A Private Business

by Barbara Nadel

  And how dare her mother invite Mosammet! Using her as temptation just to get her home to meet Mr. Choudhury’s son. Poor Mosammet would be so disappointed. As she walked down the road toward her house she said, “Amma, please stop trying to find a man for me. I don’t want one!”

  “Yes, but—”

  Her mother didn’t understand. How could she?

  “Amma, I’m going to switch my phone off now,” Mumtaz said. “Goodbye. I’ll phone you soon.”

  She finished the call just as she opened her front garden gate and took her keys out of her bag. When she went in the house it felt like a gale was blowing through.

  “Shazia!” she called. “Good grief, have you got the back door wide open or something?”

  It had been a warm day but it was still early in the year and there was a rather chilly wind. Mumtaz walked into the kitchen but found that the back door was closed. She went into the living room just in time to see Shazia shutting the French windows.

  “Oh, Amma,” she said, “you’re …”

  “I thought it would be nice to spend some time together,” Mumtaz said. “Make dinner, eat together.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked pale but the skin around her eyes was dark as if she hadn’t slept. Mumtaz walked toward her, but Shazia, oddly, began to move away.

  “Is everything OK?”

  “Yeah, why shouldn’t it be?”

  “Not overdoing the homework? You get on with Vi OK?”

  Shazia smiled, but she didn’t look Mumtaz in the eye. “Homework’s boring but OK and I like Vi, she’s cool.”

  “Good.”

  They stood opposite each other, neither doing nor saying anything for a few moments, then Shazia said, “I’ve got geography and math I have to do.”

  “Oh. Oh, I thought, because I’m away a lot at the moment that we might spend some time—”

  “Geography’s due in tomorrow.” She smiled, but she still didn’t look at Mumtaz. Then very quickly, almost at a run, she left the room.

  Amazed and a little bit hurt too, Mumtaz watched her go. Then for want of anything else to do, she called after her, “What do you want for dinner?”

  The answer came back breezily, “Whatever.”

  Annoyed, Mumtaz felt stupid, as if Shazia had duped her in some way into coming home. But then the girl’s behavior was odd, shifty. But what could she do? Mumtaz herself needed to change her clothes before she set off for the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire. It was a Deliverance night, exorcism. However weirdly Shazia was behaving, somehow she had to get herself together for that. Once in the church she’d have to have her wits about her in all sorts of ways. Believe in it or not, exorcism was frightening and if the people behind the church were, as Lee believed, possibly criminal in some way too, she’d have to be careful. Whatever her thoughts and feelings about what she was going to see might be, she’d have to keep them to herself.

  XXII

  The place was rammed with the poor. They smelt of damp pavements and cigarettes, cheap cider and dogs. For every ten of them there was one like her. But that was the point, wasn’t it? Looking after the needy? Maria sat down next to Betty on a chair that looked as if it had once belonged in a hospital.

  In reality the new church wasn’t any more or less squalid than the old one. The people were the same. It was Maria herself who was different. Her response to this place made her so. Not that it looked anything like the way it had done when it was Dave Delmonte’s old fun pub. The bar was long gone, as was the old stage where a thousand mother-in-law jokes had once been told. There was a sort of a stage but it was one that Pastor Grint had built himself and the walls, rather than being grimed with fag smoke, were covered with colorful posters and pictures that people had painted of Jesus and His miracles. The building had become a good place and yet still Maria quaked. As discreetly as she could, she took a diazepam tablet and wished that she’d asked Mumtaz to come with her. But then if she wasn’t safe, even from herself, in church, where was she safe?

  “The Devil’s going to get a right old beating tonight,” Betty said. “Lots of people will testify and have the Devil cast out.”

