A Private Business

by Barbara Nadel

  “Oh, I engaged Mr. Arnold and the rest of you, yes, but …” She slumped against the back of the sofa. “That wasn’t the answer, was it.”

  Mumtaz said nothing. The more time she was spending with Maria Peters the more she became convinced that what she needed was a doctor. But how to even begin to say such a thing? She wasn’t the woman’s friend or relative and although Mumtaz’s confidence had grown considerably since she’d been working for the agency, she still couldn’t quite get to the point of telling strangers they were bonkers. She was lost in these thoughts almost completely when she heard Maria Peters say, “I’d employ you though, alone.” Mumtaz looked up and frowned. “If you would come and stay with me here, I’d pay you well,” Maria said. “I trust you.”

  Mumtaz, taken entirely by surprise said, “I don’t know if that will be possible. I’d have to speak to Mr. Arnold.”

  “Don’t hit him!”

  Vi blocked the heavy fist of Luther Chibanda as it attempted to make contact with his son Matthias’s head. Thwarted, Luther reeled away into the corner of the room, weeping.

  “You must tell the police what has happened!” he shouted.

  The boy, lying in the hospital bed, turned away.

  “However bad and whatever it is, you must tell them.”

  But still Matthias didn’t speak.

  Luther looked across the small hospital side room at the tall, impressive man standing over by the door and said, “Pastor, you must help us to get Matthias to speak. Please! He and Jacob were like brothers. We do not understand why this has happened.”

  Vi saw how unmoved Iekanjika was and it made her skin crawl.

  “Luther, I can pray for the boy only,” he said.

  “Pastor, maybe he is possessed!”

  “If that becomes apparent, then I will cleanse him. But at the moment—”

  “You think that Matthias killed Jacob because of some, some earthly thing, some thing of greed or …” Luther Chibanda broke down in tears again.

  Vi, at a loss amid so much that she didn’t understand, put a hand on Luther’s shoulder and said, “Mr. Chibanda, we will get to the bottom of this.” Even though she really didn’t know whether that was possible.

  “He must be possessed,” Luther Chibanda said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “He must be.”

  Vi just caught, as she quickly glanced away from Luther Chibanda, a brief look that passed between Pastor Iekanjika and Matthias Chibanda. It was not a look of complicity or collusion or amusement or even disapproval. It was a look that told her that Matthias was terrified of Iekanjika.

  XVI

  “I told her that even if I could do it, she’d have to pay the agency and not just me,” Mumtaz told Lee. It was Monday morning and, after a truly awful Sunday afternoon with his mum weeping over Roy, who was missing again, Lee had needed the subject of Maria Peters landing back in his life like a hole in the head.

  “But what about your other work?” he asked. “There’s that dodgy husband over East Ham, and what about the woman who thinks her daughter-in-law’s up to no good? You can’t just walk out on them for some gig babysitting someone who’s bonkers.”

  “I know. But she’d pay us an awful lot of money.”

  Mr. Savva, the landlord, had been completely deaf to any entreaties from Lee. So the rent on the office had gone up, as had the utility bills. Cars and vans needed servicing, insuring and taxing and although the agency was making more money than it had ever done before, income was still not keeping pace with expenditure—or Lee’s debts.

  Frustrated, Lee said, “But the woman in East Ham as well as the one with the daughter-in law want you because they trust you as an Asian woman,” he said. “I can’t bowl out there and do what you do for them!”

  “I told Miss Peters I would have to get your approval,” Mumtaz said. “I also said I was busy, that maybe for a while I could only spend part of my time with her.”

  “She won’t have surveillance equipment again?”

  “No. She says she doesn’t like being watched. I think she may have an issue about being observed by men. I’ve no idea. She was married and she seems to like men on some level.”

  “So what about Amy, then?” Lee said.

  Mumtaz shook her head. “I tried that tack,” she said. “She wants me. She trusts me.”

  Still looking distinctly disgruntled Lee said, “You are very trustworthy.”

  “Thank you.”

  Then he shook his head again and said, “But what about Shazia? You can’t expect her to just go and live in the house of some woman who might be mad.”

