Displaced

by Barbara Nadel

  Shazia had looked back once to see whether the old woman was still around, but she only saw darkened caravans.

  She’d said nothing to either her amma or to Lee, but the experience had stayed with her and, in a way, she felt glad that she wouldn’t be going to the fair again this year. She’d be in Manchester, or at least preparing for her new life there, away from the East End, her past and the woman who had been both more cruel and more kind than anyone else she had ever known. Amma, who had lied to her. Amma, who she loved more than her life.

  THREE

  ‘You want that, love? I got a lot of different sizes, colours …’

  Mandy was tempted to ask the man who’d taken the lime green miniskirt she’d glanced at briefly off the dress rail what he thought an overweight woman in her forties might do with such a thing. Wear it as a belt? But she just smiled and said, ‘No, thanks.’

  Taking a trip round Barking Market was more a case of giving herself something to do than actually shopping, for Mandy Patterson. A chance to get out of her office on slow days. Several sizes too big for any of the ordinary clothes stalls, Mandy didn’t fancy going to what she called the ‘fat bird’s shop’ with all its ‘freesize’ stuff from Italy and trousers that could be seen from space. Occasionally she’d get something from one of the greengrocers, maybe a type of vegetable Ocado didn’t have in stock.

  She was looking at a load of dodgy pashminas when her phone rang. She shoved it underneath her chin and answered.

  ‘Mandy Patterson.’

  ‘Hiya, Mand.’

  God, she knew that deep, dark-brown, common-as-shite voice.

  ‘Lee,’ she said. ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘No problem,’ he said.

  ‘So you’re alright? You’re not …’

  ‘No, Mand,’ Lee Arnold said. ‘I haven’t had a drink; I don’t want a drink.’

  ‘Good.’

  Mandy had been Lee’s AA sponsor when he’d given up the booze and, over the years, they’d become, albeit infrequent, mates.

  ‘What I’m actually after is a meet up,’ Lee said.

  ‘Because?’

  She knew he had an ulterior motive. Though her friend, Lee always did. But then maybe all PIs were like that?

  ‘Something that may be of mutual interest has come up,’ Lee said. ‘How you fixed for dinner tonight?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘New Moroccan place has opened up in Stratford, called Baba Ganoush. My shout.’

  Oh, he knew her weak spots. She was a sucker for a tagine. He had her and he knew it. But still she had to make him work for it.

  She said, ‘What makes you think I’m free tonight?’

  ‘Oh, well, if you’re not … Well …’

  ‘And yet sadly and tragically we both know that you know that I am,’ Mandy said. ‘Pick me up at eight and you have a date.’

  She heard him laugh. ‘Handsome.’

  Mandy ended the call and went back to looking at the schmutter on display in the market. Maybe, she thought, I should buy that lime green miniskirt. That’d frighten the bugger.

  Lee put his phone back in his coat pocket and then sat down on a bench overlooking the boating lake. He lit a cigarette.

  ‘She could be in there,’ he said, pointing at the water.

  Mumtaz sat down beside him.

  ‘Or anywhere in the park,’ she said.

  She hadn’t been back to Barking Park since she and Lee had visited the funfair with Shazia almost a year ago.

  ‘Do you think that your reporter friend will be able to put you in touch with ex-employees?’

  ‘Mandy’s a good girl and if there’s a story in it for her, she’ll pull out the stops.’

  ‘Yes but, Lee, is there a story?’ Mumtaz said. ‘I mean, do you know whether Mr Levy will want his family history splashed across the local press?’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll care if it gets results.’

  ‘You must check it with him.’

  He looked at her and said, ‘Yes, Mum.’

  She looked away. She hadn’t slept after reading about the terrible events that had occurred in Berlin in 1945. Some of the German women had been raped thirty times, many of them had died. Then she’d gone first thing to see Shirin Shah at the hostel. When she’d arrived the girl had been crying. She’d told Mumtaz that she couldn’t stand the hostel, that she wanted to go home. It had taken all Mumtaz’s powers of persuasion to make her stay. Her head was still not in the right place. She still saw her failure to conceive as her main problem.

