The arrival of the affidavit in London created a sensation. The police realised that their monumental efforts to dredge up Gladys’ old memories had yielded a rich harvest and they had as good as got their man. The garden in Earls Court was dug up and the body found to the mortification of Mrs. Simpson. The public outcry was terrific with the tabloid press taking the lead in castigating the murder. The British legal system made an application to Copra Island for the extradition of Hassan Husseini.
Hassan, unaware of his impending doom, had been making applications to work as an electrical construction engineer in the Middle East. He went to the embassies of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai and Bahrain and received lists of civil engineering companies which might be interested in recruiting staff from abroad. The embassy staff told him that new building work was always being undertaken fuelled by the oil boom and that he had good chances of receiving a job offer. His father’s contacts told him that salaries in the Arabian Peninsula were way above anything he could expect in Copra Island and that he would be doing his native country a favour by working there because Copra Island’s exchequer would benefit from his remittance money.
However, his fond hopes for future advancement were dashed when a squad of armed police overran his father’s house where he was living at dawn. Copra Island had once been a British colony and the authorities there were still deferential to their former overlords. The local chief of police owed his position to British approvals of his methods and attitudes. Hassan was bundled into a windowless van in which he was driven to a police station where an officious superintendent read out the extradition warrant to him. He was then taken in the same van to a courthouse where a district judge pronounced the extradition application good (Copra Island and the United Kingdom had an extradition treaty). The district judge in question had once qualified as a barrister at Lincolns Inn, London and had maintained his British links assiduously after he returned to his tropical homeland. He had previously been contacted by his Chief Justice about Hassan and had assured his superior that he would do everything humanly possible to please the British.
Hassan was then driven in a different van to the airport from which he departed on board a British Airways flight for London handcuffed to a British policeman. The flight was a nightmare. Nobody talked to him. The policeman to whom he was handcuffed looked stonily ahead for hours. The air stewardesses handed him his refreshments with averted faces and then took his empty trays away as if he was the source of a contagion. On arrival at Heathrow Airport Hassan was whisked through the arrivals formalities and taken by prison van straight to a remand prison.
In prison Hassan awaited his forthcoming court appearances while being watched by hostile wardens. Sometimes members of his legal team turned up to consult him but they made him understand that his case was weak. The most he could hope for, they said, was to try to see if Iqbal could be made to share his fate. Hassan knew, however, that Iqbal belonged to an entirely different social sphere to himself and that invisible hands would shield him from his part in what they had done to Patricia.
Iqbal thanked his father profusely for his skill and influence, which had apparently miraculously succeeded in extricating him from an almost hopeless situation. Some local Copra Islanders criticised him for his tardiness in reporting the matter but he, after magnanimously admitting some measure of fault in himself in that regard, said that he had wanted to consult his parents and his family’s religious advisors on Copra Island before taking steps to expose the villain. His family took him to the houses of several holy men who recited lengthy prayers in classical Arabic over him for payment and sprinkled him from top to toes in sacred water. These holy men were accustomed to people coming to them in order to obtain assistance from the spirit world for material advancement. They also knew that in Copra Island advancement came from approvals from mighty powers beyond the seas and they counselled all these supplicants to take no steps that might offend these powerful entities. Indeed, it was well nigh impossible to be a successful holy man in Copra Island with a substantial following without implicit Anglo-American approval. Iqbal returned to London in October that year knowing that he would be called upon to be the star witness in the trial to come.
During the trial at the Old Bailey Hassan’s attempts to implicate his quondam associate Iqbal were squashed by a dozen character witnesses who upheld Iqbal’s good name. There were testimonies from senior members of the Copra Island community in Britain, from managers from accountancy firms Iqbal had audited and a representative from the Baker Street mosque who said he knew Iqbal and realised he was a thoroughly respectable young man on the first steps of a brilliant career. Hassan fired his final shot and said that Iqbal’s girlfriend was fictitious and that Iqbal needed sex as much as himself. He was acting on the vague advice rendered to him by his indifferent legal aid solicitor. The Azeez family had thoroughly prepared for this. A white woman who was almost middle aged mounted the witness box and stated that she was the ‘June’ Hassan alluded to. Ahmed Azeez, anticipating Hassan’s probable future conduct in court, had used some of his less reputable contacts in London to find the woman. She was on the books of a low class escort agency which was how they found her. She agreed, for a substantial fee, to arrive in court and say she was Iqbal’s girlfriend. She stressed that she would in no way whatsoever ever have any kind of physical relationship with the young man for that money which paid for the court appearance only. If Iqbal wanted anything more then he would have to pay an additional sum. She had mentioned a price for sex which was so high that Iqbal and his friends had laughed aloud as soon as the words were out of her mouth.
