An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (28 page)

He took a moment and then he said, ‘Alright.’ Then he looked in at the paramedics. ‘Are they staying?’

‘They want to, yes, sir,’ Vi said.

He sighed. ‘Well, let’s get this lady and her neighbours away from here at least.’

Abdullah moved the pistol away from Mumtaz’s head and then shoved her so that she toppled over onto the bed. As she sat up, Mumtaz adjusted her headscarf and said, ‘If you don’t let Nasreen have antibiotics your baby will die. Do you want that, Mr Khan?’

He didn’t say anything for a good minute. Things were happening down in the street – cars pulling up, the sound of running feet, the occasional crackle of a radio.

Mumtaz watched his face. Things had happened in ways that he hadn’t anticipated and could not have wanted. And even though she knew that Abdullah Khan worked for the Rogers brothers in some capacity, Mumtaz didn’t know what he did or why he would have a firearm. And why
had
he used it – on a window? She looked down at Nasreen, who was weeping now, and she wondered about what she’d said in relation to the war veteran who’d been found dead in the cemetery all those months ago. Had Abdullah Khan really killed John Sawyer because he was jealous of him? Sawyer had been a tramp, how could anyone be jealous of someone like that? But then her own husband had been jealous of everybody. She still remembered the day he had told the milkman never to come to their house again.

‘Get her some water,’ Abdullah Khan said. ‘There’s a glass in the bathroom.’

Mumtaz stood up. Abdullah pointed his gun at his wife’s head. ‘Try to leave and I’ll kill her,’ he said.

‘And kill your own child?’ She started walking past him, towards the bathroom.

‘There’s more than that at stake here,’ he said.

Mumtaz stopped. ‘What?’ And then she looked around the bedroom and pointed at the walls. ‘What’s at stake, Mr Khan? Is it something to do with this house?’

He stared at her for a moment and then he said, ‘Get the water and then my wife can take her antibiotics.’

Mumtaz went into the bathroom whose walls were pitted with holes big and small, some of which showed water pipes beneath. She took a dirty glass from the side of the sink and washed it. Then she filled it with water and walked back into the bedroom. As she entered she heard Nasreen say, ‘What can be more important than our baby, Abdullah? Tell me.’

But he didn’t. He put a tablet into Mumtaz’s hand and said coldly, ‘Give it to her.’

*

Families – whirls of mothers and babies, kids with toy guns, teenagers playing on games consoles, grannies, rough sorts in combat trousers and a typhoon of saris – escorted by police officers made their way round the Police Do Not Cross tape and the police cars that sealed Strone Road off from Shrewsbury Road and formed an orderly crocodile going somewhere. Lee saw Tony Bracci beyond the tape and called out to him. Tony beckoned him forwards.

Lee passed two white women in tight fitting T-shirts talking in a language he couldn’t understand. He pushed past them, a couple of kids and a bloke with a tattoo of a dragon on his neck
until he eventually got to Tony. For a moment neither of them talked, but looked at the eastern stretch of Strone Road. There were two armed response vehicles in the middle of the street. Crouched behind them on the northern side of the road were pairs of heavily Kevlared, helmeted and armed SCO19 officers.

Tony put an arm on Lee’s shoulder. ‘Here,’ he said handing him a Kevlar vest. Automatically Lee opened it up and pulled it over his chest. They walked towards the cars and, as they got close, one of the SCO19 officers stood up and aimed his weapon at the windows of the Khans’ house while Lee and Tony went inside Mrs Janwari’s house opposite.

The old woman had gone now and her front sitting room was occupied by DI Vi Collins, Superintendent Venus and a man who looked like
Robocop
. Luckily, Lee had seen such officers before.

‘This is SFO Dalton,’ Vi told Lee. Then she looked at
Robocop
and said, ‘Jim, this is ex-DI, now PI, Lee Arnold.’

The two men shook hands. Dalton said, ‘You work with one of the hostages.’

‘Yeah.’ Lee turned to Vi and said, ‘I tried to call Mumtaz on her mobile but it just rang out.’

Superintendent Venus, who had only worked with Lee for the last six months of his career in the police, said, ‘Please sit down, Mr Arnold.’

Lee sat down in a soft armchair that was covered in wine-red velour.

