Miah nodded. 'Essentially the same organization as Hizbut-Tahrir, or a branch of it. They're very clever. They seduce the government into believing they're moderates providing for the needs of disaffected Asian youth, and inculcate themselves into the Establishment. It becomes racist to question them. But the philosophy remains the same: Islam is the one and only truth and it must prevail.' He gave a slight shake of his head, his eyes suddenly those of an older man, telling the story of long years of fruitless struggle. 'We are at a bad juncture in history, Mrs Cooper. Life has become too fraught and complex for most of us to understand our place in it. The forces of liberal progression offer only more uncertainty, more competition, more casualties. Is it any wonder that fundamentalists emerge, saying we should drop anchor and stop the ship before it dashes on the rocks?'
'I think what you're trying to tell me is that you think those boys went abroad to fight.'
Miah exhaled, his breath a heavy cloud of vapour. He stopped and turned to face her, fixing her with a look that was both pained and profoundly serious. 'When they disappeared I was only beginning to understand the nature of the problem. But now I can tell you, if I were to draw a template for the ideal recruit to the extremist cause, both of them would fit it perfectly. Middle class, highly intelligent, ambitious, culturally displaced and as emotionally vulnerable as any young person. They were there for the taking. Eight years on it's not just one or two or even tens, it's hundreds and thousands.' He was fired by a tortured passion. 'We live in a country that doesn't know itself, Mrs Cooper. We keep moving, but beyond the base struggle for survival we have no idea why.'
Having said his piece, Miah retreated to his academic shell. He told Jenny that both MI5 and police officers had questioned him extensively at the time, but little of note had emerged. He denied that they had been in touch recently. Any faith he once had in the ability of the state to address these problems, he said, had long since evaporated. He no longer sat on policy-making committees or wrote papers to inform government departments; he wrote books and articles and tried his best to inspire the students who passed through his classes with values that would inoculate them against extremism.
'But the fundamentalists do have a point,' he said as they neared the garden gates and the end of their meeting. 'Without a story to explain ourselves, we are nothing.'
Miah's words lodged stubbornly in her mind as she walked back through the thin drizzle to the office. They had pierced her defences and unsettled the waters that her medication struggled to still. Storyless herself, searching for the pieces of her childhood that might explain what lay in her threatening, still unexplored recesses, he had loosened her grip on solid reality a little further. Every face in the street, lined or fresh, bright or dulled, seemed confident in its history, rooted in a certainty she had long since lost.
Walking past a florist's, she glanced at her reflection in the window and for a brief second didn't recognize herself. It was a ghostly, transparent, semi-being that looked back at her. A surge of panic tightened her chest and throat. She quickened her pace, focusing on the strength in her limbs, the breath in her lungs, the life in her. Her state, she realized, was due to being aware of the part that was missing. Rafi and Nazim hadn't been. Their voids had been filled before they had even become conscious of them. Darting across the road, dodging the traffic, a phrase surfaced from long-forgotten school days: nature abhors a vacuum. If nature forbids an absence to occur, it must, as she had always suspected, be perverted and unnatural forces that opened up fissures in the fabric of reality, and untethered nascent souls from their moorings.
Hurrying past a row of scruffy shops, turning her head away from their plate-glass fronts, her spiralling thoughts spewed up yet another realization: that the evil she touched in her dreams was such an absence, a nothingness into which innocence was easily seduced.
Nazim and Rafi had passed through the vortex, evaporated with a trace, and it fell to her, to her of all people, to follow them.
Jenny leaned heavily against the reassuringly heavy and cumbersome front door and made for the sanctuary of her office. Her brief interview with Miah had disturbed her to an extent which felt out of all proportion. Here was where she made sense of things, surrounded by her books and the trappings of office, the objects that told her who she was and all that she stood for.
Alison looked up with a start as she entered. She was sitting at her desk in her overcoat, her face drained of colour. An answerphone message was playing: Mrs Jamal pathetically pleading for someone to answer, please. She was frightened, she said, there had been more phone calls in the night. Wouldn't somebody help her? She lapsed into sobs and sniffles.
'I thought she was going to stop that,' Jenny said.
'She left three like it. Claimed she was being watched —’
'I'll call her,' Jenny said and started towards her office.
'She's dead, Mrs Cooper.'
Jenny stopped midway across the room. 'What?'
'I called her back,' Alison said, 'just now. A young constable answered. A neighbour found her body in the front garden about fifteen minutes ago. She'd fallen from her balcony.'
Numb, Jenny glanced at her watch. It was a quarter past two. It had been an hour and a half since she had left the office.
'When did she make her last call?'
'Just after one,' Alison said. 'I feel dreadful . . . You can never see it coming, can you?'
Jenny left a message on McAvoy's phone telling him she wouldn't be able to meet him, something - she didn't say what - had come up. She replaced the receiver and reached for her pills, shook out one of each and swallowed. She doodled agitatedly on a legal pad while waiting for them to dull the frantic thoughts that were crowding her mind. She felt nauseous with guilt that she hadn't answered Mrs Jamal's call. An irrational part of her blamed McAvoy for phoning when he had. A second later and she would have answered Mrs Jamal's call, and perhaps ... It didn't bear thinking about.
Chapter 14
A police cordon had gone up across the street, attracting a small crowd of onlookers eager for a glimpse of the corpse. Jenny pushed through them and caught sight of DI Pironi leaving the front of the building. It was his patch. New Bridewell police station was less than half a mile away. She caught up with him as he stood on the pavement pulling off latex gloves and the elasticated plastic bags that covered his shoes.
'David-'
'Jenny.' He didn't seem pleased to see her. 'You can't go in, I'm afraid. Forensics have got to sweep it first.'
'What happened?'
'Looks like she fell from the balcony.'
She looked up at the building. 'How could she fall? Those railings must be waist high.'
He balled up the plastic bags and gloves and tossed them into the gutter. 'She could have jumped, I suppose.'
'Why would she do that?'
'No idea. You can take a look at her if you like. She's still there.' He gestured to a female constable who didn't look old enough to be out of school. 'Show the coroner the body, would you? Don't get too close.' He aimed a key fob at a pool car that was double-parked in the street. 'We've booked her in for a post-mortem early this afternoon. I thought you'd appreciate a swift turnaround, what with the inquest and everything. I expect we'll talk in the morning.' He gave her a flat smile and left.
Jenny followed the constable, stepping over the cordon tape and crossing a damp patch of lawn around to the side of the building. Two more uniforms stood guard in front of a temporary screen made from black plastic stretched between two poles. The constable said she was permitted to look around the edge but not to go beyond the barrier. Jenny moved towards it, reminding herself that it was just a body behind there, an empty shell, and took another step forward.