Lawless by Kimberley Motley

Author:Kimberley Motley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

14

Okay, baby. Breathe. Slow down.

I sat in my office looking at the big map of the country hanging on the wall. Afghanistan isn’t a huge country—roughly the same size as Texas—but still plenty big enough to hide three kidnapped kids. Where do I even start? I needed a clue, a lead, to begin the search with purpose. I decided to call Zoe in London.

“I need to talk to their mom,” I said.

The following day, Zoe organised for me to talk on the phone with the kids’ mother, Nikki. I could tell right away that this was a genuine British woman who had endured an abusive relationship. She shared her story with me: from her falling for a good-looking younger man, to their marriage and them having three beautiful boys together. Once the wedding was over, however, the abuse started.

I’d seen this before. It happens sometimes when you get men from Afghanistan coming to Western countries. There’s a marriage and then the abuse starts. Now, of course, I’m not saying that all Afghan men beat their wives, but due to the nature of my work I’ve come across many who have. The problem is that you can’t get away with beating your wife in London like you can in Afghanistan. There are criminal consequences to behaving like that in the West that aren’t there in Afghanistan. The wife’s usually going to call the police, the police will come, and then the man gets pissed off.

And then what do they do?

In bad situations, the husbands often want to find another way to punish their wives. They sometimes do the most abusive and cowardly thing, which is either ostracise the kids or take the kids away altogether. Nikki’s husband did the latter.

I told Nikki that if I was going to find her kids, I was going to need her help.

We had already found the boys’ travel records. The flight logs showed that they had been flown to Tehran from the UK. But I had to find somewhere more specific to start the search, whether it was an address, or a name of a place, or a relative. It could be something as simple as which tribal region her husband was from, but I needed something that could help me work out which part of the country the kids might be. Nikki had no idea where her boys were.

“Do you have any recent pictures of your husband?” I asked her.

“No. Sorry. No pictures of him in either Afghanistan or Iran,” she replied.

Not a single photo. Nothing. I began to have second thoughts. I started to wonder if maybe I had bitten off more than I could chew on this one. I’d just assumed we’d be able to identify something in Afghanistan, find somewhere to start looking, but by the time I hung up the phone I was wondering if I should have taken this case at all.

Something else was bugging me. What would I do if I found the kids? Would I go get them? No.

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