The Inquiry Page 30

  ‘Stop!’ She jerked round. ‘Reverse about twenty yards.’ He edged the car backwards. ‘Here.’ She leapt out and headed for what seemed to be a tangle of branches and creepers. He joined her and they tugged at clumps too set to shift, able only to peel them away branch by branch, strand by strand. The surface of a lichen-covered, dark green gate, some twelve feet high, became slowly visible. Sara turned right and walked a few yards up the lane, scraping away more creepers covering a stone wall. It was flecked with smears of old whitewash.

  ‘It fits,’ she cried out. ‘What was it exactly Marion said… down in a dark valley… hills around…’ She walked back towards Patrick. ‘And that weird thing her mother mentioned she once said… when I smell the life inside me, I must leave the smell of death.’

  ‘It may have been smells on the wind from an abattoir,’ he said prosaically.

  ‘No!’ Sara protested. ‘This is isolation. The sort of place you could yell and yell, day after day, month after month, and no one would ever hear you.’ She thought of Marion slumped on her chair. ‘A hell-hole to drive you crazy.’

  ‘That gate’s pretty solid,’ he said. ‘Any way round it?’

  ‘That stone wall’s just as tall and there’s a long stretch of it – may not lead into the courtyard Sami described anyway.’

  ‘I’ll look left.’ He walked in the opposite direction. ‘The wall abuts an outbuilding.’ He continued along a high hedge and stopped to feel through it. ‘There’s a wire fence behind the hedge. Doesn’t help us.’

  As he rejoined her, she was scratching at a rusting metal panel. ‘Remnants of an entryphone. I reckon that proves it.’ She stared at him, a challenge in her eyes. ‘You lift.’ She stood in front of the gate, arms stretched upwards.

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘No other way, is there?’ He took her by the hips and pushed her up the gate, then she eased back to sit on his shoulders. ‘Higher.’ She sensed him hesitating. ‘Get on with it, it’s no time to be shy.’ He pushed his hands beneath her buttocks, raising them while she used her own hands against the gate to steady herself. She bent one knee, flattening her heel on his shoulder, followed by the second. He managed to repress an oath as they dug sharply in.

  She placed a hand on the top of the gate. ‘Ow!’ Her shriek echoed across the valley. ‘I think I hit some old barbed wire.’

  ‘Come down. This is no good.’

  ‘It’s all right. Just a nail. Don’t move.’

  Gingerly she felt for clean gaps between nails and wood splinters to place her hands, finding enough grip to push herself upwards while he raised his hands to hold her feet.

  ‘I’m up. I can see over.’

  ‘See what.’

  ‘Buildings, weeds, a barn. It’s a good size.’

  ‘Can you jump?’

  She looked down. ‘Maybe. How do you get in?’

  ‘Does the gate have a handle?’

  ‘Yes, but looks as if there’s a lock below.’

  ‘I should have bought a f—’ he stopped himself again, ‘a rope.’ He tried to think, then felt her feet rising from his hands as she hoicked herself onto the top of the gate. She leant forward, gave a little yelp, and disappeared from view. He heard a scrunch, followed by silence. ‘My God,’ he murmured. Further silence, then a rustle. ‘Are you all right?’

  He heard her voice. ‘There’s a keyhole. Look through it.’ He did; her eye was lodged against the other side.

  ‘You could have hurt yourself,’ he said angrily. ‘Badly.’

  Her reply was a release of a latch. ‘You push, I’ll pull.’

  After a few minutes of heaving they’d prised the gate several inches open. He took off his jacket, flung it in the car, and squeezed himself through. ‘Just tell me what you’d have done if it had been locked.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘We’ll shift the gate further open. Then I’ll move the car off the lane.’

  Sara looked around, admiring the accuracy of Sami’s memory. Just as he’d described, the van would have twisted down the lane, and turned through the gates – before, presumably, he was bundled into the whitewashed stone building across the yard. Its door was ajar, hanging loose. She eased it open; it squealed with the shock of unfamiliar movement.

  ‘Come,’ she called to Patrick. Shafts of light from the door and high barred windows were enough to reveal the layout of stables.

