The Inquiry Page 8

  Before there was time for an answer, his friend pulled away. Two figures in dark hoodies ranged alongside, clamping his arms and forcing him across the road.

  ‘Hey, what the—’

  ‘Shut it, brother, I’m just the escort,’ snarled one, gagging his mouth with a black leather glove.

  Sami turned his head and glimpsed Asif watching, the fear now tinged with regret. Did he hear his voice? ‘Sorry, man.’ Or did he just imagine it as his friend disappeared into the dawn gloom?

  He was alone, outnumbered, unarmed, not even a knife. He thought of screaming. They saw it; the black-gloved fist slapped into his mouth. They pushed him into the windowless back of a small van; one leapt inside with him, the other locked the door. Imprisoned. Even if he overpowered his ‘escort’, there was no way out.

  ‘What’s this about, brother? I ain’t done nothing,’ he mumbled.

  He heard the second man’s footsteps circle the van, a door slam, the engine fire up, a jerk of acceleration pitching him against the carcass of steel.

  The escort – his jailer, more like – pointed to his pocket and beckoned with a finger to hand over what was in it.

  ‘What you want?’

  The escort, staying silent, beckoned again. Sami feigned puzzlement. The response was a kick in the shin. Understanding, he handed over his mobile. He was allowed to keep his watch.

  One hour gone.

  It seemed unreal, a sick fantasy happening in a parallel universe. The silence became his oppressor, the unreality lifting like the misty dawn he imagined outside. He thought, rethought, re-rethought. What could they know about him? Sure, he’d talked stuff with the group – Ali, Farooq, Shay the glamour boy, Asif himself. They’d dreamed and schemed but it was never more than bravado. At least not from him. An ugly idea hit him – were any of them serious? Had they really meant it? Had he seemed to commit?

  That night with the girl? There was some messing, sure… she was a bit young – but none of them actually did it with her. Nothing like some of the rumours he’d heard going around. After the foster mother complained, the police had them in but didn’t even caution them. He’d wanted to apologise to her but the others told him to leave it. Surely it couldn’t be that. If not, what else?

  Three or so hours steady speed on flat roads – motorway, he assumed – then endless bends, falling and climbing, now the rattle of rutted lanes. Seated on the wheel-arch, he felt only the soreness in his behind and scraping in his bones. For the thousandth time he lifted an eye to the escort sitting opposite. For the thousandth time, there was no response.

  He tried one gambit. ‘I need to piss, brother.’ Another. ‘I can’t say my prayers like this, brother.’ A curl of the lip from the bleak figure facing him. A third. ‘Which way’s east?’ The figure shook his head. ‘Don’t you speak, man?’ A scowl.

  The van juddered to a stop, swiftly followed by the crunch of boots on gravel and the shock of blinding daylight as the back doors were flung open. His escort shoved him out of the van and he managed not to stumble. They were on a rutted single-track road through the forest. There was no view, no contours in the land – no sense of height or terrain. He knew these men had been here before. One produced a bottle of water, filled a small basin, and gestured at him to wash and say his prayers. His heart raced as he wondered if they were to be his last. They watched and, when he’d finished, retrieved the basin.

  ‘I need a piss, brothers.’ They pointed to a bush and carried on watching. As he emptied his aching bladder, he stole a look to left and right but each direction led only to a canopy of forest. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘You’re in the back of there, brother,’ said the driver, opening the doors again.

  ‘Hey, you speak.’ Sami turned from driver to escort. ‘He don’t.’

  The blow in the solar plexus doubled him up, arrows of agony tearing into his gut. ‘Fuck!’ was all he could say. They shoved him inside with a kick in the back of a knee. He looked down at the escort’s hob-nailed boots and excruciating pain speared into his thigh. The grinding and spluttering of an abused engine drove them ever higher. He tried to imagine sky, sun, cloud, rain. Nothing came – just the implacable expression of the man opposite.

  ‘You know what day it is, brother?’ The escort’s voice struck like a cymbal clash. He’d spoken. This time he’d be the one to say nothing.

  ‘I asked you a question, brother. Do you know what day it is today?’

  ‘What you mean, what day?’

