Part 20 (1/2)

”I wanted to believe it, Mr. Wexford. I desperately wanted to believe it. You see, I thought that if it was mine to do with as I liked I would rewrite it myself, keeping the story, the characters, the essence or spirit of it, but improving it; I thought I could improve it, make it perfect. I'd make it mine.”

”You saw the letter Mrs. Tredown had from him?”

”I saw it. It was typed. It was signed.”

Wexford would hardly have believed that any more blood could drain from Tredown's face, but this is what seemed to have happened. He turned his head to one side, subsiding, slipping down the cus.h.i.+ons of the chair.

”It was actually signed Samuel Miller?”

There was no answer. Wexford got up and rang the bell. The nurse came in, lifted Tredown's wrist, and felt his pulse. ”Better go now,” he said. ”He's very tired.”

”Please come back tomorrow,” Tredown whispered.

The call to the police station was put through to Karen Malahyde. But she had gone after paying a routine visit to the Imrans and it was Hannah who took the call. Two hours before she had come back from questioning two hospice visitors who might have, but evidently had not, witnessed Maeve Tredown's murder attempt. The day had been a long one and she had her usual drive ahead of her to home and Bal. It had been a dull, heavy day and at six in the evening was pitch dark. A premonition that it would delay her made her very unwilling to take this call, but Burden had already left, Wexford was not yet back from visiting Tredown, and Barry Vine had begun his annual leave. A slightly tentative voice speaking fluent English but with a strong accent came on the line.

”My name is Iman Dirir. I have come from the home of the Imran family. I think-no, I know-something is going to happen in their flat-tonight. Yes, tonight. Please can you come?”

”Our child protection officer isn't available,” Hannah began. She hesitated, said, ”Of course I'll come, I'll come now-but wait. Will I get in?”

”I'll be there,” Mrs. Dirir said. ”They trust me.” Her tone was bitter. ”They never will again, but-never mind.”

”Would you do something for me? Would you phone this number and tell the child care officer. She's called Sylvia Fairfax.”

Karen and Sylvia had called at that flat two or three times a week and found nothing but an apparently happy family entertaining a middle-aged relative from Somalia. Shamis had been like any normal European child, free, playful, mischievous. If she had been circ.u.mcised she would have been confined to a chair with her legs bound together from ankles to hips. Driving out of the police station car park, her lights on, Hannah reminded herself of the commentary on female life Sylvia had repeated to her as coming from an elderly Somali woman she had met. ”The three sorrows of a woman come to her on the day she is cut, on her wedding night, and the day she gives birth.” It made her shudder to think of it.

The block was brightly lit but as Hannah came to the top of the stairs and out onto the external walkway where the Imrans' flat was, she saw that it was in darkness. It was as if no one was at home. Sylvia Fairfax stepped out of the shadows to meet her.

”Dr. Akande is on his way,” she said. ”I daren't ring the bell, and there's no need. Iman Dirir will open the door at seven sharp.”

”And Shamis?”

”The woman they call auntie is a circ.u.mciser. Iman says she has seen the tools she uses, a razor, a knife, and some special scissors.”

Hannah bit her lip. ”It doesn't bear thinking of, but we have to think of it.”

”We have to stop it,” Sylvia said.

They stood outside the front door. There was no sound from inside. Next door they had a window open and music pounded out, the kind that has a steady regular beat, thump, thump, thump. Hannah's watch told her it was ten minutes to seven.

”It's horrible to think of,” she said, ”but will Iman let her begin? I mean, for G.o.d's sake, will this woman start on the child?”

”I don't know. I hope not, but if she doesn't . . . Here's Dr. Akande.”

He came running along the walkway. ”This can't be allowed to happen,” he said breathlessly. ”Even if it means failing to catch them, we can't let them cut this child when we're able to stop it.”

”She'll open the door,” Hannah said, ”the moment this woman picks up her razor.”

”That's too late. You don't know how fast a practiced circ.u.mciser can do this-this atrocity. I do.”

”But surely they'll give Shamis some sort of anesthetic?”

”I doubt it, I very much doubt it,” Akande said and with that he put his finger to the bell push, holding it there so that the chimes it made rang loudly above the thumps of the music.

The door flew open. Iman Dirir shouted in a loud clear voice, ”Come in, all of you, come in. In here!”

Akande went first, Sylvia behind him. The hallway was dark; the only light was in the kitchen at the end of the pa.s.sage, showing around the edges of the door. They ran toward the closed door and, thinking it locked, the doctor kicked at it. But it flew open and he almost fell into the little room. The woman in a long black robe who had been bending over the child, a cutthroat razor in her ungloved hand, took a step backward, exposing to their view a small girl, entirely naked, lying on a spread towel on the kitchen table. Reeta Imran, the child's mother, made a shocked sound and flung a sheet over her. As Hannah said afterward to Wexford, she was more affronted by a male, even though a doctor, seeing her little daughter without clothes than she was by the rite that the circ.u.mciser had been on the point of performing.