During the course of Iqbal’s testimony Hassan attempted to leave the dock to fight him physically but was foiled by the timely action of a policeman who had been sitting next to him in the dock as a precaution against just such an event. He was handcuffed to the policeman for the rest of his time in court. Every night during the trial he was taken back to the remand prison to be greeted by the abusive staff and hostile prisoners. On more than one occasion he considered suicide but had nothing to hang himself with. His cellmate was a hyperactive black man who talked nonsense non-stop.
While Hassan’s parents, who had travelled all the way from Copra Island for the trial, watched horrified from the public gallery the judge made his summing up to the jury which seemed like a continuation and amplification of the prosecution case. He castigated Iqbal for his delay in reporting the matter and for having passively spectated while Hassan hid the evidence of his crime in the garden. His venom, however, was reserved for Hassan who, he said, had callously wasted a young life with amoral disregard for its sanctity. Some members of the general public up in the gallery reflected that the defence team, the prosecution counsel and the judge himself had all skirted carefully around the central fact that Muslim girls were unavailable for sex causing their male co-religionists to become desperate and attempt to do with non-Muslims what they could not do with the female Faithful.
Hassan was sentenced to twenty-five years imprisonment while his mother shrieked and fainted in the public gallery. He spent a dozen years of his life in Pentonville Prison from which he was released early for good behaviour and was repatriated on a flight to Copra Island on the day he left the prison. His prison years had been a punishment for his soul. He discovered that sex offenders were accorded a special place in the prison hierarchy and staff and inmates abused him verbally. ‘Slopping out’ was a particularly nasty event in his routine. Sometimes an Immam from a local mosque turned up to advise the Muslim prisoners. He gave anodyne advice which was not of lasting value. All the time Hassan’s knowledge of electrical engineering was atrophying and there were no resources in the prison library to remedy that.
When Hassan arrived in his homeland after prison he found that his family had been utterly vanquished by the revenge of the Azeez family for his statements in the Old Bailey about Iqbal when he should have taken the blame like a man. His father had been run out of business because his shops had been broken into and vandalised at night by unknown thugs whom the Suba police were most reluctant to pursue. The authorities used the same method concerning the seriousness of what had been done to the shops as they had used after Hussain had been attacked. They knew that the Azeez family was at the bottom of the shop break-ins and so referred to old notes comparing the economic and social positions of the two families. The Azeez family came out on top by a very wide margin so the police did nothing. Ifthicar was forced to sell his small businesses and his house and he and his wife lived in a tiny tenement in one of Copra Island’s rural districts on the proceeds of the sales. Part of the sale money bought the tenement and the rest was invested so that a meagre monthly income could just about keep him and his wife in food, clothing and household necessaries like soap, gas and electricity. Hussain became a resident in a government institution for the mentally handicapped. Conditions were primitive. He ate his meals with his fingers crouching on a stone floor in a cell in the company of other inmates whose average intelligence approached the levels of the higher apes. He stayed there for the rest of his life. After he died of bacterial meningitis at the age of thirty-two his corpse was incinerated and the ashes were thrown onto the ground in a nearby jungle.
Iqbal Azeez was awarded his practising certificate in London and returned to Suba where he married his fiancée Ayesha and worked as a senior partner in his father’s accountancy firm of which he became head after Ahmed’s retirement. After a while he grew tired of constantly supervising the audits of profoundly unethical business people and longed for something else to do. If he was back in London he could have branched out into management consultancy but there was no scope for that in a big way in Copra Island so Iqbal gritted his teeth and persevered in his soul-destroying work for the sake of his social position and his growing family. He became a social and religious leader in Copra Island’s society.
