Jess sat opposite Michael at the same table in the same meeting room in which Peter had, four years previously, revealed his intention to change his will in favour of “Alice”. And in that very room, he had instructed Michael to start the process of tracking down Leila and bringing her home.
Jess felt nervous and fidgety for two reasons. Firstly, she had agreed to meet Michael in his office “so as not to be disturbed or distracted,” he had said, which meant that, much against her instincts, she’d had to leave her precious daughters in Emma’s care for a couple of hours. She had no doubts about Emma’s good intentions, nor that her girls would be safe, but she did have concerns that Emma’s nerves might be tested to their limits if the girls were their usual hyperactive selves. It was simply being parted from them that she found difficult to bear.
Secondly, she remained confused about her current position and apprehensive of the future. And although she had many questions about how and why Peter had done what he had, and how Leila had been found, she was not entirely sure she wanted to know the answers.
“We have a few things to get through,” said Michael by way of introduction, and Jess nodded without quite knowing what he meant. Michael in his office, wearing a suit, speaking like a lawyer, seemed to her a far more forbidding animal than the man they all knew as “Uncle Mikey”.
“Why did Peter do it?” blurted out Jess. She still felt unworthy of his kindness but also harboured some bitterness that he had never told her, and now he was gone, there was no chance of explaining.
“Do you mean clearing all the debt, changing the will or finding Leila?”
“All of it.”
Michael sat back in his chair.
“Well, the debt part was relatively quick and easy. The notices had gone out and all your creditors were lined up at the County Court so it could be settled in one fell swoop. There was a complication with a couple of rather unpleasant characters who had bought a debt from who knows where; a legacy of Mo’s drug dealing.”
Jess was instantly transported back to Wellingford five years earlier.
“Oh God! I remember two evil guys who used to frighten me to death.”
“Quite. Well, they were made an offer and persuaded to desist.” Jess frowned, not fully understanding what he meant, but Michael was clearly not going to elaborate, as he moved on swiftly.
“As regards his will, I have to be honest with you, Jess, and say that when Peter came here to explain his plans, I tried to talk him out of it. Not, you’ll understand, because I thought he was wrong; in fact, I think it was the noblest of gestures and I was full of admiration for him. I simply wanted him to be sure he was doing the right thing for the right reasons. You will have known that he wasn’t a well man, and together with the heartbreak of losing Lisa, I feared he might not be thinking straight.” He paused for a moment. “I also thought that he had become a little obsessed with you and the fear that you might leave him had clouded his judgement.”
“It never crossed my mind to walk away once he’d told me about Lisa.”
“But when he told me that he didn’t want you to know about the will, I knew then that his motives were totally altruistic. You remained free to make your own future as you saw fit, without influence from him or any financial incentive, while he could make certain that, for as long as you remained with him, you and the twins would always be provided for. I assume that if you had decided to leave him, he’d have thought again, but we’ll never know.” She looked pensive as he continued. “I also have to say, Jess, that I hadn’t known you very long when Peter came to see me, and when he told me you were pregnant too, I may have formed, shall we say, a less than charitable view of your character.”
“You thought I was a gold-digger,” she shot back.
“It was a possibility I couldn’t ignore.”
“I guess Emma thought so too.”
“She had her doubts from the moment you met, but I hope you’ll believe me when I say we’ve come to love you a great deal and, as we’ve already said, we’ll always be there for you. For your sake and Peter’s.”
Jess chided herself for being riled at Michael’s honesty and had to accept that from their point of view, her circumstances had been, at best, questionable.
“Thank you. I really am grateful to you both. I’m just still a little … wound up.”
“The other thing is, of course, he had no one else left. He was profoundly affected by Janica’s death and, try as he might, he couldn’t seem to console Lisa. When she disappeared from his life too, he truly was a lost soul.”
“He said he regretted never having told her that he loved her.” Jess recalled the agony she felt when Peter had related his story in the garden.
