The screen view was from a higher vantage point again, but this time a series of highlighted dots, labelled A, B, C, etc., also appeared onscreen, scattered along the shoreline for a range of roughly twenty miles.
They worked their way through the dots carefully. Several were false positives – large boulders detected as buildings, or else abandoned sites, including a tiny village perched right on the shore, now full of deserted crumbling shacks.
Then, just half a mile down from the former village, they examined a number of shapes bunched closely together. They sat under a high rolling dune which half-disguised them from the normal perspective of the MOD aerial cameras. But zoomed in on and looked at carefully, they revealed a suspiciously orderly arrangement, with a central blob that could have been the block house Luckhurst had mentioned, surrounded by a thin line that might have been a wall. A dusty square sat next to it, and at its far end was a long dark rectangle.
‘The pen you were kept in,’ asked Peggy, ‘was it roofed?’
‘Part of it was. With plywood covered by tar paper – to keep us warm,’ Luckhurst said ironically.
Peggy laughed and increased the magnification by a notch. The blob sharpened slightly, and she could see that, yes, it was a structure – nature didn’t like straight lines. ‘What about this? Have we found it?’
Luckhurst peered closely at the scene. Finally he nodded. ‘It must be. There’s the wall, and the compound, and the pen next to the patch of ground where they let us out to exercise and where the food was cooked. There’s something else inside the compound wall…’
‘They look like huts,’ said Peggy.
‘Probably – that’s where Khalid’s men would stay, I suppose. But what are those?’
He pointed to some small triangular shapes that sat at the bottom of the square. ‘Can we look at them from a different angle?’ he asked hopefully.
‘You mean, like Google View?’ Peggy said, referring to the perspective showing scenes at street level. ‘Not very likely,’ she said, and laughed at the thought of a Google representative venturing out to the camp with a video camera. She looked back at the screen and suddenly said, ‘I know – they’re tents. Lots of tents. There must be a dozen of them.’
‘Taban said there had been visitors.’
‘And now we know exactly where they were staying.’ The next step, thought Peggy, was finding out who they were.
Chapter 27
It had taken Tahira six months to persuade her father that the shop needed more than one till. Always cautious, always suspicious even of his own family, Mr Khan had resisted all her efforts to install another cash register, ignoring the queues that formed as a result, sometimes halfway to the shop’s front doors. It was only when he had seen with his own eyes two customers leave one evening in disgust, not prepared to wait ten minutes to pay for a bag of crisps and a bottle of Sprite, that he had relented.
In the same way, Tahira had managed to change the stock – gradually adding more staples for people who’d run out and didn’t want to make the journey to the big supermarkets; and more high-end items, like ready-made curries and sauces, for the increasing number of young singles living in the area. It seemed to be working. Not that her father gave her any credit for the way sales and profits were holding up, even in the middle of a recession.
She sighed, hearing yet again in her head the constant paternal reminders that she wouldn’t be working in the shop for long, that marriage was the next step in life for her – as far as she was concerned, marriage would be the grim last step, the end of everything she enjoyed. She liked business and working; getting married could wait… and wait some more. But she saw trouble ahead, for she knew her father was in touch with the extended family in Pakistan to find her a suitable husband. A plan she was determined to resist.
Now she was getting ready to cash up, just waiting for her cousin Nazir to flip the sign on the front door to closed. There was a solitary customer still in the shop, someone moseying around the magazines at the far end. She heard him moving down the aisle and, peering at the monitor which showed the images from the video camera set in the corner above the ice-cream cabinet, she could make him out clearly. A man in a parka – a white man, unusual in this neighbourhood in the evening. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, dressed in smart jeans and trainers – clearly not a builder. During the day this was quite a mixed area – many of the people working nearby, in other shops and in offices, were white – but those who shopped in the evening, the residents, were almost all Asians.
There was something familiar about his figure, and she wondered if he’d been in earlier in the day. Her mild suspicions went away when he came up to the counter and put down a copy of the Birmingham News, paying for it with a pound coin. When she gave him his change, he said thank you very politely and smiled at Tahira – a nice smile, and he had a pleasant face. Good-looking, she thought, if a little old for her. Not that it would ever be a possibility – her father wouldn’t dream of letting her go out with a white boy, and while she continued to live under his roof she was obliged to obey. The man in the parka left the shop and Nazir flipped the sign and turned the key.
Silly to distrust the man, she thought. Though you couldn’t be too careful. They hadn’t been robbed recently, not since the nasty incident three years before when two young men wearing balaclavas had rushed in, one brandishing a knife, the other a hammer. Thank God her father hadn’t been there; with his hot temper, he might have tried to resist. Tahira had just held up both hands and let them empty the till – no life, much less her own, was worth £74, the amount the robbers had gone off with. They didn’t realise that the register was checked every hour, so that only relatively few takings were ever held inside.
It was now that she saw the piece of paper. It was lying on the counter, folded in two. It must have been left by the man in the parka – otherwise she would have noticed it before. She looked around but of course the shop was closed, and Nazir was busy pulling down the window grilles. She unfolded the paper quickly and her eyes widened as she read:
Could we have a word, please? It’s about your brother Amir. If you walk home via Slocombe Avenue we could talk in private.
Her hands were shaking. She took the note and ripped it in two, then four, then eight. Pushing the strips deep down into the rubbish bin that stood behind the counter, she tried to concentrate on the closing up routine. Methodically she emptied the two tills and rang up the day’s takings. Good, better than the day before; better than she would have expected twelve months before as the recession took hold.
She wondered what to do. Should she walk home by Slocombe Avenue and see what this man wanted? But what if he was luring her there, by the lime trees and the small park, because he had something else in mind? How could a white man know anything about her brother Amir? Unless…
Nazir called goodnight and she followed him out a few minutes later, turning out the lights by the shop’s entrance, then tapping in the numbers to activate the alarm before closing the heavy door behind her. She set off along the street, noting that Kassim’s newsagent’s was still open as usual. I work hard, she thought, but Kassim seems never to sleep.
She turned on to a side street and began the long uphill walk that would take her to her father’s house. Funny, she realised, she never thought of it as her mother’s. Whatever happened to her, she was determined not to follow her mother’s path; Tahira vowed to have a life of her own.