There is a nod of acceptance but no hint of a journey completed or sense of achievement.
Samira washes her face, ears, hands and feet, talking softly to herself. I take her arm again, leading her back to bed.
Motioning to the window, she wants to look outside. The North Sea is just visible over the rooftops and between buildings. It is the color of brushed steel.
“As a child I used to wonder what the sea looked like,” she says. “I had only ever seen pictures in books and on TV.” She gazes at the horizon.
“What do you think now?”
“I think it looks higher than the land. Why doesn’t the water rush in and sweep us away?”
“Sometimes it does.”
I notice a towel in her hand. She wants to use it as a prayer mat but doesn’t know which direction to face toward Mecca. She turns slowly round and round like a cat trying to settle.
There are tears in her eyes and her lips tremble, struggling to form the words.
“They will be hungry soon. Who will feed them?”
BOOK THREE
Love and pain are not the same. Love is put to the test—pain is not. You do not say of pain, as you do of love, “That was not true pain or it would not have disappeared so quickly.”—WILLIAM BOYD,
“The Blue Afternoon”
1
In the nights since the twins were born I have drowned countless times, twitching and kicking at the bedclothes. I see tiny bodies floating in fields of kelp or washed up on beaches. My lungs give out before I can reach them, leaving me choking and numb with an obscure anguish. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a swollen heart?
Samira is also awake. She walks through the house at 3:00 a.m. moving as though her feet have an agreement with the ground that she will always tread lightly in return for never encountering another path that is too steep.
It has been five days since the twins went missing. Pearl has soaked through the cracks of the world and vanished. We know how he got off the ferry. A CCTV camera on Deck 3 picked up a man in a hard hat and reflective jacket who couldn’t be identified as one of the crew. The footage didn’t show his face clearly but he was seen carrying a pet traveling cage. The square gray plastic box was supposed to contain two Siamese cats but they were found wandering in a stairwell.
Another camera in the Customs area picked up the clearest images of the unidentified man. In the foreground trucks are being scanned with heat-seeking equipment designed to find illegals. But in the background, at the edge of the frame, a pumpkin-shaped caravan attached to an early-model Range Rover can be seen. Mr. and Mrs. Jones of Cardiff are seen repacking their duty-frees and souvenirs after being searched. As the car and caravan pull away, a square gray pet cage is visible on the tarmac next to where they were parked.
The Welsh couple were pulled over a little after midday Sunday on the M4 just east of Reading. The caravan was empty but Pearl’s fingerprints were lifted from the table and the aluminum door. The couple had stopped for petrol at a motorway service center on the M25. A cashier remembered Pearl buying bottles and baby formula. Shortly afterward, at 10:42 a.m., a car was reported stolen from an adjacent parking area. It still hasn’t been found.
Forbes is running the investigation, liaising with Spijker in Amsterdam, combining resources, pitting their wills against the problem. They are cross-checking names from the IVF clinic with the U.K. immigration records.
There has been a news blackout about the missing twins. DI Forbes made the decision. Stolen children make dramatic headlines and he wants to avoid creating panic. A year ago a newborn was snatched from a hospital in Harrogate and there were 1,200 alleged sightings in the first two days. Mothers were accosted in the street and treated like kidnappers. Homes were raided needlessly. Innocent families suffered.
The only public statement has been about Pearl, who has a warrant out for his arrest. Another one. I have taken to carrying my gun again. As long as he’s out there, I’m going to keep it with me. I am not going to lose Samira again.
She has been staying with me since leaving hospital on Wednesday. Hari has moved out of the spare room and is sleeping downstairs on a sofa bed. He seems quite taken by our lodger. He has started wearing a shirt around the house because he senses that she disapproves.
I am to face a Police Disciplinary Tribunal. Neglect of duty, deliberate falsehood and abuse of authority are just three of the charges. Failing to show up at Hendon is the least of my worries. Barnaby Elliot has accused me of harassment and arson. The investigation is being supervised by the Police Complaints Authority. I am guilty until proven innocent.
A toilet flushes along the hallway. A light switch clicks off. A few minutes later comes the hum of a machine and the rhythmic suction of a breast pump. Samira’s milk has come in and she has to express every six hours. The sound of the pump is strangely soporific. I close my eyes again.
She hasn’t said anything about the twins. I keep wondering when she is going to crack, fragmented by the loss. Even when she identified Hassan’s body at Westminster Mortuary she held it all inside.
“It’s OK to cry,” I told her.
“That is why Allah gave us tears,” she answered.
“You think God played a part in this?”
“He would not give me this suffering if he did not think I could endure it.”
How can she be so wise, yet so accepting? Can she really believe this is part of some grand master plan or that Allah would test her so cruelly?
Such faith seems positively medieval, yet she has an appetite for learning. Things that I take for granted she finds fascinating, like central heating, dual flush toilets and my washer/dryer. In Kabul she had to carry water upstairs to their flat and the power failed almost daily. London has lights along every street, burning through the night. Samira asked me if perhaps we British are scared of the dark. She didn’t understand why I laughed.
I took her shopping for clothes at Canary Wharf yesterday. “There is not so much glass in all of Afghanistan,” she said, pointing to the office towers that shone in the morning sun. I could see her studying the office workers queuing for coffee and “skinny” muffins: the women dressed in narrow skirts, tight tops and jackets, flicking their short hair, chatting on mobile phones.
The clothing boutiques intimidated her. The shop assistants were dressed like mourners and the shops felt like funeral parlors. I told Samira there was a better place to find clothes. We left and went to Commercial Road where garments were crammed on racks and spilling from bins. She chose two skirts, a long-sleeved blouse and a cardigan. It came to less than sixty pounds.
She studied the twenty-pound notes.
“Is this your Queen?”
“Yes.”
“She looks like she has been dipped in plaster.”
I laughed. “I guess she does.”
The Christmas decorations were up. Even the bagel bakery and halal butcher had fairy lights and fake snow. Samira stopped and peered into a lobster tank in the window of a restaurant.
“I am never going to swim in the sea.”
“Why?”
