The Inquiry Read online

  She stood straight, inspected her eyes, saw the fatigue and sighed before heading back down the corridor into the chambers library. The rows of bound black volumes looked as untouched as ever – in these days of online research the room was a quiet retreat, and usually deserted when she wanted it for prayers; she suspected her new colleagues had been educated in the prayer calendar. The suspicion embarrassed her.

  She thought of the exchange with Ludo and asked herself again if the switch from human rights campaigner to highly paid fraud specialist was corrupting her. The fact remained that she’d fallen out of love with too much of the human rights agenda – unable to repress an inner voice that Rainbow Chambers, and therefore she, had become prone to exploiting generously intended legislation. The sad truth was that rejected asylum seekers were often turned away for good reasons. She knew that in at least one case, perhaps more, she had represented ‘victims’ making false claims of British army brutality – and won. She’d come to worry that a realism about these sad people, born of too much experience, was chipping away at her humanity. She’d even started reading The Times ahead of the Guardian!

  A move to fraud had been the right thing to do. If iron was entering her soul, better to direct it against hardened criminals, though she hadn’t yet had to defend one. She remembered Ludo’s ‘good chap’ and ‘bad chap’. Cynic or wit?

  Stop thinking and pray. She faced east; the slanting sun cast sienna rays above the opposite building. ‘I intend to perform the four rakat fardh of the Salat Al-Asr for Allah.’ She paused, her mind cluttered, impossibly distracted, unable to slip into an automatic empathy with the words she was about to say. Perhaps if her father had drummed discipline into her in the way she’d seen with others, it would be easier. But Tariq Shah was not like that. For him it was cultural, not spiritual – something he and his family had always done. He occasionally looked in at mosque and, however sceptical he might be, wished no offence to Islam – nor any other religion. She had inherited the scepticism but not the temperament to relax with it; self-discipline was her only answer to both.

  Ultimately, she told herself, emerging from the jumble of thoughts, it was her duty to her father that justified the professional move she’d made – the money to guarantee his comfort till the day he died. The comfort of this conclusion finally cleared her mind and she raised her arms over her chest. ‘Audhu billahi min-ash-shaytan -hir-rajeem, bismillah-hir-Rahman-hir-raheem.’

  Ten minutes later, she was back in the room she shared at chambers with two other junior counsel. Marty Richards was out of London but Sheila Blackstone was there, make-up mirror angled towards full lips, to which she was applying copious layers of scarlet lipstick.

  ‘Sara darling, you caught me at it! Good day in court?’

  ‘Yes, fun,’ said Sara. ‘And utterly irresponsible. A wine fraudster. Who could care?’

  ‘Half the QCs in this Chambers will care a very great deal about that,’ said Sheila, eyes down on her mirror.

  Sara hung her coat on a hook and looked at the hand-written envelope. She was tempted to chuck it in a bin – ‘Private and Confidential’ was probably shorthand for ‘I need a free favour’. But there was an edginess in the scrawled writing that stoked her curiosity; anyone sending begging letters would write more neatly. She caught Sheila’s inquisitive eye peering around the mirror, rose and left the room. She returned with the envelope to the ladies, the one guaranteed place of uninterrupted refuge, entered a cubicle and sat on the closed seat. She ripped it open. The printed heading was followed by the same scrawling hand-writing as on the envelope.

  The Rt Hon Lord Justice Morahan

  45 Chelsea Place Upper

  London SW3 6BY

  Monday evening

  Dear Ms Shah

  My apologies for writing to you in such an unusual way. You may remember that we met briefly in Cambridge two years ago at the ‘Human Rights: A Judge’s Role’ conference. I was most impressed with your contribution to that and also by your formidable record in this area.

  You will be aware of the government Inquiry into security service strategy against terror which the incoming administration appointed me to chair last year. There is a missing expertise in the Inquiry which I believe you are uniquely qualified to provide. Formally speaking, this approach should be coming not from me but from the Government Legal Department which administers such matters. However, I have overwhelming and powerful reasons for initially speaking to you alone.

