An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (33 page)

By the time they reached the hall, Abdullah knew about the bedroom window. He’d shot it out because he’d needed to stay in the house to find the diamonds. Sean and Marty were getting impatient for the money they’d lent him. Once the paramedics had seen Nasreen’s legs they would have called the police anyway. It was obvious she’d been left like that for days. The shot had bought him time.

‘Open the door,’ he now ordered Mumtaz.

She unclipped the latch.

‘Don’t pull it wide open, just …’ He positioned himself behind the doorway into the living room so that he could see outside the front door without revealing himself. ‘ …open it enough so you can get the tray and then get back in again.’

She opened the door. He pointed the gun at her back and moved it downwards as she bent to retrieve the tray. He heard rather than saw her pick it up. And then suddenly there was a pain in his shoulder.

*

Mumtaz heard a noise behind her, but she had no idea what it might be. She was straightening up when all the commotion began. First there was shouting, none of which she could decipher, and then a figure appeared from nowhere, ripped the food tray out of her hands, threw it to the ground and picked her up in one smooth movement. The figure was matt black with no face, just a shiny visor. But it told her not to be frightened and she believed it.

Then, from inside the Khans’ house she heard a sound that made her blood still in her veins. It was a howl which was furious, wretched and heartbroken all at the same time.

‘If your father, Marek Berkowicz, left what had been his house, now your house, in Strone Road, East Ham, in 1955, what made him think that his aunt’s – Sara Kaminski’s – diamonds would still be in the building?’ Vi leaned across the table and looked into the blood-stained face of Abdullah Khan. He’d put up quite a fight, even when an SCO19 officer had jammed a gun against the side of his head. ‘Eh?’

Superintendent Venus, who was sitting beside her, cleared his throat. He wasn’t comfortable around emotion, and that included gloating. And Vi did like a gloat.

‘Sean and Marty Rogers, your employers, don’t just buy people houses for the hell of it,’ Vi continued. ‘We could hear every word you said, Mr Khan, and you said that you had to get the diamonds because you owe some men some money. You said your future depended on finding those diamonds. If that isn’t, in some way, to pay off Sean and Marty, then I don’t know …’

‘Sean and Marty kindly lent me the money to buy Strone Road, but they never knew why I really wanted that particular place,’ Khan said. He looked up. ‘They’ve got nothing to do with any of it.’

‘Really.’ Vi looked down at her notes. ‘But you told Mrs Mumtaz Hakim, and I quote, “I owe some men some money.” What men?’

Abdullah Khan looked up at the ceiling. He’d been told who Mumtaz Hakim was and what she did at the beginning of this interview. When Vi had uttered the words ‘private detective’ he’d laughed. A Muslim woman who did
that
?! But he’d known about her, he’d even had her pointed out to him once, by one of Sean’s Asian handymen. He knew he’d known that woman all along.

‘What men?’ Vi repeated.

He looked away, and Vi looked down at her notes again. Tony Bracci had placed a pile of relevant paperwork beside her own stuff just before the interview had begun. It was six o’clock in the morning and Vi hadn’t been to bed, so a lot of the words she was reading were a bit blurry. But she made out the picture of the Strone Road house in the ad that had been placed by the auction house in the
Recorder
the previous November.

‘You bought the place, with Sean and Marty’s money, just after you got married to your wife, Nasreen.’ She paused for a moment and then she said, ‘Did you love her, or did you marry her just to give yourself an air of respectability? You do a dirty job, don’t you, Abdullah – or is it Paul? – tossing Sean and Marty’s tenants out of their homes, parting poor people from their extortionate rent?’

‘What I do is quite legal.’

‘Oh, so says the lawyer!’ she laughed. She checked her notes again. ‘You did the same gig for the Macaulay family up in Manchester, didn’t you?’

Again he didn’t answer.

‘My understanding is that Christopher Macaulay, the head of the family, is still in Strangeways and you still owe him money,’ Vi said. ‘And as I’m sure you as a lawyer know, Mr Khan, criminals in one nick can and do get word out to criminals in other nicks about who they’d like to hurt. Just because Chris Macaulay won’t
be able to get you hisself, up there in Manchester, don’t mean to say that you won’t be got. Know what I mean?’

Abdullah Khan was silent.

‘By your own admission you killed a man called John Sawyer who, you suspected, may have beaten you to the diamonds,’ Superintendent Venus said.

‘Yes.’

