Enough Rope: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery)

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘No. I called him once, but just got voicemail. Thought he was probably cycling.’ He looked over at his father. ‘Then Dad rang Mrs Venus. To be honest, I wasn’t worried. The next thing we heard was that Harry had gone to Malta for a holiday.’

  ‘Didn’t you try to ring him?’ Vi asked. It had been a treat driving high above the Thames to get to this house full of good taste. But she comforted herself with the knowledge that she only ever really liked to see the countryside from afar. It was nice as a view, but to live in it was something else.

  ‘In Malta? No.’

  ‘Still seems strange to me that Harry blew you out and then you didn’t contact him.’

  ‘I was due to go away myself the following day,’ George said. ‘Where to?’

  ‘I spent some time in London.’

  ‘Before you get the idea that George went to London alone, DI Collins, he actually stayed with our eldest son,’ Dr Grogan interjected.

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Shoreditch. Henry works for a merchant bank and so he’s got one of those rather dreadful industrial-looking apartments in an old mansion block.’

  Vi thought about her eldest son and the crumbling wreck he’d bought in Romford just to get a toehold on the property ladder, but she said nothing. He’d paid nearly two hundred grand for that. God alone knew what Henry Grogan had shelled out for his flat.

  She looked at George. ‘So you went to see your brother the next day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you do while you were waiting for Harry?’

  ‘What? The day before?’

  ‘The day he disappeared, yeah. Where were you, George?’

  ‘Waiting for Harry. Here. Where else would I have been?’

  ‘But you only phoned him once?’

  ‘I started swimming. Time passed. I thought maybe he’d forgotten.’

  Vi turned her attention to Dr Grogan. ‘Where were you, Dr Grogan? And Mrs Grogan?’

  The missus spoke for the first time. It was a bit like listening to Joanna Lumley, which was nice.

  ‘Oh, I’d gone off to London to meet a girlfriend,’ she said.

  ‘I took Helen to the station on my way to the surgery,’ Dr Grogan said. ‘I got back here just before midday.’

  ‘What time’d you leave home?’

  ‘Seven thirty. I had an early surgery that day.’

  ‘And when you got home, you found George alone in the pool?’

  ‘Yes. I asked him where Harry was and he said he hadn’t turned up. He wasn’t worried, but I called Mrs Venus out of courtesy. Then Henry arrived to stay over and take George back to London with him the following day. Mrs Venus called later to say that Harry had gone off with a girl, apparently. Then he was off to Malta. To be honest with you, I thought no more about it,’ he said. ‘Now—’

  ‘No reason why you should’ve thought about it, Dr Grogan,’ Vi said. ‘Superintendent Venus wanted it kept quiet for the reasons I’ve told you about.’

  She looked at George as she spoke, who looked straight back at her and smiled. She wondered what he thought of her and imagined him telling his friends he’d just been interviewed about Harry Venus by some rough old cunt. Kids liked that word, she’d noticed.

  After speaking to Lee Arnold, Venus and Tony Bracci, Vi had decided to keep the fact that the PI had spotted George titting about the East End with some mates and, possibly, his brother earlier in the week to herself for the moment. It could mean nothing, but Dr Grogan had just told her that his son had been in London when the first ransom for Harry Venus had been paid, to an address in Brick Lane. Not more than ten minutes’ walk from Shoreditch.

  Instead she said, ‘What’d you do in London then, George? Your brother take time off to be with you, did he?’

  For a moment he said nothing. It was a question he hadn’t been expecting. ‘No. He has to work. I did some shopping . . . Wandered about . . .’

  Mrs Grogan sat down elegantly beside her husband. ‘Young people are so macabre these days,’ she said.

  Her husband looked at her as if displeased and then said, ‘George collects taxidermy, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ The boy smiled again.

  ‘And he has the most awful clothes,’ his mother said. ‘All black and . . . with a distinct smell of mothballs. But I’m not allowed to wash them . . .’

  ‘Bit of a Goth are you, son?’ Vi said to George.

  ‘No.’

  He looked offended now.

  She smiled. Then she asked, ‘What you got in your taxidermy collection, George?’