  ‘September the eleventh. Eleven nine. Nine eleven. Remember?’ His voice leeched sarcasm. ‘Fifth anniversary.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck, sorry, brother.’ Sami tried to stop the cowering in his mind from showing in his face. Nor the confusion, because he didn’t know what he was supposed to say.

  ‘And you call yourself a brother.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, I’m confused. Wouldn’t you be? Five years, yeah?’

  ‘That’s right. Never forget. Five years.’

  The van slowed and snagged left, then immediately right. More footsteps, the tuneless squeal of a rusting gate, a door slam, then bouncing along… along what? The van stopped, turned and reversed, the doors opened. He emerged with head bowed; all he saw was a dark concrete passage, the van doors at right angles blocking right and left. He wondered what lay beyond and listened. A rustling, nothing more.

  They dragged him along a ribbed concrete floor, a smell of hay and dung. Petrol fumes overtaken by shit. Stables, cows, horses? He’d hardly ever been outside the town or seen an animal beyond the halal butcher. They stopped, pushed open a door and hurled him through it. He heard the click of key in lock – his new prison. The floor was tiny squares of concrete, a bed of hay in one corner, a trough of water in another, a single tap and a bucket below. Soap and a roll of toilet paper. High up a small window, an inch or two ajar, too high and too small to escape through. Though he didn’t know what he’d be escaping from. At least it offered some sense of light and time. Were they watching his observance? He should exaggerate to make sure, make a show of it. The stink of shit was overwhelming – he felt it seeping into his clothes and pores.

  ‘Watch!’ A voice from outside. The door half-opened, a hand stretched towards him. ‘Gimme your watch.’

  He tried to count the minutes and hours, washed and prayed according to his best guesses until, finally, the light through the window began to fade. The door opened; a new face appeared with a slice of bread and bowl of thin soup.

  ‘Thank you, brother.’

  The reply was a punch below the midriff. He recoiled. He looked at the food and tepid liquid and a tear trickled down his cheek. Angrily he brushed it away and began hungrily to eat and drink the meagre ration. When he finished, there remained an emptiness in the pit of his stomach.

  Darkness. The sound of a dripping tap on the other side of the wall. He counted the gap – every three seconds without break. It stopped. He breathed deeply, forced himself to relax, closed his eyes and laid his head on the hay. Fatigue seized him and he waited for sleep to end the waking nightmare. As his eyes closed and peace descended, the drip restarted – a loud, metallic ping. He sat up with a jolt, nerves crushing him. Was the timing deliberate? Yet there was no noise, no sounds of other humans, no breathing beyond his now hurried exhalations. He looked up and around for cameras, both overt and concealed. Nothing. Some kind of lamp outside the window cast a shaft of light on the opposite wall. He tried to close his eyes to darken the reflection. Another drip. Then he woke up, cold and cramped.

  After daybreak, more bread and a mug of black tea. He said nothing and it was delivered without violence. He was given a brush to clean his teeth and managed a small defecation in the bucket. When the plate and bowl were collected, the bucket was replaced. He didn’t dare to speak words of gratitude.

  On the third morning, after two more breaking, corroding days and nights, a different man looked in, less roughly dressed.

  ‘Come.’ Sami nodded, not opening his mouth. �
��It’s all right, brother, you may speak now.’

  He felt exhausted, cramped, his legs like jelly. He forced his voice into action despite the dread of allowing the wrong words to escape. ‘Thank you, brother,’ he murmured.

  ‘It is time for you to meet the Adviser.’

  ‘It’s everything I imagined,’ said Patrick, turning the corner that brought the unique form of Pendle Hill into view. It was late afternoon – they had a couple of hours to get up and down before darkness would turn the great delineated mass visible in daylight into a brooding nocturnal shadow. ‘You see photographs and don’t think it could be like that. But it is. A blue whale. An enormous blue whale.’

  ‘A whale?’ Sara exclaimed with exaggerated alarm.

  ‘Yes, don’t you see the tail rising up from the valley and that smooth long back leading to the broad mouth feeding off the valley below?’

  She turned to him. ‘I think I see a man with an unexpected imagination.’

