The Sheikh's Son (3 page)

“Go away!” Ali yelled.

“Ali, please,” Sarah said from behind Akbar. “I know you’re upset, but…”

“I don’t want to talk to him.” Ali shoved his head under his pillow.

“Maybe we should leave him for a bit,” Sarah suggested.

Akbar ignored her and sat on Ali’s bed. “I see you’re a Manchester United fan. When I was your age, I was a great footballer. I was one of the best in the whole country.”

“I never knew that,” Sarah said.

Akbar winked at her and then carried on talking to Ali. “Your mother tells me that you like to play football.”

Sarah raised her eyebrows in surprise. She hadn’t told Akbar that, though looking at Ali’s room, it wasn’t hard to guess that he was a big football fan. The walls were covered in football posters and on the floor there was a small heap of football clothes that hadn’t found their way to the laundry basket yet.

“How often do you go training?” Akbar asked. Ali poked his head out from under the pillow, but didn’t reply.

“Maybe I could take you training sometime. Where’s the nearest football field?”

“There’s the park,” Ali mumbled.

“A park would be the perfect place to show me what a good footballer you are.”

“I’m not that good. I wasn’t even picked for the school team.”

“That’s all the more reason why we need to go training. I’ll teach you some tricks. How about we go straight after school? I could meet you there.”

Ali looked at his mum. Sarah nodded. “We could all go together,” she said. She was glad that Akbar had dropped the subject of fighting.

Ali explained where his school was and what time he finished.

“Excellent. I’ll see you tomorrow, Ali. Get some rest.” Akbar patted the boy on the shoulder, got up and left the room. He motioned for Sarah to follow him downstairs. Once they were standing by the front door, he whispered into Sarah’s ear, “Until tomorrow, my desert rose.” He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand and left the house.

Sarah touched her face where his hand had been and looked in the mirror that hung in the hallway. Only then did she realise what a mess she looked. Her make-up had run from when she’d been caught in the rain earlier and across the front of her blonde hair was a long streak of mozzarella and tomato sauce. She couldn’t believe that Akbar had seen her like this, but then what did it matter what he thought?

Sarah went through all the reasons why she left him. First, he stopped her from working at the Women’s Hospital in Yazan because he refused to write a letter giving his consent, a necessary procedure for all married women who wanted to work. However, she could live with that. Instead of working at the hospital, which was a long and difficult drive away, she acted as a doctor to the local Bedouin who she lived with. But then Akbar told her that he wanted to take Rasha as a second wife. He said it was to look after her, as she was unmarried and pregnant with a dead man’s son. However, it was possible that Rasha was pregnant with Akbar’s child. Sarah once saw her coming out of his tent late at night and when she accused Akbar of sleeping with Rasha, he didn’t deny it.

Sarah looked at her reflection in the mirror and promised herself that there was no way that she was going to fall back into Akbar’s arms and return to the desert with him. Her place was in London with her son, not in a Bedouin camp, living as part of the sheikh’s harem.

Sarah left the clinic late the next day. Even though she managed to cancel her last few appointments, the ones that she did have took longer than expected. She worked in an area where there were a high number of Arabic-speaking women and her language skills were certainly an asset. However, there were many different forms of Arabic and Sarah didn’t know all of them. The last patient she saw that day spoke a regional dialect from East Africa and it took Sarah a long time to understand what the woman was telling her. Eventually she worked out that the woman was suffering from migraines and, after prescribing some medicine and telling her to come back in a couple of weeks, Sarah finally managed to get away.

By the time she reached Ali’s school, she was thirty minutes late. There was no sign of Ali or Akbar. A few older students were hanging around the gates. Sarah asked them whether they’d seen Ali, but it was a large school and none of them knew who he was. Sarah went off to the park to look for them, sure that they’d already set off.

One of the best things about living in London was the number of large public parks. Despite the high cost of land, London hadn’t sacrificed its open spaces. The one nearest Ali’s school was not one of London’s finest, but it was certainly beautiful enough that people used it all year round, even on dark, damp days like that afternoon.

Sarah walked through the metal Victorian gates and looked around. There was no sign of Akbar or Ali, but she wasn’t surprised as they were probably on the other side of the park where there was a wide-open space that people used for ball games. She strolled past several dog walkers, an old man on a bench, and a couple walking in the opposite direction. As they passed her, she noticed that the boy had his hand right down the back of his girlfriend’s jeans. She wondered what Akbar would think if he saw them. It was certainly not a sight one would see in his home country, where a woman was expected to cover up and keep a respectful distance from all men in public, even their own sons and husbands.

Sarah turned a corner and saw the wide expanse of damp green grass in front of her. A group of six or seven boys were kicking a football about, using jackets and scarves as makeshift goalposts. Ali and Akbar were not with them. Maybe they’d decided to practice somewhere else. Sarah walked the short distance to the end of the park, but she couldn’t see them anywhere. On her way back out, she stopped and asked the boys who were playing football whether they’d seen her son, but they just grunted some kind of incoherent answer and returned to their game.

Sarah knew Akbar wouldn’t be put off by a group of teenage boys, but perhaps he’d decided to find somewhere else to practice, instead of trying to share the same space with other people. There was a small park near Sarah’s house. Although it was more of a children’s playground than a park, maybe they’d gone there for a kick around.

Sarah walked as quickly as she could down the main shopping street of her London suburb. It was now more than an hour since Ali had finished school and he would be wondering where she was. However, when she got to the park, she could only see a young mother sitting on a wooden bench next to a pram that had a pink-faced baby in it. In front of them was a little girl who was pushing herself on the swings.