  ‘Couple of voles. A meerkat. Got sparrows this time.’

  ‘Nice.’

  The Grogan parents looked embarrassed.

  Then Vi pushed. ‘You see any schoolmates up in town when you was at your brother’s?’ she asked. ‘Must’ve been a bit lonely for you just hanging about the streets?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, you didn’t see any mates, or you weren’t lonely?’

  ‘Neither,’ George said. ‘Everyone talks to everyone round there. All you have to do is go into a shop or a gallery. There’s loads to do.’

  ‘George has been very taken with that area ever since Henry bought his flat,’ his mother said. ‘Personally, I find it claustrophobic and, well, a bit dirty, you know.’

  Vi smiled again. ‘Do you?’ Compared with what it had been like in her youth, Shoreditch was pristine. Which was more than could be said for Mrs Grogan’s son. Who had just lied.

  *

  When Shazia had first told Cousin Aftab that Naz Sheikh wanted to speak to him, he’d said, ‘Oh fuck!’ Then he’d apologised. Now he was smoking out the back of the shop after receiving a phone call from the Sheikhs telling him to be ready, whatever that meant, at eleven. Shazia, stationed at the counter, knew that Naz could either come in through the shop door or via the alleyway round the back. At eleven, he chose the latter.

  It was a warm day, but Aftab shivered as the gangster walked up beside him. He’d been in business for over twenty years and not once had he had to deal with organised criminals. He’d been lucky, but that luck had just run out. He knew why.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Naz hunkered down beside him. ‘You shouldn’t be employing Muslim girls. It’s not decent.’

  He should’ve given Shazia’s need for work more thought. Mumtaz was mixed up with the Sheikhs in some capacity – he’d never asked – but he should have borne it in mind. He’d just wanted to help his cousin and her kid.

  But he wasn’t going down without a fight. ‘My girls used to work in the shop when they were Shazia’s age,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, but your daughters were whores.’

  Aftab wanted to hit him so hard his eyeballs fell out. But Naz Sheikh wanted violence, it was what he traded in. Aftab breathed. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want you to get rid of Shazia Hakim, now.’

  ‘And if I won’t?’

  He shrugged. That could mean anything from ‘I’ll torch the shop’ to ‘I’ll rip your head off and shit down your neck.’ And Aftab knew it.

  ‘She’s only temporary,’ he said. ‘While George is away on his holidays.’

  ‘I don’t care. I want her gone.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I told you.’

  ‘There’s loads of Muslim girls working in shops, it’s—’

  ‘They should be covered,’ Naz instructed.

  In common with most people, Aftab had seen Naz and his brother in company with scantily dressed young girls, both Muslim and non-Muslim. He didn’t give a shit about religious observance, what he wanted to do was deprive Shazia of money, from which Aftab deduced that Mumtaz was probably in a lot of debt to him. And if she owed him, she was in his power. Aftab had no doubt that her ex-husband had to be at the root of all this. Mumtaz had always been very good with money.

  ‘I’ll get her to cover.’

  ‘Too late,’ Naz said. ‘People are already offended.’
r />   ‘What people?’

  ‘Good Muslims.’

  He wasn’t going to say, because no one had complained.

  ‘And what am I supposed to do without the girl until George comes back, Mr Sheikh? You gonna provide me with some lad to do all me heavy lifting, are you?’

  Naz grabbed Aftab by the front of his kurta shirt. ‘You usually do it on your own. What’s the matter? Too old now?’

  His breath smelt of onions and tobacco.

  ‘No. I am . . .’

  ‘And anyway, you had better get used to it.’

  Aftab felt all the blood drain from his face.

  ‘Because when your old white man comes back, you’re going to sack him too, unless you do what I tell you.’

  ‘What, sack the . . .?’

  ‘Sack the girl, agree with me that you need security and then pay me what that service is worth.’

  Protection money. Aftab didn’t have to ask whether something ‘unfortunate’ would happen to him, his family or his shop if he didn’t comply.

  ‘But if you don’t want my services, all you have to do is get rid of that girl,’ Naz said. ‘Plus a charge for my time with you today.’

