A Private Business (9 page)

A particular type of need brought Maria Peters downstairs at just after three o'clock the next morning. She wanted a drink of water but she didn't like to get it from the bathroom. Bathroom water tasted funny and was tainted, her mother had said so, and all through her childhood Maria had lived in fear of it. Bathroom water, like unwed sex, rotted your insides. She knew it was nonsense but she descended her staircase in the dark and then walked across the wide entrance hall to the kitchen.

Reaching around the doorpost, she flicked the switch to put on the kitchen spotlights. Like tiny stars in a dead white sky, the lights came on illuminating a vast chrome
and granite room that looked like a cross between an operating theater and a particularly cool restaurant. Even when Len had still been alive, she'd rarely cooked. Maria went over to the fridge and took out a jug of fresh cold spring water which she poured into a glass and drank. As the icy liquid went down her throat she began to feel more awake. That was a nuisance. She riffled around in the medicine drawer for a moment, looking for a sleeping tablet, but she knew all along that there wasn't one in there. They were upstairs with the rest of the junk.

Maria left the kitchen, walked back into the hall and then went into her living room. She imagined whoever was watching her from the agency was wondering why she hadn't just gone back to bed. She knew that she was being taken care of, that someone would come to her aid immediately if necessary, but still she couldn't settle. Thirst had woken her up, now an apparent and sudden lack of tiredness was keeping her awake. She walked around the largest of her two sofas and switched on the uplighter beside the TV. It took a few moments for the energy-saving bulb to do much more than cast a somewhat sepia gloom upon the ceiling, but then as the light grew stronger Maria was able to see the area around the television in detail. For want of anything else to do she leaned forward to switch the set on. It was then that Gog and Magog caught her eye.

Gog and Magog, like most of her ornaments, were ceramic cats. They lived behind the old grate at the bottom of the fireplace. Or rather that was where they always had been. Maria felt her heart begin to pound. She picked up her mobile phone and dialed.

“So Betty Muller and Rachel Cole are friends.”

“They only came around briefly yesterday evening, with Pastor Grint. We talked and then prayed. I saw my mother for most of the day. Your … Mrs. Hakim was here.” Maria Peters pulled her dressing gown tightly round her body and curled up into the corner of the sofa. First Neil West and then Lee Arnold had come to her aid as soon as she'd called. It was still only just after four in the morning with absolutely no sign of sunrise. “I didn't ask you to come here to talk about my friends!” she continued. Then she pointed to the two ceramic cats underneath the television. “I've told you, those cats have been moved. Gog and Magog always live in the fire grate.”

“Always?”

Her jaw became hard. “Where the cats are, are where the cats are meant to be,” she said. “OK, it's a bit OCD but it's what I do. I clean, dust, hoover every part of this house.
I
move things. Nobody else. Me.”

When Neil had first come into the house she'd been
completely hysterical. He'd called Lee to come and sit with her while he checked the surveillance data, but there was nothing of any significance on it. Neither her friends nor her mother had moved anything. The cats, though not directly in the line of sight of either living room camera, could nevertheless be detected. Since the equipment had been installed, they'd not been anywhere near the grate.

Lee asked Maria whether she thought she could have absentmindedly moved the ornaments herself. She replied with a furious “No!” And to be fair there was no evidence to suggest that she had moved them. “Could you, or anyone, have moved the ornaments before we put our surveillance equipment in?” Lee asked. Someone, logically, had to have done so.

He knew that neither he nor Neil had moved them.

“I would have noticed. I would have!” Maria said, albeit with just a catch of uncertainty in her voice. “This house is my palace. I know every inch of it because I have planned every tiny part of it! I didn't move Gog and Magog. I wouldn't. They live in the grate. Someone came in and—”

“Miss Peters, our cameras have recorded nothing,” Neil said. “You said your mother was here yesterday?”

