An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (11 page)

Apart from the kids, Wendy was sorry about her sister, Mary, or Ayesha as she called herself these days. She meant well and
Wendy loved her and her husband, Wazim, who was a good man, but they didn’t live in her world. The Asians she knew, weren’t like Wazim. Men like Yunus Ali, the Rogers’ business partner, and that family of gangsters, the Sheikhs. Some of them went to Sean’s orgies and they all took bungs and bribes and broke people’s fingers. Get behind with the rent and, just like their white counterparts, they’d be on your doorstep with either a baseball bat or an offer you most certainly couldn’t refuse. Wendy, suddenly exhausted, sat down and she cried.

*

‘Oi! Stop!’

Tony Bracci had seen the bloke his snout had told him about standing outside the Boleyn. Tony didn’t know him, but he clearly knew Tony because the sight of him had made him run. Had the snout, a junkie known as ‘Deserts Disease’ (on account of the fact the palms of his hands tended to wander onto women’s thighs), tipped off the bloke Tony was running after? To play both the police and the criminals was not an unknown tactic for a snout, especially one who was on the gear. The bloke, known as Bully, took off up the Barking Road towards East Ham like Usain Bolt. Tony Bracci, who was really more of a Gordon Brown style of runner, puffed and wheezed after him.

Tony was a long way behind. Bully, who did indeed have a ring through his nose, was, according to Deserts Disease, not so much a racist as a necrophile. Fantastic as it sounded, Deserts Disease said Bully had ‘had’ several fresh corpses up the East London Cemetery. But Deserts Disease was permanently off his neck, so who knew what he knew about anything. Up in front, Bully, who was twenty-five at the most, was pulling ever further ahead. Tony thought about stopping and calling for assistance, but he knew
that if he did he’d never get going again. Bully slipped his skinny, white body between two black-clad Muslim ladies and then, briefly, looked behind him at Tony. And that, luckily for Tony Bracci, was Bully’s undoing.

*

When Mumtaz entered the office she found Lee at her desk, fiddling with something.

‘What are you doing?’

He looked up at her. In his hand was the metal capsule that Nasreen Khan had found on one of the doorposts in her new house. He was scratching away at the layers of paint. ‘If I’m not too much mistaken, I know what this is,’ he said.

Mumtaz put her handbag down on her desk and looked at Lee as he worked away at the lump with his fingernails.

‘I saw something like this up at Brian Green’s house last night,’ Lee said. He picked a spoon up off the desk and used the end to whittle away at the paint. Mumtaz frowned. As ancient paint flakes fluttered down towards the floor, she saw a shape come into view. She gasped.

‘A Star of David,’ Lee said as he held the metal lump up. ‘Which means that this is a mezuzah.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Well,’ Lee said, ‘according to Brian, who, let’s face it, is not even strictly Jewish, it’s a container for some sort of Hebrew scroll that observant Jews have to have on their doorposts. Brian’s father was Jewish and he lived with him for a few years before he died so Brian had them put on his doorposts.’

‘So Nasreen Khan’s house was once owned by Jews?’

‘Yes. It could have been back in the 1900s when there were a lot of Jews around here,’ Lee said. ‘Although that photograph
your client found underneath it looks more modern than that to me.’

Mumtaz sat down. ‘I went back to the Land Registry records and discovered that the last individual the house had belonged to was a man called Eric Smith,’ she said.

‘Not very Jewish.’ Lee put the mezuzah back on her desk. He’d called Brian Green first thing and told him about his wife hurting her hand on the thing on his doorpost and the blown kiss she’d made at her chauffeur. Brian had growled out the detail about the mezuzah. Lee had told Brian not to make assumptions about Amy and the chauffeur. She was the sort of girl who blew kisses at the bloody dog. But apparently Amy was going to be out with her mates again on Saturday and Brian wanted Lee to be there at a price that he couldn’t even think about refusing.

‘No, but his mother was Polish apparently,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Her name before she married Eric Smith’s father was Lily Berkowicz.’

‘That sounds Jewish to me.’ Lee went into their tiny office kitchen, picked up the dustpan and brush and swept the paint shavings from the mezuzah off the floor.

‘There was another son too,’ Mumtaz continued, ‘besides Eric, a boy called Marek.’

‘From a previous marriage?’

‘Must have been,’ she said. ‘The information I found about Marek Berkowicz on line was very scant.’

‘Why would it be anything else? I mean he must be quite old now …’

‘Wherever he is, yes,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Lee, Marek Berkowicz went missing from his home in 1955 when he was fifteen and hasn’t been seen since.’

