M.R. Hall - The Disappeared

From his abrupt telephone manner, she had expected DI Pironi to be gruff and taciturn with a detective's jowly face and dead, unshockable eyes. The man who wandered over with an espresso and a tumbler of water looked more like a businessman who'd just signed off an unexpectedly lucrative deal. He was in his early fifties and trim. His smart-casual clothes looked Italian and stylish: black knitted polo shirt beneath a wool blazer. She noticed his nails - filed and buffed.

'Mrs Cooper?' He had a light Welsh accent.

'Yes.' She half-rose from her chair and shook his hand.

'I've only got a few minutes, I'm afraid.'

'No problem. Anything exciting?'

'I'm giving evidence at Short Street. Heard of Marek Stich? He's Czech. Shot one of the uniform lads late last year. Real piece of work.'

'I know. Owns a nightclub?'

'That's one of his interests. Our boy was fresh out of training college - pulled him over for jumping a light, and pop .'

'Is he going down?'

'I'd like to think so. All on forensics, though - not one single decent witness with the balls to come forward.' He shook his head as he stirred a sweetener into his coffee. 'You know what really turned the public off the police? Roadside cameras. Machine as judge, jury and executioner, no discretion involved. Makes people despise all authority.'

'You're a benefit-of-the-doubt man?'

'Always have been.' He smiled as he raised his cup to his lips.

Jenny tried to marry the smart-dressing modern detective with what little she knew of the reality of life in the force. What did it say about a policeman near the end of his career that he'd maintained such studied self-control? What was he hiding?

She cut to business. 'Alison tells me you were in charge of the observation on the A1 Rahma mosque.'

'Uh-huh.' He set his cup back on its saucer with measured precision.

'Can you tell me what you were looking at?'

'We had some intelligence that extremists were operating inside it, setting up cells to try to recruit young men to Hizbut-Tahrir and other organizations. We weren't tooled up with informers at the time; we had to sit and watch for three months, get to know names, times and places.'

'Are you allowed to say where this information was coming from?'

'Let's say we were one of the partners in the operation.'

'With the Security Services?'

'I'm just a humble DI, Mrs Cooper. I'd get into all sorts of trouble for giving straight answers to questions like that.'

That was more like a policeman: letting her know but pretending he wasn't, thinking the way he did it was clever.

'Let's imagine a hypothetical situation,' Jenny said. 'Say MI5 had a tip-off and wanted a mosque looked into. They'd hook up with the local force and get them to do the sitting around in cars, right?'

'They've taken on a lot more staff in recent years. These days they might run it all themselves.'

'But back then?'

'We were all a lot greener, weren't we?'

'Meaning what - that things were missed that shouldn't have been?'

'I'm just saying - we'd do it differently now. We'd have insiders, hook onto things more quickly. Pre-empt trouble before it happened.'

Jenny pushed her hair back from her face and held him in an innocent gaze she thought might pique his interest, throw him off guard a little. 'Nazim Jamal and Rafi Hassan were two of the young men you were watching, presumably?'

'Yes.' His eyes traced her neck down to the open top of her blouse.

'How long for?'

'A number of weeks as far as I recall.'

'Have you any idea what happened to them on the night of 28 June 2002?'

'After they left their meeting? No.'

'Nobody followed them?'

'My officers saw them leave, but their job was to stay put and watch who came and went from the building, not to follow those two across the city.'

'Do you think they went back to their rooms in the hall of residence that night?' ,

'I'm sure you've seen my team's reports, Mrs Cooper. We don't know for sure, but they were seen on the London train the next morning.'

'Any idea where they went after that?'

'The CCTV tapes at Paddington had been overwritten by the time we got to them. The trail went cold. We got as far as finding out that there were rat-runs through France, Italy and the Balkans, but there was no positive sighting. If they made it to Turkey, they could have caught a flight out to Kabul, Islamabad, wherever.'

He swallowed the last drops of his coffee and carefully dabbed his lips with the paper napkin.

Jenny said, 'Am I right in assuming that your partners took the lead role once it was known they'd disappeared?'

'We did what we could, within our resources. Whether others looked further, I wouldn't know. We didn't receive any more information.'

'There are very few police statements in the papers Mrs Jamal handed me. I presume your officers made detailed observation logs.'

'We did the job we were asked to,' he said and glanced at his expensive gold watch. Jenny imagined him letting villains see it across the interview table, showing them that a cop didn't have to go without.

'So how about some names - people who knew these boys? They must have had friends and associates you were looking at.'

Pironi glanced out through the window. She knew he was treading a fine line. While conducting a joint operation with the Security Services he and his officers would have been warned time and again that secrecy was paramount, but she sensed his vanity wouldn't let him leave her with nothing.

Pironi said, 'You know the form. All I can tell you is which of the names in the statements we made at the time we considered the most important. There was a mullah, Sayeed Faruq - must've been about thirty at the time - disappeared to Pakistan a couple of weeks later. Never spoke to us. Never came back. And there was another guy, a radical we think set up this halaqah. His name was Anwar Ali. He was a regular at the mosque, and held smaller meetings at his flat. I investigated him myself, couldn't pin a thing on him, but I had a hunch he was drawing kids in and passing them on to others. He was a post-grad at the university . . . politics and sociology, something like that.'

'Any idea what happened to him?'

Pironi studied his well-kept hands. 'I agreed to meet you this morning because Alison's a good friend of mine. We worked out of the same station for fifteen years. She took her fair share of risks and this isn't the time of life for her to be taking on any more. I'd be grateful if you didn't send her out to talk to these people.'

'I wouldn't make her do anything she's uncomfortable with.'

'That's not what I asked.'

He looked into her eyes. She felt like a suspect.

'Fine. Understood.'

'Good.'

He reached a scrap of paper out from his pocket and tucked it under his saucer.

'Nice meeting you, Jenny.' He got up from the table.

'One more thing,' Jenny said. 'Is this case still of any interest to anyone?'

'You won't have to scratch far to find out.'

He moved off towards the door.

She watched him jog across the road and jump into an unmarked squad car that was parked opposite, a junior detective at the wheel. She reached the folded message out from under his saucer and opened it. Printed on it was the name Anwar Ali and an address in Morfa, south Wales.

It was late in the afternoon before she had processed the most urgent files on her desk. Among the mountain of paper had been Dr Kerr's report on the Africans in the refrigerated trailer. He'd found traces of paint under their nails, suggesting they'd tried to scratch their way out before succumbing to the cold. The youngest of the three was a fifteen-year-old boy dressed only in a Manchester United football shirt. None had any papers or documents to identify them by. They too would now be stored in the mortuary until the police, at some indeterminate time, decided they had exhausted their inquiries.