‘Mr Arnold, we think that your assistant and a woman called Nasreen Khan are in the house opposite with an armed man, who we believe is Mrs Khan’s husband, Abdullah,’ Venus said. ‘The lady who lives in this house, Mrs Janwari, saw a woman she named as Mumtaz Hakim go into that house at approximately 10.45.’ He looked down at his notebook. ‘Then at approximately 11.05 a man
Mrs Janwari identified as Nasreen Khan’s husband Abdullah arrived and let himself into the house. Mrs Janwari didn’t see the ambulance, which Mrs Hakim had called for Mrs Khan, arrive ten minutes later, but the paramedics’ TOA was 11.15. Can you tell me why Mrs Hakim went to visit Mrs Khan please, Mr Arnold?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lee said. ‘As far as I knew, Mumtaz went to the post office.’

‘When was that?’

‘About twenty past ten.’

‘The post office on Green Street?’

‘Yeah.’

‘So weren’t you concerned when she hadn’t returned to your office – which I understand is also on Green Street – over an hour later?’

‘Not really,’ Lee said. ‘I asked her to get stamps in the full knowledge that she’d probably look in some shops along the way for a while. She’s a Muslim and it’s Ramadan, she has to take her mind off food and drink somehow. She says she doesn’t mind if I eat in front of her and I was eating a cream cake when she arrived this morning. But I was still hungry after I’d finished it. I’ll be honest, I asked her to get stamps so she could go out and I could eat more cakes. We both knew what was going on.’ Then he frowned. ‘What’s all this about firearms? Are the women hostages or what? What’s the score?’

‘Someone, we think Abdullah Khan, fired two shots, one of which broke a front bedroom window, out into Strone Road at about 11.18. Paramedic William Connor called it in and we responded with support from SCO19. No demands have been made by Khan so far, who has yet to make contact, and so the status of the two women is still unknown. Now DI Collins tells me that you know something about the Khans, Mr Arnold.’

‘Nasreen Khan first came to us back in the spring,’ he said. ‘She wanted Mumtaz to find out who had lived in that house over there before her husband bought it. She’d found a mezuzah, a sort of a capsule with a prayer in it that Jews put on their door-posts. But this one had a photograph of a woman behind it. We found out that a Jewish woman who had been in Belsen concentration camp had once lived there with her English husband, but all that was by the by because later on Nasreen Khan asked Mumtaz to investigate her husband’s background. Mumtaz felt that the husband was really what Nasreen had wanted investigated right from the start.’

‘The mezuzah and the photograph were just an excuse?’

‘Maybe. Although I think that Nasreen was genuinely interested in who’d lived in her house too.’

‘What about the husband? What did you find out about him?’ SFO Dalton asked. For him, a firearms officer, it was all about the man with the gun.

‘Mumtaz did some digging and then I filled in a few gaps,’ Lee said. ‘Khan comes from an Asian family in Lancashire, where he said he did a law degree at Manchester University. That much we think is correct, but then it all gets a bit hazy. According to Nasreen Khan, her husband was a practising solicitor working for a reputable local company. Turned out he never qualified and he was working for Rogers and Ali.’

Venus looked over at Vi Collins who met his gaze with steady eyes. The abortive raid on Sean Rogers’s house in Ongar still sat between them like an open sore. Neither of them so much as dared touch it. But both of them knew all too well that a shot had been fired by an unknown attendee at that party. Could that man have been Abdullah Khan?

‘What Khan does or did for Sean and Marty Rogers, we never
got to,’ Lee said. ‘Mrs Khan refused to believe what we’d dug up and that seemed to be the end of that.’

‘But you say you don’t know why Mrs Hakim went to visit Nasreen Khan this morning?’ Venus asked.

Lee shrugged. ‘No. We’d recently had a bit more intel on the Jewish family who used to live in the house from an old bloke I know from the Boleyn pub. But my understanding from Mumtaz was that she wasn’t going to pass that on to Nasreen Khan. She believed Abdullah Khan was the jealous type, know what I mean?’

‘Do you think, Mr Arnold, that Abdullah Khan might be jealous enough to do his wife or others harm?’ Venus asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Lee said, ‘I’ve never met him, and I don’t think Mumtaz ever did until now. Like I said, Superintendent, I don’t know what he does for Sean and Marty Rogers. For all I know he could clean out their swimming pool or chauffeur Debbie Rogers about when she’s out on the piss. But then again he could be one of their enforcers, employed to terrorise their tenants. He could be dangerous, so I think it’s important that we don’t tell him who Mumtaz is. She won’t have told him, that I do know. I train all my staff to protect their identities. As far as I’m aware, he never knew his wife was having him investigated and we want to keep it that way.’

‘I understand.’

