A Private Business

by Barbara Nadel

  Lee looked up. “Council say no,” he said.

  She nodded. He knew what she was thinking. Perhaps if he’d passed that snippet on sooner some of what had just happened could have been prevented. But she also knew that in itself it hadn’t been much. It hadn’t been looting and rioting.

  “I’m interviewing Grint,” she said.

  Lee nodded.

  “Someone’ll come for you to take statements.”

  She walked back toward the door and then she turned. “Maria Peters’ll live. You did some good vomit work there, Arnold.”

  “You’re lying.”

  DS Bracci shrugged. “Am I? I’m not.”

  “That man, that private detective, assaulted me,” Betty said.

  “You had a cushion over another woman’s face. You were trying to kill her,” he countered. Lee Arnold had smacked her good and proper but she’d been seen by a doctor who’d said she was well enough to be interviewed. “I’m not lying about there being no church in Barking, Betty.”

  “I’ve seen the site. Paul took me. He would never lie to me.”

  “Paul took you somewhere,” Bracci said. “But it weren’t to no site he’d bought, rented or had planning permission for. He’s a conman.” He watched her eyes mist. “Paul Grint always was and he always will be. God has not, Betty, saved his soul.”

  She said nothing. Tony Bracci didn’t know what was more painful, the look of her bruised eyes or the crushed look on her face. She’d loved Paul Grint. All the God-squad stuff aside, that had been the bottom line.

  “I want to know why you tried to help Maria Peters kill herself. Was it for money?”

  “Of course not.” She looked up sharply. “That woman killed her own child!”

  Tony leaned back in his chair. “Tell me about it.”

  “It was a long time ago.” She looked away.

  “Obviously still bothers you.”

  “I was her best friend. At school and then until … it.”

  Tony didn’t speak. He just waited.

  She tilted her head up sharply. “I was married. She was trying to get into comedy and I went to her first audition with her. But she was sick because she was pregnant. Not that she remembered me being there. Just thinking about herself! That was always Maria! Just ran home after the audition—just left me. She had a baby, a little girl, in a toilet, and then she strangled her.” She cried, hugging herself. “She put her body in a Clarks shoebox and left it on the mud at Wapping Stairs!”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I knew some of it already. But she told me and Pastor Grint the rest of it today.”

  “Why?”

  Through tears Betty said, “Because she wanted to be saved! Because Jesus was sending her terrible signs!”

  Tony had imagined a tale of abortion.

  “But, maybe because of guilt, she couldn’t part with the little one’s body,” Betty said. “She went back and got the box off the mud and she kept it. I went to the flat she got when she left her parents’ place once and while she went out to get milk for our tea I looked around. There was a terrible smell and I wanted to know what it was. Then I found her, the little one, rotting in that box. That box that God made appear to Maria all these last months to force her to confess her sins …”

  Tony Bracci had heard some things in his time … “What are you talking about?”

  “She came to our church. She knew she had to. Jesus had called her and then, when she came to church, he began sending her signs to make her testify.”

  “She found you, not the other way around?”

  “Yes.” Then she leaned across the table toward him and said, “She arrived at church one day, alone. It was meant to be. Jesus wanted us to meet and he wanted justice, for her child.”

  “And had you, before Maria arrived, ever told anyone else about what you’d seen in her flat all those years ago?”

  “Marie had been in the papers some months before, making her comeback. When I saw it, it made me cross. So much fuss about her! But it made me sad too. No one knew of her shame except me, and I knew she had to be heavily burdened and she was.”

  “And so you told Pastor Grint about your old friend, did you?”

  “I thought she’d had an abortion and then just kept the body,” Betty said. “I didn’t know about the murder until today.” She put her head down. “And of course I told Pastor Grint and he tried to help her, as I knew he would. I’ve always told him everything. But Maria wanted to die. She wanted to.”

  “And did you tell Pastor Grint that too?” Tony asked.

  “Of course I did,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone at the time.”

  The duty psych, a blond, middle-aged man with a nicotine-stain streak in his hair, said, “Why did you kill the child, Maria?”

