Strangers Page 22

  ‘They told me that someone’s been arrested for robbery and might be charged with murder. It didn’t…’ She could remember the sense of distance and unreality when they told her. Closure. Her friends had said this would mean closure, but it hadn’t meant anything.

  ‘Do you believe that?’ He was watching her closely.

  ‘I…’ She shook her head. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Neither do I. Listen, Roisin, I’m sorry to talk about things that are going to distress you, but I’m trying to find out what happened that night.’

  That night. She could remember standing by the door at the Bradshaws’, watching out for the car. She could remember falling and hitting the ground, feeling the impact knocking the breath out of her, but not remembering the pain. She could remember Damien’s hand pressing her face hard against his shirt. Then there was nothing. That was the point where the dreams took over. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Joe–when he called you at the party, what did he say?’

  ‘That it was going to take longer than he thought–he was going to go over something with someone.’

  ‘How did he sound?’

  She thought about it, calling Joe’s voice into her head. She could hear him speaking as if he was standing beside her: Listen, sweetheart, there’s a problem here. I’ve got to sort out some stuff. I’m going to be a bit of time. ‘He sounded…serious. As though it was serious.’

  ‘Did he say anything about the missing child?’

  She looked at him blankly. ‘Missing child?’

  ‘You don’t know about…Christ, I’m sorry. It’s more bad news. A baby was taken from the hospital that day–that’s why they called Joe in.’

  ‘A missing baby?’ She could see there was something he wasn’t telling her. ‘Whose baby?’

  ‘A Saudi family.’

  She knew he was being evasive so she supplied the name. ‘Yasmin. Yasmin’s baby.’

  He nodded, watching her closely.

  Her eyes stung and she blinked rapidly to clear them. ‘But he was ill. The baby was ill.’

  ‘Yes.’ He didn’t elaborate.

  ‘Joe didn’t say anything when he got the call. We’d been talking about Yasmin just before.’ Because a baby had died. There’d been a post mortem.

  ‘They won’t have told him something like that over the phone.’

  She was back in the car. They were in the car park in front of the strip mall and Joe had been talking, telling her about his friend Haroun Patel. Haroun is dead…And then…She shook her head. ‘No. It was a call on his pager. Then he called them back.’

  ‘And it was the hospital?’

  ‘Yes. But no one said it was anything serious. He was pissed off because he wasn’t supposed to be on duty. Why would they call him in for that? What could he have done to help track a kidnapped child?’

  ‘He’d have had the information they’d need to identify the child if they found him.’

  ‘The blood tests?’

  He nodded. ‘What happened then?’

  ‘He dropped me off at the party. He said he’d phone me…’ He’d put his arms round her, and she’d said, Don’t be long. He’d said, I won’t.

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘I called him. Well, I tried, but I couldn’t get through.’

  ‘Was his phone busy, or was it switched off?’

  ‘Switched off.’

  Damien was staring into the distance, calculating. ‘He never made it to the meeting.’ His voice was absent. ‘It sounds as though he was calling you from the hospital. The police never found his phone or his pager. A thief would take the phone, but the pager…? Maybe. But it means the police can’t check on any calls. The hospital paged him–that’s on record. But where he was calling from…’ He looked at her for a long moment. ‘If he’d gone somewhere else, would he have told you? Did he always tell you what he was doing?’

  She wanted to say yes, but that wasn’t true. ‘No. Not always.’

  He wasn’t looking at her. His left hand was resting on his thigh and she could see him moving it, trying to make a fist with fingers that were stiff and crooked. ‘Does the name Haroun Patel mean anything to you?’ he said.

  She felt her glass start to slip through her fingers and grabbed at it quickly. She was back with Joe on the road out of Riyadh, the traffic weaving around them.

  Joe, who’s Haroun Patel?

  Christ, Roisin, what kind of time is it to ask me that?

  The last time she’d seen him.

  Damien was watching her reaction. He didn’t say anything, just waited until she was ready to speak. ‘Why are you asking me that?’

