Poisoned Ground: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 3) (11 page)

‘Oh, he played the field,’ Barry said. ‘Proper tart. I dunno what he done with Sandra but I doubt it was the same as what he got in massage parlours up west.’

‘Do you think he could have asked his wife for a divorce because he was gay?’

‘I don’t think he would’ve wanted to hurt her,’ Barry said. ‘But I s’pose that had to be at the bottom of it, whether Sandra knew or not. I’m surprised they lasted so long.’

‘Sandra Rivers is rich,’ Lee said.

‘That’s cynical.’

‘What else am I supposed to think?’

‘He loved her, you know.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yeah.’

An account of Phil Rivers agonising over deceiving his wife and his parents about his sexuality made Lee feel even more tired than he had been before the conversation. If he’d loved his wife that much he would have told her. He just wanted to have his cake and eat it.

Barry Barber claimed not to know where Phil was or who had
beaten Lee up. And, as things stood, there wasn’t a lot of arguing with that. He certainly hadn’t been amongst the men who had thumped him but that didn’t necessarily mean that he didn’t know where Phil was. When Lee ended the call he made a note to contact Barry Barber again some time in the near future. Then he called Derek Salmon.

‘The police contacted me this morning,’ the solicitor said. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Nothing heavy pain control can’t help,’ Lee said. But he was aware that his joke was like whistling in the dark. Being back, albeit just for a short time, on opiate medication again was nerve-wracking and he wondered how he’d cope once the pain went away. Last time he’d been in this situation he’d found himself hooked for years. He lit another cigarette and threw half the co-codamol tablets he’d been given in the wastepaper bin.

‘You still in hospital?’ Derek Salmon asked.

‘No. I’m back at work.’

‘You twat. Look I’ll understand if you want off the case.’

‘Nah.’ Lee told him about his conversation with Barry Barber.

‘Barry reckons Sandra Rivers doesn’t know,’ Lee said.

‘You wanna ask her?’

‘You’re the client, what do you think?’

‘Well, someone’s got it in for you for some reason, Lee, and so I think we play our cards close to our chests until we find out who that is,’ Derek said. ‘Can you think of any old lags who might have issues with you?’

‘Only dozens,’ Lee said. ‘So keep Sandra in the dark for now?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘I’ll try and find out whether he was seeing anyone when he sold the house.’

‘Are you going back to Southend?’

‘As soon as I can.’

‘Do you plan to confront Phil’s father?’

‘I don’t see I’ve got a choice,’ Lee said. ‘He was throwing a lot of money up the wall, Del. Phil’s rolling around somewhere with a load of dosh, why not give some to his dad?’

‘Mmm. Agreed. But try not to startle the old couple too much.’

‘Old couple?’ Lee shook his head. ‘I haven’t had sight of the old woman.’

‘Doesn’t mean she’s not in the flat.’

‘No, but …’

‘Just go carefully, Lee,’ Derek said. ‘We don’t know where the old man got that money from.’

‘No, but we know where it’s going.’

‘Be that as it may. Just go easy.’

The solicitor ended the conversation. For a moment, Lee didn’t know what to do next. With Mumtaz out at Ilford Hospital he felt he should go into the office and pick up any answerphone messages. But he was really too tired to move. In the end he put the television on and fell asleep to a programme about antiques.

*

Mumtaz had got into her car and was just about to start the engine when she realized she’d left her watch in the toilet. She’d taken it off to wash her hands and had forgotten to pick it up. She walked back into the hospital admin block and ran down the corridor towards the staff canteen and the toilets. She’d only been in there at most five minutes before and so there was a good chance her watch would still be on the sink. She found it immediately.

Relieved, she walked sedately out of the toilets and put her
watch on outside the staff canteen. She heard raised voices. Both male, one sounded foreign.

‘Look, this is your first job,’ she heard the foreigner say. ‘Suck it up, man!’

‘I can’t,’ an English voice replied.

‘This sort of thing goes on all the time,’ the other man said. ‘You have to learn to wait. It’s a hierarchy here. It’s institutional.’

Could the foreign voice belong to el Masri?

‘It shouldn’t be.’

‘I know that!’ the foreigner said, ‘I like you. I want … You think I like it?’

‘No.’

‘We all do what we do to survive. For now, for you, that means that you just work and forget everything else. Your time will come. You understand?’

