The Inquiry. Will Caine

days of online research the room was a quiet retreat, and usually deserted when she wanted it for prayers; she suspected her new colleagues had been educated in the prayer calendar. The suspicion embarrassed her.

      She thought of the exchange with Ludo and asked herself again if the switch from human rights campaigner to highly paid fraud specialist was corrupting her. The fact remained that she’d fallen out of love with too much of the human rights agenda – unable to repress an inner voice that Rainbow Chambers, and therefore she, had become prone to exploiting generously intended legislation. The sad truth was that rejected asylum seekers were often turned away for good reasons. She knew that in at least one case, perhaps more, she had represented ‘victims’ making false claims of British army brutality – and won. She’d come to worry that a realism about these sad people, born of too much experience, was chipping away at her humanity. She’d even started reading The Times ahead of the Guardian!

      A move to fraud had been the right thing to do. If iron was entering her soul, better to direct it against hardened criminals, though she hadn’t yet had to defend one. She remembered Ludo’s ‘good chap’ and ‘bad chap’. Cynic or wit?

      Stop thinking and pray. She faced east; the slanting sun cast sienna rays above the opposite building. ‘I intend to perform the four rakat fardh of the Salat Al-Asr for Allah.’ She paused, her mind cluttered, impossibly distracted, unable to slip into an automatic empathy with the words she was about to say. Perhaps if her father had drummed discipline into her in the way she’d seen with others, it would be easier. But Tariq Shah was not like that. For him it was cultural, not spiritual – something he and his family had always done. He occasionally looked in at mosque and, however sceptical he might be, wished no offence to Islam – nor any other religion. She had inherited the scepticism but not the temperament to relax with it; self-discipline was her only answer to both.

      Ultimately, she told herself, emerging from the jumble of thoughts, it was her duty to her father that justified the professional move she’d made – the money to guarantee his comfort till the day he died. The comfort of this conclusion finally cleared her mind and she raised her arms over her chest. ‘Audhu billahi min-ash-shaytan -hir-rajeem, bismillah-hir-Rahman-hir-raheem.’

      Ten minutes later, she was back in the room she shared at chambers with two other junior counsel. Marty Richards was out of London but Sheila Blackstone was there, make-up mirror angled towards full lips, to which she was applying copious layers of scarlet lipstick.

      ‘Sara darling, you caught me at it! Good day in court?’

      ‘Yes, fun,’ said Sara. ‘And utterly irresponsible. A wine fraudster. Who could care?’

      ‘Half the QCs in this Chambers will care a very great deal about that,’ said Sheila, eyes down on her mirror.

      Sara hung her coat on a hook and looked at the hand-written envelope. She was tempted to chuck it in a bin – ‘Private and Confidential’ was probably shorthand for ‘I need a free favour’. But there was an edginess in the scrawled writing that stoked her curiosity; anyone sending begging letters would write more neatly. She caught Sheila’s inquisitive eye peering around the mirror, rose and left the room. She returned with the envelope to the ladies, the one guaranteed place of uninterrupted refuge, entered a cubicle and sat on the closed seat. She ripped it open. The printed heading was followed by the same scrawling hand-writing as on the envelope.

      The Rt Hon Lord Justice Morahan

      45 Chelsea Place Upper

      London SW3 6BY

       Monday evening

       Dear Ms Shah

       My apologies for writing to you in such an unusual way. You may remember that we met briefly in Cambridge two years ago at the ‘Human Rights: A Judge’s Role’ conference. I was most impressed with your contribution to that and also by your formidable record in this area.

       You will be aware of the government Inquiry into security service strategy against terror which the incoming administration appointed me to chair last year. There is a missing expertise in the Inquiry which I believe you are uniquely qualified to provide. Formally speaking, this approach should be coming not from me but from the Government Legal Department which administers such matters. However, I have overwhelming and powerful reasons for initially speaking to you alone.

       I would therefore be most grateful if, in the first instance, you would meet me privately. I cannot impress upon you too strongly that it is vital for my sake, if not yours, that this meeting is confidential and unobserved. I leave it to you to arrange a time and place that would suit these criteria. I can travel anonymously by bicycle. Anywhere within reach of Vauxhall Cross would be suitable. The meeting would be purely exploratory and you would be making no commitment by agreeing to it. However, I do not exaggerate when I say that truly vital matters of state and possible wrong-doing are at stake.

       I would ask you to deliver your reply hand-written to the address above. I hope very much to hear from you with your arrangement.

       Yours most sincerely

       Francis Morahan

      Sara stood up with a jerk, blood rushing from her head. Both the author’s identity and the fretfulness of the letter were a shock. She took a few deep breaths. Her thumping heart began to slow and the colour returned to her face. She wondered at how such perfect, concise sentences could emerge from such an apparently shaky hand. She didn’t dare to step out of the cubicle until she’d calmed down. It was the most disconcerting letter she had ever received, prompting a scattergun of questions and images. Chambers was not the place to confront them.

      She walked back to her room; for once she was relieved to find Sheila gone. She stuffed the next day’s briefs and a sheaf of articles on cybercrime into her bag, grabbed her coat and headed for the exit. Ludo’s door was open – deliberately, she suspected.

      ‘Go on then,’ he grinned. ‘Something interesting?’

      ‘Really, Ludo, is not a lady’s privacy to be protected?’

      He wasn’t buying it. ‘If it’s an offer, tell them to sod off. It’s my firm intention, Sara Shah, to clamp you in chains to 14 Knightly Court until my retiring day.’

      She wandered over, gave him a pat on the shoulder, and headed out into the street, making for the Embankment. The sun was dipping beyond Big Ben and the skyscrapers of the new Vauxhall megacity. She crossed Waterloo Bridge, losing herself among the swathes of homeward-bound commuters. She found herself staring at the London Eye. The memory of that day – when it was still the new, exciting addition to the capital’s skyline called the Millennium Wheel – struck her like a smack of iced water.

      She must snap out of it. London, her logical mind told her, remained safe. For well over a decade after 7/7 only one death, that of Lee Rigby, the soldier drummer hacked to death outside Woolwich barracks, had been the result of terrorism. Not just in the city but in Britain itself. Then came the van and knife attacks in central London; the bombing of a pop concert at Manchester Arena, lethally shattering the calm; the reminder that terror had not, and would not, go away.

      Compared with other death tolls – road accidents, fires, polluted air – the figures remained, it seemed to Sara, insignificant. The ultimate victims were ordinary Muslims, tainted by association, fearful of hate-fuelled revenge. Yet, unable to shift the strangeness of Morahan’s scrawled letter from her mind, she found herself edgily inspecting the young Asian with the blue rucksack fidgeting in the corner of the underground carriage. When he stepped out of the train at Kennington, she was, despite herself, unable to prevent a flush of relief.

      Back on Tooting Broadway, her mood changed. The Islamic Centre and halal butchers stood contentedly alongside trendy brunch cafés with eager central European waitresses and antipodean chefs. In this part of London few wore the full niqab and burka, but there were plenty of hijabis like herself. Some young Muslim women dressed in figure-hugging jeans and short-sleeved shirts; that was not her own choice now, but she never forgot the time when,