An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (12 page)

Mursel Khan had had an electrical shop in the middle of the town and had been something of a local character on account of his heavy involvement with the heritage railway. He had died, according to an article in a local newspaper, in 2011 at the age of seventy-one. His wife, Meena, had died in 1974, which was the same year in which her only child, Abdullah, had been born. She’d only been twenty-three. Mursel had not remarried. Thus Abdullah and Mursel had lived as, she imagined, a fairly isolated unit in what seemed to be a white, Christian town. Bolton itself, which was where Meena, if not Mursel, had been born, had a high proportion of Asian people and in the racially tense 1970s surely the Khans would have felt happier and safer living there. Mumtaz’s father had told her about the ‘Paki-bashing’ that had gone on all over the country at that time even though she had no memories of it herself. Back then there had been a lot of activity against immigrants by far-right groups like the National Front. The British National Party, their successors, were still around but they usually operated in a far less confrontational way than they had in the 1970s. Long before the 1970s, back at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jews had been treated badly too. Mumtaz’s eyes, yet again, were drawn to the mezuzah. She looked away.

Abdullah Khan had, so he’d told his wife Nasreen, entered Manchester University’s School of Law in 1992. Via the Law Society’s website, Mumtaz learned that he would have done a three-year degree course, after which he would have had to complete a one-year postgraduate Legal Practice Course in order to qualify for a training contract with a firm of solicitors. Only after completing that contract would he have become a fully-fledged solicitor. That would have taken him up to approximately 1997/8. He had come to London in 2005 which meant that he had to have been working as a solicitor for about seven years prior to that. So why had he, when he first came to the city, stayed in a cheap boarding house in Poplar?

*

She’d been sick. It was the first time it had happened since Nasreen had learned that she was pregnant and it had come as a shock. It was after all barely still morning. But as she stripped thirty-year-old-plus wallpaper off the kitchen wall, she suddenly felt nauseous. Her mobile rang as Nasreen flung herself out of the back door and into the garden where she threw up her breakfast. As soon as she’d finished retching she felt instantly better. But she made herself sit down on the back step for a moment anyway.

Nasreen took deep breaths of the torrid London air. Looking up at the sky she could see that it was going to rain again soon. She couldn’t help thinking that if John had still been alive she would have been embarrassed by what had just happened, but comforted too. John would have been concerned, he had been kind. He’d killed people and yet he’d also been very kind. How could that be?

Nasreen heard her mobile phone bleep, letting her know that
she had either an ansaphone message or a text. It was probably from the person who had called while she was throwing up. She didn’t much care. It could wait. Oddly, she was elated all of a sudden and she wanted to enjoy it. Being sick, even more than the test results she’d got from the doctor, meant that she really was pregnant.

*

‘Once I’d found that body, I didn’t leave it for an instant, I can assure you,’ Majid Islam said. ‘Such strange people cavorting around in the graveyard. Who knew what they might do to it?’

Vi Collins’s officers had told her that Majid Islam had been standing over the body when they’d arrived and she had no reason to disbelieve either them or him. The only jarring theme to the melody was being provided by a cokehead and general oddity known as Bully. But Vi had to check his story out.

‘Apart from the girl we arrested did you see anyone else in the Plashet Graveyard that night?’ Vi asked.

She’d gone round to Islam’s house, keeping it informal. As Plashet Cemetery’s unofficial guardian, he was alright with the police and she wanted to keep him on side.

Majid Islam twirled his tasbeeh beads around his fingers and said, ‘I saw a boy jump over the gate.’

‘But there were three figures in the graveyard when you got there weren’t there, Mr Islam?’ Vi said. ‘That’s what you told us. The girl, the boy who jumped the gate and …’ She shrugged.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I saw a figure and then …’ He snapped his fingers.

‘Did you get any sort of idea about whether it was male or female, white or …’

‘Oh, no, it was just an impression,’ Majid Islam said. ‘A silhouette.’ Then he paused for a moment, his face creased into a frown. ‘But I suppose I would have to say, at a pinch, that he was a man.’

‘Why do you say that?’ Vi asked.

He shook his head. ‘I don’t really know. An instinct perhaps you’d say?’ He looked over at his fifty-inch television screen which was playing children’s afternoon programmes to no-one and said, ‘Perhaps it was the way that he moved?’

