Displaced

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Then surely that would solve this mystery.’

  ‘Mystery? What mystery? That we may be related? We are not,’ Beltz said. ‘My aunt is dead. Maybe underneath this city, possibly in a mass grave somewhere. It is not anything to do with me, not now.’

  ‘Then why let us in yesterday?’ Irving persisted. ‘You didn’t the day before – and don’t try to deny it, we knew you were in. Frau Metzler told you why we’d come when she left you her number, so you knew what we wanted when we returned.’

  ‘I was curious.’

  ‘Only that? I don’t think so.’

  Of course, Irving was right. Someone like Beltz had to have a good reason to let strangers into his house and then tell them what Lee imagined had to be family secrets.

  The ex-Stasi officer sat back in his chair. Once again they were arranged around his fire. It still gave off little heat.

  ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘I did hope you may have known something that I could use. I thought that if you were some distant relative of the Austerlitz family or you had access to information I don’t have that maybe you could help me.’

  ‘With what?’

  He deflated his lungs as he looked at the floor and then he said, ‘My father was a sad man. People saw him as a member of the Politburo and as a war hero, but they never knew how damaged he was. This house meant more to him than I ever did. Not just because Rachel Austerlitz died here or because he owed his life to her father. He loved Rachel and he never got over her. This house was her mausoleum. It remains so. My mother, my brother and I, we suffered for it. We were like ghosts passing through his life without touching him.’ He shook his head. ‘And when my mother died he had that woman’s body brought back to this house and laid underneath the alcove where she hid from the Nazis. My brother would never speak to him then. Such an insult to our mother. I knew he was damaged and he was dying by then. I let it go.

  ‘But I’ve always wondered whether Rachel loved him too. Did they sleep together? Did they maybe make plans to marry one day? Did her father put him on that train to Hungary, not to save his life, but to get him away from his daughter? They were just children, really, but he never forgot. He damaged his only family because of Rachel and now I find myself keeping this house for him and for the dead body in my cellar. Madness? Maybe. I have a corpse in my cellar. But what else can I do?’

  He didn’t cry or scream or even raise his voice, but Gunther Beltz was in pain. He must have kept part, if not all, of this to himself for most of his life. Not that Lee was surprised. Secrets were what he dealt with every day. No secrets, no need for private investigators. They paid his bills.

  Eventually, Irving spoke.

  ‘I’m afraid I know nothing about your father and Rachel Austerlitz,’ he said. ‘The Rachel Austerlitz that was my mother was not that girl your father loved.’ He stood up. ‘I should not have come here. I apologise for disturbing you.’

  Lee stood and pulled his coat tight around his body. Christ, what a bloody cold house! Maybe it was the corpse in the cellar …

  Lee had left the room and Irving was just about to leave when Gunther Beltz called them back.

  While the rides and the generators went on ahead, the caravans pulled into a field just outside Dartford. The fair had used it as a staging place and wintered there for decades. They’d spend one night and then push on to Barking in the morning. As soon as the vans were secured the women began connecting up the gas supplies and getting water.

  Eva and Amber came to make sure that he was alright and the kid made tea.

  ‘God, you look like a bag of rags!’ Bela said when he saw his daughter. ‘Tidy yourself up!’

  She shook her head. ‘I look like you, Papa,’ she said. ‘And, anyway, what do you expect? I’ve just packed my life away for the millionth time. This life gets no easier, I shouldn’t have to tell you that.’

  She did look like him. Brown as a Gypsy, her black hair, dyed now to try and hide her age, a long rope of thick coarse wire down her back. She’d passed her looks on to her daughter, Gala, another child from the dark side.

  ‘Here you are, Nagyapa, a nice cup of tea.’

  Ah but the little one was different. Unlike most of the girls her age she didn’t need to dye her hair blonde. It shone like gold even in dull weather and it made the old man smile. But this time he resisted the temptation to do that and said, ‘And you, Amber, I don’t want you flying now. Not for a while.’

  ‘Not ever,’ his daughter said.

