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

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘How much in the hole to the Sheikhs are you?’ he asked.

  She told him and he visibly baulked. Then he said, ‘As a whole family we could probably get you out of that.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘But better would be to bring the bastards down.’

  ‘I know. But how? If I told the police about their criminal activities and they somehow managed to wriggle out of the charges, they’d take my daughter.’

  ‘If—’

  ‘I can’t take that risk, Aftab!’

  What she couldn’t tell him was about the other risk she couldn’t take. If Mumtaz told the police what she knew about the Sheikhs, they’d tell Shazia how her amma had let her father bleed out on Wanstead Flats. And she couldn’t have that.

  Aftab reached inside his pocket and took out a roll of banknotes. He pushed it across the kitchen table. ‘Take this and give it to Shazia,’ he said. ‘It’s what I owe her for her work and a little bit extra for some clothes or something.’

  ‘No, I . . .’

  ‘Take it,’ he said. ‘For her.’

  She sighed. Briefly their hands touched as she took the money.

  ‘I need to think about what we can do about the Sheikhs—’

  ‘Nothing!’

  He held up a thin finger. ‘Not strictly true,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what we can do because I haven’t thought about it till now, but there’s nothing can’t be fixed. I know there’s people round here who’d say it was your fate to be bled dry by them twats, ’scuse me again. They say it’s ungodly to resist your fate. But I don’t buy that. God’s good, right? Then why would He want the innocent to suffer at the hands of people like the Sheikhs? I need to bend me mind to it and I will need to talk to George when he gets back from his holidays.’

  ‘George? Oh no, Aftab, you mustn’t tell anyone!’

  ‘Except George, I promise,’ he said. ‘But as well as having a trial for West Ham donkey’s years ago, George was also a bit of a fist for hire in the old days. He worked for several firms of hard men and still knows one or two.’

  Mumtaz put her head in her hands. She knew old George and recognised him as a bit of a villain, but she couldn’t see what he could do to help her. But in the end she said, ‘OK.’ Then she remembered the money. ‘But Aftab, what about the eight thousand pounds?’

  ‘What about it?’ he said. ‘What do you think this cash cow’s for, Mumtaz?’

  He held his arms up to encompass much of the greasy kitchen.

  ‘Three hundred grand and counting,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much London property bubble.’

  *

  Should he call Vi or shouldn’t he? The Asian kid he’d seen with George Grogan definitely worked at an organic shop called Veg on Navarre Street. There was him and some posh girl in a mini-kilt and some slightly older bloke, probably in his thirties, who seemed to run the place. Was he the Mr Shaw that Venus had addressed all that money to?

  Lee had been in and bought a couple of organic apples, which had tasted like cotton wool. He’d poked around for as long as he could and had learned that the Asian boy was called Danny. Up close he was camper than he’d been when he was with the other boys. He wore eyeliner.

  Lee’s phone rang. It was Vi.

  ‘Wotcha.’

  ‘They’ve made contact with Venus,’ she said. ‘Two hundred and fifty grand this Saturday, drop location and time TBA on the day. They say they’ve put proof of life in the post.’

  ‘Taking no chances. Venus back at work?’

  ‘Yup. All apparently normal on the western front,’ she said. ‘What you up to?’

  He told her.

  She said, ‘I feel an obbo coming on. Can you hold on, just for now?’

  ‘Course,’ he said. ‘The first lot of cash almost certainly passed through here, but whether the people working in the shop knew what it was . . .’

  ‘I can also feel a visit to the owner of that electrical shop on Brick Lane coming on,’ Vi said. ‘Saturday’ll be upon us before we know it.’

  ‘Have to be careful with the dirty PO box owner, Vi. If he finds out the Ullah boy’s been talking to us, it could go bad for the kid.’

  ‘Like I care? Arnold, a life’s at stake here, remember? If one Asian boy gets shunned by his neighbours for a bit, I really couldn’t give too much of a fuck.’ As far as Vi was concerned, religious and ethnic differences didn’t matter a toss when weighed against the possibility of criminal activity.

