The Fortune Men

by Nadifa Mohamed

  Diana laughs out loud, surprising herself as well as the journalist, a single incredulous honk of a laugh. ‘I can say with complete confidence that she didn’t have any enemies.’

  ‘No rough sorts with a grudge? No disputed debts?’ he pursues. ‘Moneylenders are not known for their universal popularity, are they?’

  ‘Violet was not just a moneylender,’ Diana says bitterly. ‘People knew her, they bought little odds and ends from here and were given credit when they needed it. Even the seamen treated her with respect, she helped them.’

  ‘But there must be so many foreigners! Seamen from Bongo Bongo Land and God knows where, violent men, men who are not used to our laws and the way things are done here.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about that.’

  ‘The police are looking for a Somali, aren’t they? I have a note of the police telegram: “Somali, approximately thirty years of age, five foot seven, moustache, a gold tooth.” Did you see this man yourself?’

  ‘Yes … no … I don’t know. I looked through the door but I can’t be sure. My daughter thinks she saw a Somali.’

  Finding a crack in her apparent assurance, Parry hesitates a moment before asking, ‘Was Miss Volacki … ah … interfered with … at all?’

  Diana’s eyes widen in shock but then in a loud, clear voice she replies, ‘No! And you better make that damned clear.’

  ‘Understood, understood.’

  ‘Ridiculous!’ Diana hisses under her breath.

  ‘Didn’t mean any offence, Mrs Tanay, it’s the readers, you see, they want to know absolutely everything.’

  ‘I think we should end the interview now, Mr Parry, but there is just one last thing I want to say. The police are doing a sterling job and have sent extra officers, from London to Glasgow, but they are struggling to identify a suspect. To that end …’ Diana removes a folded piece of paper from her pocket and flattens it out against the counter. Looking like a child slouched over her homework, she focuses hard on Daniel’s extravagant handwriting and reads. ‘“My brother-in-law, Mr Daniel Levy, an outfitter of Church Street, Ebbw Vale, decided with the family yesterday that we would be prepared to pay the sum of two hundred pounds to anybody who gives information which will lead to the conviction of the man. A cheque for that amount will be deposited with the family solicitor, Mr Myer Cohen. The solicitor, in conjunction with the police, will decide who is eligible for the reward if a man is discovered and convicted.”’

  ‘Oh, sensational!’ Parry looks ready to shake her hand in gratitude. ‘What a generous reward that is! That will definitely put the cat amongst the pigeons. This story will run on the front page tomorrow, I’m sure of it.’

  Diana rises and leads him to the door.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Parry.’

  ‘And a very good evening to you, Mrs Tanay, I’ll be following this case very closely, I assure you, very closely indeed.’

  Diana fakes a smile and then slams the door behind him.

  Chief Detective Inspector Powell takes a sip of scalding black tea from his glazed blue mug, an old raffle prize from his rugby club’s Christmas party, and waits a moment outside the interview room. He hears Lavery going over and over the same details in his monotonous drone and the suspect mumbling back in broken English; Mattan doesn’t know that they have been following him for more than a week. He twists the handle and then throws the door open, his bulk almost darkening the room. After a dramatic pause he nods to Lavery, who slides from his seat and offers it to him wordlessly.

  The room is stuffy, and sweat quickly gathers between his shoulder blades and under his arms. Powell pulls the plug on the two-bar heater positioned beneath his feet and rubs his palm over his bald pate. Mattan, the small-time thief, sits opposite him, cocky as anything.

  ‘How do you do?’ Powell says, offering a handshake across the plywood table.

  ‘How do you do,’ echoes Mattan, squeezing his hand hard.

  ‘Let’s make this simple, shall we, son? We’re all busy men here, aren’t we?’ Powell laughs.

  Mahmood murmurs something non-committal and tries to maintain his poker face.

  ‘Simple larceny. You’re no virgin when it comes to that charge, we all know that, but there is something else I’d like us to chew the cud over.’

  Mahmood waits impassively, his fingers knitted together into a ball on the table.

  ‘You see, we have many witnesses who say they saw a Somali outside the Volacki shop on the night that Violet Volacki had her throat cut.’