Vi looked across at her superior. He wanted Khan convicted of the murder, or murders, he had committed and then moved along. Talk about organised crime, in this case in the shape of the Rogers brothers, unsettled him. Talk of that nature always did. Was it really because he didn’t possess the stomach for taking on gangs or was there a more sinister reason? Vi had never trusted him, but was she just allowing her prejudices to obscure her vision? Venus was irredeemably middle class, and with a penchant for very young women, but did that necessarily make him corrupt? Would he even have the wit to take bungs from people like Sean and Marty Rogers, even if his latest bit of totty did want a holiday in Barbados … ?

Leaning back in her chair now, Vi said, ‘I still want to know how you knew about those diamonds being in that house. Until I understand that, I’m either gonna think you’re a fantasist or mental. What is it, Abdullah, are you a—’

‘My dad came back,’ he said.

Vi leaned forwards. ‘When?’

‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said. ‘But his mum were dead by then. He saw his brother and he told him?’

‘About the diamonds?’

‘Amongst other things, yeah.’

‘But if Eric Smith knew where the diamonds were …’

‘He didn’t.’ Abdullah looked up. ‘That’s what he told my dad.

*

What was more, he didn’t want them. Eric knew his dad had killed his auntie over them. He and his mum knew on the night Reg killed her, they saw her dead when they got in from the cinema. Eric wanted nothing to do with those diamonds.’

‘But your dad did?’

‘No!’ He shook his head which hurt just like his eyes, which had been punched when he’d fought the coppers who arrested him ‘No, he wanted nothing to do with them either. He told me about them because he wanted me to have them. I wasn’t involved, like, and so if there was something of value there …’

‘Why didn’t he tell you about the diamonds before?’

Abdullah Khan’s face changed then and he looked at Vi with contempt. ‘Well, why’d you think?’ he said.

‘I dunno. Why?’

‘Because for me to understand, he had to tell me I was a Jew,’ he said. ‘And he didn’t want to do that.’

*

Mumtaz hadn’t been able to see Nasreen. She’d been transferred from Newham General’s maternity department over to the burns unit at the London. Her parents, who had been contacted by staff at the General, had gone with her. This had left Mumtaz on her own, to be checked over by doctors at Accident and Emergency while an armed officer waited for her outside her cubicle. Until Abdullah Khan had been properly interviewed there could be a danger from whoever he had been working for or with, although Mumtaz believed that he had operated, at least in the Strone Road house, entirely on his own. When she’d met him he’d been at the height of his obsession with that house, entirely in thrall to a fixation he believed would save him both on a financial and a personal level. He believed that those diamonds were his right.
Compensation, Mumtaz thought, for the loss of identity his father’s story had engendered in him.

In reality, Abdullah Khan wasn’t Jewish at all. Judaism passed only through the matriarchal line, and it was Abdullah’s father who had been Jewish, not his mother. Besides, what difference did it really make? In the brief moment that she’d seen Khan before the police had taken him away, she’d seen a man who had resisted arrest and been beaten. Jew or not, he bled just like anybody else.

She’d had a far more civilised route out of the Strone Road house. Although grabbed roughly by the SCO19 officer who had taken her to the house next door and safety, she had been quickly placed into the care of Lee Arnold. Then, and only then, had she cried.

*

‘If your dad was such a good person, why didn’t he tell the police about how his stepfather had killed his aunt?’

Abdullah Khan looked down at the floor. ‘Because his brother didn’t want him to. He’d spent his life protecting his parents’ memories – and his aunt’s body.’

‘Mr Khan, my predecessors searched that house and garden for your aunt’s body back in the 1950s,’ Vi said. ‘They didn’t find it.’ And yet, so Abdullah Khan claimed, John Sawyer had found Sara Kaminski’s body in his garden.

‘Reg Smith buried her in the graveyard at the end of the garden until the heat was off,’ Khan said. ‘Where’d you think I got the idea from for putting the soldier, and the remains of Sara, in the graveyard?’

‘So why’d Reg dig her up again?’

‘Apart from the chance that next time there was a funeral at the Plashet Cemetery, some grave digger might find her? My
grandmother Lily wanted her close. As soon as I saw that sink outside the back door, I knew she was probably in the garden somewhere. Jews always have running water at the entrances to their cemeteries. That sink were plumbed in for a reason.’

Vi knew that, but she didn’t say anything.

