A Private Business

by Barbara Nadel

  Maria Peters put her head in her hands and silently screamed.

  “Still being given the runaround by your flasher?” Lee asked.

  Vi Collins looked at him and scowled. “What you doing here, Arnold?”

  Two bulldozers revved their engines in front of the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire. The happy-clappies didn’t usually meet on a Tuesday morning, but the pastor had wanted to have just one more service before the developers reduced the place to rubble.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t bother Miss Peters,” Lee said.

  “I should hope not, she sacked you. She sacked us an’ all,” Vi said.

  “Your boffin proved that only Maria touched that death threat note,” Lee said. “Either whoever put it in her car had gloves on or she did it herself. Personally I’m inclined toward the latter. There’s something well adrift with that woman. You could do her.”

  “For what?” Vi lit up a cigarette and then smiled at one of the young men sitting in the cab of one of the bulldozers. “Neil West called us in, and he gave us the sample we needed for comparison, not laughing girl. Anyway there’s no CCTV footage to back it up. Sod all cameras in this area that work.”

  “I still think she did it herself,” Lee said.

  “Then she must be ill, which is not my problem.”

  Lee looked at her and smirked. “You just don’t want to get old Sid in trouble for using his lab inappropriately. Still doing him favors are you, Vi?”

  She pulled her coat closely around her shoulders. It wasn’t cold, it was late March, but it was damp and what with all the churned up dirt on the roads from the construction, it got into your bones. “The last time me and Dr. Smith had relations, Princess Diana was still happily married to Charles,” she said. “Fucking grow up will you, Arnold! I did you a favor, it came out how you predicted it would. What more do you want? The woman’s a nutter and she sacked you, deal with it.”

  She was right, of course, but Lee had never been sacked before and although that was over four weeks ago now, it still irked him. Mumtaz had even tried to explain why he should feel sorry for Maria Peters, but he couldn’t. Everything that had happened had done so because she had made it happen. On the day that she’d sacked the Arnold Agency, Maria herself had been dropped by her manager Alan Myers, for canceling a gig he’d had lined up for her at the Comedy Store.

  And yet questions still remained. Lee had checked the security tapes from the house again and again and he hadn’t once been able to record her putting items where they shouldn’t be. He hadn’t caught anyone else doing that either. But then nothing, as far as he could tell, was moving on its own. No stalker had once been detected in Maria’s garden or following her anywhere. The only slightly dodgy thing was the way that shoebox Maria wouldn’t talk about had definitely turned up at the end of one of the big prayer meetings she sometimes had at her place. But that didn’t mean that she hadn’t put it there. Maria had been at the prayer meeting as well as all the other weirdos. Vi was right, she was cracking up. She was a poor mad comedian who was attempting to make some sort of pathetic comeback but it was all too much for her.

  From inside the building, voices shouted “Praise the Lord!” Lee rolled his eyes. Sounded like one of those African churches. The older of the two blokes up on the bulldozers lit a fag and then leaned onto his steering wheel looking bored. To Lee, he looked like a foreigner of some sort—a Serb or an Albanian—there were a lot of them about on the Olympic site. Poor sod! All he probably wanted to do was get the job done and then go back to lie down in whatever rancid little room he’d managed to rent.

  “So what about your flasher then?” Lee asked Vi again. She was on site, together with Bracci and a load of uniforms, to supervise the safe destruction of the church and the derelict building next to it.

  “I’m not here about that.”

  “Yeah, but I read in the Recorder some old dear had an eyeful last Wednesday. You got a description?”

  “From a myopic eighty-five-year-old?” Vi threw her dog-end onto the ground and then lit up another fag. “I’m still not sure she even saw a knob. Could’ve been wishful thinking. He, whoever he is, was lucky she didn’t just walk past him.”

  “What about known faces?”

  “I’ve a few on the bubble,” she said. “Nothing useful. I give old Martin Gold a nudge a few weeks back though, remember him?”

  “Bit before my time. Wasn’t he the cemetery wanker?”