“Peter blamed himself for driving Lisa away. It was entirely irrational but he’d talked himself into it and, grieving as he was, on two levels, he would not be persuaded otherwise. You have to remember, Peter wasn’t a man to show his emotions, at least not in the affectionate sense. It seemed to him that his wife and daughter were such soul mates, he was quite content to take a back seat. They never wanted for anything. He provided for them. He would have died for them and he showed them as much love as anyone could; he was just never very good at saying it. Janica knew him. It was one of the things that attracted her most – his stoic Britishness, his matter-of-factness, his calm under fire. God knows he had needed that in the past.” Jess nodded in understanding, but her sadness was evident.
“But Lisa had problems of her own. She was totally reliant on Janica, at least on an emotional level. Living at Chalton meant she didn’t have any friends locally and had to travel a fair distance to school. Janica may have been her mum but she was also her best friend and there were only twenty years between them, so the bond was especially strong.”
Jess wondered how strong the bond between her and Leila might become, and the sobering thought occurred to her that there were only seventeen years between them; she could be a grandmother at thirty-four at this rate.
“Lisa even called her mum by her Christian name. We always thought it was a bit weird and modern, but it reflected how close they were. It took fifteen months after diagnosis for Janica to succumb to the cancer, during which time Peter and Lisa had to watch her slowly fade away, and when she died, Lisa’s whole world imploded. She virtually closed down, wanted to die herself, and the more Peter tried desperately to encourage her and shake her out of her despond, the worse he made it.”
“Oh God,” said Jess. “It must have been terrible for them both.”
“Lisa had to get away from Chalton. From the constant reminders of life with Janica. She had to have a complete break, which is why she went travelling. She read something about Buddhism at university and decided Nepal was the place to be. A place of escape, both physically and mentally.”
“Yes. Peter told me where she went, but not why.”
“He would have agreed to anything by then. Anything that would help her, as they say, find herself. He thought Nepal was intrinsically peaceful and benign, and going with a friend from university somehow made it more acceptable. It started off fine and Peter was encouraged. He could sense the old Lisa coming out of her shell. Motivated and enthusiastic. Keen to explore and discover new places and meet new people, and in the early days they seemed to talk more on the phone than they ever did at home.”
“And then they lost touch.”
“Peter was sanguine about that. He didn’t want to pester her, and the fact is, mobile phones don’t work so well in remote parts of the Himalayas, so he was not surprised when the calls dried up. He didn’t need to speak to her; he just needed to know she was safe. He was torn between the need to know and the desire to leave her be.” Michael sighed. “Well. You know what happened next.”
“Yes. The earthquake in Nepal didn’t register with me at the time. It was so far away from reality as I knew it and I suppose I had other things on my mind, with Mo running away and taking Leila.”
Michael nodded.
“Peter was beside himself. He made frantic attempts to find out where she was and whether she was okay. There was nothing he could find out from here. No news, good or bad. Nothing. He flew out there himself to look for her and …”
“He discovered that Lisa had died at Langtang.”
Michael nodded.
“He was a beaten man. There was nothing left for him. Just memories, a misplaced guilt and a profound sense of self-loathing. He was finished. Ready to drop. Ready to be taken as soon as his good lord called, and the sooner the better, as far as he was concerned.” He looked at her and smiled. “And then … you turned up.”
She nodded in understanding.
“And then I turned up. Sodden, weak, feeble, pathetic … and pregnant. Although I didn’t know that at the time.”
“Did he ever show you a photograph of Lisa?” asked Michael carefully. Jess shifted in her chair. She still felt guilty she’d intruded on Peter’s private grief when she’d inadvertently seen the picture and had never told him that she had. She hadn’t meant to pry, but it would have taken a monumental exercise of self-will not to have turned over that picture frame when she stumbled over it, especially as at the time she herself was having doubts about Peter’s intentions. And recalling those doubts – doubts about a man who’d put unlimited resources behind finding her daughter when his own was lost; a man who’d given her and her children everything, unconditionally, without her knowledge, without asking anything in return – she was suddenly overwhelmed with shame and sadness. But she told the truth, always.