  ‘I guess once this would have been a significant farm,’ said Patrick. He’d calmed, his tone more conciliatory. ‘Big enough for visitors on horseback to need stabling. Their own horses too. Maybe a carriage.’

  ‘Each stable door has newish fittings,’ she said, ‘presumably to take a padlock.’

  ‘Horses don’t need locks.’

  ‘Sami’s prison.’ She pushed a stable door open – barred window above, concrete water basin, remnants of straw on the small square cobbles. ‘And however many others too.’

  ‘He said they shone light through the window at night, didn’t he?’ asked Patrick.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We can look behind later.’

  She turned to him fiercely. ‘So this is the place. What do we need to find?’

  ‘At least one piece of incontrovertible physical evidence that criminal acts took place here. Probably kidnapping at minimum, murder at maximum.’

  ‘So bones, fragments of clothing…’

  ‘Blood stains… of sufficient quality for forensic testing.’ His eyes roved over the stable, his nose wrinkling. ‘And we have to act fast. We can’t assume we’ll have this place to ourselves all day. I did the best I could yesterday but they’ll pick up a trail sometime. If the stables were the prison, let’s start with those. Then be selective. I can’t see the main house offering anything, the captives would never have been taken there.’

  ‘There’s what Sami called the big hall with the platform.’

  ‘That must be the barn opposite the house. Let’s look before searching the stables.’

  They ran across the courtyard. The clouds they’d seen in the distance were floating over. The rectangular courtyard, sun reflecting from the farmhouse’s windows, was transformed in no more than a moment to a menacing gloom. As she entered the barn, Sara jumped at something tickling her face and neck.

  ‘Cobwebs,’ said Patrick. He raised his arms and walked up and down, clearing thread after thread from wooden beams and corners.

  ‘The platform’s still there.’ She imagined Kareem sitting in the centre like a Sultan on his dais, Maryam his consort on one side, the burly apparatchik on the other. The clouds erupted and what sounded like giant raindrops beat down on slate tiles sitting flush on the timber roof trusses.

  ‘Creepy,’ she whispered to Patrick.

  The rain crashing onto the cobbles, each drop seeming to ricochet like a bullet before it settled, ceased as suddenly as it had started. Over a watery softness streams of sunlight decorated the courtyard with bright diagonal strings. They crossed back into the stables.

  She heard a rustling in the far corner of a stable and crept toward it. She screamed. Patrick ran in to see her frozen, half-crouched, staring ahead. Coming alongside, he saw a giant rat, fattened on the detritus of the shed. It stared at them from the pink beads of its eyes, then scurried past their ankles.

  ‘Eaters of flesh and blood,’ he said. ‘Destroyers of evidence.’

  Hours later, between them they’d searched every stable and the connecting passage. Their prize was a single item, a pair of soiled, caked underpants buried beneath straw in a stable corner.

  ‘You never know. There might be some blood traces,’ said Patrick as they regrouped. He produced a cellophane bag and inserted the pants.

  ‘When I spread the palms of my hands across those cold walls and harsh squares on the floors,’ said Sara, ‘it’s blood I keep thinking of. That this was some kind of mini Lubyanka, now left to rot and hide its sins.’

  ‘Imagination isn’t evidence.’

  ‘Sami was terrified here. He wasn’t faking
.’

  ‘But he’s alive.’

  ‘Yes, he survived.’

  Patrick checked his watch. ‘Hell, it’s nearly four.’

  ‘Yes, I was thinking the same. I ought to check in with the hospital again.’ She took her burner phone from a pocket. She quickly glanced again at the anonymous text that had arrived a couple of hours earlier while she was searching alone. This time, however much she knew the message wouldn’t send, she checked her phone was on silent, hit reply and typed.

  Who ARE you?

  An instant reply. She jumped out of her skin.

  Don’t you know by now?

  She turned her back to Patrick, thumbs gently tapping.

  Just tell me it’s you.

  Seconds passed. Nothing.

  Message sending failed.

  ‘I can’t get a signal,’ she said, hiding her tension by fiddling with her phone. She disliked the lie and promised herself it would be the last.

  He sighed. ‘OK, we’ll drive back up the hill till you get one. But be quick.’ She was already marching down the drive, shaking with relief that he hadn’t checked for a signal on his own phone.

