41

The policemen had identical grips. Each had hold of his upper arm with a pressure that was merely professional. One was left-handed, one right-handed, and Raza wondered if this had been a consideration in pairing them up. Did policemen, like opening batsmen, work well with a left-right combination?

       Pellets of ice were falling out of the grey sky. Raza was glad to be outside, away from the atmosphere of terror replaced by thrill – the diners had witnessed something, it would be on the evening news, they would tell all their friends to watch.

       A car in the parking lot was covered in snow; it would have been here since the previous night. He wondered if its owner had spent the night in the restaurant, hiding in the bathroom stalls until the closing-up shift departed, scavenging through the kitchens in the dregs of night, finding everything locked up save for condiments. Or perhaps someone was in that car – had been there for days, would stay there until the first spring thaw revealed the corpse of a man so defined by absence that no one noticed he was missing.

       His head was down so she wouldn’t see his face. He wasn’t actually looking at the car, was only recalling he had seen it as he entered the restaurant and had paid it no attention then. All he was looking at now was ice melting at every moment of impact – with paving, with shoes, with the soil in the otherwise empty flowerbeds near the restaurant door. Annihilated by contact, any contact.

       ‘Wait!’ he heard her shout. The policemen stopped, angled their bodies towards her.

       There was the spider, and there was its shadow. Two families, two versions of the spider dance. The Ashraf-Tanakas, the Weiss-Burtons – their story together the story of a bomb, the story of a lost homeland, the story of a man shot dead by the docks, the story of body armour ignored, of running alone from the world’s greatest power.

       Still he didn’t look up, but the space between one footfall and the next told him she was walking towards him in large strides. No other sound in the parking lot; the zip of cars on the highway was backdrop – and hope. Abdullah should have left through the exit around the back, he would be on the highway now, using his phone to call John and set up another meeting place. But it wasn’t enough to be out of the parking lot, he needed time to get away, time in which no one would know they should be looking out for a broad-shouldered, hazel-eyed Afghan.

       ‘I need to make sure that’s him,’ he heard Kim say.

       Raza raised his head and bellowed, ‘Chup!’, the end of the word half-strangled with pain as the policemen’s hands pressed down on his head, forced him to his knees.

       He saw Kim Burton’s eyes refuse to believe what they were seeing. Blood rushed to her face and for a moment she looked angry, furious – Harry’s quick temper manifest in her – as though the world was attempting to play a trick on her which she didn’t find even remotely entertaining. Then she was reaching a hand out to him, and Raza’s body jerked away from her touch.

       ‘Stand back,’ he heard one of the policemen say.

       Raza wasn’t sure she’d heard. She was staring at him as a child might stare at a unicorn or some other creature of legend whose existence she’d always believed in yet never expected to receive proof of.

       In any other circumstance he’d be reflecting her expression back at her. In the twenty years since Harry had handed him marshmallows on the beach and said Kim was asking if he had a girlfriend he’d been imagining and re-imagining their first meeting. Now his mouth twisted at how far his imagination had fallen short.

       His grimace brought her back to the moment. He saw her looking up towards the restaurant window, then at the winter coat . . . she took a step back. She would be wondering, he guessed correctly, if he had set her up from the beginning, from that first phone call from Afghanistan. Why had he recoiled from her touch and why had he said, ‘Chup!’ It was one of the Urdu words with which Harry most liberally seasoned his language – Raza would be aware she knew it meant ‘Be quiet.’ What did he think she was going to say? He saw Harry’s careful intelligence in her – looking at the pieces, trying to understand the picture.

       The ice was falling into her auburn hair, splinters winking as they dissolved. For a moment, he wavered. All he needed to do was allow her to say what she had been about to say when he stopped her. She had only to say, ‘That’s not him,’ and they would let him go. And then – a bead of melted ice trailed down her face, following the route a tear might take – he and Kim Burton would finally sit down face to face, to talk about Harry, to talk about Hiroko, to talk about everything.

       But he would not do that to Abdullah. Not this Raza Konrad Ashraf – not the one who had lain in the hold of a ship bearing the weight of an Afghan boy, not the one who had floated in the dagger-cold sea looking up at Orion, promising himself he would not be as he was before. Every chance, every second, he could give Abdullah he would.

       He looked once more at the snow-covered car, the desolation of it, and wryly considered this new heroic persona he was trying to take on. Truth was, he didn’t have the temperament for this kind of running anyway; they’d catch him soon enough. Perhaps arrest Bilal, or his mother, or anyone else who might be termed accomplice. Kim Burton, too, if she walked with him out of this parking lot. What a gift, then, what a surprising gift, to be able to say the moment when freedom ended had counted for something. Finally, he counted for something.

       ‘Is it him?’ one of the policemen said.

       He looked straight at Kim.

       ‘Hanh,’ he said very softly. Hanh. Yes. Say yes.

       He saw her decision, though he didn’t know how or why she had come to it.

       ‘Yes,’ she said.

       The men nodded and lifted Raza to his feet. Her expression became frantic as she heard the jangle of his handcuffs.

       ‘I don’t know that he’s done anything wrong. He just looked suspicious. My father died in Afghanistan a few days ago. I’m not coping very well. There’s nothing he’s done wrong. Please let him go.’

       ‘Don’t worry,’ the policeman said in the tone of voice men reserve for women they decide are hysterical. ‘We’re just going to ask him a few questions. And I’m sorry about your father.’

       They walked Raza past Kim as they headed to the car. The look on her face was one he knew he’d never forget. No matter what happened to him, what anyone did now, what they said, how they tried to break him, he would remember – as if it were a promise of the world that awaited if he survived – Kim Burton’s expression, which said, clearer than the words of any language, ‘Forgive me.’

       He would have. If it were in his power he would have taken her mistake from her and flung all the points of its gleaming sharpness into the heavens. But he knew it didn’t work that way. He could only try to convey, in that final instant before they dragged him away – in the dip of his head, the sorrow of his smile – that he still saw the spider as well as its shadow.