  Mumtaz frowned. She’d made various suggestions to Shazia about how Maria Peters’ plan might work, but she’d hated them all. She didn’t, quite rightly, want to leave her home under any circumstances and she certainly didn’t want Mumtaz’s parents to move in, in order to look after her. It left Mumtaz feeling torn. If she did live with Maria Peters for a while then she would get a lot more money in overtime payments which could help to mollify the bank. Leaving Shazia alone in the house at night, however, was not something she was comfortable with. But then, as Lee had said, she couldn’t take her to Maria Peters’ house either because the woman was not right. And what if she discovered that she was actually raving mad? What then? Maybe it was time for Mumtaz to tell someone just how deep her financial problems were.

  “I haven’t paid my mortgage for six months,” she blurted. “I need the money.”

  Lee had known that she was hard up but he thought that the house she’d shared with her husband now belonged to her. He was shocked. “Mumtaz! Didn’t your husband have life insurance?”

  She felt ashamed. Even though what had been done had been none of her doing. “He took out a mortgage with a proper bank and then he took it away and gave it over to a bunch of criminals. Then he remortgaged. Then he remortgaged again,” she said. “You know, Lee, it was my husband who made me cover my head because he was supposedly such a good Muslim and I did it gladly. It is a good thing. I can’t imagine my life any other way now. But in my religion we are not supposed to either pay or take interest payments. What kind of a Muslim was he?”

  Lee didn’t have an answer. He wanted to put his arms around her and give her a hug, but instead he said, “Why didn’t you say?”

  She began to feel her eyes fill up. “For what reason? You have financial problems all the time! What good would it do?”

  Now she’d told him, she still didn’t feel any better.

  “Does Shazia know about it?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “How can I tell her? It’s her home. She’s never lived anywhere else. It’s full of memories of her mother.”

  “And her father.”

  Mumtaz didn’t answer. Lee didn’t know about Ahmed. Nobody really knew about Ahmed except herself and Shazia.

  Lee Arnold took a deep breath in and then stood up and went over to the front office door. He turned the Open sign at the window to Closed and then sat down again.

  “Sorry, Mumtaz,” he said, “I’m going to have to smoke to think this one through.”

  “There’s nothing you can—”

  “Listen.” Lee took his cigarettes out of his jacket pocket and then lit up. “You need Maria Peters’ money, I need Maria Peters’ money and, I’ll be honest, I need to know what’s going on in that house for my own peace of mind. At the moment, what’s going on in there, or not, is like a cross between One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the bloody Amityville Horror. Then seeing the look of confusion on Mumtaz’s face he said, “One’s a film about nutters, the other’s a supernatural horror flick. I need to think. You have to meet one of your ladies this morning, don’t you?”

  “At ten thirty in East Ham, yes.”

  Lee sighed. “Could be a bit of a chain-smoke problem,” he said.

  “Lee, you don’t have to—”

  “I need the dosh too, Mumtaz,” he said. “Rent’s due and I’ll be honest, I ain’t good for it.”

/>   “Oh, no!” As well as feeling sorry for him, if her job disappeared now she’d definitely be out on the street.

  Lee held up a hand. “But listen, don’t fret it now,” he said. “Go out to your meeting, let me have a smoke and something’ll come to me. The main thing is we need to get Shazia safe and looked after in a way that won’t upset her and we need to keep you in with the Asian ladies of Newham.” Then he looked up and smiled. “Bit of thought, couple of fags, it’ll be a doddle.”

  “He was maybe about forty, possibly older. Darkish, guv,” Vi said to Superintendent Tom Venus.

  “IC4?” He didn’t even bother to look up from his paperwork. Vi couldn’t decide whether it was because the paperwork had come from Lord Coe or whether it was because she was over fifty and therefore invisible. Venus liked young and pretty women almost as much as he loved all the Olympic nonsense.

  “I don’t know for certain,” Vi replied. “IC1? Maybe, more likely, IC2. To me he looked more gray than anything else.”

  “No recognizable skin tone is gray, DI Collins,” he said. He still didn’t look at her.