  ‘What about the police reports?’ she said.

  ‘I’m working on it.’ He smoked. ‘I never had much to do with Barking nick when I was in the Job, but Vi’s looking into it. I doubt whether there’s many blokes still alive from that time.’

  ‘What about the fair?’

  ‘Well that changed hands,’ he said. ‘Used to be run by a family called Mitchell, but they were bought out by a company called Lesters in the eighties. They’re due to hit town on Monday 19th September.’

  ‘I thought the fair didn’t come until later in the month?’

  ‘Not this year. Dunno why. Brexit?’

  Mumtaz shook her head. Ever since the referendum on British membership of the European Union had produced a negative result, people who had wanted to remain, like Lee and Mumtaz, had started to blame everything on those who wanted to leave.

  The park was quiet. Apart from a few joggers and a small group of dog walkers, they almost had the old Victorian park to themselves. A large green open space in the middle of a packed, still mainly poor, if changing, London borough, Barking Park’s main attractions – the boating lake and a splash park – were aimed at kids who were clearly spending their summer holidays elsewhere.

  ‘Whoever took Miriam could have buried her body anywhere here,’ Mumtaz said as she looked at the vast areas of grass, trees and water around her. ‘And when the fair left, its vehicles would have churned the ground up so much, how would anyone have even known where to dig?’

  ‘Unless it was hot that year.’ He threw his dog-end on the ground and stamped it out. He said, ‘This is a big job and so I’m gonna get some of the casuals in to do the day to day so you and me can concentrate on this.’

  Process serving and performing background checks, the bread and butter of PI work, carried on in spite of bigger, more lucrative investigations.

  ‘Lee, do you think that Miriam Levy could still be alive?’

  ‘Her brother thinks she could and so we have to assume it’s possible.’ He shook his head. ‘I think, he thinks that because his mother wasn’t who he thought she was, Miriam’s disappearance is connected to that.’

  ‘But if she was just taken …’

  ‘We don’t know that she was,’ he said. ‘That’s what Irving Levy says, and what he says and the truth may be very different things.’

  Mumtaz shook her head. They were due to meet Mr Levy at his house on Longbridge Road in an hour. Although, according to him, he’d shown them everything he’d managed to find regarding his sister, Irving Levy felt it was important for Lee and Mumtaz to see where she had lived.

  After a pause, during which he considered changing the subject to something more personal, Lee said, ‘I googled Irving’s house. It’s bloody massive.’

  Croydon was one of only two venues the fair went to that was close to London. The other one was Barking. Back in the old days when Lesters Fair had been Mitchells they’d gone right in to Clapham Common. But old Mr Lester had been a country boy born and bred, and he’d changed the original routes to, largely, give the capital a wide berth. His son, Roman, hadn’t altered things when he’d taken over in the noughties. So when first Croydon and then Barking came on the horizon, teenage fairground kids like Amber Sanders became excited.

  ‘Lulu and Misty are going to go to Camden Market,’ she told her mother, Gala, as they packed away and secured the crockery in the caravan’s small kitchen. Just because Guildford was only thirty-
four miles from Croydon, didn’t mean they didn’t have to carefully wrap up all their belongings and secure the fittings in their caravans.

  ‘Are they.’

  Amber knew from her mum’s tone of voice that meant that she wouldn’t be able to join her friends. Not unless she bunked off.

  ‘Misty is twenty now,’ Amber said. ‘So she’s not, like, a kid any more …’

  ‘She isn’t, no,’ her mother said. ‘But you are. You know the rules, Amber, no one goes off site until they’re eighteen unless it’s with their parents.’

  ‘So you take me!’

  She wrapped a Royal Wedding commemorative plate from 1981 in tissue paper and slid it carefully into its original box.

  ‘And when am I going to do that, eh?’

  ‘I dunno. In the daytime, when you’re not working?’

  ‘You mean when I’m working, or looking after you and your dad, or helping Mama take care of Nagyapa?’

  Amber pulled a face. ‘She can manage on her own for a few hours. If Nagyapa knows you need to take time off for me …’

  ‘You think?’ Her mother turned away. ‘Just because you twist him around your little finger. I’m not talking about this any more.’

