The Disappeared Read online

  ‘You fucking bitch. You’ve killed him. You’ve killed my brother.’

  He reaches out to slap your face and you duck away from him, throwing yourself shaking and weeping on the berth. You had placed what little hope you had in Yunus. Now the fate of Laura Markham, MA, ACA, Junior Partner Milbank and Co., is sealed. But to your surprise Yunus, who has lifted his brother against the side of the bunk, and applied a towel from the bathroom to his ear, does nothing further to punish you. Instead he goes out into the corridor and shouts a few words in Arabic. Hassan’s dingy companion comes running to his master with a patter of canine footsteps, and together the two men lift Hassan on to the bunk, Yunus pushing you out of the way as though you were an intrusive pillow.

  ‘Stop crying, bitch. What’s your trouble compared with his?’

  You curl up in the corner of the bunk, and fiddle with your torn shirt and bra. Your breasts are sore and there is a taste of blood in your mouth, where Hassan’s hand had pressed the flesh against your teeth. Hassan is conscious and muttering, his head lolling slightly from side to side. Yunus picks up the wrench from the floor and shakes his head before handing it with a few words to the dog, who goes with it down the corridor.

  Yunus looks at you, still shaking his head. There are tears in his eyes.

  ‘You dinna had done this, Catherine. I coulda been good to you. Now we’re fucked. Hassan!’

  He puts his head in his hands.

  ‘He asked for it. I didn’t mean to kill him.’

  You realise as you speak that it’s a lie.

  ‘We’ve got to get him to hospital. Iqbal!’

  The dog comes running. Yunus mutters a few words, and he again disappears down the corridor. Now Hassan is moaning and holding his ear. Catching sight of you, he gives a threatening grimace, and attempts to move in your direction. Yunus holds him down.

  Iqbal reappears, followed by a large, pot-bellied man in a uniform of smudged white canvas. He has a broad face in which the eyelids seem to have been cut in as an afterthought, the watery pupils barely visible behind their rims. His hair is long, greasy, unkempt, and his thick lips and broad squashed nose contrast oddly with the tiny slits of his eyes.

  ‘Ya you fuckvits,’ he says, spitting the words. ‘I get only trouble since you come. Contract says collect in Kaliningrad two days’ time. Now you vant I turn back to Hull. Vot the fuck this about, you tell me.’

  You are off the bunk and standing firm before him.

  ‘Are you the captain?’

  He laughs. It is a sinister, hollow sound, as though a door had been opened on some other creature laughing deep inside.

  ‘You call me captain, ya. I give ze orders.’

  ‘Do you realise I’ve been kidnapped?’

  ‘You telling me I don’t know vot goes on in my ship? Listen, slut, these fuckers make a big mistake. Pick up the wrong bitch, see. Don’t tell nothing till ve’re half vay to Denmark. Now they’re vorried, say ve gotta stop. And next thing one o’ zem is damaged.’

  It is Yunus who speaks. He is crying, tears of fear and rage.

  ‘You get us back to Hull right now, Bogdan, OK?’

  Bogdan laughs again.

  ‘You want rewrite our contract, kid?’

  ‘My brother is hurt bad. He dies, I kill you.’

  ‘Talk tough to old sea-dog, you make friends with sharks.’

  Bogdan’s brow wrinkles and his fists clench in readiness. But he is clearly assessing the situation, his eyes shifting from one to the other and his lips moving slightly as though doing mental sums. Hassan groans again, and raises his hand to the towel around his smashed ear. Yunus holds him around the shoulder.

  ‘OK,’ he says at last. ‘I put you two off this ship.’

  ‘And Iqbal too,’ Hassan says through clenched teeth.

  ‘No Iqbal. How I talk to ze new cargo when zey load zem up?’

  ‘This girl too,’ Yunus says. ‘She comes with us.’

  ‘So I get to Kalinigrad, big Boris comes on board, says “vere’s ze juicy bitch I paid for?” I shrug my shoulders and say she vent overboard off Gdansk. Nice one, and a belly full of lead for Bogdan.’

  Yunus looks at you, and then at Bogdan. Something in his manner recommends silence.

  ‘OK, Bogdan. But just get moving yeah?’