“Yes. Yes, but if there's nothing on record …” She shrugged. “Don't get me wrong, my mother is quite capable of doing something evil just to piss me off. But as you said yourself, there's nothing …”

“As soon as the system went live the cats could be seen underneath the telly,” Lee said. “What about your real cat? Could he have knocked them down or …”

“Caspar lives in the garden, occasionally I let him into the kitchen,” Maria said. “I don't like him in here. He's only a stray anyway. He sort of adopted me.”

“I see.”

Maria looked at him. Without make-up she appeared far closer to her actual age than when Lee had first seen her in his office.

“They were where they are now this morning,” he said.

“They can't have been.”

“But they were. Now, Miss Peters, you talk about being a bit obsessive-compulsive. Do you check all your ornaments and whatever every day?”

She curled her lip. “I'm OCD, not mad.”

“I didn't say that you were. I'm trying to find out whether or not you can remember checking on those particular cats yesterday.”

She did think about it. She thought about it hard.

“Because if you actively looked at those two cats in your grate yesterday afternoon or evening then we really do have a bit of a mystery on our hands. That or some seriously malfunctioning equipment,” Lee said. “But if you can't remember seeing the cats then maybe you just didn't notice that they had been moved. They could've been shifted days ago.”

“I would've noticed,” she said. “And anyway, who would have moved them except me?”

“I don't know. Your mum? You said yourself she likes to piss you off.”

“Not like that.” Maria hugged her knees up to her chest. “Ma's all talk. She winds me up with words, but she's too cowardly to do anything.”

“What about your friends? Your manager?”

“Alan?” She shook her head. “We have differences but he wouldn't try to send me round the bend. He's trying, to his way of thinking, to make me saner.”

“How?”

She looked over at Neil West and then said, “He knows …”

“We share all our information, Miss Peters,” Lee said.

She took a deep breath in. “Alan's upset about my conversion to Christianity,” she said. “He says it takes the edge off the act, and to be truthful I don't find being the old Maria Peters that everyone knows and loves easy now. Christians aren't supposed to be cruel and cuss and make fun of God and His creation. And yet I still love being on stage. I feel wanted up there. Even with the heckling. I know it's arrogant, but up there I can forget for just a little while that Len's dead and I'm alone. But it breaks me up too.” She looked down. “I keep on falling apart. As you know.”

Lee did.

“If it wasn't for the church and the people in it, I wouldn't be able to cope. I've put my life in God's hands.”

Lee had to say what was on his mind. “Seems to me, Miss Peters, that it's the church that's giving you grief.”

Her face darkened.

“If it wasn't for this church you'd just be merrily doing your old act,” Lee said. “No guilt. You'd be happy, Mr. Myers'd be happy.”

“Once you've seen the truth, Mr. Arnold, there's no going back, whatever the cost,” Maria said.

“The truth is important. But who arbitrates the truth?”

“God.”

There was a simplicity about her answer that spoke of an absolute sincerity. Lee heard Neil clear his throat and saw him look into some irrelevant corner of the room. For those without religion all this God squad stuff was embarrassing and incomprehensible. The first time Neil had seen Mumtaz—head and shoulders covered in scarves, admittedly very stylishly tied—he'd had what he called “a moment.”
Christ Almighty
, he'd said to Lee,
what you doing taking on a nutter?
Religious people sometimes got a bad rap. Lee knew he had to be careful not to become infuriated with his client. But the notion that a woman who apparently put her life in the hands of God and yet paid him a mint to protect her, did not sit easily with him.

* * *

Mr. Arnold wasn't due in until ten and so Mumtaz had a bit of time to tidy up the office. A woman who'd sounded as if she could have been Asian had called to make an appointment to see him and Mumtaz had booked her in for eleven. She'd given a very obviously false name, Danielle, and hadn't said what she wanted to see Lee about. Mumtaz hoped that the most obvious and stereotypical reason for the appointment—matrimonial issues—wasn't in fact true. But one's own experiences color one's view and her marriage to Ahmed Hakim had been characterized by things that, even now he was dead, she could not easily think about. They were things she'd caught whispers of amongst other women over the years; good women, who prayed five times a day, looked after their husbands and their children and never left their homes without permission.