As for the rest of Hassan’s life, he found he could not get an engineering position on Copra Island because of his criminal conviction in the UK. In any event he had not kept up with his chosen profession and had not anticipated the advent of computers and their software in the field of engineering. None of the major companies recruiting electrical engineers would touch him. Once, he enrolled in an evening class to update his skills for a possible future job but found the assumptions of knowledge of I.T. baffling. He could not understand the new terminology and the teachers, knowing his background, did not help him.
Eventually, he found work as a clerk in the back office of a large shop in Suba for meagre wages in the course of which employment his employers and colleagues treated him with scant respect. He had landed the job by answering a newspaper advertisement and secured the position by offering to work for less than the salary printed in the advertisement. His job was stock control. The shop management used the figures he produced to compute the extent of thieving by members of the public and their own employees. The other employees refused to eat their midday meals in proximity to Hassan so he learnt to have his lunch standing on the pavement outside. Once, one of the shop managers castigated him for eating in front of the shop so he moved his location to a side street.
One afternoon, during a holiday, Hassan went to the Israeli section of the local American embassy. For the first time in ages he was treated with courtesy. He asked the staff for help with whatever was left of his career and they told him to wait while they made enquiries. Eventually, he was given permission to go to Israel where he worked as an electrical technician for several years. His knowledge of electrical engineering was too rusty and out of date for him to work as an engineer but a little reading up enabled him to be a competent electrician. He worked on setting up new settlements on the West Bank where Palestinian women who watched him working from a distance roundly scolded him. Occasionally former indigenous inhabitants threw stones but none struck Hassan.
A Jewish male friend in Israel advised him to give Africa a chance. Some people in Israel made enquiries on his behalf through unofficial channels as few African countries had diplomatic relations with Israel. He travelled out to Zaire after his friends made arrangements. In Africa he did manage to work as an electrical engineer. He supervised the wiring of newly constructed office buildings and was occasionally consulted professionally on matters connected with electricity generation. In that environment the residual knowledge won by working his tail off in London delivered results. He married a Muslim Asian girl after meeting her father in a café and had children. He learnt to speak the local dialect of French and, for the first time in his life, made friends. Under African skies his British criminal conviction seemed far away and of little import. The local Asian community looked to him for guidance in their troubles in a chaotic environment. Black Africans came to him to ask him about life in London and how to make applications to go to Europe to study. Hassan was frightened of the violence and the here-and-now thinking of the African culture but found that was preferable to the studied hostility of the prison conditions and the total social boycott which marked his stay in Copra Island after his return from Pentonville.
Hassan died of his injuries after becoming involved in disturbances, which later developed into the Congo Civil War. A group of young men with military aspirations were demanding money from an Asian family. The militants needed the money to buy arms and provisions. The Asian paterfamilias saw Hassan walking on the lane outside in the dusk and called loudly for his assistance in dealing with the rapacious demands. Hassan, who was now a minor Asian communal leader, crossed the lane and remonstrated in accented French with the apparent captain of the militants who pointed an AK47 up his nose throughout. After a while the members of the militant gang began sniggering that their leader was going soft and was talking like a woman instead of laying down his demands and taking what he wanted. Hearing this and feeling his command slipping away, the captain shot Hassan fatally through the head. The troop then ransacked the Asian man’s house, looted cash and valuables and then made themselves scarce.
At Hassan’s funeral, held within twenty-four hours, as is the custom in tropical Islamic regions, the officiating Immam said that he had expiated the wrong he had done in Europe by serving his community and that for him ‘real life’ was just beginning.
After his death, Hassan’s wife and two children returned to India where they lived as unofficial servants in the home of one of her rich relatives. After a while they learnt it was politic not to ever mention his name.
When Patricia’s family learnt of Hassan’s death they said it was a “good riddance” and held a minor celebration at a local pub.
A police inspector turned up at the Husseini tenement in a squad car to give his parents the news of his death. He delivered his message in scornful language. His mother wept.
posted by Ali @ 8:41 AM
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