  As the village of Barlow receded and they gained altitude, he in boots, jeans and anorak, she in trainers, jeans and hoodie, the north-west wind began to flap their jackets and flick their faces. The stony path on peat bog compressed by thousands of summer tramplings was dry and they skipped easily up it. Sara felt the tensions of the encounter with Sami ebb as her breaths deepened. Nearing the final crest, the wind strengthened and, once they were over it, was transformed into a roar, an invisible compression of sounds and waves ripping into their cheeks and rib cages. The summit plateau, Patrick’s enormous whale-back, stretched into the distance.

  ‘Let’s get to the very top,’ he yelled. In a few hundred yards they were standing by the cairn and trig point that marked the summit, the wind at its fiercest.

  ‘I always wanted,’ said Patrick, betraying for the first time a slight breathlessness, ‘to see if it’s possible to lean against wind.’ He spread his arms and legs out. ‘But until now I’ve never been in a wind strong enough to try it.’ He slowly leant forward into its teeth until, finally, he was forced to put forward a leg to steady himself. ‘Fantastic. It works. Try it!’

  There was an edge in Patrick’s challenge. Sara frowned at him, then grinned. ‘OK.’ She likewise spread her arms and legs. He was right; there was an invisible wall keeping her from falling. She leant further, and then, without warning, the wind relented a fraction and she went, the grass rushing towards her. She felt arms round her chest, pulling her back up and enfolding her, then releasing her.

  ‘You went too far,’ he said. ‘Lucky I was here.’

  ‘Yes, too far.’ She felt suddenly embarrassed, foolish even, messing around on an isolated hilltop with a man she might instinctively trust but still hardly knew. ‘Enough of the entertainment,’ she said waspishly. ‘Let’s head down.’

  As they reached the plateau’s edge she paused before beginning the descent. The Ribble valley was alight in the late sun, arrows of reddening yellow bouncing off the Black Moss reservoirs below, a few farmhouses and cottages adrift like small boats in a calm sea of green. Remembering the modest streets of Muslim Blackburn, she was mesmerised by the peaceful spectacle below in the dying of the day. ‘You can see why people might want to come to these parts,’ she said, poise recovered. ‘You’d have to travel hours out of London to see anything like this.’

  ‘You can see why it spooked people too,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, the Witches of Pendle. I mugged up on them on the train. 1612. Twelve tried and executed. A land of superstition and fraudulence.’

  ‘Nothing like now, then,’ he said. There was no grin.

  That night Sara went over the five files again. First contacts varied between the second half of 2005 and early 2006. There was wider variation in their outcomes.

  1)Asif Hassan, closed in 2006.

  2)Farooq Siddiqi, first contact 2003, ‘exited 2007’, file then closed.

  3)Shayan al-Rehman, ‘contact lost’, file open.

  4)Iqbal Jamal Wahab, ‘returned 2014’, file closed 2015.

  5)Samir Mohammed, ‘closed 2006’.

  And there was the link. The one thing common to them all. Should she have bounced it on Sami? No. It would have been a huge risk, a shock tactic that could have deterred him irredeemably. No specific day was given but in June 2006 under ‘Contacts’ there was an entry in all five files. ‘Interviewed by Blackburn CID. Released without charge.’ It gave no hint of the content of the interview. It may not have been proof positive but it gave every sign of a connection.

  If only Sami would get back to her, she might have gained enough trust to lure him into giving her the link; but she knew that bird might have flown. She would next try Asif Hassan’s family address; as his file was also closed at the end of 2006, he, like Samir, might just have stayed in Blackburn. Or remained in touch with his family.

  Who else was alive? Who, if any, was dead? And how?

  What were the files designed to lead her to?

  She washed, prayed and allowed herself a slow bath. Even if the Savoy Inn’s sanitary ware was peeling at the edges, the water was hot and she could stretch out her legs. She thought of Patrick’s arms retrieving her. ‘You went too far.’ She tried to remember his expression at that moment; it wouldn’t come.

  A coded warning? ‘Don’t go too far again.’

  7

  2006

  ‘Move faster! You don’t wanna keep the Adviser waiting.’

