M.R. Hall: The Disappeared

Amira Jamal was a small, round woman barely more than five feet tall and somewhere in her fifties. She wore a smart black suit with a large, elaborate silk scarf, which she lowered from her head and draped around her shoulders as she took her seat. From a small pull-along suitcase she produced a box file containing a mass of notes, documents, statements and newspaper articles. She was clearly an educated woman, but emotional and overwrought: she spoke in short excited bursts about a missing son, as if assuming Jenny was already familiar with her case.

'Seven years it's taken,' Mrs Jamal said, 'Seven years. I went to the High Court in London last week, the Family Court, I can't tell you how hard it was to get there. I had to sack the solicitor, and three others before him - none of them would believe me. They're all fools. But I knew the judge would listen. I don't care what anyone says, I have always believed in British justice. Look at these papers . . .' She reached for the box.

'Hold on a moment, Mrs Jamal,' Jenny said patiently, feeling anything but. 'I'm afraid we'll have to rewind for a moment.'

'What's the matter?' Mrs Jamal flashed uncomprehending deep brown eyes at her, her lashes thick with mascara and her lids heavily pencilled.

'This is the first I've heard of your case. We'll need to take it a step at a time.'

'But the judge said to come to you,' Mrs Jamal said with a note of panic.

'Yes, but the coroner is an independent officer. When I look into a case I have to start afresh. So, please, perhaps you could explain briefly what's happened.'

Mrs Jamal rifled through her disorganized documents and thrust a photocopy of a court order at her. 'Here.'

Jenny saw that it was dated the previous Friday: 23 January. Mrs Justice Haines of the High Court Family Division had made a declaration that Nazim Jamal, born 5 May 1982, and having been registered as a missing person on 1 July 2002, and having remained missing for seven years, was presumed to be dead.

'Nazim Jamal is your son?'

'My only son. My only child . . . All I had.' She wrung her hands and rocked to and fro in a way which Jenny could see would eventually have caused her lawyers to feel more irritation than sympathy. But she had spent enough years in the company of distressed mothers - fifteen years as a family lawyer employed by the legal department of a hard-pressed local authority - to tell melodrama from the real thing, and it was genuine torment she saw in the woman's eyes. Against all her better instincts she decided to hear Mrs Jamal's story.

'Perhaps you could tell me what happened, from the beginning?'

Mrs Jamal looked at her as if she had briefly forgotten why she was there.

'Can we get you some tea?' Jenny said.

Armed with a cup of Alison's strong, thick, builder's tea, Mrs Jamal started falteringly into the story she had told countless times to sceptical police officers and lawyers. She appeared mistrustful at first, but once she saw that Jenny was listening carefully and taking detailed chronological notes, she slowly relaxed and became more fluent, pausing only to wipe away tears and apologize for her displays of emotion. She was a highly strung but proud woman, Jenny realized; a woman who, given different chances in life, might have been sitting on her side of the desk.

And the more Jenny heard, the more troubled she became.

Amira Jamal and her husband Zachariah had both been brought to Britain as children in the 1960s. Their marriage was arranged by their families when they were in their early twenties, but fortunately for them they fell in love. Zachariah trained as a dentist and they moved from London to Bristol for him to join his uncle's practice in early 1980. They had been married for three years before Amira fell pregnant. The pregnancy came as a huge relief: she was becoming frightened that her husband's very conservative family might put pressure on him to divorce her, or even to take another wife. It was a moment of great joy when she gave birth to a healthy boy.

With all the love and attention his doting parents lavished on him, Nazim sailed through primary school and won a scholarship to the exclusive Clifton College. And as their son became absorbed into mainstream British culture, so Amira and Zachariah adapted themselves to their new social milieu of private school parents. Nazim went from strength to strength, scoring highly in exams and playing tennis and badminton for the school.

The family's first major convulsion occurred when Nazim was seventeen, at the start of his final year. Having spent so much time mixing with other mothers, Amira had come to appreciate what she had been missing cooped up at home. Against Zachariah's wishes she insisted on going out to work. The only position she could find was that of a sales assistant in a respectable women's outfitters, but it was still too much for her husband's pride to stand. He made her choose between him and the job. She called his bluff and chose the job. That evening she came home to find her two brothers- in-law waiting with the news that he was divorcing her and that she was to leave the house immediately.

Nazim gave in to irresistible family pressure and continued to live with his father, who shortly afterwards took a younger wife, with whom he was to have a further three children. Amira was forced out to a rented flat. Nazim loyally visited her several evenings each week, and rather than leave her isolated refused an offer from Imperial College London, and instead took up a place at Bristol University to study physics.

He started at university in the autumn of 2001 in the weeks when the world was still reeling and the word 'Muslim' had become synonymous with atrocity. Uninterested in politics, Nazim barely mentioned events in America and went off happily to college; and in his first act of rebellion against his father he decided to live on campus.

'I didn't see much of him that year,' Mrs Jamal said with a touch of sadness tinged with pride. 'He got so busy with his work and playing tennis - he was trying to get on the university team. When I did see him he looked so well, so happy. He wasn't a boy any more, I saw him change into a man.' A trace of emotion re-entered her voice and she paused for a moment. 'It was in the second term, after the Christmas holidays, that he became more distant. I only saw him three or four times. The thing I noticed was that he'd grown a beard and sometimes he wore the prayer cap, the taqiyah. I was shocked. Even my husband wore Western dress. One time he came to my flat wearing full traditional dress: a white robe and sirwal like the Arabs. When I asked him why, he said a lot of his Muslim friends dressed that way.'

'He was becoming religious?'

'We were always a religious family, but peaceful. My husband and I followed Sheikh Abd al-Latif: our religion was between us and God. No politics. That's how Nazim was brought up, to respect his fellow man, no matter who.' A look of incomprehension settled on her face. 'Later they said he'd been going to the Al Rahma mosque, and to meetings . . .'

'What sort of meetings?'

'With radicals, Hizut-Tahrir, the police said. They told me he went to a halaqah .'

' Halaqah ?'

'A small group. A cell, they called it.'

'Let's stop there. When did he start going to these meetings?'

'I don't know exactly. Some time after Christmas.'

'OK ., .' Jenny made a note to the effect that whatever had happened to Nazim was linked to people he met in the winter of 2001-2. 'You noticed a change in your son in early 2002. What then?'

'He was much the same in the Easter vacation. His father didn't speak to me so I didn't know how he behaved at his house, but I was worried.'

'Why?'

'Nazim didn't talk about religion in my presence, but I'd heard things. We all had. These Hizb, followers of that criminal Omar Bakri, it's all politics with them: telling our young men they have to fight for their people, for a khalifah - an Islamic state. It's poison for young minds.'