  “In the mid-seventies you couldn’t walk safe in the East London, no,” Vi said. “Not if you were a woman. It was Martin Gold I was going to see that morning I saw you outside Miss Peters’ place. Martin’s one of her tenants.”

  “In the Forest Gate multiple-occupancy place?”

  “Yeah.” She looked up at him and smiled. “Old Len Blatt never gave a toss, if you’ll excuse the expression, about who he put in his rotten old dumps. He was a nice enough bloke, but he was a slum landlord and his missus seems to be continuing the tradition. Place is a shit hole. But then Martin said that one of the Asians had told him Maria Peters was thinking of selling up the rental places.”

  “She never mentioned anything to me,” Lee said.

  The old double doors of the bathroom factory opened and what looked like a load of people about to go on a particularly jolly trip spilled out onto the street. The bulldozers both revved their engines, but the happy-clappies didn’t seem in the slightest bit fazed by this. For some reason, in spite of the fact that their church was about to be demolished, and that many of them were poor, they appeared to be in very good spirits.

  “Just look at them!” Lee said with contempt. “Happy as Larry, silly as assholes!”

  “You’re just jealous,” Vi replied.

  Lee looked down at her and scowled. He hated it when she told him the truth about himself.

  * * *

  Young Anjali Butt was not, as far as Mumtaz could tell, taking any sort of narcotic substance. Anjali Butt was distracted from her school work, vague and not very communicative because she was in love. This was a very big love that encompassed her entire mind, body and soul, and contemplation of it left her little time for anything else. But it was also Anjali’s great and very guilty secret because the object of her affections was a boy called Bipul, from a very nice family from Seven Kings who were all devout Hindus.

  Now Mumtaz was waiting for Mrs. Butt to come into the office to talk about Anjali and she felt terrible. Good Muslim woman that she was, Mumtaz knew more than people would have guessed about infatuation and desire for someone “unsuitable.” Anjali and Bipul were just having little conversations, kissing, looking longingly into each other’s eyes. They weren’t having sex, they weren’t even indulging in heavy petting. They were just kids who had fallen in love for the first time and it was really quite sweet.

  When she’d first told Lee about it, he’d seemed sympathetic too. But then when she’d said that she was reluctant to tell Mrs. Butt about her daughter, he’d become angry. “We have to be honest with clients!” he’d said. “Otherwise what’s the point? Whatever you find out, you have to pass that on to the client. That’s why they’re paying us.”

  “But if Mrs. Butt thinks that Anjali has dishonored the family, if she tells her husband then it could go badly for the girl!” she’d said. “I don’t know this family, but some families, they can do terrible things!”

  Lee had known about honor killing but he’d told Mumtaz it was none of their concern. Provided Mrs. Butt didn’t actually say that she or her husband were going to harm their daughter, they couldn’t call the police. What the Butts did with the agency’s information was their own affair.

  But Mumtaz still dreaded Mrs. Butt’s arrival. She was clearly an extremely religious woman. No one ever wore the niqab lightly and so she had to have very high moral standards indeed. What was she going to say? What was she going to do? Anjali was almost Shazia’s age, she couldn’t bear to think of what a furious father might do to her.

 
The office door swung open and the black pyramid that was Mrs. Butt entered. She smiled at Mumtaz with her eyes and then sat down. Even her hands were covered by thin, black gloves, her feet swaddled in men’s socks and what Mumtaz saw as the obligatory open-toed sandals. Even her mother wore them, just like this lady probably, all through the winter and into the spring. These were spattered with street mud and there was an old cigarette end sticking to one of the straps.

  Mumtaz got straight to the point in case her courage failed her. “Your daughter is not taking drugs,” she said. “But she is seeing a boy sometimes after school.” Knowing that the woman would view kissing and touching as highly undesirable, she attempted to soft pedal. “Nothing sexual or inappropriate. Just young love.”

  The woman’s eyes narrowed. “Do you have photographs?”

  “You wanted photographs and so I have them,” Mumtaz said. She’d had the file ready to view on her screen. Now she turned it around so that Mrs. Butt could see it. Anjali and Bipul were holding hands and smiling at each other.