  ‘Yeah, but—’

  ‘Yeah, but nothing. Get on with the packing. We need to be on the road first thing tomorrow morning and I haven’t even started putting the clothes away.’

  Amber pulled a face, but she did as she was told. Her great-grandfather, Nagyapa, had been bed-bound for years and now, at ninety-three, needed round-the-clock care. This was mostly done by her grandmother, Eva, or Mama as her mum called her. Nagyapa had been in circuses when he was young. He’d been a trapeze artist in a circus back in his native Hungary. When she was little he’d shown Amber lots of old photographs of himself and his little brothers and his sister flying in space across the great, grand circuses that had travelled across Europe in the 1930s and 40s. But then World War II happened and he’d ended up in England, a middle-aged man with arthritis who couldn’t fly any more. Amber had only ever known Nagyapa as the crippled man who ran the duck shoot stall. But she knew that once upon a time he had flown, which was what she wanted to do. And, on the few occasions when Nanny Eva and her mother left Nagyapa on his own, Amber would go into his caravan and ask him what it took to be a flier. Over the years he told her much which, boiled down to basics, amounted to the fact that she had to be fit, flexible and she had to find a flying troupe who would take her. At sixteen, Amber was really getting on a bit to train from scratch. Her mother and grandmother had always discouraged her. But she was determined and she was very fit. She’d even taken some circus skills classes when a school she’d gone to in Kent had offered a short course during the summer two years ago. Her parents had disapproved and she’d had to lie and tell them she was only interested in clowning. But she’d told Nagyapa, who had smiled. He was much more capable of looking after himself than Nanny Eva or her mum liked to think. In fact, Amber had always thought that Nagyapa could do anything he wanted if he really put his mind to it. Apparently unable to walk for the last five years, Amber had nevertheless seen him get out of bed and even dance around his van when he thought no one was looking.

  Amber loved her nagyapa probably more than any of her other relatives. He could and would do anything for her. But she knew he was no saint. Neither was she.

  ‘What you have to understand about the Garden is that it was a closed world. Still is, at its core. But when my grandfather started working, well it was like something out of a Dickens novel.’

  Irving Levy handed Lee a picture of a small man in a heavy coat and hat standing outside a very old building that looked as if it was just about to crumble to dust.

  ‘Those houses were down the Clerkenwell end of Hatton Garden,’ he said. ‘Long gone after the war, of course. My grandfather, Isaac, must’ve been about twenty-five when that was taken. My dad was just a nipper. Like his father before him, Isaac was a diamond cutter, so was my dad, so am I. It’s what we do. Dad joined up, in the army, in 1944, but he was back in London by ’46 and he never left again until the day he died.’

  As a kid, Lee Arnold had gone with his mother, Rose, to a similar house overlooking Barking Park. Like Irving Levy’s, that had been a massive, dusty place filled with ‘things’. He’d had nightmares about stuffed birds for months afterwards. At the time he hadn’t known why his mum had to go to such a place. Later he’d learnt the house was owned by a gynaecology consultant to whom his mum had been referred for what she still called ‘women’s trouble’.

  ‘Like priests your cutters keep the secrets of their clients and their stones,’ Levy went on. ‘I could tell you tales of jobs I’ve worked on that’d make your hair curl. Who I’ve worked for, what I’ve worked on and why. But it’s not what we do. When you work in a world where a deal worth millions is sealed on the shake of a hand you have to be able to trust and be trusted.’

  ‘Is there anyone still working who would remember your father?’ Mumtaz asked.

  Levy sat down. The chair he chose sagged even beneath his slight frame. Both the house and its owner were running out of oomph.

  He sighed. Then he said, ‘Working, not strictly, but about …’ He shrugged. ‘Most people look forward to retirement, or so I’m told. But in the Garden, things are different. Being there …’ He shrugged again. ‘Do you know the book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?’

  Mumtaz said that she did.

