Maria Peters and her party pulled out of her drive and down to the Romford Road. She was going to go through Stratford and, briefly, onto the A12, then she’d turn off onto the old industrial site. Neil knew the area. He was in a car he hadn’t used before, his brother’s old Nissan Micra which had no turn of speed whatsoever but it was anonymous and it never broke down. He had the route and so he let Maria get almost out of sight before he followed. It was a gray, drizzly, misty London morning and although there was a fair bit of traffic on the roads they were hardly packed so it was all plain sailing until Neil reached the A12.
It wasn’t mist, it was fog, getting denser by the second as he followed a white van down from Stratford High Street and onto the roundabout that would take him onto the A12. He wasn’t old enough to remember the London smogs of the nineteen fifties but his dad had told him enough for him to be able to imagine what they must have been like. There had, his dad had always said, been a sort of a green tinge to them, like a whiff of arsenic. The stuff he was driving through was faintly green. Or was he just imagining that? He followed the van, secure in where he was going, where he had to be. Maria’s car, out of sight, was up ahead.
Leaving the van on the A12, Neil took the Old Ford exit and negotiated the awkward Tredegar Road junction. Turning on to Wick Lane he was almost there. Strangely for such a short journey in familiar territory he felt nervous. It was probably the fog—that or the notion of going to a church. Neil knew so little about religion. When he was a kid some Catholic boy at school had told him about the Holy Ghost and he hadn’t slept for a week. Apparently it was everywhere.
The car in front, an Astra, turned right into Monier Road and Neil allowed himself a second to take in all the breakers’ yards and empty warehouses on both sides of the road until, facing front, he found himself looking at a metal barrier and a pair of very cold blue eyes. “What the …” Neil slammed his right foot down on the brake, bringing the car to a halt in front of the temporary metal barrier. The Astra in front was already on its way. Neil wound his window down. “What’s going on?” he asked the man with the bright blue eyes. The man shrugged.
“That’s no bloody answer!” Neil said. “What’s going on?”
“Is bad holes in road,” the man said. Probably some sort of eastern European. Where the fuck had the Olympic jobs for the locals gone? Neil fumed. “So fucking what?” he said to the man. “This is Hackney Wick, it’s full of holes.”
“Is dangerous. Cannot see.” The man placed the barrier on the ground and put a hand up to the gray sky, tinged with green.
Neil pointed to the retreating Astra. “You let him go!” he said. “Why you stopping me?”
The man shrugged again. “Boss tells me only now. Your bad luck, I think.”
Neil, red with fury now, looked at the barrier, the fog and the blank-faced man and remembered just how scared he had once been of the Holy Ghost.
Maria was still shaking. Although he’d very patiently sat in the back of the car and just waited, she’d been able to feel how worried Pastor Grint had been. He’d kept on fiddling with his scarf, taking his gloves on and off nervously. At one time he’d handed her his sermon while he rearranged his coat and then he’d taken it back again. She didn’t want to let him down! But all the road priorities had changed so none of them had known where on earth they were going. The satnav had been completely useless. She’d taken what had proved to be a silly detour and there’d been a real danger of not making it in time for the service.
She jumped out of the car quickly and looked around as discreetly as she could for any sign of Neil West, but there was none. Although she was amongst friends she felt exposed and alone. It had taken her two days to open the box down by the side of the TV. Two days! It had of course been empty, but it had also been a Clarks shoebox and that indicated knowledge. Like Not funny, it came from a time she would rather forget. Lee Arnold had seen her looking at it, must have seen her open it. He’d asked her about it twice, but she’d just played it down and said it was nothing.
“Marie! Are you coming?”
Maria turned around and saw Betty standing at the back of the queue to go inside. The last Sunday in every month was Sunday Lunch Fellowship Day and Betty was struggling to carry a cake tin full of sausage rolls she’d brought to add to the meal. People brought all sorts of things. Often they cooked them themselves which Maria admired enormously. But she couldn’t do that and so her own contribution consisted of a range of sweet treats from Marks and Spencer.
