A Private Business

by Barbara Nadel

  A PRIVATE BUSINESS

  A PRIVATE BUSINESS

  Barbara Nadel

  New York • London

  © 2012 by Barbara Nadel

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of the same without the permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use or anthology should send inquiries to Permissions c/o Quercus Publishing Inc., 31 West 57th Street, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10019, or to permissions@quercus.com.

  ISBN 978-1-62365-226-5

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  www.quercus.com

  Also by Barbara Nadel

  The Inspector Ikmen Series

  Belshazzar’s Daughter

  A Chemical Prison

  Arabesk

  Deep Waters

  Harem

  Petrified

  Deadly Web

  Dance with Death

  A Passion for Killing

  Pretty Dead Things

  River of the Dead

  Death by Design

  Dead of Night

  The Hancock series

  Last Rights

  After the Mourning

  Ashes to Ashes

  Sure and Certain Death

  To all the east enders who inspired my life with their stories. To my grandparents, my dad, my aunts and uncles and to the long dead people they told stories about. To Oggy, Mrs. Fawcett, the O’Malleys, “Peggy” Dooley, Dr. O’Dwyer, Mr. Kopoloff, the Boleyn Bugler, the peddlers of rags and bones who kept their horses in their houses and all the other rich and varied real life characters I was privileged to grow up with.

  Contents

  Part one

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Part Two

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Part Three

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Epilogue

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Acknowledgments

  Part One

  I

  The comedian is in full flow, effing and blinding in her usual style with the late Princess Diana as her target. She eyes a woman in the front row of the audience.

  You look shocked, sweet? Not comfortable with speaking ill of the dead? Oh, please. That woman flung herself into the public arena when she told us all about her colonic irrigation. There was nothing that was private about her! Queen of Hearts? Diana was Queen of Chat. Empress of the Exposé! Let’s face it, if she was still alive now she’d be on Jeremy Kyle trailing a whole tribe of half Egyptian children, weeping because she can’t get Disability Living Allowance.

  The audience laughs, all except one man who yells out, At least Di never became some old has-been, like you!!

  The comedian leans forward into the audience and cups a hand at the back of her ear to hear better. What’s that? Is that Bloke with no Bollocks and a Theoretical Dick, I hear?

  The audience laughs and the man says something else but no-one can hear it.

  Deal with it, mate. You’re the sort of person who thinks the Queen’s got no ring-piece, that she can’t fart and only burps rainbows. A British patriot who lives in a la-la land of ridiculous military uniforms and the divine bleeding right of kings. You’re an asshole. There’s no divine anything. Babies are babies are babies. They’re all like Joan Rivers when they come out of the womb, misshapen and screaming with fury. Even the royal ones.

  The audience laughs but the comedian’s face has turned to stone.

  Nothing’s sacred, people, nothing’s divine. There’s no such thing. Jesus was a crazy urban warrior crusty, with a bit of a Paul Daniels vibe thrown in. But he was just a bloke. He’s not sitting on a cloud somewhere, blessing all the royal babies and twanging away on his harp. It’s a fairy story! A fiction! It’s like a whitehat, black-hat cowboy story for mad people. It’s …

  The comedian staggers slightly and looks confused as if she can’t remember what she’s doing. It’s … She puts a hand up to her head, her eyes glaze over and then she collapses.

  The woman, who would not give her name, was tall and elegant. A well-preserved fifty or so, she wore a beautifully cut trouser suit with a peacock-blue Hermès scarf wrapped turban-like around her head. Her slim face was almost completely eclipsed by large Jackie-O-style sunglasses which did not, however, manage to obscure her eyes. They didn’t know how to be, those eyes; fearful and elated, ashamed and even possibly guilty and yet, at the same time, furious—intensely, madly furious too. Mumtaz had seen eyes like that before and she wondered what terrible thing was happening or had happened to this woman.

  “Can I get you anything?” Mumtaz asked. “Tea? Coffee?”

  “No.” There was a pause. “Thanks.”

  Her voice was cockney with a veneer of “proper” speech laid over the top. Mumtaz imagined that, given the good clothes and the general demeanor of the woman, she came from a “nice” part of the borough, or maybe from somewhere outside, possibly the Isle of Dogs, Ilford or Chigwell. There was also something vaguely familiar about her but Mumtaz couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

  The woman stared down at her watch. Mumtaz looked at the clock on the wall and realized that she’d been in her awkward presence for just over an hour. Given her own comparative newness to the business, together with the feelings those eyes were evoking in her, Mumtaz didn’t know whether she wanted to run away or somehow force the woman to tell a story that was clearly bursting to get out of her. In the end she opted for neither and just considered the old computer screen on her desk. She knew why Lee didn’t invest in more modern equipment but it was still annoying to be forced to put up with such antiques. When Shazia had seen her office, she’d laughed. That was the first time she’d done that since her father’s death, so Lee’s old rubbish served some sort of purpose even if the production of a professional-looking letter wasn’t part of it.

