Often Laura broke down as she recounted her story, and some details she hurried past since they were clearly too painful to recall. But Justin was struck by her way of describing Yunus, who appeared in the character of her rescuer, the one who had fallen into this hell from a better place, where people reach hands of succour across the void. And just as Laura made a protective wall around Yunus, so Justin made a wall around Muhibbah, so that it was tacitly agreed between them that neither Yunus nor Muhibbah would be singled out for punishment.
Meanwhile, Laura insisted, the other girl must be rescued. Justin recalled the case of Sharon Williams, as Iona had described it. Almost certainly it was Sharon Williams whom they had to rescue. Almost certainly Iona would be aware of what must be done, and was probably already doing it. The first move, therefore, would be to get through to Iona and impart what she needed to know of Laura’s story. That afternoon he tried several times to ring her, but was told always that she was out on a case and would probably not return to the office until next day. The case clearly required Iona’s complete attention, for her mobile phone was also switched to the answer service.
In a few hours, Justin reckoned, Yunus would be out of the country, taking Muhibba with him, not to safety indeed, but to the rock hard discipline of the desert, and a marriage that would protect her honour by killing her love. So it had to be, and she herself had decided it. He looked with the remains of his love at the poem that she had given him: Yeats at his most vapid and sentimental, and Muhibbah likewise. For all those months, the poem said, she had looked at Justin and sighed, and for all those months he had been to her like wine: intoxicating, attractive, but forbidden. Such was the meaning of the poem as he now read it. And yet he lacked the surgical skills to remove her from his heart.
In the few hours of their re-meeting he had come close to loving her, close even to marrying her. He had suffered through her humiliation, had burned inwardly with shame as she was shamed, had sought in every corner of his mind for the excuses that she needed and the ways of healing her wound. And when she had fled – fled because honour required it, and only love could hold her back, a love that he had so veiled in hesitation that she could no longer rely on it – he saw the gesture as wholly admirable. She was saving him from her disgrace, and taking it with her into the void. She would disappear now, and this time finally. And he was never to know, never to enquire, what became of the girl he had so much loved.
Laura was adamant that she could not take her story to the police. There were no witnesses to what she had suffered save Yunus, but what kind of a witness was he, whose side was he on, and where would they find him? Besides, she would have to face up to her own behaviour: self-defence? Attempted murder? Maybe murder by now. She longed to be released into a purer world, where things like this could not happen. To be part of a police investigation, to revisit the foul sewer that she had escaped from – how could she do this now? And what would it mean for her rescuer?
But they should explore the block of flats, Laura said, where she was staying, to see if the other girl were really there. Maybe this story of a mistake was invented for the occasion, by way of scraping together what few morsels of blamelessness might have dropped from between their criminal fingers.
Two police cars were parked in the street outside, a driver sitting in each of them. The first person they encountered on the stairs was Iona. She had her arms around a young girl, whose blanched and tear-stained face Justin had seen once before, on the staircase of the Angel Towers, during his ill-fated visit to Muhibbah’s family. Iona looked up in astonishment.
‘Justin!’ she cried. ‘How strange. Busy now, but I will ring you tonight.’
And she turned again to the girl, whom she was coaxing step by step down the stairs, and into one of the parked police cars. A woman in uniform followed them, carrying a small suitcase, which she stowed in a business-like way in the boot of the car. As Justin and Laura turned the key in the door of her flat another police officer passed, leading a young man in a tattered sports-jacket, grey flannel trousers and an unbuttoned shirt. The young man was thin, good-looking, with a crown of dark hair slightly receding at the brows. His brown eyes were bloodshot, as though he had been crying, and there was a nervous tremor around his mouth. He was carrying a plastic holdall in one hand, and a book in the other, and he stumbled slightly as he passed them so that the officer reached out to support him, only to be shrugged away.
That evening, as Justin, Iona and Laura sat together in Laura’s flat, over a magnum of Justin’s favourite Rioja, they each rehearsed their separate pieces of the story. Laura objected violently to the arrest of the teacher, saying that he might be the best thing, the only good thing, that had ever entered the life of that poor girl, and the only obstacle between her and a life of slavery.
