Secret Asset

35

The bookshop owner, when called in for questioning, turned out to be Jamaican, an ex-Rasta with a string of narcotics convictions and a history of dabbling in the murkier fringes of what was left of Britain’s Black Power movement.

Now a Muslim, he brought to his new creed the fervour of the converted. And a new name—the Kingston-born Otis Quarrie now went under the exotic soubriquet Jamil Abdul-Hakim. Gone were the dread-locks, and the floppy Rasta hat; now he wore a white caftan and sandals in all weathers. Intellectually he had travelled far—it was clear to Dave Armstrong, as he sat listening to the man talk, that Abdul-Hakim had read many if not all of the Islamist volumes he sold, and was happy to talk about them to anyone at length. Including Dave and a confused-looking Special Branch officer.

Dave had managed to get in a few questions. He had learned that Sohail Din had been a steady employee about whom Abdul-Hakim professed to know very little. He had been punctual, quiet, diligent. Since this account accorded with Dave’s own impressions, there had been nothing more to say. Abdul-Hakim had seemed sincerely sorry about Sohail’s death; equally, he seemed authentically to believe it had been a racist murder.

“Excuse me,” said Dave now, breaking in on the latest tangent, a defence of the rights of Muslim schoolgirls to wear the jilbab. “But if we could just get back to this Imam, Abu Sayed. My understanding is that he was supposed to meet certain followers here but the meeting never came off.”

“There were lots of meetings, mon,” said Abdul-Hakim, who for all his new identity had not shed his Rasta accent.

“With these men?” Dave handed over the photographs of Rashid Khan and the other two men.

The Jamaican glanced casually at them, then shrugged.

“Do you know who they are?” asked Dave.

“No.”

“But you recognise them, don’t you?”

“They were here, mon, sure. So?”

“So,” said Dave, finding his patience tried, “they met once with the Imam and were supposed to meet with him again. What happened? Why didn’t they show?”

“You’d have to ask them di question,” Abdul-Hakim said with a trace of defiance.

“It’s your bookshop.”

“But it was the Imam’s meetings, mon,” said Abdul-Hakim with a smirk, and would not be drawn further.

In the freshly hoovered living room of her house in Wokingham, Thelma Dawnton was distinctly miffed. Trevor had insisted on being present when Simon came back for another chat. He was good-looking, the young Simon, even if he looked a bit scruffy in his parka. He was friendly too, and he liked badminton—though he didn’t get to play very often. Thelma would never have dreamed of being anything but a loyal wife (well, she might have dreamed, but reality was different), but glancing over at Trevor she resented his unnecessary chaperoning.

Still, she had to admit that Trevor knew about some things she didn’t. Like cars—which Simon seemed very keen on.

At first, they had talked about the men next door, and Thelma knew she had been helpful there—more than Trevor, for sure, since, as he would be the first to admit, he couldn’t tell a Pakistani from a Zulu. She’d searched her memory (ignoring Trevor’s “Don’t invent”) and surprised even herself at what she’d come up with.

One of the men had been short, almost a dwarf Thelma remembered, and she was pretty sure he had a trace of a limp. Maybe he’d twisted an ankle, she offered, and Simon had written this down in his notebook. As for the other two, she really only had an impression of one of them, for he was always scowling, as if—she had thought about this since her last conversation with Simon—he was depressed about something. After all (though she decided not to say this to Simon) hadn’t the Femail pages in the newspaper said anger and depression were usually linked? And hadn’t it said that one out of four Britons were depressed? Or was it one out of twelve?

It was then that Trevor rolled his eyes, which infuriated Thelma and, as the same newspaper said, lowered her self-esteem, though she was determined not to show it. She was going to have a word with her husband about this habit of his, and she would do it sooner rather than later.

This time Simon didn’t write anything down, but changed the subject instead. To cars. She’d said the men next door had had a smart motor, and that was when Trevor snorted and Simon smiled—she knew that meant a man thought you were being daft—and focused his attention solely on her husband. “You said it was a Golf these men drove. Black—or was it dark blue?”

“Black.” Trevor was adamant.

“Can you remember anything else about it? Any kind of quirk, anything unusual?”

And Trevor had sat there and thought. “It was a T-reg.”