  Thirty minutes later, they were back.

  ‘I overestimated,’ said Patrick. ‘Depending on the weather, we’ve got two or so hours of decent light left before the sun ducks behind the mountain. Maybe the stable was our best chance. But let’s cover the ground – courtyards, drives, garden, perimeter. That’s the one thing the underpants do confirm – if someone has tidied the place up, something else could have been missed.’

  Beyond the house, they found a disused well. Patrick peered down; it seemed to descend for ever. ‘You’d probably never see the bottom,’ he said, ‘even with the sun overhead.’ He leant over, his head and long back disappearing. ‘Anyway no need to chuck bodies down here. That’s the trouble,’ he said, pulling himself up and gazing at the hillside beyond, ‘great expanses of green as far as the eye can see, some thick forests, lakes, reservoirs. Hiding bodies wouldn’t be difficult if you had the will and the muscle.’

  They were tramping around the perimeter fields as the sun ducked behind a ridge, their spirits sinking with the light. ‘That’s nearly it,’ he said. ‘One last look inside.’ They walked back down the lane and slid back through the gateway. ‘You said it earlier. It’s not as if we found nothing.’ He spread his arms towards the courtyard. ‘We found the place itself.’

  ‘Shush,’ she whispered.

  ‘What?’

  She placed a forefinger on her lips and then pointed it towards the barn. He followed the line. ‘Is that a light?’

  ‘We can leave,’ he murmured. ‘Just turn round. Drive away.’ She shook her head, then nodded once, silently, and moved forward.

  28

  They crept across the courtyard. Nothing moved. Just an unexplained single bulb hanging from a beam at the near end of the barn.

  ‘Looks like a security light on a timer,’ whispered Patrick. ‘There’s some kind of watch over this place even if it’s been left to rot.’ The doors opened easily; they stepped inside, as if drawn to the light. The far end where the platform stood was dark. ‘What was that?’

  ‘What?’

  They turned. The doors they’d come through had closed.

  ‘Did you close them?’ she asked.

  Piercing lights from the barn’s two front corners burst out, blinding them. Instinctively, they covered their eyes with their hands. A key turned noisily in a lock. They opened their eyes. Nothing. No movement. No sound.

  Footsteps echoed from beyond the far wall, slowly growing louder and nearer. Three chairs had been placed in the middle of the illuminated platform. A door behind opened and a silhouetted figure entered, stepped onto the platform and walked to its front. Stepping into the pool of light, the figure stretched its hands out.

  ‘You came here to hunt down the dead. Instead you find the living.’ A deep male voice in a precise English accent.

  Sara closed her eyes again, not wanting to believe it, however much she now knew it. She felt no panic, no jumping of the heart; instead a numbing confirmation of some huge deception.

  ‘Hello, Kareem,’ she said softly.

  ‘Kareem was killed in a drone strike.’

  ‘This isn’t a game, Kareem,’ said Patrick.

  ‘Hello, Sara. Hello, Patrick.’

  Patrick strode across the long barn’s floor towards him. ‘Please halt,’ said Kareem with a show of quiet politeness.

  A burly, roughly shaved man with coarsely brushed, thick grey hair, a large knife deliberately showing from his belt, appeared from nowhere to block Patrick’s path. ‘I believe, Patrick,’ said Kareem, ‘you were never introduced to Aaqil.’ Sara, watching them, instinctively thought back to the unidentified person at the restaurant table. The only difference was the black hair now turned grey.

  Kareem moved alongside the two men now facing each other and lowered his voice. ‘Do not try anything, Patrick. He would cut you to pieces without a moment’s thought – and with great pleasure.’

  Kareem turned away; Aaqil nodded from Patrick to Sara and then to the chairs on the platform where he was heading.

  ‘Come,’ said Kareem, ‘join me. I mean you no harm. You are my guests.’ He directed them to two of the chairs and sat down in the third.

  ‘How did you know, Kareem?’ asked Patrick.

  ‘Are you still as naive as you always were, Patrick? Did you not see that your movements yesterday were being observed? A man entering this world must learn how to look over his shoulder. Now, if you will allow me. You have come far with your investigation. But enough. It is over.’

  ‘It’s never over, Kareem,’ said Sara.

