Secret Asset

13

It was his turn to close up the shop, and since it was Thursday it was not until seven-thirty that he turned off the lights, took a last tour of the three rooms on the ground floor in case anyone was so immersed in a book that he would lock them in, then firmly shut the front door and turned the key in the double set of Chubb locks.

It had been exactly a week since the Imam had come to the shop. Then Sohail had deliberately stayed in the stockroom, counting inventory, lest his own tense nerves be obvious. To Sohail’s surprise, Abu Sayed had not gone upstairs, but stayed in the office off the main room for almost an hour. No one joined him, and when Abu Sayed did emerge he had walked straight out of the shop into a waiting car.

What had gone wrong? Why had the three young men not shown up? Sohail racked his brain to see if he could have got it wrong. But no, he was certain there had been an appointment set up between the Imam and the young men. Yet the uncertainty of why it hadn’t happened gnawed at him like an unappeasable hunger, and he felt he had badly let down both Jane and Simon and their unnamed secret service, which he was certain was MI5.

Was it possible, and he felt his adrenaline stir at the thought, that the people watching—he knew they must have been there—had been detected? He himself had looked for any sign of external surveillance, on his way to and from work; at lunchtime too, he would look around as he walked to eat his sandwich in the park. There was nothing that he could see, hard as he looked.

So what reason would the Imam have to suspect something was amiss? Or the bookshop owner for that matter, who had behaved as he always did with Sohail—slightly aloof, but scrupulously polite? In fact, it was Sohail’s colleague Aswan who had been the object of the owner’s attention most recently—when Aswan had asked if he should now retrieve the video from upstairs, the owner had responded tetchily, saying he should listen more and ask fewer questions.

Yet could it be, and now he began to feel even more jittery, that somehow it was suspected that Sohail was not what he pretended to be? A young man, quiet, devout, serious, working hard to help his family. He tried to be rational: this portrait was not a front; this was what Sohail was, and there was no reason for anyone to think he was anything else at all.

He waited for the bus for almost fifteen minutes, then had to stand for half the journey home. Usually, he could find a seat and read. He was in the middle of English Torts: A Casebook, for if he had good reason to postpone university for a year, he thought he might as well not let all the time go to waste. He liked the precision and arid tautness of the prose. The book was almost theoretical in its abstraction, but unlike the Islamic literature he was surrounded by during the day, English law seemed incapable of perversion in the hands of fanatics.

He wondered what it would be like to lead a normal life again. Not to have to worry about what he said, or the expression on his face. To study again, in an environment where different opinions could be expressed in argument rather than violence. It was the approval of violence he found most disturbing in the people around him at work; the casual acceptance of, even applause for, the loss of life, as though lives were not real, as though human beings were just symbols.

Not that England was free of violence. The BNP had almost won a council seat in the area where he lived with his parents. He himself had twice been chased by white youths, shouting racist abuse, and once he had been shaken down for money by two drunks not more than a hundred yards from his home. But at least with such people, they clearly broke the law; they could hardly claim the law was somehow on their side.

He got off the bus early, as he usually did, so he could walk a bit before he reached home. There his mother would have held supper for him on this, the late night of the week, and his little sister would be bathed and ready for bed.

The dark was drawing in, and he quickened his pace as he walked along the main road of his neighbourhood, then turned into a side street. At its end there was a long alleyway, which ran between a warehouse on one side and the back of a row of shops on the other. It was poorly lit, and a little spooky—his little sister would not walk through it even in broad daylight—but it knocked five minutes off the way home and he turned down it without hesitation. As he hurried along, he thought momentarily that he heard someone behind him, but turning around saw nothing except the long shadow of the warehouse cast by the distant street light. Don’t be so nervous, he told himself, then thought again of how he had let Jane and Simon down. And possibly—he knew it sounded pompous, but it was true—the country as well.

And it was with these feelings of disappointment that he looked up to see a figure approaching. He was instantly wary, until he saw the person was as dark as he was, and then he relaxed. And as the man came closer Sohail thought there seemed something familiar about him. The man was smiling broadly—even in the dusk Sohail could see his teeth—and he called out, “Sohail!”

Reflexively Sohail began to smile back, assured this was a friend after all. And sure enough the short man’s face was familiar. I know, thought Sohail, it’s the little chap who didn’t turn up at the bookshop the second time. But what is he doing here?