An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (4 page)

Then it started up again. More violently than it ever had done before. Paul Simon sang about Scarborough Fair.

*

The woman was nothing like Mumtaz had imagined she’d be. For a start she was white. She wore Western clothes and her problem was nothing to do with either her husband or her children.

‘It’s my little sister,’ she said as she took the cup of tea that Mumtaz had made her. ‘I think she’s on the game.’

She was called Mrs Mirza and she looked about forty. With her long blonde hair and pale blue eyes she was one of the whitest people Mumtaz had ever met. She lived in Forest Gate with her
husband, a Pakistani-born taxi driver. Ayesha, or Mary – Mumtaz could choose to call her by either name – had found out about Mumtaz on what she called the ‘umma telegraph’.

‘That’s one of the great things about being a Muslim,’ she said. ‘You get help. We all help each other and that’s priceless.’

Mumtaz, who was well aware of the power and utility of the worldwide Muslim brother and sisterhood known as the umma, smiled in spite of herself. That was usually the case but …

‘Why do you think that your sister might be a prostitute, Mrs Mirza?’ Mumtaz asked.

She leant across the desk. There was no-one else in the office. Lee was out at lunch, but Mrs Mirza clearly felt that she had to lower her voice. ‘Well, you know how it is, these days,’ she said. ‘What with all the cuts and everything. Wend, that’s me sister, Wendy Dixon, well she’s on her own with three kids, know what I mean?’

Mumtaz, on her own with one child, understood more than Mrs Mirza could imagine. It had been almost two weeks now since she’d sold her wedding dress to a shop called
Retro Rocks!
on Brick Lane. A woman called Lilith had told her that saris were going to go ‘viral’ in the summer and had bought the dress on the spot. What Mumtaz had got for it after, surprisingly, no haggling at all, had paid off half her debt – for last month.

‘Yes,’ Mumtaz said.

‘None of the kids’ dads are interested,’ Mrs Mirza continued. ‘She can’t get a job. She’s tried, but she’s got no certificates or nothing. She had her eldest at sixteen, she’d never been to work. But everything’s gone up – food, fags, rent.’

‘Yes, but why do you think that—’

‘She’s never in of a night,’ Mrs Mirza said. ‘Leaves Dolly, that’s her eldest, fifteen, to look after the two little ’uns. I know people
who’ve seen her in pubs, giving all the men the old come on, you know. One time, she was so skint she didn’t even have the price of a packet of nappies for the baby. Then about three months ago that all stopped.’

‘That was when you noticed your sister had started going out at night?’

‘You’ve got it,’ Mrs Mirza said. ‘
Inshallah
, I’m totally wrong and she’s found some money in the attic or something, but I don’t think so. There’s no actual bloke on the horizon as far as I can tell. I’m worried.’

Mumtaz nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘I want to find out what she’s doing so I can stop her before it’s too late,’ she said. ‘That life, well, it’s a one-way ticket, and if she’s having to do that just to pay that slime of a landlord of hers …’ She shook her head. ‘Me and Wazim, that’s my old man, we’d rather Wend and the kids moved in with us if that’s what it takes.’

‘So you’d like us to follow her?’

‘Well not you, obviously,’ she smiled.

‘Why is that?’

Mrs Mirza blushed a little now. ‘Well, you’re a covered lady. Our Wend, she goes into pubs.’

‘And you think that I can’t?’ Mumtaz asked.

Mrs Mirza’s eyes widened.

‘Just as you choose not to cover your head, I may uncover mine when I need to,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I may also go into a pub, for my job. Provided I don’t drink alcohol, which I don’t, that’s fine. Mrs Mirza, you are obviously a woman of faith and so you will know that Islam is a very practical religion.’ She smiled. ‘If you would like me to take this case, I will be happy to work for you and do whatever I have to in order to find out the truth about your sister.
Let’s start with you giving me her address and the name of this landlord, please?’

Mrs Mirza looked relieved. She gave her Wendy’s address in Plaistow. ‘The landlord’s called Sean Rogers,’ she said, ‘and he’s a right, if you’ll excuse the expression Mrs Hakim, bastard.’

*

When John was little and he’d dug about in the back yard, his granddad had always told him off. ‘Keep on digging like that and you’ll end up in Australia. And leave my bloody daffs alone while you’re at it!’ But John had always carried on anyway. Granddad hadn’t really minded that much and, anyway, as a kid John had always been besotted by the idea of buried treasure. Now he dug because it comforted him and because it meant that sometimes he could get into the hole that he dug and hide there. Except that he couldn’t get into
this
hole.
This
hole was way too scary.