  “Because I wanted to get away. From home. I couldn’t do that with a child.”

  She hadn’t had to talk, it was the middle of the night and she was still in pain. But she’d wanted to.

  “It was easy. I put her body in a shoebox and I took it down to the river. That’s what people used to do in the old days when abortions were still illegal. They got a shoebox and they put the fetus in it. I got a shoebox of my own. It was the right thing to do, the right thing to put her in.”

  “And you got on with your life.”

  “Yes. I made jokes.”

  He put his fingers up to his lips; he was confused. She was so cold. For a woman who had just tried to take her own life because of this incident, she was very cold.

  “I switched that part of my life off.”

  “Until?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When did you start to think about it again?” he asked.

  For a moment she looked confused and then she said, “Always.”

  “You just said, Maria, that you switched that part of your life off.”

  “I switched the guilt off.”

  “So what made the guilt switch back on again?”

  “God told me I needed to be guilty. He sent me signs. He stalked me.”

  “What signs?”

  “Omens. Things that nudged my conscience.”

  “What things?”

  “The shoebox I put the child’s body in, full of blood.”

  The psych cleared his throat. “So the memory of killing your child never left you.”

  “No.”

  “So when the tide took her body away …”

  “Tide didn’t take her body away.” She looked up. She saw him frowning and then she said, “I couldn’t leave her there.”

  It was hot and stuffy in the day room, the psych wanted a fag and he knew he was beginning to sweat. “So what did you do?” he said. “With her?”

  “I took her home,” she said. “And then I moved out and I took her with me. I always took her everywhere I went. It wasn’t her fault that her father raped me, was it?”

  “Who raped you, Maria?” the psychiatrist asked.

  “My baby’s father,” she replied, “was Father Fernandez. He was a priest at our church and my mother and my sisters all loved him. What could I do?”

  In spite of his dodgy past, Vi hadn’t actually envisaged Paul Grint as a bit of a geezer. Maybe it was because he originated from up west?

  “The church?” he shrugged. “Yeah, I’ll give you that. The Barking place doesn’t exist, never did. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t going to. The Lord provides and I did get that short lease over the Olympic site.”

  “And then you moved to Canning Town.”

  “I had to keep my congregation together,” he said. “Church is important to them, to all of us.”

  “So what was the plan, Paul?”

  “Miss Peters helped, she gave us the money. She was giving us more.”

  “Was she.”

  “Her idea. Drew up legal contracts for it with a proper solicitor, Mr. Allitt. No pressure from me or anyone. Totally kosher. Ask him.”
/>   “Had Miss Peters also written the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire into her will?”

  “That was part of it,” he said. “But she was turning some money over to the church straight away, to clear our debts.”

  “Did you ask her to do that?”

  “No. It was all her idea, she offered.”

  “So you didn’t want Maria Peters dead?”

  “No!”

  “So why did Betty Muller who, my colleagues tell me, is obsessed with you, try to assist Miss Peters to kill herself earlier this evening?”

  “I’ve no idea. Ask her.” He smiled and then his face became grave. “Inspector, Betty and Maria have a history. Neither woman is particularly stable.”

  “Oh, no?” Vi raised an eyebrow. “So why’d you spend so much time with Betty, eh? As far as I can tell you’re part of her problem. She’s a bit too religious, isn’t she?”

  He smiled but said nothing.

  Vi looked down at her notes. “And this history between Miss Peters and Miss Muller,” she said. “Anything to do with a baby Maria had back in 1980?”

  “You’d have to ask her.”

  “Who? Maria or Betty?”

  Again Grint said nothing.

  “Maria Peters gave birth to a baby girl in May 1980,” Vi said. “I know you know this, because both Maria Peters and Betty Muller have told us you do. Mr. Grint, did you use this knowledge, in any way, to try to manipulate or get money out of Maria Peters?”

  “Did I blackmail her? No.”

  “I didn’t say blackmail,” Vi said. “What I’m talking about is you sending her out of her mind. She had some strange experiences. Boxes filled with blood, mysteriously appearing.”