  ‘But, Vi, you can’t just go steaming into Zafar Bhatti’s shop, all guns blazing.’

  ‘Oh, do give me credit, Arnold!’

  ‘So what you gonna do?’

  ‘First I’ll speak to old Kev Thorpe, it’s his manor.’

  Lee had seen DI Thorpe when he’d obboed the first drop site in Brick Lane. Thorpe, or rather Thorpe’s mum, had given him the original lead on the PO box.

  ‘I’m sure Kev can come up with some reason to go and have a chat with Mr Bhatti,’ she said. ‘Maybe he can pick up a couple of batteries for his hearing aid while he’s there.’

  Thorpe could sometimes drift off when someone was talking about something that didn’t particularly interest him, hence the myth that he was a little bit deaf. He’d never actually had a hearing aid, but the East End rumour machine had never been bound by details like the truth.

  ‘Keep me in the loop,’ Lee said. ‘Kev’s always good value.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘What you up to now?’ he asked.

  ‘On my way to visit a flat in Mark Street, Shoreditch,’ she told him. ‘Belongs to Henry Grogan, George’s merchant banker brother.’

  ‘Mmm. Expect exposed brickwork and ironic furniture. Back in the good old days it probably used to be a crack-house. And tell me what he looks like,’ Lee said. ‘Told you I saw a suit twatting about with George and his mates. George Grogan’s one of the “in crowd” according to his tutor at school.’

  Danny came out of Veg and put two apples in one of the baskets on the pavement and then went inside again.

  ‘That school they all go to made my fucking skin crawl. I’m sure I was being spooked on purpose.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Lee said. ‘Maybe it’s because I’m common.’

  ‘Or an inverted snob.’

  He laughed. She was the biggest inverted snob he’d ever met.

  *

  ‘Her mother was called Rosa Alvarez,’ the old man said. ‘She was eighteen and came from Buenos Aires in Argentina.’

  Dr Chitty had turned out to be small, pale and very lined. But his eyes, which were a very bright blue, still sparkled in the sunlight, reminding Mumtaz of Paul Newman. A gracious man, he had taken Mumtaz’s hand as soon as they’d met and organised tea and cake for both of them in the small visitors’ room, far away from the day room and the blaring TV set.

  ‘Rosa came to London to study English at a language school in Earls Court,’ Dr Chitty continued. ‘Her family was, it was thought at the time, a religious one and so it seemed natural they should look for a Catholic organisation for her to stay with. And they found the Siena Sisters. Unfortunately, shortly after arriving here, Rosa found a young local man too. She became pregnant, but she either didn’t know what was going on, or she ignored it.’

  Mumtaz sipped her tea. Still upset by her visit to Cousin Aftab, she couldn’t bring herself to eat more than a few mouthfuls of the lemon drizzle cake.

  ‘Eventually and inevitably, Rosa went into labour in her room at the convent. Thinking she could deliver the baby herself, she locked herself away for five hours, until Mother Emerita heard grunts and squeaks from outside the door and let herself in. She could see immediately what was happening and that Rosa was in trouble. She wanted to call an ambulance, but the girl wouldn’t let her. Rosa said that she’d rather die than go to hospital and face the shame of being an unmarried mother. She was very vocal about that. Emerita was a kind, good woman, but she always found decisions difficult. It was Sister
Pia, who can speak Spanish, who called Rosa’s parents. She spoke to her mother. A little later it was discovered that Rosa didn’t actually have a father. Or rather, she did, but he was not living with her mother. At the time he wasn’t even in the same country. But what was significant was what the mother said, which was, “Get rid of it.”’

  ‘The baby?’

  ‘Yes. Now, not only as a good Catholic could Sister Pia not even contemplate such a thing, but the baby was already being born. Rosa’s mother said that she would speak to the girl’s father, but the sisters had to deal with Rosa themselves, and it was then that money came into the story. And me.’

  ‘You delivered Alison?’