  “Do you know his name? The boy?”

  Had he been a Muslim, it would have been bad enough, but this … “He’s called Bipul Banergee,” she said. “He comes from Seven Kings.”

  Mrs. Butt did not reply. Her eyes, stilled now, could have been expressing anything from disappointment to grief. The name was so obviously Hindu.

  “Where do they meet?” she asked.

  Mumtaz’s stomach turned. Was Mrs. Butt going to get her husband to go out and find them? Beat the boy and do who knew what to the girl? But what could she do? She had to give the client the information that she’d paid for.

  “Mrs. Butt—”

  “The information—please.” She lowered her gaze.

  Mumtaz had never thought that this job would involve something as painful as this. Working in the office only gave one a distant, academic view of the job, but private investigation was about real people and their real, messy lives. It was grubby, boring, pathetic and visceral. Mumtaz hated herself. “They meet on Wanlip Road, beside the sixth-form college,” she said. “They only spend at the most fifteen minutes together.”

  “I see.” Mrs. Butt sat silently for a few moments, her gloved hands clasped nervously in her lap. Then slowly she put her hands inside the folds of her chador and took out a wad of banknotes. “You have my thanks,” she said. She put the notes onto Mumtaz’s desk and then withdrew her hands quickly. Mumtaz looked down at the money and began to feel sick.

  “Could you keep the photographs here on your system for me?”

  “I have taken copies, you may have them,” Mumtaz said. She pushed a large brown envelope across the desk at the woman.

  Mrs. Butt pushed it back. “No!”

  “But you’ve paid for them,” Mumtaz said. “They’re yours.”

  “My husband mustn’t see them.”

  “You’re not going to—”

  “I used my own money for a reason. If it had been drugs I would have used more of my money to cure my daughter. My husband is a good man, but …” She stood up. “Your part in this is now over.”

  She moved toward the office door and Mumtaz jumped up. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “With Anjali?”

  The woman turned, her chador sweeping the old office carpet. “I will talk to her,” she said calmly. Then she added, “I will tell her how love has to be duty. I will cry with her.”

  Betty and Rachel went back with Maria after the service. Unlike many of the other church congregants, all three women were subdued. Betty said that even though it had been a terrible old building, she would miss the church at Hackney Wick.

  “Shall we have a cuppa?” she asked Maria when they walked into the kitchen.

  “I could do with something a bit stronger than that,” Maria said. On top of the shock of finding out where the temporary church was going to be, she’d seen Lee Arnold. He’d been watching the bulldozers from over by the canal. Her blood had frozen, she hadn’t wanted to be reminded of that time. As soon as she’d sacked him, all feelings of being stalked and haunted had just vanished. She’d felt instantly relieved and Pastor Grint had said how much more peaceful she had appeared to be with herself and with Jesus. But then she had also been dealing with her sin. So nothing had “moved,” she’d had no mysterious notes or letters, no boxes. Only now that she learned that the new church was to be in Dave Delmonte’s old Fun Palace was she horrified. But she knew she had to keep her nerve. She’d made her decision back in February. Pastor Grint had been right: it had all been her own guilt. The stalking, the notes, the box. She’d done it all herself. She’d had a breakdown, a God-given breakdown.

  And yet that terrible feeling of threat she’d experienced when she first went to the Arnold Agency had been very real and she had been desperate. She’d only been back on the comedy circuit for six months. Had the pressure of that been too much for her? The look on Alan Myers’ face when she’d told him she wasn’t going to do the gig he’d got her at the Comedy Store still stuck in her mind. The same went for what he’d said.

  You cancel the Comedy Store, you’re finished!

  It had been a few hours after the Death isn’t funny incident. She’d sacked Lee Arnold and his firm but that didn’t mean she wasn’t still frightened. She’d actually been more frightened than ever for a while, thinking that someone might, had to know. But Paul Grint and Betty had soothed her and later she’d told Alan that she couldn’t even think about leaving the house and he’d asked her why, but she couldn’t and wouldn’t tell him. He’d called the Comedy Store to tell them she was ill and then he’d resigned. No more Alan, no more comedy and for a while it had felt like a relief. For a while it had felt like the old days. But then Len hadn’t been there and so it couldn’t be.