  Others could feel it too. There was an excited hubbub amongst the poor and the dispossessed. Looking for new lives or just a spark of hope, they speculated about whether or not the Spirit would fall upon them, whether they would be blessed by Deliverance. Maria looked around the vast space and knew for a fact that she was the only one in that room who actively feared it. In order to be delivered one had to want to free oneself of sin and push the Devil out. Of course sometimes the Devil had to be forcibly cast from a person—she’d seen that done twice now—and that could be violent and traumatic. But whatever happened, people always had to confess all their sins first and she couldn’t do that. But then maybe that was her punishment. Maybe this limbo state of yearning for Christ while at the same time being unable to completely enter His kingdom was a kind of protracted penance.

  “Brothers and sisters, let’s make a start shall we?” she heard Pastor Grint say. She looked up and saw his sweet, thin face behind the stage microphone. He looked a little worn. But then the prayer meeting they’d had the previous night had been intense and it must have taken it out of him.

  People stopped talking and began to take their seats. Grint smiled. “Hey, everyone,” he said, “we are going to have a banging Deliverance service tonight! We are going to make our beloved Jesus jump for joy! Let me hear you say ‘Jesus is just!’”

  “Jesus is just!” They all cried out, even Maria. It was always like this. Once a service started she got caught up, like everyone else.

  “Jesus is just what I need!” Grint said.

  “Jesus is just what I need!”

  “Jesus is just what you need!”

  “Jesus is just what you need!”

  “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

  “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

  The man to Mumtaz’s left smelt of beer while the woman to her right just hadn’t bathed for a while. In the final row of seats, right at the back, Mumtaz was glad there was a small breeze coming from underneath the front door. Unused to wearing trousers—Ahmed had hated her in them—and especially unaccustomed to an uncovered head, Mumtaz felt totally odd, both in this context and in herself. Her hair was almost down to her waist! When had it got to be so long? Why hadn’t she noticed that?

  “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

  Everyone around her was standing, swaying, smiling and clapping to the beat. A man she recognized as a local solicitor was slightly more reticent than others. She could see Maria, down at the front, swaying along with the rest of them, her eyes, like everyone else’s, firmly on Pastor Grint. Mumtaz stood, but she didn’t sway, nor did she chant. No one seemed to notice.

  “Let me hear you say, ‘Give it all up to Jesus!’” Grint yelled. “Let me hear you!”

  “Give it all up to Jesus!” they all said. “Give it all up to Jesus!”

  “Let me hear you say, ‘Sacrifice to the Lord!’”

  “Sacrifice to the Lord! Sacrifice to the Lord! Sacrifice to the Lord!”

  Somewhere, music played. It sounded to Mumtaz like music from that old film The Blues Brothers. There’d been a preacher in that, she remembered. That part of the film had ended in all sorts of dancing and ecstatic craziness. Mumtaz knew about repetition and how it could affect people. She stood still and silent and looked at the pictures and the slogans that lined the walls. They were rough and amateurish but their message was clear. Someone giving someone else what looked like a piece of food was accompanied by the slogan The meek shall inherit the earth.

  “Sacrifice to the Lord!”

  A man with long, light brown hair and a beard, who could have been Jesus, had light coming out of his head. A speech bubble had him saying Give and you shall receive. There were children in lots of the pictures, most of them poor and hungry-looking.

  “Sacrifice to the Lord! Sacrifice to the Lord!”r />
  The hairs on the back of Mumtaz’s neck began to stand up. Light coming through a single window up high in the roof illuminated the stage and Pastor Grint had now changed the chant to “Lord don’t love a liar! Jesus Lord of Truth!”

  “Lord don’t love a liar! Jesus Lord of Truth!”

  Someone had scrawled the words Bring on the Rapture above a tattered picture of a rose, a slogan referring to the Apocalypse some Christians believed was coming soon. Mumtaz began to feel her head lighten so she moved her gaze around the building. The chanting had been going for a good fifteen minutes and if she allowed herself to go with it, she wouldn’t be able to see what was going on any more.

  “Jesus loves His family! Oh, yes he does!”

  “Jesus loves his family!”

  Grint was smiling and sweating, his face looked red and cherubic. The smell coming from the woman standing next to Mumtaz became intense. Everyone clapped in time to the music now which was also repetitious. Some people closed their eyes.

