I looked the woman in black in the face for the first time, saw the shape of her head, her hair, features that I recognized. As she took a huge, painful gasp and began breathing again, everything became clear. I helped her sit, before closing the shed door and putting on the light. I wrapped the duvet around her, sat down opposite on the mat and gave her time.
I knew now, finally, what had been bothering me about the night Aamir was killed. The crowd had been too quick to conclude that the attack had been racially motivated. The angry crowd of Asian men had arrived too soon. We’d been watching a carefully staged performance. Smoke and mirrors. Looking at the photograph on Aamir’s bedroom wall, taken during a dance performance, I’d almost got there. I’d just been too focused on the white woman at its centre. I’d missed what else it had been telling me.
The face opposite mine was Asian, dark-skinned and fine-featured, every bit as beautiful as I’d expected. The form still gasping for breath was tall, slender and agile; the body of a dancer, who could move gracefully across snow-covered ground and climb like a monkey. Only the hair was different to the picture I’d carried in my head. The gleaming, ink-black hair I’d imagined was no more than an inch long over the entire, perfectly formed head. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t realized sooner. The woman in black was a man.
‘I saw your photograph,’ I said. ‘On Aamir’s bedroom wall. I’m so sorry.’
He started to cry then. Soundlessly, his face buried in his hands, he wept for the man he’d loved, and for his own life, which he’d been on the brink of ending. I watched his shoulders rise and fall for several minutes, then I moved closer and wrapped my arms around him. He wasn’t much wider than a girl, but so strong; able to support his dance partner high above his head. This was the man who’d been Aamir’s proposed companion at the Rambert Dance Company, the man who’d shared the double bed in his stylish flat, the secret the Chowdhury family had been ashamed to share with the police.
There is little tolerance for homosexuality among devout Muslim communities. To many it is an abomination, a crime against God and nature, possibly the worst form of disgrace a man or woman could inflict on their family. Aamir Chowdhury had been a practising homosexual and it had cost him his life.
‘Were you there, the night Aamir was killed?’ I asked. ‘Did you see what happened to him?’
He nodded and tried to speak, but it was a second or two before I could make out anything above the sobs. ‘They tricked us into meeting there,’ he got out at last. ‘I got away. He didn’t.’
It had been this man, the key to it all, whom I’d seen running away that night. ‘So you know who killed him?’ I asked next. He let his head drop and rise again in a simple act of confirmation.
‘Was it the five men we arrested?’
Eyes the colour of oiled chestnuts gleamed back at me. ‘You know who killed Aamir,’ he told me.
I did. I just didn’t want it to be true. At that moment I’d have given anything for Aamir Chowdhury to be the victim of nothing worse than racial hatred. But I knew I’d have to face it some time.
‘His family,’ I said.
20
WE TALKED FOR the rest of the night. His bruised throat was obviously painful but he managed to tell me that his name was Hashim, that he was twenty-four years old and that he and Aamir had known each other for just over a year. They’d talked about moving away from London, finding a place where no one would know them, of marrying. They’d talked about it in the way some of us talk about winning the lottery, in the way I sometimes dream of a future with Joesbury.
It was never going to happen. Although they’d done their best to be discreet, rumours of the relationship had reached Aamir’s family. His parents had tried to persuade him to go back to Pakistan, to marry a girl from their home village, never to see Hashim again. Aamir had refused, and his loyalty to the man he loved had killed him.
‘Was Aamir’s father one of them?’ I asked, remembering the softly spoken man, who’d been so calm, so dignified in his grief.
‘Yes,’ said Hashim. ‘And his uncle, two brothers and a cousin. His father was the wolf.’
The city started to wake up and still we sat talking, huddled under a duvet in my shed. After seeing the attack on Aamir, Hashim had been living rough, using a stolen burka to move around unrecognized, foraging food wherever he could, knowing that the men of Aamir’s family were still looking for him, that they were watching his mother’s house constantly. He hadn’t dared go back there, as much out of concern for his family’s safety as his own.
As the blackness of the sky started to fade, I broached the subject of Hashim making a statement.
‘You don’t know what you’re asking,’ he told me.
‘We’ll protect you,’ I said, wondering if we could.
‘You’ll never prove anything,’ he said. ‘Any number of people from the community will give them alibis, stand up for them. You think that man, Shahid Karim, really saw five white men running from the park that night? They will all lie.’
‘What about Aamir’s mother?’ I said. ‘His sisters? Surely—’
‘The last time Aamir saw his mother, she disowned him,’ Hashim said. ‘Even if she and his sisters know, they won’t go against the men. The same thing would happen to them.’
I remembered the atmosphere in the Chowdhury household. The polite hostility, the edginess, the eyes that couldn’t quite meet mine.
‘You’ll never bring charges,’ said Hashim. ‘You’ll have to let them go, and when that happens, they’ll come for me. Or my family.’
Round and round we went, in endless circles. I tried to point out that forensic evidence would convict them, no matter what alibis family members came up with. I told him about the footprint found in my garden just hours earlier. I told him there were places we could hide him, until it was all over.
‘Even if you manage to put one or two of them away,’ he said, ‘these families stretch out for ever. So many cousins. I’ll never be free. Not while they know I’m alive. And what happens when they decide to threaten my sisters? Or my mother?’
‘I get that they’re determined,’ I said. ‘But so are the police. They tried to kill a police officer tonight. Every officer in the Metropolitan Police wants a conviction now. Me more than anyone. They want to kill me as well as you.’
As an attempt at solidarity it failed. ‘They didn’t come here for you,’ he told me. ‘They know better than to attack a copper. They were looking for me. I heard them talking about what you said to Amelia. If they’d bothered to check the shed, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’
Hashim got to his feet and, on legs that felt stiff and heavy, I did the same. He opened the shed door and stepped out into the cold air of a December morning. The sun was on its way up and somewhere, on the rooftops of London, it would be possible to see the most wonderful sunrise imaginable. I knew that because the last of the night sky shone a rich petrol blue, the light in the east was just starting to turn gold and the heavy clouds above us were the colour of blood.