‘Which was?’

‘Like a man.’

‘Which is how?’ Vi asked. She’d often been told she walked about like a bloke when she had flat shoes on.

He held his hands out. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I know it when I see it. But I can’t be sure.’

Vi left Majid Islam’s house and went back to the station. Both Kazia and Bully had been released on bail pending possible charges, but there had been nothing – forensic or otherwise – to connect them to either of the bodies in the graveyard. There was Majid Islam who was an unlikely culprit on account of his history with the graveyard and some shadowy figure that could have been male. Where had he gone? And had he, this shadowy figure, actually been the ‘Paki’ that Bully had seen running away from the bodies when he approached them?

He hadn’t jumped over the gate into High Street North and it was unlikely that he could have hidden in the graveyard during the time she and all the other coppers had spent in there. Logically the only way he could have got out of there without being seen was over that fucking wall. Visions of Spiderman invaded Vi’s mind. She replaced them with more sensible pictures of ladders.

When Tony Bracci came in from his protracted smoking session
out in the car park she said, ‘I think we need to have another look at the wall around the old Plashet Cemetery.’

‘We’ve had a look at the wall, guv,’ Tony said. ‘We looked at it when we found John Sawyer. There was nothing to see.’

‘Not at ground level, no,’ Vi smiled. ‘We need to get on top of it, Tone.’

‘Oh.’

‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘I’m not asking you to do something I wouldn’t do myself.’ And then she added. ‘In theory.’

Her phone rang, and while she answered it Tony Bracci pulled a face. He didn’t like climbing any more than he liked running. But she waved him away. As he left he heard her say, ‘Well, Arnold, I haven’t heard anyone mention the Smiths of Strone Road for at least twenty years. You got a client down there, have you?’

*

‘Why aren’t you at work?’ Nasreen was surprised to see her husband come through the front door. She was pleased to see Abdullah but also a little nervous. He didn’t like her working at the house on her own in case she had an accident or felt faint. She wouldn’t tell him about the sickness.

‘I have to do some odds and sods over the weekend,’ her husband said. ‘So I took myself off early. It’s Friday.’

Nasreen stopped scraping weird moss-green wallpaper off the dining room wall. ‘Don’t you have clients to attend to?’

He shrugged. Then he said, ‘What you doing here? I went to your mum and dad’s and they—’

‘I just wanted to get on.’

‘So what did you do?’

He didn’t trust her, she could hear it in his voice. Did he know
about John maybe? Did he think that she was having some sort of affair with John? But John was dead.

‘Just some scraping,’ she said.

He looked at the walls of the dining room. ‘Fun?’

‘No, but it has to be done.’

‘Mmm.’

Nasreen particularly fancied Abdullah when he was all suited up for work – as he was now. Although completely inexperienced sexually before her wedding night, Nasreen had nevertheless educated herself extensively in the art of sex via books, friends and films. Abdullah had known what to do as she had expected and so her first time had been exciting and painless. She’d wanted him so much. After he’d taken her virginity she’d ached to carry on. But he hadn’t wanted to. Now, looking at him, she wanted him even though she knew that part of such a voracious desire was due to her hormones. She walked over to him and kissed him on the mouth and she felt his dick harden against her leg.

When he finally disengaged from her he said, ‘That was nice.’

She took one of his hands and put it on her breast. ‘There could be more …’

He smiled. ‘Maybe when we go back to your parents …’

They hadn’t had sex for over a month. ‘There are things we could do here,’ she said.

‘Yes, but it’s not very hygienic and—’

Nasreen got down on her knees and opened his fly.

‘Nasreen!’

‘Oh, Abi, I really want to do it!’ she said as she reached for his cock.

But he pulled away. ‘That’s disgusting!’ he said. ‘That’s not what married people do!’

‘Yes, it is!’ Nasreen said. Kneeling on the floor in front of him she felt pathetic now, but she still made her point. ‘Oral sex is normal.’

His pale face became red. ‘It’s disgusting and dishonourable. You’re my wife, the mother of my child, not some whore!’

Nasreen began to cry. ‘But Abi, I want our sex to be wonderful,’ she said.

‘By doing …that?’ He did up his fly.

‘Yes, if you …’

‘But I don’t,’ he said. He moved away from her completely. He looked at her with disgust. Didn’t he realise that even if what they occasionally did in bed satisfied him completely, she wanted more? Didn’t she have a right to more?

