A Private Business (28 page)

“Get out!”

Everyone, including Mumtaz, watched as something invisible, intangible appeared to leave the woman and she stopped bucking and heaving and lay flat and silent on the floor. Pastor Grint, still sweating but now also panting like a runner, bent down on one knee and put his hand, gently this time, on the woman's head. “The truth,” he said, “in Jesus, has set you free.”

Everyone fell to their knees except, Mumtaz thought, herself. But then she saw that Maria Peters was also still on her feet. She put her arms out toward the stage and she said, “Help me! Help me!”

Grint looked round and smiled. “Maria?” He beckoned her to him while the woman on the floor still lay flat and motionless. “Are you ready for …” He took one of her hands as if to shake it, then he tapped her forehead with a finger and whispered something to her.

Maria took one step forward and then she just collapsed.

Pure instinct made Mumtaz rush down the aisle and kneel
down at Maria's side. She hadn't seen Maria eat for at least twelve hours and she dreaded to think about what drugs she'd consumed in that time. She also knew she'd seen Grint do something to her as well; something she, probably alone in that church, recognized.

“Maria?” Mumtaz took her pulse which was slow.

“Who are you and what are you doing?”

Mumtaz looked up into Pastor Grint's livid face and saw Betty recognize her all in the same moment.

“What are
you
doing here?” Betty Muller asked. Then she turned to Grint and said, “She's that private detective!”

Maria began to groan and splutter and Mumtaz sat her up so that she could cough. Grint and a few other people talked quietly to one side. Everyone else either tried to see what was going on or just stood about looking concerned. Quite a few of them looked dazed.

Mumtaz said, “I think I should call a doctor …”

“Mumtaz?”

She looked down into Maria's face. Her eyes were only just able to focus.

Betty Muller's face appeared from one side and blocked Mumtaz's view of Maria. “What are you doing here?” she asked again. “What?” She was angry but then church had always been the one place that Maria had wanted to go to alone. For a moment Mumtaz thought about lying her way out of her dilemma but then people had already seen her at the back.

“I came because …”

She heard the words “private detective” but she didn't know where they came from. Maria Peters, though still ashily pale, was sitting up now and looking at her. “Mumtaz?” she said. “Mumtaz, I'm OK in church.”

“Yes, I know but—”

“So what are you doing here?”

She didn't know what to say.
I came to check your church out because the police think it might be dodgy
?
I came to see what these people do to your mind when you're full of drugs and half starved
?
I don't like what I've experienced here today
?

“Mumtaz, when I'm at church or at prayer meetings at home, I don't need you,” Maria said. “This is my private life.” And then she noticed that Mumtaz's head wasn't covered. “Were you trying to disguise yourself?” A look that Mumtaz didn't like came over Maria's face. “Why?”

“Why—”

“Yes, why? I didn't ask you to come here. You went home to your daughter. I would have called you when I got back.”

Neil West had followed Maria to the old church back in the winter but he hadn't gone in. Flustered and angry with herself for not even planning what she might say if she was recognized, Mumtaz felt her face turn red. She looked up and saw that they were all staring down at her with suspicious, hostile, sometimes glazed eyes. When she did speak, she just blurted. Pointing to Grint, she said, “He just tried to put you in a hypnotic trance. I saw him.”

“What? What total nonsense. You're crazy!” she heard Maria say. “I will need to speak to your employer, right now!”

Matthias Chibanda had pleaded guilty to the murder of Jacob Sitole in a hearing that had lasted just under ten minutes. Vi Collins and Tony Bracci went out onto the grass outside the honey-colored courthouse and had a smoke. Snaresbrook was a funny old place. A great graceful Victorian pile as often as not surrounded by groups of heavily tattooed gangsters, their women and their kids.

“I don't call this summer,” Vi said as she pulled her coat in close to her body. “Bloody July! If this is global warming I can't be fucking done with it.”

“At least Chibanda did the right thing,” Tony said.

