The Inquiry Page 26

  23

  The red Mazda sports car, hood down, drew up; she glanced around and got in.

  ‘Where would you like me to drive you?’ he asked, as courteously as when he’d first exchanged words with her.

  ‘Let’s go back to white yummy-mummy land.’ Her tone was even; she determined to keep it that way.

  They drove in silence, he glaring at the road and tut-tutting at straying pedestrians while she stared ahead.

  ‘Do you wish to walk?’ he asked, parking neatly and switching off the engine.

  ‘No, we’ll talk here.’ She whipped round. ‘I expected to hear from you after what happened on Tuesday. I don’t know what. Even a word of comfort.’

  He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel; she waited. ‘I did not see it as entirely necessary. Further, I would not have known what words to say.’

  ‘You always have something to say. You certainly had enough to say when we were looking down on Parliament.’

  ‘That is true.’ He sounded subdued.

  ‘Didn’t you think at least that it was a weird coincidence?’

  ‘I truly have no idea of what you mean.’

  ‘One day you talk about Parliament exploding, the next day three thousand people are killed in the Twin Towers.’

  His eyes narrowed. ‘If you are trying to find some sort of connection, Sara, I suggest that you analyse such events more rationally.’

  She sensed the rage within him but still did not understand what was driving it. Whatever it was, she was going to confront it. ‘It made me feel I don’t know you. Don’t understand you.’

  ‘I do not take it back,’ he said. ‘What was done on Tuesday was justified.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I told you. Our people are entitled to payback.’

  ‘Killing all those innocent victims.’

  ‘Those towers were not innocent. They were symbols of domination. Imperialism. Exploitation. Like the Pentagon. Like the White House if the fourth plane had got through.’

  ‘Do you truly believe that, Kareem?’ She no longer felt eighteen; in the past two days she had grown up and was now an adult trying to drum sense into a wayward fool. ‘Because I hope you’re just in some muddled way theorising. Philosophising. Whatever you want to call it. And you’ll grow out of it.’

  He softened. ‘I hope one day you might grow into it.’

  She fought back tears – she refused to release them – welling up from an indefinable sense of betrayal. That, somehow, he had cheated her, not just sexually but by not presenting his full self from the outset; and that she had betrayed herself by not having the intelligence or insight, before he engulfed her, to probe beyond the outer sheath of the civilised and romantic gentleman.

  ‘An action like this,’ he continued, ‘will have a counter-reaction, then a counter-counter-reaction which will show up the West for what it is.’

  ‘What do you want, Kareem? War? Chaos? You’re someone who can do so much good if you choose to.’

  ‘This will be good. If you had spent as much time as I have among the West’s upper classes, you would agree with me.’

  ‘Is that where this is all coming from?’

  ‘No, they are only a symptom. We have suffered centuries of rapacity and aggression. Now we can begin to redress the balance of history.’

  She looked away. He spoke with a cold aloofness – as if he were an automaton repeating a drilled-in slogan. Had there always been something of that about him? The way, as she now reinterpreted it, that he gave his opinions – as if he’d always rehearsed? There was the same handsomeness but a dullness in the eyes. No joy. A dead stare.

  ‘I don’t believe this is the real you,’ she said at last. ‘Not the person I’ve been spending all this time with.’

  He took time to answer. ‘Look at me, Sara. You are beautiful. I have never felt for anyone what I have felt – what I feel – for you. Such a wanting. Such desire.’

  ‘And I’ve allowed you to have it.’ Tears threatened again and she wiped one angrily away.

  ‘No, we have had each other. And we must continue to. It is our fate.’

  ‘Not like this. Not after what you did.’

  ‘You must not regret it. It was a wonderful thing that we were joined.’

  His perception was so one-sided that part of her wanted him to know the truth. But what was the point in trying to reverse or recapture what might have been? Now it was no more than a wrongly imagined dream. She gathered her bag and moved her left hand towards the door lever. He grabbed both her hands with his.

  ‘Do not leave. We have to be together now. It is our destiny. It is God’s will.’

