An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (3 page)

He took hold of it, a hand on either side. His fingernails were black, she noticed. He tugged and pulled and Nasreen began to feel guilty that he would strain himself. Suddenly he stopped and turned a red face towards her. ‘It’s plumbed in,’ he said.

Nasreen went over to see for herself and, yes, the old sink was attached to a pipe. ‘That’s odd isn’t it? To have a sink outside?’

John looked vague again. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe. You’ll have to get a plumber, I think.’

‘Yes.’ She looked up at him. He was well over six feet tall and behind all the hair and the unkempt beard, he had the look of someone kind.

‘What do you do for food, John?’ she asked.

*

Dinner was a basic dhal with rice. Luckily Shazia had been anxious to finish her homework so that she could watch TV later and so the food, or lack of it, hadn’t bothered her much. Mumtaz was so glad that her stepdaughter was enjoying college. She was just anxious that nothing should stop her from doing so.

Now that the girl was up in her bedroom doing her work, Mumtaz could roam the house looking for things to sell. She’d given up on the idea of selling kitchen equipment; it just wasn’t worth it. Even one of the many canteens of cutlery that Ahmet, her husband, had liked so much would barely fetch the price of
a week’s shopping. Mumtaz went from the kitchen and into the room Ahmet had called ‘the games room’. It was where he’d sat with his friends, smoking, drinking and playing poker. Even with his friends, for fivers and tenners, he played it badly. With other people it was worse. She opened the large teak chest in the corner by the window and took out a bundle enrobed in sheets of tissue paper. She laid it on the larger of the two card tables and began to unwrap it, removing layer upon layer of thin, white tissue – a modern and, she felt, deserved mummification.

Her red wedding sari came into view. Made of banarasi silk and decorated with zari and buta work, it was a sari fit for a Bollywood superstar. Ahmet had spared no expense and Mumtaz and her family had been dazzled. How happy she’d been! Not even a scowling Shazia, resentful that – as she saw it – Mumtaz had usurped her dead mother, could spoil her big beautiful wedding. Rich, handsome and generous, Ahmet had been the perfect bridegroom and her female cousins – and even some of her aunts – had been openly jealous of her. And although she had been nervous about her ‘first time’ alone with her husband, Ahmet had been so gentle it had been wonderful. Her father and mother, she had felt back then, had chosen carefully and well. But within a year she’d wished Ahmet dead.

She looked down at the dress with nothing but contempt. She’d take it to one of those vintage shops at the northern end of Brick Lane so beloved by those young white people known as ‘hipsters’. If she stuck to her guns, she’d get a good price for the sari. Also, it would probably be bought by someone who would do something self-consciously ironic with it. Some boy would make it into a jacket to wear to the pub or a girl would team it with a pair of combat trousers and a bag made out of old tractor tyres. The thought of its defilement pleased her. She went into the teak box
again and found her wedding shoes and the heavily jewelled bag she had used at her wedding.

Her mobile rang. Mumtaz took it out of her pocket and looked at it. She put it down on top of her wedding sari. It was always like this when a payment was coming up. Relentless.

First she took him some mutton biryani and chapatis, but Nasreen quickly learned that John had a sweet tooth. Her mum made good baklawa which she took him, and he had a particular weakness for halua. She bought some from one of the shops on Green Street.

Whether or not she and Abdullah were working on the house, she’d go there most days and put a small box of food out for John just in case he was around. If she was alone they’d talk, and he’d tell her how much he’d liked the Afghan people and how sad he’d been to see so many of their beautiful buildings in ruins. She told him that if her husband was around she would hide his food in the long grass just in front of the trees.

‘You seem a bit afraid of your hubby,’ he said to her one day. ‘Why is that?’

‘John, it isn’t your business,’ she said, but she smiled.

He’d said he understood. Nasreen wished that she did too. Her husband was a good man.

When she was with Abdullah, sneaking food out wasn’t easy even if they were taking something to eat for themselves. He always wanted to look in the bag to see what she’d packed before they left her parents’ house. She had to pretend to have eaten more sweets than she had which had made Abdullah tell her that
she should watch her weight. ‘Just because you’re pregnant doesn’t mean you can eat all day long,’ he said one day when she appeared to have eaten all the baklawa they had brought with them.

