An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (13 page)

‘So Marek Berkowicz could have run away just as the family said.’

The old man shrugged. ‘Possibly.’ Then he said, ‘Here, fancy a fag?’

They both went out onto Green Street which, in contrast to how it had been earlier on when it was riddled with football fans, looked a bit like some recession-hit high street in the Midlands. Only the occasional roar of the crowd from the Boleyn Ground broke the one noise that was always around: traffic.

Lee lit up first. ‘What about Lily Smith?’ he asked. ‘Remember much about her?’

Wilf frowned. He lowered his voice. ‘She’d been in the camps.’

‘What? Like Auschwitz?’

‘Belsen,’ the old man said. ‘We, the British, liberated it in 1945. Reg Smith was one of the soldiers first in. Piles of bodies so high they cut out the sunlight, people said. No wonder Reg took to the bottle.’

‘But he brought Lily back from Germany with him?’

‘And the boy.’

‘Marek.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember what Lily looked like, Wilf?’

He puffed on his fag and then he smiled. ‘Like a little fairy, she was.’ he said. ‘A nice pretty lady with long, blonde hair. I thought she was German – you know, proper German – not a Jew. My mum told me not to speak to her because of it – until she realised, like.’

Wilf was sure that Lily Smith had been blonde, but the little picture that Mumtaz’s client had found behind the mezuzah had been of a dark-haired woman. Who was she? For the moment at least, it seemed unlikely that she was Lily Smith.

‘Actually, my mum got to know Lily Smith a bit before the boy left,’ Wilf said. ‘She, Mum that is, she always said that Lily Smith was quality.’

Lee frowned. ‘You mean …’

‘She come from a well-off, educated family.’ Wilf shook his head. ‘Dunno what her first husband was like, but Reg Smith must have been a come-down.’

‘He saved her,’ Lee said.

‘Oh, well that was the story, yes,’ Wilf said. ‘Her and the boy was close to death on the floor of some hut and Reg took them out of there. That’s what my cousin Arthur always said anyway, and he knew them well.’

‘What, Arthur Dobson?’ Lee asked.

‘Yeah.’ Wilf shook his head. ‘We could ask him if he weren’t in hospital.’

Lee, who knew Wilf’s much older cousin a little bit, said, ‘What’s he in there for?’

Wilf leaned towards him and whispered, ‘Cancer.’

‘Oh. Sorry.’

Across Green Street the lads in the local barber’s shop came out onto the pavement for a smoke and one of them, Kumar, waved at Lee.

‘Alright, mate,’ Lee called out.

‘Yes, yes.’

Lee turned back to Wilf. ‘You said that your mum knew Lily Smith until Marek went missing. What happened after that?’

‘Oh, Lily Smith never went out again,’ Wilf said. ‘Only once, which was when she was took out feet first in a box. Buried in the old Plashet I think.’

‘When was that?’

He shrugged. ‘Must’ve been sometime in the 1960s. Eric went to the funeral of course, and I have heard it said that that was the last time
he
ever left that house.’ Vi had told Lee that Eric Smith had been a recluse. ‘Then he died,’ Wilf said, ‘and then the place just went to rack and ruin. Arthur’d know more about it than I would, but …’ He shook his head. ‘Not a good house that one, I wouldn’t live in it. Here, Lee, is it true it’s been bought by some young couple?’

*

The woman behind the toughened glass window looked down at the ring with nothing but contempt. Mumtaz said, ‘It’s a onecarat solitaire diamond.’

The woman shrugged as if to say, So you’re another skint woman with another onecarat diamond, so what?

‘We have to verify it,’ she said. She put the ring that Ahmet had bought Mumtaz for their first wedding anniversary in a battered cardboard jewellery box and passed it to an old man who
sat behind her. ‘Can you move out the way so I can serve the next customer?’

Mumtaz stood aside to let a big-haired woman, who looked like she was probably a traveller, push a load of gold chains underneath the toughened glass and say, ‘Eighteen carat.’ Her economy of speech and her tone made Mumtaz feel that she hated what she was doing. That was understandable.

Mumtaz had come to Manor Park to sell her final piece of valuable jewellery because the pawn shops on Green Street had become too familiar and public and she needed to go somewhere anonymous. This place, however, made her shudder. Part of a chain that had expanded massively since the onset of the credit crunch of 2007, it dealt in anything anyone might want to sell. It was the sort of establishment that attracted men in their early thirties pushing babies in buggies, looking to sell guitars that had once been imbued with their dreams.