“No, he never showed me.” She looked up at Michael. “But I found a photograph of Lisa and Janica in a drawer full of sweaters.” She shrugged. “I was just tidying, doing my job, and there it was.”
“So you know …”
“That we could have been twins? Yes.” She shook her head. She needed to explain and she felt herself becoming more animated. “This was before I knew she was dead. At the time, I almost freaked. I thought that maybe Lisa had run away. Run away from him for the wrong reasons. For the same reasons I ran away from my father. It was just too awful to contemplate. The parallels were there and unmistakeable. I was a substitute. A replacement Lisa. And I didn’t know what he intended. Despite his kindness towards me, and the fact that, up until then, he’d never once touched me, other than to shake my hand when we first met, I was frightened. And confused. It took me a few days before I plucked up the courage to ask him, and when he told me all about her, I was mortified. Not just because of the pain he had clearly suffered but because I had doubted him. But, to my shame, I was also relieved.”
”There’s no shame in that,” said Michael gently. “How could you possibly have known?”
“I don’t think I trusted anyone back then,” she said, the sorrow and regret evident in her voice. “Peter restored that faith. He trusted me when he had no reason to do so and every reason to do otherwise. It was an act of pure selflessness.”
“That was the way he was, Jess.”
“And now he’s gone.” She couldn’t stop the tears forming again. Michael passed her a tissue from a box on the table and she wiped her eyes and nose. She took a sip of water from a crystal glass. “And Leila?” she sobbed. “Why did he spend the next three years and countless thousands searching for someone he’d never met, or even knew existed?”
“Oh, he knew she existed. You told him so. That was all he needed. I confess, the lawyer in me checked with Births. I’m sorry.”
“No, no – don’t be,” she said quickly. Michael leaned forward to get closer to her.
“He had already lost his daughter, so he knew what it was like, even though the circumstances were very different. He even said to me that he thought your suffering had been worse than his and he made it his mission to put things right for you in the way he had been unable to do for himself or his family. And it gave him a goal. Something to live for. And despite his poor health, he far outlived the consultant’s prognosis. He was never in any doubt that she could be tracked down and brought home, although none of us could have known how long it would take.”
“But he never once said anything to me about it.”
“He didn’t want to give you false hope, despite his own optimism, especially when you had your hands full with the twins. It would have been a dreadful torment for you to experience the numerous false alarms, dashed hopes, constant wondering. He knew you had to focus on Sophie and Lucy, and if, in the end, he was wrong, then you’d be no worse off. But if he was right …”
“And he was.”
“Yes, he was.”
“And so … how did you find her?”
Michael sat back again and sighed.
“Well, I didn’t actually do much other than coordinate matters and manage the expenses. I put some feelers out with contacts of mine in India, who in turn had contacts in Pakistan. But progress was slow and nothing happened for a very long time, so Peter suggested we use two of his men, Jackson and Rutherford. Ex-soldiers. SAS. They’d worked with Peter in Kosovo back in ’98 and he said they were the best, although they’d since left the service and were, shall we say, freelancers. By the way, these were the same guys who, er, negotiated with your evil debt collectors.”
Jess swallowed, remembering the blood-stained baseball bat, tried to imagine the encounter and what might have happened but then shuddered at the thought.
“But they had their own contacts, especially in Asia; they’d served in Afghanistan, had the odd skirmish with the Taliban on and around the border with Pakistan and basically knew their way around.” Jess was listening intently, and one of the questions that had always plagued her came to the fore.
“I never understood why he took her. Mo. He was never that close to her, and although I knew he and his mates had abused other girls, he never hurt Leila because she never left my sight. I never believed he would do that to her anyway, but there was no logic in taking her back to Pakistan when he could have found thousands of vulnerable girls already out there. And he’d have had to buy her a ticket when I know he had no money. He’d have had barely enough to buy his own. Was it too simple to believe he just loved her?” Jess didn’t know that Peter had wondered much the same, but his conclusion had been less charitable. “So why take her to Pakistan?” Michael took a breath before he replied.