There was one small porthole window in the canteen door and Mumtaz tried to look through it. But she heard footsteps moving towards her and she began to walk away. When she got to the end of the corridor she turned. She saw someone leaving the canteen, but she couldn’t see who it was.

‘Tone?’ Lee could hear the voice through the receiver rasping like a cartoon snake eating sandpaper.

Tony Bracci rolled his eyes and mouthed, ‘The guv’nor.’

They were both sitting in Lee’s kitchen after their first night as flatmates. It hadn’t been easy for Lee to raise the subject of his messed-up spare bed or the coffee cup, but when Tony had come back the previous evening he’d owned up immediately. After almost thirty years of marriage, his wife had thrown him out and moved a younger model in. Until Lee had gone to Southend, Tony had been sleeping in his car. And although he’d got accustomed to living alone since his divorce and had started to prefer it, Lee hadn’t been able to just chuck his old mate out.

‘Yes, guv,’ Tony said. He put a finger in the ear that wasn’t on the phone and took out a small plug of wax. Lee, nervously, watched him roll it into a ball.

He heard Vi say, ‘What’s going on?’

‘Not a lot.’ Mindlessly Tony squashed the ball of wax into one of the legs of his trousers. Every nerve in Lee’s body screamed. How could he do that?

‘Lee Arnold out of hospital?’

‘Yes,’ Tony said. ‘He’s at home resting.’

She laughed. ‘Expect me to believe he’s resting?’

‘I don’t know, guv,’ Tony said. ‘That’s what he told me.’

‘So what’s he been working on that got him beaten up?’

This time Lee rolled his eyes. Vi was a good copper and a great mate but she was also never off for a second, which was wearing.

‘I don’t know, guv,’ Tony said. ‘In relation to the assault, Dagenham have it, ask them.’

‘I can’t ask them!’

‘Then I can’t help you, guv.’

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Never mind. You’re off sick.’

‘Tony!’

Against his better judgement, Lee took Tony’s phone out of his hand. He couldn’t bear to see him suffer any longer.

‘Vi,’ he said. ‘Lee.’

‘Oh.’

‘In answer to your question, I’m watching cheap chat shows on the telly today and Tony’s trying to do his job in spite of you.’

‘I was just—’

‘You were meddling, Vi,’ Lee said. ‘You’re sick, be sick. Like I am. And leave Tony alone.’

There was a pause and then she said, ‘What’s Tony doing at your place, Arnold?’

The lie came out smoothly. ‘He brought my car back from Dagenham. All right? Now butt out, Vi.’

Lee ended the call and gave Tony’s phone back to him. Tony looked down at the floor. ‘Thanks, mate. I’ll make sure you get your car back today.’

‘Cheers. Does Vi know about your situation?’

‘She knows I’m having marital problems,’ Tony said.

‘She doesn’t know you’ve been chucked out?’

‘No.’

Tony had a big mortgage on the house he’d once shared with his wife and children and so Lee knew he couldn’t afford rent on top. He also knew that Tony was very proud and wouldn’t feel able to tell his family about his troubles. Again, the words just slipped out of Lee Arnold’s mouth. ‘You can stay here as long as you like,’ he said.

‘Ta, mate. I’ll pay you.’

He sounded genuine but Lee just couldn’t do it. ‘No, just buy some food, the odd packet of fags and we’ll be quits.’

Tony’s big face smiled. ‘You’ll hardly know I’m here, mate. Promise.’

If the untidy bed and the dirty coffee cup he’d left in the spare room were anything to go by, Lee doubted that.

*

Shirley Mayfield looked at what she’d just written again. She put a line through it and chucked it into the bin. It was a lie. For all his madness, Dylan Smith knew when he’d been hit and by whom. Timothy Pool’s arrogance was growing. And she, amongst others, was allowing that.

She’d wanted to spend the previous morning with the new advocate so that she could, to some extent, control her first exposure to Roy and Mandy. Roy especially could veer off into his own obsessions and she didn’t want Mumtaz Huq to be put off. But Dylan Smith had sent a message from the forensic ward and so she’d had to leave them to it. When she’d got onto Forensic, Dylan had been sitting in his room, holding his face. When he looked up his left eye was half closed. By the next day it would be all the colours of the rainbow. His story, supported by no one, was that Timothy Pool had just hit him for no reason. Timothy, supported by every member of staff on shift, said that
Dylan had attacked him. The black eye had been inflicted in self-defence.