  Mahmood raises his eyebrows in bewilderment. ‘You not notice how many Somalis live on that road? Why you ask me this question?’

  ‘When was the last time you went to Bute Street?’

  ‘I can’t remember, too many months ago.’

  ‘So why did the Indian, Mubashir, say you called him out of a café the night before the murder asking him to sell you bread from his shop?’

  ‘If I’m in café why I’m asking him to go to shop for bread?’ Mahmood laughs.

  ‘Don’t laugh, lad, don’t laugh.’ Powell holds Mattan’s gaze hard until the Somali blinks and lowers his eyes.

  ‘Why has your landlord, Madison, said that you arrived home at eight thirty on the night of the murder while you claimed to have got home from the cinema a full hour before that?’

  ‘I know what time I got home.’

  ‘How do you?’

  ‘Because I looked at the clock above the paying box at the Central when I come in, four thirty, and when I left, seven thirty.’

  ‘Who did you see at the cinema?’

  ‘I see many people I know.’

  ‘Did you talk to them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You been to Bute Street after the murder, then?’

  ‘No, I don’t go there.’

  ‘At all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Witnesses tell us they saw you there on the day of the funeral.’

  Mahmood rolls his eyes in exasperation. ‘You say this man said this and said that but I do not believe you. I no read what you write down. You fetch them and I will see if they say these things.’

  ‘That can be arranged, I dare say. Your wish is our command. Inspector Lavery, bring Madison or Monday here.’

  Mahmood watches the door open and close as Lavery leaves, and then grimaces for a moment: this interview is strange, these coppers unpredictable, the coat long forgotten, but all this talk of the dead woman instead.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll furnish you with a sandwich and a cup of tea in a while,’ Powell says, misunderstanding the suspect’s expression.

  Mahmood glances at Powell. He regrets saying that he didn’t believe him so bluntly. His plan was to say as little as possible and to stir truths and untruths together until they both dissolved into one convincing story. He shouldn’t have spoken with af-buhaan, he needs to rein back his temper and smile a little, especially as this detective looks like he could easily punch his fist through a wall. A Welsh bull, that’s what this man Powell reminds him of: dense, compacted meat squeezed into an old-fashioned suit with two small, unblinking eyes in his large-boned face. Well past fifty, but his muscles probably galvanized by age rather than weakened.

  Powell yawns. ‘Pardon me, I’ve been barely catching a wink this past fortnight, working twelve-, fourteen-hour shifts,’ he says, as if to an empty room.

  Mahmood nods his head lightly in false sympathy.

  The policeman recording the interview on a typewriter in the corner looks between them, and waits with fingers stretched expectantly over the keys.

  Lavery returns and whispers into Detective Powell’s ear, and then both take up positions, facing Mahmood across the table.

  ‘Did you ever tell Mr Madison how you thought the woman in Bute Street was killed, and did you show him by actions how you thought it was done?’

  ‘I doesn’t speak to anybody about how the woman was killed. I don’t know this woman. I don’t bother her. She don’t bother me. She don
’t tell me nothing. I don’t tell her nothing.’

  ‘Well, we’re hearing the complete opposite. It’s put us in something of a quandary. Either you’re lying or Madison and Monday are.’

  ‘Believe what you want, I tell you true, ruunta, I tell you truth.’ Mahmood stumbles, his English is fracturing, words of Somali, Arabic, Hindi, Swahili and English clotting at once on his tongue. He runs his hand over his hair and takes a deep breath. ‘Monday say whatever Madison tell him, if he says jump he say how high.’

  ‘In your country how do they slaughter animals?’

  ‘What you mean?’

  ‘Well, how do you do it? What makes the sacrifice holy?’

  ‘You say bismillah over the animal.’

  ‘And you run a dagger across its throat, do you not? Did you ever do that in your country?’

  ‘I never butcher.’

  ‘I’ve seen it here in Cardiff, on your feast days, you’ve never taken part?’

  ‘I like my clothes too much.’

  Powell scribbles something on his notepad and then rises slowly from the table, leaving the room without a word.