“He didn’t.”
The words hit her like a bombshell and her jaw dropped, but she was unable to utter more than a single word.
“What?”
“He didn’t take her to Pakistan with him.”
“Then …?”
“He sold her. Here in the UK.”
“Oh my God!” she clasped a hand over her mouth in astonishment and then, still searching for explanations, said “but … how can that happen … here?”
“I’m afraid people trafficking is not confined to bringing the vulnerable in from poor parts of the world. It works in all directions.” But she was still confused.
“But … Leila came back wearing traditional dress and speaking Urdu. She can barely understand English.”
“Oh yes, she was in Lahore when we eventually found her.”
“Now I really don’t understand,” she said in exasperation, sitting back and putting her hand to a forehead that was beginning to throb. Michael noticed.
“Would you like some paracetamol?”
“No … no. I’m fine, thanks. I just don’t get it.”
“Let me explain.”
***
Mohammed Khalid stood outside the huge wrought-iron gates, staring through the bars at the daunting Georgian mansion standing proud and floodlit at the end of a short, curving drive. He felt a tug on his left hand and looked down at his four-year-old daughter who was looking back up at him, kicking her feet on the ground in boredom.
“What?” he said gruffly.
“Where’s Mummy?” said the little girl for the fourth time in the past half hour.
“She’s in that big house,” said Mo, hoping that would finally shut her up. He was nervous and apprehensive and the last thing he wanted was any more aggro from the kid. She’d moaned and whinged at him from the moment he’d picked her up from pre-school, bundled her into his car and driven to London. Where’s Mummy? Where’s Mummy? She had kept on at him until he’d lost it and shouted at her and she’d started crying. Then, mercifully, she’d stopped, only the occasional whimper indicating she was there at all, strapped into the child seat in the back of the Passat.
He’d parked in a resident’s bay in a street around the corner, but it was after seven and he’d only be ten minutes or so, he judged, so he’d risk being clamped. And if he had to abandon the car here and use the train for the last leg then so be it. Here or Heathrow, it hardly mattered.
The gates remained steadfastly shut and he noticed two cameras pointing down at him from the top of the stone pillars either side of the gate. They must have seen us, we’re on time. What are they waiting for?
He spotted a panel of buttons on the right pillar and decided he’d have to press one of them. He examined it closely. A numerical keypad, a small flat panel with a Wi-Fi logo on it and a slot illuminated by a dim blue flashing light and what looked like a small speaker. But then he saw what he was looking for: a large chrome button at the bottom, bearing the words “Call for Assistance”.
Mouth dry, heart beating a little faster and still gripping Leila’s hand tightly, he looked around, instinctively checking there was no one watching him, and reached out tentatively for the button. Before his finger got there, the gates snapped open with a loud crack.
“Aah!” He jumped back in shock, but he noticed one of the gates beginning to swing inwards, followed by the other, and he breathed a sigh of relief. He jumped again at the sound of a disembodied, strangulated voice emanating from the speaker.
“Approach the house slowly. Stay on the drive.” And then there was another click. Mo led his daughter slowly up the driveway, step by step, looking left and right, expecting at any moment someone would leap out of the darkness and attack him.
It was only a hundred feet or so to the house and Mo took note of the cars parked at an angle on either side – on the right, a black Range Rover, on the left, a white Porsche Carrera, and next to it, also black, a Mercedes S Class. His, hers and theirs, he thought. As he got nearer, the drive split and swung around the house to the right and down a slope, disappearing from view. Underground garage, he guessed, with no doubt more luxury hardware inside.
He dragged Leila along, her little legs taking four paces for every one of his, and reached the bottom of a flight of eight stone steps that led up to a huge oak-panelled double door beneath a large portico, the area bathed in a bright yellow glow.
As they climbed the steps, two men in dark suits stepped into view from either side of the door. They were smartly dressed with white shirts, black ties and shiny shoes, and their hands were crossed in front of them, as if they were waiting patiently for something or someone.
