‘Well, whoever it was and whatever he said, it did the trick. The buyer came in this morning and signed the contract. He’s not happy, but the sale has gone through and all we need to do now is hand over the keys.’
‘That’s great news,’ said Shepherd. ‘I’ll get my au pair to arrange the move. The purchase of the Hereford house is still okay, right?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Howe. ‘We should have everything sorted within the next day or two.’
‘I’ll probably be out of the country again, but my mobile will still work,’ said Shepherd. He ended the call, unzipped his holdall and emptied the contents on to the quilt. He tossed his dirty clothes into the wicker basket in the bathroom, took clean underwear and socks from his chest of drawers, then put them with three polo shirts into his holdall.
He heard footsteps on the stairs and turned to see Liam in the doorway. ‘You were joking about my pocket money, weren’t you?’ he said.
Shepherd took out his wallet and gave his son a ten-pound note. ‘That’s for two weeks,’ he said.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ said Liam. He picked up the hardback book Shepherd had been reading on the flight from Dubai. ‘Hey, you’re reading a book,’ he said, sitting down on the bed.
Shepherd pretended to clip his son’s head. ‘I can read, you know,’ he said. He’d picked up the copy of the Koran at Dubai airport. He knew next to nothing about the religion of the men who were holding Geordie hostage and he had decided it was about time to fill in the gaps.
Liam flicked through it. ‘The Koran?’ he said. ‘That’s like the Bible, right? Why are you reading it?’
‘I wanted to learn about Islam,’ said Shepherd, sitting down on the bed next to his son. ‘Muslims read the Koran, so I thought I would too.’
‘They want to kill Christians, don’t they?’
‘Where did you get that idea?’
‘That’s what they do. The men who exploded the bombs on the Tube were Muslims. And the men fighting the troops in Iraq are Muslims.’
‘Sure, but that doesn’t mean all Muslims want to kill Christians. It’s a really peaceful religion.’ He nodded at the book. ‘You should read it. If everyone behaved the way the Koran tells people to behave, the world would be a much better place.’
‘What does it say?’
‘It says that a good Muslim follows five rules. They’re called the five pillars of Islam, a bit like the Ten Commandments. You know the Ten Commandments, right?’
‘I think so.’
‘You think so?’
‘We did them at school. “Thou shalt not kill.” That’s one.’
‘Sure,’ said Shepherd. ‘And honouring your father and mother is another you could try to remember. The five pillars are pretty simple. The first is that Muslims have to have faith that Allah is God and that only He can be worshipped, and that Muhammad was Allah’s messenger. It’s a bit like when the Bible says there’s only one God.’
‘So God is Allah?’
‘Yes. But Muslims don’t believe that Jesus was the son of God. The second pillar says that Muslims have to pray five times a day. Between dawn and sunrise, after midday, between midday and sunset, right after sunset and one hour after sunset. That’s why you hear that wailing noise from mosques. It’s telling Muslims it’s time to pray. The third pillar is called zakah, which means giving to charity. Every year Muslims are supposed to give a percentage of their wealth to the needy.’
‘We do that,’ said Liam. ‘We give to charity at school.’
‘Sure,’ said Shepherd, ‘but Islam makes giving to charity part of the religion. The fourth pillar is fasting. Once a year Muslims have to fast for a month during daylight. No food or drink from dawn to dusk. The idea is that it teaches patience and self-control.’
‘Like giving stuff up for Lent,’ said Liam.
‘Absolutely,’ said Shepherd. ‘There are lots of similarities between Christianity and Islam. The fifth pillar’s a bit different, though. Once in their lifetime, Muslims have to make a pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, if they can – it’s their big holy place. According to the Koran, those are the main rules that Muslims have to follow.’
‘So why do they kill so many people?’ asked Liam.
‘It’s not because they’re Muslims,’ said Shepherd. ‘The people who set off the bombs are terrorists. It’s like with the IRA. The IRA were Catholics, but the men who set off the IRA bombs were terrorists first and Catholics second. The Bible says it’s wrong to kill, so the IRA men who set off the bombs couldn’t be called real Christians. It’s the same with the Koran. The Koran doesn’t say that killing is right. It talks about defending the religion, but not about violence. So Muslims who kill aren’t good Muslims. And the vast majority of Muslims are good people. We mustn’t let what’s happening in Iraq, or what happened in London, change how we view a whole religion. That’s what the terrorists want.’
Liam nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’d be a better world without any religion, though, wouldn’t it?’
Shepherd exhaled through pursed lips. ‘Tough question,’ he said. ‘Religion causes conflict, there’s no getting away from that, but following a religion tends to make people behave better. Terrorists notwithstanding.’
‘Because they’re scared of God?’
‘Not necessarily scared,’ said Shepherd, ‘but if you believe that a God, any God, is watching over you, you’d tend to be nicer to those around you.’
‘What about you, Dad? Do you believe in God?’
Shepherd grimaced. ‘You’re full of tough questions today, aren’t you?’ He lay back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling – as he had thousands of times before, most of them with Sue lying next to him. Now she was dead and Shepherd didn’t believe she was sitting on a cloud, strumming a harp. Dead was dead and death was for ever. No heaven, no hell. Did that mean he didn’t believe in God? Shepherd had seen so much evil that it was hard to believe an omnipotent being was somehow in control. But he remembered, too, that when he’d been shot in Afghanistan, he had asked God, through gritted teeth as he lay bleeding on the sand, to keep him alive. It hadn’t been God, of course, who’d stemmed the blood and packed the wound, it had been Geordie. And it hadn’t been God who’d called in the helicopter and carried him to it. That had been Geordie, too.
‘Dad…’ said Liam.
‘I’m thinking,’ said Shepherd.
‘About what?’
‘About how to answer your question,’ he said. He sat up. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I’m honestly not sure. God has never spoken to me, that much I know. And I see a lot of bad in the world. But there are people who truly believe that God has spoken to them, and they often do a lot of good. It’s something that everyone has to decide for themselves. You either believe, or you don’t.’
‘Gran and Grandad do, don’t they? They go to church every Sunday.’
That was true, Shepherd knew. But the God Moira and Tom believed in would abhor gay marriage, abortion and women clergy. They had insisted that he and Sue were married in church, and he had been happy to go along with it. Whenever he had been at their home on a Sunday he’d accompanied them to church. He’d enjoyed the hymns and laughed at the vicar’s occasional jokes, but he’d always seen it as a way to keep Tom and Moira sweet rather than as a way of communing with God. Shepherd’s photographic memory had always come in handy when he was leaving: he’d shake the vicar’s hand, smile warmly and quote an obscure passage from the Bible, word perfect. Sue had always been noncommittal on religion, and they hadn’t talked about it much. There was a Bible in the house, a gift from Tom and Moira, but he and Sue had never opened it. ‘Going to church is a good thing,’ said Shepherd.
‘But you don’t go, do you?’
‘I do if we’re with Gran and Grandad.’
‘But you don’t believe in God, do you?’
‘It doesn’t matter what I believe,’ said Shepherd. ‘What matters is what you believe.’
‘I don’t think there’s a God. If there was, why would He let Mum die?’
‘It’s a tough question.’