It was strange, this smallness of family. Even Nasreen’s relatives, who basically lived very English lives and had few children, were still numerous. Abdullah was such a lonely soul, she felt her heart ache when she thought about it. ‘Well, you can share my family then,’ she’d said.
But he hadn’t. Abdullah, though polite and courteous to her family, had little to do with them beyond niceties. Most of the time he was at her parents’ house he either watched TV or listened to his father’s old Paul Simon CDs in their room. It was clear from all the frantic activity that he put into it that he wanted to get their own house ready as soon as possible so that he and Nasreen could leave her parents’ place and move in. She wanted that too, but she also wanted to talk to her husband. She looked at the photograph of the woman and wondered how old it was. It was black and white, but it could have been thirty or sixty years old. She had no idea. Maybe John would know? But then she remembered that she didn’t know where John was.
*
‘I couldn’t have him like that at home,’ the woman told Vi. ‘Not like that. Not in that state. Even his girlfriend left him.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he was violent! Because he couldn’t get what had happened out there out of his head! Because the mess in his brain spread out across every room in my house. Why should I live with that? For Afghanistan? I don’t care.’
The woman was called Rita Sawyer and she’d just identified the man they’d found in Plashet Jewish Cemetery as her son, John Sawyer. Around fifty, Mrs Sawyer was thin and sun-dried in the way that only people who sunbathed or went abroad a lot were. Together with her husband and a teenage daughter, she lived in Manor Park.
‘Tell me about John, Mrs Sawyer,’ Vi asked.
‘What do you want to know?’
Vi wanted to know whether John Sawyer had ever been a member of any sort of far-right or anti-Semitic group and whether he’d been nuts enough to dig up a skeleton. But she said, ‘What was he like? As a son? You mean before Afghanistan or after?’
‘Both.’
Rita Sawyer sighed. She wore clothes that were at least twenty years too young for her. A mini-skirt in electric pink and a zebra print top that showed her wrinkled cleavage. Vi, whose sartorial tastes were rather more conservative, was half appalled, half lost in admiration. ‘John was a bit of an ’erbert when he was young,’ she said. ‘He never done well at school, couldn’t concentrate. But he liked sports and he was good enough at home with his sister and me and Ken. He thought about things.’
‘What things?’
She shook her head and grimaced, as if the memory she’d conjured was too painful for her. ‘Hunger, all that Live Eight stuff, homeless people. Always on the side of the underdog. Got sick of hearing it sometimes.’
‘Why did he go into the army?’
‘Couldn’t get a job,’ she said. ‘He learnt to drive when he was seventeen and Ken wanted him to do the Knowledge.’ Vi knew that Ken Sawyer drove a black cab. ‘But he never wanted to. He drifted into a bit of mini-cabbing but he never liked it much. One of his mates was going to Afghanistan and the next thing, he’d joined up.’
‘What did you think about that?’
‘I thought it was up to him,’ she said.
‘So what happened when he came home …’ She wanted to say ‘damaged’ but in the end she said ‘… unwell?’
Rita Sawyer shifted uncomfortably in her chair. ‘Well, he was a nightmare. Awake most of the night, wandering around the house and then flopping down on the Chesterfield at some Godforsaken hour of the morning, spilling his tobacco all over the coffee table. If you said anything to him about it he’d go berserk. Shouted right in his sister Shania’s face, on about how all what he’d done out in Afghanistan was wrong, about injustice.’ Vi saw her wince as if in physical pain. ‘Then when Lisa left him – that was his girlfriend – he really lost the plot. He stopped washing, wouldn’t eat, shouted and cried all the time. Ken took him down the doctor’s, but they wouldn’t do nothing except give him some pills what he never took.’
‘What pills?’
‘I dunno. Pills. I thought they put people like that somewhere, but not any more. They have to be looked after in the “community”. I tried his old regiment but they didn’t want to know. Something happened to him out there, something he wouldn’t talk about.’ She looked up at Vi and her eyes were challenging. ‘What was we supposed to do? Have him destroy what we took thirty years to put together? My daughter was frightened of him.’