Mo looked at each of them anxiously, curious that, given the darkness, they both wore sunglasses. Ray-Ban Aviators with gold frames. He stopped when he got to the top step and the man on his right spoke.
“Take off your jacket.”
Mo hesitated for only a second, until the man stepped towards him and he quickly released Leila’s hand. He shrugged off his bomber jacket as Leila looked up at the second man who was standing still, watching, her little neck straining backwards to take in his height. “Hold out your arms,” said man number one, demonstrating the pose the visitor was required to adopt. Mo copied the move, his jacket dangling from his right hand.
The man stepped forward and frisked Mo roughly; neck, shoulders, around his back and chest, up and down his legs, inside and out, and lifted his trousers above the ankle feeling over his socks and shoes, the whole procedure watched intently by the man on his left. He checked Mo’s jacket pockets and, satisfied, turned to Leila and dropped to his haunches in front of her. She burst into tears.
“Quiet, Leila!” hissed Mo and she stopped momentarily. The man spun her around one hundred and eighty degrees and ran his hand down the back of her coat, before turning her back round, whereupon her face creased up and she started to wail again.
“Okay,” said the first man and Mo grabbed the hand of his still weeping child and gave it a tug.
“Shh!”
The second man spoke into his lapel and instantly one half of the oak door swung inwards. He gestured towards the open doorway with a nod of the head and Mo dragged Leila through into a large entrance hall, brilliantly lit by an enormous sparkling chandelier.
The floor was chequerboard marble, and two matching staircases curved up each side of the wall ahead of him to meet on a galleried landing on the first floor. The walls were adorned with giant oil paintings, the ceiling featured ornate plaster coving and, above the chandelier, a huge plaster rose.
Between the staircases, a sculpted archway revealed a wide corridor extending into the distance and, at the far end, a floor-to-ceiling stained glass window. The door thudded closed behind him, the sound echoing around the entrance hall. Mo turned to see man number one had stepped in behind him and had resumed his stance, legs apart, his hands crossed in front.
“Mr Khalid,” said a voice from nowhere, and Mo turned to see a tall, impeccably dressed Asian in his late fifties strolling into the entrance hall from a room to his left.
“Yes,” said Mo, swallowing deeply and trying not to show his fear. The Asian stepped forward and looked down at Leila with some disdain, but before he could say anything more, they were both distracted by the sound of heels click-clacking on the marble floor. A woman was hurrying towards them from the corridor ahead. Forty-something, big hair, big earrings, dressed in black silk trousers over high heels and a cream silk blouse with cashmere scarf, her neck and hands dripping expensive jewellery, the pungent scent of her perfume arriving long before she did.
“Let me see! Let me see!” she said excitedly as she trotted up to where Leila stood, completely ignoring Mo and dropping down to her haunches in front of her. “Oh, sweetheart!” Mo thought she sounded American. “Aren’t you just the most beautiful girl in the world?” she gushed at the little girl, whose eyes widened and nose twitched at the sight and smell of the woman squatting in front of her. The woman took Leila’s hand in hers and tried to stroke her face with the other, but Leila turned her head away. “Aw sweetie, come on now. Say hello to Mama.” Leila said nothing and the woman’s smile dropped.
“Mahmoud!” she snapped. The Asian let out a deep sigh.
“That will be all, Khalid. You may go.” And before Mo could respond, the woman had taken Leila’s hand out of his and dragged her off down the corridor, heels echoing as she went. Leila turned her head around as she trotted along behind, propelled at speed by the woman gripping her hand.
“Daddy?” she called out, and for a second Mo felt a surge of remorse until the woman and his daughter disappeared into a room to the right and he quickly remembered his business was not yet complete. But he suddenly noticed with alarm that the Asian man had turned and was disappearing back into the room from whence he had come. Mo was about to take a step forward and call out when he was stopped dead by a large yellow padded envelope slapping into his chest.
