Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
It felt as if I didn’t sleep at all that night. I don’t know whether Sam did or whether he was just pretending to. In any event, his back was utterly still next to me when I got under the covers, and it stayed that way, a chilly few inches of mattress in between us.
I lay there, rigid, nervous about what I might hear. What if Jamie woke up and tried to sneak into our bedroom to cause more trouble between Sam and me? What if he got up needing to be sick and didn’t make it to the bathroom?
Sam’s mood was pretty foul already – how he’d feel if he had to clean up vomit in the small hours didn’t bear thinking about.
And what – what the actual? – had Jamie even being doing here in the first place?
I must have drifted into a light doze, but the footsteps I’d expected to hear woke me. Glancing at my watch, I saw it was half past three. Jamie was moving around the flat almost silently – his shoes must still be in the hallway where he’d left them when he took off his jacket.
I heard him open and close the bathroom door and braced myself for the sound of retching, but there was only the flush of the toilet.
Next to me, Sam lay immobile. The latch on the bathroom door clicked again, and I heard soft footsteps padding past our bedroom – past, thank God – and then through to the hallway.
A few seconds later, I heard the front door open and close.
He’d gone. Woken up and let himself out, presumably reluctant to face me or Sam in the morning. I didn’t blame him – but he was certainly going to have some explaining to do when I saw him in the office.
Except, as it turned out, I didn’t.
When I emerged from the Tube station at twenty-five past nine, running late because, having eventually fallen asleep, my body had decided there was no way it was waking up at seven, my phone was ringing.
Shit. Surely even at his narkiest, Jasper wouldn’t be calling me to tell me off before I was even late?
But the name on my screen was Zahra’s.
‘Hello?’ I gasped, my phone pressed to my ear. ‘Georgia speaking.’
‘Georgia, hi. It’s me.’
‘Hi, Zahra.’ I made sure my bright, professional voice was on, pausing in a doorway so I wouldn’t sound flustered and out of breath, giving away the fact that I’d run up the stairs out of the station two at a time and felt like I might die. ‘How are you?’
Please don’t let her be ringing to ask for help arranging her wedding, I thought. I’d been meaning to think of a tactful way to contact her and ask if it was still going ahead, hoping to learn that somehow she’d managed to persuade her father that this wouldn’t make her happy.
But what with everything that had been going on with Sam and now Jamie, her problems had slipped lower down my priority list than they deserved to be.
‘Not so good.’ Her voice was muffled – I wondered whether she was speaking through the black niqab that covered her mouth or if she’d been crying.
Or whether there was someone nearby who she didn’t want to overhear her conversation.
‘I’m sorry, Zahra. Do you need help? What can I do?’
‘Can you meet me later this morning?’
‘Sure. Shall we go for coffee?’
‘Just a walk.’ Her words came out quickly now. ‘Meet me in Hyde Park, by Speakers’ Corner, okay? At half ten?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you there.’
But she’d already ended the call.
Fortunately, neither Jasper nor Jamie were in the office, so I didn’t have to fabricate an excuse for leaving half an hour after I’d arrived when I had no arranged meeting in the shared diary.
I chugged down a coffee, answered a couple of emails and then left, deciding I might as well walk the short distance through Mayfair to meet Zahra.
It was a gorgeous day – last night’s rain had left everything cleansed and sparkling, and several degrees cooler than it had been.
Still, when I saw Zahra waiting for me under the shade of an oak tree, I thought how hot she must be feeling.
But her clothes had been developed for wear in the literal desert; presumably the people whose idea it had been knew what they were doing.
That or they just didn’t care whether women were too hot or not – or expected them to stay indoors.
I hurried over to her, and we exchanged a quick hug.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s walk. I’m staying at my auntie’s place. She said it was okay for me to go out, but she’ll get twitchy if I’m too long, so we’ll need to be quick.’
This seemed like quite the contrast to the freedom Zahra had had when I saw her previously, when it had apparently been fine for her to spend a morning shopping and an afternoon at the ballet.
But what did I know – she’d evidently been permitted to spend years at university in Cambridge, presumably unchaperoned.
I’d never asked her about this aspect of her life – it had seemed too intrusive and too fraught with the risk of causing offence.
‘What’s happened, Zahra?’ I asked as we walked. She had quite a pace on and was almost as difficult to keep up with as Jamie. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘My dad is freaking out.’ She looked at me sideways. ‘Remember those photos you took of me when we were trying on clothes?’
‘Of course.’ I’d thought nothing of it at the time – I’d snapped pictures of her in the various garments, sometimes capturing angles the mirror couldn’t to help her make her choices, sometimes catching her as she posed, laughing, her head tilted and her hip jutting like a fashion model, and AirDropped them to her when we’d finished.
