The Disappeared

'How was he dressed on that occasion?'

'In normal clothes: jeans, a shirt. His hair and beard were shorter than before.' She glanced anxiously around the room, aware that she was being listened to closely. Most of the Muslims in the hall wore Western clothes, a few traditional dress, nearly all had beards. 'I remember feeling glad about that. In our family we didn't believe that you had to dress- as if you live in the desert to be close to God. That's something that's come from outside. It's never been that way with us.'

The young men in the hall traded disapproving glances.

'Did he say anything to indicate that he had changed in some way?'

'No. But when you look at your child you know. Something had changed in him. He wanted me that day. He wanted things the way they used to be before . . . when he was a boy.'

'Do you have any idea what this "change" was about, Mrs Jamal, what had caused it?'

She lowered her head and looked down at the floor, silent for a long moment. 'I remember thinking, it's over. I was relieved. And when I heard him at dawn the next morning, praying the way he was taught as a child, I knew.'

'What was over?'

'Whatever ideas those people had put in his head.' She nodded towards Anwar Ali. 'People like him. Radicals: She spat out the word. 'My Nazim was never one of them.'

Anwar Ali held her in a steady, unflinching gaze. His friends and associates in the room stirred restively.

'Mrs Jamal,' Jenny said, 'did your son ever mention Rafi Hassan?'

'Never once.'

'Did he mention any university friends?'

'Not by name.'

'You didn't consider that odd?'

'For eight months, from October to June, I hardly saw him . . . When I did, perhaps I was a little selfish. I wanted him with me, not talking about friends.'

'Is the truth more that you didn't want to know?'

'Perhaps . . .'

'Because you knew that groups, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, had no qualms about prising members away from their families?'

'Yes ... I had heard that.'

Jenny made a note that from January to June 2002 Mrs Jamal knew full well that her son was radicalized and had buried her head in the sand. Her own painful experience had taught her how easily a mother could deceive herself.

In terms of evidence, Mrs Jamal had little more to offer, but Jenny nevertheless took her through the events of the weeks following Nazim and Rafi's disappearance. She described her sketchy meetings with DC Sarah Owens, the family liaison officer appointed by the Bristol and Avon police, and her interviews with David Skene and Ashok Singh, the MI5 officers who met her three times before the investigation was effectively brought to a halt in December. Mrs Jamal insisted that the last formal contact she had with the police or with the Security Services was the letter from DC Owens dated 19 December 2002, which contained the nonsensical sentence: 'In the absence of any firm evidence concerning the whereabouts of your son or Mr Hassan, it has been decided that the investigation will be suspended until such time as further evidence becomes available.' A detective whose name she couldn't remember had told her several days before that the Security Services had received intelligence suggesting the two young men may have gone abroad, but no one, she claimed, had ever come up with one solid fact to back this up. In the months and years that followed she wrote countless letters to the police and MI5 both personally and through a number of lawyers, but received nothing in return except barely polite acknowledgements, and often there was no response at all.

She had been met with a wall of silence and indifference.

Before handing her over to the waiting lawyers, Jenny leafed through the photocopied documents Mrs Jamal had given her and pulled out a statement made by Detective Sergeant Angus Watkins on 3 July 2003. She passed it to Alison to read aloud to the jury. Watkins stated that he had examined the door frames of both Nazim and Rafi's rooms in Manor Hall and found identical quarter-inch wide depressions in both, consistent with the use of a blunt object to force entry. He also noted that laptops and mobile phones belonging to both students were missing from their rooms, but there was no sign of their other possessions having been disturbed. Valuable objects such as an MP3 player were still in evidence.

'Was this suggestion of forced entry to both rooms ever followed up to your knowledge?' Jenny asked Mrs Jamal.

'I don't know. I didn't even get this statement until my solicitor wrote to them the following year.'

'Did you go to your son's room yourself?'

'Yes, I did.'

'What impression did you form?'

'All his clothes were still there, and his suitcase. His koran - the one his father and I gave him when he won his scholarship - was still on the shelf. His prayer mat was on the floor. All that we could see that was missing were his phone and computer.'

'What about Mr Hassan's room?'

'I spoke to his mother briefly. It was the same. No computer. Everything else was as he would have left it.'

'Was there no burglary investigation? Didn't your solicitor take this up with the police, ask if they searched for fingerprints or DNA samples?'

'My solicitor . . .' She shook her head in exasperation. 'He was working on the case when he was arrested and went to prison. He claims he was innocent. . .'

'Arrested for what?'

'Something to do with evidence in another case.' She shook her head. 'I don't know what to believe about him.'

'What was his name?'

'Mr McAvoy,' she said, as if she could never forget. 'Mr Alec McAvoy.'

From the corner of her eye, Jenny saw Alison look up with a frown of recognition. And then she remembered. McAvoy: the legal executive she'd met at the morgue, whose card she still had in her purse. She turned to Alison, 'Gould you request that Mr McAvoy attend, please, Usher? This afternoon if possible.' She would like to hear his side of the story before she called the police witnesses. It was becoming apparent that their investigation had been pursued with far less than the usual rigour and she would expect a full and comprehensive explanation.

Fraser Havilland, counsel for the chief of police, had only a few low-key questions for Mrs Jamal. Did the police respond swiftly when she raised the alarm? Would she accept that they had taken appropriate steps to trace her son? Could she agree that if her son really had left the country, perhaps on false documents, that there was little more the police could have done? He didn't get the answers he would have liked, but neither did Mrs Jamal react angrily or emotionally as Jenny had feared she might. When Havilland asked, quite reasonably, what was her chief complaint against his client's force, she replied that she didn't believe it was the police who were to blame. They were being told what to do by a higher authority, she said. They were merely obeying orders. Why else would they have given up so easily?

Martha Denton, counsel for the Security Services, whom it was now clear were the focus of Mrs Jamal's suspicion, shared none of her colleague's deference. Her first question, more of a statement, was a well-aimed arrow designed to do harm: 'You've been disingenuous, haven't you, Mrs Jamal? You knew your son had become a radical Islamist and you are using these proceedings as an attempt to assuage the guilt you feel at not having taken action to stop him being sucked in as far as he was.'

'I don't understand. Why should I feel guilty? It was your people who stopped the police from finding out what had happened to him.'

'And where did you get that idea?'

'The detective who told me about the intelligence, he almost said as much.'

'The one whose name you can't remember?'

'He was about forty years old. Slim.'