The Inquiry. Will Caine
and yellowing streaks from overflowing pipes discolouring their whitewashed frontages. But most were spruced-up and clean, often with recently added porches and front doors proudly displaying their panelled multi-coloured glass. Her shrewd father had bought their house three years after she was born, during the heyday of Mrs Thatcher’s right to buy, a nest for the family he’d once hoped to grow.
She had been just eight years old when her mother had died – how distant it seemed. Not old enough truly to know her; or to ask her what she really believed. Would her mother, with the conviction of a convert’s faith, have seeded in her the certainty her father lacked? Whenever Sara occasionally referred to her, her father never seemed to want to engage; the answer was always a platitude. ‘Yes, your mother was always a good woman.’ ‘Always true to God.’ ‘So beautiful.’ ‘I never stopped loving her.’ It was territory he did not want to enter. After her death, the house had become father and daughter’s sanctuary. She never thought of leaving him, whatever the pressures to marry from aunts and cousins. With him to look after, how could she? The truth was that, far from being her burden, he was her excuse.
She turned her key in the front door Yale lock and it opened. Noisily – a signal to her father that she was home – she wiped her feet, hung up her coat and after a few seconds called, ‘Dad!’ No answer; he must have forgotten to double lock on his way out. Despite such lapses, his brain was in good order and she remembered it was his bridge evening at the Working Men’s Club up in Clapham. She smiled at the thought of him – his shortness, the little sticking-out tummy and the ever-present smile. A purist might have told him that card-play was un-Islamic; he would have joyously replied that it was a great Pakistani game, and Zia Mahmood the finest player the world had ever seen.
She went into the cramped kitchen, made herself tea and headed upstairs. After her mother’s death, he had knocked through the two rooms at the back to give her a bedroom-cum-study with her own shower room. She later realised it was his way of saying he never would, nor could, remarry. No more wives, no more children. Just him and her.
She removed her scarf, jacket and tailored black skirt she wore for work, replacing them with a loose blouse, cardigan and trousers. In the shower room she stared at herself in the mirror; the unblemished pale olive skin she was blessed with stared back. The odd line was forming on her forehead but the rest of her body from high cheekbones to slender ankles, was uncreased and lean – as photographs showed, the figure of her mother not her father. She rubbed her face with soap and warm water, patted it dry and returned to the bedroom. With half a sigh, she unstrapped her black holdall and lifted out the laptop and envelope containing Morahan’s letter. From her desk she looked out at the row of neighbouring back gardens – neat flowerbeds and patches of lawn interrupted occasionally by messes of dumped detritus. She booted up her laptop and typed in the two words ‘Morahan Inquiry’.
She clicked on the official website, then ‘Chair and Panel’, and found herself lingering over the portrait photograph of Morahan himself. She tried to remember him from that Cambridge conference. He’d certainly been on the panel at one session but she couldn’t recall an actual meeting, seeing him close up, shaking his hand. It must have happened if he said so – and there’d been hundreds there.
Under the scrutiny of the camera, she detected an apprehension in the eyes, a trace of disappointment too perhaps. A figure that must be imposing peering down from the judicial bench under cover of the judge’s wig seemed unsettled. Was he an unhappy – or disenchanted – man? His biography showed the bare bones of a personal life; married Iona Chesterfield 1977, two daughters. Otherwise it outlined a seamlessly upward legal career interrupted only by a five-year stint, 1997–2002, in Parliament, ending with his resignation both as Attorney General and MP.
Or was it a lack of fulfilment those eyes betrayed? His resignation seemed never to have been fully explained. Journalists and, later, historians writing about the Iraq war, assumed Morahan had seen it coming and got out ahead. She wondered if he himself had encouraged that narrative – whether those eyes hid another story.
Press coverage of the Inquiry was patchy. On the day of its announcement by the Prime Minister the Guardian had hailed it as a ‘brave innovation to shine a chink of public light onto the security services’. The Times applauded the PM’s initiative but warned that ‘secret services must be allowed to keep secrets’.
She heard the front door lock click and footsteps below. She flinched. ‘Is that you, Dad?’ she shouted down.
‘’Course it’s me, who else are you expecting?’
Who else indeed? She collected herself, went downstairs and bound him in a close hug, tucking her chin against his ear from her greater height. They broke away and he gave her a puzzled smile.
‘Sara, you hug me tight. Are you OK?’
‘’Course I’m OK, just pleased to see you.’
He felt her relax. ‘You looked agitated to me. That’s not like my girl.’
‘Pressure, I guess.’
‘You gotta take it easy. Like me!’
‘If only,’ she laughed.
‘Anyway, I got something to celebrate. I landed a better squeeze tonight even than that one you just gave me.’
She shook her head in mock disapproval of him and handed him the sheet of paper she’d been holding. ‘You remember a while ago the government set up an Inquiry into the security services under a judge called Sir Francis Morahan?’
‘Rings some kind of bell.’ Tariq Shah was a news junkie, addicted to Channel 4 News and Newsnight. Sara was grateful for the short cuts it offered whenever she wanted to discuss something.
‘Read.’
Her father read the letter once quickly, a second time slowly. ‘I see why you’re jumpy.’
‘What should I do?’
‘What do you want to do?’
‘For once I’d like you to tell me.’
‘You know I’d never stand in your way.’
‘But would you approve?’
She could feel him trying to read her. ‘You don’t need that, Sara.’ She looked silently down at the floor. ‘See the man. Maybe he’s in trouble, needs help. Maybe it’d be good for you. For your career.’ He handed back the letter.
She raised her eyes. ‘You’ll promise never, ever even to hint about it to anyone. Anyone at all.’
‘Why would I do that? Don’t you trust me?’
‘Sorry, Dad, ’course I trust you.’ She felt a burn of shame. ‘It’s just that…’
‘I know. It’s… what’s the word? It’s peculiar.’ He inspected her with an unfamiliar curiosity. ‘You’re afraid of something, aren’t you?’ he said.
It was the enduring sadness within the love she felt for her father – far greater than for any other human being – that made her, even eighteen years later, unable to answer him.
Two days later at 12.55 p.m., Sara Shah arrived at the Afghan restaurant on Farnwood Road, between Tooting High Street and the Common. She’d quickly replied to the letter after discussing it with her father; he’d driven to Chelsea Place Upper that night to put it through No. 45’s front door. She’d ended the note by reminding Morahan, if he cycled, to wear a helmet; after her father set off, she wondered what on earth had possessed her to do so.
She’d proposed to Morahan a lunchtime meeting – somehow evening felt inappropriate. She was not in court that day and Ludo, as always, had happily agreed to her studying the next case files from home.
In one corner of the small restaurant, a young Asian family with two toddlers were faces down in a huge plate of sizzling