‘Amma, are you sure?’ Shazia said.

She’d been asking to stay overnight at her friend Maud’s house for weeks but Mumtaz had refused to let her – until now. Unbe-known to her stepdaughter, it had taken Mumtaz a while to check out Maud’s family. For some reason, that Mumtaz now knew was Maud’s father’s redundancy, they had moved from a house in Shepherd’s Bush to a rented dump in Plaistow. They were nice people, who had initially struck Mumtaz as rather too good to be true. But the father, though out of work now, was an academic and the mother a struggling mid-list author. As far as Mumtaz could tell, they didn’t have any skeletons in their cupboards.

Working in private investigation had made Mumtaz, who was cautious by nature, even more so. And when it came to her stepdaughter, Shazia, she was fanatical. She had good reason to be – and not just because the girl was only sixteen. Mumtaz’s creditors, including the odious Naz, used the threat of harm to Shazia as a lever. In spite of Shazia not being her own blood, Mumtaz loved her. They shared a bond of pain forged at the hands of Ahmet Hakim who had beaten and raped them both. Even from beyond the grave he still made their lives hard. Theirs was a connection that was never going to be broken, not by anyone.

‘Yes,’ Mumtaz said. She’d spoken to Maud’s mother, Christine,
who had assured her that the girls would not be going out. They were going to watch DVDs and listen to music. Not having Shazia for the evening suited Mumtaz’s plan to see what Wendy Dixon might be getting up to. Wendy lived two streets away from Maud’s house in Patrick Road. According to Mrs Mirza, Wendy always went out on a Saturday night and was rarely home before dawn.

‘Get your stuff together now and I’ll take you to Maud’s for eight o’clock,’ Mumtaz told Shazia.

Shazia ran upstairs before Mumtaz could change her mind. Where her father had been laissez-faire about his daughter’s social life, Mumtaz was strict. But she was kind too. Ahmet had been anything but that.

Mumtaz looked at the old Nissan Micra sitting on her drive and, just for a moment or two, pined for Ahmet’s Mercedes. She knew it was shallow but she couldn’t help it. The Nissan was probably the dodgiest company car in London but Mumtaz was glad of anything, especially when Lee was paying for the petrol and the upkeep. But it did look a mess.

‘We’re gonna watch
The Hurt Locker
,’ Shazia said, as she ran down the stairs carrying a small rucksack. She spoke with that rising inflection which drove Mumtaz crazy. She had to keep on reminding herself that a lot of the kids did it as well as many people of her own age. After all, she told herself, at thirty-two, she was still quite young herself.

‘Isn’t
The Hurt Locker
about US soldiers in Afghanistan?’ Mumtaz asked.

‘Yeah. Maud and me are doing a module on colonialism,’ Shazia said. ‘Afghanistan’s an example of cultural colonialism isn’t it?’

Mumtaz frowned. ‘That’s a tough question, Shazia. It depends on your point of view.’

‘Yeah, but as a Muslim …’

‘As a Muslim I strongly disapprove of the Taliban. That isn’t Islam, that’s just violence and misogyny.’

‘But isn’t NATO imposing its western brand of democracy on Afghanistan?’

‘Some Afghans want it,’ Mumtaz said.

‘But some want the Taliban.’

‘And most, probably, want something in-between. It’s a difficult issue.’ But she was glad that Shazia was thinking about it. Time was, when she was back at her old private school, all she ever thought about were her clothes and what people thought about them.

*

It was raining again. Nasreen stood at her parents’ dining room window and looked out at their soaked little garden. Her mind drifted to her own garden and John.

She’d never seen what he called his shack up close but she knew it couldn’t be waterproof. What was he doing now, she wondered? Abdullah had been at the house for most of the afternoon. Then, just before seven, he’d come back, showered, and given her a present – an emerald ring that must have cost a fortune. He sometimes gave her things like that, out of the blue, and although she was invariably delighted, she didn’t always know what to say to him. Instead, she’d kissed him and then pulled him towards their bed but he had rebuffed her advances, albeit gently, as he so often did. They’d only had sex three times since their wedding night and it made Nasreen sad. Now her husband had gone out to meet a client with his boss.

