Read A Private Business Online
Authors: Barbara Nadel
A Private Business
A PRIVATE BUSINESS
Barbara Nadel
New York ⢠London
© 2012 by Barbara Nadel
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.
Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57
th
Street, 6
th
Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to
[email protected]
.
ISBN 978-1-62365-226-5
Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services
c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway
New York, NY 10019
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual personsâliving or deadâevents, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Also by Barbara Nadel
The Inspector Ikmen Series
Belshazzar's Daughter
A Chemical Prison
Arabesk
Deep Waters
Harem
Petrified
Deadly Web
Dance with Death
A Passion for Killing
Pretty Dead Things
River of the Dead
Death by Design
Dead of Night
The Hancock series
Last Rights
After the Mourning
Ashes to Ashes
Sure and Certain Death
To all the east enders who inspired my life with their stories. To my grandparents, my dad, my aunts and uncles and to the long dead people they told stories about. To Oggy, Mrs. Fawcett, the O'Malleys, “Peggy” Dooley, Dr. O'Dwyer, Mr. Kopoloff, the Boleyn Bugler, the peddlers of rags and bones who kept their horses in their houses and all the other rich and varied real life characters I was privileged to grow up with.
Part One
I
The comedian is in full flow, effing and blinding in her
usual style with the late Princess Diana as her target. She
eyes a woman in the front row of the audience.
You look shocked, sweet? Not comfortable with speaking ill of
the dead? Oh, please. That woman flung herself into the public
arena when she told us all about her colonic irrigation. There
was nothing that was private about her! Queen of Hearts? Diana
was Queen of Chat. Empress of the Exposé! Let's face it, if she
was still alive now she'd be on Jeremy Kyle trailing a whole
tribe of half Egyptian children, weeping because she can't get
Disability Living Allowance.
The audience laughs, all except one man who yells out,
At least Di never became some old has-been, like you!!
The comedian leans forward into the audience and cups
a hand at the back of her ear to hear better.
What's that?
Is that Bloke with no Bollocks and a Theoretical Dick, I hear?
The audience laughs and the man says something else
but no-one can hear it.
Deal with it, mate. You're the sort of person who thinks the
Queen's got no ring-piece, that she can't fart and only burps rainbows.
A British patriot who lives in a la-la land of ridiculous
military uniforms and the divine bleeding right of kings. You're
an asshole. There's no divine anything. Babies are babies are
babies. They're all like Joan Rivers when they come out of the
womb, misshapen and screaming with fury. Even the royal ones.
The audience laughs but the comedian's face has turned
to stone.
Nothing's sacred, people, nothing's divine. There's no such thing.
Jesus was a crazy urban warrior crusty, with a bit of a Paul
Daniels vibe thrown in. But he was just a bloke. He's not sitting
on a cloud somewhere, blessing all the royal babies and twanging
away on his harp. It's a fairy story! A fiction! It's like a whitehat,
black-hat cowboy story for mad people. It's â¦
The comedian staggers slightly and looks confused as
if she can't remember what she's doing. It's ⦠She puts
a hand up to her head, her eyes glaze over and then she
collapses.
The woman, who would not give her name, was tall and elegant. A well-preserved fifty or so, she wore a beautifully cut trouser suit with a peacock-blue Hermès scarf wrapped turban-like around her head. Her slim face was almost completely eclipsed by large Jackie-O-style sunglasses which did not, however, manage to obscure her eyes. They didn't know how to be, those eyes; fearful and elated, ashamed and even possibly guilty and yet, at
the same time, furiousâintensely, madly furious too. Mumtaz had seen eyes like that before and she wondered what terrible thing was happening or had happened to this woman.
“Can I get you anything?” Mumtaz asked. “Tea? Coffee?”
“No.” There was a pause. “Thanks.”
Her voice was cockney with a veneer of “proper” speech laid over the top. Mumtaz imagined that, given the good clothes and the general demeanor of the woman, she came from a “nice” part of the borough, or maybe from somewhere outside, possibly the Isle of Dogs, Ilford or Chigwell. There was also something vaguely familiar about her but Mumtaz couldn't put her finger on what it was.