  ‘I’m not sure. Maybe I’m just clutching at straws.’

  ‘OK. Well, yes, it does. He was a friend of Joe’s. Joe told me about him, that last evening…We were driving to the party, and we stopped and he told me.’

  ‘You know what happened to him?’

  She nodded. ‘Joe was there. When they…when they did it.’

  ‘I knew he was asking questions about Patel. I never knew why. You said that he told you that last evening. Why did he tell you then? Why not before?’

  ‘He told me because I asked him. I found some stuff among his papers, on his desk. I wanted to know what it was all about.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  It was like an interrogation. ‘Damien, you need to tell me what’s going on. Why are you asking?’

  He sighed. ‘I don’t know much. That’s the truth, Roisin. I’ve been cut out of the loop as well, so this is all guesswork. I don’t know the police officer in charge of your husband’s case, but I understand he’s going along with the robbery story. I suspect they aren’t as convinced as they say they are, but they’re coming under pressure to solve it in a way that won’t embarrass the government. No one will talk to me about it. There’s something I need to ask you. Do you think that Joe kept quiet about what he was doing because he thought it was dangerous?’

  Dangerous…Joe had been tense for most of the time they’d been in Riyadh. He’d been preoccupied and stressed. He’d said it was work. And then that last weekend he’d seemed…different. More relaxed. And glad that they were going to leave. She stalled. ‘Dangerous, how?’

  ‘How do you think, Roisin? He kept what he was doing a secret. He didn’t want you to know what he knew. But then, the night he died, you were almost killed as well. What kind of coincidence is that?’

  She had a sudden, farcical picture of Souad tracking her through the streets of Riyadh with murder on her mind because she didn’t like Roisin’s seminars, but it wasn’t a farce. It wasn’t funny. Whatever it was, it had killed Joe. And it had almost killed Damien, and almost killed her.

  ‘I need to know what it was that Joe was looking for,’ he said. ‘Roisin?’

  But she didn’t know. That was the thing. Even now, she didn’t know. ‘All I know is what he told me that night. He told me that this man was his friend. He told me that he went there, the day he was executed. And he said that he thought Haroun Patel was innocent. That’s all.’

  But it hadn’t been all. She could still hear Joe’s voice, still see his face as he said, I know that the brain, that consciousness, can survive for minutes without oxygen. It doesn’t shut down at once. Joe, his head half-severed, bleeding to death by the side of the road. She turned her face away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Damien said. ‘I shouldn’t have come here to talk about things that upset you.’

  She shook her head. ‘Talking about it makes no difference. It’s there all the time. I’m glad you’re doing this. I’m glad you’re asking questions. You’re the only one who is.’ Or the only one who was asking the right questions.

  ‘I may not get very far,’ he said. ‘It’s all speculation. I just don’t see why asking questions about Haroun Patel would be such a big deal.’

  ‘If Joe was right, if there had been a miscarriage of justice…’

  ‘No one would care–and Joe would have known t
hat. They might have thrown him out if he’d started kicking up a big stink in the overseas press–but, be honest, Roisin, who would have listened? Organizations like Amnesty give the Saudis a hard time on a regular basis, but no one else is worried. Whatever happened, I can’t see that the Patel case is anything to do with it.’

  They both fell silent. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. After a while, she forced her mind back into action. ‘Have you eaten?’

  ‘No. I don’t know what they served on the plane, but I don’t think it was food.’

  She managed to laugh. ‘I’ll make us something, OK?’

  ‘That would be great. Thank you.’

  She went into the kitchen, glad of something to do to distract herself. She put a heavy pan on the burner and turned the flame up high, then she cut some tomatoes and put them in to roast with a drizzle of oil and a sprinkling of dried herbs. When she and Joe lived here, she always had fresh herbs growing in pots along the window sill and spices waiting to be ground into whatever she was making. There was always good cheese from the deli, fresh bread, fresh fruit. Now, the shelves were empty.

