Ayesha's Gift tells the story of a British-Pakistani woman and her hunt to track down father's killer (stock image)

The Muslim council of elders, or Sharia court, listened intently as the plaintiff outlined his case. He’d been disrespected by a neighbour, he told them, and in such a small Pakistani community, people talk.

As atonement for that disrespect, the neighbour had agreed to the plaintiff’s demand that their children would marry each other. But when the neighbour’s children objected to the idea, he reneged on that promise.

The plaintiff before the makeshift court was therefore demanding retribution.

The price for that broken promise was clear, he argued: his neighbour’s recalcitrant children had dishonoured him as well, and what’s more, they were consorting with white people.

As they were already promised to his own children, that constituted adultery: they should pay with their lives.

The council of elders deliberated, then issued their judgment.

He did, indeed, have the right to exact the death penalty on his neighbour’s children, the court ruled. It would be merciful if he would negotiate financial compensation in lieu of their death, but he was not obliged to do so.

If you think that sounds positively medieval, you’d be right. But this happened just a few years ago — not in Pakistan, but here in Britain, in a small town in Lancashire.

It was one of the most disturbing discoveries I made while researching my new book.

Over the years, I have probed the murky depths of Kremlin-commissioned assassinations, religious scandals and political cover-ups. But this latest project has been by far the most troubling. It has taken me into a world of murder, corruption and, as I’ve just described, violent summary justice sanctioned by appeals to the code of Sharia law. My book Ayesha’s Gift is the poignant story of a young woman’s quest to discover what has happened to her father, missing on a trip from Britain to his native village in Pakistan.

It is a real-life detective story, driven by Ayesha’s burning need to know why her father died, who might have killed him and who her father really was — the loving parent she had revered all her life or someone with a dangerous secret he had hidden from the world?

Her search for the truth about her father leads Ayesha to question the values on which she has built her life and identity.

It culminates in an encounter with a murderer on Death Row and his shocking claim that a council of religious elders in Britain were prepared to condone the revenge killing of two young people for the ‘crime’ of illicit sex.

It was a story that I felt drawn to on a deeply personal level, and it left me, a hardened journalist, moved and distressed.

My journey began in 2009. My book Philomena, about an Irish woman’s search for the son she was forced to give away for the ‘sin’ of giving birth out of wedlock (and which was turned into a film Philomena, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan, nominated for Oscars, Baftas and Golden Globes), had just been published and I found myself approached by a series of people with personal stories they wanted me to write.

Among them was a British Pakistani woman (not Ayesha), who told me her father had died in violent and mysterious circumstances in Pakistan. I took some time to investigate the case and uncovered a rather sordid tale.

The woman’s brother had been in an arranged marriage with a cousin from Pakistan; the family had brought his young bride to Britain, but the marriage fell apart.

Author Martin Sixsmith wrote Philomena, a book about an Irish woman’s search for the son she was forced to give away for the ‘sin’ of giving birth out of wedlock

So the groom’s father took the couple back to Pakistan on what he said was a holiday, but stole the young wife’s passport and flew back with his son to Britain — leaving the girl stranded and abandoned.

Her side of the family took this as an insult to their honour, so when her father-in-law visited Pakistan a year later, they murdered him.

I discovered the phenomenon of ‘disposable brides’, where British Asian men marry girls from the sub-continent, take their dowry and then cast them aside, is widespread in Pakistan and India.

But I concluded this story wouldn’t work as a book because no one emerged from it with any credit. However, I was hooked on the Pakistani setting and the notions of honour and justice that hold sway there.

It wasn’t until years later when I met Ayesha, through a mutual acquaintance, that I found the perfect story, the one I knew I had to write.

Ayesha Rahman was young, intelligent and attractive. She had a first-class degree from Cambridge and was running her own successful IT company in London, providing computer services to the NHS and government departments.

She had been born in Pakistan, but had come to Britain with her parents at the age of four. In most respects, she was British through and through.

I often said to her that people hearing her on the phone would take her for a product of Cheltenham Ladies’ College rather than a shanty town on the outskirts of Karachi.

The story that Ayesha told me stirred my imagination. She had grown up in a town in Lancashire with loving parents who had encouraged her to do well at school.

Her father, Ibrahim, cherished his young daughter, telling her tall tales of his childhood in rural Pakistan. When he described how, as a boy, he would spend his days fighting tigers and fleeing from wild elephants, she knew he was inventing adventures to impress her and she loved him for it.

The day she was offered a place at Cambridge, he was filled with pride at her success.

Unlike many Muslim men, Ibrahim believed that girls should be accorded the same advantages as boys. But this didn’t go down well with others in the local community; there were murmurings and petty jealousies.

Some, including Ibrahim’s brother, had suffered from racist abuse and they warned him against trying to integrate into what they called ‘white man’s society’.

Grudges and resentments began to form around Ibrahim that would grow over the years and eventually open the way for tragedy.

Sixsmith's book Philomena was turned into a film (shown) starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan

Meanwhile, his daughter graduated from Cambridge and moved to London. She did her best to keep in touch with her family, but she visited home less frequently and she sensed a change in her father. He seemed distant and uncommunicative.

When a teenage girl was found dead outside a house Ibrahim used as offices for his business, the police had questioned him and tried to implicate him.

He was cleared of any involvement, but there were lurid reports in the local media and Ibrahim felt his reputation had been blackened.

The changes coincided with a time of growing success in Ayesha’s career. Her IT company was expanding and she was competing with the industry’s top consultancies.