The woman behind the toughened glass took the traveller’s chains wordlessly and then she beckoned Mumtaz back to the counter.

‘Our expert says we can advance you eight hundred on it,’ she said.

Mumtaz remembered what Ahmet had paid for the ring, because he had been the sort of man who told a woman such things.
Look, I paid three thousand pounds for this, for you!
he’d said as he’d hurled it at her after she’d said she’d rather have a few less beatings than a ring for their first wedding anniversary. Now it was the last valuable piece of jewellery that she had, it was the most beautiful and she hated it. It was a no brainer.

‘OK,’ she said.

The woman behind the counter began to fill out paperwork and quoted a figure that Mumtaz would have to pay if she wanted
to keep the ring ‘in’. She knew that unless some miracle happened she’d never redeem it, and nor did she want to, not for herself. The only reason to pawn it at all was so that maybe one day she could redeem it to give to Shazia. The girl had no jewellery from her own mother; Ahmet had sold that long ago.

Once she’d completed her business, Mumtaz put the eight hundred pounds in her purse and left the shop as quickly as possible. Once outside, even though it was raining and grey, she breathed more easily.

*

Some of the girls she’d seen there before. A lot of them were eastern European – generally of the blonde, long-legged variety – who sat in one corner of the room talking and laughing among themselves. Over Wendy’s side of the room were two black girls whom she knew, and four others, white and British, that she didn’t.

Sean Rogers’s house wasn’t beautiful but it was fabulous. The girls had been put into what Sean called the ‘Granny Flat’ which was an apartment on the first floor of the pool house. It had a vast living room, two bedrooms and two bathrooms. This was the ‘holding pen’ where the girls who would provide Sean and Marty’s business associates with ‘entertainment’ that night would prepare themselves with fake tans, perfume and makeup. The Rogers had their reputations to think about while Wendy just concentrated on how much this would knock off her debt.

She was wearing a thong, a bra and a pair of six-inch wedges which took her to almost six feet tall. There were mirrors all over the living room and she sat in front of one to do her make-up and put on her false eyelashes. A black girl, Harmony, smiled at
her, but it was a leggy East European who came and sat down at the mirror beside her.

In comparison to this fake-tanned girl, Wendy was pallid. Her face looked grey and for a few moments her own deathly pallor gave her pause.

‘This waterproof is very good.’

Wendy looked to her left. The girl, blonde and unsmiling, was offering her a tube of foundation cream.

‘Is a little dark for you but it do not run,’ the girl continued. ‘Take it.’

Wendy took it. ‘Thank you.’

‘Do you work here before?’

‘Yes,’ Wendy said.

‘Is very nice house.’

‘Yes.’

A house with a room that would later be darkened and packed to the ceiling with bodies fucking and being fucked like pieces of meat.

The East European shadowed her eyes in green and then picked up a set of false eyelashes with a pair of tweezers. ‘I would like to live in a house like this one day,’ she said.

Wendy didn’t answer. All she wanted was her own flat with the kids in Plaistow.

‘But I must have a lot of sex before I can do that,’ the girl continued.

Was she a professional prostitute? The few East European girls Wendy had met before at Sean’s parties had been, like this girl, very calm about it all. But then maybe that was just how they were. Coming from poor places like Romania and Albania maybe you did whatever you had to to survive … But then wasn’t Wendy’s own situation rather like theirs?

‘Anyway, perhaps we meet rich men who want to keep us or maybe marry,’ the girl said. She saw Wendy shudder and she asked, ‘You don’t like?’

‘I don’t want to marry a bloke like that,’ she said.

‘But if he is rich …’

‘Even if he is rich,’ Wendy said. The other girl had put her false eyelashes on now, Wendy was just getting going with hers.

‘Why not?’

‘Because to marry a bloke I’d have to love him, and I can’t love anyone who abuses me.’

The girl stopped what she was doing and turned to Wendy. This time she smiled. ‘When I see you come here I see there is fear in you.’

‘I’ve been before and it’s …’

‘It is a way for women like us to survive. You would not be here if you had trouble with that.’

In the past, Wendy had always fought shy of these foreign girls. She’d found them unintelligible and even a bit cold. This one was no different, but she had a nice smile. ‘What’s your name?’ Wendy asked.

‘Is Tatiana. You?’

‘I’m Wendy.’

‘Wendy.’

