazy theory.’

  She took the cup and saucer he was holding for her and they walked together to his desk. She sat down opposite and slowly sipped, trying to arrange her proliferation of thoughts into an orderly list. ‘His theory isn’t crazy. It fits the known chronology.’

  ‘But not true.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘No, Patrick, not true.’

  ‘Sara, it wasn’t a question, it was a statement.’

  She shook her head. ‘Sorry. I guess this is what it does to you.’

  He drained his cup and walked over to the expanse of window, staring at the American Embassy, its strange conical ornaments reflecting the sky, and the muddle of blocks and towers beyond. She ranged alongside. ‘Buildings,’ he said. ‘Great slabs of concrete, steel and glass bolted into the ground. At the centre that enormous mass of the Embassy – the central event, if you like. The death. It stands out but around it there’s no clear pattern. Structures of different heights made of different materials. Brick façades, huge plasticky panels – red, green, grey, silver, blue – smooth concrete, windows of all shapes and sizes. But let’s imagine we change the colour of one of those giant panels.’

  ‘Metaphor over?’

  He turned to her. ‘What i
f it wasn’t Morahan who texted you?’

  ‘I don’t follow…’

  ‘What if the person Morahan was with texted you from Morahan’s phone? And he was already lying dead on the sofa.’

  ‘You mean… you mean I was summoned to be the patsy.’ She closed her eyes, turning over the vileness of it. ‘The fall guy. Girl, rather.’

  ‘Or, as I said, it was done to scare you. Either way, it explains why your text was remotely deleted. It also shows a certain expertise – but one an amateur might possess. I was bluffing that with Buttler but I’ve checked since. You can even get gizmos to do it on the net though it might depend on the phone you have.’

  ‘Keep going.’

  ‘It means one very simple thing. Because of the chronology the medics were given, no one made an issue about the exact time of his death. And it rapidly becomes too late to revisit once the body’s beyond a certain stage.’

  ‘I’m seeing it.’

  ‘Quite. Morahan could have died any time after you left the office. From 7.15 p.m. onwards.’

  Sara recalled that parting conversation when she left for home. ‘Rayah.’

  ‘No.’ Patrick almost raised his voice. ‘By which I mean that in the same way there’s no concrete evidence to link you, there’s none to link her either.’

  ‘She could have let someone else in,’ said Sara.

  ‘Yes, she could have.’ He shot her a hang-dog grin. ‘And many other things could have happened too.’ Patrick stared out again. ‘That’s the point. This is the perfect death to induce speculation. One piece of evidence, the remnants of cleanser, shows someone was with him before, during or after his death. If there was a sex act after which the cleanser was used, he may have died later, alone and innocently. So the cleanser itself does not prove a crime. Any hare can run. Russian crime syndicate, MI5 cover-up, the blackmailer he was refusing to pay. It will be unsolvable.’ He paused. ‘Let’s sit. Let’s really look at each other.’

  She frowned for a second. ‘OK.’

  He went back to his desk. They locked eyes. ‘It will be unsolvable,’ he repeated, ‘unless there’s something someone knows that they’re not letting on. That might begin to explain it. We don’t have that something yet. A few Muslims being taken for interrogation to a mysterious guy they only know as the Adviser or whatever doesn’t do it. A few Muslims going missing—’

  ‘More than a few if it’s the tip of the iceberg—’

  ‘Doesn’t matter how many. Not on its own. Lists of missing people in the Sayyid files, whoever they might be, don’t mean anything unless there’s a pattern. A uniting factor. Some kind of agent – individual, organisation, force, whatever – which is so significant – or has done something so out of order – that it has to remain buried for ever.’

  He drew his chair even closer, the strength of his eyes and soft urgency of his voice beginning to alarm her. ‘Unless there’s something more – something that some big fish’s whole being, whatever side they’re on, depends on concealing – it stops here. Morahan’s death is just a sad accident that happened to an old man who liked the odd moment of excitement. We can’t take it any further.’

  ‘Yes, we could stop it here,’ she murmured.

  ‘Look inside yourself,’ he said. ‘Is that what you want? Be truthful.’

  ‘I could ask you the same question.’

  ‘Two days ago my answer would have been different to now.’

  ‘So something did change.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s not relevant.’

  ‘I have to know.’

  He cupped his face in his hands. Motionless on her seat, she waited. ‘All right. I had a visit.’

  He turned away; she wondered if he was aware of his intensity. She rose and took up his former position by the window, her back to him. ‘Tell.’

  ‘After I dropped you off at the office, I was hailed by two men as I approached the front door of my flat. I recognised one of them from an episode twelve years ago both visually and from his Scottish accent.’ Sara almost buckled, thinking of her father’s description of the driver in the parked car. ‘He reminded me whose side I was on,’ continued Patrick. ‘The second man, it turned out, had an expertise in knuckle blows which he used to reinforce the message. The one who spoke addressed me as “boy”.’