  The girl pulled a face, but said nothing and left the caravan to go and help her mother. When she’d gone, Eva said, ‘What are you playing at, Papa? It’s you who have been encouraging the girl.’

  He sipped his tea. ‘I play at nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m just tired of trouble.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Eva said, ‘but I’m still grateful you said it. She does what you say even if she ignores the rest of us.’

  Later, Amber came to see him when he was alone. She said, ‘Nagyapa, did you mean it about not flying?’

  She looked hurt, which made his heart sting and he said, ‘For a while only.’ And then he beckoned her close. ‘I will give you money to go to Camden instead. How is that?’

  Her eyes lit up. He had to work hard not to look sad. She was the only one who had ever listened to his stories. It was a pity her parents and her grandmother had discouraged her. It was sad that she was like so many young people inasmuch as she wanted every material thing. It broke his heart. And yet, poor child, she still wanted to fly and he could deny her nothing.

  ‘You may fly again when we leave Barking,’ he said.

  ‘That’s a long time. I’ll get out of practice!’

  She would never be good enough. Not really. She didn’t have the discipline. He’d tried to tell her, but he couldn’t be cruel. He’d never been cruel to that face and he never would be.

  SIXTEEN

  There was no reality in her mother’s observation. ‘Oh, you look thin!’ was Bangladeshi shorthand for ‘You’ve been away and only your mother can make you normal again.’

  Mumtaz sat at the table of her mother’s kitchen and watched helplessly as Sumita heaved pans around, chopped vegetables and ground spice.

  ‘Amma …’

  ‘It’s just a biryani,’ her mother said as she ground nutmeg, mace, pepper, cloves, cardamom, cinnamon, coriander and ginger. No wonder her arms remained strong even if her legs were sometimes weak.

  Hopefully, Shazia would be home soon and they could talk. Mumtaz always felt guilty when she was in her mother’s kitchen not helping. But her mother was adamant, she was a ‘guest’ now and so of course she couldn’t be expected to help. Also, she’d just returned from abroad which, in Sumita’s experience, was a very tiring thing.

  ‘You should go and lie down, Mumtaz,’ she said. ‘You must be exhausted.’

  ‘I’ve only flown from Berlin,’ Mumtaz said. ‘It’s only one and a half hours.’

  Her mother looked amazed. She only ever flew to see family in Bangladesh, which was a gruelling eleven hours.

  Mumtaz heard the front door open and then close. Then she listened for the footsteps in the hall. If they were slightly heavy and halting it was her father, if light and fast, her stepdaughter. They were the latter and Mumtaz smiled.

  They’d be setting up all weekend. Lesters was one of the biggest fairs in the country. Already he could see a few local kids were beginning to hang around the park gates, hoping for a look at this year’s most daring rides.

  Ever since so many people had started going to Disneyland and other huge theme parks in America as well as on the Continent, travelling fairs had needed to up their game. This meant new and ever more exciting rides every year. According to posters on the park railings, this year’s main attraction was something called the ‘BigO’. But there was no picture or description of this thing and so Irving was left to create his very own fairground monster in his mind. But he was too tired.

  The flight fro
m Berlin hadn’t taken long, but the taxi back to Barking had got caught in traffic on the A13, making the journey home much longer than it should have been.

  He sat in his chair and switched on the TV, which he immediately zoned out. The news was never pleasant these days. But at least he had been to Berlin, he’d seen the house where his parents had met, supposedly, and Herr Beltz had assured him that he would take a DNA test. Lee was going to look into how they would proceed with a comparison.

  God, what a grim place that house had been! So cold and grey and so full of its own tragic history. Even, according to Beltz, a corpse under the cellar. A product of obsession, that. He couldn’t understand; he’d never been in love. It reminded him of Ruben Abrahams, who had briefly lived next door when they were both children. He had once dug up the budgie his dad had buried in their garden to see what it looked like. Its beak had fallen off and then its legs. And it had been alive with maggots. Irving had almost been sick.