  ‘The Garden’s a bit like an adult Narnia, the land the children go into through the wardrobe. There are nooks that look like cupboards that are actually workrooms that lead to tunnels underground. Dark staircases take you to laboratories in the sky. The human mind is addicted to mystery and the Garden and its layout, how it works, what in fact it really is, remains one of the few genuine mysterious places in the world.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘I know of one person who knew my father,’ Levy said. ‘But he wouldn’t know anything about my father’s private life. The traditional men of the Garden didn’t operate that way.’

  ‘And yet you said they kept their clients’ secrets,’ Lee said.

  ‘Clients’, yes, but you didn’t take your home to work, you still don’t,’ Levy said.

  ‘And yet they would know about each other’s families?’

  ‘Oh yes, but there’d be no gossip. Not like these days where everyone, what do they call it, “shares” …’

  Lee smiled. He didn’t know much about Hatton Garden, but what he did know were East Enders and, through his maternal grandfather, East End Jews. And considering that most of the Jews in Hatton Garden originated in the East End, he couldn’t quite believe they would be so different.

  ‘Irving,’ he said, ‘let’s be frank, shall we? The Jewish East End was always full of gossip. My mum’s dad was one of ’em, I know. Maybe the darkest secrets weren’t shared, but if you know someone who knew your dad I’d like to speak to him.’

  ‘I’d have to be there with you,’ Levy said. ‘He’d never talk to an outsider on his own. The gentleman I’m thinking of is very frum. With respect, Mrs Hakim, you couldn’t be there. People like this don’t mix with women outside their own family.’

  Mumtaz said, ‘I understand.’

  ‘Not that the Garden doesn’t have its share of Muslim traders these days. We have several firms whose staff originate in the Indian subcontinent, and some of the ladies cover their heads. But that is a recent development and those people weren’t part of my father’s world, which was Orthodox Jewish, regimented by tradition and closed. And anyway, I don’t even know whether Dad knew about Mum not being Jewish. I’m not even certain she did.’ Then he changed the subject. ‘You know the fair’s on its way, don’t you?’

  Lee said that he did and that he and Mumtaz were going.

  ‘You must talk to people,’ Levy said. ‘Go on every ride. Money no object.’

  ‘We will,’ Lee said, ‘although whether that will help us to fin
d your sister, I don’t know. The company operating the fair has changed hands since Miriam’s disappearance. Maybe all the previous staff went, maybe they didn’t. I’m trying to get my hands on some police and press reports from the time, which may be more helpful, I don’t know. But Irving, it was a long time ago.’

  ‘I know! I know!’

  ‘I mean, mate, we will do our best, but you have to accept that if someone killed Miriam, her body could be anywhere in that park or even beyond.’

  He shook his head and Mumtaz wanted to offer a reassuring hand to him, but she suspected he wouldn’t appreciate it. Religious Jews like religious Muslims didn’t do cross-gender affection unless they were related.

  ‘I know I’m being a silly old schlemiel when I tell people I feel that Miriam is alive. How can anyone feel the presence of another after so many years? But if I die without at least trying to find her, I know I won’t rest. Even finding out the real identity of my mother is only a way, possibly, of getting to Miriam. That’s really a sideshow. That’s not important to me, not now …’

  But Mumtaz knew that it was. Irving Levy’s entire identity was that of an Orthodox Jewish diamond cutter and so, because Jewish inheritance is carried on the mother’s side of the family, discovering that Rachel was a Gentile must have hit him hard. Suddenly, close to death, he wasn’t sure who he was any more and that had to hurt.

  ‘If we find Miriam, then we give up on who my mother might have been,’ he continued.

  Although having already asked Lee whether he’d be willing to go to Berlin to follow up on his mother’s story, this was clearly not going to happen. Irving Levy wanted to find both his sister and the shadow of his mother.

  However, he had not, Lee thought, even considered how any potential ‘Miriams’ would try to prove their authenticity. It made him feel protective towards the man.

  Irving Levy took his wallet out of his pocket and put a small black and white photograph down in front of Mumtaz. He said, ‘This is the only photo I’ve got of Miriam. This house looks chaotic, but I’ve been through all my parents’ things, except for the toot in the old garage, and this is all I’ve been able to find. I don’t even know if there were any others. The woman holding her is my mother.’