Totally covered, face and all, by the sheet, Shamis began to scream and struggle. She fought her way out and threw herself into her mother's arms. Mrs. Imran once more grabbed the sheet and swathed her in it. Hannah walked up to the table and eyed the circ.u.mciser's other tools that lay there, a knife and a pair of scissors. There was no sterilization equipment to be seen, no medication of any kind. A length from the reel of sewing thread would be used, she supposed, to st.i.tch the raw edges of the wound together, a length from the ball of garden twine to bind Shamis's legs together once the deed had been done. The circ.u.mciser, a woman of perhaps no more than fifty, though she looked seventy, her face brown and wrinkled, most of her front teeth missing, fixed on Hannah a stare of absolute impa.s.sivity. She laid the razor on the table and said something to Mrs. Imran in Somali.

I ought to arrest her, Hannah thought. Or Reeta, or both of them. But charge them with what? They've done nothing and I can't wish they'd begun what they were going to do for the sake of charging them. But I can't leave them here with the child either. All she could think of was that this woman had been in possession of an offensive weapon-could she arrest them on suspicion of intending to perform an illegal act? Hardly knowing what she was doing or the consequences, she s.n.a.t.c.hed Shamis out of her mother's arms and pulled off the sheet. There was blood on it. And a long streak of blood across Shamis's left thigh where the razor had just touched her. They had got there just in time.

”You do not have to say anything in answer to the charge,” she began, and glancing at Sylvia, saw tears running down her face.

Chapter Twenty-six.

Wexford went back to the hospice in the morning, feeling he had had a lucky escape. If he had gone ahead and Amara Ali and Reeta Imran had appeared in court, the case would have been dismissed and contumely heaped upon him for racism, s.e.xism, and jumping to unjustifiable conclusions. Anger against Hannah had been strong at first. Karen wouldn't have done it, but Karen hadn't been there. Hadn't it occurred to Hannah that the women would say Shamis was sitting on the table after a shampoo and prior to having the hair on the nape of her neck shaved? The trace of blood? The shock of three people bursting into the flat had made Amara Ali's hand slip. Halfway home on the previous evening, he had answered his phone to be told that the two women were in custody and he had turned around and gone back, letting them both go with scarcely a word.

Now as he waited to be admitted to Tredown's room, he thought of things that had hardly occurred to him before. Naively, he had supposed he could prevent the mutilation of girls and so perhaps he could, but only after a number of them had already been mutilated, for in order for a prosecution to succeed a circ.u.mciser would have to be caught either in the act or when it was in the recent past and the poor little child crippled, her legs bound together. Later he would read through the Act of Parliament and see if there was provision for a charge of intention to commit mutilation, though, without going any further, he could see all the problems and pitfalls this would entail.

Tredown had had his shower, been shaved, and was propped up in his bed this time. A drip had been inserted in the back of his hand. Surely pointless at this stage? But no, perhaps it was a painkiller that traveled down that tube to make his last days more bearable. Tredown's greenish pallor was even more marked today and his sad smile more revealing of the skull beneath the skin. This time he noticed the cast on Wexford's arm and remarked on it.

So no one had told him. The last thing Wexford wanted was to tell him that his wife had been charged with attempted murder. ”A fall,” he said. ”It's just a simple fracture.”

This satisfied him. ”I was telling you about the letter,” he began. ”I told you it said I could have the ma.n.u.script to do what I liked with. I took that to mean I could-well, make it mine.”

”But he'd taken the copy away with him, hadn't he? If he meant to give it to you why would he do that?”

”He took it out of my-the room where I work. That was where we'd talked. That evening my wife brought it to me. He'd given it to her before he left.”

”Mr. Tredown, do you mean he'd given it to her, or she said he'd given it to her?”

Tredown frowned. ”It's the same thing.”

”Not always,” Wexford said.

”I hear what you're saying. And, yes, I'll tell you now that I did have doubts. Oh, more than that, more than that.” The agonized note in his voice came from mental, not physical, pain. ”I did write to him-that is, I got Maeve to write to him, saying it was too enormous a gift and telling him again how good it was and how very likely it was to be published and perhaps make a lot of money.”

”You never saw him again?”

”Not in the flesh.” The words and the way in which they were spoken brought Wexford an unpleasant feeling that someone or something was watching them. Tredown s.h.i.+vered. ”It was just my fancy,” he said. ”In the evenings-when I was alone upstairs-if there was a heavy rainfall-but this is pointless, I mustn't go on like this.”