  She stood at an angle, her profile silhouetted by the morning light flooding in. Despite the long skirt and scarf wound over her head and shoulders, her svelteness and a frailty he saw for the first time stirred him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Patrick. Not just bastards, racist bastards too.’

  ‘It was premeditated. To get under my skin.’

  She hesitated, wondering whether to tell him about the men waiting outside her house. No. This was not the moment – not what this conversation was for.

  She turned. ‘So, whatever it is their “side” is protecting, wherever it might lead, you don’t want to let them get away with it.’

  ‘I don’t know. Because I don’t know what’s buried there.’

  ‘Is that why you’re doing this? Because you think there’s a buried reason that explains why Morahan wanted me? And it may be linked to his death?’

  He rubbed his eyes and squinted, feeling wrong-footed, assailed by a confusion of emotions. It was safer for both of them if she knew nothing more. If he provoked her into making some revelation, he couldn’t foretell the outcome. And for him, if not her – yet or ever – it was personal. Would the door between them, that he’d believed she was allowing slowly to open, now slam shut?

  ‘It’s your decision,’ he finally said.

  Sara too understood the moment with a devastating clarity. Morahan’s death would almost certainly mean Sayyid drying up as a source – he was most unlikely to start giving classified information to anyone more junior. In fact, she recalled Morahan saying Sayyid had told him in their strange car trip that there would be no more.

  There was no need to embroil herself further; no need to be propelled on a journey whose direction she could not control. Morahan’s death would be consigned to history as an unsolved oddity, beloved of conspiracy theorists but otherwise forgotten. She could go back to Ludo. Men in parked cars would fade away. Maybe that would be for the best.

  It was not a decision she had the right or strength to make alone; she had to find a way of sharing it. There was no one else.

  ‘There are two things I’ve held back,’ she said at last. ‘In doing so, I’ve had to lie to you. I apologise. Firstly, Morahan did, by the end, tell me everything about his source.’ Evenly and without emotion, she gave Patrick the account Morahan had given her of his dealings with Sayyid; his summary of the contents of the note that accompanied the Blackburn files; and Morahan’s description of his conversation with Sayyid in the car.

  Patrick listened in silence. He fixed his gaze on her as she gathered her thoughts, composing herself for the further revelation.

  ‘The second thing is this,’ she resumed quietly. ‘After I discovered Morahan’s body, I did a quick search of his office.’ He eyed her sharply. ‘Don’t worry, I found a way of leaving no trail. Behind the radiator covered by the grille below the main window, an envelope was sellotaped. It turned out to be a second delivery from Sayyid.’ She described the corporate profile of her and the words of Sayyid’s accompanying note. Patrick was slowly shaking his head. ‘What have you done with the note?’

  ‘I hand-wrote a copy, then flushed it down the toilet.’

  ‘OK, but—’

  ‘There’s more,’ she interrupted. ‘Just as I was about to leave Iona Morahan’s house, she stopped me. She went upstairs and returned with a small package. She’d wrapped it in birthday paper. I went straight home, not to have lunch with my father but to explore that package. I didn’t dare open it until I was on my own, out of sight. It turned out to contain the further delivery Sayyid had promised Morahan if he succeeded in recruiting me to the Inquiry.’

  ‘I r
ealised you weren’t telling me everything,’ he said. ‘But I never imagined how much you weren’t.’

  She sagged, her head drooping. ‘I couldn’t tell you yesterday, Patrick. Not before the interview with Buttler because it was better I carried the strain of it alone. And not after because too much was swirling around. I had to let it settle. To work out where I stood.’

  ‘It’s all right. You’ve had so little time to see into me.’

  ‘It’s only in the last few minutes that I’ve come to be sure of where I stand.’ She said it flatly, oppressed by the weight of the secrets she’d been forced to carry and the lies she’d been forced to tell. ‘Look away for a minute.’

  He frowned, but did as she bade. She removed her jacket, raised her shirt and pulled down an envelope wedged between the shirt and skin of her back. ‘You can turn round.’ She approached him. ‘Inside this is a photograph of a group of people taken fourteen years ago.’ She handed him the envelope and then pulled one small package out of one trouser pocket, and a second from another. ‘One of these contains an audiocassette, the other a recorder to play it back on.’

  Patrick prised the photograph from the envelope. As he held it up, she moved to stand over his shoulder. ‘That woman,’ she said, touching the back of the head with her fingernail, ‘is me.’ She moved her finger to the right. ‘That man is the connection I have that Sayyid referred to.’ She removed her finger. ‘That person lies at the heart of whatever it is we’re trying to reveal.’

  Patrick was staring rigidly at the photograph, apparently dumbstruck. He removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, and looked at it again, this time for longer. He was shaking, searching for words.

  ‘I’ve seen this photograph.’

  She was electrified. ‘What?’

  ‘This must be what they’re scared of. Perhaps they lost control of it. Of him.’