She was unaware that her father was spending more and more time in Pakistan. So the phone call she had received three months before I met her had come as a wrenching shock. Her mother had rung in a panic, saying she had just heard that Ibrahim had been found dead at his parents’ house outside Karachi.

It was the start of a nightmare that Ayesha told me she was still struggling to come to terms with.

The Pakistani police were claiming that Ibrahim had killed himself, but a relative in Karachi told Ayesha he did not believe them: he was convinced there had been foul play.

Ayesha had flown out at once to see for herself. She had arranged for her father’s body to be exhumed and a post-mortem to be carried out.

The results were conclusive: the injuries to the rear of Ibrahim’s skull were so extensive they could not have been self-inflicted.

What was more, there was evidence his wrists had been bound at the time of his death and there were ligature marks around his neck.

Ayesha was horrified. But she was a determined woman and decided she must uncover the truth. So she engaged a local Karachi private detective and asked him to contact the police officers who had conducted the initial investigation and had tried to pass the death off as a suicide.

The detective spoke to the police and said he was certain they had been bribed by the men who murdered Ibrahim to cover up their crime.

A couple of weeks later, Ayesha’s investigator came back with more disturbing news.

He had been informed that her father had come into contact with one of Pakistan’s most dangerous organised crime groups — men who dealt in drugs, alcohol, kidnapping and people trafficking.

They were powerful people who enjoyed the patronage and protection of local politicians; they would not be easy to bring to justice.

When Ayesha asked if these were the men who killed her father, the detective hesitated.

There were indications, he said, that on the contrary, Ibrahim might have been working for them — that he had been a part of their gang.

Ayesha was shocked. She refused to accept her father had been anything other than an innocent victim. She could not contemplate the idea that her kind, gentle dad might have changed so much that he had turned to a life of crime. She was determined to clear his name and wanted me to help her.

I flew to Pakistan and followed as many leads as I could. My initial findings were worrying. When I went to see the police officer in charge of the investigation, he was sneering and dismissive. He claimed Ibrahim had been involved in a fraudulent land deal by Pakistan’s so-called ‘land mafia’, criminals who bully, threaten and blackmail landowners, seize their land and exploit it for unlawful purposes.

The policeman was especially rude about Ayesha, calling her a ‘stupid little English girl’.

‘This is not England,’ he said. ‘This is Pakistan and you don’t know the first thing about this place! In England, perhaps, crimes get solved. But here, people get killed by powerful men and the murderers are never found.

Ayesha’s Gift by Martin Sixsmith is published by Simon & Schuster on Thursday

‘I advise you in your own interest — go home at once!’

The warning could hardly have been clearer. By pursuing the investigation, we were putting ourselves in imminent danger.

Ayesha hesitated. She was scared and, it seemed to me, deeply worried she would discover things about her father that would destroy the picture of a loving man she was so desperate to cling on to.

Most troubling of all, the police chief had claimed that he and his associates were involved in an illicit trade in smuggling ‘commodities’ between Pakistan and the UK.

One of those commodities, he hinted, was human traffic. And, devastatingly, he said he knew ‘the real story’ of the dead girl outside Ibrahim’s office in Lancashire. Ayesha wanted to call off the investigation. I could see she was horrified by the thought that the policeman might be right and we would discover her father had been an evil man who had died as a result of his own deeds.

I said we would both regret not finding the truth: she would be left in lifelong uncertainty about her father — and I would be left without an ending for my book.

We were still arguing when I got a message from England with news of a tragedy in my own life. The death of someone dear to me shook me and I returned home from Pakistan with the investigation unresolved.

I spent weeks trying to put my own world back together. And in the course of those weeks, Ayesha showed a compassion for me that I realised I had never shown for her.

We spoke frankly to each other; we began to understand each other’s feelings and sorrows; and we decided we must see the investigation in Pakistan to its conclusion.

When I returned to Karachi, I went alone. Ayesha could not face the strain of a second round of harrowing confrontations.

With the help of a young Pakistani academic who knew the ins and outs of his country’s politics and its shady, overlapping worlds of business and crime, I plunged back into this perilous underworld.

We spoke to swaggering mafia bosses, devious bureaucrats and treacherous policemen. And we tracked down the person we believed most likely to have carried out Ibrahim’s murder.

We discovered he was in prison, awaiting execution for another, unrelated crime.

So we were faced with the prospect that this man could be hanged before we had a chance to talk to him and learn the truth about Ibrahim. Therefore, we took a gamble and asked the governor of the jail if we might be allowed to interview the condemned man.

Astoundingly, my eloquent assistant persuaded the governor and our visit to the death cell answered our questions. What we learned would provide an answer to Ayesha’s need to know the truth about her father.

The condemned man’s initial anger and hostility thawed into wary candour, then overflowed into one of the most dramatic confessions I have ever heard — including the story I began with about the Sharia court in England condoning a revenge killing.

I cannot repeat everything he told me without giving away a crucial twist that helped lead me to Ibrahim’s killers and the ending of my book. But I can say that Ayesha and I have remained close.

During the course of writing it, we both had to come to terms with tragic events in our lives and that created an empathy between us that had not existed before.

It remains the case, however, that several of the men involved in the murder of her father are still alive and carrying out the criminal activities the book portrays.

The world that my book depicts is a very dangerous one and since I began my investigation, there have been threats of reprisals.

My concern has been to balance a story that desperately needs to be told against the risk that telling it could endanger the lives of Ayesha or others involved in it.

For that reason, I have changed the names and descriptions of all the major characters as well as the locations of events. Now I must hope and trust they will be safe.