An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (20 page)

As well as his brother Mike and his family, Brian had invited staff from his five health and boxing clubs, some of his most promising young athletes and a few old faces that Lee recognised from both his own and Brian’s pasts: men getting on in years with cauliflower ears or the odd false eye, and one old chap with a broken nose who Lee knew had done a few favours for the Krays. It was an odd mixture – some kids rapping in one room, a couple of old girls talking about turning tricks up Kings Cross in the Sixties in another.

This being summer, of course it was raining. Lee looked out of Brian’s patio doors at his sodden garden, and at Amy’s little fish pond now bereft of fairies. But Brian didn’t like people smoking in his house and so he’d have to go out there for a fag. There was
only just so much interest that a glassful of cranberry juice could hold for anyone. He left it for half an hour, but when the rain failed to abate he went out. He was quickly joined by a woman power-dressed à la 1980s in bright red and matt black. Lee recognised her immediately, but was surprised to see her at Brian’s gaff. ‘Debs,’ he said.

She lit her cigarette, a gold-collared St Moritz, with a gold lighter and looked at him out of heavily kohl-rimmed eyes. ‘Hello, officer,’ Debbie Rogers said. ‘If I’d known Brian was gonna invite the Old Bill …’

‘Private detective these days, Debs,’ Lee said. ‘But I imagine you know that. You’re a smart lady.’ She didn’t smile. Looking at her, Lee couldn’t tell how old she was, but then he’d never been able to do that. She’d married Martin Rogers sometime back in the 1980s. Word at the time had been that she’d had a good ten years on him, but nobody actually knew or, probably Lee thought, dared to ask.

‘You here with Marty?’ Lee asked, once the silence between them became unbearable. ‘I’ve not seen him.’

‘Maybe he’s avoiding you.’

He smiled. ‘I didn’t know you and Marty were thick with Brian.’

‘We’re not.’

‘But you’re here.’

Debbie puffed on her posh fag. ‘It’s respect, innit,’ she said.

‘For Brian’s wife?’ She looked at him with slow, lizard-like eyes. ‘Know her did you, Debs?’

‘No.’ She paused. ‘But I know you saw her die.’

Lee looked down at the ground. He hadn’t known Amy Green at all and what he had observed about her had only proved what an airhead she had been. But she’d also been young, pretty and
full of life. Whatever she’d been doing that night, she hadn’t deserved to die.

‘Don’t wanna talk about it?’ Debbie’s concern could have been for real or she could have been sneering at him. Either way Lee wasn’t bothered.

‘No,’ he said. Then he changed the subject. ‘Sean here?’

‘Somewhere.’

Sean Rogers had a house just up the road. It was in that house, so Wendy Dixon had told her sister Ayesha, that he had sex parties. Lee wondered whether Brian had ever been to one. Unlikely. Brian had always been a one-woman-at-a-time sort of a man. Lee thought about having another fag while he was outside in the rain and then decided against it. Thoughts about Wendy Dixon had led his mind back to Mumtaz. Two of the women she’d tried to help back in the spring, Wendy Dixon and Nasreen Khan, had seemingly disappeared off the face of the earth. Lee knew it still bugged Mumtaz, although on this particular Saturday afternoon he knew she had more pressing concerns.

*

‘You should’ve put it up for sale way before the Olympics,’ Shazia said. ‘Then you’d’ve got loads of money for it. Now there are missiles on people’s roofs and everything, and everybody’s getting really stressed.’

Mumtaz and Shazia watched as a man in a woolly hat put a ‘For Sale’ sign up outside their house. It had taken weeks of soul searching by Mumtaz to find a way to tell Shazia that she’d have to sell the house and all the girl had said was, ‘Cool.’

Of course Shazia didn’t know
why
Mumtaz was selling the house, beyond the fact that ‘we can’t afford it anymore’. Only Lee, who had lent her money for two months and couldn’t afford
any more, knew that Mumtaz couldn’t carry on being financially drained, even though he didn’t know by whom. What she knew he’d surmised, however, was that selling the house on the open market was a risk. Those she ‘owed’ had wanted to buy it at a knock-down price – that had always been the Sheikh family’s plan.

Mumtaz looked up and down the street to see whether anyone was watching the man put the sign up, but no-one was about. It was raining too hard.

‘Can we move to Stratford?’ she heard Shazia say. The girl had walked away from the window now and was sprawling across one of the living room sofas.