‘I saw what could have been the remains of a Sukkot sukkah,’ he said. ‘That’s the temporary building Jews make every year to commemorate Sukkot, when Moses was wandering with them in Sinai. But I never thought she might be buried under it. I thought she’d be better hidden than that. Anyway, that tramp lived in it. I was going to wait until he was away from the garden one day and go and have a look to make sure but the bastard beat me to it.’

‘So you smashed him over the head, you searched the skeleton for the diamonds and then you decided to do what Reg Smith had done and lob both bodies over—’

‘I never lobbed, I—’

‘Whatever.’ Vi dismissed his words with a wave of her hand.

There was a knock on the door, followed by the arrival of a uniformed officer holding a piece of paper. He gave it to Vi and then left. ‘Abdullah, you ever heard the old saying about how anyone who doesn’t learn from the mistakes of the past is doomed to repeat them? You walked right into that one, didn’t you, son,’ she said, reading with a frown on her face and Venus looking over her shoulder. Then she looked up, ‘So tell me about Wendy Dixon then,’ she said.

‘Wendy …’

‘The woman you shagged up at Sean Roger’s gaff,’ Vi said. ‘The one who liked to call you Paul. The one this ballistics report tells me you killed.’

*

Tony Bracci looked over at Lee Arnold and wondered what was going through his head. The DI, the Super and Tony himself had seen Arnold just about hold back tears when Mumtaz Hakim came out of the Strone Road house alive. Tony knew that they were close, but he hadn’t realised until that moment that Lee felt as strongly as he clearly did.

Lee’s phone rang. He took his fag out of his mouth and Tony saw him smile. ‘Alright,’ he heard him say, ‘I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.’ Then there was a pause and he said, ‘See you soon.’

Tony looked at him and said, ‘Was that …’

‘Mumtaz, yes,’ Lee replied. ‘She’s got a clean bill of health. She’s coming back here.’

*

‘Sean tell you to kill her?’

He paused but then he said, ‘I killed her.’

‘But on Sean’s orders …’

‘No, why …’

‘Oh, you know why!’ Vi said. ‘Wendy was one of Sean’s pigs who owed him money, who sometimes defied him, and she was looking rough. What was the fucking point, eh?’

‘No, no it wasn’t …’ He stopped. He frowned.

‘What you thinking, Abdullah?’ Vi asked.

Was it just in her head or did Venus suddenly look worried?

She pressed home her advantage. ‘We can look after you, you know,’ she said. ‘Just as the Macaulays can get in jails other than Strangeways, we can put people places where they can’t be found provided—’

‘I killed Wendy because she was pregnant,’ Abdullah said. ‘She did it deliberately, to trap me. She loved me.’

‘Oh and why was that?’ Vi asked.

‘Because I was … I was nice to her,’ he said.

Vi looked down at the table in front of her. ‘So you told her you loved her as you stuck your nob up her arse.’

She heard Venus draw in breath. Vi looked up again. Abdullah Khan was not denying anything. Vi shook her head. ‘So let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You killed John Sawyer because you thought he might have found your diamonds, you—’

‘I hit him over the head. I’d taken a kitchen knife to stab him, but he saw me coming and so I punched him, then I smacked him over the head. I thought I’d killed him, he wasn’t breathing, and so after I’d looked for the diamonds I pushed him over the wall – with – her.’

‘The skeleton of your aunt.’

He looked across at her, and for the first time he seemed to be showing some sort of real emotion. ‘But then he started to come round.’

‘In the Plashet Cemetery?’ Forensics had said that Sawyer had actually died in the cemetery.

‘Yeah. And there were other people in there …’ He looked both surprised and also confused by his own words.

‘And so you …’

‘He started to sit up.’ He ran his hands through his hair and shook his head. He looked down at the table again, and panted. ‘I heard voices. I punched him in the head to get him down and then I stabbed him in the back.’

‘What with?’

‘The kitchen knife.’ He shook his head again. ‘I’d proper lost it by then. I ran. But the voices still kept on coming. I got out of there just before some kids arrived. Like Goths or something they were. I saw them, but they never saw me.’

Vi narrowed her eyes. ‘You sure about that are you, Abdullah? I thought the kids were already in there,’ she said. Bully Murray had been killed pretty soon after the events that Khan was describing and he did, after all, adhere at least in terms of his ethnicity to the ‘other man’ that Bully had briefly described to her. In addition to that, Abdullah had told Mumtaz Hakim ‘I was seen’ when he’d ‘confessed’ to her back at Strone Road. Bully Murray had almost certainly seen him.