An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (34 page)

But he looked her straight in the face and he said, ‘Yes.’

Vi sighed, but let that go. Bully Murray’s murderer had been caught and was now dead himself. What, really, did it matter any more? It mattered because maybe Abdullah had told the Rogers brothers and maybe they had organised Bully’s death. Maybe …

‘So just to get this straight then,’ she said, ‘you killed Wendy Dixon because she was needy, possibly pregnant and you killed John Sawyer because he appeared to be threatening your fictional diamonds—’

‘They’re not fictional, they’re—’

‘Real?’ Vi smiled. ‘So if they’re real, where are they? You knocked seven shades of shit out of your house for months on end, and you didn’t find them.’

He didn’t say anything.

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what the fuck you thought you were doing, Mr Khan,’ she said, ‘but prospecting for diamonds in East Ham was not one of your better ideas. Now one more chance, Mr Khan, why did Sean and Marty order the deaths of John Sawyer and Wendy Dixon? She was a pig and so I can kind of understand that, but him? What did the Rogers boys have against a tramp?’

‘I told you I was looking for d—’

‘Yeah, yeah, the bloody treasure of the Sierra Madre,’ she said.
She stood up, looking at Venus as she did so. ‘Think we’re probably done here for the time being, sir.’ Then she looked back at Abdullah. ‘Psych evaluation next I think, son.’

Venus, apparently relieved, smiled.

Lee looked out of the window down onto Green Street. A group of men who normally smoked continuously outside the front of their small restaurant now gathered around an old-fashioned portable TV balanced on a footstool. The Olympics were having a good effect upon Ramadan fasters. It was taking their minds off their bellies. Sadly they also seemed to be having a somewhat adverse effect upon the need for private investigation services. But Lee comforted himself with the notion that once the feel-good effect of the Olympics was over, people would start being suspicious of one another all over again.

On a personal level, he was surprised at how much of the Games he was watching on television. And it wasn’t just because Chronus got excited whenever he saw people run. Lee’s mother had made him watch the opening ceremony with her, which he had found surprisingly affecting, probably because it was so very ‘English’ – odd, and rather slanted towards the ordinary person. Thereafter, he’d been suckered at various times into watching cycling, swimming and athletics. The only events he’d switch off immediately were equestrian competitions. What did he, or anyone he knew, know about dressage?

Lee walked through his office to the front door and sat down
on the metal staircase outside. Just as he was lighting a fag, he saw Mumtaz coming up the stairs.

‘Morning.’

She looked up at him and smiled. ‘Morning, Lee.’

‘How’d it go?’ he asked.

She carried on climbing until her head was level with his. She shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They liked it, but …’

‘The boarded-up windows are putting them off.’

‘Of course.’

‘But you haven’t …’

‘Had any more trouble? No.’ She walked past him and went into the office. ‘Tea?’

‘If you don’t mind making,’ Lee said. She was still fasting.

‘I don’t mind making.’

Mumtaz walked into their small office kitchen, switched the kettle on and then put her head in her hands. The latest couple to view her house, that morning, had looked around as if they had bad smells under their noses. Then, on her way from the house to the office, her estate agent had rung to say that the viewers would be interested in the house if she dropped the price by fifty thousand. They, like most of the borough, had read the story about the window-pane shootings in Forest Gate just over three weeks before, but Mumtaz couldn’t drop that far. If she did, she would end up truly potless, possibly even still in debt. She listened to the kettle come to the boil, then pulled herself together. Whether the house sold or not, the bills – including Ahmet’s debt to the Sheikhs – had to be paid, and so she was obliged to work. She put a teabag into Lee’s mug and poured on the boiling water. He’d just given her a pay rise of a hundred pounds a month, bless him. She knew that he couldn’t afford it.

‘Lee, do you want sugar today?’ she called out, as she poured
milk into the cup and removed the teabag. Sometimes he wanted sugar and sometimes he didn’t.

‘Yeah, please.’

Then, as she was spooning two heaped teaspoons into his mug she heard him say something else. ‘What?’

Straining her ears, she thought she heard another voice, talking to Lee. She didn’t think anything of it until she came out of the kitchen with the tea in her hands. Through the open office door, and Lee’s thick cigarette smoke, she saw the thin, pale figure of Nasreen Khan.

*

There wasn’t even a pretence of subterfuge. One of Abduljabbar Mitra’s sons came out of what had once been his father’s greengrocer shop on Green Street, and handed a pile of bank notes in through the window of a BMW parked outside. Inside the car, Vi easily recognised the bulky figure of Dave Spall, Marty Roger’s minder.