  I would therefore be most grateful if, in the first instance, you would meet me privately. I cannot impress upon you too strongly that it is vital for my sake, if not yours, that this meeting is confidential and unobserved. I leave it to you to arrange a time and place that would suit these criteria. I can travel anonymously by bicycle. Anywhere within reach of Vauxhall Cross would be suitable. The meeting would be purely exploratory and you would be making no commitment by agreeing to it. However, I do not exaggerate when I say that truly vital matters of state and possible wrong-doing are at stake.

  I would ask you to deliver your reply hand-written to the address above. I hope very much to hear from you with your arrangement.

  Yours most sincerely

  Francis Morahan

  Sara stood up with a jerk, blood rushing from her head. Both the author’s identity and the fretfulness of the letter were a shock. She took a few deep breaths. Her thumping heart began to slow and the colour returned to her face. She wondered at how such perfect, concise sentences could emerge from such an apparently shaky hand. She didn’t dare to step out of the cubicle until she’d calmed down. It was the most disconcerting letter she had ever received, prompting a scattergun of questions and images. Chambers was not the place to confront them.

  She walked back to her room; for once she was relieved to find Sheila gone. She stuffed the next day’s briefs and a sheaf of articles on cybercrime into her bag, grabbed her coat and headed for the exit. Ludo’s door was open – deliberately, she suspected.

  ‘Go on then,’ he grinned. ‘Something interesting?’

  ‘Really, Ludo, is not a lady’s privacy to be protected?’

  He wasn’t buying it. ‘If it’s an offer, tell them to sod off. It’s my firm intention, Sara Shah, to clamp you in chains to 14 Knightly Court until my retiring day.’

  She wandered over, gave him a pat on the shoulder, and headed out into the street, making for the Embankment. The sun was dipping beyond Big Ben and the skyscrapers of the new Vauxhall megacity. She crossed Waterloo Bridge, losing herself among the swathes of homeward-bound commuters. She found herself staring at the London Eye. The memory of that day – when it was still the new, exciting addition to the capital’s skyline called the Millennium Wheel – struck her like a smack of iced water.

  She must snap out of it. London, her logical mind told her, remained safe. For well over a decade after 7/7 only one death, that of Lee Rigby, the soldier drummer hacked to death outside Woolwich barracks, had been the result of terrorism. Not just in the city but in Britain itself. Then came the van and knife attacks in central London; the bombing of a pop concert at Manchester Arena, lethally shattering the calm; the reminder that terror had not, and would not, go away.

  Compared with other death tolls – road accidents, fires, polluted air – the figures remained, it seemed to Sara, insignificant. The ultimate victims were ordinary Muslims, tainted by association, fearful of hate-fuelled revenge. Yet, unable to shift the strangeness of Morahan’s scrawled letter from her mind, she found herself edgily inspecting the young Asian with the blue rucksack fidgeting in the corner of the underground carriage. When he stepped out of the train at Kennington, she was, despite herself, unable to prevent a flush of relief.

  Back on Tooting Broadway, her mood changed. The Islamic Centre and halal butchers stood contentedly alongside trendy brunch cafés with eager central European waitresses and antipodean chefs. In this part of London few wore the full niqab and burka, but there were plenty of hijabis like herself
. Some young Muslim women dressed in figure-hugging jeans and short-sleeved shirts; that was not her own choice now, but she never forgot the time when, all too briefly, she had also enjoyed that lifestyle.

  She headed up the Broadway and into Webster Road with its terraces of small 1920s bow-fronted houses. A few sagged unloved, rotting window sills and yellowing streaks from overflowing pipes discolouring their whitewashed frontages. But most were spruced-up and clean, often with recently added porches and front doors proudly displaying their panelled multi-coloured glass. Her shrewd father had bought their house three years after she was born, during the heyday of Mrs Thatcher’s right to buy, a nest for the family he’d once hoped to grow.