  Bogdan swings away, nursing a private smile. Iqbal follows him. You pick up the bottle of water from the floor and drink from it, standing against the wall under the porthole. Iqbal returns with iodine, bandages and a packet of pain killers; he and Yunus bandage Hassan’s head and prop it against the pillow. The ship is vibrating again, and you feel the surge and groan of the propellers as it turns for land. Yunus beckons to you, and you run past him on to the deck.

  Your feet are bare, the deck is cold, and a light drizzle wets your shirt. Despair billows out before you, dragging you like a sail filled by wind. You scrape past bulkheads and stanchions, are held up at last against a kind of cabin in white metal. Yunus has pulled you to a standstill with his hand on your arm. You try to wriggle free, but he turns you around and presses you up against the metal wall.

  ‘How far did he get? Tell me.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘No further than you. And he got what he deserved.’

  ‘You’re mine see.’

  ‘I’m not yours or anyone’s.’

  ‘If Hassan dies I’ll kill you.’

  ‘Good.’

  Yunus’s eyes seem to wander. He reaches his hands above his head as though summoning help from on high. Clearly family relations are not his strong point. He is rival and double of his brother, protector and accuser of his sister. Where you fit in is unclear. But he is nonplussed, because he wants you as a lover, not a slave.

  ‘Anyway he’s a tough fucker,’ he says. ‘When he gets better you’ll be meat on the pavement, man.’

  ‘I thought I was meat in any case. Apparently Boris has paid for a consignment.’

  A pained look crosses Yunus’s face.

  ‘I seen the kinda cunt you are. You’ll wriggle out of it somehow and be back making trouble. We’re in deep shit, Hassan and me. They’re gonna ask how he got hit, people are gonna look for you and you gonna make trouble anyway. We gotta have a deal. You say nothing about all this and I’ll get you off the ship, OK? Yeah, and maybe you’ll give me some cred and we can get together.’

  You laugh bitterly at this.

  ‘So tell me your plan, Yunus. Without the getting together bit.’

  ‘We’ll be offshore in Hull this afternoon. Now you go down out of sight.’

  ‘I’m not sharing a cabin with your brother. Unless you want one of us dead.’

  ‘But you gotta stay below.’

  You look at him defiantly.

  ‘I’m not taking orders from you.’

  He hesitates. There are tears in his eyes again. How can there be room in your heart for pity? Yet there is something bewildered in Yunus, a kind of plea for indulgence that has never been properly answered, unless by the sister who is too sacred to be mentioned, and whose icon exists in some inaccessible inner space. Always you have had the gift of solving problems, of seeing in a flash what is wrong and how to rectify it, and that is precisely why you are the thing you are – or were, before this. Now too you see things clearly. Yunus has never respected women, unless he can hide them in an enchanted inner world, as he hid his sister. Now he has come across a woman in the open. You are the reality that he has always denied.

  ‘Shit, Catherine, I’m on your fucking side. I wanna get you back home, like I wanna get Hassan to hospital. If Bogdan sees you walking around the deck you’re fucked, man. Get in there – OK?’

  He points to a door in the metal bulkhead where you stand.

  ‘Why in there?’

  ‘That’s our cabin, me and Hassan. I’m staying with him below. I’ll bring your stuff. You gotta be ready.’

  He pushes you towards the door, but with gentle, uncertain g
estures, perhaps afraid you are going to scream. You are in a cabin now with two berths. Men’s clothes are scattered across the floor and there is a smell of male sweat. There is a CD player and a heap of CDs, mostly hard rock. In the corner under the porthole is a suitcase. Both berths are unmade, but you sit on one of them, shaking still, your mind empty and your stomach sick. The door opens and you start back in fear. But it is Yunus, holding your jacket and shoes in one hand, a bottle of water in the other. He looks nervously to either side of you, then places the objects on the other berth.

  ‘Couple of hours we’re in the roads at Hull. Get ready, OK?’