Once the cash had been passed, Vi threw her cigarette butt down on the ground, crossed the road and let herself into the BMW beside the man who, on seeing her, stuffed the money hurriedly into his pockets.

‘Hello, Dave,’ Vi said with a smile. ‘How’s it going?’

Spall’s face whitened. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘This is a private car, you’ve no right to get in here.’

She ignored him. ‘Better drive on, Dave,’ she said. ‘You’re on double yellows. Don’t want to get nicked by a warden, do you?’

‘Yeah, but you’re …’

‘Drive on or I’ll find a warden,’ Vi said.

Dave put the car into Drive and pulled out, heading north towards Forest Gate.

‘I don’t know about you, but I quite fancy a little trip up to Wanstead Flats,’ Vi said. ‘Head for Capel Road, just off Woodford Road. Know it?’

Dave made a half grunting, just about affirmative noise.

‘Good,’ Vi said. Then she sat back in her luxurious leather seat and enjoyed the view. Ramadan or no Ramadan, Green Street was buzzing.

*

Mumtaz put a mug of tea down in front of Nasreen and then sat. Because she’d lost her baby and been ill afterwards, Nasreen had not been allowed to fast for Ramadan. Getting her strength and her life back were more important to God than her strict adherence to one of the Five Pillars of Islam.

‘My legs will be scarred,’ she said. ‘But that’ nothing.’

Mumtaz looked at Lee, who she saw was equally at a loss as to what to say.

‘I will be able to have children again.’

‘Oh, that’s good news,’ Mumtaz said.

And then suddenly Nasreen smiled. ‘I’d be dead without you, Mumtaz,’ she said.

‘You would have found a way to get out of there.’

‘No.’ She looked at Lee. ‘She’s too modest, Mr Arnold.’

‘Oh, tell me about it, love,’ Lee said.

She laughed. ‘It’s so good to see you both,’ she said. ‘Even though I feel a fool about not believing you about Abdullah.’

‘He’s your husband, why—’

‘He won’t be my husband for very much longer,’ Nasreen said.

Since she’d arrested Abdullah Khan, all Vi Collins had told Lee and Mumtaz about him, beyond what was in the public domain, was that his psychiatric assessment had been inconclusive. Logically,
some of his ideas and beliefs about people around him, his past and his family were quite outlandish. But whether they were actually untrue was very difficult to ascertain. His father, Mursel Khan, hadn’t looked at all like either of his parents or the one sister, now deceased, he had been raised with. But on the other hand, Mursel had possessed what was at the time, before the formation of Bangladesh, Indian birth documents. According to these he had been born, under British rule, in Sylhet in 1940. Could such documents have been falsified by the Khans for their stray Jewish boy in what by then must have been 1956?

‘You’re divorcing him.’

‘Eventually,’ Nasreen said. ‘As you know he’s been charged with John Sawyer’s murder and the killing of a woman called Wendy Dixon.’ She looked down at the floor. ‘He was having an affair with her. She was a prostitute.’

That had been another blow to Nasreen’s pride, and neither Mumtaz nor Lee considered it politic to tell her what they knew about Wendy.

‘That he killed a total innocent like John over a delusion …’ She shook her head. ‘Diamonds!’

Once Khan had been arrested, the police had also looked for the diamonds and found none. In addition, the skeleton thought to be that of Sara Kaminski showed signs of the kind of wear associated with a hard life. On that basis, the notion that she had been the daughter of a rich jeweller who had then comfortably sat out the Second World War seemed unlikely. At some point Sara Kaminski had worked, and worked hard.

‘The police have asked for Abdullah’s father’s body to be exhumed so they can compare his DNA to the skeleton,’ Nasreen said. ‘It’s all so horrible.’ Then she looked at Mumtaz. ‘Do you think that my husband is mad?’

‘I’m not qualified to say.’ Abdullah Khan had been in the grip of an obsession that had caused him to kill when Mumtaz had come upon him, but whether that made him insane or not was another matter.

Nasreen drank her tea.

‘DNA testing like that’ll take time,’ Lee said. ‘Where old bones are involved, they generally have to look at mitochondrial DNA through the mother’s line of inheritance, and that is not done in five minutes.’

‘Yes, the police said it would take some time.’

‘So what about the house?’ Mumtaz asked. ‘What’s happening about that?’