  She dug around in the cupboard, looking for some pasta, keeping her mind focused on what she was doing. While she was waiting for the water to come to the boil, she made a salad with the rest of the tomatoes and some oil and basil. The fragrance of the herbs filled the kitchen with the smell of summer.

  When the tomatoes were done, she crushed them into a thick sauce and spooned it over the drained pasta. She put the salad into a dish, put everything on to a tray and took it through to the other room. He jumped to his feet to help her set the table, then produced a bottle of red wine from his bag and poured them both a glass, though she noticed he hadn’t finished the glass of wine she’d given him earlier.

  They talked about casual, easy topics while they ate. ‘This is good,’ he said. ‘I’m out of touch with European food.’

  ‘I enjoy cooking.’ It was something else she missed. She’d always taken trouble to cook, even when it was just for herself, but since she’d come back, she’d lived on bread, cheese, fruit–things she could just grab and eat. Cooking had seemed like too much trouble.

  ‘Are you going to stay in the UK?’ she asked. ‘Do you have family here?’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m just here to sort out some business. I’m going to France tomorrow for a few days, then I’ll be back to finish some things off. I need to think about what I’m going to do.’

  ‘Are you going back?’ To her, it seemed inconceivable.

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Maybe not to Saudi.’

  He told her a bit about the other Gulf states: about Kuwait, that still bore some of the scars of invasion and war; about the glittering opulence of Dubai, which he dismissed as Blackpool in the desert; about how much he liked Oman–the only Gulf state, in his view, that hadn’t been damaged either by Westernization or by excessive wealth. He wanted to live in an Arab country. ‘A lot of the ex-pats think that the Arabs are cold and distant. They aren’t. They’re among the most friendly and hospitable people in the world. The Saudis aren’t so easy, I’ll grant you that. I like them fine, but they do have…I don’t know what you would call it–a superiority complex, I suppose.’

  Roisin thought about her meetings with Souad, the barely disguised contempt with which she reacted to both Roisin and her views. But Yasmin hadn’t been like that. Nor had Najia. ‘Not all,’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘No, not all.’

  She didn’t want to talk about Riyadh, so she turned the conversation back to him. The level of wine in her glass was barely falling, but she was starting to feel more relaxed. ‘Where were you born?’

  ‘In Lancashire–in a village that’s probably part of Greater Manchester by now.’

  ‘Your family–are they still there?’

  He shook his head. ‘My parents are dead.’

  ‘Brothers? Sisters?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have any children?’ She knew she was pushing. ‘I don’t know you at all, and I feel as though I should.’

  ‘There’s no great mystery about me. I grew up in England. I went to Oxford to do my degree and then I worked for the diplomatic service in France and Germany. I left Europe when I was twenty-seven, and I’ve worked overseas ever since. I’ve been married, but it didn’t last. I have no children. I’m just another ex-civil servant carving out a living.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.’

  He grinned. ‘Really, this is all there is. What you see is what you get. OK, my turn. Tell me about yourself. Where do you come from?’

  She found herself being more forthcoming than he had been, telling him about her family, her adoption, her lack of memories of her early life, her worries about her mother, the way she missed her father.

  He listened quietly, topping up her wine glass from time to time. ‘And do you have brothers? Or sisters?’

  She shook her head. ‘No.’ She thought about the gap that had always been there in her life. ‘I had a sister, but she died when my parents were killed. I don’t remember her. I had a friend, once, who was almost like a sister.’ She realized that all these weeks, she had been waiting for Amy to get in touch, but there had been nothing but silence. It had been the same all those years ago when Amy had gone to London and never come back.

  It was as if he’d read her thoughts. ‘Amy?’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘How did you know? You know Amy?’

  He smiled. ‘I know just about every ex-pat in Riyadh. Yes, I know Amy, and she told me she knew you.’ He topped up her glass again.

