An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (6 page)

‘Over the wall?’ Her eyes widened. She was blonde and small and Tony rather fancied her. ‘No, that’s crazy,’ she said. ‘No, I heard nothing. Baby cries, you don’t hear anything else.’

He moved on down Colston, briefly into Shrewsbury Road and then onto Strone Road, which had the largest number of houses backing on to the cemetery. Through the rain and the darkness Tony looked up at the houses that surrounded him. They were all of a type, Edwardian terraces, like so much of the borough. Hard though it was to believe now, Newham, or West Ham as it had been known, had been built as a rather genteel suburb, intended to house clerks and their families from the docks and the City. But it had soon turned into an ocean of poverty like Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and other manors ‘out east’. And Olympics or no Olympics, it hadn’t changed that much. House prices could be as high as they liked, but while people filled their front yards with old mattresses and flats meant for six people housed twelve, Newham would still be Newham. Tony knocked on a door that looked as if it had had acid thrown at it, and waited for someone to answer.

*

‘He might as well have done her in front of the whole pub,’ Lee said as he put a cup of tea down in front of Mumtaz.

Wendy Dixon had walked home after Sean Rogers had sex with her round the back of the pub. He’d told her to ‘fuck off’ while he got in his Daimler and drove away. Mumtaz had watched
Wendy drag herself down a wet High Street North. She’d wanted to give the poor woman a lift even though she knew that she couldn’t. Shortly afterwards she’d met up with Lee back at the office.

Lee sat behind his desk. ‘You got it all on camera?’

‘Yes.’ It had been vile. Sean Rogers had just slammed himself into her. Mumtaz remembered such encounters herself. The only way to deal with them was to pretend that you weren’t there.

Lee said, ‘Good.’

She’d had to stand on one of the toilets and hold the camera up to the gap between the back window and its frame. Luckily no one had come in. She wondered if all the trouble had been worth it. Now her client would know that she’d been right about her sister, but so what? Would that change anything for Wendy?

‘I’m afraid that Mrs Mirza, Wendy’s sister, will use our evidence to try and get her and her children to go and live with her and her husband,’ Mumtaz said.

‘That’d get her away from Sean Rogers,’ Lee said.

‘Yes, but why should
she
have to move?’

Lee looked at her and smiled. Mumtaz wasn’t naive but sometimes her sense of justice made her sound like she was. ‘Because she’s Sean Rogers’s tenant and if she isn’t paying her rent then the law will be on his side. You know that.’

Mumtaz sipped her tea.

‘And even if we did tell the coppers that Sean is screwing one of his tenants in lieu of rent, what do you think they’ll do? Wendy’ll support him anyway, she’ll have to if she wants to stay in one piece.’

‘I heard him talk about wanting her to be at a party he’s holding next weekend. She’d have to “make up” for what she hadn’t done this evening.’

‘With the Asian guy?’

‘I assume so. Lee are you sure that DI Collins wouldn’t find this interesting?’

‘She would if Wendy Dixon would shop Sean Rogers,’ Lee said. ‘But she won’t. The Rogers boys and Yunus Ali own hundreds of properties in this borough and if you can find any one of their tenants who is prepared to grass them up, then you’re better than Forest Gate’s finest. Rogers and Ali are a crime empire and it takes time and extraordinary courage to take an empire down.’

Gangsters. Of course. Mumtaz’s throat felt dry and she cleared it with a cough. ‘I’ll call Mrs Mirza in the morning.’

‘Good.’

Mumtaz had asked to meet up at the office before they went home because she’d needed to talk about what she’d seen at the back of that pub. She didn’t want to take those images home with her. But Lee’s assessment of Wendy Dixon’s future was so bleak she could hardly bear it. She changed the subject. ‘What about the police being called out to the Plashet cemetery,’ she said.

Lee shrugged. ‘Again,’ he said. ‘Something else that just goes on and on and on.’

‘Anti-Semitism?’

He shrugged again. ‘Who knows? But whatever it was it must have been bad because when I drove past earlier, the coppers were still in there. A lot of coppers, judging by the number of cars parked outside.’

The woman he’d cuffed and then taken back to Forest Gate nick told Tony Bracci her name was Kazia Ostrowska and she was twenty-five years old. She obviously supported a Polish football team called Wisla Krakow, since she wore a Wisla Krakow tee-shirt, scarf and arm bands. She also had a grasp of the English language that she hadn’t exhibited when they’d first caught up with her the previous night. She sounded, Tony thought, a bit like the pretty blonde woman he’d spoken to when he was doing house to house on Colston Road.