“Come on!” Betty said. “We’re late!”
The mist split as Maria walked through it toward her friend. She put a tranquilizer under her tongue and swallowed hard. Sunday Lunch Fellowship was always well attended and so there were a lot of people clutching food and bottles of soft drink in front of them. Maria joined Betty, aware of a pervading smell of sour bodies on the air. More of the local homeless than usual had come for a blow-out, but then that was part of the point. As Pastor Grint always said, to feed a person’s soul one must first ensure that his body is fed. Hungry people could not concentrate.
“A lot of cars here today,” Betty said as she looked at the large piece of waste ground that constituted the car park. “A good turnout considering the difficulties with the roads changing and that. I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m always amazed at how thirsty for the Word people are, especially from Pastor Grint.” She turned her one remaining beautiful feature, her startling violet eyes, on Maria’s face and she smiled. “It’s truly the end of days, isn’t it? The Lord draws near in all his wrath and all his mercy. Can’t you just feel the shimmer of the Rapture in the air, Marie?”
Maria fought to suppress a shudder. Time was short. The Rapture, the taking up of Jesus’s own into heaven was coming and she had to do what was right soon. Maria knew what that meant.
* * *
The Archers. He’d driven what felt like all over East London in the fucking fog and all Neil had to help him calm down was the tale of some bunch of touchy farming folk somewhere just outside Birmingham. He turned the dial on the Micra’s antediluvian radio and found the racket that was Radio 1—not that Radio 2 was any better. Some sort of love songs request show. Ugh. Maria didn’t want him in church with her so Neil wished he’d brought some CDs to help pass the time—except that the car didn’t have anything to play them on. Oh, for an iPod! But then at just over fifty, Neil always felt a twat when he listened to his in public. The oldest fucking swinger in town.
The happy-clappies had gone in by the time he’d arrived. What had been the front door of the old factory had been well and truly closed and now they were all singing. He could also hear guitars, which reminded him of that terrible church social his mate Steve had taken him to when they were kids. Steve’s family had been born-agains and they’d been forever inviting him to one church thing or another. He went just the once. There’d been two young blokes in tank tops playing “modern Christian music” up on a stage at the back of an old chapel in Ilford. They’d all been so bloody smiley, it had made Neil want to open his veins. When, he wondered, had born-agains become almost exclusively black and African? This Chapel of the Pentecostal whatever had to be some sort of freakish exception to attract its mainly white congregation. Neil wondered what else apart from singing was going on in there. He wondered if they had a secret stash of dancing girls somewhere, or booze or drugs.
He gave up on the radio and turned The Archers off. The only book he’d managed to grab before he left the house was some load of old pony about vampires his daughter kept banging on about. Neil didn’t “do” newspapers, even on a Sunday. He got out of the car and lit up a fag. His brother Dennis had given up three years ago and he wouldn’t allow smoking within a ten mile radius of him or his family, and that included his cars. Through the mist he could see the outline of the massive Olympic media center; it almost over-shadowed the main stadium. If size had anything to do with it, then the Olympics themselves were almost an irrelevance. It was the spin
that was important, how the thing was presented, which media organizations got the biggest cuts of the Olympic cake and how much merchandise could be shifted off the back of the games. The athletes themselves had nothing but Neil’s admiration, but the rest of it? To blast Hackney Wick almost off the face of the earth for the sake of two weeks in 2012 … No. Neil looked around, remembering how the old Wick had been, anticipating the emptiness that would follow on from the demolition of all the old factories and industrial units, including the church. He began to walk.
The area had needed some sort of redevelopment, but had it needed this? A load of artists had moved into all the old empty factories, pubs and yards some years back and although Neil didn’t exactly understand modern art, he applauded the young artists’ gumption to get up and do it for themselves. It wasn’t right that so many of them were having to go. It wasn’t right that the old allotments had gone or that the smoked salmon plant had had to relocate. All for some sort of prestige only a very small minority gave a toss about. Neil wandered around the church—he couldn’t go too far away. He heard a load of voices shout “Hallelujah!” and he smiled. Just like Steve’s old church. A load of people with their arms in the air, listening to guitars, waiting for the end of the world. Neil leaned up against the side of the building, finished his fag, lit up another and waited. They were all going to have lunch together after the service. It was going to be a long old shift.