  He vanishes, closing and locking the door. The throb of the engines in this deck-level cabin is somehow amplified. You feel it in your thighs, and in the lower part of your body. You writhe away from it but there is no escape. Your heart is gripped by it, your mind is gripped, your soul too. You are reduced to this mad unceasing throb; you have become part of the mechanism, a gear of human flesh, a tender nerve stretched across metal cogs. Sometimes you weep. Sometimes you start up in anger. Sometimes you just sit on the bunk and stare in desolation at an Oasis T-shirt that lies discarded on the floor.

  There are footsteps on the deck. There are cries in some Slavic tongue – Polish, maybe Russian. Sacks are dragged on the deck, someone is hammering metal on metal, Bogdan is shouting. There is a sound of winching and suddenly the ship seems to tilt to one side and to lurch round in a tight circle. Yunus is standing in the open door, his dark eyes beseeching, his hands open and held out to his sides. You wish you could hate him, but you can’t.

  ‘For fuck’s sake get your things on. And stay with me.’

  You follow on wooden legs. Out on the deck a breeze is blowing. There is a light of afternoon, with the docks of Hull ranged on both sides of the road where the ship is idling. A thin sliver of red sunlight daubs the grey-green gantries along the seawall. A boat is suspended from chains and swinging in the air. Hassan has been placed in it. He is still clutching his ear, and his face is pale and weary. The chains unwind and the boat slides down to the water. The bent old sailor with pale skin busies himself with the pilot ladder, attaching it to hooks in the side of the ship and letting it fall into the boat. He grips the gunwale and swings himself with surprisingly agile movements over the side. Yunus has pushed through the crew, who are gathering up the chains on to the two capstans that house them.

  Bogdan’s voice sounds from the bridge.

  ‘You stop zere Yunus fuckvit. That slut stay viz me.’

  He adds orders in his own language, and two of the sailors step forward, one tall and burly, wearing white canvas and with an unpleasant leer, the other small, dressed in jeans and an oil-smeared pullover, who wipes his face on the back of a dirty hand before staring at you and reaching towards your body. Bogdan is descending the stairs from the bridge at a run. You are beyond tears now, beyond screams, almost beyond awareness.

  The two sailors move aside for their captain. Bogdan reaches out to you, his eye-slits closed tight by the angry swelling of his cheeks. Suddenly Yunus is there between you, face to face with Bogdan. He has a knife in his hand.

  ‘You touch that girl and you’re dead. She’s coming with us, see.’

  Yunus pushes you behind him and backs step by step to the gunwale, the knife held out at arm’s length.

  Bogdan stands perplexed for a moment, and then bursts into hollow laughter.

  ‘Ya. So you take ze bitch. You tear up ze contrak. Great. Ze parting of ze ways. And zis cargo waiting in Kaliningrad: zey wait and zey wait. And look what trouble old Yunus is in, when ze big boss in Kabul learn all about it.’

  Yunus stops for a moment. Your hands behind you touch the gunwale. In a moment you can be over and on to the pilot ladder. But an unaccountable feeling of solidarity attaches you to Yunus. It seems more important to understand why you have ceased to hate him than to figure out your escape.

  ‘OK, Bogdan,’ Yunus says. ‘I’ll bring the other girl, the one you wanted. Just give us a few hours, OK? I’ll get Hassan to the hospital and be straight back with the bitch. Marcin can wait for me.’

  Yunus pushes you against the gunwale and, understanding the gesture, you swing yourself onto the pilot ladder. There is a vertical drop to the boat below, where the man you hate, still clutching his ear, is looking up at you. Your head is spinning; a hot flush of shame confuses you. How absurd, after all that has happened, that you are more troubled that Hassan can see up your skirt than by the danger from which you are escaping. There is a scuffle against the metal rail above you. Yunus is shouting ‘back off’, and Bogdan is giving orders. More shouts are exchanged, you are in the boat now, and Yunus is clinging with one arm to the ladder, while fending off the two sailors with the knife. Somehow he gains the boat as the sailors swing themselves, one after the other, on to the ladder. Bogdan is shouting to the old man, but Yunus has him by the throat with the point of the knife below his ear. In a moment Yunus has kicked the boat away from the ship, and taken charge of the outboard motor, steering towards the docks.