  ‘Don’t give me your pretence of God, Kareem.’ For the first time, her tone changed – not a shout but a low hiss. ‘I thought your God says sex is prohibited outside marriage. What God’s will do you dare to claim after what you’ve done to me?’

  She tried to free her hands but he tightened his grip and began to twist. ‘Let me go.’

  ‘I will never release you.’

  ‘Let me go.’ This time she shouted. A mother with a pram was walking past the car. She beat her face against the door, screaming. He crunched and turned the skin of her wrist ever tighter. She screamed again, catching the woman’s eye. Kareem saw it. He let go. She opened the door and rushed towards the pram.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’

  ‘No. Yes. I’m fine, thank you.’

  She ran, not daring to look behind to see if he were pursuing her. After a hundred yards or so she slowed to check: there was no one in sight, just the sound of a reedy-voiced car starting up and accelerating harshly into the distance. She looked down at her wrists, turning bright red and fiery with pain.

  ‘The flash of anger,’ said Patrick, ‘is something I never saw. We were courting him, flattering him.’ He suspected she had never told anyone the story before; certainly not the real story. ‘But I can imagine it inside him.’

  Sara moved within inches of her father’s becalmed face, watching him silently.

  ‘I think your father,’ said Patrick, ‘would want to ask you why you never went to him at the time.’

  ‘I’d answer that, even if it was partly because I feared his shame, it was mostly because I couldn’t hurt him.’ She paused. ‘What I’d have done if I got pregnant doesn’t bear thinking about.’

  Patrick allowed the flicker of fear, still kindled by the remembered dread, a moment to ebb. ‘And then?’

  ‘A couple of months later, I was chatting with Salman, my cousin who got married. “Your friend, Kareem, was a handsome chap. What’s he like?” I asked lightly. “Didn’t know him that well,” Salman replied, “he was only on the edge of our group. He always paid for things so I thought I should invite him.” Then he gave me a look. “Why, Sara, do you fancy him?” “’Course not,” I said. “He’s probably got a girlfriend anyway.” “Yeah,” he said, “I’ve mostly lost touch with him since the wedding, but he did have a girl hanging around. Called Marion. English. Quite posh. Sorry if you fancied your chances, kid,” he said.’

  ‘Oh, Sara,’ said Patrick.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Among everything else, what a fool. But my main thought was different. I escaped. Marion would become the abused.’

  A moment passed, then Patrick spoke with hot intensity. ‘They must have been mad.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘MI5 in the form of Isobel Le Marchant, now Dame Isobel… if, in some way, they were giving this man no one properly knew the power of life and death over other human beings.’ He looked as if he wanted to flagellate himself. ‘And a signed contract saying that he’d never be brought to book.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sara calmly. ‘Though it’s still only our assumption.’ She laid her arms on the edge of her father’s bed and rested her head on them. ‘Imagine being Sami, brought before him, being told he’s called the Adviser. Whatever the name, he can see he’s the one who decides fates. Imagine being Marion, or Maryam, so
terrified that she has to escape from him.’ She paused and rubbed her nose along the sleeve of her sweater. ‘Imagine being me, an eighteen-year-old virgin lying beneath him, overwhelmed and pinned down, about to be raped. And him loving it all.’ The confusion of emotions was resolving to a cold, enduring anger.

  ‘Power,’ said Patrick. ‘The love of power.’

  ‘And what was he doing to you?’

  ‘Again trying to exert his power, I guess.’

  ‘He had no power over you. Or Isobel or J.’

  ‘The power of manipulation, then. They were desperate.’

  ‘And no underlying principle. It’s all about himself. It doesn’t matter whose side he’s on. Politics, ideology, religion all irrelevant.’

  ‘What about Islam?’

  ‘It would never have been more than a means. Causes were handy tools, nothing more.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that.’

  ‘Yes, we can. You saw for yourself it didn’t matter to him that he was switching sides. He just had to preserve a dominance. My question is whether Isobel fully saw it. Maybe she did. Maybe she deliberately gave him a role that fulfilled what he needed. Maybe, with that same deliberation, she stroked and massaged him. “It’s you the world is depending on, Kareem.” Can’t you imagine it? “One day, Kareem, your greatness will emerge for those in a position to see it.” Maybe it went like that.’

