An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (7 page)

The door from Green Street burst open and everyone in the pub looked up. Framed in the doorway was a middle-aged woman holding a roll-up in her right hand. She was swaying. ‘I need a light for me fag,’ she said. ‘Anyone got a light for me fag?’

Wilf said, ‘Christ,’ but Lee stood up and took his lighter out of his pocket.

‘You can’t smoke in here, Cheryl!’ Maureen the barmaid yelled.

‘Yeah, I know that, I …’

Lee braved the hum of cheap cider that always came off Cheryl’s clothes and led her outside. She was, as usual, arse’oled. ‘I went to Mass, but they chucked me out,’ she said.

‘Stick your fag in your gob,’ Lee said, ‘and I’ll light it.’

Once Cheryl had had kids, a husband and a life. But then her husband had lost his job, then she’d fallen out with him, then they’d lost their home and Cheryl had gone on the booze. Now she was homeless and drunk while her husband and her kids lived in some damp flat in Barking. She put her roll-up in her mouth and sucked hard as Lee lit it.

‘Ta, darling.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said.

He was just about to go back into the Boleyn when she said to him, ‘You know they found a dead body up the old Jewish Cemetery last night?’

‘Yes,’ Lee said. ‘Terrible.’

‘Not really,’ Cheryl said. She burped. ‘He was grave robbing.’

Lee walked back towards her. ‘Who was?’

‘The dead geezer.’

‘How do you know he was grave robbing?’

Cheryl smirked. ‘Can I have a Kronenbourg?’ she said.

She was always ligging booze off everybody, using all sorts of weird stories. Even through the booze Cheryl knew that Lee was an ex-copper and that stories about crime would get him going.

‘You can have a Kronenbourg if you tell me,’ Lee said. ‘Story first, Cheryl.’

She swayed. Stained teeth made a brief appearance as she smiled.

‘Because they found him with a skeleton.’

‘Who did? The coppers?’

‘Yeah. Can I have that beer now?’

‘No, not yet. How do you know this, Cheryl? And why should I believe you?’

Cheryl put a finger to her nose and tapped it. ‘Because I was up there, you stupid arse.’

‘Where?’

‘The fucking cemetery.’ She waved a hand in the air. ‘They was talking about it. I was walking past.’

‘The coppers?’

‘Yeah.’

‘When?’

‘I dunno. It was dark.’

‘What did they say?’

‘Fucking hell, don’t you listen?’ Cheryl said. ‘They said the stiff had been grave robbing. He had a skeleton. Can you get me a beer?’

*

Vi was alone in the cemetery. She’d asked for a moment by herself and so SOCO had gone off to have a break. She didn’t have a clue where her Nana Faye was buried. She remembered her dying but she hadn’t gone to the funeral. She’d only been eight and Nana
Faye hadn’t liked her anyway. Or rather she hadn’t liked her mum. Her dad’s people had been Orthodox Jews and so her gentile mum had never gone down well.

She looked around at the gravestones but it was hopeless. The inscriptions were in English as well as Hebrew but half of them had been worn away or vandalised. Nana Faye had called Vi’s mum a ‘gypsy’ because she was Irish. She’d felt keenly and bitterly the dilution of her own Jewish blood. Vi’s dad, her son, had hated her for it. But in spite of this, Vi was relieved that it didn’t seem as if their unknown dead bloke had dug anyone up from the graveyard. The Polish skinhead girl they held in custody was denying any sort of involvement too and, so far, the forensic evidence from her clothes didn’t point to any either. SOCO had already checked out the one pathetic camera on the site, but it hadn’t shown anything of interest. But if the skeleton hadn’t come from the graveyard, where
had
it come from? And why had the dead man been lying beside it when Majid Islam tripped over him?

Vi looked around the cemetery. She put one hand up to the Star of David around her neck but she knew that she was as much of an intruder there as the Polish girl had been.

Monday morning was dull, but at least it wasn’t raining. Nasreen sat on the back step looking at the tangle of trees and bushes that concealed John’s shack. To distract herself from thoughts of him, she took the photograph and the thing it had been hidden behind from her pocket and looked at them again. It was weird to nail a photograph behind something like that, on a doorpost. Maybe Abdullah would know what it was. He was the one who’d chosen this house, after all. He had to know more about it than she did. But did he? He’d bought the house at auction, which meant that he’d only viewed it very briefly and in a group of other potential buyers. As far as Nasreen could tell, it had been the price that had attracted him to it more than anything else. Although why that should have been of concern to a man who bought her emeralds she couldn’t always square in her mind. But since they’d got married, and particularly after she became pregnant, Nasreen had found it hard to talk to Abdullah. If he wasn’t busy, he was distracted, and if she talked about something he wasn’t interested in, he would cut her off.