A crackle, followed by a voice from the radio that Dalton had been holding on his knee, stopped Lee in his tracks and they all watched while the Special Firearms Officer held it up to his ear. Once the speaking had finished, Dalton said, ‘OK, on way.’ Then he stood up. ‘Somebody’s come to the top bedroom window with a woman,’ he said.

*

He held her jaws shut with one hand while, with the other, he jammed the muzzle of the gun against her head. ‘Say one word and I’ll blow your brains out,’ Abdullah Khan said to Mumtaz.

On the bedroom floor behind, Nasreen rocked from side to side in agony. There was now some movement in her abdomen, so she said, and she felt as if she could be going into labour.

Abdullah opened the largest of the bedroom windows and Mumtaz saw two police cars plus at least eight officers in Kevlar vests down in the street below. Most of them held guns and all of them were trained on the window she was being pulled through.

‘No-one’ll get hurt provided you do as I say,’ Abdullah shouted into the street.

The front door of the house opposite opened and a man in uniform emerged. Mumtaz felt the fear shoot through Abdullah Khan’s body and he shrieked, ‘Who’s that?’

The man, a tall, middle-aged person in police uniform, called up, using a megaphone. ‘My name’s Superintendent Paul Venus,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘That’s not important,’ Abdullah said.

‘I have to call you something.’

Mumtaz felt his pulse as it pounded through his hand and against her neck. He breathed hard twice and then he said, ‘Call me Mursel.’

Mumtaz remembered that had been his father’s name.

‘Mursel it is then,’ Venus said. ‘Mursel, you have two ladies with you. I can see one of them now. Are both the ladies fit and in good health?’

‘Yes.’ He didn’t miss a beat. Liar, Mumtaz thought, Nasreen is almost hallucinating she’s in so much pain.

‘Because the paramedic team who were called out earlier say
that one of the ladies might be pregnant and she might have septicaemia. Would it be possible for one of the medics to just look at—’

Abdullah ignored him. ‘I wanna get to Heathrow,’ he said. ‘I want to fly to Dhaka.’

‘Let’s do some talking first, Mursel, shall we?’ Venus said.

‘I don’t wanna talk. I want you to organise a flight for me to Bangladesh.’

‘Yes, but we have to talk about that, make arrangements between us.’

Abdullah didn’t reply.

‘Do you have a phone there, Mursel?’ Venus said. ‘If I could call you on your phone I wouldn’t have to shout and we could talk whenever you wanted to.’

There was a pause. Abdullah made little noises in his throat that sounded to Mumtaz like confusion. Then he said, ‘Alright, but I’ll need a minute to sort myself out.’

‘That’s fine,’ Venus said. ‘Take your time. You can ring me if you like. Shall I give you my number now?’

Mumtaz felt him take his hand away from her mouth and push her back inside the room. Then, one-handed, he searched his jacket pockets for a pen and something to write on. He pointed the gun at her head and said, ‘Come here and take down this number.’

She walked forwards and picked up the pen.

‘What’s the number?’ Abdullah shouted down into the street.

Mumtaz wrote it down. Then Abdullah shouted, ‘I’ll call you,’ and closed the window.

On the floor, Nasreen whimpered, ‘I think the baby’s coming.’

*

Lee looked at his watch. It was nearly two-thirty, and still no further word from Abdullah Khan. Venus, who was a trained hostage negotiator, paced the floor of Mrs Janwari’s living room. News about the Strone Road incident would be leaking out into the borough and beyond by this time. It was then that Lee remembered Shazia. It was the school holidays and she was either out with her friends or at home. Unless they were lucky and wrapped up the siege before nightfall, she’d have to be told and taken to Mumtaz’s parents’ house in Tower Hamlets.

‘You know her well and so maybe you and Tone should go and pick her up,’ Vi said when he told her.

‘I’ll ring her.’

While Lee rang Shazia, Vi spoke to Venus. ‘Sir, if Khan is employed by Rogers and Ali, shouldn’t we tap them up? If I know Sean and Marty they won’t want this kind of trouble. I saw Sean’s face when he heard that shot outside his house on Saturday night.’

Venus frowned. ‘And what would we say to the Rogers brothers, do you think, DI Collins?’

‘We can tell them that one of their employees has gone postal,’ she said. ‘They’ve a right to know.’

‘Mmm.’ He was doubtful. ‘I don’t want them contacting him. That won’t help.’

‘No, but sir, Sean and Marty should know Abdullah Khan better than anyone else we can get access to, and they won’t want any bother. You know how they are. They’ll give us chapter and verse if they think it’ll benefit them in any way.’