Mo looked down stupidly at the envelope and then to his right at the man in Ray-Bans who was holding it. He took the envelope and slowly looked inside. He scanned the contents, eyes darting around a dozen neat bundles of notes. He had planned his negotiating strategy well in advance, deciding he would take his time and ensure every penny was there before he released Leila to anyone, keep them waiting until he was satisfied; run the show, so to speak. But it hadn’t gone according to plan. He knew when he was totally out of his depth, and it was now.
He did some quick mental arithmetic; twenties, looked like fifty in a bundle, a dozen bundles, twelve grand! He only asked for ten! But then he noticed something else and began to protest.
“These are dollars! I said ten grand Sterling.”
“So? You’ve got twelve grand US. Same thing.”
“No it’s not!”
But the man stepped forward and Mo flinched, sweat forming on his temples.
“I suggest you leave,” said the man in the Ray-Bans. “Now.” The threat was clear and the menace which accompanied it, unmistakeable. Mo turned and, gripping the envelope tightly, stomped out of the open door past the second man, down the steps to the driveway, fumbling to put his jacket on as he disappeared into the night and beyond.
***
“Mo was in a lot of trouble, as you well know. He was being hounded by some very nasty people for money he owed both through gambling losses and a drugs deal that went badly wrong. The stuff he was peddling was, shall we say, sub-standard. We learnt that from your friendly debt collectors. He had to get away and so he sought refuge in Karachi where his parents still had family. He’d been planning his escape for a while but needed the money for his fare, so he sold Leila to a rich couple in North London who wanted a mixed-race girl.” Jess was totally absorbed trying to keep up; her mind was racing but she didn’t want to interrupt his flow.
“He was a Pakistani businessman with political connections in Islamabad, and his wife, a Canadian socialite from a publishing dynasty. He already had three teenage sons from a previous marriage, but she wanted a daughter and, well, she was told she couldn’t have kids. He wasn’t interested in having a daughter but he wanted to shut his wife up, so he bought her one.” The questions were amassing in her head and she couldn’t stop them spilling out.
“But why couldn’t they just adopt?”
“Because they’d have had to wait and jump through all sorts of hoops, and people like that don’t like to wait when the problem can be solved instantly with a sum of money that means nothing to them.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Mo told us.”
“When?”
“After we tracked him down in Karachi.”
“Why would you believe him?”
“Well at the time, we didn’t, but then Jackson was quite confident that Mo had every incentive to tell the truth, and subsequently, it turned out he was right.”
“Jackson?”
“The, er, SAS man.”
“What incentive?”
“Let’s not go there, Jess.”
“Oh God.” She wondered what they might have done to Mo but then to her dismay realised she didn’t much care. A window had been opened onto a world she knew nothing about, and it frightened her. Michael went on.
“So, we’d spent two years tracking down Mo in Pakistan, and when we did find him he kept us on the hook for several weeks pretending he still had her in order to extract more money, when the reality was Leila had been in St John’s Wood all the time.”
“But how did someone like Mo come across this couple in the first place?”
“Through his driving contacts. One of their many staff was a driver and he was a friend of a friend. Mahmoud Kayani – that’s the husband – had an entourage of security men and this driver chap used to ferry them all around in a bulletproof Range Rover. It’s a dodgy business being a rich, expat Asian with aspirations of a political comeback, especially when the government back home doesn’t want you.” Jess struggled to imagine such a situation. It was an alien world to her. “The driver overheard the wife nagging her husband about having a child, so he knew what they wanted, saw an opportunity and set it all up.” Jess was calculating the timeline in her head and frowned.
“You mean that, from the time I left home, all the way through to after the twins were born, Leila was living fifty miles away in London with these rich folk?”
“Yes. And long after that, too.” She rubbed her forehead and moaned. All that stuff with the police and the Home Office and the Pakistan Embassy, all a waste of time. She remembered sitting on the train to London, distraught, broken, staring aimlessly out of the carriage window, believing Leila to be thousands of miles away when, in reality, she could have been playing in a garden not a hundred yards from where sh