Strangers by Carla Banks

Patel’s?’
    ‘Haroun Patel’s.’
    ‘And it was Patel who had put them there?’
    ‘The lockers have code numbers. No one but the user can access them.’ Majid’s voice was cooler.
    No one but the user and the hospital authorities
. But Damien kept that thought to himself. He chose his words carefully. He didn’t want to offend Majid. ‘I knew Haroun Patel. It seems to have been a very unintelligent crime, and Patel was not a stupid man. It puzzled me…’
    ‘It wasn’t so stupid,’ Majid said. He sounded more relaxed now he understood Damien’s concern. ‘He did extra hours as a driver. He had been away the day before, delivering supplies round the villages. He didn’t know there was going to be a check.’
    ‘Thank you,’ Damien said formally. After he hung up, he reflected that this conversation had removed some of the doubts he’d had himself about the case. He still didn’t know why Patel had taken the risk of stealing the drugs, but if he thought he had time to get them away…Patel’s confession to the other crimes, the ones he probably hadn’t committed, had never surprised him. The Saudi police had interrogation methods that didn’t bear close scrutiny. It was another sore in a system that was chronically diseased, and it distressed Damien that a man like Majid was touched by that contamination.
    But someone was stirring things up. Majid, too, was aware of questions around the case. If the authorities were starting to pay attention, then that curiosity was dangerous and it was up to Damien to stop it. He needed to find out who was at the root of it, and why.
    The
who
he had some ideas about. This had started after Joe Massey had arrived. Massey had actually been talking about the case to Amy. It was possible that someone else could have been asking questions that had prompted Massey to talk to Amy, but Occam’s razor said that Massey was the
who
. The
why
eluded him completely. Why would anyone want to dig around the Haroun Patel case?
    He went back over the conversation in his mind. Amy had queried Haroun’s guilt, at least as far as some of the charges went. What was it she had said?
The case against him never made a lot of sense
…But sense was exactly what it had made. Patel had been a technician. He’d had access to the pharmacy. Means, motive, opportunity. Patel had the means and he had had the opportunity. The only thing Damien didn’t know was the motive. But if Patel was putting in extra hours as a driver, then he clearly needed money and had taken a fatal gamble.
    Damien shrugged off his doubts. People did stupid things when they panicked. It was academic. His concern now was to find out who was asking questions, who was about to cause some serious trouble in the ex-pat community, and put a stop to it.
    The best way to find something out was to go straight to the source. He picked up the phone and found the name on his address list: Arshak Nazarian. Majid’s father-in-law had cornered thelucrative Saudi market in migrant workers. By means of sweeteners, pay-offs, subtle pressure, and when all else failed, threats, Nazarian had gradually incorporated all the disparate groups who were recruiting third world migrants into his own agency. His organization would almost certainly have brokered Haroun Patel’s presence in the Kingdom.
    Nazarian was a powerful man with friends in high places. He was also, by Damien’s definition, a crook, though in Saudi terms he had done nothing illegal. Through a network of agents in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Sri Lanka–countries where levels of poverty and unemployment were high–Nazarian recruited workers desperate to feed their families and to secure them some kind of future. He found them Saudi sponsors and offered them contracts that, by the standards of their own countries, were very well paid. But those contracts did not come cheap: the workers had to pay exorbitant sums for their sponsorship and visas. When they