  But at least the woman Beltz’s father had exhumed hadn’t been his mother. He was certain of that now. Rachel Austerlitz, however she had died, had breathed her last in 1944. This left a void where whoever his mother was should have been. And if he wasn’t related to Beltz, what then? He would die without knowing who he had been. Did it really matter? World War II had taken not only lives, but also identities. Sara Metzler said there were thousands of people walking about who didn’t even know they were Jewish because of what had happened between 1939 and 1945. He was just one of those. Nothing special; he should accept it.

  And Irving knew he could do that if it wasn’t for Miriam. Not knowing one’s past was one thing, but not knowing if one’s only blood relative was alive or dead was unbearable. He’d encased his life in diamonds to blot it out.

  Human flesh could disappear in a heartbeat, but diamonds, as the De Beers diamond company had first said back in the 1940s, are for ever.

  ‘He looked right at me and, even though I know he probably still feels hatred towards me about Naz, I began thinking there had to be more to it than that,’ Shazia said. ‘His family killed Dad.’

  ‘Your father owed them money. That is how such people operate. You owe them money, they take your life. It’s an object lesson for their other debtors.’

  Mumtaz had never questioned why the Sheikh family had killed her husband. They were gangsters and he had owed them money.

  Shazia swung her legs up onto the bed and lay down beside her stepmother. Her bedroom was the only place in that massive house they stood a chance of getting away from the old people. And even there she had to make sure she put a chair against the door or her didima would be coming in with tea.

  ‘Shazia …’

  ‘Now you tell me that Wahid-ji is asking you for money again …’

  ‘He has cancer; he needs treatment …’

  ‘He’s rich,’ Shazia said. ‘They all are. And anyway, why make you pay for that? They must have people way richer than us indebted to them. They own property all over the East End; they own lawyers for God’s sake!’

  Still trying to absorb the fact that Wahid Sheikh had been seen around her stepdaughter, Mumtaz felt both relieved that they were talking again and anxious. If the old man was just lurking that was one thing, but what if he did something more drastic? What if he took Shazia? People like the Sheikhs were a law unto themselves. People who had friends in high places were, and the Sheikhs had very good lawyers and, it was said, police officers on their payroll. However, Shazia had made a good point: had they actually killed anyone apart from Ahmet Hakim?

  ‘There has to be something else,’ Shazia said.

  ‘Like what?’

  Why had she said that? Mumtaz had been careful never ever to think about such a possibility, even though she had always known it had to exist. To kill Ahmet had been a huge risk to take. After all, the Sheikhs couldn’t have known for certain that she wouldn’t go straight to the police with a description of her husband’s attacker the night he died in a pool of his own blood on Wanstead Flats. The risk had to either be worth it or unavoidable, and if it were unavoidable, that probably meant that Ahmet had hurt the family in some way. She felt herself shiver.

  Shazia, looking down at her painted fingernails, said, ‘Lee could find out, couldn’t he?’

  Lee had been trying to find a weakness in the Sheikh family’s armour for some time. And, although they rarely talked outside work now, she knew he was in all probability still looking. He loved her.

  Mumtaz said, ‘I don’t want you going out on your own until you leave for uni.’

  ‘I rarely am on my own. It’s annoying.’

  ‘Annoying it may be, but it’s necessary,’ Mumtaz said. ‘And I will take you up to Manchester myself. I can’t let your dadu do all that driving.’

  ‘You were going to,’ Shazia said. ‘Before I phoned you in Germany.’

  ‘Yes! Yes!’

  She had been prepared to let her father take on a journey to Manchester, it was true.

  ‘Shazia,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what I can do to make things better between us. But really that is all I care about. If the Sheikhs want money from me then so be it. I don’t know what finding out if your father had other problems with that family will achieve.’

  ‘Speak to Lee.’

  The girl didn’t know what had happened between them and how both ashamed and confused she now felt about it. Hopefully, she would never know.

  ‘He loves you, you know, Amma,’ Shazia said.