Timothy usually came across with self-righteous indignation whenever he had issues with service users. But this time he had been smug too. However, what was more significant still was that his staff, usually unconditionally supportive, had looked uncomfortable. None of them had wanted to talk much and she noticed that a couple of them couldn’t actually return Dylan’s damaged gaze. The ward manager was turning into an increasingly vicious autocrat and nobody was going to do anything about it. Shirley remembered little Sara Ibrahim again, even though she tried very hard not to. Dylan’s smashed-up face and Sara’s sweet one melded in her head. How could she have told the advocates that Timothy Pool was innocent?

She’d have to get a new job. She’d looked at the
Guardian
’s charity work vacancies page online but didn’t find much. There was one mental health job, coordinating a befriending project in Hackney, but everything else was voluntary work. Shirley often felt desperate. Her husband had left her years ago and the kids had gone so now she had to pay all the costs on her house herself. That meant all the bills plus the mortgage. She had to work. But it was costing her in ways that had nothing to do with money.

Things hadn’t been right before Sara’s death. There had been rumours – about what happened at night, about what certain members of staff did and why. Timothy Pool was vicious. Roy had ended up on Forensic for a bit a few years back and always claimed that Pool had once punched him until he’d passed out. Dr el Masri was a lecher whose eager hands, it was said, sometimes got the better of him. And then there had been Sara. Who had raped her? Had it been Dr el Masri? It was well known that
he hadn’t been on friendly terms with the other Egyptian in the hospital. Nurse Hatem el Shamy, later known to all staff as ‘the bomber’, had been a particular friend to Sara Ibrahim. But had he taken advantage of that?

Shirley had only ever worked in the community before coming to Ilford. She’d been advocate in residence at a day centre in Barking. There the patients needs were complex – they frequently required support when visiting the Jobcentre, help with housing, going to their GPs – but they weren’t trapped in an institution where personalities became larger than life, enmities festered and nights were long and drug-addled. What was real and what wasn’t had become blurred, although the line drawn by the management and the clinical lead, in the person of Mr Cotton, was clear. Patients were generally deluded and staff told the truth. Shirley had bought into that via her deeds but never in her mind. Years before she’d done a short Open University psychology course. She didn’t remember a lot about it but one thing that had stuck was the notion of cognitive dissonance. This was where a person did one thing whilst thinking the opposite or vice versa. Her whole working life had become a classic example of cognitive dissonance.

What could she do? The thought of going through the process of getting a new job again frightened her. She was the wrong side of fifty and she had the odd health issue. Realistically, she was best off staying at Ilford until it closed and then taking early retirement. Except that the thought of doing that made her feel suicidal. There was another option, however, and Shirley considered it.

She could do her job the way it was supposed to be done. But that was the scariest option of all.

*

Mumtaz left a message.

‘Shazia,’ she said, ‘it’s Amma. The solicitor called and we’ve got a moving date. It’s Monday the twenty-second. That gives us just under three weeks. Our new landlord says it’s fine to move in that day and so it’s all settled. Hope you’re having a good day.’

She ended the call and spent a few moments feeling content. Things were far from perfect but at least once the move was over she could tick it off her list of things to do. And once she’d got Shazia away to university, she could think about tackling the Sheikhs – or not. Maybe being in debt to them forever was her fate?

The entry phone buzzed.

‘Who is it?’

A woman said, ‘It’s Amy.’

‘Oh, hi,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Come in.’ She opened the door.

Amy Reid was a young ex-policewoman who worked for the Arnold Agency from time to time on a freelance basis. Lee had a small stable of people he used in this way and they’d almost all been in the police. Recently married, Amy had a spring in her step, which was obvious from the way her feet clattered rapidly on the iron stairs outside.

‘Hi, Mumtaz.’ She almost ran into the office and Mumtaz smiled. Blonde and fit, Amy was always good company and she enjoyed seeing her. But then her smile froze on her face.

‘So, this is the office,’ Naz Sheikh said.

‘Oh, Mumtaz, I met this gentleman outside,’ Amy said. ‘I think he wants to use our services …’

Mumtaz cleared her throat. Aware that her face was hot she said, ‘Ah, well, sir, maybe you’d like to make an appointment. I’m afraid we don’t see people without one.’

‘Oh?’

He was a good actor. But then so was she. ‘I’ve a meeting now so maybe you can give us a call later?’ She handed him one of her cards.