‘I don’t care for Jews, but I never killed no-one,’ Kazia said.

‘What were you doing in the Plashet Cemetery in the dark?’

Kazia turned her face towards the duty solicitor who was representing her and said nothing.

‘I’ll take that as a “no comment” then,’ Tony said. He looked down at his notes. ‘Considering the fact that Wisla Krakow are not playing any games in this country at the moment and you don’t live here, why are you here, Miss Ostrowska?’

‘My brother, he lives in Leytonstone. I tell you this I think.’

‘Yes,’ Tony said. He looked at his notes again. ‘Lech Ostrowski, your brother, is a cook.’

‘A chef,’ she corrected. ‘I come for holiday.’

‘For almost three months?’

‘Why not?’ She shrugged. She was beyond thin, yet had a sort of sinewy muscularity that suggested time spent in a gym.

‘Who was with you in the cemetery last night?’ Tony asked.

‘No-one.’

‘Oh, come on Kazia. We have a witness who saw at least two other people. Who were you with?’

‘A witness?’ she said. And then she laughed. ‘A Paki.’

Tony saw the duty solicitor flinch. ‘I don’t know a great deal about Polish football violence and far-right racist politics but I’m aware they’re connected.’ He’d seen a documentary with Ross Kemp, who used to be in
EastEnders
and had knocked about with a load of Polish football thugs for enough time to make a programme about it. They were serious people. ‘You’ve said you don’t like Jews. You were in a Jewish cemetery—’

‘The man who was dead, he was white,’ she said. The expression on her face was almost blank. She could have been talking about bus times. ‘So the Paki killed him. Easy.’

Even if Tony hadn’t known that Majid Islam had handed his clothes over to forensics without a murmur, he still wouldn’t have believed he’d killed the man in the graveyard.

‘I don’t think that our witness killed anyone,’ Tony said.

‘You think I did.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

The man without a name had been stabbed in the back. Considerable force had been applied, according to the pathologist. Kazia looked as if she both did and didn’t have it in her. The clothes she’d been wearing the night before were also being examined by forensics. But like Majid Islam’s, they’d showed no signs of blood.

‘I need to know who you were with last night, Kazia,’ Tony said. ‘Give me their names. If they’re a bit tasty we’ll protect you.’

‘I was alone. How many times … !’

He looked into her eyes. They were as blue and as cold as an Alpine lake. Her lips curled as she regarded Tony with something approaching humour. ‘I want cigarette now,’ she said.

*

Mumtaz was on the phone to Ayesha Mirza. Still talking, she picked up her car keys. As soon as she’d finished the call, she’d have to go and pick up Shazia.

‘If you like I’ll come round to your house tomorrow morning, I can show you the footage,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t for the fainthearted. I’m sorry.’

At the other end of the line, Mrs Mirza sighed.

‘Christ, I knew our Wend was into something horrible. Everyone knows what Sean Rogers and his brother are, but to do that to our Wend … I’ve got to get her and the kids out of there.’

‘But you must be careful, Mrs Mirza,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Wendy owes Sean Rogers rent or she wouldn’t be doing this.’

‘Then I’ll pay it off for her, I’ll—’

‘Rogers may want to charge you interest on what she owes,’ Mumtaz cut in. She wanted to add
I know all about this
because that was exactly what had happened to her with Ahmet’s debts, but she managed to stop herself. Her problems with the Sheikh family, the gangsters her husband had associated with, were not Mrs Mirza’s. ‘It could be at an extortionate rate. Say nothing until you’ve seen the footage and then speak to Mr Arnold, he was a policeman and he knows the Rogers brothers. He will advise you.’

She eventually agreed to this and Mumtaz managed to end the call. She walked out of the house and looked at the shabby little Micra on her driveway. When Ahmet had been alive they’d had not only the Mercedes, but a gardener too,
and
she’d had all her
jewellery back then … But what had gone along with all that had not been so pleasant. She looked at the battered old car and smiled. She was about to open the driver’s door when Mr Higgs from across the road, the one Ahmet had always called the ‘Leftie’, stopped trimming his hedge and called out to her, ‘Did you hear they found a man dead in the old Jewish Cemetery?’

