When he’d been a teenager, mobile phones had been bricks carried by yuppies and computer games were played by kids. Almost as full of testosterone as of hatred for his pissed-up father, Lee had left home and joined the army. While he was in the UK he’d had a great laugh getting rid of his aggression in the gym, out in the park or down the pub. Then they’d sent him to Iraq, and all that had changed. Lee wondered what the kids who joined ISIS really thought once they got out there. Did they cry behind rocks for their mothers as bombs went off? He had.
*
It was a stupid fucking job. Fetching and carrying for Mr Bhatti. Pratting around Brick Lane like a prick. Imran knew he was worth more than just being Mr Bhatti’s peon. He had an NVQ 2 in Social Care. He could look after mentals and kids.
‘There’s a lot of deliveries today,’ Mr Bhatti said, while fiddling about with an old plug. He called his business an ‘electrical shop’, but he didn’t sell computers or phones or anything cool. Just old bits of wire and plugs.
Imran walked up the stairs at the back of the shop and then through the hatch into the building next door. From the top of the stairs he could see that there was a lot of post, including some massive parcels. He sighed. He’d only brought a couple of plastic bags with him. He walked down and began picking it all up. No one lived in the flat, which was knackered even by the worst Brick Lane standards, but the address served its owner, Mr Bhatti, well. Dodgy people paid a lot of money for a secure address that couldn’t be traced back to them.
So here was a letter to Mr Qazi’s Haj and Umrah Tours, which took lots of very pious and sincere pilgrims to Mecca and then dumped them in overpriced doss houses full of fleas. The letter was probably a complaint; they usually were. Something for Mrs Korai, not to be seen by her husband, from her son who’d run away with a Polish girl, a raft of perfumed love notes and the usual weird little envelopes addressed to that artist who lived in a damp basement and spoke like he’d been to public school. Then there were the seven very large envelopes. These were a first. Addressed to B. Shaw, they weighed a bit, and when Imran retraced his steps back into Mr Bhatti’s shop, he only just managed to stop them falling out onto the floor.
‘What the—?’ Mr Bhatti ran over and hustled him to the back of the shop. He told his son, cross-eyed Jabbar, to ‘watch the shop!’
He took some of the packages from Imran and pushed a load of light switches off a table and into a box. ‘Put them down!’ Imran let them fall onto the table.
‘What are they?’
‘I don’t know! Why would I? Are those the only bags you brought?’
‘Yeah.’
He clicked his tongue. ‘Ach! I’ll have to give you a rucksack. You can’t take these in Asda bags.’
‘Didn’t know I’d have to take stuff this size.’
He never had before.
‘This Mr Shaw job is very important,’ Mr Bhatti said. ‘They paid a lot of money to use the address.’
‘Who?’
‘Mr Shaw.’
Imran picked up an envelope. ‘What’s in them?’
‘Not our business.’ He took the parcel from him. ‘Now listen, you must deliver these to an address in Navarre Street.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Up bloody Bethnal Green. Arnold Circus.’
Imran looked blank.
Mr Bhatti shook his head. ‘Go up the top of Brick Lane and turn left, then right onto Club Row. You’ll find it.’
He pulled a battered canvas rucksack out from underneath shelves loaded with screws, fuses and switches. ‘The rest of the letters are regulars?’
‘Yeah.’
There was a list. He kept it in his wallet.
‘Mr Shaw are new customers . . .’
‘How can Mr Shaw be more than one person? I don’t know who or what Mr Shaw is. Neither do you. How am I to know? It’s money, most of which I pass on to you.’
That was a lie and they both knew it.
‘You go to Navarre Street, to a shop called Veg. I don’t know what it is. Some hippy-dippy thing, it sounds like. You ask for Danish.’
‘Then what?’
‘You give the envelopes to him. Then you go,’ Mr Bhatti said.
‘What about payment?’
Some of the regulars, particularly Mr Qazi, gave Imran cash in an envelope. Others had some other sort of arrangement.
Mr Bhatti filled the bag. ‘Don’t worry about that. Just take this to Navarre Street. Veg, Danish. OK?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then you can do your other deliveries.’
