'Did he seem to you to be a religious fanatic?'
'Not at the time. He was certainly observant - he would pray five times a day - but in all other respects he was just a normal young man.'
'Who ended the relationship?'
'He didn't call me over the Christmas vacation. It just sort of petered out.'
'You may or may not know that Nazim had a subsequent brief relationship with another student in your year, Dani James.'
Sarah Levin nodded. 'I heard last week. I had no idea.'
'She thinks she contracted chlamydia from him. Did you have a similar experience?'
Sarah Levin tensed, her shoulders suddenly rigid. A spontaneous reaction, Jenny thought. She groped for a response. 'Is this relevant?'
'It could be. I have had sight of your medical records, Dr Levin . . .'
The witness blinked and reeled from the unexpected blow. 'I was diagnosed with the infection a few months later, yes,' she said, acutely embarrassed. 'Whether it came from Nazim, I couldn't say.'
'Did you mention it to him?' 'No.'
'Were you angry about it?'
'Not in the sense you're suggesting.'
'Dr Levin, did the police know about your previous relationship with Nazim?'
'No. I've never mentioned it to anyone until today.'
'You see the importance of that question, don't you? This isn't a criminal trial, I'm not accusing you of anything, but if, for example, the police had got hold of that information, and if they were trying to prove that he and Rafi Hassan went abroad, they might have come to you and asked if he had ever suggested he might?'
'I know what you're implying, but it's not the case.'
'Did anyone from the Security Services ever speak to or question you?'
'Never.'
Jenny sat back in her chair with the uneasy feeling that something was still missing, that a question remained unanswered. If she had been an advocate she could have grilled Sarah Levin relentlessly on her unlikely lack of malice towards the young man who had wounded her in such an intimate way, but it would have been inappropriate for a coroner, laying her open to accusations of heavy-handedness and bias.
'Could you please tell us, then, whether Nazim ever said anything to you which might have indicated what happened to him.'
Sarah considered her answer carefully. 'It wasn't anything he said at the time, but looking back I can see that he was angry. I'm not even sure he knew what he was angry with. He channelled it into his religion - it gave him a sense of purpose, of specialness perhaps - but he was also intelligent, sensitive . . .'
'Do you believe that he went abroad?'
'I can believe it,' she said. 'It would have seemed like an adventure.'
'Did he ever talk to you about Rafi Hassan?'
'I didn't even know who he was until they both vanished. Nazim never spoke about him. Looking back, I suppose he was leading two very separate lives. I didn't see the other one.'
Jenny ended her examination with her niggling sense of doubt unresolved. As Havilland rose to confirm with Sarah Levin that all her contact with the police had been at her own initiative, Jenny wrestled with the fact that McAvoy had kept his inkling of an affair between her and Nazim to himself. She didn't buy his explanation that he'd wanted to protect Mrs Jamal from shame and scandal. He had pushed her towards a complex and sinister conspiracy theory and away from the person with whom Nazim had been most intimate. It was as if he didn't want Nazim and Rafi to have gone abroad. He wanted a grand struggle between good and evil; he wanted to place himself on the side of the angels and bid for redemption.
When Havilland had finished polishing the reputation of the police, Martha Denton stood to cross-examine for the first time that day.
'Dr Levin, I'm sure we all understand your motives in not mentioning your intimate association with Nazim Jamal before now, but I'm sure you understand the importance of telling this court everything that could possibly cast light on what became of him.' She spoke with a reassuring softness, without a trace of threat or impatience.
'Absolutely.'
'And, of course, any insight we can gain into his state of mind will help to shore up or indeed weaken the case for him having left the country for political or religious motives.'
'If I could tell you, I would. I don't know what Nazim was thinking.'
'Did he not talk to you about his religious beliefs?'
'Not in any detail. I knew he went to mosque, I saw that he had books on politics and history, but to be honest I wasn't that interested.'
'You didn't get a sense that he was using you?'
'Not really.'
'You sound unsure . . . He was a young radical Muslim having sex with an unbeliever. That was a very compromising situation for him.'
'I suppose it was.'
'Did he suffer from feelings of guilt?'
Sarah Levin glanced at Mr Jamal, whose face was finally beginning to show signs of strain. After so many years of unanswered questions he was being forced to peer into the troubled mind of his son. 'Yes, I think he probably did, but he was too considerate to share that with me. There was obviously a conflict.'
'A conflict between extremes - was that your impression?'
'He was a passionate person . . . You don't appreciate the full depth of these things at such a young age, but thinking about it now I can see that's what he was.'
'And when he dropped you, did he end all contact?'
'Completely.'
'Why did you think he did that?'
'His religion must have won out... I was hurt, but I tried to move on.'
'You've been most helpful, Dr Levin,' Martha Denton said.
As if to demonstrate his own immunity to Sarah Levin's now wounded beauty, Khan proceeded to question her aggressively, seeking to attack the notion that Nazim suppressed sexual passion and transformed it into a zealot's anger, even suggesting that the affair was a figment of her imagination. It was as if the Nazim Jamal he had imagined was beyond corruption, but at the very least - as a direct consequence of his spiritual purity - innocent enough to have been cruelly seduced.
Hearing Sarah Levin's pained replies, it occurred to Jenny for the first time that she may have been genuinely in love with Nazim: the more battered she was by Khan's invective, the more she seemed to expose her hurt. Perhaps she felt responsible for his disappearance; a beautiful and unwitting siren who'd propelled him onto a fatal course.
Chapter 24
Jenny was picking at a soggy cheese sandwich in the small upstairs room when Alison knocked and delivered the news that their missing witnesses, Tathum and Maitland, had arrived. Maitland had requested to be heard early as he was due out on a flight to the Middle East the next morning. Jenny said she'd get to him that afternoon. She had decided to follow the chain of evidence from Elizabeth Murray's sighting of the Toyota back to Maitland's office before calling McAvoy. Only then would she call Pironi and Skene. The morning's testimony had exposed a number of cracks in the official version of events: she wanted them to be as wide as possible before the detective and the MI5 officer were called to account.
'I've also got a request from Detective Inspector Pironi,' Alison said, a little embarrassed. 'He's asked if Mr McAvoy can wait somewhere other than the committee room - he's behaving oddly, apparently.'
'I can imagine it's rather intense in there,' Jenny said. 'Fine. As long as he's kept away from the hall while the