Mumtaz, anxious since she'd seen that young man outside the house the previous evening, took her phone out of her pocket. She should have told Shazia about him immediately, but she hadn't known what to say. She couldn't tell Shazia who he was—she didn't know his name herself—but she'd have to warn the girl somehow. He was, after all, very dangerous and as yet she had no idea about his motives. She called Shazia's number.

“Amma?” The girl sounded surprised and a little annoyed. In the background Mumtaz could hear the sound of youngsters milling around, laughing and talking. It was just before nine and they were lining up to go into their lessons.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Mumtaz said. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Why?”

She was thinking that this call was odd, which it was.

“Just making sure you took your lunch out of the fridge,” Mumtaz said. “Did you pick up the strawberry lassi I put beside your sandwiches?”

“Yeah …”

Mumtaz knew that Shazia had taken the yogurt drink. She also knew that Shazia knew that she knew. She'd even thanked Mumtaz for buying her favorite drink.

“Amma, you're being well weird, is everything all right?”

Mumtaz most certainly didn't want to discuss her own feelings; she'd barely slept. “Of course!” she said. “Just…” She heard Shazia's school bell ring and knew that she had to be quick. “Shazia, there is a man exposing himself to women…”

“A flasher!” Shazia laughed. “Oh, they are just
so
pathetic!”

That laugh was all bravado and they both knew it.

Mumtaz ignored the words and the laughter. “Shazia, if you see any man you do not know hanging around our house, or following you from the bus stop you must call me immediately. It was in the paper last night, the police are looking for him.”

“OK.”

“There are bad people in this world,” Mumtaz said. “Shazia—”

“Whatever. Amma, I've got history. Gotta go.” Shazia cut the connection, leaving Mumtaz holding a silent phone up to her ear.

In any great conurbation some people were bound to be watching others—the State was certainly watching. London had more CCTV cameras than any other capital city on earth, but in spite of that, things were missed. People with ill intent slithered through the system and sexual assaults, robberies and murders still happened way beyond the dead eyes of the State's surveillance every day. Mumtaz knew this to be an absolute truth.

Ahmed had never let her have a mobile phone of her own. He'd taken the one that Abba had given her, the one she'd used at university, and smashed it up with a hammer. When Ahmed was dying she'd had to use his phone to call an ambulance. She'd had to put her hand inside his blood-soaked jacket and pull it out. It had taken every gram of self control that she possessed to put it up to her ear. The ferrous reek of the blood had made her want to be sick. Dialing 999 had taken maybe as long as a minute, maybe more.

Had anyone seen them? Ahmed collapsed on the grass in front of her, Mumtaz putting her hand inside his jacket for his telephone and then holding it, doing nothing? Watching the handsome young man in the silver trainers who had just stabbed her husband run away across the
Flats toward Wanstead. Feeling nothing but disgust for her dying spouse.

It was one of those coincidences that Lee couldn't quite believe was a real coincidence. As he came out of Maria Peters' house, he saw Vi Collins getting out of her car. Fag on and reeking of Poison perfume, Vi walked over to Lee and then nodded toward the comedian's house. “New woman in your life?”

“Couldn't possibly say.” Lee smiled.

Vi quickly clocked the van across the road and shrugged. “Business?”

“And what brings you up here?” he asked. “Thought you were supposed to be protecting the Olympic site from flasher attack?”

She leaned in close enough for him to be able to smell the tobacco on her breath. “Believe it or not, Arnold, my job isn't all about blokes' dicks,” she said.

“So …”

“Can't tell you,” she said as she walked back across the road. “If I did I'd have to kill you.”

He watched her walk around the corner and then disappear from sight. Mumtaz lived on that street. Lee jogged across the road in Vi's footsteps, but by the time he could see into Mumtaz's street, Vi had disappeared.

* * *

“I do apologize for the smell, DI Collins. Curry isn't to my taste, as you may or may not know, but the Asians who live here now, they love it.”