An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (32 page)

Silence.

‘My dad went to help her, but it was too late. He stood in the doorway of the living room and watched Reg Smith choke the life out of Sara, and Reg saw him. Dad said that their eyes met. Reg looked like an animal gone mad, so me dad ran. Out of the house, up the street, eventually on a train to anywhere. He never paid, he had no money. He only got off when he was thrown off, which was in Manchester. At first he lived on the streets, robbing and going down bins. He kept around the old Piccadilly Station because that was all he knew of the city.

He didn’t realise for a while that one of the guards was watching him – the man I always thought was my grandfather. He tried to get Dad’s name and who he was out of him, but all he’d ever say was that he was a refugee and that all his family had died in the camps. My granddad took him in. He believed him. Later, I believed him. Me dad told me the truth about himself because he was about to die – no one lies when they’re just about to die – and because he wanted me to have the diamonds.’

Abdullah paused, and then he said, ‘I know you think I’m just a greedy bastard – and I am – I’ve only myself to blame for the mess my life has become, but I did right by my dad. He lived as the Muslim he became when he went to live with the Khans, but when he died I got a rabbi from Manchester to say Kaddish for him. He wanted that and I got it for him. Know what Kaddish is?’ There was silence. ‘It’s the Jewish prayer for the dead. And I honoured my father by doing that last thing for him. But it means I’m not a real Muslim. My blood’s wrong, which is why I’m like this.’

‘That’s nonsense. And anyway, like what?’ they heard Mumtaz say.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never managed to find the right words for it, but it makes me unhappy. It means … It means … I can kill people.’

‘What people, Mr Khan, have you …’

‘I think we should look for those diamonds now,’ he said calmly. ‘I do the talking, Mrs Anwar, and I do it when
I
like, not when
you
like.’

Lee Arnold tried to speak but found that he had no saliva.

Vi said, ‘He is clearly off his rocker. We need to get Mumtaz out of there.’

*

He took her into a small boxroom behind the bedroom he’d once shared with Nasreen. Its walls were not pockmarked with holes like so many of the other rooms. He told her to make a start by the door and work her way around. She should, he said, tap the walls gently at first to try and locate any cavities.

Mumtaz tapped. Occasionally, she glanced at him, and thought he looked more awake. He had also started to smile. Was he experiencing relief now that he’d got the truth about his father – if it was the truth – off his chest? And what did he mean about killing people? Who had he killed? Perhaps Nasreen had been right, and he had murdered the Afghanistan veteran John Sawyer … But why?

Outside in the street, and at the back of the house, there was an unknown number of police officers. Mumtaz wondered whether she knew any of them, and also whether Lee was with them. He’d been a police officer and so he might be. Having found no cavities, Mumtaz hammered. At the very least, Lee had to know
what was happening, and she knew that he would have organised care for Shazia. Poor Shazia, she was probably terrified. And her parents! She hadn’t thought about them earlier; now she saw their faces in her mind.

Plaster flew up and made her cough as she smashed away at the walls. She looked over at him and heard him say, ‘Carry on.’ She carried on.

What would he do if he didn’t find the diamonds? Why did he think they were in the walls of the house? Reg Smith might have found them, or Lily Smith could have taken them to her grave – or sold them … But then why was she even thinking about jewels that couldn’t possibly exist? And then, being a private investigator and knowing what she did about surveillance, Mumtaz realised that even if the police hadn’t been listening in to their conversations earlier on in the day, they had to be by this time.

She stopped hammering.

Abdullah Khan said, ‘I’ve not told you to have a rest.’

She said, ‘How do you
know
that these diamonds you’re looking for are behind these walls?’

For a moment he said nothing, then he walked over and stood in front of her. Mumtaz felt her heart begin to pick up its beat. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But I’ve had everything else apart in this house. Floorboards, doors, units, the garden – even that old Sukkah at the bottom, the Jew’s shack. All I found there was her body.’

‘Whose body?’

‘Auntie Sara’s body. Some old tramp that my wife liked to feed had dug it up.’ He jammed the pistol against her forehead. ‘I killed him before he got to her diamonds.’

Mumtaz made a conscious effort to breathe as evenly as she could. He really had killed that man, John Sawyer. ‘But you don’t have any diamonds and so he—’

‘I couldn’t let him live,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know if the diamonds were on her body or not. Not then.’