*

John’s shack was barely a structure at all. Made out of a hood of tangled branches and creepers, it hung between two trees that butted up against the cemetery wall. The branches, which didn’t belong to the trees, were clearly old and dead and, at some point, someone had thrown a sheet of polythene over them.

Underneath the canopy, on ground that was churned and damp from the recent rain, was a rolled up sleeping bag, a candle that was half burnt down and a tobacco tin. How did John survive?

Feeling like a burglar, Nasreen ducked down into the shack. The sleeping bag was covered with a camouflage pattern and she wondered whether it was John’s old army one. She opened the tobacco tin and found only a couple of Rizla papers. She hadn’t realised that John smoked. She closed the tin again and unrolled the sleeping bag. There was nothing in it except a spider. Nasreen looked at the uneven surface and she wondered how he ever slept there. She didn’t know anything about the man who had been found dead in the cemetery. It might be John, but it might not. Yet she knew she should tell the police about the man who sometimes lived in her garden, a few metres from the graveyard, and was now nowhere to be seen.

But then there was Abdullah to consider. She’d kept quiet about the ex-soldier at the end of their garden for a good reason. What
would he say if she suddenly went to the police with a story about keeping a homeless man in food?

*

Lee went into the Boleyn at lunchtime. Usually on a Sunday he went to his mum’s place in Custom House, but she’d been invited to a friend’s for lunch and Lee didn’t want to spend any time alone with his brother. Roy Arnold, Lee’s older and only sibling, was an alcoholic. In that respect the Arnold boys were the same, except that Lee had managed to stop drinking. Roy, on the other hand, reeked of cheap cider, was lairy most of the time, could be violent and ligged off their mother at every opportunity. Lee hated him with almost the same passion as their mother loved him. He only gave him the time of day at all because of her.

So he read the Sunday papers in the pub, ate a plate of chips and drank more diet Pepsi than he should. Occasionally he went out onto Green Street for a fag. The rest of the time he chatted to various people he knew both on and off the manor. A lot of them were old men, mates of his late father, plus the odd West Ham fan and someone Lee knew to be one of Vi Collins’s snouts, a bloke in an electric wheelchair called ‘Murderer’ Noakes.

Wilf Cox, one of Lee’s dad’s old friends, bought Lee a Pepsi and himself a pint of bitter. As he walked over to the table where Lee sat flicking through the
Observer
, he looked over at Noakes.

‘Dunno who’s supposed to be looking after Murderer these days,’ Wilf said, as he put Lee’s drink down in front of him. ‘But he smells of piss.’

Lee knew that Murderer had carers in twice a day, or he always had done.

‘Shouldn’t let him out smelling like that,’ Wilf said. He sat
down and looked idly at a bit of Lee’s paper. ‘Bleedin’ country’s going to pot. Run by rich boys for rich boys. But no-one cares about the poor anymore do they? Look at old Murderer. I mean I know he was in that bike gang—’

‘The Hells Angels.’

‘Yeah, but now he’s a cripple and nobody wants to know!’

In principle Lee agreed with what Wilf was saying. He hated the cuts the government was making to public services, he hated the resultant unemployment and the complete absence of punishment for the big City financiers who had brought about the economic crisis in the first place, but Murderer Noakes was hardly the epitome of want. He’d come off his bike back in 1979 while riding to some Angels orgy out in Hertfordshire. He’d had every benefit and perk the State would give him. On top of that was the money Vi Collins bunged him from time to time for keeping his ear to the ground. If Murderer smelt of piss it was possibly because he wanted to.

Wilf read the cookery section of the
Observer
while continuing to witter on about politics. Lee’s own thoughts were still with the events of the previous night. Mumtaz had been right about Sean Rogers. Something needed to be done about his business practices. Sean, Marty and their silent partner Yunus Ali had been abusing their tenants for years. There were loads of stories about how they put young girls out on the streets, how they gave them as presents, and rumours about orgies, drugs, protection, and their occasional spats with the Asian Sheikh brothers organisation. Years ago, Marty’s wife Debbie had allegedly cut girls for failing to please their customers. Now it seemed Sean took the lead. But how to get either Wendy Dixon or any of the tenants of Rogers and Ali to grass on the bastards was a puzzler. There wasn’t enough property on the manor as it was and so the poor were
pushed into ever smaller and more squalid spaces for more and more money.