They’d met, indirectly, via her father’s brother, Uncle Salim. He lived in Poplar where he owned a boarding house that was used by men who had come to London to work. All the landlords in the area knew each other and Uncle Salim was particular
friends with a certain Fazal Bashar, who had his very personable nephew Abdullah staying with him. A thirty-seven-year-old lawyer from Bolton, Abdullah had impressed Uncle Salim from the start. After consulting Fazal Bashar and Nasreen’s father Imran who, like her mother, was a liberal, western-leaning person, Uncle Salim had introduced Nasreen to the young lawyer. The attraction between them had been immediate. Within weeks they had announced their engagement.

During the months leading up to the wedding, Abdullah had taken Nasreen everywhere. They’d been to high-end restaurants run by celebrity chefs, to cinemas and theatres. Together they had chosen the most beautiful wedding cake and wedding rings, which Abdullah had paid for with his gold credit cards. But as the wedding day approached he had, she’d noticed, become nervous – and increasingly jealous. Later, he’d put extra pressure on himself by buying the house. He’d told Nasreen it was a bargain because it had been empty for so long and he just couldn’t let it slip through his fingers. However, there was something else too. Unlike her, Abdullah had no real family. She’d only ever, briefly, met his uncle Fazal once. Abdullah was an only child, both his parents were dead and, although he was paying his share when it came to the wedding, he was ashamed that he was doing it on his own.

‘But can’t your uncle help out?’ Nasreen had asked him when he’d told her. ‘Don’t you have cousins or whatever?’

But he’d said, ‘No, there’s nobody. I left Bolton because there was no point in being there anymore. Everybody was gone.’

‘What about friends?’ she’d said.

Abdullah had shaken his head. ‘All the local lads were losers,’ he’d said. ‘When I went off to uni I lost touch.’

It was strange, this smallness of family. Even Nasreen’s relatives, who basically lived very English lives and had few children,
were still numerous. Abdullah was such a lonely soul, she felt her heart ache when she thought about it. ‘Well, you can share my family then,’ she’d said.

But he hadn’t. Abdullah, though polite and courteous to her family, had little to do with them beyond niceties. Most of the time he was at her parents’ house he either watched TV or listened to his father’s old Paul Simon CDs in their room. It was clear from all the frantic activity that he put into it that he wanted to get their own house ready as soon as possible so that he and Nasreen could leave her parents’ place and move in. She wanted that too, but she also wanted to talk to her husband. She looked at the photograph of the woman and wondered how old it was. It was black and white, but it could have been thirty or sixty years old. She had no idea. Maybe John would know? But then she remembered that she didn’t know where John was.

*

‘I couldn’t have him like that at home,’ the woman told Vi. ‘Not like that. Not in that state. Even his girlfriend left him.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was violent! Because he couldn’t get what had happened out there out of his head! Because the mess in his brain spread out across every room in my house. Why should I live with that? For Afghanistan? I don’t care.’

The woman was called Rita Sawyer and she’d just identified the man they’d found in Plashet Jewish Cemetery as her son, John Sawyer. Around fifty, Mrs Sawyer was thin and sun-dried in the way that only people who sunbathed or went abroad a lot were. Together with her husband and a teenage daughter, she lived in Manor Park.

‘Tell me about John, Mrs Sawyer,’ Vi asked.

‘What do you want to know?’

Vi wanted to know whether John Sawyer had ever been a member of any sort of far-right or anti-Semitic group and whether he’d been nuts enough to dig up a skeleton. But she said, ‘What was he like? As a son? You mean before Afghanistan or after?’

‘Both.’

Rita Sawyer sighed. She wore clothes that were at least twenty years too young for her. A mini-skirt in electric pink and a zebra print top that showed her wrinkled cleavage. Vi, whose sartorial tastes were rather more conservative, was half appalled, half lost in admiration. ‘John was a bit of an ’erbert when he was young,’ she said. ‘He never done well at school, couldn’t concentrate. But he liked sports and he was good enough at home with his sister and me and Ken. He thought about things.’

‘What things?’