  Shifting in her chair, the woman looked as if she was about to say something but then she appeared to change her mind. Mumtaz went back to composing the letter Lee had asked her to write to
Mr. Savva, their landlord. He’d put the office rent up but, given the parlous state of the company finances, it just wasn’t possible to pay him. Lee had told her to tell him to shove his rent “where the sun don’t shine.” She had translated that into rather more diplomatic language but was now struggling to read what she’d written on the cracked, scarred monitor screen. Looking at it produced a kind of double vision that made her feel vaguely sick, and not for the first time she considered bringing a laptop in from home. There were, after all, several about. Shazia had her own—it wouldn’t be a problem—but just the thought of it made Mumtaz shudder. Those machines had been Ahmed’s. The woman saw her body flinch, but she didn’t say anything to her.

  Mumtaz regretted not having brought any magazines in to the office for waiting clients. It had never even occurred to Lee, but then men didn’t generally think about things like that. If they did, the magazines they chose were usually about cars or golf or caravans. The smart woman in the Hermès scarf probably liked to read rather serious women’s magazines. True-life stories of people being incinerated by their ex-boyfriends and celebrities in “crisis” were unlikely, Mumtaz felt, to be her thing. Her handbag was understated quality and she wore a small and discreet gold cross around her neck. In spite of her confusion she had nothing to prove; in some areas of her life, she was as she was and she possessed a degree of comfort with that. Only her eyes, trembling and shimmering with feelings she was clearly failing to cope with, gave her away—that and the fact that she was in that office at all.

  “Mate, I’m not being funny or anything, but quite honestly, I don’t give a flying fuck whether you get paid today, last week, next Thursday or when the saints go marching in. You owe me money.” Lee Arnold was calm, but the man sitting beside him wasn’t. Lee smiled. “Bob, mate, the rent’s due on the office—just gone up as a matter of fact—the oven’s crying out for Mr. Muscle, I’m out of bird food and I could do with a diet Coke.”

  “Oh …” The man, a small sort called Bob Singleton, got up, went straight over to the bar and ordered Lee a pint of diet Coke. The three old geezers sitting by the open door to the public bar looked at Lee. One of them flicked his cigarette ash out into Green Street while the other two laughed bronchitically.

  “You wanna get money out of Bob the Builder you better bring a crowbar with you next time, son!” the fag smoker said to Lee.

  “Yeah, right,” Lee said gloomily.

  Bob Singleton looked around resentfully at the men but he didn’t say anything. He just paid for Lee’s drink and then took it over to him. The Boleyn was quiet this lunchtime and so Lee’s latest attempt at getting Bob the Builder to settle his bill was just about the only show in town. The three old men watched him sit down.

  Bob moved in close to Lee and said, “Look, I done this extension for this posh bird over Wanstead and she’s, well, she ain’t exactly satisfied …”

  “So she’s not paid you,” Lee said. “At all.”

  Bob, embarrassed, looked down at the floor and said, “No.”

  It was well known that Bob was one of the few soletrader builders in the East End who didn’t ask for any money up front. It was also well known that all his work was terrible, he suffered from appalling halitosis and was as tight as a gnat’s ass. Was it any wonder that his wife had been having an affair with an Indian restaurant owner for the last six months?

  “Well, you’d better go back and put whatever mess you left that lady in right, then, hadn’t you,” Lee said. Then he pointed a finger up at Bob’s face. “Because if I can’t clean that oven and, more importantly, if I can’t pay my assistant, there will be consequences.”

  Bob, who had known Lee Arnold for most of his life, knew when he was being serious and when he was not. He swallowed hard. “You have to give me till Friday,” he said.

  Lee Arnold looked down his long Roman nose at the small, grubby man at his side and he said, “Friday morning and no longer. If I don’t get it on Friday …”

  “I know! I know!” Bob Singleton waved his hands in the air. “It all comes on top and—”

  “Pay me and you’ll never find out,” Lee said in a voice the whole pub could easily hear.

  The three old men opposite looked very seriously at each other, then two of them lit up cigarettes. Aware that everyone was watching him now, Bob the Builder muttered something to Lee about “having confidence in him” and then he left.

  The oldest of the three old men frowned and then said to Lee, “You think you’ll ever see him again, do you?”