Imran picked up the bag. It was heavy and made him wish he had a car. Amir, his brother, had one, but then he had a lot of things Imran didn’t. Like a girlfriend, a leather jacket and money. Their mother cried over him all the time, worrying about what he did and where he went. Whatever it was, it let him buy a Mitsubishi Evo, which was one of those cars that went very fast and made a lot of noise.
When he left the shop, Imran went north along Brick Lane and into the area where most of the hipsters lived. A bloke with a beard dyed blue looked at him. Maybe he wanted to take his ‘look’. They all wanted to keep on finding new ‘looks’, those people. But what was to want about being a fat kid in shalwar khameez? Imran certainly didn’t like it, even if it did make his mother happy.
*
‘We all want to know who we are, don’t we?’
‘Of course.’
Mumtaz sipped her tea. When she had multiple appointments like this, she tended to get bombarded. This client, Alison, was no exception.
‘I’ve always known I was adopted,’ she said. ‘Mum and Dad were open about that. What none of us knew is who my birth parents were.’
‘Which is . . .’
‘So far, so normal, yes,’ Alison said. ‘Trouble is, there was no way any of us could know, because I was found in a phone box in Chiswick. Newborn and naked. A nun found me and took me to her convent.’
‘The authorities would have tried to find your mother, surely?’ Mumtaz said.
‘Yes. I’ve got press cuttings I can let you have. They tried. But nobody came forward. After the convent, I spent some time in a children’s home in Essex until Mum and Dad adopted me.’
‘Have you always wanted to try and find your mother?’ Mumtaz asked.
Alison shrugged. She was a dark-haired, slightly plump woman in her early forties. She sat awkwardly on her leather sofa. ‘Not until this turned up,’ she said.
‘Your illness.’
‘I just started to jerk. I’d be making a cup of tea, like I just did for you, and suddenly the cup’d fly out of my hand. I went to the doctor and was tested for everything – MS, motor neurone disease, cancer . . . Then, eventually, they found Huntington’s.’
Mumtaz knew of it. Mainly afflicting white Europeans, Huntington’s affected movement, cognition, and eventually presaged a form of dementia. It was inherited and fatal.
‘I could have a year, five years, ten,’ Alison said. ‘And because it’s inherited I may have got it from my mum or my dad who could both be dead. But I have to try. I’ve a son who’s only sixteen and I’ve a limited amount of time to spend with him. The only bright point in all of this is that Charlie, my son, is negative for the disease.’
‘Are you married, Alison?’
‘I was,’ she said. ‘Christopher. Very good to us financially – but then he works in banking so he bloody well should be – pretty useless as a husband and father. Likes a young girl or three, does Chris. Legacy of his youth as a dashing officer in the RAF. Twat.’
Often when people saw her headscarf, they behaved as if Mumtaz had to be protected from subjects like sex. It was a response she hated. Alison was refreshingly straightforward.
‘I’d like my son to know who he is,’ she said. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time in Chiswick lately, looking around the area, but I haven’t talked to the nuns at the convent. I don’t seem to be able to do that. Probably to do with the fact I’m knackered all the time. T
he nun who found me, Mother Emerita, died back in the nineties. I’ve even put ads in local papers.’
‘No luck?’
‘Nothing. I was “baby unknown” when I was found and I remain “baby unknown” to this day. All I do know, because I had a DNA test last year, is that I’m of white northern European and Mediterranean heritage. Oddly though, there’s also a Native American component. Isn’t that a turn-up, eh?’
Mumtaz said nothing. Sitting in Alison’s large, neat garden they could have been in the Cotswolds. That was weird. In fact, they were less than five minutes from Wanstead tube station. Probably via her banker husband, the ‘baby unknown’ from Chiswick had come into some serious money.
‘If I were well I’d do all this myself,’ Alison said. ‘But I’m not, and you were recommended by one of my neighbours.’
Mumtaz smiled. A Sikh woman, if she remembered correctly, with a wayward husband.
‘Even now I don’t know much,’ Alison said. ‘I know where the phone box is, I can give you the address of the convent where I spent my first few days, and the police of course, but I think this is down to legwork. One thing the nuns at the orphanage in Essex where I eventually ended up did tell me about Mother Emerita is that she always said that people were looking at her when she found me.’