And then suddenly he was sitting on the floor beside her, kissing her hands. ‘I care for you and our baby more than anything else in this world,’ he said.

‘Then why …’

His eyes were so intense and so passionate they stopped Nasreen in her tracks.

He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Because we don’t need all that,’ he said. ‘Our love is pure, we’re good Muslims you and me, Nasreen. Sex is good but it’s for babies, you know? It’s to make the baby we’re making now. Anything else is dirty and disrespectful – to you. Don’t you see that?’

How could he be so passionate and yet at the same time so sexually unadventurous? And why was he bringing up religion? Sure they were both Muslims but neither of them were shalwar khameez wearing types. It was one of those moments, which were increasing, when Nasreen didn’t understand her husband.

‘You know I love you. You know I’ll give you everything—’

A noise from outside interrupted him and Abdullah, frowning, said, ‘Sounds like someone in the back garden.’

‘Who?’

He stood up.

‘I’ll go and see,’ he said. ‘You stay here.’

Still on her knees, Nasreen slowly rose and it was then that her phone rang. This time she picked it up.

‘Nasreen,’ she heard Mumtaz Hakim’s confident voice on the end of the line.

‘Yes?’

‘Are you alright?’

She must have heard the tremor in Nasreen’s voice. ‘Yes fine,’ Nasreen lied.

‘Nasreen, a question,’ Mumtaz said. ‘When your husband first came to London why did he stay in the ZamZam boarding house in Poplar? It seems odd to me that a solicitor of some years practice should do something like that.’

Nasreen said, ‘His uncle owns the boarding house.’

‘Oh, I see.’

And yet Nasreen felt that she didn’t – not really. And neither – really – did Nasreen, not now she came to think about it. Why
had
Abdullah stayed in that dirty place? It wasn’t as if he even liked his uncle. Nasreen saw Abdullah coming back in from the garden. ‘I have to go,’ she said and ended the call.

As he walked into the dining room, Abdullah Khan looked very formal indeed. His suit, straight and smooth again, his hair neat.

Nasreen said, ‘What’s going on? In the garden?’

For a moment he appeared to be lost in thought and then he said, ‘Oh, it’s the police.’

‘What are they doing? Where?’

‘They’re on the back wall,’ he said. ‘I think it’s got something
to do with that body they found in the graveyard. You know, the soldier.’

‘Yes.’ Nasreen put her arms around her shoulders and hugged herself.

‘The Berkowicz boy just disappeared,’ Wilf Cox said.

The barmaid, Maureen, picked his empty pint up off the table and said, ‘Same again?’

The old man looked expectantly across at Lee Arnold who said, ‘Yeah, thanks Maureen. And I’ll have me usual.’ He handed her his Pepsi glass.

Now that the game had started the Boleyn was very light on football fans of any description and so Lee and Wilf could talk. Lee had been trying to catch up with the old man since the previous day, and later this evening he had to go to a no doubt designer perfume-scented place called ‘Spicey’s’ in Billericay for another obbo on Amy Green. He’d decided to fortify himself in the blokiness of the Boleyn first. It was an added bonus that Wilf had turned up – he rarely did on a match day – so Lee had taken the opportunity to ask him about the house on Strone Road where that client of Mumtaz’s had found a mezuzah.

‘Police looked everywhere,’ the old man continued. ‘Dug up gardens and everything. People whispered about the stepfather, what was his name? Reg. About Reg.’

‘Why?’

‘You mean aside from the fact that he was his stepdad? He was a bit of a lout, Reg Smith, as I remember him.’

‘Drinks.’ Maureen put Wilf’s pint down in front of him and gave Lee his Pepsi.

‘Ta, darling.’

Wilf continued, ‘He had his own son by Lily by the time the other boy went missing.’

‘Eric.’ Mumtaz and Vi had told him the bones of the story.

‘Yes, Eric.’ He shook his head. ‘He was weird. Living in that house all them years all on his own after his parents died. People said he was guarding that first boy’s body in there – until they forgot about it.’

‘Guarding it for who?’

‘The memory of his dad? His mum? I dunno,’ Wilf said. ‘But then Eric died years ago – he weren’t that old even though he looked it. Far as I know, nothing was ever found in that house.’