  ‘She was my best friend.’ She stared into the deep red of the wine. She told him about how she and Amy had met, the plans they had shared. ‘She told me she’d lost her family, like I had. I used to pretend we were sisters–we were close enough, or so I thought. Then…I didn’t know at the time, but Amy really did have a sister–a half-sister, and her stepfather took her away.’ She looked into the distance, remembering Amy sitting on the settee, talking about what had happened to her. She told him about Amy leaving, about the brief trip to London that had swallowed her up for fifteen years. ‘I don’t know what happened. Except that she found her sister. That’s why she left Riyadh. Her sister was going to have a baby, in Paris. Amy trained as a nurse in Paris. She told me.’

  ‘And her sister’s there?’

  She looked at him. She was having trouble gathering her thoughts. Her glass was still full, which was odd because she could have sworn she’d been drinking it. She took another swallow of wine. ‘Paris. Amy was going to Paris to be an aunt.’ If her sister had lived, maybe she would be an aunt by now.

  ‘What’s the sister’s name?’

  ‘Nell. She was…Oh, you mean Amy’s sister. Jassy. She’s called Jassy.’

  ‘Jassy?’

  ‘Jesamine for short. I mean–shit–Jesamine for long.’ For some reason it struck her as funny and she started laughing.

  He was smiling as he watched her.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘You look better. Better than you did before. More wine?’

  ‘I think I’ve had enough. Jesamine for short…’ She wanted to start laughing again.

  ‘Have you heard from her since you left?’

  ‘No.’ And just like that, the laughter stopped. ‘I thought she’d get in touch, after…She must have heard. But it’s like last time. She’s gone. She was like my sister, and then she went away. I didn’t see her again until she came knocking on my door in Riyadh.’ Amy had said I’m not going to lose touch again. ‘She said she’d keep in touch and then she didn’t. And now I don’t know where she is.’

  She was having trouble enunciating her words and she could hear the wobble of self-pity that had come into her voice. The wine bottle was empty and so was her glass. If she wasn’t careful, she’d end up on a crying jag. ‘Oh, God, ignore me. I’ve had too much to drink. I’m sorry.’

&nbs
p; ‘No,’ he said. I’m the one who should be sorry. It’s OK, Roisin. Listen, it’s getting late and I’m a bit jet-lagged. ‘I’ve got a trip to make tomorrow. Can I call you when I get back?’

  ‘Of course.’ They both stood up and she forced her eyes to focus.

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  She dismissed this with an airy gesture that sent her off balance.

  He steadied her with one hand on her arm. ‘Careful.’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I’m not as bad as I look. You go. Have a good trip.’ This came out rather garbled, but he seemed to understand her.

  ‘If you’re sure.’ He let go of her, watching her assessingly. She kept herself determinedly upright and gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile.

  ‘Call me when you get back,’ she said.

  ‘I will,’ he agreed, brushing his lips against hers.

  When the door had closed behind him, she went back to the living room. Unsteadily, she piled up the plates and carried them through to the kitchen, but she was too tired, and too drunk, to do any more.

  As she wove her way into the bedroom, she reflected that she’d at least have a good night’s sleep–she must have drunk enough to guarantee oblivion. But as she lay in bed trying to still the sway of the mattress, the orange light from the street glowed through the blinds, and her dreams were filled with visions of flames in the darkness, of a path leading to the creeper-hung wall where a pale face glimmered in the shadows, the face serene, the eyes closed.

  But as she drew closer, the dead eyes snapped open. They were wide with terror and somewhere in the shadows the red glow of a cigarette burned, then faded.

  Damien flagged down a taxi and headed back towards the flat he’d taken for the next month, uncertain how long his stay in the UK would be. He wasn’t pleased with himself. He’d gone to see Roisin with an agenda–to find out more about the night when Joe Massey had died, and to get as much information as he could about Amy. And instead of just asking her, he’d pushed the conversation until he could introduce Amy’s name, then he’d let her talk, nudging her with questions as he refilled her glass before the level sank too low so she wouldn’t notice how much she was drinking.