  Kareem smiled sweetly at her, as handsome as ever, hardly a crease in his face, the hair still thick and shining. He was clean-shaven, just as when she had first encountered him, and dressed in a dark grey business suit, white shirt and blue tie. For the identity he was now assuming his physical appearance had melted into West, not East.

  ‘You are wrong, Sara,’ he began. ‘The story is finished. Although I prefer to use the word “narrative”. You know much of it. An Arab boy from a rich family is sent to England to live and be educated. He begins to see a corrupted society, to meet people with other, better values. Now a man, he meets a beautiful girl called Sara with whom he could spend his life—’

  ‘And rapes her.’ She finished his sentence with a contempt that shocked Patrick.

  ‘No!’ It was a scream, a cry from the dark, a noise she never could have imagined from him.

  Kareem paused, taking a deep breath, uncrossing and recrossing his leg. ‘There is no need for accusations, particularly false ones.’ The voice had quietened – calmer, colder, more controlled than ever.

  Sara, wanting to rebut him, bit her tongue as Aaqil, knife still displayed, moved into the lights. He carried a jug of water and two glasses. Glaring at her and giving an almost imperceptible shake of the head, he placed them on a side table between her and Patrick.

  ‘I must apologize,’ said Kareem, ‘I am afraid we no longer have facilities here for tea.’ He waved a hand at Aaqil who disappeared into the shadows. ‘Perhaps I may now continue my narrative.

  ‘One September day this man takes the girl for a ride on the Millennium Wheel. At the top, he imagines how beautiful, how deserved it would be if the Parliament he sees below could explode into the air. The girl fails to understand him.

  ‘By a fateful coincidence, the next day real destruction happens – but in America, not the society and nation he has lived in and come to despise. He reads more, learns more, advances his own understanding. He flies to Pakistan where he talks to scholars and meets fighters. They tell him his role is not on the battlefield. He will be different, his task to radicalise and recruit. The Iraq war makes it easy.

  ‘Then comes 7/7. There is nothing beautiful to him about it – not like 9/11. He sees flaws, but cannot desert the cause. He is picked up – illegally, thou
gh he does not complain – by MI5. His outlook changes, he agrees to switch sides.’

  ‘Come on, Kareem,’ said Patrick. He cast a glance to see if Aaqil was in hearing range. There was no sign of him. ‘You had no bloody choice. You took the traitor’s shilling.’

  ‘How cynical, Patrick, you were never capable of real understanding. And please, your language. To continue… this man does his best for his new masters. But first, he must protect his bona fides with his old masters.’

  ‘By appearing to expose and execute MI5 and police informers – and sometimes going beyond appearance,’ said Sara. ‘We want names.’

  ‘Again please,’ he said. ‘His “handler” is a highly intelligent woman destined for the top. He admires her greatly and wants to help her. She gives him names on her list, he finds out what she needs to know and tells her.’ He paused, looking down on them. ‘I believe J has filled in these gaps for you.’

  ‘How many were executed, Kareem?’ said Patrick. ‘How many were “disappeared”?’

  ‘But then the woman he admires,’ continued Kareem, ignoring him, ‘is promoted to be head of her organisation. She will be too senior, too exposed, to continue their partnership. They agree an exit strategy. He is given a new identity and hopes that, one day, he may return to be of service to her and her country. But for now he must be erased from the record.

  ‘There is a coda. Two years later a short-sighted prime minister sets up an inquiry. A so-called whistleblower emerges. A sharp-brained female lawyer with a connection to this narrative is hired. She begins to poke her nose into dangerous areas. The threat is contained.’

  ‘By the murder of two people and the attempted murder of another,’ said Patrick.

  Kareem shrugged. ‘I am told your father had an accident, Sara. I am so sorry; I am sure no one intended it. I believe he is recovering well.’

  ‘Where are the bodies, Kareem?’ growled Patrick. ‘For your own sanity and salvation, you need to tell us where the bodies are.’

  ‘You are too impatient, Patrick. Please, have a sip of water, I repeat my regret that I cannot offer more.’

  ‘Patrick’s right,’ said Sara, ‘you’ll never live with yourself unless you do. We can do a deal. You’re the innocent party.’