  “God can prick your conscience.” He smiled.

  Vi lost it. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Paul, it was you! I know you’re bankrupt! Or you were. I know you’re a conman.”

  “Not any more, I’ve found—”

  “Jesus. Yeah.” Vi sat back in her seat and looked down at her notes. “Just like Maria, you’re a lapsed Catholic, aren’t you?”

  He said nothing.

  Vi persisted. “So some notion at least about the Catholic mindset. Maria had been religious. You’d know how that would work, wouldn’t you, Paul? You’d know she’d have a need to be punished in some way. You have a key to her gaff, did you? Betty give it you, did she?”

  He didn’t reply to the question, but said instead, “Money isn’t everything, DI Collins.”

  “It is if you haven’t got any,” Vi said. “And you really haven’t, have you, Paul. And this brings me to one Pastor Iekanjika and why you keep on giving him IOUs for seven grand a month.”

  “That’s rent.”

  “No, it isn’t, Paul,” Vi said, “that’s well dodgy, that is, and you and I both know it. What we both also know is where the three million quid just recently landed in the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire’s bank account came from too.”

  He smiled. “Maria’s generous gift to help with our expenses.”

  “Your new life, where was it to be, Paul, Spain?” Vi smiled. “I know you knew she was planning to kill herself, Paul,” she said, “because Betty told us so. She told us she told you everything.”

  But Paul Grint just carried on smiling and then he said, “But she’s a nutter, DI Collins. Prove your allegations or let me go.”

  It was almost midday by the time Mumtaz got home. She invited Lee in for some lunch and then spoke briefly to her mother on the phone. According to her mother, Mr. Choudhury’s son Aziz had been arrested by the police. She had no idea what for or why but the local community was buzzing with the news.

  “And to think that you were so mad keen on him, Mumtaz!” she’d said. “We will have to find you someone else.”

  Mumtaz made tea and tuna sandwiches and took them in to the living room. Lee, his eyes half closed in what had once been Ahmed’s chair took a sandwich and said, “Ta.”

  For a while they ate and talked about other things; their children, the riots, the weather. But then suddenly there was an awkward silence into which Mumtaz said, “When do you think we’ll hear anything?”

  Paul Grint, Betty Muller and a Zimbabwean preacher called Iekanjika were still being questioned by the police. Maria Peters was in hospital.

  Lee shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Grint manipulated those people in his church.”

  “Mumtaz, you and me’ll never agree on this but all religion is manipulation.”

  She said nothing.

  “All Vi told me was that they found a key to Maria’s front door in Betty Muller’s bag.”

  “Maria said she didn’t give anyone a key.”

  “Can we trust the word of a woman who tries to top herself, albeit with help? And what about Betty having a duplicate cut without her knowing? Didn’t you say one of your brothers did that once?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could explain all the feelings she had about being watched, about the peacock feathers and all that other stuff just materializing. Betty nipping in to drive her bonkers.”

  “It could.”

  He looked at her with narrowed, doubting eyes. “Don’t tell me you prefer a weird, supernatural explanation.”

  She smiled. “Lee, I prefer a psychological explanation.”

  “Same difference.”

  This time she laughed. “No it isn’t. A person’s state of mind can produce strange effects.”

  “Like peacock feathers.”

  “No! But guilt, which Maria has in spades, can haunt a person. People can produce conditions of fear to punish themselves or others, if they know their weaknesses and can exploit such things. Betty Muller was assisting Maria’s suicide because she felt she needed to be punished for what she had done.”

  “And for her money.”

  “We don’t know that yet.”

  “No, but—”

  “Lee, both Maria and Betty are vulnerable women. They are both alone and one of them, it seems, had a terrible secret. Things can happen to such people. To some extent they anticipate it.”

  He didn’t really know what she meant, but Lee just ate his sandwich and then he said, “Oh, one of the blokes told me they’ve caught the Olympic Flasher.”

  “Oh, that’s good.”