Poor John Sawyer. He wasn’t the first soldier to go feral on the streets of London. According to Rita Sawyer, he’d left, been chucked out or whatever almost a year ago. Since then he’d been seen by his family on Green Street, High Street North, East Ham and wandering about talking to himself on Wanstead Flats and in Central Park. Vi reckoned she’d probably seen him. But John hadn’t been a great drinker. He hadn’t come to her attention for lobbing a cider bottle of piss at anybody, unlike some of the more lairy ex-soldiers.
‘Do you know where John stayed or slept?’
‘No.’
‘You must’ve been curious about him, Mrs Sawyer.’
She took it as a criticism. ‘You try living with what we had to live with, getting no help from no-one and then you criticise me, you mare,’ she barked
It wasn’t often that Vi looked away from an interviewee. Was this woman’s apparent hardness real or a defence mechanism? She’d just turned back to look at Rita Sawyer again when she saw a single tear slide down her face.
*
When Mumtaz arrived at Ayesha Mirza’s house in Forest Gate, everyone was out. Suspecting that the woman hadn’t forgotten their appointment so much as ignored it, Mumtaz got in the Micra and drove to Patrick Road in Plaistow. And sure enough, there she was in Wendy Dixon’s front garden.
‘You and the kids have gotta come with me!’ Mrs Mirza called up towards a top-floor window.
Wendy Dixon, leaning out, shouted back, ‘Fuck off, Mary, you don’t know what you’re talking about!’
‘You making money that way,’ Ayesha Mirza said. ‘You can’t do it Wend. You can’t. Think of the kids.’
Mumtaz, appalled, if not surprised, that Ayesha Mirza had done the opposite to what she had advised, got out of the car and went over to her. ‘Mrs Mirza …’
The woman turned and looked at her, her face red with anger and frustration. ‘Oh, Mrs Hakim,’ she said, ‘what—’
‘And don’t think I give a shit what your fucking al Qaeda mates think either!’ Wendy Dixon yelled as she looked at Mumtaz.
‘Wendy, you …’
Mumtaz put a hand on Ayesha Mirza’s arm.
‘Come and get in the car and we’ll talk,’ she said. She wanted to say to her, You still haven’t seen the footage you’ve paid me for. Look at it and then tell me whether you can judge your sister or not? But she didn’t. A couple of Wendy Dixon’s neighbours were peeping through their curtains at what was going on in the street, and one of them had come out of her front door to have a look.
Ayesha Mirza looked at Mumtaz, ‘But …’
‘Come on,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Let’s go for a coffee somewhere.’
The woman let herself be led to the car while Wendy Dixon shouted, ‘Go on! Fuck off!’
At the end of Patrick Road, where it met Tunmarsh Lane, Mumtaz saw a big BMW with blacked-out windows. It was the sort of car that gangsters often drove. People like the Sheikh family. Naz Sheikh, that good looking, lethal psychopath, was in charge of collecting ‘her’ debt for his equally ruthless father and brothers. If any of them were in that car now she hoped they would have an accident.
‘Ayesha,’ she said, ‘I have to ask, did you tell your sister that you’d had her followed?’
Ayesha shook her head. ‘No.’
‘So what did you tell her?’
‘Just that I knew what she was up to with her landlord. She didn’t deny it. She just pushed me out the flat. I offered her and the kids to come and
live with Wazim and me, I said all I wanted to do was help her.’
She was genuinely baffled. Clearly Ayesha had lived a much more sheltered life than her sister – and had listened to nothing Mumtaz had told her on Sunday.
‘But it isn’t as simple as that,’ Mumtaz said. She was heading for Prince Regent Lane and then on down to Silvertown and the little cafe in the Thames Barrier Park. She liked it down there, it was quiet and anonymous. ‘Your sister owes her landlord, Sean Rogers. Even if you do take her and her children out of that house, he will come after her.’
‘But if he’s putting her on the streets …’
‘She’d have to make a complaint to the police herself,’ Mumtaz said. ‘According to the law, at the moment she is in the wrong because she owes him money.’
‘How much?’
‘I don’t know. But these people charge unbelievable rates of interest.’
‘How can they do that?’