  She had been just eight years old when her mother had died – how distant it seemed. Not old enough truly to know her; or to ask her what she really believed. Would her mother, with the conviction of a convert’s faith, have seeded in her the certainty her father lacked? Whenever Sara occasionally referred to her, her father never seemed to want to engage; the answer was always a platitude. ‘Yes, your mother was always a good woman.’ ‘Always true to God.’ ‘So beautiful.’ ‘I never stopped loving her.’ It was territory he did not want to enter. After her death, the house had become father and daughter’s sanctuary. She never thought of leaving him, whatever the pressures to marry from aunts and cousins. With him to look after, how could she? The truth was that, far from being her burden, he was her excuse.

  She turned her key in the front door Yale lock and it opened. Noisily – a signal to her father that she was home – she wiped her feet, hung up her coat and after a few seconds called, ‘Dad!’ No answer; he must have forgotten to double lock on his way out. Despite such lapses, his brain was in good order and she remembered it was his bridge evening at the Working Men’s Club up in Clapham. She smiled at the thought of him – his shortness, the little sticking-out tummy and the ever-present smile. A purist might have told him that card-play was un-Islamic; he would have joyously replied that it was a great Pakistani game, and Zia Mahmood the finest player the world had ever seen.

  She went into the cramped kitchen, made herself tea and headed upstairs. After her mother’s death, he had knocked through the two rooms at the back to give her a bedroom-cum-study with her own shower room. She later realised it was his way of saying he never would, nor could, remarry. No more wives, no more children. Just him and her.

  She removed her scarf, jacket and tailored black skirt she wore for work, replacing them with a loose blouse, cardigan and trousers. In the shower room she stared at herself in the mirror; the unblemished pale olive skin she was blessed with stared back. The odd line was forming on her forehead but the rest of her body from high cheekbones to slender ankles, was uncreased and lean – as photographs showed, the figure of her mother not her father. She rubbed her face with soap and warm water, patted it dry and returned to the bedroom. With half a sigh, she unstrapped her black holdall and lifted out the laptop and envelope containing Morahan’s letter. From her desk she looked out at the row of neighbouring back gardens – neat flowerbeds and patches of lawn interrupted occasionally by messes of dumped detritus. She booted up her laptop and typed in the two words ‘Morahan Inquiry’.

  She clicked on the official website, then ‘Chair and Panel’, and found herself lingering over the portrait photograph of Morahan himself. She tried to remember him from that Cambridge conference. He’d certainly been on the panel at one session but she couldn’t recall an actual meeting, seeing him close up, shaking his hand. It must have happened if he said so – and there’d been hundreds there.

  Under the scrutiny of the camera, she detected an apprehension in the eyes, a trace of disappointment too perhaps. A figure that must be imposing peering down from the judicial bench under cover of the judge’s wig seemed unsettled. Was he an unhappy – or disenchanted – man? His biography showed the bare bones of a personal life; married Iona Chesterfield 1977, two daughters. Otherwise it outlined a seamlessly upward legal career interrupted only by a five-year stint, 1997–2002, in Parliament, ending with his resignation both as Attorney General and MP.

  Or was it a lack of fulfilment those eyes betrayed? His resignation seemed never to have been fully explained. Journalists and, later, historians writing about the Iraq war, assumed Morahan had seen it coming and got out ahead. She wondered if he himself had encouraged that narrative – whether those eyes hid another story.

  Press coverage of the Inquiry was patchy. On the day of its announcement by the Prime Minister the Guardian had hailed it as a ‘brave innovation to shine a chink of public light onto the security services’. The Times applauded the PM’s initiative but warned that ‘secret services must be allowed to keep secrets’.

  She heard the front door lock click and footsteps below. She flinched. ‘Is that you, Dad?’ she shouted down.

  ‘’Course it’s me, who else are you expecting?’

  Who else indeed? She collected herself, went downstairs and bound him in a close hug, tucking her chin against his ear from her greater height. They broke away and he gave her a puzzled smile.