  Irving would need the weekend to recover from Berlin, then Monday, the fair was closed. Things got going on the Tuesday with the first of two half-price wristband afternoons. Then they’d go. Hopefully, Irving would be up to being walked through what he could remember about the day Miriam had gone missing. In the meantime, Lee had a shit-ton of calls on the office answerphone. He’d had casuals covering the office all week, except the Friday, and so they had to have all come in that day. Someone was keen to get hold of him. He was just about to listen to them when the bloody thing rang again.

  ‘Hello, Arnold Agency.’

  The caller cleared his or her throat, then an elderly voice said, ‘Mr Arnold? That you?’

  ‘Yeah. Who’s this?’

  ‘It’s Tommy Askew from Thames View.’

  The old bloke who’d been a copper when Miriam Levy had gone missing.

  ‘Oh hello, Mr Askew,’ Lee said.

  ‘Been trying to get hold of you,’ the old man said. ‘Always goes to answerphone. Where you been?’

  ‘Berlin,’ Lee said. ‘On a job.’

  ‘The Levy baby?’

  Lee said, ‘What do you want, Mr Askew?’

  ‘My oldest daughter come to see me today,’ the old man said. ‘She lives down Dorset; her husband’s a doctor in some little village down there, I dunno. Second marriage, it is. Anyway, she can’t get here much so when she turns up this morning I had tea and Mr Kipling ready for her. Don’t want your kids to think you can’t do nothing, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  Lee was tired and, if he was honest, he felt in two minds about the Berlin trip. Sara Metzler had been more proactive than he had, and it had been Mumtaz who had contacted her. He’d done sod all. And what had they learnt?

  ‘So anyway, we’re jawing,’ Tommy Askew said. ‘This and that, the old days. I told Suzy, that’s me daughter, about how people’d come to talk to me about the Levy baby. She was the only kid I had then. She was five. Upset her at the time.’

  ‘What did?’

  ‘The baby going missing,’ Tommy said. ‘It was on the telly. I was on the telly. The missus pointed me out to her. Daddy was gonna find the little baby girl for definite, according to Suzy. Except I never did.’

  There was going to be a point to this but, to Lee, it seemed a long time coming. God he was impatient! Since when had he joined the iPhone generation?

  ‘But any case,’ the old man continued, ‘you’re probably wondering what this has to do with your investigation. Now
I’ll tell you. You know I said that we asked the baby’s mother whether she had a toy in her pram with her, but I couldn’t remember what it was? Well, Suzy knew. She said I told her it was a bear.’

  ‘A teddy bear.’

  ‘That’s it, but it weren’t no ordinary one. It was one of them … I’ll have to get me daughter, I’ve forgot, bloody foreign …’ He yelled, ‘Here! Sue! Can you come over here and speak to …’

  He heard the phone get passed over and then a very studiously cultured woman’s voice said, ‘My father means a Steiff bear. The ones that have a button in the ear.’

  ‘That’s it! That’s it! Give us the phone back, girl!’

  Lee had known that posh teddies had buttons in their ears. Even he was occasionally desperate enough to watch Antiques Roadshow on a Sunday night.

  Tommy said, ‘Apparently the kiddie played with it all the time. Brought it with her when she come from Germany, the mother. Only thing she brought, poor soul.’

  The BigO, the world’s tallest big wheel ride was certainly a big draw, but the rest of the fair was a bit bog-standard for punters accustomed to the thrill rides at Disney and places like Alton Towers. If travelling outfits wanted to survive they had to be prepared to evolve. David Sanders knew that but, even as he showed his boss, Roman Lester, a breakdown of their takings from Croydon, he could see the old man disagreed.

  ‘This is all about lack of pre-publicity,’ Lester said. ‘If folk knew we were on our way, they’d look forward to our appearance and come along. Anticipation is what fairs are all about, David – always has been. We need to get bodies out on the street handing out leaflets, like we did in the old days.’

  They’d had this discussion before, many times. Roman wouldn’t or couldn’t see the value of putting their advertising efforts onto social media, which frustrated the hell out of David. Knowing they had a largely empty website all ready to be filled with show details and offers broke his heart. But however often he told Roman about how ‘kids these days’ looked everything up online, he wouldn’t have it. So David just said, ‘Yes, boss,’ and the conversation moved on.