Tom remained in the psychiatric ward. The doctors were worried about discharging him and their assessments dragged on. I went to visit half a dozen times, driving up and down from London, and found my brother generally in good spirits. He had made a lot of friends among the nurses and patients and he told me about them with a glint of amusement in his eye. I asked him if he would be okay if I went away to Pakistan and he said of course he would.
Preparations for the trip were protracted. Ayesha kept adding and removing names from the list of people we were planning to interview, to the point that I wondered if she was serious about going. She agreed we should talk to the local police in Kahin Nahi and to Inspector Iqbal, the man she suspected of leading the cover-up of her father’s murder. She said her great-uncle Guddu would be the best source of information, and she thought that Masood Jilani, the private detective who was making a painfully slow recovery from the bullet that had damaged his spine, might be willing to meet us if we promised him complete confidentiality.
I suggested we should also try to speak to her uncle Ahmed and to the men Ayesha believed to be behind the murder – the crime boss Javed Shafik and his two brothers. At first she agreed but then changed her mind, saying to do so would be too dangerous. I argued that there was little point in flying all the way to Pakistan if we weren’t going to pursue the investigation to its logical conclusion. She was unconvinced. I set out to find a way round her objections.
In my days covering politics in London I had reported on several stories involving Pakistani exiles, ranging from human rights campaigners and billionaires to benefit fraudsters and criminals. One of the men I had interviewed was a politician called Mohammed Asif, who had been forced to flee Pakistan when his party, the United Front, was defeated and banned by the new government. Granted political asylum in Britain, Mohammed Asif had lived for ten years in north London, until the UF’s fortunes revived and he returned to Pakistan in triumph. He had become the Governor of Sindh Province, with a palatial residence in the capital Karachi and considerable influence over the province’s affairs. I wrote to him and he replied that he would be happy to put his authority at our service; he would provide us with the security we needed to visit and interview whomever we wished.
But when I told Ayesha, she frowned and shook her head.
‘There’s no way we can accept this, Martin. You need to write back to him and turn him down. I’m disappointed you did this without consulting me; I would have told you straight away not to do it.’
‘What do you mean? You asked me to help you find out what happened to your father, and that’s what I’m doing.’
‘Well, I’m not prepared to go along with it.’
Tensions that had grown silently between us were crystallising; our personal dramas had left us both on edge. I should have held my tongue, but I didn’t.
‘So is this about control? Are you vetoing this because it was me who came up with it?’
‘Not at all . . .’
‘Then what reason can you possibly have for turning down an offer that’ll help us get to the men who might have killed your dad? I can’t understand that for one minute.’
‘Okay, I’ll tell you why. Pakistanis who offer help like that are all the same – they make promises, they’re as friendly and as helpful as can be, but they’re all devious. They always end up demanding money or asking for favours. They don’t do anything for nothing. They’re out for themselves.’
‘Hang on. Who are “they”? Are you saying all Pakistanis are devious and out for money?’
‘Pretty much. I wouldn’t trust any of them.’
‘Well, I’m astonished, Ayesha. If I had said that, I’d be in court on a charge of inciting racial intolerance. Yet you say these things about the very country your family comes from . . .’
‘I say it because it’s true. Pakistanis in Pakistan see us Brits as a source of money. That’s all. So don’t believe their promises; they’ll end up fleecing you . . .’
If Ayesha really didn’t want to accept the Governor’s help, there was little I could do about it. Part of me suspected she was right about the money-grabbing; part of me wondered if there were other, more complex reasons for her anger.
I went to see Aled Parry-Jones. He had recently returned from Islamabad and was making a documentary on the Pakistani Taliban for the BBC World Service. We met in a café close to Broadcasting House.
‘So how did your joust with the Foreign Office go?’ he asked as we sat down.
I told him the story of our meeting with the minister and he laughed.
‘Oh, so just the tea and sympathy, then? No practical help? Par for the course, I’d say. What’s your next step?’
‘That’s what I wanted to ask you about. Ayesha has finally agreed to come to Pakistan, but there are all sorts of things bothering me. On the most practical level, what should I do about a visa? If I get a journalist visa, do you think they’ll start asking what story I’m working on? Ayesha doesn’t want the authorities to know we are digging into things like police corruption and cover-ups.’
‘She’s probably right. You’d be better off going as a tourist. If you get a journalist visa, you’ll have the ISI tailing you day and night . . .’
‘The ISI?’
‘Military intelligence – they run the country. People forget that Pakistan exists in a constant state of emergency. The terrorist threat is so huge that the place has become a police state.’
‘But why would military intelligence be interested in someone investigating a family murder?’
‘Because you’re foreign. Because all murders are suspect. Can you be sure Ibrahim’s death wasn’t linked to terrorism? Organised crime, if that’s what he was involved in, has close links with the terrorists over there. It’s just like Northern Ireland, where the IRA and the UVF run the smuggling and extortion rackets.’
‘Well, I can’t be certain. I don’t know what Ibrahim was up to, if anything. But when I mentioned terrorism to Ayesha she was furious.’
‘Okay. So look out for the intelligence wallahs. They’re hot as mustard and they’re leery of any foreigner who doesn’t have a transparent reason for being there. The ISI and the army are the only organisations that function properly in Pakistan. All the rest – politicians, businessmen, judges, police – are riddled with crime and corruption. Talking of which, did you check out the taxi driver connection I mentioned to you? Could Ibrahim have been mixed up in any of that stuff?’
‘I’m not sure. But Ayesha seems pretty worried what we might discover. I came up with a way for us to get to the crooks Ibrahim may have been involved with, but she told me to forget it.’
‘Well, again, she might be right. You don’t want to be poking these guys – they can bite!’
‘Sure. But I got a promise from the Governor of Sindh that he’d provide us with security, that we’d have full protection . . .’
Aled shook his head.
‘You mean you’ve been in touch with Mohammed Asif? Can I ask what you know about the guy; about his reputation, I mean?’
‘Only that I interviewed him once back in the day, when he was living in London. He was meant to be a political exile, but it seems he was claiming housing benefit for a house in Edgware that was owned by his brother. I never really got to the bottom of his politics.’
‘I think you might have made a blunder there, Martin. Mohammed Asif is one of the biggest beasts in the United Front party and they’re definitely not people you should fool around with. The UF are a real power in Karachi – Amnesty says they’re up to their necks in summary killings and torture and abuse. But the biggest problem for you is that you’ve probably just tipped off the guys who are the political patrons of the thugs you suspect of murdering Ibrahim . . .’
‘What? The UF and organised crime?’
‘Sure. The phoney public works schemes that Javed Shafik and mafiosi like him are awarded are all set up by the UF. They’ll be helping Javed cream off public funds and taking their cut, too. If you’ve told them what you’re going over there to investigate, I think you might have put yourself in serious danger . . .’