The Disappeared Read Online Free

the moors where wind turbines could be installed, to find out who owned the land, and to begin the negotiations that would turn unprofitable acres of poor grazing into a lucrative source of clean energy. Copley Solutions received a large subsidy from the government to offset the capital cost of the turbines, and the profits from the sale of electricity were divided between Copley and the farmer. It filled Justin with contentment, that he was making profit for his firm, and a share of it for himself, in ways that helped the planet. For seven years he had been happy in his job, living a bachelor life, indulging his taste for Heavy Metal, and playing bass guitar in a Rock band which had acquired a certain following in the Northern city where he lived and worked. From time to time he nurtured the ambition of forming a Heavy Metal group of his own, and playing to the local metallurgists, as he called them, who formed a small but devoted sect.
    Then he met Muhibbah Shahin and everything changed. Muhibbah was 20, eleven years his junior, and worked in a boutique in the city centre. She was from a migrant Afghan family, which had come to Britain eight years before from Yemen, to which country they had fled from the conflict in Afghanistan. Unlike her parents she had adopted the British way of life, running away from home aged 19 to avoid the marriage that had been arranged with a distant cousin in Waziristan, and sharing a flat in a run-down part of the city with two university students, both of them girls. After she took up her place behind the counter in Amanda’s Fashion Boutique she was spotted by a member of the Afghan community; her father appeared the next day with two accomplices, and seized her. Muhibbah screamed, spat, scratched, gripped, kicked and clung to whatever she could, and soon members of the public – including Justin, who was passing by – intervened. Someone called the police. The three men were arrested, and Justin volunteered to take Muhibbah to her home. She raised her perfect almond eyes in her perfect oval face, swept back her perfect black hair with perfect smooth fingers from her perfect olive features and looked at him. She did not smile. She did not speak. But she gave a condescending nod in his direction, and he received it as a command.
    He called each day at the flat that she shared in order to walk with her to work; he came to the boutique at the end of each afternoon ready to take her home. He went with her to the police station to give evidence against her family. The police were reluctant to act. Ever since the MacPherson Report, which issued a general accusation of ‘institutional racism’ against the British police, they had been confidentially advised to steer clear of all involvement with the immigrant communities. Nevertheless, by dint of persistence, Justin secured a restraining order, a promise of protection and a safe number for Muhibbah to call. He kept watch over her, took her flowers and presents, encouraged her to read and write in English, and tried to pronounce her name in the way she liked, with the full-throated H of the Arabs, though she was not exactly an Arab and her parents often spoke Pashto at home. Muhibbah, she explained, looking at him curiously, comes from Hubb, the verb for love, and he practised the sound again and again until she rewarded him with a smile.
    â€˜So what does Muhibba mean?’ he asked.
    â€˜It means love, or the thing loving, or the thing loved, depending how you take it.’
    â€˜And how do
you
take it?’
    â€˜I don’t,’ she said coldly. ‘It’s other people give you your name. Usually so as to trap you into doing things their way. I do things
my
way.’
    Doing things her way marked Muhibbah out as a singular person who belonged to no category that Justin had previously encountered. It was not long before he recognised that she was no ordinary intimidated refugee, but an intelligent, wilful and