‘That may be true,’ Iona said. ‘But when the adoptive mother comes to us with a tale of abduction, saying that the girl has been absent from home for two weeks, we have to act by the rules. Sure Mrs Williams was put up to it by that vile seaman she lives with who, because he couldn’t have the girl, decided to punish her instead. But that doesn’t alter the case.’
‘But she clung to the teacher, wanted nothing but to stay with him!’
‘Listen Laura, that’s how it always is. The girls in our care are vulnerable, needy, desperate for affection, and easily tricked into giving it. We have tens of abduction cases every year. And usually, when we come to collect the girls, they cling to their seducers and tell us to fuck off and leave them alone.’
‘So will he go to jail?’
‘That depends on the girl’s testimony. Usually they clam up, and say nothing. Wendy – Sergeant Pinsent – has to get her to talk, and it won’t be easy. Also it depends on you.’
Iona leaned back in the armchair and sipped from her glass, looking across at Laura in the way she had, when she put her mind on display.
‘Why on Laura?’ Justin asked.
‘If Laura tells her story to the police they will have to investigate Bogdan Krupnik and Hassan Shahin. They will come up with the real tormentors of that poor girl, and why she fled to her teacher. His behaviour will appear in quite another light, and it is unlikely that a jury will convict him.’
Laura shook her head silently, and Justin was glad. Any police response to Laura’s story would lead to enquiries about the Shahin business, and therefore about Muhibbah and her role in Copley Solutions. Besides, both of them had invested emotions in the Shahin children that they would rather not openly confess to. And there was something else too. Justin was uncertain what it was, but he saw that Laura was concealing her wounds, and had some reason for not exposing them, even if healing required it.
‘Of course,’ Iona said with a sympathetic nod, ‘there is the matter of sex. Even if she has reached the age of consent he can still be charged with exploiting a relation of trust for sexual purposes.’
‘But if she were just staying with him, as he said, sleeping on the sofa?’
Iona laughed.
‘Do you believe that? A pretty girl with a crush on her teacher, all ready and willing to be used? Do attractive girls stay overnight with attractive men on the sofa next door? Besides, we found her in his bedroom, dressed in nothing but a bathrobe. Mrs Williams testifies that he had been hanging around the Angel Towers, obviously in wait for her, that he had even come knocking at the door on some excuse, hoping to find her. And of course he had twice come to see me, hoping I would prize her loose from her adoptive family and make it that much easier for him to take her under his wing.’
When Iona had left them Laura turned to Justin with a worried look.
‘You know, Justin, I don’t want to stay in this place. I shall lie awake shaking as I did last night. If I were to sleep on your sofa, assuming you have a sofa?’
‘Do attractive girls stay overnight with attractive men on the sofa next door? Of course, I don’t mean to imply that you find me attractive.’
‘Oh but I do,’ Laura replied. ‘However I still want to lie on the sofa, and to sense you sleeping next door.’
Justin’s sleep was disturbed by a dream. In the dream Muhibbah was crying, imploring him to help her. A strange hand was on her shoulder and a knife was held at her throat. He explained carefully that the time had come to play by the rules, and that her past behaviour must be taken into account when deciding what it would be permissible for him to do. ‘Please, Justin!’ she cried, ‘I love you, will be good to you, will never leave you!’ He consulted the file of correspondence with Lesprom, in which he was sure he could find instructions as to how he should respond to her. But the pages were written in Arabic script and he couldn’t read them. There must be some other source that he could consult and he hastily searched his desk for it. Then she reached across to him. In her hand was a piece of paper, on which she had written ‘I look in your eyes and I sigh’. He looked in her eyes. And they stared steadily into his as the knife speared her throat.
With a cry Justin awoke. A figure in a white nightdress stood above him, shimmering in the twilight that seeped through the curtains.
‘Perhaps Iona was right after all,’ Laura said. ‘I don’t want to do anything. But would you mind just holding me for a while?’
Justin pulled back the bedclothes and guided her in beside him. She was warm, soft, with a clean smell like a freshly bitten apple. She put her head on his shoulder and her arms around his body. And she sobbed herself to sleep.