  This could be any sum of money that came into Naz Sheikh’s head. Five hundred quid, five thousand, a hundred thousand. Anything.

  Aftab looked into the handsome, smiling face of his tormentor and he knew what he had to do.

  *

  Lee watched Mumtaz replace her office phone on her desk. She looked thoughtful. He’d spent the last ten minutes talking to Vi about young George Grogan, who had lied about being with friends in London. Mumtaz’s call had also given her something to think about.

  ‘What’s up?’ he asked.

  ‘That was the old convent doctor,’ she said. ‘Wants to speak to me tomorrow about Alison. He says he wants to tell me “everything”, whatever that means.’

  ‘Maybe he’s going to drop your nuns in it,’ Lee said.

  ‘I get the feeling you’d like it if one of the sisters turned out to be her mother.’

  ‘Not really. It’d be no good to the poor woman to have a nun for a mum. But I’m a realist, and as a realist I know that babies have been getting born in convents for years. Celibacy doesn’t work, period.’

  ‘Oh, well, we’ll see,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I’m meeting Dr Chitty at eleven tomorrow morning at his care home.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  ‘I just hope I can get some closure for Alison. One way or another. Do you know what your plans are yet?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘You know, what would be really helpful would be if your “contact” could get that Imran Ullah to let on exactly where the shop he took Venus’s money to was. Is there any way . . .?’

  ‘The boy doesn’t want to lose his job and so he will withhold information,’ she said. ‘What I was told last night . . .’

  During what he knew was her routine phone call to her parents.

  ‘. . . was that Imran thought it might have been on Navarre Street.’

  ‘His way of saying it was.’

  ‘Possibly. But my memory of Navarre Street is that it contains several “hippy” shops.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Lee. ‘It was in Navarre Street I spotted the Asian boy I later saw with George Grogan and his mates. You know Vi said that George lied about being in London with mates. Said when his brother was at work he just wandered about on his own.’

  ‘Were his parents there while he was being interviewed?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then he could have been lying for their benefit. I mean he’s sixteen, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then his parents will want to know he’s being good up in the big city, won’t they,’ she said. ‘But if he’s with his mates . . .’

  ‘Yeah. Right.’

  ‘Also the boys he was with may not have been school friends.’

  ‘True.’

  Mumtaz’s mobile rang. She said, ‘Oh, hi sweetie.’

  Shazia.

  For the next fifteen minutes she said nothing, Lee heard crying on the other end of the line.

  *

  The time had finally come. The pain was building and, instead of calling for one of the sisters to administer her morphine, Sister Pia gritted her teeth. Successive doctors over the years, including Chitty, had told her that her heart was weak. If she took the full force of the pain she could die.

  Wasn’t that suicide? Which was a sin? The old woman rocked backwards and forwards in her bed, silently begging her god to take her life. But nothing happened. Dr Chitty was seeing the Asian woman in the morning, when it would all come out, and she couldn’t face it. To be bought like that, like Judas for thirty pieces of dirty silver . . .

  She’d never confessed, Mother Katerina had been right. She was either a woman of unusual astuteness or she knew something. But who would have told her? The pain no longer came in waves, where one could rest in between breakers. There was just one, solid mass, a monolith that sat on her body like the lid of a stone tomb.

  For reparation, forgiveness and God’s mercy to be enacted, one first had to recognise one’s sin and then confess. One also had to suffer. Not like this, but in one’s mind, through one’s heart and in the wreckage of a ruined reputation. Sister Pia’s hand shook as she pressed the bell to summon Sister Sofia to her side with her morphine.

  14

  He put the phone down. Then he lit a fag and sat in his favourite chair. Over the years Dr Flanagan, the headmaster, had annoyed him in many and various different ways. But never as much as in the last year.

  Malcolm knew it wasn’t personal. Reeds wasn’t wealthy by public school standards and certain financial realities had to be faced. But if the trend towards taking vast amounts of money from Russian and Chechen oligarchs in return for educating their over-indulged children continued, then in a few years’ time Reeds could be dominated by sulky blond boys playing on their diamond-studded iPads and telling people like him to ‘fuck off’. And people like Malcolm McCullough and his forebears were people who had once had servants with more taste and grace than the Roman Abramoviches of this world.