Lee, now back at his desk, said, ‘I’ve never heard anything about that.’

‘It was before you were born.’

‘Yes, I know, but you hear stories as you’re growing up, don’t you?’

‘But you come from the south of the borough.’

‘Yeah.’ Custom House, down by the old Victoria Dock. When Lee had been a kid it had been a whole distinct and separate community from places like Upton Park. Then the Docks had been alive and trips to places like Upton Park for Lee and his brother had been rare. ‘My mum might remember,’ he said. ‘Or maybe me dad’s old drinking mates.’

‘I found one newspaper report,’ Mumtaz said. ‘From the
Recorder
. Marek went missing one night in December 1955. No-one saw him go, no-one knew where he might have gone. The police even dug up the Smith family’s garden.’

‘Mmm. Perhaps I’ll speak to Vi. Her dad was Jewish.’

Mumtaz picked up the small photograph that had been hidden behind the mezuzah and said, ‘I wonder if this is Lily Smith.’ Then she looked up again. ‘Lee, do you know what’s written on the scroll inside this … mezuzah?’

‘Not a clue. But it’ll be in Hebrew and so neither of us’d be able to read it.’

‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking about opening it. I don’t think that would be right. We’re not Jewish,’ Mumtaz said, and she put the mezuzah to one side.

*

‘DS Bracci tells me he reckons you’ve a tale to tell, Mr Murray,’ Vi Collins said, as she sat down in front of one Mark Murray aka Bully. A pale, skinny lad, Bully had apparently got his nickname
because of the black metal ring that he’d stuck through his nose. It made him, he’d told Tony Bracci, look a bit like a bull. Tony Bracci felt it made him look like a twat.

Bully didn’t say anything.

‘What were you doing in the old Plashet Cemetery on Saturday night?’ Vi asked. ‘Fiddling about with the dead?’

He looked up at her from underneath heavy eyelids. ‘I don’t do that.’

‘Don’t you?’ The notion that Bully was a necrophiliac had only come from that deadbeat Deserts Disease and so it was hardly gospel. But Vi had to see how Bully would respond.

‘No.’ He
looked
disgusted.

‘So what were you doing?’ Vi asked.

‘Hanging out.’

‘In a cemetery?’ And then something occurred to Vi, something she’d once talked about to a drag queen she’d met on a night out up west. ‘The old Plashet’s not like Brompton Cemetery is it, Mark? Brompton Cemetery is well known as a place where men go to meet other men for sex …’

‘I’m no fuckin’ Iron!’ Bully’s face had gone from spotty white to spotty red in an instant. It either meant that he was deeply offended by the suggestion that he might be gay or he was so far in the closet he was out the other side.

‘So why were you there?’ Vi asked. ‘Tell us and you can go. Don’t tell us and …’ She held up the very small wrap of cocaine Tony Bracci had found in one of Bully’s pockets.

Bully looked at it with what could have been hunger in his eyes. ‘You’ll do me for that anyway.’

Vi, smiling, dropped the wrap onto the floor. ‘You’ll have to find that out,’ she said.

Tony Bracci looked across at his superior nervously.

‘Tell me the truth,’ Vi said.

The boy had refused a Brief. He’d done that for a reason.

Bully moved his head to the left, then to the right, and he sucked his teeth. He said, ‘I go to get laid.’

‘Oh, so you—’

‘Not by no man!’ He sniffed. ‘I like girls, you know what I mean?’

‘In a graveyard.’

‘Yeah, man!’

Bully was one of the whitest people Vi had ever met and yet, in common with a lot of young people, he spoke in a semi-Caribbean, semi-London/Essex dialect that, to her, sounded weird.

‘Goth girls go to boneyards, yeah? They like to get laid on the gravestones and they are reem, man. ‘

‘Easy, tiger.’ Vi raised a hand. ‘So let me get this straight, you go to graveyards to pick up Goth girls?’

‘They’ll do it with anyone as long as you do it on a tomb,’ he said. Then he went red again when he realised what he’d just said. ‘Not that I couldn’t get laid by other girls but, you know, I like the Goth girls.’

‘So is Plashet Jewish Cemetery a known place for this sort of activity?’

Bully looked back again. ‘No.’

‘So why were you romping about in there last Saturday night?’

For a moment he didn’t say anything.

‘Well?’

‘I saw this bitch,’ he said. ‘Sort of gothy but also she had a swastika tattoo and other symbols and stuff on her garms, you know? She was vaulting over the railings into the cemetery and she looked at me like …’

‘Like she wouldn’t be averse to letting you slip her a length.’