  ‘Sara, you hug me tight. Are you OK?’

  ‘’Course I’m OK, just pleased to see you.’

  He felt her relax. ‘You looked agitated to me. That’s not like my girl.’

  ‘Pressure, I guess.’

  ‘You gotta take it easy. Like me!’

  ‘If only,’ she laughed.

  ‘Anyway, I got something to celebrate. I landed a better squeeze tonight even than that one you just gave me.’

  She shook her head in mock disapproval of him and handed him the sheet of paper she’d been holding. ‘You remember a while ago the government set up an Inquiry into the security services under a judge called Sir Francis Morahan?’

  ‘Rings some kind of bell.’ Tariq Shah was a news junkie, addicted to Channel 4 News and Newsnight. Sara was grateful for the short cuts it offered whenever she wanted to discuss something.

  ‘Read.’

  Her father read the letter once quickly, a second time slowly. ‘I see why you’re jumpy.’

  ‘What should I do?’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘For once I’d like you to tell me.’

  ‘You know I’d never stand in your way.’

  ‘But would you approve?’

  She could feel him trying to read her. ‘You don’t need that, Sara.’ She looked silently down at the floor. ‘See the man. Maybe he’s in trouble, needs help. Maybe it’d be good for you. For your career.’ He handed back the letter.

  She raised her eyes. ‘You’ll promise never, ever even to hint about it to anyone. Anyone at all.’

  ‘Why would I do that? Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Sorry, Dad, ’course I trust you.’ She felt a burn of shame. ‘It’s just that…’

  ‘I know. It’s… what’s the word? It’s peculiar.’ He inspected her with an unfamiliar curiosity. ‘You’re afraid of something, aren’t you?’ he said.

  It was the enduring sadness within the love she felt for her father – far greater than for any other human being – that made her, even eighteen years later, unable to answer him.

  2

  Two days later at 12.55 p.m., Sara Shah arrived at the Afghan restaurant on Farnwood Road, between Tooting High Street and the Common. She’d quickly replied to the letter after discussing it with her father; he’d driven to Chelsea Place Upper that night to put it through No. 45’s front door. She’d ended the note by reminding Morahan, if he cycled, to wear a helmet; after her father set off, she wondered what on earth had possessed her to do so.

  She’d proposed to Morahan a lunchtime meeting – somehow evening felt inappropriate. She was not in court that day and Ludo, as always, had happily agreed to her studying the next case files from home.

  In one corner of the small restaurant, a young Asian family with two toddlers were faces down in a huge plate of sizzling mixed grill and chips. The mother and father showed tr
aces of middle-aged bulge; she imagined the sweet slim little figures with their smooth cheeks and searching eyes going the same way. A jeans-clad boy and high-cheeked girl in a flowing red linen dress and cardigan, laced with a string of glass beads, were ordering; they must have sat down just before her. Pashtuns, she assumed. In the corner a Pakistani man sat alone munching, reading the Mirror.

  Morahan had not replied to her letter; she understood that he must be nervous about communications. Her instincts told her that he would show up, even if it meant cancelling the Palace. They were correct; one minute after the designated time of 1 p.m., a tall figure strode past the window, turned through the door, and cast a wary eye over the restaurant. She rose, saying simply, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ he replied. He seemed unsure whether to offer a hand to shake, finally keeping it to himself. Culturally conflicted, she noted. He sat down across the Formica table and buried himself in the menu. He cast a further eye around and behind; none of the other diners caught it.

  She hesitated, wondering whether to test his humour. ‘It’s hardly the Garrick or the Temple.’

  ‘No.’ Expressionless, he peered back down; she couldn’t help noticing the thin prominence of the aquiline nose, with its near-perfect shallow curve. His skin was surprisingly smooth and unblemished for a man of his age; there was no sign of stray hairs emerging from nostrils or ears. His uniformly grey hair flopped elegantly over his collar edge. A good-looking man who had looked after himself. ‘What will you eat?’ he murmured.