“Yeah.” But Vi didn't look convinced. Matthias Chibanda had only actually spoken about what had happened between himself and Jacob Sitole in early June. So silent he had become almost catatonic, Chibanda had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act for a month so that a psychiatrist could assess his fitness to plead. For weeks, nothing had happened and then one day he'd said to one of the nurses, “I killed Jacob because he wouldn't give me his phone.”

It wouldn't be the first time that someone had been killed for their mobile phone and Jacob Sitole had indeed just been given a new iPhone by his mother. But Vi wasn't buying it. One thing the psychiatrists at Basildon Mental Health Unit had discovered was that Matthias Chibanda had a mental age of just twelve. Apparently his thinking was magical and animistic; in other words he saw the world in very superstitious ways. And he hadn't had Jacob's iPhone on him when he was taken to hospital. Even wounded, someone who really wanted something that badly would take it.

“Still got it in for Iekanjika, guv?”

Vi pulled a face both of disgust and against the sharp wind. “He makes my skin creep,” she said. “What's he doing making seven grand a month out of that old pub in Canning Town?”

“Potentially. If Paul Grint's now paid …”

Vi laughed. “One bloody crook fleecing another!”

“Ah, but Grint's had a religious conversion, guv,” Tony said.

“Yeah, and I'm Cheryl Cole.” Vi shook her head. “I know it was a long time ago but Grint went down for fraud,” she said.

“He makes no secret of it.”

“No. And being originally from the West End, we haven't followed his career,” Vi said. “But I have a bad feeling in my water about him and not just because of what Mumtaz
Hakim reckoned he was doing. Bloody holy men! Most of them turn out to have feet of clay. I don't like Iekanjika for the same reason. Maybe it's because the Zimbabwean High Commission suddenly like him now he's apparently off the hook for any sort of involvement in Jacob Sitole's death. Or perhaps it's because their attitude toward poor old Reverend Manyika seems to be in such marked contrast. But then maybe I just can't bring meself to believe a word any representative of Robert Mugabe says. Him starving his own people is a story that seems to have slipped off the news radar. But then he doesn't have any oil, does he?”

Vi had had a bad time wrestling with her conscience during the build-up to the second Iraq war. She hadn't approved and when she'd been sent to help police the anti-war march in London in February 2003, her heart had wanted to take off her uniform and join in. But she hadn't. She'd done her duty in spite of the fact that she believed then, as now, that the only reason for the invasion of Iraq had been because the West wanted its oil. Tony Bracci she knew disagreed, and so she changed the subject. “But in the meantime, we still have that fucking flasher threatening the Olympics,” she said.

They both laughed. The inflated importance of the 2012 Olympics was something they did agree on. That said, Vi didn't really take the Olympic Flasher lightly. He could, she knew, escalate his behavior to assault at any time.
Plus Chief Inspector Venus was distinctly unamused by their lack of progress and Vi had wanted to tell him that given the fact that the Met as a whole was facing job cuts, and possible pension cuts too, motivation and morale across the entire force wasn't exactly high. Going the extra mile for a flasher was not at the top of anyone's agenda, in Forest Gate or outside Forest Gate.

“Could be to do with being anxious about her exam results,” Lee said.

It was a slow day and he and Mumtaz were in the office together for all of it.

“I wish my daughter cared at all,” he continued. They were talking about Shazia and Lee's daughter Jodie and their very different attitudes toward their upcoming GCSE results. Shazia, according to Mumtaz, was not a happy girl and had lost weight she couldn't afford to lose.

“I can't get her to eat,” Mumtaz said. “Even when my mother comes over laden with sweets, she doesn't eat them. Shazia has always loved chocolate. I don't know what's going on.”

Lee shrugged. “My Jodie wants to go on
X Factor
. Doesn't see qualifications as anything she needs. Just the right handbag, the right tan, the right shoes …” He shook his head. “Kids!”

