The Disappeared

'Just so I've got this straight,' Jenny said, 'you're telling me that if I do get to hold an inquest, you'll provide one witness from the Security Services but I won't get to see your records.'

Gillian Golder nodded. 'Pretty much.'

'And you're asking me not to push for any more documentary evidence or to plant the thought in Mrs Jamal's head that there might be secret information to which I won't have access.'

Rhys cut in. 'We're not trying to clip your wings, Mrs Cooper, we just need to get two things clear. First off, the chances of any of our internal notes or records being released to a public inquest are zero. The most you can hope for is that you'll get to look at them in private. Second, we're asking you to trust us when we say we have absolutely no clue what happened to Nazim Jamal and Rafi Hassan. Apart from reviewing the papers, we've spoken to the retired officer who was heading up the case at the time. These two just vanished - I mean, off the face of the earth. OK, so the investigation was only live for a month or so, but there wasn't one solid lead after the sighting on the train.'

'So what do you people think happened to them?'

'We assume they went abroad. Plenty of others did at the time.'

'No other theories?'

'None that stand up. They were just a couple of Muslim boys flirting with radicals, who were most likely shipped off to be fighters.'

'Is it really that easy to escape the country undetected? I don't buy it.'

Both officers smiled at once. 'You'd be amazed,' Rhys said. 'Just because you've got CCTV doesn't mean the picture's any good, or that some klutz hasn't taped over it.'

'I hear the army have routinely taken DNA from dead insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Has any attempt been made to trace them that way?'

'They're both on a database. We'd have been told if anything had turned up.'

Jenny sighed. Something niggled. 'One more question: why was the police inquiry so short-lived? I've heard some officers felt it was closed down prematurely.'

Gillian Golder fielded the question without hesitating. 'Because they vanished so completely it was felt they might be in hiding. A decision was taken to tone things down and concentrate on picking up intelligence. It was thought that if we smoked them out too soon we might miss out on being led to something bigger.'

Jenny nodded, but if the meeting was intended to dispel her mistrust it hadn't succeeded. Golder and Rhys were young, but knew how to go about their business.

They had dangled the possibility of an inquest in front of her, but on condition that she played by their rules. They wanted it low key, not to ask too many questions of the Security Services, to appear to appease the Muslim community and above all to avoid inflaming it.

She considered her dilemma, then decided on the only course she could square with her conscience. 'I don't want my inquest descending into a media circus any more than you do,' she said, 'and I've no intention of providing a platform for wild, unfounded allegations. But as you've driven all this way to see me, you ought to know that I won't tolerate any outside interference in my inquiry. If it's done, it's done properly, thoroughly and independently and in accordance with the law. '

Gillian Golder said, 'We wouldn't expect any less. Honestly, Mrs Cooper, we're as keen to find out what happened as you are.'

Jenny couldn't tell if she had won or lost the encounter; whether she had guaranteed that an inquest would never happen or whether her display of honesty had marked her down as sufficiently naive to be trusted. Nor could she decide if she had been brazenly lied to or if there was more than a grain of truth in Golder and Rhys's claim that the Security Services were clueless as to what had happened to Rafi and Nazim. All she could be certain about was that she was entering a world of which she had no experience.

Fending off Alison's attempts to extract a verbatim account of her conversation with the two intelligence officers, she locked herself away for the rest of the afternoon to write her report to the Home Secretary. She kept it tight and uncontroversial, cited case law sparingly and strove to give every impression of reasonableness. Her conclusion was a model of restraint, arguing that while legally the Home Secretary would be perfectly entitled to conclude there were insufficient reasons to hold an inquest - not least the absence of a body - the interests of justice tipped in favour of a formal inquiry.

'Finally,' she wrote, allowing herself one rhetorical flourish,

while other agencies of the Crown are frequently accused by the deceased's relatives of pursuing self, or political interest, the coroner is a truly independent judicial officer whose only duty is to unearth truth. Although in this case the chances of that occurring are slim, a non-finding is surely preferable to no attempt having been made at all.

She had the report sent to London by motorcycle courier. As it went, she found herself mouthing a silent prayer.

Chapter 6

Mrs Jamal had somehow managed to get hold of Jenny's home number. She arrived back to Ross's announcement that a mad woman had been calling every ten minutes. The answerphone was jammed with messages. In ascending degrees of hysteria, they all rehearsed the same allegations: that she was being watched, followed in the street, that her post was being intercepted and that secret cameras had been placed in her apartment. 'I am a prisoner in my home,' was a phrase she repeated many times. The final call was so tearful Jenny could barely make it out.

Personal contact with the next of kin should be kept on a formal footing: to enter into a relationship with surviving family members could only lead to trouble. Relatives seldom understood that the coroner was acting purely in the public interest, and that any appearance of friendliness was out of courtesy and a desire to make the process as painless as possible for those left behind. The correct way to deal with Mrs Jamal would have been to write her a letter politely explaining that it was inappropriate for her to behave in this way and asking her to desist. To respond to such behaviour by phoning back would risk creating expectations she could never fulfil. But what sort of person could ignore such desperate pleas for help?

Mrs Jamal snatched up the phone on the first ring. 'Yes. Who is it?' She sounded fraught.

'Mrs Jamal, this is Mrs Cooper, the—'

'Oh, thank goodness,' she cut in. 'I knew I could trust you. You were sent by God, I know you were. No one else understands, no one else.' She continued without drawing breath. 'These people are hounding me day and night, Mrs Cooper, they won't leave me alone. They're watching my flat, they follow me in the street. They've been in here at night, I know they have. They've moved things. They've put bugs in the flat, that's what they've done. They're listening to this now. I've got to leave, I have to go —’

'Hold on a moment. Calm down. Let me speak.'

'Yes, yes, of course, but you have to believe —’

'Listen to me.'

Finally, Mrs Jamal stopped talking.

'Now keep calm. Getting worked up is going to achieve nothing.'

'No, you're right. I'm so grateful —’

'Tell me who you think is watching you.'

'I don't know who they are. They're men. White men. I don't know what they want with me. I don't know anything. I'm just a mother . . .' She sniffed back tears.

'Remember last time we spoke - you went to the window and there was no one there.'

'They listen to me. They know when to disappear. That's why I have to go somewhere they can't find me.'

'Mrs Jamal, you're upset. You're going through one of the most stressful experiences anyone can imagine. You've lost your son and you're desperate to know where he went. Now think about this: you don't know where he went, that's why you want an inquest. No one has any reason to follow or listen to you. I know it may be hard to understand, but I think your mind may be playing tricks.'