‘Eh?’

Inwardly Vi laughed. How quickly slang changed. ‘Fuck her,’ she interpreted.

‘Oh, er, yeah.’

‘So did you? Fuck her?’

Kazia Ostrowska had been the only female, as far as they knew, who had been in the Plashet Jewish Cemetery that night. Kazia it had been who was tattooed with a swastika.

‘Did you fuck her?’ Vi reiterated.

Bully put his head down again. ‘No,’ he mumbled.

‘What?’ Tony Bracci only pretended he hadn’t heard. The little scrote had made him run, he was ripe for a bit of humiliation.

‘No, I never,’ Bully said. He looked up.

‘Why not? If she give you the eye and all that?’

Bully sighed. ‘Because she wasn’t alone,’ he said.

‘Who was with her?’

He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’

‘How many of them were there?’

He shrugged again.

‘Did you see what any of them looked like? Hear how they spoke?’

‘Foreign.’

‘What sort of foreign?’

‘I dunno.’

Kazia was Polish and so it was possible she had been in the graveyard with other Polish people. The only other person who could definitely be placed in the graveyard was Majid Islam. Would Majid, a British-born Asian, have cried out or spoken in any other language apart from English in that context?

‘Did any of the voices you heard sound Asian?’ Vi asked.

‘What like Pak—’

‘Asian,’ she cut across.

He thought for a moment and then he said, ‘No. No it was like … foreign, you know.’

Like it or not, and even among those of a decidedly right-wing nature, Asian voices had become native to Newham, even when they were speaking Urdu or Hindi. Like the Jews before them, their language had become accepted. Now it was other European tones that were ‘foreign’.

‘No,’ Vi said, even though she did know. ‘And anyway what’s this “it”. How many voices did you hear, Bully?’

‘Oh, just hers.’

‘The girl you took a fancy to?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So you saw more than one person but only actually heard one foreign voice?’

‘Yeah. But there was a bloke, a Pak … an Asian in there too,’ Bully said.

Majid Islam, who had found the body.

‘So what made you run away?’ Vi said.

‘Oh, that was the stiff on the ground,’ Bully said.

‘Which was?’

‘Holding a fucking skellington. Fuck man!’ he put a hand up to his head. He was sweating now. ‘All on its own holding a fucking skellington!’

But if that was the case, then how had he seen Majid Islam? While Kazia and who knew who else cavorted around the graveyard, according to Mr Islam, he had not moved from the dead man’s side.

‘So where was the Asian bloke you claimed you saw?’ Vi asked.

‘Oh, he was off on his toes,’ Bully said.

‘To where?’

He shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘The railings? I was shitting myself at the skellington, what did I care? So you gonna do something with that wrap or not?’

It was difficult for Mumtaz to concentrate. The mezuzah kept on catching her eye. She was supposed to be looking into the background of Nasreen Khan’s husband, Abdullah, but it wasn’t easy. In spite of what she’d said to Lee, who had disappeared down to the Boleyn to try and meet up with some of his dad’s old mates in order to help her, she wanted to take the back off it and look at the scroll inside. But that was so wrong. She could hear her father’s rebuke in her head,
That’s not for you, leave it alone!

Growing up just off Brick Lane in Spitalfields, Mumtaz had been brought up with a strange view of Jewish people. On the one hand, the area her family lived in had once been Jewish, the mosque her father and her brothers attended had been first a church and then a synagogue. Her parents had Jewish friends, Mumtaz herself had once loved a Jewish boy when she was at university and yet hatred of Jews was common. White racist lunatics preached it, those who sympathised with the Palestinians and opposed Israel often resorted to it and some of her fellow Muslims felt that if you
really
followed Islam, then you had to do it. She disagreed. She could see why the Palestinian cause was a just one, but she could also appreciate why Israel existed and why it was so important to world Jewry. In addition, she’d worked out long ago that there were Jews and there were Israelis and the two
were not necessarily the same. But did her sympathy for the Jews permit her to open that mezuzah?

Mumtaz turned back to her computer screen. So far her researches had taken her to Abdullah Khan’s parents who had been called Mursel and Meena Khan. They’d lived just outside where Abdullah had told Nasreen he came from, the town of Bolton, in a place called Ramsbottom. She’d Googled some pictures of it and it was not what she had expected. Ramsbottom looked middle class and quite trendy. It even had a ‘heritage’ steam railway.