‘But they wouldn’t be, would they? If Reg Smith killed her he would have found them.’

‘I had to be sure,’ he said. ‘I always have to be sure. And that is why my bosses have so much confidence in me.’ He pushed the gun into the flesh on her forehead and made her gasp in pain. ‘I clear up after myself. I leave no stone unturned.’ And then he smiled at her. ‘Here and now are no exceptions.’

‘Mr Khan,’ Mumtaz said, ‘why did you come here today with a gun in your hand?’

He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, ‘Because I’d been clearing up after myself this morning, then I came home, Mrs Anwar.’

‘Killing …’

‘Why not? I’m a Jew and we all know there’s no Paradise for them in the hereafter, don’t we?’

*

‘Wendy Dixon has to be a contender.’

‘For his victim.’

‘For one of them,’ Vi said. ‘We heard him say he killed John Sawyer. He admitted it. That skeleton we found with him may well have been Khan’s aunt.’

‘This is an extremely dangerous man who has lost his identity. He’s only got one thought in his head, so what he’ll do if the diamonds aren’t in that house doesn’t bear thought.’ Superintendent Venus shook his head. ‘We have to bring this to a conclusion and get Mrs Hakim out of there without killing Khan – unless we have to. We need to find out whether he just killed for his own
purposes or whether his actions were part of his remit from the Rogers brothers.’

Vi’s eyes ignited. ‘We could bring them down …’

‘Don’t get excited, DI Collins,’ Venus said. ‘I think the man is more mental health case than gangster.’

Lee Arnold, who had been listening to their conversation, said, ‘But where do the diamonds come into the story? Really? Assuming that Marek Berkowicz was in fact Abdullah Khan’s father, how could he have known that his aunt’s diamonds were somewhere in that house? He left. He never went back. Did he know himself where the diamonds were before his stepfather killed his aunt? There’s a bit missing here that …’ He stopped. SFO Dalton had come into the room and was looking at him and Lee looked back.

‘We have to get Mumtaz out of there,’ Venus said.

‘Yes, sir,’ Dalton answered, then said to the Superintendent, ‘Khan’s got nothing to lose, not even Paradise.’

‘I know, and we also have to assume that the diamonds don’t exist,’ Venus said.

‘Because they are unlikely to do so?’

‘What do you think, Mr Arnold?’

Lee shook his head. Of course Abdullah Khan had to be delusional, although how he had come upon this particular fantasy, he couldn’t imagine.

Venus looked at the SFO. ‘Have your men managed to break in the back door?’

‘Yes.’

The phone that Venus had dedicated to calls from Abdullah Khan rang.

‘Yes?’

Dalton looked at Lee Arnold. ‘We need to think about when Khan might be alone,’ he said in a low tone. Then he turned to
Vi. ‘DI Collins,’ he said, ‘would a man like Khan risk letting Mrs Hakim visit the bathroom on her own?’

Vi, frowning, looked at Lee. ‘I don’t think she’s been to the toilet, has she?’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. What if he watches her go? What then?’

‘We have to separate them somehow,’ Dalton said. He rubbed his face. ‘We have ingress at the back of the property now but we can’t just go in. He’ll shoot her.’

‘Then what can we do?’ Lee asked.

Venus, off the phone now, said, ‘He wants some food.’

*

He wouldn’t think twice about killing her. But only after he’d found the diamonds. There was not, however, much chance of that, Mumtaz thought. If Marek Berkowicz had left that house for the last time the night that Reg Smith had killed Sara Kaminski, then how could he have known where the diamonds were? If the story was true, Sara had died rather than tell Reg their location. Had Marek known, surely he would have told his stepfather where the diamonds were in order to save Sara’s life? The diamonds had to be a story, nothing more.

And where, if anywhere, did strange Eric Smith, Marek’s younger half brother, fit into the story? People talked about Eric ‘guarding’ something in that house. But what was it? The diamonds? Sara Kaminski’s body? Eric had been out with Lily when Sara was killed so what, if anything, had he known about any of it? And, anyway, wasn’t this all just a tale? A good one, which fitted some of the facts admittedly, but no more. Mumtaz smashed another hole in the wall and stood back to let Abdullah Khan look at it. He’d finally asked the police to provide some food for
the early morning meal known during Ramadan as
suhoor
. And, although really too anxious to be hungry, Mumtaz knew that she should eat and drink more than she had done for
iftar
.