  ‘I did. At just gone one a.m. the following morning. At first I doubted whether Rosa could give birth naturally, but she managed even though she was completely exhausted at the end of the process. Both mother and baby were well. But I wasn’t happy about what the sisters had asked me to do. I was even less happy when they asked me to take part in the pantomime they had devised in order to distance Rosa from her baby. Mother Emerita was to take the child out and then claim to have found it abandoned. I would then be called back to the convent to assess the child’s health. I asked why this was being done and I was told it was at the request of Rosa’s mother, who wanted the child to be adopted.’ He smiled. ‘Shame was still quite a big thing in people’s lives in those days, especially in Catholic families.’

  ‘Unmarried parenthood remains a big no-no in Muslim communities today,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘So I agreed to the mother’s request,’ he said. ‘Mother Emerita “found” the baby in the telephone box, even at one point embroidering the story with some nonsense about having been watched by an unknown person when she discovered the child. It was only when the child the nuns called Madonna had been sent to an orphanage in Essex that I learned the truth. Rosa had returned to Argentina, but I was still in and out of the convent as and when the sisters needed me. I couldn’t help noticing that the building was becoming very smart, the accommodation for the nuns and the girls much more comfortable. I remarked upon it.’

  Mumtaz felt cold. There was something very bad in this story, something she would soon have to tell Alison.

  ‘Due to complaints that had been made about her by some of the girls, Sister Pia had been dispatched to Rome in order to contemplate her future, but Sister Concezione, another Spanish-speaker who had also spoken to Rosa Alvarez’s mother, as well as to her father, was in the convent. She heard what I said and then, according to her, spent some weeks wrestling with her conscience.’

  ‘About whether to tell you something?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Eventually she came to me and said that she had something to confess. I told her that she’d better go and see Father Tucci, our parish priest, but she said she couldn’t speak to him, it had to be me. It was bizarre. I had to meet her outside Chiswick House of all places, on a Saturday morning. Later of course I realised she couldn’t say anything in front of the other nuns because they were all in it together. And it was low, Mrs Hakim.’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘That’s what it came down to, of course,’ he said. ‘The old demon himself.’

  ‘The parents had paid the nuns to hush Rosa’s pregnancy up.’

  ‘The father,’ Dr Chitty said. ‘To be honest, from what Sister Concezione said, the mother didn’t really care. A drunk, Sisi Alvarez was a woman only in her very early thirties and had actually sent Rosa away so that she could enjoy her career as a nightclub singer and have a lot of men in her bed.’

  Mumtaz frowned. If the woman was only in her early thirties, then how old had she been when Rosa had been born?

  ‘Rosa was illegitimate, but that didn’t mean that her father had to like the idea of his only child giving birth out of wedlock. The convent was in dire need of repair in those days,’ he said. ‘Parts of it were positively unsafe. So when the money came from Spain . . .’

  ‘I thought that Rosa was Argentinian.’

  ‘She was, but her father was living in Spain at the time. In exile. Juan Perón, Rosa’s father, was actively seeking re-election as president of Argentina and the last thing he needed was an illegitimate daughter and grandchild coming out of the woodwork. Keeping Rosa’s mother quiet about bearing him a daughter at the age of thirteen had already cost him quite enough money.’

  Mumtaz gripped her teacup to her chest.

  ‘Your client is the granddaughter of Juan Perón, the Argentinian dictator,’ Dr Chitty said. ‘Deprived of her name by a bunch of poor nuns and a greedy old doctor.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘When Sister Concezione told me who the child was, I went to see Mother Emerita. I was going to go to the police, but in those days the Catholic Church wasn’t routinely dragged through the courts. I couldn’t do it. And she gave me money. I used it to buy equipment for my surgery and I’ve been telling myself it was all for the good ever since. But it wasn’t. That money came from an anti-Semitic dictator who got a thirteen-year-old girl pregnant.’ He paused for a moment, then he said, ‘Mrs Hakim, I understand from Sister Pia that your client is dying. Is that correct?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ Mumtaz said. ‘She has a terminal disease, but it’s one of those that involves a slow decline . . .’