‘Why do you want to move to Stratford?’ Mumtaz asked. The leafy quietness of Forest Gate came at a premium. Why would anyone want to give that up for the concrete jungle that was Stratford?

‘Is it so you can just nip out to Westfield whenever you want?’ she asked.

‘No!’ Shazia tossed her thick hair over her shoulders slightly petulantly. ‘No, it’s because there are some way cool flats in Stratford now. They have like, gyms and porters and everything.’

Mumtaz smiled. ‘Do we need gyms and porters and everything?’

‘Well, where were you thinking of buying a house then?’ Shazia asked.

Mumtaz wasn’t thinking of buying anything, not until she knew what money she would have available. She’d put the house up for sale at £500,000, which was a price that reflected its somewhat neglected state. The Sheikhs would have taken it off her hands for £400,000 but that still left her in debt. At £500,000 she’d come out of the deal with about £50,000 and no debts. With
that she’d be able to find a nice place for herself and Shazia to rent.

‘Well, I thought another place around here, but smaller,’ Mumtaz said. ‘There are some really nice little houses on Radley Road and around that area.’

Shazia pulled a face.

‘What?’ Mumtaz asked.

‘They’re full of old people,’ she said.

‘So?’

‘So I don’t want to live around a lot of old people.’ She hauled herself up off the sofa. ‘Still think you’d’ve got more money if you’d sold a few months ago.
Everybody
wanted to live in east London then. Now the Olympics are just giving everyone terrors.’

Shazia wandered out to the kitchen, no doubt to raid the fridge. The girl had been right about prices though. Now just under two weeks away from the Olympic opening ceremony, no-one was shopping for houses. Most people were spending most of their time sheltering from the non-stop summer rain. What if the Olympics turned out to be just one big washout?

Although not interested in sport in any way, Mumtaz hoped that it wasn’t, for the sake of the athletes. But if the skies wouldn’t clear then what was anyone to do? She looked out into the rain again and willed someone, anyone, to come along quickly and buy her house.

*

Nasreen looked up at the cracked ceiling above her head and tried to imagine that it wasn’t there. Beyond it was the roof and then the sky. She could hear that it was raining outside even though she couldn’t see it. But that didn’t bother her.

Her belly was huge now. The baby was due in two weeks’ time and she still knew so little. Her mother came to visit so seldom that she always forgot to ask her about babies. She didn’t ask her mother much about anything, or even talk to her often, not with Abdullah in the room. And Abdullah was always in the room, the one reasonably respectable room downstairs, when her mother and father came to the house. Her father even seemed to think that Abdullah’s protectiveness of her, as well as his devotion to apparently endless DIY, was laudable in some way. Her mother, she knew, felt differently. Her mother’s eyes looked sad every time she saw her and how she had to live.

Alone in that house, in that terrible bedroom, day in and day out, with only Abdullah for company, was turning her into some sort of mindless blob. All she did was eat, sleep, go to the toilet. She no longer read or even watched the television. There was no television in the bedroom. She was just a thing with one purpose: to give birth. And when Abdullah was out, she was a thing that was fixed to her bed by handcuff ties.

*

She’d known it was wrong because the kids were at home. It was also unwise to let people know where she lived. But Wendy had had to do it.

They’d met, she and Paul, in Central Park. Since that first time at Westfield she’d met him on a weekly basis. Always somewhere anonymous. Sean didn’t know and he wasn’t to know. Paul, although he wouldn’t tell her exactly what he did, had some sort of business which meant that he had contact with Sean, so he had to know that she still went to Sean’s parties and had sex with men for him all the time. But he never said anything and he hadn’t gone to any more parties.

Wendy could hear Dolly singing to the other kids through the walls and through her own gasps and squeaks. She wanted to feel guilty, but with Paul inside her she couldn’t. This wasn’t anything like the tricks she turned for Sean, this made her feel alive.

Later, when she lay in his arms, feeling his sleeping breath rising and falling beneath her, that was when the guilt had come upon her. If Sean found out she was fucking a bloke she knew outside of her usual ‘work’, he’d go off his nut. Where was Sean’s cut in what she was doing? He’d punish her. How could she put them all at such risk?

Paul opened his eyes and he looked at her. She reached for him but he pushed her gently away. ‘Let me watch you do yourself,’ he said.