‘Well, thank you, I will,’ Naz said. ‘Soon.’

She smiled, widely. ‘You do that.’

Amy looked at her a little strangely. Had she gone a bit over the top with the fake bonhomie?

‘I will,’ Naz said. ‘You can count on it.’

He left and Mumtaz shut the door behind him. She heard his feet run down the iron staircase.

‘He was cute,’ Amy said.

‘Was he?’

Amy sat down in front of Mumtaz’s desk. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t believe it when I saw him outside the office.’

‘Where was he?’ Mumtaz sat down before she fell down. Having Naz in the office even for just seconds had been stressful.

‘Oh, he was at the top of the staircase,’ Amy said. ‘Nervous about ringing the bell. I don’t know, maybe he’s got some really embarrassing problem. Unfaithful wife or something.’

At the top of the stairs. How long had he been there, on his own, listening to her making calls through the office door? Mumtaz felt her skin go cold. He knew his money was coming and so this stunt had to be a mind game. Naz liked those.

‘So what’s the job?’

Mumtaz hardly heard her. ‘Eh?’

‘The job, Mumtaz. You said something about a Polish woman …’

‘Ah yes. A Mrs …’ she looked down at a piece of paper on her desk – ‘Brzezinski. She’s worried her sixteen-year-old son is dealing drugs on her estate.’

She passed Amy the photograph the boy’s mother had pushed through the letterbox. He was blond, spotty and clearly cultivated a moody look.

‘Where do they live?’

‘The Keir Hardie Estate in Canning Town.’

‘Some of that’s quite desirable these days,’ Amy said.

‘Not where they live,’ Mumtaz said. ‘And the boy, Antoni, isn’t working or at college. He’s just hanging about the streets, according to his mother. She wants him followed.’

‘OK.’

‘Also because Lee’s likely to be off sick this week I was wondering if you could be in the office for me on Friday?’

‘Yeah,’ Amy said. ‘That’s fine. Hey, Mumtaz, is Lee OK? God, whoever beat him up must have been an animal. Lee’s really hard, you know.’

‘It was two men,’ Mumtaz said.

‘Ah, well, that makes sense. Poor old Lee, though. Harsh.’

When Amy finally left, Mumtaz felt exhausted. Just trying to be normal after an appearance from Naz had taken it out of her. And then her mobile phone began to ring and she saw that it was him. She switched it off, but then the office phone rang and she had to answer that. It was Naz, but all he said was, ‘Like your girlfriend. Like blondes.’

And then he cut the connection.

*

The fridge was full of stuff Susan wasn’t sure Lee could eat. When he’d called first thing and said he’d be back the next day, she’d gone out to Sainsbury’s and bought a load of food. She’d been a bit of a mare to him when he’d visited her before and she
wanted to make up for it. But with a broken jaw, albeit repaired, what could he actually get down?

She was pretty certain that the steak had been a mistake and she’d had a bit of a funny moment when she’d bought the vegetarian lasagne. Not in any way Lee’s sort of thing. But she had also got a load of cakes and she knew he liked those. Although whether he could get his battered mouth around a doughnut was another matter.

In the hospital he’d looked so vulnerable in that bed with his face all bruised and swollen. Like a wounded soldier. His mother had been a pain in the bum, not giving them a second to themselves, but then Susan recognized that she must’ve been worried too. And anyway, now Lee was out of hospital, he was coming to see her, not his mum, even if it was for work.

Susan didn’t know what Lee was working on in Southend. She suspected it had something to do with her casino, although Lee had denied it. But if it wasn’t anything to do with the casino then why had he been so interested in their high rollers? He’d said it was because he found the behaviour of gamblers fascinating but that sounded to Susan like a speech he’d picked up from Mumtaz. She had a degree in psychology or sociology or something.

Since Lee’s beating, the old man who’d lost a lot of dosh the previous week, Kenny, had been back twice. Probably desperate to try to win some of his money back, he’d lost big again on both occasions. Usually he didn’t behave as if he cared, but Dale the doorman had said that when he’d put him in his cab to go home the second time, Kenny had been visibly shaken. But then he wasn’t rich, was he? Dale always got him a cab to or from his home, which was at the far end of the Golden Mile. Nobody with any money lived round there, unless Kenny was an eccentric
millionaire with a liking for working girls and candyfloss. Which was always possible.