  You sit in the rear, Hassan in the prow, the old man muttering curses between you. Yunus stands behind you at the tiller, steering with the outboard motor. He lands the boat outside the dockland area, in an oily backwater beside an old warehouse, a shadowy place with no sign of human life, where the sea scrapes its crust of plastic bottles monotonously against the land’s concrete rim.

  He begins to lift his brother on to a flight of stone steps that you can just discern, and which lead up from the water to an old stone platform. The sailor watches you, and in the fading afternoon light his eyes take on a violet hue, seeming to shine from his skull like lamps. Suddenly you are afraid of him. You must get off this boat at once. Yunus is calling to you.

  ‘Catherine, for fuck’s sake, give me a hand.’

  The thought of touching Hassan fills you with loathing. But once the brothers have disembarked, the old sailor will take the boat straight back to the ship, with you on board. You have no choice; you are attached to Yunus, and without him you are lost. You go across, and together you lift Hassan out of the boat and on to the steps. Hassan scowls at you, but says nothing. There is that smell of engine oil; you recall the impatient jabbing of his sex against you and again there is the image of a terrier, poking the hole of a rat. You almost succumb to nausea and stumble as Yunus turns back to the boat.

  ‘See you here, Marcin. Tomorrow midday. At this place, OK?’

  ‘No speak English.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s what you say. Just be here tomorrow midday, OK?’

  The old sailor shrugs, and remains sitting in the middle of the boat. Yunus leads you away from the water, his brother leaning against him, along a path beside the warehouse. He has taken a mobile phone from his pocket and is giving instructions in a language that you do not recognise. You emerge onto a main road through derelict warehouses, where two taxis are waiting. Yunus manhandles his brother into one of them and turns to you.

  ‘OK you hit my bro, and I dunna like that. But he’s a moron and a bastard. I apologize for him. You and me, we could be friends see. Here.’

  He reaches into his pocket and takes out a mobile phone and a set of keys.

  ‘These are yours. And this too.’

  He hands you the wallet that had been pressed against The Wind in the Willows in your pocket. You look at him in silence. In the yellow light of the street lamp his smooth shadowless face seems curiously vulnerable, like the face of a child. You notice the difficulty he has with eye contact. He looks at you as though you were not revealed in your face but hidden somewhere behind it. You see that he wants to touch you, but doesn’t dare. Maybe it is the first time in his life that he has been caught in this dilemma.

  ‘Look. You had a fucking bad time and I apologize. If you tell anyone then that’s going to mean big trouble for me and my bro. I’m not threatening, see. I’m too fucking scared, man.’

  Still you look at him in silence. He takes a
piece of paper from his pocket and hands it to you.

  ‘I wrote my number on this. You can ring me when you want. I gotta go now. Dunna say nowt, OK?’

  He opens the taxi door and tries to take your hand as you slip inside, but you shake him off. A hurt expression crosses his face.

  ‘You tell him where you wanna go. He wunna charge.’

  The taxi draws away and you watch as Yunus shakes his head sadly and then goes to join his brother. You give the address from which you were abducted; the taciturn driver nods and drives into the night. Two hours later you are back on the concrete staircase of the block of flats, letting yourself in to the poky foyer with shaking hands. You are in the bedroom, lying on the bed and sobbing violently, your face pressed into the pillow. And yes, there is another person in the flat.

  Chapter 20

  It was several minutes before Millie was able to explain herself. Perched on the edge of the sofa, with her hands gripping the fabric, she searched the ceiling with outraged eyes for the words she needed, and her lips trembled over the inadequacy of what they found. The floor was covered with CDs and magazines, scattered from the shelves that had harboured them. The Picasso reproduction had been taken down and propped against the wall. Cushions had been flung from all the chairs. And on the window seat where he had watched as Muhibbah wove her spells around him, was a heap of files, their lever-arches opened and their pages scattered. They were the notes she had made for her course on accountancy.

  ‘Yale locks are no obstacle to professionals, and there was this guy with them, Polish or Bulgarian or something, who looked as professional as they come. I came home to this: the three of them just standing there like they were the landlords. There was the one who was with her when she picked up her things. And another, older and taller, with coarse black hair and a squint. No apologies of course. Simply angry stares, as though I were to blame for trashing the place.’