‘What people?’
‘In one of the houses on the street. Locals were questioned at the time and claimed to have seen nothing, but I wonder.’
‘You know that it’s actually more likely that your mother wasn’t local,’ Mumtaz said. ‘If you think about it—’
‘Oh yes, she wouldn’t have wanted to dump me on her doorstep, I accept that. But I wonder if anyone in the street recognised her.’
‘If they did then why didn’t they say something?’
‘I don’t know.’ She shook her head. ‘But if there is anything I can find out about my parents, I want to know while I still can. I’ll pay you whatever rate you ask and if nothing comes of it, nothing comes of it. That will be no reflection on you, Mrs Hakim. I just have to try. You understand that?’
‘Of course,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I will take your case and do what I can.’
Unlike all the other work she’d been offered, this was not a matrimonial case that could probably be wrapped up in a couple of days. And it interested her.
*
DI Kevin Thorpe was a legend. An expert on East End gang culture, as a kid he’d sat on Reggie Kray’s knee. As an adult he knew every gang, however big or small, in his manor of Tower Hamlets.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said when he saw Lee Arnold sitting in the grimy window of the Chittagong Cafe. ‘What brings you—?’
‘Just having a cuppa,’ Lee said.
Everyone in Tower Hamlets knew Kev, and the bloke behind the counter was no exception.
‘DI Thorpe, you want cappuccino? Latte?’
‘Just a normal coffee, Riz, mate.’ He sat down opposite Lee. ‘So . . .’
It wasn’t like Kev not to twig that he was working, but then he was getting on. Maybe he’d even forgotten that Lee was a PI? Lee leaned in towards him. The young Asian bloke who had walked into the electrical shop next to the drop site was standing on the doorstep, apparently looking at electrical components. ‘Kev, I’m not being funny but . . .’
He smiled. A grin of recognition – finally. Kev moved to another table and picked up a newspaper. Lee photographed the boy. He’d gone in with some plastic bags and come out carrying a rucksack. It probably meant nothing. The boy turned right up Brick Lane.
His phone rang. ‘Yeah.’
‘I’m being stared at by a bloke I think may have designs on my body,’ Amy said. ‘He’s also wondering what I’m doing.’
Even in the busiest parts of London, the yards and lanes behind shops were often creepy and unsafe.
‘Move off for a bit,’ Lee said. He ended the call. Like Lee, Amy was ex-job. If the geezer tried it on with her, she could look after herself.
No one went near the drop site. Bangladeshi men came and went from the electrical shop next door, but that was to be expected. Maybe the shop had some sort of connection to the door. But what? The proprietor of the electrical shop didn’t own it. According to Venus, who’d contacted Tower Hamlets council as soon as he knew the address of the drop, it was listed to an owner who was resident in Bangladesh. It was empty and uninhabited. Except that now it contained a hundred grand.
Lee finished his drink and went outside. Aware of the owner’s eyes on him as he left, he cursed Kev Thorpe for queering his pitch. He stood underneath the bridge slung over the street from one side of the old Truman’s Brewery to the other and watched the scarred doorway. Someone had to come to it some time.
‘Old Mr Bhatti cheating on his missus?’ Kev Thorpe appeared beside him and smiled. ‘I told Riz in the Chittagong that I arrested you for car clocking, back in the eighties,’ he said. ‘What’s so fascinating about Mr Bhatti’s electrical shop? Or are you scoping out the flat next door?’
Lee said nothing.
‘Ah, I see,’ Kev said. ‘I suppose these days if you told old plod anything, you’d have to kill old plod, wouldn’t you? Well, far as we know, Mr Bhatti’s only vice is mucky videos from Holland. Old school, women and Alsatians. Place next door is a postal address. We think. We know the postman puts letters through but we don’t know who collects them. I’ve never seen anyone go in or out and, more to the point, neither’s my mum.’
Lee looked at him for the first time.
‘She lives in Hanbury Street,’ he said. Where Amy had been watching the back of the address. Where Mumtaz’s parents lived. ‘She can remember when a load of Irish lived there, she’s so bloody old. Now, according to mum legend, the “Pakis” use it to arrange romantic assignations. But then she is a racist with dementia.’