  “No, sir.” Fucking prick! she thought. What do you know with your sexy little secretary and your posh Surrey accent.

  “You gave chase.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now he looked up at her and muttered, “Mmm.” She saw him look at the thick lines that radiated out from her mouth and she knew he was thinking dirty, unfit smoker. But then he changed the subject. “And the revivalist churches, DI Collins?”

  “I definitely detected some tension between Jacob Sitole’s minister Reverend Manyika and Matthias Chibanda’s pastor, Iekanjika,” she said. “I also think that Iekanjika may have some sort of hold over Matthias.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She shrugged. “I’m not sure yet, sir. But when I was at the hospital I noticed that the boy looked afraid of the pastor.”

  “What about witchcraft?”

  “I only got that off my snout, guv.”

  “You followed it up?”

  “Of course. But we’ve had no other reports about it on the manor and I didn’t pick up anything from Manyika that made me skin crawl. Iekanjika, as I’ve said, was another matter though.”

  Venus creased his otherwise smooth brow into a frown. “In what way?”

  “Doesn’t recognize what he calls ‘secular authority,’” Vi said. “Won’t talk, just like Chibanda.”

  “So something dodgy’s going on,” Venus said. “Think we’ve got enough to pull this Iekanjika in?”

  “What for?” Vi said. “He was nowhere near when Sitole got killed. The whole thing about Iekanjika revolves around his silence and my feelings about him.”

  Venus sighed. “But just as the devil makes work for idle hands so, sometimes, I think God does too. Run a check on this Iekanjika.”

  As far as Vi was concerned Venus’s only saving grace was that he had little time for God squads of any stripe. Apart from that he was an arrogant berk in the grip of a mid-life crisis. It was said that he did some dance/exercise thing called Zumba.

  “Yes, sir. Nothing was removed from Sitole’s body,” Vi said. “Often in witchcraft cases it is. Body parts are used as talismans. Not always but—”

  “We don’t need this in the run-up to the Olympics, whatever it is,” Venus said. “We don’t need this and we don’t need a flasher. By the way, did he actually get his tackle out for your benefit?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Mmm.”

  Vi thought he was probably thinking that he could understand why. But what did Venus really know about the flasher anyway? He went for white women, generally older, didn’t matter to him what they looked like.

  “There have been a couple of cases of fraud concerning some of these charismatic churches down on what is now the Olympic site,” Venus said. “They take their parishioners’ money, ostensibly for charity, and then they do a bunk. Maybe we should have a look at exactly where these churches stand in terms of finance. Perhaps it’s money rather than God that keeps Matthias Chibanda’s mouth closed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Vi had only just left when her mobile began to ring. She listened to the voice at the other end for about a minute before she said in a tone much louder than she had intended, “You what?!”

  The rope was thick, like nautical rope, and it hung on the back of the kitchen door handle like a long, blond braid, but it had a neck-shaped loop at one end. Maria, slumped against the door frame, covered in milk and glass, couldn’t move. She owned nothing, had never owned anything, like it, and yet here it was, materialized on the back of the kitchen door. Brought out of nothing, just like the peacock feathers: a hanging noose. She could hardly breathe. What was it doing there? What was it saying?

  In her phone she had Mumtaz Hakim’s number but she couldn’t remember where she’d put her BlackBerry, even if she had wanted to call anyone. Because she hadn’t. Because she knew. She’d been alone all night and she’d only got up half an hour ago. Only she could have looped that thing around the kitchen door handle. Or rather, logically only she could have done so. In the world of the unseen anything was possible and God, who was love, was also, as even Pastor Grint sometimes said, a God who made those who sought him confront their misdeeds by force.

  Did the noose mean that she wanted to kill herself? That Jesus wanted her to confess or die? Surely not. Suicide was a sin.

  Somewhere upstairs, her BlackBerry began to ring and Maria Peters screamed. She could no more move to answer it than she could stop looking at the terrible anomalous thing on the back of her kitchen door. The only way forward was just to sit quietly where she was and not interact with anyone or anything. She didn’t want to horrify Betty or appall the pastor with her madness and Mumtaz Hakim was never going to call! She had a daughter and a job and a life and she’d never killed anyone.