  The end of the darkened passage emerged into a small courtyard. The sky was a clear blue, the sun hiding behind a slate roof to the east; below, greyish bricks and mullioned windows, a fanlight over a charcoal front door. As before, he could see no further – the courtyard walls were the screen now. He imagined hills and green fields, valleys and crystal streams, but there was no evidence of them, nor of where he might be. No people with accents or different-coloured skins, no road signs, no markings. No lights in the house.

  They turned away to a carriage door opposite. It swung open, apparently of its own will; they entered a vaulted space, brightly illuminated with lamps hung high on thick oak beams. He shielded his eyes, adjusting from the days of dimmed solitude. On a platform at one end stood a long thin table, three figures looming over it. His guard gestured him to climb the steps and face them.

  He took up his position and the seconds passed, perhaps even a minute – he’d lost all sense of time. He brought the three figures into focus. In the middle a tall, thin man with thick black hair unmarked by white or grey and a neatly trimmed beard was dressed in a flowing white robe, his cheek and jaw well-defined, neck and chin creaseless. A contrasting image of straggly-haired, grey-bearded, pot-bellied imams flashed before Sami and he felt ever more uncertain of what he was facing. To the left was a fair-skinned woman swathed in silky yellow, crowned by a light blue scarf; round the edges he could detect wisps of wavy blonde hair. Her azure eyes glistened like jewels and her straight delicate nose flowed seamlessly into full, unadorned lips. Even from where he stood, he smelt her sweetness. Starved of company for three eternal days, he thought they were the most beautiful couple he had ever seen. To the right, a different shape – burly and dressed in black, a rough bristled face, thick eyebrows hooding cold eyes and a flat nose with gaping nostrils.

  The white-robed man stretched out his hands, palms faced upwards. ‘Mashallah. Welcome. Can I call you Sami?’ His voice was soft, precise, clear; to Sami the tone and accent seemed in some way to belong to a rich and ancient civilisation; this man must be the Adviser. ‘I know you have suffered.’ He further stretched out his arms and Sami fell into his embrace. They hugged until the Adviser pulled away, yet without breaking his intense, powerful gaze.

  ‘So, my brother Sami, now we must talk. Please sit.’

  ‘Yes, Master.’ He didn’t know why he’d used that word rather than ‘brother’, only that this was a man he, in his weakened state, must submit to. He slumped into a hard wooden chair the guard placed behind him.

  The woman spoke. ‘Do you know why you have come here, S
ami?’ Her voice was soothing, enfolding him.

  ‘No, sister.’

  She stared at him with surprise. ‘No?’

  ‘They came for me. That’s why.’

  ‘Why did they come for you, brother?’ It was the second man, his Pakistani accent rougher. He recognised a Lancastrian tinge.

  ‘I dunno, brother.’ He tried to read their three faces; nothing emerged. ‘I ain’t done nothing.’

  ‘Is it good or bad to do nothing?’ asked the Adviser.

  ‘I dunno. What you want me to do?’ he answered with the yearning of a starved dog.

  ‘No, Sami, it is what you want to do.’

  A tear trickled down his cheek. ‘I dunno.’

  ‘You must not tell us lies,’ said the woman.

  ‘That’s right, Sami,’ said the second man, walking around the end of the table to stand over him. He bent down, placing his mouth against Samir’s right ear.

  ‘We want to know whose fucking side you’re on!’

  His shout was so furious that Samir flinched wildly to his left, crashing off his chair onto the bare wood of the platform. The man hoicked him up.

  ‘There is no need for unkindness or hurt,’ said the Adviser. ‘We must be friends. Return to your room and pray to Allah. You must think about your conscience and truth. We will pray for you too.’

  The Adviser nodded once to the second man. He grabbed Sami by the shoulder, turned him and kneed him in the small of the back so violently that he crumpled.

  Asif Hassan’s family address of twelve years ago was 24 Pond Street. Obeying Patrick’s rule of ten, Sara would only have to knock on two doors before arriving at the target house. No. 4 answered, detaining her for the ten minutes it took to speed through the questionnaire. Sara walked slowly by the next five doors. Her phone rang – Patrick, she assumed. Unhurriedly, she removed it from her bag; a number she didn’t recognise. She felt that lurch in the stomach and took a deep breath.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is that Sara?’

  She punched the air, relief surging through her. ‘Hey, is that you, Sami?’