The woman stared down at her watch. Mumtaz looked at the clock on the wall and realized that she'd been in her awkward presence for just over an hour. Given her own comparative newness to the business, together with the feelings those eyes were evoking in her, Mumtaz didn't know whether she wanted to run away or somehow force the woman to tell a story that was clearly bursting to get out of her. In the end she opted for neither and just considered the old computer screen on her desk. She knew why Lee didn't invest in more modern equipment but it was still annoying to be forced to put up with such antiques. When Shazia had seen her office, she'd laughed. That was the first time she'd done that since her father's death, so
Lee's old rubbish served some sort of purpose even if the production of a professional-looking letter wasn't part of it.
Shifting in her chair, the woman looked as if she was about to say something but then she appeared to change her mind. Mumtaz went back to composing the letter Lee had asked her to write to Mr. Savva, their landlord. He'd put the office rent up but, given the parlous state of the company finances, it just wasn't possible to pay him. Lee had told her to tell him to shove his rent “where the sun don't shine.” She had translated that into rather more diplomatic language but was now struggling to read what she'd written on the cracked, scarred monitor screen. Looking at it produced a kind of double vision that made her feel vaguely sick, and not for the first time she considered bringing a laptop in from home. There were, after all, several about. Shazia had her ownâit wouldn't be a problemâbut just the thought of it made Mumtaz shudder. Those machines had been Ahmed's. The woman saw her body flinch, but she didn't say anything to her.
Mumtaz regretted not having brought any magazines in to the office for waiting clients. It had never even occurred to Lee, but then men didn't generally think about things like that. If they did, the magazines they chose were usually about cars or golf or caravans. The smart woman in the Hermès scarf probably liked to read rather
serious women's magazines. True-life stories of people being incinerated by their ex-boyfriends and celebrities in “crisis” were unlikely, Mumtaz felt, to be her thing. Her handbag was understated quality and she wore a small and discreet gold cross around her neck. In spite of her confusion she had nothing to prove; in some areas of her life, she was as she was and she possessed a degree of comfort with that. Only her eyes, trembling and shimmering with feelings she was clearly failing to cope with, gave her awayâthat and the fact that she was in that office at all.
“Mate, I'm not being funny or anything, but quite honestly, I don't give a flying fuck whether you get paid today, last week, next Thursday or when the saints go marching in. You owe me money.” Lee Arnold was calm, but the man sitting beside him wasn't. Lee smiled. “Bob, mate, the rent's due on the officeâjust gone up as a matter of factâthe oven's crying out for Mr. Muscle, I'm out of bird food and I could do with a diet Coke.”
“Oh ⦔ The man, a small sort called Bob Singleton, got up, went straight over to the bar and ordered Lee a pint of diet Coke. The three old geezers sitting by the open door to the public bar looked at Lee. One of them flicked his cigarette ash out into Green Street while the other two laughed bronchitically.
“You wanna get money out of Bob the Builder you better
bring a crowbar with you next time, son!” the fag smoker said to Lee.
“Yeah, right,” Lee said gloomily.
Bob Singleton looked around resentfully at the men but he didn't say anything. He just paid for Lee's drink and then took it over to him. The Boleyn was quiet this lunchtime and so Lee's latest attempt at getting Bob the Builder to settle his bill was just about the only show in town. The three old men watched him sit down.
Bob moved in close to Lee and said, “Look, I done this extension for this posh bird over Wanstead and she's, well, she ain't exactly satisfied ⦔
“So she's not paid you,” Lee said. “At all.”
Bob, embarrassed, looked down at the floor and said, “No.”
It was well known that Bob was one of the few soletrader builders in the East End who didn't ask for any money up front. It was also well known that all his work was terrible, he suffered from appalling halitosis and was as tight as a gnat's ass. Was it any wonder that his wife had been having an affair with an Indian restaurant owner for the last six months?