All the food had looked and smelt really lovely, but Maria hadn’t been in the mood. In a strange sense, in just this one respect, she wished that she was still a Catholic. She could understand, and actually wanted, formalized confession. This ridding of the soul of sin in preparation for Christ’s love and the Rapture that Pastor Grint talked about just served to confuse her. How did you do that? Did you speak directly to Jesus? Did someone in the church help you in some way?
Everyone was still eating but Maria needed some fresh air. It had been a very emotional and upbeat service during which many people had been saved and two women had been healed. She never got over the sheer amazingness of the miracles. Christianity had never been like this when she’d been a child. All the Catholic miracles had taken place in dark grottos; they’d all been performed by saints who had flagellated themselves for decades. There had been no worlds beyond that one could actually imagine. Just gold-covered bones and darkness and waste and fearful, awful sex. There had been no Rapture. Jesus was coming—soon—and everyone had to be ready. All clean and ready.
Maria looked down at the cracked and filthy pavement and knew that she could murder a drink—or a joint. She looked up and saw Neil West leaning against his car. Even though she was alone she didn’t let him know that she’d seen him. Neither he nor his boss or anyone could really help her. All these shadows which may or may not be real had to be faced and they had to be faced alone.
Maria walked over to her car and put the bag she’d brought the cakes in in the boot. When she moved around to the driver’s side her eye was caught by something white on her seat. She could see that it was either a piece of paper or card. She opened the car door and took whatever it was in her hands. DEATH ISN’T FUNNY.
Maria dropped the card on the ground and started to scream. She found that in spite of herself, she couldn’t stop. Neil West ran over to her and, when he saw what she had seen, he started dialing a number on his mobile phone.
XI
“Did you lock the car up when you went into the church?” Vi asked.
“I don’t know! I’ve been trying to tell you!” Maria Peters said.
“All right,” Vi said. “Let’s put it this way. When you came out of church did you have to unlock your car to put the bag you brought the cakes in into the boot?”
But Maria couldn’t remember that either. She was still too traumatized by what she’d found in her car and by the police. Neil West had given her no choice. “This has to be a police matter now,” he’d said. “This could be perceived as a death threat.”
“No it isn’t!” she’d insisted. But she couldn’t tell him or anyone else why that was. She couldn’t tell them about the note on Len’s grave, about the shoebox … She wasn’t ready. She knew it was wrong, but she just wasn’t. She’d thought that she was only being stalked—or going mad—but it was worse than that.
“I don’t want any of this!” she said when the forensic people arrived. That hard-faced woman copper was talking about interviewing everyone in church—it was ridiculous! “I want you all to go away!”
Neil West was hanging around with the other police officers, blending in. Maria wanted to ring Lee Arnold and tell him to call the whole thing off, everything, but she couldn’t do that in front of all these people.
Betty, at her side, said, “Marie, you should let these officers help you or let them get on with something else. They’re busy people.”
She didn’t know what had happened. Maria hadn’t wanted anyone to see what she’d seen. The police had taken the note and now they were looking in the car, asking her questions about whether or not she’d locked it up. She didn’t know!
“We have to check any CCTV footage we can get,” Vi Collins said. Maria Peters was looking even rougher than she had done when she’d seen her break down in Camden.
“Can’t you leave these people alone?” Maria asked Vi through her tears. “They haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I’m not saying they have,” Vi said. “But if you’ve been threatened, ma’am, I have to try and find out who’s doing it. Do you see?”
“Yes …”
Neil West hadn’t seen a thing, but then he’d arrived late and he had gone for a bit of a stroll around the side of the building. There’d been enough time for someone to put something in the car provided it had been left open… or whoever did it had a key. At first Neil had thought that this real piece of hard evidence proved that Maria was not delusional or manipulative, but it didn’t. She could have planted the sheet of paper on the seat herself. Why she would do such a thing was another matter.