‘What… Has something happened with them?’
‘I put them on my Instagram,’ she said. ‘Same as I often do. It’s locked down like you won’t believe – only my sisters and a few of my friends have access. But now my dad’s seen them, and he’s going absolutely mental.’
My brain whirled. I didn’t understand – the full complexity of what was and wasn’t permitted in Zahra’s religion or more specifically within her family was a mystery to me. But clearly, what she and I had done or what she’d posted on her private social media had crossed a line.
And I’d been there. I’d been behind the camera. Therefore, what was happening was at least partly my fault. Guilt washed over me at the thought.
Zahra’s uncle Ahmet and his wife were among Devereaux Partners’ highest-spending clients. If he complained about me to Jasper, I’d be in a world of pain – but that seemed inconsequential compared to the trouble Zahra herself might be in.
‘What’s he going to do?’ I asked. ‘Your dad, I mean.’
‘Apart from giving me a massive lecture about what’s inappropriate behaviour for a married woman, which he’s already done? Make me one, as soon as he can.’
‘So your marriage – your wedding, I mean – it’s going ahead?’
‘Dad says so.’ She walked even faster, and I realised she was letting out pent-up anger and tension in the only way she could.
‘He says it’s going to happen back home in Riyadh in the autumn at the latest. Hamza – he’s my second cousin – he’s been married before, and he’s got kids older than me.
He’s all right – but he’s an old man, Georgia. He’s like… sixty. I can’t imagine…’
I couldn’t imagine either. This vibrant girl, younger than I was, marrying a man my own father’s age. Her dreams of a PhD and a career in science or academia being torn away from her. Having to leave the country she loved and her friends here.
And it might be all my fault.
‘I’m so sorry.’ The words felt hopelessly inadequate. ‘I don’t know what to say, Zahra. I don’t know what to do.’
‘I needed to talk to someone,’ she said. ‘Because the thing is – even if Hamza wasn’t a bloody granddad with a massive belly and bad teeth, I wouldn’t want to marry him. I wouldn’t want to if he was the last man on the planet.’
Of course, very few women in Zahra’s position would enter happily into an arranged marriage with a much older man – I knew I wouldn’t. But what if there was more to it than that? What if the boyfriend I’d speculated about did exist and was the real reason – or yet another reason – for her distress?
I wanted to ask her. If I knew the full facts of her situation, I’d be better placed to support her.
But she was in this mess partly because of me – because of the photos I’d taken on my phone, which had somehow got into the wrong hands.
She had no reason at all to trust me with even more sensitive details about her life.
Abruptly, Zahra stopped walking. I’d been trailing slightly behind her, and I almost cannoned into the back of her. She turned to face me, and her eyes were fierce.
‘Georgia. Did you share those pictures with anyone? Maybe you didn’t think it would be a problem. I guess I didn’t explain. But if you did, I want to know who it was. I need to know who has them because this could get really bad for me.’
‘Of course I didn’t. I would never do that – whether I knew they could cause problems for you or not. You’re a client, and they’re confidential.’
‘Are they still on your phone?’
My phone. My phone that was snatched out of my hand in the street. After the initial lost-a-limb helplessness of being without one for twenty-four hours and the hassle of claiming on insurance and getting a replacement, I’d barely given the incident another thought.
I’d checked my online banking every few hours for the first couple of days afterwards, but when no fraudulent transactions had gone through, I’d stopped checking.
Everything had been backed up to the cloud, and once I’d done the initial set-up, my new phone functioned exactly the same as the old one, so much so that it had only taken about a week before I forgot it was new at all.
‘I… yes, I suppose so. I didn’t delete them after I sent them to you, and I haven’t looked at them since.’
‘Delete them now,’ she said. ‘It’s too late, but do it anyway.’
‘Of course I will. And, Zahra – please, stay in touch. Let me know you’re safe.’
‘I will. I must go.’ She turned and headed off, gliding along the path at a speed I could never have matched.
I followed more slowly, taking out my phone and looking at the pictures one more time before wiping them from my phone.
They were innocent enough – unless you knew what the implications for Zahra could be.
But someone had accessed them – either from her social media or phone or from mine.
They’d known what destructive power they had, and they’d used it.
Whoever had stolen the phone wouldn’t have been interested in my photos, surely? They’d have sold the handset on – or fenced it, or whatever word they used – within hours if not minutes of it coming into their possession.
Unless they hadn’t.
There was only one other person I could think of who could have accessed the phone or its contents. One other person who could have sent the photos to Zahra’s uncle Ahmet, Devereaux Partners’ valuable client.
And I couldn’t think of a single reason why.