He began to walk away. ‘Nice to see ya.’
Lee’s phone rang. It was Venus. ‘Anything?’
‘Nothing so far.’
Except that, possibly, there could be an Asian connection . . .
*
Veg didn’t look like a shop. Not a proper one. There was lots of wood everywhere and for some reason, hay lay on the floor and ordinary things like apples and tomatoes were nestled in tissue paper. There were no prices on anything. A young woman in a wet dream-inducing mini-kilt came towards him and said, ‘Hi.’
Imran knew his face was red from all the walking and his embarrassment. ‘I’ve come to see Danish,’ he said.
‘Oh. Danish? Oh, Dan,’ she smiled. ‘Are you a mate?’ She didn’t wait for an answer, which was lucky because Imran didn’t have one. ‘Dan!’
He wasn’t like anyone Imran knew. Asian, but with blond hair, wearing jeans so tight you could see his balls. ‘Oh, hi.’
He was ever so posh. ‘Can I help you?’
Imran looked down at his own shoes. They were broken at the sides where his feet spilled out. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said. ‘Parcels. For Mr Shaw.’
‘Oh. Cool.’
Imran began to open up the rucksack, but Danish stopped him. ‘Let’s go through to the back,’ he said. He called over to the girl, ‘Can you manage for a moment, Clarrie?’
‘Sure.’
Imran followed Danish through a doorway into a small storage room almost completely filled with boxes. It smelt sweet and earthy.
‘This is for Mr Shaw, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Get them out then.’
He leaned against a stack of boxes, all his earlier bonhomie gone now that Imran was unloading the parcels onto the floor. As soon as they were all out he counted them. Then he said, ‘Turn your back.’
‘What?’
‘Turn your back while I make sure they’re genuine,’ Danish said. ‘Do you want to get paid or what?’
Imran did as he was told. He heard paper and plastic rip and then a short grunt.
‘It’s cool.’
When he turned back the parcels were gone. Danish reached into one
of the boxes behind him and took out an envelope. ‘Give this to your employer from Mr Shaw,’ he said. ‘A little bonus. With thanks.’
Imran took the envelope. He was used to this from his regulars. Bit odd that the posh did things this way though.
‘And no opening it,’ Danish said. ‘Give it to your boss, sealed.’
‘Yeah.’
Then he smiled again. ‘Because if you don’t, Mr Shaw will cut your fingers off,’ he said. ‘Fat boy.’
5
Tina couldn’t stop crying. Why didn’t Paul ring? It was five in the afternoon and not a word from either him or Lee Arnold. Nothing. What had happened and where was her son? Was Paul withholding information just to punish her? She knew he blamed her for Harry’s kidnap. He hadn’t said so in as many words, but he had told her that if she’d been more willing to drive the boy around it would never have happened. She’d countered by saying that Harry liked cycling, which he did.
Paul had answered, ‘Cycling’s not a proper sport.’ Implying, as usual, that Harry was in some way effeminate. He had a thing about Harry possibly being gay. They’d argued about it and she’d called him a homophobe. Paul had responded by telling her about all the diversity courses he’d been on. Knob. What did it matter what Harry did in bed, if anything? He was sixteen, he was her son and she loved him.
She wanted to be held, but that wasn’t possible. Nobody could know about Harry, and that included Cyd.
*
‘When did they call you?’
‘Just now. I’ve just got off the phone.’
Lee Arnold stamped his cigarette end out on the pavement. ‘So what’s the deal?’
‘They want a quarter of a million this time,’ Venus said. ‘Otherwise same thing. Money or Harry dies.’
Why hadn’t they asked for more money in the first place? Lee had wondered why the amount was so small. He walked past the drop site and ignored a man who tried to tempt him into a shabby-looking restaurant. ‘We need to talk,’ he said.
‘I can get the money,’ Venus said.
‘I’ve no doubt you can, but that’s not the point. Either these people have been bucked up by getting their hands on the hundred grand – not that I’ve seen anyone come and take it – or they’re playing a game with you. I want to rule out the latter if I can.’
Enough Rope: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery) Page 5