Mumtaz shrugged. ‘It’s legal,’ she said. ‘The only way forward for Wendy would be for her to go to the police and report the abuse. But I can tell from seeing how she was just now, she won’t do that. My boss, Mr Arnold, has never known anyone press charges against the Rogers brothers or any of their associates. That’s the thing with gangsters, Ayesha, nobody ever tells. That’s where their power comes from: other people’s silence.’
Just talking about it, about herself, made Mumtaz want to cry. Ahmet had gambled, literally, with the Sheikh family and he’d lost. Now she was selling everything she had to pay the interest on that debt and keep a roof over her own and Shazia’s heads. And just like Wendy Dixon who kept her mouth shut about the Rogers brothers, she wasn’t saying a word.
*
Lee could find nothing about any skeleton or bones in the local paper. He’d gone to the newsagents in Green Street and bought the Newham Recorder but there was no mention of bones being found in the Plashet Graveyard. There was just a sad little story about a man called John Sawyer, who’d been found stabbed in the back on Saturday night. He’d served in Afghanistan apparently. He was only twenty-seven, had been homeless and mentally ill and no-one had given a damn. A few of Lee’s old mates from Iraq had ended up like that. He hadn’t. He’d joined the police, lost his marriage and become addicted to booze and painkillers. Serving one’s country was an honour that came at a price, Lee thought as he watched a cold rain lash down on Green Street.
*
There was no picture of John Sawyer in the newspaper, but Nasreen knew that it was him. His age seemed about right, he’d been a soldier in Afghanistan and he’d been homeless. It had to be John. Abdullah came in from the garden, soaked through.
‘The guttering needs doing,’ he said.
Water had suddenly poured through the open bathroom window.
‘Oh.’ She put the newspaper down.
‘Anything in the Recorder?’ he asked.
‘Not much,’ she said. She should have said the homeless man who used to live in our garden is dead, but she couldn’t. If Abdullah found out she’d known about a man living in their garden he’d subject her to protracted interrogation. If he knew she’d fed John, his questioning would be furious and, she feared, without end. His jealousy of other men, in her experience, knew no limits.
Soon after they’d married, one of her cousins, Rafiq, had come to stay. Rafiq’s father had spent a lot of time working away from home. His mother was dead, and Rafiq had often stayed at Nasreen’s house when they were children. He was like a brother to her. As soon as he arrived they’d reverted to how they’d always been with each other – mucking around, joking, laughing loudly. Then Rafiq had tickled her, just for a laugh.
There was nothing in it, but Abdullah hadn’t taken it that way. He’d pulled them apart and then he’d hit Rafiq, hard. Neither Nasreen nor her parents had known what to do. None of them had seen Rafiq since.
As Abdullah walked past her into the living room, he briefly touched her shoulder. It was an affectionate touch and she wanted to turn to him, kiss him. But she daren’t because by this time she was crying. John was dead and no-one knew why – but she feared her own terrible thoughts. Surely, even if Abdullah had found John in the garden, whatever had happened she as his wife would have been the first to know? Nasreen’s next feeling was one of shame. Whatever else he was, Abdullah was her husband and she owed him trust and loyalty.
8
‘Where’d you hear about a skeleton, Arnold?’ Vi Collins asked Lee as they sat out in the cold in the garden of the Golden Fleece. Lee had had the morning off to take Chronus to the vet – he’d been off his food for a few days. He’d met Vi as he was going out to his car after depositing the mynah bird back in the flat. She’d offered him a drink and the Golden Fleece was the nearest boozer. He’d taken her up on her offer and then he’d asked her, naming no names, about the weird little bit of intel Cheryl the alkie had given him outside the Boleyn, about a skeleton found with the body of John Sawyer in the Plashet Jewish Cemetery.
‘I just heard,’ Lee said.
‘Well, you must’ve heard from some sort of nutter,’ Vi said.
‘So there isn’t any skeleton?’
‘I chose my words very carefully, Arnold,’ Vi said. ‘I talked about “a” skeleton, not “the” skeleton.’
‘So you’re saying that the whole skeleton thing—’
‘“A” skeleton,’ Vi repeated. ‘“A” as in “a”.’