  Patrick sighed. ‘Or, you’re wanting to say, maybe it didn’t.’

  She sat bolt upright. ‘Precisely. Who was manipulating who? Who really was in control?’

  ‘There’s one simple indicator,’ said Patrick, eyes aching from fatigue and the alcohol in his system that he’d been disguising. ‘She got to be Head of MI5.’

  ‘Indicators are not enough.’

  ‘It’s late, Sara, you should sleep.’

  ‘No,’ she whispered harshly. The anger, now overt and visible to him, overwhelmed any sense of exhaustion. Anger with herself, with her father and himself, with fate – a moral anger he’d never seen before. ‘Kareem needed a victim. Always. He lined them up. That’s what gave him the kick. I was one. Marion, Sami, how many others we may never know. Each time his appetite was whetted more. You, Patrick, you were a victim, you signed that contract.’ He stayed silent, closing his eyes again. The storm had to blow itself out. ‘Was Isobel a victim too? That’s what we need to know.’ She put her lips to her father’s ear. ‘Come on, Dad,’ she whispered urgently, ‘I’m asking you too. Wake up and tell me the answer.’

  The nurse entered and knelt by Sara, putting an arm round her. Patrick could tell she’d been watching. ‘Let him rest.’

  Sara stretched out a hand; he took it and led her away. Bridget nodded to him and he nodded back in agreement. She went peacefully with him to the family room and lay herself on the sofa, curling up like a small child. He returned to the intensive care unit and asked Bridget if there was a blanket. By the time she had found one and he was laying it over, her eyes were closed. He watched her for a few minutes and left.

  Around 5 a.m. she stirred, wondering briefly where she was and why she seemed alone. She checked her watch – it would soon be time for prayers. As the events of the night and the image of her immobile father were replayed, she found no inclination for them. Her mouth tasted sour and bitter; her breath must be foul. She tried to recall what she’d eaten or drunk; the attempt made her hungry and thirsty. She rose, turned on a light, and inspected herself in a mirror. There was a door ajar in the corner; she remembered there was a washroom. A toothbrush, toothpaste and unpacked bar of soap were on the basin. For a moment she was puzzled, and then, for a second, even though she’d already packed a toothbrush and paste in her bag, felt a tiny joy. She removed her scarf, brushed her teeth and soaped her face, dabbing it lightly with paper towels.

  Rather than turn right towards the intensive care unit, she remembered the nurse’s instructions and turned left to the canteen. There was increased shuffling and pacing of smocked men and women along corridors, trolleys being wheeled, a hospital waking up. She pushed open the double doors; two porters were closing and shifting a partition in the canteen. Its disappearance revealed a single figure sitting at a table, back bowed, shoulders hunched, head flopped on arms. She crept slowly opposite and murmured, ‘Thank you, Patrick.’

  A blurry-eyed face raised itself. ‘What for?’

  ‘The things you got for me. Being here.’ The face shook itself and forced its eyes open. She hesitated. ‘You could have stayed in the room.’

  ‘You might have thought it disrespectful.’ She smiled at him, saying nothing. ‘Coffee?’

  ‘This time I’ll get it,’ she said.

  She returned with steaming cups and biscuits. ‘I never got to the photograph. The reason you and I are here.’

  24

  2005

  The audience drifted through swing doors in their ones and twos to the bare lecture room. It was a smallish gathering; Sara did not count precisely but certainly fewer than thirty. Murmurings of ‘Hello, brother’ and ‘Hello, sister’ were interrupted by occasional cries of recognition.

  The dramatically changed world after 9/11 had brought both vengefulness and soul-searching. She had marched against the Iraq war in the great London demonstration of 2003, rubbing shoulders with all colours and creeds. But in the warp and weft of daily life, that good-natured togetherness was a mirage. Once you might have been called ‘Paki bastard’ or ‘bloody Arab’; after 9/11 you were a ‘fucking Muslim’ whether or not you’d ever set foot inside a mosque.