  Smoking his pipe and pacing up and down the dark hallway, Powell collects his thoughts: Mattan is wilder than he expected, a real rogue with no respect for authority, a covetous darkie of no fixed abode. He’d read somewhere that for Somalis every man is his own master. They aren’t like the jovial Kroo boys or anglicized West Indians, but are truculent and vicious, quick to draw a weapon and unrepentant after the fact. This one must have become bold after the soft sentences he’d received in the past; remembered to wear gloves, dispatched the victim without a peep, disposed quickly of the murder weapon and stolen cash. Dangerous but now unable to keep his lies straight. A good substantial case, something his son should be helping out on, instead of faffing around in Ryton College, wasting his time on amateur dramatics, civics and English literature. What does an inspector need with all that gobbledegook? The police service is surely losing its way. He’s been in the job gone thirty years and he’s learnt everything he’s needed to know by thinning his boots out on the streets. Talking to the dregs of society. Knowing their habits better than they do. Holding your dinner down when confronted with their bestial acts, that’s the knack to this job. Not to say that there isn’t some place for book learning, forensics, but it’s still down to that relentless knowledge and pursuit of the wolves who live within the flock. The perverts, lunatics, desperadoes, lovefools, sadists and Jekyll and Hydes that he’s interviewed and shared a cigarette with before sending them on to the gallows. It’s usually the sluts and nigger-lovers that bear the brunt of it, shot down if they’re lucky or dragged naked out of a blood-soaked ditch if they’re not. Respectable women like Miss Volacki should be inviolable, must be. He’d known her for decades, known her father too. She was a minuscule woman, wouldn’t even reach as high as his chest, obviously not a Christian but sober, industrious and straight as a die. Tiger Bay needed people like her, otherwise it would go completely to the dogs. He’d catch her killer, he was sure of that; he didn’t need the papers or the councillors hurrying him. They’d spoken to every seaman docked that night, every pub landlord, every thief, every dopehead, every whore, the milkmen and road sweepers, the shopkeepers and café owners, the pastors and sheikhs, the moneylenders and their debtors, the street dice-throwers and the kids who watch them, and to police forces across the country. If the local cats, dogs and horses could talk he would have pulled them in for questioning too. The younger men might get excited working the docks, but for him it was just depressing what the country had come to. Spending almost every night this past fortnight on the Bay had disheartened him; it was crawling with queers, darkies, hoodlums, communists, and traitors of every description. You could smell the dissolution in the air, from the oily stink of spices pumping out of the eating houses to the wisps of marijuana smoke coming from loud house parties. Was this the country that so many good men and boys had died for? ‘The ports are our broken skin,’ that’s what his first Chief Constable had said, way back in the twenties, and it was still true. No one had listened when Wilson suggested outlawing mixed-race marriages then, and here lay the consequences.

  Footsteps clatter towards Powell and he raises his head from the floor. ‘Sir, Monday is here to see you.’

  ‘Good, good, bring him in, and call in that useless Jamaican, Cover, too. He said that asylum case, Tahir Gass, was the Somali he saw outside the shop, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, let’s see if we can’t jog his memory a little bit. Gass has already hot-footed it on to a ship.’

  ‘Mr Mattan says that you have made a mistake in the time that you have said he came into the house that Thursday night. Would you tell me now what time he came in?’

  Monday stands by the door, holding his hands behind his back, and nods sombrely, avoiding Mahmood’s face. ‘I will.

  ‘I was sitting on the sofa in Mr Madison’s room, talking about racing and pools. This man …’ Monday points disdainfully at Mahmood, ‘came in about quarter to nine. He sat down on the sofa by me. He didn’t say anything. I gave him the paper but he didn’t look at it. Just stared in front of him.’

  ‘I doesn’t, I doesn’t, you say everything Madison tell you to say.’

  ‘What is this? Why can’t you tell the man the truth? You know what time you came in that night.’

  ‘Bastard!’

  ‘You call me a bastard? You call me a bastard in front of the policemen?’ Monday raises his palms to the ceiling as if testifying in church.

  ‘And a liar! Big liar! You tell them untruths. I no show you nothing about how woman was killed, you lie.’