  Grint pointed one arm up into the air. “Tonight we are going to deliver those afflicted by the Devil to Jesus! Hallelujah!”

  “Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”

  A woman she’d not seen before gave a bag to the man at the end of the row. He took the bag, put his hand in his pocket, took out some money, dropped it into the bag and passed it on. Christian worshippers, like most religious people, took collections. Mumtaz took fifty pence out of her purse and when the bag came to her, she dropped it in. The smelly woman put in a five pound note which was both surprising and not surprising. Her eyes shone with ecstasy.

  Hallelujah, as a chant, almost as a song, went on. Mumtaz fought to keep a handle on how much time had passed but she found that she couldn’t. She began to relate one of her mother’s old stories about the Silver Prince to herself. In Bengal, many centuries past, an immortal Silver Prince was born to a humble washerwoman and her husband. Though poor, the lady and her husband were good Muslims. Allah rewarded their piety with … She looked up at the ceiling again and saw the slogan Come the Hour, the sinners will perish! written in red paint. Her stomach curdled and Mumtaz began to shiver.

  “Who is hungry for the Lord?” Grint asked.

  Everybody yelled out, “I am!”

  “Who wants to renounce the world, kick out Satan, testify, confess, be DELIVERED?”

  Mumtaz’s heart beat fast.

  “Lord, forgive me, I took a man who was not my husband to my bed!” The woman who said this threw herself at the stage, smashing her face against the flimsy wooden paneling as she lay down at Grint’s feet. “I took another man and I had sex with him and I can’t be right with Jesus! I—”

  “Sister.” Grint bent down and raised her up to her feet and then onto the stage with him. Her face was bleeding and she was crying.

  “Oh, God!”

  Grint put his hands underneath her armpits to support her. She was limp with emotion and her eyes were glazed and rolled around wildly in their sockets. “Sister, if you are truly remorseful, if you truly can offer your sorrow, your life and everything you are in this world to the Lord then he will forgive you! Do you want that, sister?” He shook her. “Do you?”

  She made a noise like a wounded cat, a yowl of pain, and then he forced her to the ground again and put his hands on her head. “Leave this woman, Satan!” he shouted. Grint had a loud and, now that he was yelling, rough voice, almost like Vi Collins’s. “She’s confessed her sin! She says she wants no more of you and your works! You have no power over her now!”

  The woman began to buck and shake and red blood-tinged spittle flew out of her mouth.

  “You hear me, Satan, you old hypocrite, you old liar, you old tight-fist, you old enemy of love! Get out of this woman in the name of Jesus, Lord of Light, Lord of the Truth, Lord of Generosity, of Brotherhood and of Life!”

  He leaned forward, digging his fingers into her back and the woman howled. A long, deep, almost orgasmic sound that took with it every tiny breath from her body. Mumtaz’s mind fought to hang on to what was real, what she had been trained to know about things like this.

  “Get out!”

  Everyone, including Mumtaz, watched as something invisible, intangible appeared to leave the woman and she stopped bucking and heaving and lay flat and silent on the floor. Pastor Grint, still sweating but now also panting like a runner, bent down on one knee and put his hand, gently this time, on the woman’s head. “The truth,” he said, “in Jesus, has set you free.”

  Everyone fell to their knees except, Mumtaz thought, herself. But then she saw that Maria Peters was also still on her feet. She put her arms out toward the stage and she said, “Help me! Help me!”

  Grint looked round and smiled. “Maria?” He beckoned her to him while the woman on the floor still lay flat and motionless. “Are you ready for …” He took one of her hands as if to shake it, then he tapped her forehead with a finger and whispered something to her.

  Maria took one step forward and then she just collapsed.

  Pure instinct made Mumtaz rush down the aisle and kneel down at Maria’s side. She hadn’t seen Maria eat for at least twelve hours and she dreaded to think about what drugs she’d consumed in that time. She also knew she’d seen Grint do something to her as well; something she, probably alone in that church, recognized.

  “Maria?” Mumtaz took her pulse which was slow.