  “A bloke called Choudhury,” Lee said. “Aziz Choudhury.”

  So that was why he’d been arrested. Mumtaz felt vindicated in her low opinion of Aziz Choudhury but also a little bit sick too. Although she didn’t usually go in for a lot of exposition about her priviate life unless she absolutely had to, she told Lee about her brush with the Choudhury’s. He smiled and said, “So you had a narrow escape then.”

  Pastor Marius Iekanjika’s lawyer was a Mr. Riordan. As Iekanjika was big and dark, so Mr. Riordan was small and pale. Vi Collins knew him of old. She knew his fearsome reputation as a pocket legal Rottweiler and she ignored it. Fixing her eyes on Iekanjika, she said, “So, Mr. Iekanjika, what’s this about these seven-grand IOUs you have from Mr. Paul Grint?”

  Iekanjika turned aside to quietly consult with his lawyer. Vi looked at Tony Bracci and rolled her eyes. The rich and powerful were always like this, in her experience—not moving a centimeter without their advocate.

  George Riordan cleared his throat. “That’s a private matter between my client and Mr. Grint.”

  Ignoring Riordan again, Vi said to Iekanjika, “We believe that Grint may have been involved in extorting money from one of his wealthier parishioners in order to pay you—amongst other things.”

  “No comment.”

  Vi shrugged. “Why so much for a dump like that old pub, Marius? You’ve got other properties. Why that pub in particular, eh?”

  The Zimbabwean looked away.

  Tony Bracci said, “Mr. Grint tell you why he needed that particular pub, Mr. Iekanjika?”

  Iekanjika said, “Because he needed a place for his congregation to meet. A temporary place. He has a new church that is being built over i
n Barking.”

  “No he doesn’t,” Vi said. “But then I think you know that, Mr. Iekanjika. I think this because yesterday Mr. Grint authorized the bank that holds the church’s account to pay you what he owed you plus another hundred thousand pounds. He was going to do a runner with the rest, wasn’t he?”

  “He paid me what he owed me.”

  “He paid you a hundred grand over the top,” Bracci said.

  Mr. Riordan put his hand on Iekanjika’s arm, as if to restrain him. “My client was owed more than just back-rent by Mr. Grint,” he said.

  “Oh? What?”

  “That is a private—”

  “A private matter?” Vi leaned forward. “No it isn’t, Mr. Iekanjika. The woman who gave Mr. Grint several million quid, as you probably know, tried to kill herself last night. Know who she left the rest of her ten million fortune to, do you?”

  Neither Iekanjika or Mr. Riordan said a word.

  “Oh, yes, it was Mr. Grint, wasn’t it. A member of Mr. Grint’s church tried to assist this woman to kill herself, which is an offense in this country,” Vi continued. “It all smells bad, Mr. Iekanjika, and you know what? I think you picked up the stink well before I did and I think you exploited it.” She took a copy of an e-mail out from underneath the papers on her desk and placed it in front of him. “From Shepherd’s Bush nick,” she said as Iekanjika looked down at the document. “You used to do a bit of enforcing over there, didn’t you, Marius? Helping Mr. Grint to ‘sort out’ people who complained about being sold houses by him that he didn’t own. He went down, while you just went home for a couple of years.”

  “We’ve got evidence”—although whether Roy Arnold would actually testify to this as no one seemed to know where he was—“that you and Grint planned this little job on this lady between you,” Vi said. “Personally, I think that the death of Jacob Sitole may well be in there somewhere too. Matthias Chibanda tell his old mate Jacob about your plans, did he?”

  “Matthias Chibanda killed Jacob Sitole for his mobile phone.” Iekanjika looked up, his eyes hooded and threatening.

  “Oh, right, silly me.” She smiled. “Mind you, I do have to have a chat with your mate Reverend Manyika at some point. Because on the twenty-second of April 2011 he visited you at your home in Silvertown, didn’t he? And you may recall, Mr. Iekanjika, that one of the things Reverend Manyika said to you was, ‘What kind of Christian allows killing.’”