It had been nearly three months since Maria Peters had fired the Arnold Agency for a second time. She'd made a
vitriolic accusation about Mumtaz prying into her private life and making “groundless” accusations against Paul Grint and then, after paying up by post, she'd just disappeared. Lee had tried to talk to her about what had happened, but she never returned his calls. Of course he couldn't tell her that Mumtaz had been in the church that evening partly because he owed a favor to his old colleagues up at Forest Gate. But he had wanted to tell her that no offense had ever been intended. Now it was July and half the country was on holiday, in spite of the recession, and so the agency was quiet. Yet again, Lee was worrying about how he was going to pay his bills. The departure of Maria Peters still rankled, not just because she was a complete mystery—who was possibly being manipulated—but because she had brought good money too.

“I don't know why Shazia might be worried about her exams,” Mumtaz said. “She worked very hard for them. Her predicted grades are all As or A stars.”

“She's a bright girl. You're lucky.”

“Am I?” She didn't feel lucky. The bank had called her three times already that morning about the mortgage. But why bother Lee with that? There was nothing he could do about it. Mumtaz walked over to the tiny kitchen in the corner of the office and put the kettle on. “Tea?”

“Brill.” Lee leaned back in his chair and rested his head against the wall behind him. “Shazia thinks,” Lee said. “Kid's got some sort of inner life going on. All my daughter ever
goes on about is stuff. Clothes, make-up, iPhones, jewelry. She's on my case all the time.” He didn't say anything about his ex-wife who chose not to work. That was private business. “And yet some parents are shelling out for things for their kids all the time. Little sods won't leave them alone.”

The kettle began to boil. “Your daughter will grow out of it,” Mumtaz said.

“You think?” Lee was far from convinced. “When it comes to kids nowadays I don't know what to think.”

Vi Collins's case with the two Zimbabwean lads had finally resolved. Matthias Chibanda had admitted that he'd killed Jacob Sitole for his new mobile. How pathetic! And how very, very sad for a death to occur over something so trivial. But it was also good that it hadn't signaled some sort of feud between the two respective churches—even if Vi still distrusted Pastor Iekanjika.

“Even religious kids get involved in crime now.” Lee was aware that he was making himself sound like some sort of grumpy old git but he didn't care.

“You mean like the Zimbabwean boys?” Mumtaz poured boiling water onto teabags in two cups and then stirred them around with a spoon. “People still want things even if they are religious.”

“Like Pastor Grint?”

Grint's fraudulent past had involved a property scam in his native Shepherd's Bush. Twenty years ago he'd sold houses he didn't own to immigrants.

“Part of his appeal is that he's come through all that and found God,” Mumtaz said. “Supposedly.”

“And yet you think that he's hypnotizing those people in his services.”

Mumtaz poured milk into the cups and then hooked out the teabags. She spooned two sugars into Lee's cup and put it on his desk. “I definitely saw a well-known technique at work when he took Maria's hand and then tapped her head. He was confounding her senses so that she would shut down. He told her to sleep, I think. He was trying to put her in a trance.” She took her tea back to her desk and sat down. “All religious ceremony and ritual has an element of hypnosis within it. There is repetition, there is meaningful imagery, there is enhanced emotion. All these things can lead to states of heightened consciousness. So she was halfway there already.”

“And you're religious yourself? Knowing all that?”

She smiled. “Just because ritual worship encourages a heightened state of awareness doesn't alter the central tenets of a religion; it doesn't mean that God does not exist.”

“But if we're basically animals just responding to—”

“So what if we are? Just because we are animals that doesn't disprove God. God made us whatever we are.”

Lee was really happier listening to old punk records and cleaning up than he was with philosophy. Although he was intrigued as to where Mumtaz stood on the theory
of evolution. He'd never met a religious Muslim yet who believed in it. He did play about with the notion of asking Mumtaz what she thought about dinosaurs, but then thought better of it. Christian fundamentalists claimed to believe that God had put dinosaur bones in the earth to test man's faith. Lee thought it was bollocks and it made him cross and so he held his peace.

Lee thought about his brother Roy and wondered where he was. It was nearly three months now since he'd chucked him out of their mother's house. She'd been out. Lee had found Roy pissed as a fart, shitting on the kitchen floor. He'd beaten what crap had remained inside his brother out of him and then thrown him into the street. Amazingly he'd gone and stayed gone.
Maybe
, Lee thought without any emotion whatsoever,
he's dead
.