Free The Disappeared by Roger Scruton

words. But it was as though Muhibbah were sealed, offering no place from which to peel away the membrane that protected her. Her path through life had been charted on some other planet, and she received instructions for her future in a language that he could not understand. She had gone out of his life as she had entered it, without an explanation.
    But the thought of it made him sick. She would be drugged, gagged, kicked and beaten, maybe even raped, then bundled through that dark doorway in Waziristan, the fourth wife of some bigoted slave-master, who would smother her dear face in his stinking beard, and fill her sweet body with his children.
    â€˜Impossible,’ he said aloud.
    He took the phone from his pocket, scrolled down to the number of the mobile he had given her, and pressed the key. As he held the device to his ear another phone began ringing in the office, and his heart missed a beat.
    â€˜What the hell…’
    He located it in the sleeveless grey coat that hung from the door. He reached into the pocket: the first time he had his hands in her clothing and her clothing in his hands. Pushed down alongside the phone were two pieces of paper. One seemed to be a letter in Arabic. The other, neatly copied out, was a poem. He recognized it as Yeats:
    Wine comes in at the mouth
    And love comes in at the eye;
    That’s all we shall know for truth
    Before we grow old and die
.
    I lift the glass to my mouth
,
    I look at you, and I sigh
.
    He knew the handwriting, and it was hers. How was it that Muhibbah, who allowed neither wine nor love to cross her boundaries, had found meaning in those words? Was there such a ‘you’ in her life? He doubted it; indeed he insisted that it could not be true. He replaced the pieces of paper in the pocket with a puzzled shake of the head.
    The screen of the phone read ‘15 missed calls’. The latest showed his number. The others were all from a landline in Yorkshire. He thought for a moment, and then wrote the number down: he would call it from a public phone box, so as not to be traced. He packed his briefcase quickly, adding Muhibbah’s phone to his sheaf of papers. Then he locked the office, and hurried into the street.
    He came to a phone box; it had been vandalized, and only a stub of twisted metal remained on the wall. He walked on towards the city centre, recalling a public phone in a shopping precinct off South Parade. He could not find it, and by now his heart was racing. There had been few emergencies in Justin’s life. Yes, there was the time when his father had been lost in a storm on Cross Fell, and Justin had joined the search party, only to come across the familiar figure almost at once, peacefully striding towards them down the hill. There were a few incidents with the band in which he used to play, but they had petered out as soon as they had begun. And there was Muhibbah, who had entered his life as an emergency but who had remained wedded to her secrets, refusing to be rescued, or at least to be rescued by him. As he pressed onwards through the rush hour crowds, Justin regretted his indolent life and all the shortcuts to comfort he had taken.
    â€˜Muhibbah!’ he said aloud. He had turned from South Parade into Park Row. The proud facades of the Victorian banks and offices lined the street like uniformed soldiers. Rusticated arches, glazed friezes, buttressed galleries, unblinking windows beneath their brows of carved stone – all spoke of permanence, comfort and the immovable certainty of law. The noble town hall, raising its clock tower high above the rank of giant columns, seemed in its wide sweep to clear away all lesser creations, affirming the right of this city to be forever England. It was inconceivable that in a town dedicated to prosperity, comfort and English order, a girl might simply disappear, smuggled into slavery under far distant skies. But the inconceivable would not be noticed when it finally occurred. His