  She had gradually made herself less visible, wearing modest, fuller clothes. It had been an almost subconscious process; when she occasionally analysed it, she wasn’t sure whether it was more the consequence of her individual violation by Kareem or of the violation of the world beyond. She was unresolved about Islam as a religion, still lacking a deep-seated faith and sceptical of the afterlife, but admiring its discipline and calming prayers. She was on a journey of discovery, and when she saw that the Queen Vic’s Islamic Society was hosting an evening with leaders from the ‘Islam in the Community’ campaign, she went along.

  The President of the Society led prayers: ‘Bismillah hiram maan niraheem…’ Then two figures walked on to the platform.

  She wanted to flee but in this close-knit group it was impossible without making a scene. He was as tall and lean as ever, the black hair wavy and lustrous but longer, hanging down over his collar, his fine-boned face now supplemented by a shortish, groomed beard running in a neat line from one ear and around his chin to the other. He was dressed in a free-flowing white robe. The handsomeness aimed at saintliness, a prophet for the contemporary world. He spotted her instantly and smiled. She was trapped.

  The woman alongside him she did not recognise. She was also tall, a sky-blue silk scarf over her head, strands of blonde hair pushing through its edges like tiny shoots in cracks of paving. Her face was roundish, her skin pale and unblemished, with a prettily snubbed nose and cupid lips. Together they looked ethereal.

  ‘Brothers and sisters,’ began the president, ‘we’re privileged to have with us this evening Kareem and Maryam from Islam in the Community…’ Sara remembered her conversation with Salman four years before. The girl he’d called Marion had become Kareem’s convert and adornment.

  Kareem related with his customary precision of speech how the post 9/11 world had awakened the visceral prejudices of the Christian and Jewish West against Islam. ‘So what are we to do? What does Islam in our community now mean?’ Sara scanned his listeners, a few eagerly attentive, others blank-faced or looking down at their hands, perhaps wary.

  ‘What is our own personal struggle – our jihad – to be? Do we – as in the bad joke of Christians, who aim cluster bombs at innocent families and children in Afghanistan and Iraq, while claiming allegiance to their prophet’s instruction to turn the other cheek – do we accept and submit? Or do we fight? And what are to be our weapons? Words only? Or must there now be mo
re than words?’

  When he finished, the few who’d shown rapt attention clapped loudly; beyond them the applause was lip service. One or two kept their hands to themselves, ignoring the disapproving looks.

  Sara searched for an escape route but the geography of the room was against her. The exit was at its lower level; she would have to walk directly past Kareem to reach it. Instead it was he who made the first gesture, moving up and beside her before she had time to think.

  ‘Sara!’ He smiled, stretching out his arms.

  ‘Kareem.’ The magnetism was still there, the beam of energy from those brown eyes. She looked at him, avoiding any animation, keeping her hands by her side.

  Maryam joined them. ‘Did you ever meet Sara?’ asked Kareem innocently; he must have known she had not.

  ‘I would never forget if I had,’ said Maryam with gushing flattery.

  ‘We’re going to eat,’ said Kareem, ‘you must join us.’

  Sara wished she had a prepared excuse that would have stopped him. ‘No really, I must—’

  ‘Of course you will come. We have room in the car. We are meeting a friend or two who will interest you.’

  The president of the society loomed alongside. ‘Yes, you must come.’ She felt locked between them, their prisoner. But there was a tiny flicker of curiosity too.

  The sports car had been replaced by something much larger with tinted windows. Kareem and the president sat in the front, Maryam and Sara in the back.

  ‘How did you know it would be Kareem speaking?’ asked Maryam.

  ‘I didn’t,’ replied Sara. ‘No names were given.’ She paused, catching sight of him glancing at her in his rear-view mirror. ‘It was a surprise.’

  ‘A good one, I hope.’ Sara did not answer. ‘How long have you known Kareem?’ asked Maryam.

  ‘Oh, we go back a while.’

  ‘Did you meet at university?’

  ‘Yes. His third year, I think. And you?’

  ‘I was doing jobs here and there,’ Maryam answered vaguely. ‘There was no university for me.’ Sara detected bitterness and the shutters rising. There was a waspishness and also a fragility about her.