On the desk a Celtic mug with a broken handle was being used for two pencils and a biro. The desk had a thin layer of white dust on it, undisturbed. Even the chair had dust on it.
‘Oh.’ Billal stood in the doorway looking in, disappointed. ‘I thought it would be busier. He spent a lot of time in here, I just thought… I dunno.’ He was looking at the filing cabinet, the only object of promise in the room other than the hard drive. Bannerman followed his gaze and went over to it, opening the top drawer and finding it empty. He opened the second drawer. A set of accounts books still in the sealed clear wrapper.
In the third drawer down by the floor he pulled out two cricket magazines and, rummaging at the back, a copy of Asian Babes. Billal saw it and seemed shocked.
Bannerman stood up and pointed at the hard drive. ‘We’re going to take this, OK?’
Billal shrugged. ‘Sure.’
‘Because it may have something on it.’
‘Sure, sure.’ He shrugged again. ‘Take whatever you want.’
Everything was bagged and tagged and loaded into the van. Billal had finished his prayers and came out of the bedroom looking calmer, ready to see them out. He stood at the door and signed the evidence receipts for Bannerman. Morrow made a point of shaking his hand.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Bye.’
‘Where does your brother do business with?’ she asked.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Where does he import from? Does he ever have dealings with Arabic countries?’ She was asking to find an anomaly in the pattern, to give Bannerman hope. VAT fraud was an EU crime.
‘Like where?’
‘Oh, you know, Saudi Arabia, those countries, maybe even Afghanistan?’
‘No,’ said Billal thoughtfully. ‘Just Europe, I think. They don’t make silicone chips in Afghanistan, do they?’ He half smiled. ‘They can’t even make chips there, can they? Bit backward…’ Bannerman turned away.
She tried again. ‘What makes you think he only deals with Europe, does he travel?’
‘No, he just mentioned it.’
Morrow looked at him but found he was looking at Bannerman’s back. ‘Thank you for all your help, Mr Anwar. We’ll listen to the tape and see what we can find out about your dad.’
‘Thank you.’ Billal was still watching Bannerman. ‘Thank you very much.’
Behind him a bedraggled Meeshra appeared at the door of the bedroom, the baby crying behind her. ‘Billal…’ she said plaintively.
‘Coming,’ said Billal over his shoulder. ‘I’m coming.’
The atmosphere in the car was so tense that at one point she thought Bannerman might be on the verge of crying. He drove, hunched over the wheel and his voice sounded changed.
‘Before five o’clock I want you to go to the university and see if you can find out more about him,’ he said. ‘If he’s working this with anyone else. He could have made contacts there.’
‘You going to liaise with Fraud?’
‘Only if I have to.’
‘Makes sense of the ransom demand though, doesn’t it? Remember they shut the Cayman Island banks where everyone was laundering the VAT money?’
‘Did they?’
‘Yeah, in that lecture they said no major movement of money had happened for a year, since they clamped down on the Caymans. Said they must be keeping it all in cash, look out for lock-ups. Big boxes of readies, large cheques cashed.’
‘So, Omar could have millions in boxes in a lock-up and he’s let them keep his dad?’
‘Could be.’
‘What kind of prick does that?’
Morrow shrugged. ‘A prick that doesn’t want to get caught?’ She smiled.
‘You’re fucking chuffed, aren’t you?’ He spat the words through a tense jaw, threatened, as if she’d orchestrated the whole thing to spite him.
‘Well, I’m fucking delighted it’s not my case.’
The frank admission broke the space between them and Bannerman smiled at the road ahead. ‘Bastard.’
They drove on for a moment until Morrow spoke. ‘Billal’s not that bright, is he?’
‘Hmm. Very into his family. Did you see him blushing when I found that scuddy mag?’
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s odd. You saw the rows of that stuff in his dad’s shop. It’s no worse than them and they’re straight across from the counter. He’d have been looking right at it every day he worked there.’
‘Maybe he doesn’t use porn. Maybe he did once, and feels bad about it.’
She had the impression that it was Bannerman’s own story. ‘Maybe he’s short-sighted,’ she said to brush over it. ‘Anyway, he just gave his brother up.’
Neither of them said anything but they were both thinking that Billal didn’t seem all that sad about it.
Shugie stayed on the same bar stool all afternoon. Even when he went out for a smoke he came back and found that Senga had shooed squatters away from his perch. The money evaporated over six rounds or so, he found he only had enough for a whisky but he didn’t want to ask her for that. Women knew when the money was running out. They could smell it, like loneliness.
Shugie stumbled off his stool, caught himself from falling by grabbing hold of the end of the bar, just had time to congratulate himself on his snake-like reflexes when his knees melted like butter in a pan and he dropped softly to the floor, sighed and fell asleep on the cold stone. A guy coming back from a smoke saw him go down and moved to yank him up again.
‘Leave it!’ ordered Senga protectively. ‘Leave it.’
The men in the bar looked at Shugie, lying on his side, cuddled into the brass foot rail. Senga might allow dozing on chairs but she forbade sleeping on the floor. There must be something between them.
24
The absolute dark took on a life. It was an animal, a gas, a liquid that filled Aamir’s nose and suffocated him, coated his eyes, crept in through his ear canal and crossed membranes, seeping into capillaries, veins, arteries, catastrophically colonising.
There was nothing. No noise from outside, no chinks of light, nothing coming back. Nothing.
Aamir shook his head, opened his eyes wide, shut them, slapped his own face, tugged at the skin on his belly but nothing could stop it. He began to move, slowly at first, tentatively trying to get away from it. He shuffled his feet, chipping rust dust from the floor with his toes, scurrying back and forth along the lowest point of the drum, touching each end with his outstretched hands, slamming into the wall and pushing himself back. He did it several times before he realised that he wasn’t outrunning it but running into it, deeper and deeper and now he was fathoms down into the dark and would never be able to swim out of it.
He doubled over, dropped messily to his knees. Face pressed tight to his knee, he bared his teeth and bit deep into the skin but felt nothing. His hands stretched slowly out in front of him. He could feel the rust flaking off in papery sheets, coming away at the merest nudge of his fingertips.
Through the blackness the deep red blood on his mother’s sari seeped towards him and he was powerless to move away. He closed his eyes and felt the warm blood wash over his scalp, down his back, over his buttocks. Engulfed in the salt of her he continued to breathe. There was not a chink of mercy left in the world for him.
He could hear himself breathing loudly through his nose, panting like a dog. Rust crumbled to dust, he could smell it. Shards scratched at the material of his pyjamas, cutting into it and sticking into the soft skin on his knees.
His life had no meaning. It was intolerable. The last three decades had been a hollow waste of time.
Hands searched the floor in the oily darkness, fingertips jamming recklessly into rusting iron, pulling it up and crumbling it in his hands, feeling again and again, getting sharp splinters of it stuck under his nails, in his palms, until he found a shard of iron that was solid.