  ‘Huntington’s,’ he said.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the internet is a wonderful thing isn’t it, Mrs Hakim? I was an early adopter, in other words I got online as soon as I could. And as soon as Google came along I began to look up all sorts. Bored old man syndrome. But it wasn’t all messing around. One day I googled Argentinian nightclub singer Sisi Alvarez, Rosa’s mother, and saw that she had died back in the 1980s. Cause of death was complications arising from Huntington’s Disease. Whether Rosa had it, we will never know.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She predeceased her mother back in 1973. Shot on the streets of Buenos Aires; the gunman was never found. Her father was president of Argentina again at that point and sometimes I wonder if he had a hand in it. People can do terrible things, even to their own children, when their ambition or their pride are under threat.’

  Mumtaz knew this only too well.

  ‘Maybe Rosa, pining for her baby, tried to blackmail him. Maybe she tried to persuade him to buy the child back for her. I don’t know. But she’s dead, so is her mother and so is Perón, so we’ll never know. I am also aware that you only have my word for any of this. I have spoken to Sister Pia and she may or may not corroborate my story, depending upon how she feels. She still thinks that any criticism of religious figures or communities is wrong. But that is my truth, Mrs Hakim, and I am prepared to meet my god with it on my lips.’

  She believed him. His manner was simple and sincere and the old nun had been evasive.

  ‘I will go and visit Mother Katerina,’ she said. ‘Just to thank her for her assistance. If Sister Pia sees me also, then that’s good, but if she doesn’t . . .’ She shrugged. ‘We – Alison and myself that is – did wonder why a DNA test she had done some time ago threw up some Native American heritage.’

  ‘That was Perón’s mother,’ the doctor said. ‘From a local tribe. His father was of Spanish origin.’

  ‘Which just leaves Alison’s father.’

  The old man shook his head. ‘Ah, but if only we knew who he was,’ he said. ‘Of course the nuns weren’t interested, but I asked Rosa. All she said was that the relationship was over. She wouldn’t say who the boy was. Maybe he never knew he had a child. The nuns were of the opinion that he was local, although I don’t know what evidence they had for that. If Sister Pia will see you again, maybe you can ask her. I’ve told her I’m telling you everything.’

  Mumtaz shook her head. ‘What can I say? I already have so much to tell my client. Where to start? Is Mother Katerina aware of all this history?’

  ‘I doubt it, unless Pia has told her,’ he said. ‘But if she is as astute as I think she is, she may wonder
how an effectively bankrupt convent back in the 1970s managed to completely renovate. You know, if Alison wants to come and visit me, if she’s well enough, she’s welcome to do so.’

  ‘Thank you, Dr Chitty. I’ll pass that on.’ Then she said, ‘Can I ask you one more thing?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The young policewoman who was called to the convent when Alison was “found” . . .’

  ‘WPC Martyn?’

  ‘She died.’

  ‘I know, I attended her. You think maybe she found something out.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ Mumtaz felt herself redden.

  The old man put a hand on her shoulder and said, ‘I’ve committed many sins, Mrs Hakim, but I can assure you that WPC Martyn died of natural causes. Sometimes people just die. We don’t know why.’

  ‘Fate.’

  ‘Maybe. But she died naturally. I wouldn’t lie, not at this late stage in my life.’

  ‘No.’

  Suddenly Mumtaz was hungry, and so she ate some more of the lemon drizzle cake and talked to the old man about his long life as a doctor and what he described as his ‘failed’ Christianity.

  Before she left, she said to him, ‘You did what you thought was best at the time. Now you have told me, I know what I’ve learned here today will give Alison some answers.’

  ‘I hope so. And tell her she may use this information however she wishes. If she wants to make it public, then I will support her. The only thing I will say is that the sisters at the convent now are not to blame for what happened in the past. Only Pia, and she’s dying.’

  They shook hands and then she walked out of the care home in the direction of the convent.

  *

  Lee Arnold hadn’t been wrong about Henry Grogan’s Shoreditch flat. On the ground floor of what had once been a tenement building for those described as the ‘underclass’, it was all about exposed brickwork, wooden floors and two large film posters for old Hitchcock movies. Gracious to a fault, Henry offered Vi any number of coffee choices, but she just said, ‘Instant’s fine, black, ta.’