“I don’t want to take this any further.”
A young copper was taking down details from Pastor Grint and Maria couldn’t bear it. She ran over and pushed the policeman aside. “Leave him alone!”
“Miss Peters!” Vi gently but firmly pulled her away.
Pastor Grint smiled. “It’s all right, Maria,” he said. “No one here has done anything wrong. We’re all happy to answer questions from the police. We all need to be lawabiding, Jesus would want us to be.”
Maria’s eyes stung with tears.
Vi nodded to the young copper and he took Grint to one side again. She turned to Maria. “Now look here,” she said, “if you want to drop this then that’s up to you. But if anything happens later it’ll be on your head, not mine. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” Maria, through tears, looked down at the ground. “But it wasn’t me who called you. It was Mr. West.”
“If you’re involved with Lee Arnold’s firm then you’re worried about something.”
“That’s a private matter.”
“If someone’s threatening you then that’s a legal matter,” Vi said. God but Maria Peters had gone down the pan! Vi was both shocked and disappointed. If this was what religion did to you, she wanted none of it.
Neil joined them. “Thanks for covering up for me, guv,” he said to Vi.
“Don’t worry, it’s all on my mental balance sheet. As the Godfather would say, ‘If I need to call on you …’”
“I want to go home,” Maria said. “I want everybody to just go home.” Still crying, she walked away.
Neil moved in closer to Vi. “Can you do forensics on that sheet?”
“Not unless she wants to proceed. Why?”
“I want to see how much of her is on it,” Neil said.
“You think she might have done it herself?”
“I’m saying nothing,” Neil said.
“Client confidentiality.”
He didn’t reply. There
was no need.
“Forensic analysis costs.”
“I know.”
They looked at each other. Vi had known Neil for a very long time. “If laughing girl doesn’t ask for it back, I’ll do it,” she said. “But as I said, if I need to call on you …”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
Vi leaned in very close to Neil’s ear and said, “And we’ll need something for comparison. Nick her toothbrush, a used glass, something.”
Mumtaz spooned the oil over the Yorkshire puddings and then put them back in the oven. Her mother, frowning said, “It’s lovely of you to invite us to dinner, but … Mumtaz, I’m not sure that your father will like it. It seems very bland to me.”
The sound of her father’s voice, shouting at the television, floated in from the living room. Shazia, sitting opposite Baharat on the sofa was plugged in to her iPod. The old man said, “Bloody Olympics! Look at all those bloody men from eastern Europe working in those construction jobs. What about jobs for local people, eh? That’s what we were promised by Lord Snooty Coe.”
“Shazia loves a roast dinner,” Mumtaz said. “Her mother always made one, every Sunday.”
“But her mother was from Bangladesh!”
“She was from Birmingham,” Mumtaz corrected.
“Yes, but her family were from Dhaka.”
Mumtaz turned the heat down on the frozen peas and put a lid on the saucepan. “They were very English,” she said. “That was the way they wanted to be.”
Shazia’s mother, Fatima, had been the last child in a family who had moved to Birmingham back in the nineteen fifties. Her mother had been well over forty when Fatima was born and the girl had grown up knowing nothing about anywhere east of Peterborough. The very few pictures she’d seen of Fatima were enough to convince Mumtaz that she’d been very beautiful. She’d also been very obviously uncovered. Fatima Hakim had not worn a hijab and her clothes had been exclusively Western. Not for the first time Mumtaz wondered whether Fatima’s spirit of independence had cost her her life. She’d died from a blood clot on the brain when Shazia was eight and Mumtaz could all too easily imagine how such a thing had formed. Ahmed had probably hit her. Or maybe he’d pushed her, probably forcing himself upon her, and she’d accidentally banged her head on something. Mumtaz had been hurt that way herself by Ahmed. That had been the least of it.
A Private Business Page 10