In one way Nasreen was glad that she didn’t have to attend any of Abdullah’s formal meetings – some lawyers’ wives were always at social events with their husbands. Of course, when their new
home was ready, she would have to entertain, but at the moment she couldn’t – working on the house and being pregnant took it out of her. She’d only spent the morning there, just enough time to rub down a door and leave John some naan bread and a couple of samosas, but she hadn’t seen him. It hadn’t been raining then and so he’d probably been out and about. She hoped he’d managed to retrieve the food and eat it before the heavens opened.

Nasreen took the ring her husband had just given her and locked it away, with all the other baubles he had bought her, in her jewellery box.

*

Mumtaz watched from across the street as Wendy Dixon went into the pub next door to East Ham tube station. She was wearing an animal print catsuit in what looked like Lycra and a pair of very high-heeled shoes covered in red glitter. Mumtaz phoned Lee, who was about to follow Wendy. He opened the door and disappeared inside. He must have caught sight of her at once because he muttered into his mobile, ‘Christ, she looks like a tranny.’

Mumtaz was going to follow him. She didn’t like going into pubs on her own, but at least Lee was there, even though they weren’t going to acknowledge each other. Mumtaz would order an orange juice, find somewhere to sit and watch the woman. Lee would watch Mumtaz’s back. This wasn’t usual practice, but when Lee had discovered that Wendy Dixon was a tenant of the Rogers brothers, his internal alarm had gone off. A young, single mum, possibly owing money to those bastards, possibly on the game, could mean that Wendy was working for Sean Rogers. He and Marty had run a lot of girls back in the day, when shoulder-padded Debbie had been their madam. They’d never actually got
done for it, but it was well known they were still in the business.

Mumtaz pushed the door open. It was a smallish pub, characterised by stripped pine furnishings. She felt odd not having her head covered. It was a bitter-sweet feeling. On the one hand, as a devout Muslim she actually enjoyed wearing her scarf. At the same time, her uncovered head brought to mind her life before her marriage, which had been a happy time. Without her scarf Lee told her that she looked Italian or Spanish – others sometimes mistook her for eastern European. Either way it meant that she blended in easily with the pub’s mixed clientele. No-one would recognise her. Muslim women in Newham didn’t go into pubs, and to almost everyone else her headscarf made her invisible.

Wendy Dixon was standing at the bar. She called the barman over and ordered something called ‘Sex on the Beach’. Mumtaz knew this was a cocktail. Briefly she caught Lee’s eye – he was further along the bar from Wendy, towards the back of the pub. When Wendy left the bar, Mumtaz went up and ordered her juice. The joint wasn’t jumping. There was only Wendy, a couple of teenage girls, a few old blokes and two serious-looking men – one white, one Asian – sitting at a table and talking quietly. Wendy went over to the white man, who was middle aged and a bit thick round the gut. The Asian was younger, leaner and good looking. As she approached them, the white man leered at her. Mumtaz paid for her drink and found a seat that allowed her to watch them. The pub was quiet enough that she could hear them too.

The white man spoke. ‘Looking proper juicy tonight, Wendy,’ he said. His voice was rough and there was something in its tone that registered with Mumtaz as contempt.

Wendy didn’t reply. She drank whatever ‘Sex on the Beach’ was through a straw. When she’d first entered the pub there’d been
a spring in her step, all gone now. The white man drank lager from a pint glass while the Asian sipped something green from a tall tumbler. Wendy’s shoulders slumped forwards as if she was trying to close herself in on her considerable breasts. She almost looked ashamed of them.

Mumtaz’s phone rang. It was Lee.

‘I’m in the toilets,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d better tell you about who Wendy’s sitting with. Not that I know who the Asian bloke is, but the white one is Sean Rogers, her landlord.’

‘Right.’ He’d told her some details about the Rogers brothers and their business partner Yunus Ali when she’d first run the case by him.

‘I know Sean and his brother Marty a bit,’ Lee said. ‘You and me can carry on with the separate act, but I’m not leaving you on your own with this. Sean’s a vicious psycho. If Wendy is working for him or just having sex with him, she’s not in a healthy place.’

‘No.’

The Asian man was smiling at Wendy now, but none of them were speaking.

Suddenly the relative quiet inside the pub was shattered. Police car sirens tore into the night like swords, rushing past the pub and up towards Forest Gate.

*

People, kids usually, were always getting into the old cemetery at the bottom of Majid Islam’s garden. It drove him crazy. He was forever trying to catch whoever was doing or planning acts of desecration because it was wrong and because it offended him. He shone his torch in front of him and then behind. Still panting from the effort of scaling the wall, jumping down the other side,
and then calling the police, he put his mobile phone back in his pocket and shouted, ‘I know you’re still in here, you bastards!’