“Excuse me. Have you seen a young boy? He’s nine years old. He’s got dark curly hair. He’s with an older man, very tall, black hair, small beard.”

“No, but I only got here a few minutes ago.” The woman took a packet of cigarettes out of her jacket, pulled one out and lit it with a cheap plastic lighter. “Want one?” The woman offered the packet to Sarah. A graphic picture of a diseased lung was displayed across the front.

“No thanks, I don’t smoke.”

“Trying to quit myself. Hard, though. I stopped for a while, but then Gavin ran out on me, leaving me with these two.” The woman pointed to the pram and the girl on the swings. “Men, bloody useless the lot of them! Your bloke gone and left you, has he? Taken the kid with him? I wish Gavin would bloody take these two sometimes! Baby was up all night last night crying. Didn’t get a wink of sleep, I didn’t.”

The woman then began a long account of her childcare problems, but Sarah had stopped listening. She was beginning to wonder whether perhaps Akbar had run off with Ali. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t find them anywhere. Maybe Akbar had taken Ali with him: the son that he always wanted.

The more Sarah thought about it, the more likely it seemed. She knew Akbar had always been desperate to have a son. It was one of the reasons he’d married the pregnant Rasha, as she would provide him with the child that Sarah seemed unable to conceive. Akbar would also know that Sarah would never willingly let him take his son back to Yazan.

Could Akbar have kidnapped Ali? It was, after all, how she’d first met the sheikh. He kidnapped her on the way to the airport, thinking that she was the British ambassador’s wife. When he found out from a local newspaper that she wasn’t, he helped her to escape his camp. However, by then they’d already fallen for each other, with him promising her a thousand nights of seduction, a promise that he more than fulfilled. But now he’d taken her son away.

“I’m really sorry about your problems,” Sarah said to the woman on the bench, “but I have to go. If you see my boy, tell him his mother’s looking for him.”

Sarah raced home, past the shoppers and rush-hour bus queues. When she reached her front door, she tried the doorknob. It was locked, which meant that Ali wasn’t home, though it was possible that he’d come in and locked the door behind him. Sarah rummaged around in her bag for her key. In her panic, it took her several minutes to find it, and then insert it into the lock, but when she finally managed to open the door, she ran in, calling out Ali’s name. However, there was no reply.

“Ali’s passport! Where’s his passport?” Sarah said aloud to break the silence more than anything else. Ali had never travelled outside the UK, but Sarah had applied for a passport for him several years ago when she almost travelled to Yazan to look for Akbar.

She pulled out a cardboard box from the bottom drawer of her dresser and emptied its contents onto the floor. Out came bank statements, school reports, insurance policies, and her own passport, but there was no sign of Ali’s. Sarah sifted through all the papers again in case she’d missed it, but the child’s passport with its distinctive dark red cover was definitely not there.

Akbar must have collected him straight from school, come back to the house, got the passport and then taken him to the airport. Sarah looked at her watch. She’d thought about booking flights to Yazan so often that she knew the schedules by heart. There would be a direct flight leaving in about an hour. She would never get to Heathrow in time to stop them, even if she left the house immediately. She tried calling the airport. After being kept on hold for a ridiculously long time, she was finally put through to an airline representative.

“My husband’s kidnapped my son and is trying to take him back to Yazan. You have to stop him.”

“I’m sorry, madam, but this sounds more like a police matter. Have you spoken to the police?” the man at the other end of the line asked.

“I don’t need the police. I need you to stop my son getting on that plane. His name’s Ali Akbar Greenwich.”

“Only the police can do that. I suggest you report the matter to your local police station and they’ll report it to airport security if necessary.”

Sarah could see that this was getting nowhere. She hung up and looked for the number of the local police station. When she got through, she explained the situation to the officer on the other end of the line.

“How long have you been divorced?” asked the officer, who said his name was P.C. Williams.

“About ten years, more or less. Does it matter?”

“It does. I need it for the report. Could you give me the date your divorce came through?”

Sarah was silent for a moment. She’d never actually obtained an official divorce from Akbar. She’d never received a marriage certificate either. They were married out in the desert by a local religious man at the sheikh’s Bedouin camp, followed by a large feast and celebrations. Neither of them signed any documents.

“Madam, are you there?” P. C. Williams asked, sounding more bored than concerned.

“Yes, sorry, I was just looking for something. I don’t know the divorce date. Look, the important thing is that my husband, ex-husband, has taken my son and is trying to leave the country with him.”

“Is your ex-husband a UK national?”

“No, he’s from Yazan. He’s never lived in the UK.”

“So when did he enter the country?”

“I’m not sure. Recently, I think. I only saw him for the first time yesterday when he came to my house.”

“So you let him into your house?”

“Yes, but I didn’t know he was going to kidnap my child!”

“So, he took the child from your house yesterday. At what time?” the officer asked. Sarah could hear him tapping away on his keyboard as he filled out his report.

“No! He came to my house and then left. He said he was going to pick up my son from school and take him to play football, but when I went to the park they weren’t there.”

“If you thought your ex-husband was going to kidnap your son, why did you let him collect him from school?”

“I don’t know. I wouldn’t have agreed if I thought this was going to happen.”

“So how do you know that your husband has taken your son?”

“Because his passport’s missing! Please, you have to do something.” Sarah looked at her watch again. “The plane leaves in less than thirty minutes.”

“Is there anything else missing?”

Sarah walked with her phone into Ali’s bedroom. It looked just as it always did: a mess. “No,” she replied. “He wouldn’t need to take anything. He’s hardly going to need his socks and jumpers in the boiling hot desert, is he? Anyways, my husband will doubtless get him whatever he needs once they reach Yazan.”