Nasreen put her cup down. ‘Abdullah’s employers paid for it and so they own it. I thought that the deeds were in our names but they’re actually in the name of Sean Rogers.’

Lee snorted.

‘Yes, I know he’s a gangster, and his brother too, but I have to say he’s been very kind to me,’ Nasreen said. ‘I mean, when you think about all the damage Abdullah did to the house it has to be worth less now than when it was bought. But Sean Rogers is planning to do it up at his own expense and has already told me that I don’t owe him anything.’

Lee and Mumtaz exchanged a look. Given the circumstances, with the police investigation in the affair still on-going, the Rogers boys could do little else.

‘So you’re back with your parents?’

‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘It’s such a relief after …’

She looked for a moment as if she was about to cry, so Mumtaz placed a comforting hand on her arm. Nasreen smiled. ‘I’m OK.’

‘I know that. You’re strong, Nasreen. Look at what you’ve come through.’

‘Yes.’ She didn’t allude to the loss of her child and neither did Mumtaz, but for a few moments its loss sat in that office and chilled the air around all three of them.

Nasreen lifted her handbag up onto Mumtaz’s desk and began to sort through its contents. ‘I actually came to give you this,’ she said.

A clunk of metal against wood signalled the return of the mezuzah to the Arnold Agency’s office. ‘The police have taken the photograph they think might be of Sara Kaminski, but they didn’t want this as well and neither do I.’ She smiled. ‘Or, rather, I don’t know what to do with it. If you assume that Reginald Smith did kill Sara, and then hid her body with what had to be the collusion of his wife at least, then hiding her photograph behind the mezuzah must have been like keeping her memory alive in just one very small place.’ She turned the mezuzah over in her hand for a moment. ‘You know, I read that the Jews consider the fixing of a mezuzah to a door as an act of kindness to the world. Maybe hiding Sara’s photo behind this mezuzah was an act of kindness to her. Maybe Lily, her sister, did it.’ She put the mezuzah back down on the desk again and said, ‘Will you keep it for me – and for Sara too?’

Mumtaz’s eyes were fixed on the thing. She’d almost forgotten about the mezuzah. ‘Of course we will,’ she murmured.

*

Much to Dave Spall’s disgust, Vi lit a fag inside Marty’s car.

‘You can’t …’ he began.

‘Oh but I can,’ Vi said. She looked out across Wanstead Flats at a happy scene of families, dogs and teenagers playing in the sunshine. Nice weather for the Olympics, which was where most of her colleagues were.

‘I got a whisper that the Mitra family on Green Street were in hock to your bosses,’ she said.

‘A whisper? What …’

‘Oh, I never reveal my sources, Dave, you know that.’ Murderer Noakes had told her that he’d heard through one of his ‘Paki’ mates that the late Abduljabbar Mitra paid protection to the Rogers. Now, seemingly, so did his heirs. ‘Anyway, I saw one of the Mitra kids give you cash with me own eyes. But what the Mitras decide to do is up to them,’ she continued. ‘I mean, the old man was a murderer …’

She looked across at Dave, who just fanned her smoke out of his window with his hand and said nothing.

‘Fancy a mild-mannered bloke like Abduljabbar knocking off a racist nut-job like Bully Murray,’ Vi said. ‘Don’t make a lot of sense. Men like Abduljabbar usually avoid trouble, but then he said that Bully goaded him and so …’ She shrugged. Dave, she noticed, was sweating. ‘And so soon too after Bully saw the person who killed that tramp, John Sawyer, in the old Plashet Cemetery. You know, your mate, Abdullah Khan.’

Dave still said nothing.

‘Occurs to me,’ Vi went on, ‘that maybe someone didn’t want Khan to get caught. Also occurs to me that maybe Bully Murray tried to make a bit of dosh out of his nugget of knowledge. Know where I’m going with this, Dave?’

He didn’t look at her. ‘No.’

She leaned in towards him. ‘Well, let me spell it out for you, shall I? I think that Sean or Marty or Abdullah Khan, or all three of them, persuaded Abduljabbar Mitra to kill Bully Murray to shut him up. I don’t think that any of those three gentlemen wanted Mitra to get caught, but they reckoned without Abduljabbar’s
moral compass. You do that when you haven’t got a moral compass yourself.’

‘That’s bollocks,’ Dave said.

‘Is it? Maybe. I mean, I think it’s a bit dodgy in light of the fact that Mitra’s kids are still paying you money. I’d think that if you topped somebody for someone then all debts would be cancelled. But then that’s me and, let’s face it, I’m not a psycho, am I.’