  * * *

  All she had to do was tell Amma that she was doing private study at home on Thursday afternoons and everything would be OK. It wasn’t a lie. Private study was scheduled for Thursday afternoons and Year 11 GCSE candidates did have the choice of studying in school or going home. It was when Shazia didn’t actually study that it was a problem. When Hilary and Adele came home with her and they all had a bit of a laugh. Did the weird old white man who lived next door know about that somehow?

  The brief conversation Shazia had had with the man on Sunday had bugged her all day. He’d been slimy and looked like he smelt and his whole approach had seemed to be based around the idea that he knew things about her that Amma didn’t. But then Amma didn’t know that Hilary and Adele came round to the house almost every Thursday. Now that she was working all the time she didn’t seem to take a lot of notice of much. Fancy suggesting that her old parents come and take care of her while she went off to guard that old comedian woman. It was terrible! The old woman, there all the time making endless samosas, while the old man sat in that chair in front of the television coughing his guts up every five minutes. It’d be a nightmare.

  Shazia walked past the house next door while scanning every window for the old white man’s face. What could he know and how? She always pulled the curtains and shut all the windows. Unless he had X-ray eyes he couldn’t have seen anything. He was just playing with her.

  But if he was just having some sort of game with her then why was he doing that? He hadn’t after all said anything about the other girls or that he intended to tell Amma at all. But she’d just felt that he would. It hadn’t been what he’d said but the way that he’d said it; it had been oily and suggestive and it had made her feel uncomfortable in a way that she hadn’t been for a very long time. Shazia felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise and she shook her head as if trying to get them to lie flat again. Confronting the old man was not something she wanted to do even if she did really, really want to find out what he did or didn’t know. In the months since Amma got her job, things had been better than they had been for years, since her
own mother had died.

  Shazia let herself into her house and put the television on. When bad things happened and no one seemed to know what to do next, Hilary always quoted her mother. Hilary’s mum always said, “Go for the do nothing option first. Always. Do nothing, see what happens, then act.” Shazia flung herself down on the sofa and let herself be engaged by some silly kids’ program. She gave herself over to the “do nothing” option.

  XVII

  The front door was not only unlocked, it was open. Given Maria Peters’ nervousness as well as the number of burglaries that took place in the borough, that was worrying. Mumtaz took her phone out of her handbag and plugged in 999 just in case she had to call the police. She walked into the large entrance hall and called the woman’s name, but she didn’t reply. There was a strange, fusty and yet acidic smell to the place that she hadn’t noticed before. Walking slowly, her ears straining to capture all and any noises that may come her way, Mumtaz moved into the living room. It was empty. She came out again and went into the little corridor that led past a row of cupboards and a bathroom into the kitchen. The door was open and opposite it, slumped down against the door frame was Maria. She was wet, covered in what looked like glass and she was looking fixedly at the kitchen door or rather at something hanging from the handle of the door. It took Mumtaz a moment or two to actually register the noose.

  She squatted down beside the comedian and took one of her hands. She was cold and, now that she was closer to her, Mumtaz could see that the liquid she was covered in was milk. She had also, by the smell of her, wet herself. She wanted to ask her what was going on, what had happened and why, but Mumtaz knew that Maria would not be able to talk. Other things would have to be done before that was going to be possible.

  “I’m going to get you a blanket and then I think a drink of some sort,” Mumtaz said.

  Maria Peters couldn’t even move but her eyes looked as if they agreed with that plan. Mumtaz went upstairs to one of the many bedrooms and pulled a duvet off one of the many beds. She went back downstairs and carefully moving as much broken glass to one side as she could, she wrapped the duvet around Maria’s shoulders. Now all she had to find was a drink, and by drink, she meant alcohol. Maria Peters wasn’t a Muslim, so what she was about to do wasn’t a sin. She went back into the living room and grabbed the decanter she’d seen Maria drink something or other from before. She took it into the kitchen, poured a large amount into a glass and held it up to Maria’s lips. “Drink.”