  “Who are you and what are you doing?”

  Mumtaz looked up into Pastor Grint’s livid face and saw Betty recognize her all in the same moment.

  “What are you doing here?” Betty Muller asked. Then she turned to Grint and said, “She’s that private detective!”

  Maria began to groan and splutter and Mumtaz sat her up so that she could cough. Grint and a few other people talked quietly to one side. Everyone else either tried to see what was going on or just stood about looking concerned. Quite a few of them looked dazed.

  Mumtaz said, “I think I should call a doctor …”

  “Mumtaz?”

  She looked down into Maria’s face. Her eyes were only just able to focus.

  Betty Muller’s face appeared from one side and blocked Mumtaz’s view of Maria. “What are you doing here?” she asked again. “What?” She was angry but then church had always been the one place that Maria had wanted to go to alone. For a moment Mumtaz thought about lying her way out of her dilemma but then people had already seen her at the back.

  “I came because …”

  She heard the words “private detective” but she didn’t know where they came from. Maria Peters, though still ashily pale, was sitting up now and looking at her. “Mumtaz?” she said. “Mumtaz, I’m OK in church.”

  “Yes, I know but—”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  She didn’t know what to say. I came to check your church out because the police think it might be dodgy? I came to see what these people do to your mind when you’re full of drugs and half starved? I don’t like what I’ve experienced here today?

  “Mumtaz, when I’m at church or at prayer meetings at home, I don’t need you,” Maria said. “This is my private life.” And then she noticed that Mumtaz’s head wasn’t covered. “Were you trying to disguise yourself?” A look that Mumtaz didn’t like came over Maria’s face. “Why?”

  “Why—”

  “Yes, why? I didn’t ask you to come here. You went home to your daughter. I would have called you when I got back.”

  Neil West had followed Maria to the old church back in the winter but he hadn’t gone in. Flustered and angry with herself for not even planning what she might say if she was recognized, Mumtaz felt her face turn red. She looked up and saw that they were all staring down at her with suspicious, hostile, sometimes glazed eyes. When she did speak, she just blurted. Pointing to Grint, she said, “He just tried to put you in a hypnotic trance. I saw him.”

  “What? What total nonsense. You’re crazy!” she heard Maria say. “I will need to speak to
your employer, right now!”

  Part Three

  XXIII

  Matthias Chibanda had pleaded guilty to the murder of Jacob Sitole in a hearing that had lasted just under ten minutes. Vi Collins and Tony Bracci went out onto the grass outside the honey-colored courthouse and had a smoke. Snaresbrook was a funny old place. A great graceful Victorian pile as often as not surrounded by groups of heavily tattooed gangsters, their women and their kids.

  “I don’t call this summer,” Vi said as she pulled her coat in close to her body. “Bloody July! If this is global warming I can’t be fucking done with it.”

  “At least Chibanda did the right thing,” Tony said.

  “Yeah.” But Vi didn’t look convinced. Matthias Chibanda had only actually spoken about what had happened between himself and Jacob Sitole in early June. So silent he had become almost catatonic, Chibanda had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act for a month so that a psychiatrist could assess his fitness to plead. For weeks, nothing had happened and then one day he’d said to one of the nurses, “I killed Jacob because he wouldn’t give me his phone.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time that someone had been killed for their mobile phone and Jacob Sitole had indeed just been given a new iPhone by his mother. But Vi wasn’t buying it. One thing the psychiatrists at Basildon Mental Health Unit had discovered was that Matthias Chibanda had a mental age of just twelve. Apparently his thinking was magical and animistic; in other words he saw the world in very superstitious ways. And he hadn’t had Jacob’s iPhone on him when he was taken to hospital. Even wounded, someone who really wanted something that badly would take it.

  “Still got it in for Iekanjika, guv?”

  Vi pulled a face both of disgust and against the sharp wind. “He makes my skin creep,” she said. “What’s he doing making seven grand a month out of that old pub in Canning Town?”

  “Potentially. If Paul Grint’s now paid …”