Nasreen had become pregnant as soon as she married Abdullah. They were both pleased, although Nasreen felt that buying a house
and
having a baby at the same time was probably a bit much. Abdullah had a good job, but he insisted on doing the renovation work on the house himself. It wasn’t easy on either of them, but the less money they spent on it the more they’d have for the new baby. Still, Nasreen couldn’t help thinking that he could at least have employed someone to do the heavy work. While she scraped paint and stripped layers of ancient wallpaper, Abdullah pulled out fireplaces and removed sinks, kitchen units and ancient built-in cupboards. Sometimes, after spending all day at the house, he would be exhausted. Renovation coupled with his job was too much for him, although Nasreen had learned early on in their marriage that her husband didn’t listen to any form of dissent. That she loved him and worried about him was, she sometimes felt, irrelevant to him. But then her father was of a similar type – if rather more gentle. He’d worked through two heart attacks so far and there had been nothing anyone in the family had been able to do about it.

Nasreen, for some reason she didn’t fully understand, told John about it.

‘It’s because men are stupid,’ he told her. ‘We’re always challenging ourselves and it’s bonkers. That’s why there are wars, because men have to front up to other men. We’re programmed to do it.’

Yet Abdullah wasn’t some empty-headed alpha male who was always ready for a fight. He was educated, a qualified lawyer, and
he loved her passionately. But he was also very jealous and he didn’t like it if she spoke to or even looked at other men. It was only recently that she’d been able to get him to laugh about the teenage crush she’d once had on Will Smith when he’d been in
The Fresh Prince of Bel Air
. He’d been jealous of the Hollywood star for weeks. She’d asked him, ‘Don’t people have crushes on film stars and musicians in Bolton?’

He hadn’t answered. But then Abdullah didn’t talk about Bolton much these days. When they’d first been introduced, his Uncle Fazal was with him and they’d talked about their old home town. Many people had moved to Bolton from Pakistan and Bangladesh in the Fifties and Sixties to work in the Lancashire cotton mills. Now the mills were all but defunct and people found other work, or went on the dole. Abdullah’s uncle had moved to London in the Eighties and Abdullah had lived at the boarding house in Poplar that Fazal owned when he’d first come to the city in 2005. As far as Nasreen could tell, her husband had only been back to Bolton once since he’d left: when his father died in 2011. His people were not like hers, they weren’t close.

*

Lee hadn’t expected to see Martin Rogers, not in the Boleyn. A pub with pretensions was more his style, or a wine bar or lap dancing club. But there he was, sitting at a table by the door, while one of his minders loudly ordered a bottle of champagne. Marty Rogers only drank champagne, or rather that was the legend that he liked to put about. Lee looked down into his diet Pepsi and ‘did invisible’. He’d been to school with Marty and his brother Sean but had no wish to speak to him. Lee had never arrested either of them, which was a shame.

‘Don’t tell me you ain’t got Cristal!’ the minder bellowed at
the barmaid. Another Custom House scrote that Lee remembered from his youth, called Dave something or other. Twat had to know that a place like the Boleyn wouldn’t have one of the most expensive champagnes in the world.

‘We’ve got Moet,’ the barmaid emphasised the ‘t’. ‘Take it or leave it.’

Clearly Sandra, the barmaid, didn’t live in any of Martin and Sean’s shonky old properties otherwise she might have made a few calls to try and find some of Marty’s preferred tipple. The Rogers’, together with their ‘business’ partner Yunus Ali, were landlords that harked back to the days of Rachman. If you didn’t pay your rent you got a visit from their ‘boys’ or, even worse, Marty’s wife Debbie, a shoulder-padded, fag-wielding stick of malice known to be handy with a sharp instrument.

‘Oh, I’ll have the Moet,’ Marty pronounced it without the ‘t’. ‘I don’t mind.’

Sandra took a bottle of champagne out of the fridge and said, ‘Don’t force yourself.’

‘Oh, darlin’, I can slum it for once.’ Marty laughed.

He was clearly in an expansive mood for some reason, although Lee was still in the dark as to why he was in the Boleyn at all. An old geezers’ pub that went bonkers with West Ham fans whenever a match was on couldn’t possibly be his scene. Lee sipped his Pepsi, wishing it was a pint of bitter. Marty Rogers had always made his skin crawl.