She’d put on ‘shows’ for him before. Just having him watch was enough to make her hot. As she touched herself, Wendy saw him lick his lips and so she lowered herself onto him. He’d used a condom before but this time she wanted him to come inside her. For a moment he looked alarmed but then his desire overtook him.

When they’d both recovered their breath, Paul said, ‘That was a bit risky.’

‘It’ll be alright,’ she said. Next door the kids were jumping on the furniture.

Paul looked at her with desire again. ‘I want you all the time,’ he said. ‘But that was …’

‘I won’t get pregnant or nothing,’ Wendy said.

‘You on the pill?’

‘Course.’ She was, but she wasn’t always on the ball with it. That day and the day before she’d missed it. She bent down and kissed his chest. Then suddenly she said, ‘Don’t you have a woman to give you love?’

And for the first time since she’d met him, she saw his face change. It morphed into something she could easily recognise as the type of face that lived around Sean and Marty.

*

In her job Vi Collins had always known that you lost far more cases than you won. Bully Murray’s killer had tried to hang himself again, and again he had failed. He was called Abduljabbar Mitra and ever since he’d been arrested – in spite of admitting his guilt immediately – he’d been trying to kill himself. A woman who bought her greengrocery from his shop on Green Street had seen him running away from the scene of the crime with blood down his shirt. He hadn’t been difficult to track down. In fact it was almost as if, Vi felt, Mitra had wanted to get arrested. Why, she couldn’t imagine. Mitra was a family man with much to live for. His business wasn’t doing too well – whose was – but he appeared to be managing. Why had he messed all that up?

Abduljabbar Mitra had told the police he’d got into a fight with Bully Murray. The thug had hurled some racist abuse at him and he’d snapped. He’d attacked Bully who had taken out a knife which Mitra had got hold of and used against him. That was the story. But was it the truth? Apart from the fact that the forensic team reckoned that the knife was Mitra’s – it had only his fingerprints on it – Vi had a bad feeling about his story. Why would he put his entire life, including the future of his wife and kids, in jeopardy like that? Why was he trying to kill himself?

But it was all academic anyway. Mitra had owned up to killing Bully, albeit in self-defence, and so he was a convicted killer, all bar the shouting. But still it irked Vi. Not because she pitied the late Bully Murray – she’d hardly known the bastard – but because
he’d been indirectly associated with another case of murder that was still outstanding. John Sawyer’s.

Four and a half months had gone by since the Afghanistan vet’s death and London had voted Boris Johnson in as Mayor again. Leads, like the ‘other Paki man’ Bully Murray had apparently seen in the graveyard that night, had fizzled out. Majid Islam had been cautioned about his cannabis use and Kazia Ostrowska had gone back to Poland. They’d even finally issued details about the skeleton to the press, but still no information about either of them had emerged.

And things were not set to get better any time soon. Word had come through from the assistant commissioner that the company that had been employed to provide security at the Olympics was not going to be able to deliver. So it would come down to the poor old coppers after all, backed up by the army. Less than two weeks away.

Vi was about to go home for the evening and try to forget all about it in front of the telly, when her phone rang. One of the constables on the front desk told her that there was a young lady who wanted to see her. Apparently she had a problem that wouldn’t wait.

It took Lee a while to recognise the old boy in the wheelchair. It was only when Wilf Cox came into the Boleyn just before midday that Lee realised the geezer was Wilf’s cousin, Arthur. The last thing that Wilf had told him about Arthur was that he was in hospital with cancer. Lee had thought he was dead.

Lee, nodding at Arthur, said to Wilf, ‘I thought he was …’

‘In remission,’ Wilf said, and put a silencing finger up to his lips.

It was a slow, wet Sunday in the Boleyn and Lee had spent much of the morning reading the papers. Then Arthur had come in, his wheelchair pushed by a woman of about fifty. Then Wilf had joined them. Now he asked Lee to come over and ‘make a party of it’ and so he did. The woman, it turned out, was Arthur’s daughter, Ella.

It was Wilf who brought up the subject of Lily Smith. ‘Here, you knew Eric Smith’s mum, Lily, didn’t you, Art? Strone Road, and all that business with that missing kid back in the Fifties?’

Although Lee hadn’t forgotten the mezuzah that had come from the house where the Smiths had once lived on Strone Road, or the little picture of the woman that Nasreen Khan had found behind it, it hadn’t been at the forefront of his mind for some time.