Lamb led the way down, lighting a cigarette before they’d reached the street. Outside, its plume of smoke was almost white. ‘Anyone else got a car here?’
Louisa Guy did.
‘Either of you in a state to drive?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then follow me.’
‘Where to?’ River asked.
‘You’re with me.’ To the other two, Lamb said, ‘Roupell Street. Know it?’
‘South of the river.’
‘This time of night?’
Lamb said, ‘That supposed to be funny?’
‘What do we do when we get there?’ River asked.
‘We rescue Hassan Ahmed,’ Lamb said. ‘And we all get to be heroes.’
River, Min and Louisa shared a glance.
Lamb said, ‘Is that all right with you? Or did you have other plans?’
They had no other plans.
Larry, Moe and Curly.
Curly, Larry and Moe.
Who were these people, and why had they taken him?
For long stretches at a time, Hassan believed that he had stopped thinking. That he was all feeling, no thought. But that was wrong: it was more that his thoughts had become feelings, and were now tumbling round his head like butterflies. His thoughts were fluttering things, impossible to pin down. They led to one thing, then to another, and then to a third, which might be the first thing over again, though it was hard to be sure, as by then he’d forgotten what the first thing had been. Whether the root cause of this was fear or hunger or loneliness, he didn’t know. What was interesting—and this interested him in the same way he might once have been interested in the activities of an ant—was that he had discovered a talent for time travel. For fractions of a second, he was able to cast himself out of this cellar and into a past in which none of this would ever happen.
For instance, he remembered the first time he’d asked his mother about the man in the photo on her bedside table; this obvious soldier, with fine firm features, and a look in his eye suggesting that he too knew the secret of time travel, and was seeing through the camera and into the future itself; a future in which children yet unborn would gaze at his photograph, and wonder who he was.
‘That is your uncle Mahmud,’ he was told.
Hassan had been five or so at the time.
‘Where is he?’ he’d asked.
‘He’s back home. In Pakistan.’
But home didn’t mean Pakistan to Hassan. Home meant where he lived; it meant the house in which he woke up every day with his parents and brothers and sisters, and also the street on which that house was set, and the town that street was part of, and so on. It confused him that for his mother, the word might mean something else. If words meant different things to different people, how could they be trusted?
And if this man was his uncle, why had Hassan never met him?
‘Why doesn’t he visit us?’
Because his uncle was a very busy and important man, who had duties that kept him on the other side of the world.
Information supplied early enough becomes hardwired into the brain, and this nugget had not only satisfied Hassan, but seemed to be the only thing worth saying on the subject. When, years later, he had glimpsed what looked like the same man on the BBC news, a figure in a line of men being introduced to the US President, who’d been on one of his welcome-to-my-world tours, it was simply confirmation of what his mother had told him: that his uncle was a very busy and important man.
And then the flicker of history was gone, and Hassan was back in his cellar.
His uncle was a very busy and important man. Too busy and important ever to visit England; that was the story his younger self had been told. The truth, as his father had told him much later, cast a somewhat different light: his uncle had never visited because he did not approve of his sister’s marriage; did not approve of their secular life. Though the matter of his busyness and importance remained true: his uncle was a high-ranking officer in the Pakistan military.
Was that busy and important enough, he wondered now? Was that important enough for Larry, Curly and Moe?
That was what they had said, but perhaps they had lied. After all, they had assaulted, drugged and kidnapped him; imprisoned him in a damp cellar; coldly informed him they were going to cut his head off. They had given him a bottle of water and a banana, and nothing else. They were bad people. That they were liars was not beyond possibility. And since busyness and importance easily equated with wealth, maybe this was in reality a kidnapping of the garden variety; that for all their threats and bluster, Moe, Curly and Larry’s aim was to screw money from his busy, important uncle, no more. Which made more sense than that they might demand a ransom from his parents, who were busy but not important; comfortable, but not rich. Hassan was almost certain, then, that this must be the case.
Yeah, sure, they said that, but only to keep him scared.