Dave the minder paid for the champagne, popped the cork and took it over to his boss. Sandra had given him two glasses, but he only picked up one. Marty had never been a great one for sharing, not even with his brother. But then Sean had never been big on sharing either. They were both fucking psychos. Lee drained his glass and stood up to go outside for a fag. Marty Rogers’s minder
was sitting across the pub from his boss, drinking ginger ale and looking pissed off.

Lee had to pass Marty as he walked towards the door into Green Street. He couldn’t stop himself from sneaking a peek at him. Marty, his dead green eyes refusing to smile in tandem with his mouth, raised his glass to Lee and said, ‘Hello there, officer.’

Lee didn’t hang around to see what Marty wanted, if anything. He got out of there, lit a fag and made his way to his office. For a moment back there the Plaistow air had smelt bloody foul.

*

Nasreen wasn’t at the house, even though she must have been earlier. She’d left him a box with some chicken curry and rice and a Mars bar. She was a lovely lady. In some lights she looked a bit like the girl whose dead face he had cried into as the dust blew over Helmand. Shot by a Talib sniper, they said, but John had known better. Her husband had done it, or rather, had it done by someone else. Everything inside John’s head screamed. Even now the memory of his own impotence in that situation made him claw the ground underneath him in frustration. When this didn’t help, and for no reason he could properly articulate, he began to dig.

He dug in time to scraping noises that came from the house, it helped him to focus. Her husband worked in the house, only rarely in the garden. But that thought made John nervous. This billet had been so quiet and secure and in the short time that Nasreen had been bringing him food he’d hardly had to kip elsewhere at all. What would he do when it all came to an end? Because it would. Like Nasreen, her old man knew about the woodpile, he wouldn’t put up with some homeless type living in it if he found him …

When the scraping stopped, Paul Simon tracks belted out of the house. John stopped digging. For a while there was just music and then, when it stopped, he heard what sounded like footsteps on the stairs inside the house. John turned his head.

Abdullah was very good looking. Tall with black hair, he had that light brown skin that people reckoned spoke of Kashmiri blood. When John had first seen him he had thought that Abdullah was probably mid-forties but Nasreen had told him that her husband was thirty-eight. John watched as Abdullah sat down on the step outside the back door. ‘Fuck!’ he said. He never swore when his wife was around, and he never smoked in front of her either. Now he took his cigarettes out of his pocket and lit up. Lawyers like him were generally stress-heads. In fact people with money seemed to do little else but stress out as far as John could see. His fingers dug into the clay as he stayed motionless on all fours beneath the flimsy roof of his shack. He didn’t want Abdullah to see him. He didn’t want any sort of confrontation.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ he heard Abdullah say. So far he had rarely come into the garden, but whenever he did it was to let off steam in some way. Last time John had seen him he’d kicked the shit out of that old Butler sink by the back door. He’d stubbed his toes and sworn like a sailor.

Back in Helmand, the girl’s seventy-year-old husband hadn’t looked even slightly phased when John had finally caught up with him outside the fly-blown house he’d been visiting. John had known that the old man could speak English because he’d heard him do it. It was night-time and John had lain in wait for him for hours. If he’d just pummelled the crap out of him and said nothing, she might have lived. But that was something he only knew with hindsight. At the time, he’d felt he
had
to say those things – those things about how he had hurt her, how he was a
pervert, how he didn’t deserve to live. But had he done it for her or for himself? And if he had his time over again would he do the selfsame thing?

John couldn’t think about that and so he began silently clawing at the earth again. Abdullah smoked and looked around himself with an arrogant sneer. Then he threw his cigarette butt across the garden and went back inside the house. John was sure that he hadn’t seen him, but he shook with fear nevertheless. His hands, almost on their own, began probing ever deeper into the ground as he looked at the cigarette butt that Abdullah had casually thrown away and wondered whether he should break his cover and take it. He hadn’t smoked for weeks and he suddenly felt the need of it. Caught in a bind of desire and fear, John scrabbled at the earth still more violently, his ever increasing movements accompanied by grunts and sobs of frustration. If he didn’t get a hold of himself, Abdullah would hear him and then that would be the end of it for him. But then his fingers touched something that made him look down and for just a moment, John’s shaking stopped.