  He was also concerned by how this new influx would affect the existing boys. They had their own internal order, their own codes; they always had. The school had never interfered unless it had to. But how would these Slavs, Chechens or whatever take to the nuances of the social hierarchy of an English public school? Would they complain?

  Dr Flanagan wanted him to take on a couple of Chechen boys as part of his pastoral duties next term. Albek Umarov and Sultan Shishani. The headmaster had said he’d be emailing their CVs and photos over to him. Malcolm fully expected them to be clad in army fatigues and carrying Kalashnikovs – Umarov’s father openly described himself as a ‘warlord’. But his ‘donation’ to Reeds was going to completely renovate the gym and buy new computers for the IT suite. Malcolm was going to hate Albek and Sultan because they were going to be nouveau riche and sarky. They’d have a good laugh at his shonky old sports jackets.

  He would have to suck it all up and take on Albek, Sultan and their like without complaint. The only consolation was that, with any luck, he wouldn’t have to do it for very much longer.

  *

  Aftab Huq’s home was the sort of house the neighbours always talked about. In the far distant backwaters of Manor Park, it had a huge hedge running wild in the front garden and hadn’t been decorated on the outside since Edward VII was on the throne. But with a sick wife, a business he ran only with the help of one old man and, until very recently, university fees for his two daughters, Aftab didn’t have a lot of time for home maintenance.

  Mumtaz knocked on the door. It was only 7 a.m. and Aftab had said he could talk for a few minutes before he went to work. On the phone he’d been mortified.

  He let her in and they walked down a hall lined with boxes of tins to a kitchen that was covered in a thin layer of grease.

  ‘Sorry about the state of the place,’
he said. ‘Sit down. Far as I know the chairs are all right. Cat might be on one of ’em but he’ll soon shift.’

  Mumtaz looked before she sat down on one of the Formica-covered chairs. It was OK – and catless. ‘Aftab, I don’t know what to say.’

  He lit a cigarette. ‘Nothing to say. Bastard wants Shazia gone and if I don’t do what he says he’ll trash me business and do who knows what to poor old George. Mumtaz, I know you’ve got some sort of issue with the Sheikhs that you won’t talk about . . .’

  ‘I can’t.’ She felt herself begin to cry. She put a hand up to her eyes to brush away the tears. ‘I can’t have family involved, not with them. Not . . .’

  ‘Well, I’m involved now,’ Aftab said. ‘You can tell me.’

  But Mumtaz said nothing.

  ‘If you don’t want me to, I won’t tell Uncle Baharat or Dad or anyone,’ he said. ‘But Mumtaz, I’ve lost Shazia helping out in the shop until George gets back and Naz Sheikh wants eight grand in cash from me for the “time and trouble” he’s spent protecting the local community from the sight of a young girl without a headscarf on.’

  Now Mumtaz’s tears came and she couldn’t stop them. ‘Oh, Aftab . . .’

  When they’d spoken on the phone, he’d told her that Naz had threatened him, but he’d not said anything about money.

  ‘I’m guessing it’s something to do with your late husband,’ he said. ‘He leave you in debt to them bastards?’

  She remained still, then slowly she nodded her head. This was the first time she’d owned up to involvement with the Sheikhs to a member of her own family.

  ‘Your boss know?’

  ‘Kind of. Not really.’

  ‘Shit. ’Scuse my language. Mumtaz, Lee’s an ex-copper, you know coppers yourself.’

  ‘If I get the police involved with the Sheikhs I might as well give Shazia to a group of rapists,’ she said. ‘Because the Sheikhs don’t threaten me if I don’t give them what they want, Aftab, they threaten her. I give them almost all my money in lieu of Ahmet’s debts that seem to have no end, and now they also want me to alert them in the event of a police raid on any of their disgusting rented properties. I’m supposed to “keep my ear to the ground”. But how can I? How can I ask DI Collins about the Sheikhs on a weekly basis? I can’t, and yet if one of their dumps full of starving eastern European sex slaves gets raided then it will be me who pays.’