‘Yeah.’ Tatiana smiled again and the feeling that Wendy had that she could talk to this girl increased. ‘I’ve got kids,’ she said. ‘Children.’

‘Ah.’ Tatiana’s face became grave. ‘The same for my friend Masha.’ She pointed to one of the other East Europeans, a slightly smaller girl with red hair. ‘You do for them.’

‘Yes.’

Tatiana put a friendly as opposed to a sexual hand on Wendy’s
knee. She said, ‘Children make life different, harder. But Wendy, maybe you still find rich man even with children? Even if you don’t really want. Is good, eh?’

*

Abdullah’s answer to her question had made perfect sense.

‘Yes, I’d been practising up north for a few years but I didn’t know how London’d work out for me,’ he’d told Nasreen, ‘so why spend a load of money on property? Uncle Fazal’s place was fine, and it meant that eventually I could buy the house in Strone Road for us when it came on the market.’

She’d wanted to ask him about the rest of the money that he’d made because, even as quite a young solicitor, even up north, he must have made a fair amount. But she hadn’t. And now he was gone. Out working, something to do with drawing up a contract for some businessman in south London, he’d said.

Nasreen, alone in her bedroom at her parents’ house, thought about that word that Mumtaz Hakim had said to her.
Mezuzah.

It was Hebrew – so it was Jewish – for that cylinder she’d found on the post beside the back door of their new house. Apparently it contained some sort of scroll that was meaningful to Jews and was part of the traditions they had around living in houses. The small picture behind the mezuzah could be of the woman who had lived in the house years ago, the mother of the odd, reclusive man who, she understood, was Jewish. But Mrs Hakim had not been sure, and was still in the process of finding out more about that family. She was also looking into Abdullah’s background. Not even Nasreen’s own mother knew about that, and just thinking about it made her feel guilty.

But when it had just been Abdullah and her, his past had not been an issue. He’d been handsome, employed in a good job and
he’d loved her: loved her enough to make her pregnant, and so there was now another life to consider. She had to know who her baby’s father really was. All the little things that had either not added up or made sense to her about Abdullah had to be addressed.

All the stuff about respecting her and keeping her away from ‘unnatural’ sexual practices set off many alarm bells for Nasreen. She knew that there were some deeply religious men who really believed that and treated their wives like empresses, but a lot of men used the ‘you’re too pure’ argument to go and do ‘dirty’ things with Western women or with prostitutes. She had sincerely wanted to be more sexually adventurous with Abdullah, but what had really hurt when he’d rebuffed her advances had been the thought that he was getting what she was offering elsewhere. He was away a lot.

As yet, Mrs Hakim had found out little about Abdullah that Nasreen didn’t already know. If she found nothing, then all well and good. But then was it? Even if Mrs Hakim found nothing bad in Abdullah’s past, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t doing what he shouldn’t in the present. If that happened, should she have him followed to these business meetings he attended?

She’d had a conversation, once, with John Sawyer about his time in Afghanistan that had stuck in her mind. John had, albeit indirectly, started her thinking about Abdullah and the doubts that she had, in all honesty, always had.

While stationed near a small village in Helmand province, John had seen a girl of twelve running, crying and bleeding into the dust. She’d looked as if she’d been attacked, which she had, by her husband. Given in marriage to a seventy-year-old man, the girl had had her virginity taken roughly. Later, John had come across the husband at a house in a neighbouring village where a troupe of
bachabaze
boy dancers was appearing. Dressed as girls,
the young boys, or
bachas
, had then been taken for sex by the men who had paid them to dance. John had caught one of them with the girl’s seventy-year-old husband. No doubt doing what the old man would never have asked his ‘wife’ to do, the boy had been petted and kissed by the old man afterwards. He’d then tossed him a low-value note and the boy had run away. John beat the ‘husband’ up when he went outside the courtyard of the house to relieve himself. He’d made the mistake of telling him just why he considered him to be a filthy, psychopathic rapist, not fit to be a husband to anyone, much less a child, while he punched and kicked him.

Only days later, John learned that the old man’s wife had died. Apparently she’d been shot by the Taliban, but John knew better than that. The old man had killed the girl in order both to retain his honour in the face of a foreigner who clearly cared on some level for her, and to punish John. When John told Nasreen about it, he had cried. He’d said that men in Afghanistan used women simply as baby makers. John hadn’t known about her sex life, but what he’d said had made Nasreen think.