  Lee took a swig from his glass. “If I don’t his missus’ll get a visit from me,” he said.

  “Oh!” All three old men laughed.

  “What’s that then, Lee?” the shortest cigarette smoker said. “You gonna help yourself to Tracey, are you?”

  For the first time that day, Lee Arnold’s face just barely cracked a smile. “No, that’d be wrong,” he said. “And anyway, Tracey’s got enough problems of her own, without me. She’s got Bob.”

  “So what’s the plan then?”

  As Lee stood up to knock back his Coke, they all huddled around him like a pack of eager, wrinkled puppies. “Bob’s got the odd little secret that I’m sure Tracey would find of interest,” he said. “It’s up to him, really, isn’t it. He pays me what he owes me and Tracey’s none the wiser. He doesn’t do that …” He shrugged.

  The oldest old man shook his head appreciatively. “You’re a cool customer, Lee Arnold.”

  Lee picked his coat up off the seat beside him and put it on. “Thanks, Harry,” he said to the ancient. Then he turned to the others and added, “Fred, Wilf, see ya.”

  Parting like the waves of the sea as he moved through them, the old men all watched Lee’s tall figure head toward the public bar door. Just before he actually left, Wilf, a fag hanging limply out of the side of his mouth said, “Here, Lee, how’s that new girl of yours coming along? She any good, is she?”

  Lee turned, his face pulled into a frown now, and he said, “Do you know, boys, I don’t really know. Time’ll tell I suppose.” And then he left.

  Once out on Green Street, Lee properly considered what he had just been asked and he decided that it was a real puzzler. Mrs. Hakim, Mumtaz, was a religious Muslim widow lady who wrote very good letters and made a mean cup of tea. Well-spoken and very polite, he nevertheless wondered how she’d cope hiding in the back of a van with a load of blokes and no access to a toilet.

  As one hour dribbled over into two, she started to think that maybe going to the police would have been the better option after all, but then she pulled herself together. That was impossible and anyway it was too late now. She’d already invested too much time firstly tracking down this place and then sitting about for over an hour doing nothing. Also, it was a private matter. What she’d come to a private detective about was something the world did not need to know.

  Every so often the Asian woman, who although not actually covered was well and truly headscarfed, looked up at her and smiled. She was very attractive, probably in her early thirties, and she had enormous moss-green eyes which she made up beautifully and with some skill. Slim and dressed modestly but very stylishly, she was rather a strange character to find working in a private detective’s office. Women like her—from the look of her clothes and her make-up she probably had a wealthy husband—usually stayed in the home.

  “I’m so sorry about the wait.” She smiled again. “I’m sure Mr. Arnold won’t be long now.”

  But she looked embarrassed, the Asian woman. What Mr. Arnold was going to be like was both intriguing and worrying. With a tiny office up a rickety flight of stairs behind a dusty Greek barber’s shop on Green Street, Upton Park, it was unlikely that he was earning enough to pay forty percent tax. But did that mean that he wasn’t any good?

  She had a mental picture in her head of what a private detective was like but she also knew that it was probably very inaccurate. For a start she’d never imagined that any sort of private eye would ha
ve a headscarfed Muslim woman for a secretary, but then maybe that said more about her than it did about Mr. Arnold’s practice. Was Mr. Arnold, in fact, Asian himself? Green Street had had a massive Asian presence for decades and even if “Arnold” wasn’t an obviously Asian name maybe it was the handle he’d taken for some reason best known to himself. Before she’d just turned up without an appointment, she’d had a few fantasies about what he was going to be like. Undoubtedly inspired by the cinema and TV, she imagined Arnold to be either some vaguely dusty East End geezer who smelt of beer and fags or some elegant and dashing Philip Marlowe creation. As it turned out he was something between the two.

  The office door opened to reveal a tall, dark, handsome, forty something man with a pronounced Roman nose who smelt of pub and fags and who looked at her and said, “Ah.”

  She took her sunglasses off and watched his features recognize her.

  “Oh, Mr. Arnold,” the Asian woman said, “this lady—”

  “I know exactly who this lady is, Mumtaz,” Lee Arnold said, and then he turned to her and smiled. “Shall we go into my office and have a chat? Assuming that’s what you’re here for.”

  “I’m being watched,” she said baldly.

  Lee offered her a chair opposite his desk and said, “Let’s pedal back a bit from that, shall we?”

  “I’m really frightened.” She sat.

  “Miss Peters, before we get into any of that, I have to know what a lady like you is doing in a place like this,” Lee said. “First time I saw you was at the Hackney Empire back in the late eighties. Then suddenly every time I switched the telly on, there you were.”