  ‘Settle down now, gentlemen.’ Powell smiles.

  ‘On my dear mother’s life I swear that he told Madison that it would be easy to attack her and that you just put your arm around her neck and cut her throat with the other hand. I saw it.’

  ‘Qaraac! Ibn Sharmuta!’ Mahmood curses.

  ‘Big fool! You son of a perverse and rebellious woman.’

  ‘That’s enough. Take him out of here, Lavery.’

  ‘You are Madison’s slave, his dog, he care nothing for you, why lie for him? He just angry because I report him.’

  ‘That’s enough, I said.’ Powell beats his fist on the table until Monday is safely out of the room.

  ‘Did that satisfy your doubts regarding our witness statements, Mr Mattan?’ Powell asks, raising a bushy eyebrow.

  Mahmood wipes saliva from the edges of his mouth and tries to shake the anger out of his skull. ‘British police is so clever. I tell you I kill twenty men. I kill your king. This I tell you if you like, you think that right?’

  Lavery visits him in the piss-walled police cell.

  ‘Why you keeping me here? Just send me down to the Magistrates.’

  ‘You forgot it’s a Sunday tomorrow?’

  Mahmood rubs at a new stain on his trousers. ‘So Monday?’

  ‘That’s right. Now, Mattan, do you have any objection to standing in a line of men, all Somalis, and several people – some ladies and perhaps a man or two – would be asked to see the line. Do you understand what I mean?’

  ‘I understand. It is up to you – I don’t care.’

  ‘Very well, I shall try to arrange it for the morning. Do you want me to send for any friend of yours to be here? Do you want me to get any special clothes for you to wear? That suit looks like a miner’s been rolling around in it.’

  Mahmood listens, at first apathetically, but when he sees the snare they are trying to catch him in, he snorts with laughter. ‘I understand, you tell them what I am wearing so they can pick me out. No, I don’t want special clothes, I don’t want no friend, I don’t need anything, and I won’t be in your parade either, you can’t force me.’ He smiles a smug, beatific smile.

  Lavery’s face, long and gloomy at the best of times, hardens but he just nods and closes the cell door softly behind him.

 
In the morning he is taken to be photographed. The camera flashes close to his face, his eyes fluttering so much that the felt hat-wearing photographer takes another to be sure. He also takes two more shots, of left and right profile, and then holsters his weapon. Mahmood puts down the board with his chalked-on name and moves away from the wall. Out of the corner of his eye he sees half a dozen people walking slowly past the open door. He recognizes an old grocer he used to buy from, then behind him, catches sight of a Maltese poker player who’d dealt him a loaded hand once, then, no, it can’t be! The Nigerian watchmaker he’d tussled with once over a watch. What kind of gathering is this? All of these disparate faces from his past coming to peer at him as if at the new lion in the zoo, guilty curiosity in their eyes. There is a white-socked, brown-haired girl trailing after them, she’s around twelve years old, sucking her sleeve absent-mindedly. She looks at him hard, neither blinking nor embarrassed, just boring into him with another set of glacial blue eyes. She whispers something to an older woman in a headscarf and then shakes her head, turning back to Mahmood for one long last look before they disappear.

  The ride in the back of the police car reveals the first frothy buds of cherry blossom and magnolia, warmth or something like it in the air, birds trilling and bickering. They’ve given him a collarless khaki shirt and brown trousers to wear and he now waits his turn at Cardiff Magistrates. The gloomy, wood-panelled waiting room is noxious with beeswax and Brasso and Mahmood is relieved when a clerk comes hammering down the steps to announce they are ready for him.

  Like a game, Mahmood’s head turns this way and that as the subject of his freedom is batted around the courtroom.

  The charge is larceny.

  Understood.

  The value of the coat £12 12s.

  Understood.

  Does the accused want to apply for bail?

  Yes, sir!

  Then the game changes. ‘Certain formalities need to be completed’, ‘We want to keep him for five days’, ‘A more serious matter.’

  What is that fool Powell doing here?

  ‘He is a seaman in possession of a seaman’s discharge book. He has been evicted from his lodgings and is now of no fixed abode.’