Even though Cheryl the alkie was a notoriously unreliable source of information, Lee could read Vi Collins and so her inability to actually answer his question by talking about ‘the’ skeleton was telling. Somewhere a skeleton existed which Vi knew about; however, whether it was directly related to the Plashet Cemetery was not something she wanted to discuss. Lee knew that he couldn’t pursue it and she was on her guard now. He’d just salt that little bit of information away in his head in case he needed it sometime in the future.
‘So what you up to this afternoon?’ Vi asked. She was drinking diet Pepsi like he was, so she must be officially on duty.
‘Going back to work.’
‘Mmm. So how’s your parrot? Is he sick or just moody?’
Chronus had been a gift from Vi, who knew full well he was a mynah bird. But she always called him a parrot and Lee had stopped correcting her years ago.
‘Moody,’ he said. The vet had been unable to find anything wrong with the bird and had concluded that he was just simply showing off in order to get more treats or different food. Lee spoiled him, but then Chronus had become what Vi had intended him to be – Lee’s surrogate child. When she’d brought the bird into his life, Lee had been mourning the loss of his wife who had divorced him and his daughter who had left with her, and he was battling addiction to booze and pain killers. He’d still been in the police then and Vi had wanted to help. She’d also fancied the pants off him. They’d slept together a few times over the years and Lee knew that by taking him for a drink she could either be angling to go back to his place, less than a minute down the road, for some afternoon delight or she was having a bit of fun watching his discomfort. Either way he wasn’t in the mood, and anyway Mumtaz was on her own in the office.
He looked at Vi and she smiled. ‘How about we …’ she began.
‘I can’t,’ Lee said. ‘I’ve gotta get back to Green Street.’
She shrugged. ‘Fair enough.’
‘And you’ve got to get back to your Plashet corpse – and that skeleton,’ Lee said.
‘I’ve told you it’s not “the”—’
‘Oh, methinks the lady doth protest too much,’ Lee said, as he rose to his feet. He began to walk away but then he stopped. Ah what the hell? Then he turned, winked at her and said, ‘You coming or what?’
‘With you?’
‘Who else you got on the go, Vi?’
She gave him a killer glare and stood up. ‘I’m on duty, Arnold, sorry.’ Then she put a fag in her mouth, lit it and began to walk towards her car. ‘Shoulda said yes the
first time, honey,’ she said to him over her shoulder. ‘No second chances here.’
Lee Arnold laughed. She was such a fucking tease.
*
Nasreen had heard of a lady, a Muslim, who helped women with problems. Her mum had mentioned her, and she’d heard her name spoken in a local shop: Mrs Hakim. She was a private detective and it was said she could sniff out a bad husband or an errant daughter-in-law the way other people sniffed out dry rot in old houses. She worked with an Englishman who was very good looking. Mrs Hakim was a widow but she was young, and some thought beautiful. Nasreen felt anxious about going to see such a person. She couldn’t talk about Abdullah – she didn’t have the courage. Not yet. What if the woman contacted him and told him what she’d done?
No, she’d have to find some other reason to go to the office on Green Street. She needed time to work out whether or not she could trust this Mrs Hakim. Maybe her reason for going to see her could be something to do with the house? She remembered the metal capsule that looked a bit like a lipstick she’d taken off the doorpost and the picture that she’d found underneath it. Nasreen rooted through her handbag to make sure that the photograph and the object were still there. They were. She left her parents’ house and made her way up the road to Green Street. She’d already decided not to breathe a word about John.
*
Naz Sheikh liked four things in life: women, flash clothes, cars and his job. The latter consisted of working for his father, Zahid, and his older brother Rizwan. They had a property development company as well as a sideline in lending money. The money had to be secured on something of course, like a house or a car – or a wife.
He dialled the number on his iPhone and put it up to his ear. As he listened to it ring, he looked up at the window of the office above George the Barbers, and he saw her pick her up mobile. Lee Arnold was still out and so he expected her to be forthright.
‘I’ve paid you,’ Mumtaz Hakim said tersely. ‘What do you want?’
An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) Page 6