  Maria poured herself a glass of port, took two codeine painkillers and then drank the alcohol down immediately. Inside she could feel her viscera shaking. She wanted to sit down, preferably on her own, but then she remembered that there was something she had to do. Stupidly she’d promised the old creep in the multiple occupancy she’d go and see him. “One of the tenants down the road has had a new gas fire put in,” she said. “I need to go and check it’s OK. I won’t be long.”

  “Don’t you have an agent or someone to do it for you?” Rachel asked.

  “Yes, but … Well, this man …” Maria said. “Well, he’s quite old and Len always used to go and sort his problems out himself, collect his rent in person. It’s not a problem.”

  But that wasn’t strictly true. Maria hated having to go and visit Martin Gold in his smelly, old man’s room. He gave her the creeps. If she were honest with herself, Martin had been one of the first people to come to mind when she’d thought that she was being stalked. Not that she’d told Lee Arnold; she’d hoped that he’d find that out without her help. She did not, after all, want to actively point the finger at any of her tenants. That could be very legally dodgy if said tenant was innocent and took offense, and although Martin Gold was an old flasher, an easy target, and she didn’t like him, Maria didn’t want to actually put him out on the street unless she had to. For the time being her only profession was that of landlady and so she wanted to do that fairly and well. But Martin Gold’s oily manner was hard work and by the time she got back to the house, Betty said that she looked pale.

  “Did that tenant give you grief?” she asked.

  “No, I’m just tired,” Maria said. And to be truthful, Martin Gold hadn’t been a problem. His room had smelt, as usual, but he’d been pleased with his new gas fire. Maria had been relieved that it worked properly. Problems with tenants on top of everything else was not something she needed. Wondering just how she was ever going to be able to go to church again was what had made her face lose its color. Dave Delmonte’s place was just too full of memories. How could she go and pray in a place that was so tainted? How could she be sure, given her recent experiences, that her mind would not just crack apart completely? Was Jesus asking too much, pus
hing her too hard this time?

  XIII

  She looked exactly the same as the last one had to Lee, but Mumtaz knew Mrs. Malik and she knew Mrs. Durrani and, most importantly, she could tell them apart.

  “They both wear dark blue burqas, how do you know?” he asked her when he came back in after Mrs. Durrani had left. None of the excessively covered women would say a word while he was in the office and so, for the duration of their visits, Lee had to sit outside on the stairs.

  Mumtaz shook her head. Did he do this ignorant thing deliberately or was it just to wind her up? “Mrs. Durrani is a good five centimeters taller than Mrs. Malik and Mrs. Malik walks with a limp. What’s so difficult about that?”

  “Nothing.” He didn’t want to say they both look like walking fabric rolls to me actually to Mumtaz and so he shut up. To complain about the clients was unprofessional and churlish and besides, since Mumtaz’s success with Mrs. Butt and her daughter, Anjali, word was clearly out about her amongst the Asian ladies of Newham. Whether Mumtaz actually did the surveillance or security work that the ladies required was sometimes irrelevant; they could talk to her about it without embarrassment and they knew she was discreet. And although the demography of who did and who didn’t use the Arnold Agency hadn’t changed completely, it had shifted. Whereas before Mumtaz’s arrival most of their clients, such as they were, had been white men, now they had a lot of Asian women too. Lee had to wonder just how much, or how little, the ladies’ husbands, fathers, brothers and sons knew about all this. They always paid their bills in cash. For women, basically in purdah, they were proving themselves not only financially independent but also very far from being pushovers. It was not all plain sailing, however.

  “I may be wrong, but I do not think that Mrs. Malik has good intent toward her daughter-in-law,” Mumtaz said. “I tell her that Nazneen never leaves her marital home except with her husband, but Mrs. Malik doesn’t believe me. Now she wants that I mount the surveillance myself. Amy, I think, is too European for her. I hate prejudice like that.”