She shook her head and grimaced, as if the memory she’d conjured was too painful for her. ‘Hunger, all that Live Eight stuff, homeless people. Always on the side of the underdog. Got sick of hearing it sometimes.’

‘Why did he go into the army?’

‘Couldn’t get a job,’ she said. ‘He learnt to drive when he was seventeen and Ken wanted him to do the Knowledge.’ Vi knew that Ken Sawyer drove a black cab. ‘But he never wanted to. He drifted into a bit of mini-cabbing but he never liked it much. One of his mates was going to Afghanistan and the next thing, he’d joined up.’

‘What did you think about that?’

‘I thought it was up to him,’ she said.

‘So what happened when he came home …’ She wanted to say ‘damaged’ but in the end she said ‘… unwell?’

Rita Sawyer shifted uncomfortably in her chair. ‘Well, he was
a nightmare. Awake most of the night, wandering around the house and then flopping down on the Chesterfield at some Godforsaken hour of the morning, spilling his tobacco all over the coffee table. If you said anything to him about it he’d go berserk. Shouted right in his sister Shania’s face, on about how all what he’d done out in Afghanistan was wrong, about injustice.’ Vi saw her wince as if in physical pain. ‘Then when Lisa left him – that was his girlfriend – he really lost the plot. He stopped washing, wouldn’t eat, shouted and cried all the time. Ken took him down the doctor’s, but they wouldn’t do nothing except give him some pills what he never took.’

‘What pills?’

‘I dunno. Pills. I thought they put people like that somewhere, but not any more. They have to be looked after in the “community”. I tried his old regiment but they didn’t want to know. Something happened to him out there, something he wouldn’t talk about.’ She looked up at Vi and her eyes were challenging. ‘What was we supposed to do? Have him destroy what we took thirty years to put together? My daughter was frightened of him.’

Poor John Sawyer. He wasn’t the first soldier to go feral on the streets of London. According to Rita Sawyer, he’d left, been chucked out or whatever almost a year ago. Since then he’d been seen by his family on Green Street, High Street North, East Ham and wandering about talking to himself on Wanstead Flats and in Central Park. Vi reckoned she’d probably seen him. But John hadn’t been a great drinker. He hadn’t come to her attention for lobbing a cider bottle of piss at anybody, unlike some of the more lairy ex-soldiers.

‘Do you know where John stayed or slept?’

‘No.’

‘You must’ve been curious about him, Mrs Sawyer.’

She took it as a criticism. ‘You try living with what we had to live with, getting no help from no-one and then you criticise me, you mare,’ she barked

It wasn’t often that Vi looked away from an interviewee. Was this woman’s apparent hardness real or a defence mechanism? She’d just turned back to look at Rita Sawyer again when she saw a single tear slide down her face.

*

When Mumtaz arrived at Ayesha Mirza’s house in Forest Gate, everyone was out. Suspecting that the woman hadn’t forgotten their appointment so much as ignored it, Mumtaz got in the Micra and drove to Patrick Road in Plaistow. And sure enough, there she was in Wendy Dixon’s front garden.

‘You and the kids have gotta come with me!’ Mrs Mirza called up towards a top-floor window.

Wendy Dixon, leaning out, shouted back, ‘Fuck off, Mary, you don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘You making money
that
way,’ Ayesha Mirza said. ‘You can’t do it Wend. You can’t. Think of the kids.’

Mumtaz, appalled, if not surprised, that Ayesha Mirza had done the opposite to what she had advised, got out of the car and went over to her. ‘Mrs Mirza …’

The woman turned and looked at her, her face red with anger and frustration. ‘Oh, Mrs Hakim,’ she said, ‘what—’

‘And don’t think I give a shit what your fucking al Qaeda mates think either!’ Wendy Dixon yelled as she looked at Mumtaz.

‘Wendy, you …’

Mumtaz put a hand on Ayesha Mirza’s arm.

‘Come and get in the car and we’ll talk,’ she said. She wanted
to say to her,
You still haven’t seen the footage you’ve paid me for. Look at it and then tell me whether you can judge your sister or not?
But she didn’t. A couple of Wendy Dixon’s neighbours were peeping through their curtains at what was going on in the street, and one of them had come out of her front door to have a look.

Ayesha Mirza looked at Mumtaz, ‘But …’

‘Come on,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Let’s go for a coffee somewhere.’

The woman let herself be led to the car while Wendy Dixon shouted, ‘Go on! Fuck off!’