Khan moved back from the wall and told Mumtaz to carry on destroying the fabric of his house. She was finding it very hard to focus now so, also with half her mind on the police and what she hoped they could hear, she said, ‘Wasn’t the body of the man in your garden found in the old cemetery?’

‘I dragged it over the back wall,’ he said. ‘Keep working.’

She pounded the wall. ‘The police found a skeleton with it.’

‘I dumped him, why shouldn’t I dump Sara? She had nothing on her,’ he said. ‘Actually I tried not to just dump them, to be honest. I tried to lay them out decently, but when I got in there the place was full of kids desecrating graves and then some lunatic shouting his head off.’

‘But you can’t have been seen, or the police would have come for you.’

He laughed. ‘Oh, I was seen,’ he said. ‘Just not by the police.’ He looked at what she’d done, put his hand in the hole and said, ‘Shit.’

She said, ‘What happens to me if you don’t find your diamonds?’

He didn’t say anything.

‘Will you kill me?’ she asked. ‘Will you tidy me up after yourself?’

Again he didn’t say anything, but this time she waited. He looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘You and I will leave in that case, and when I’ve got as far away as I can I’ll either let you go or I’ll kill you. Same if I do find the diamonds.’

*

Lee Arnold shook. He looked down at the food that was about to be taken into the house next door and realised that he was not only anxious and tired but he was hungry too. In spite of having just heard Abdullah Khan say that he was likely to kill Mumtaz, he was still hungry. He found it odd and disturbing, and he couldn’t convince himself that he liked himself for it.

He went and looked out of the back window at the darkened garden of the house next door. If he hadn’t known that anyone was in there, he would have thought that it was empty. Vi, just off her mobile, came over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Nasreen Khan’s baby boy was stillborn,’ she said.

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘Good news is they think she’ll be alright.’

She started to move away, but he stopped her. ‘This’ll work, right?’

She sighed. ‘We either move when the food goes in or …’ She shrugged. ‘The hammering’s given the FOs in the garden cover to get the back door open. Khan’s concentrating on Mumtaz and his diamonds. If we’re lucky, when they go downstairs to get the food, we’ll have a chance …’

*

They called up to let him know that the food was ready this time. Abdullah took Mumtaz with him to the window and pressed the gun to the side of her head.

He watched as a figure wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest put something down in front of the door and then left. Last time an officer had handed the food over to Mumtaz at the door. Why the change? He was suspicious. He called Venus. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean, Mursel?’

‘Leaving the food on the doorstep. Last time it was handed over.’

‘Do you have a problem with it being left? We thought if we left it for you, you’d feel less concerned about what our officer might be doing at your door. It’s supposed to be less confrontational. For you.’

Abdullah Khan thought about it. When the
iftar
food had been delivered he had worried about the possibility of the police officer who had delivered it grabbing Mrs Anwar and taking away his bargaining chip. This way, that couldn’t happen. But he was still suspicious, even though he said, ‘Alright,’ to Venus and then ended the call. Unlike last time, this time he was hungry. Maybe it was because the woman had talked about food and woken his stomach up. He looked down at Mumtaz with hatred in his eyes. Who was she, and why had he spent so much time talking to her? He’d spoken to the police hardly at all, why had he spoken to her?

He pulled her away from the window and pushed her onto the landing. ‘Go down the stairs in front of me,’ he said. ‘And don’t try to run when you open the door.’

She said nothing as she began descending. Following her, he wondered – and not for the first time – why he’d let that shot off through the bedroom window when he’d first come into the house. Had he still been hyped up after Wendy? Had he been upset after Wendy? Maybe, in a sense. He’d never initially planned to kill her. She’d just been a lot of sexy fun, until he’d realised what she could know, until his vulnerability through her had been revealed when the police raided Sean Rogers’s house. Sean didn’t know yet, and Abdullah wondered how he’d feel when he did. Wendy had been one of what Sean always called his ‘pigs’. Abdullah had liked that about her. Women were mothers or dirty whores, they couldn’t be both.