She wanted to say what did that matter, but then she looked at Simon’s excited face and decided not to say anything at all. Men, she thought with disgust. Men and cars.

Doris Feldman wanted to help but didn’t see how she could. Insomnia might put her in the chair by the window, early in the morning, but there had never been anything to see across the street—not that is, until the night the policemen had shown up. As she said to the young man in the parka who sat sipping a cuppa with her—he could have been her grandson almost, she thought—there was nothing to say about the visitors to the bookshop that she hadn’t said before.

The young man nodded. And he didn’t seem surprised. Almost perfunctorily, he passed over a sheet on which there were photocopied photographs of three young men. All three were Asian in appearance, and at first Doris shook her head when the man in the parka asked if she recognised them. Then like a light bulb, memory lit up. “I know him,” she exclaimed, pointing to the photograph of Rashid. “And him,” she said, pointing to one of the other photos.

“How is that?” asked the man patiently.

“This one,” she said pointing to the picture of Rashid, “bought some cord rope. He started to ask how strong it was and the other chap got cross. ‘Just pay the lady,’ he said, as if I wasn’t there. Rude if you ask me. That’s why I remember him. The other fellow seemed upset. Poor little thing.”

Why had this man come back? He’d told him what he knew already about the lease on 48 Somerset Drive. Which was next to nothing. And Richard Penbury had so much to do—there were three viewings he was conducting that afternoon alone, and about a million chasing phone calls to make.

But here was the policeman again, Simon something, asking him once more to try and remember the man who had let the house on Somerset Drive. A white man, which as he had tried to explain, was precisely the difficulty—an Asian would have been memorable in this part of town. It made for a kind of racism in reverse.

Penbury said, “I probably saw ten people that day about properties. Multiply by five for the week, that’s fifty, and it’s been fifteen weeks or so. Surely you can see the problem.”

“Of course I can, but anything at all you can remember about our Mr. Larrabee would help. I mean, was he tall or short? Did he have bad teeth? It’s things like that you might remember. Had he rung first, for example?”

“He would have done. He wasn’t going to come all the way from London on an off chance we had something to let.”

“London?” said Simon quickly. “How do you know he came from there?”

“Because of his application form. He gave a London address,” said Penbury, weary in the face of the policeman’s interest. “Not because of anything I remembered.”

But curiously something was coming back to him. What was it? Something visual, but it wasn’t a face. Something to do with a hand. “I know,” he said aloud.

The policeman looked startled. “What is it?” he asked hopefully.

“He had one arm in a sling.”

“A sling.” Simon sounded doubtful. “Which arm?”

“Well, I can’t remember, but I suppose it was his left. He signed stuff anyway, so unless he was left-handed…”

“Keep thinking,” said Simon, “you’re doing well.”

Penbury was thinking hard. “Take your time,” said Simon. And he did, concentrating intently, while images of faces, and gestures, and once even a handbag flashed through his mind. But the phone on the next desk rang twice in the space of a minute, loudly, and then Millie, the new girl, shrieked as she spilled tea on her blouse, and it was no good. No good at all. He’d try again, he reassured Simon, who looked disappointed, but now if he didn’t mind, he really had better get on with his work.

Sarah Manpini sat on her own in the control room outside Reading, finding the viewing room a relief after yet another session with the late-night shift patrolmen, who even after two years still seemed to find her surname hilarious.

She was on her third hour of CCTV analysis—only it wasn’t exactly analytical, now was it? More like mindless viewing, just like any couch potato, only nothing much was happening on this filmed record of the M4 traffic either side of Reading. To be accurate, nothing much had happened, since the footage she was viewing was almost a week old. Twenty-seven VW Golfs had triggered the cameras for one reason or another in the forty-eight-hour period she was reviewing, but only three had been black or dark enough to pass as black.

Two of those had been heading east and she duly recorded their number plates. The third had been going west like the clappers—the speed had triggered the camera—but its numbers had not come out on the screen. She replayed the segment of the tape and peered at it closely. Luminescent paint had been applied to the plastic strip of numerals. Clever, she thought—that must be the car. She called in further tapes, now that she knew the time the Golf had triggered the camera west of Reading. And bingo—at the Newbury exit thirty minutes later the Golf had left the M4. From the secondary camera she knew only that it had then headed north.