‘Yes. It could have been back in the 1900s when there were a lot of Jews around here,’ Lee said. ‘Although that photograph your client found underneath it looks more modern than that to me.’
Mumtaz sat down. ‘I went back to the Land Registry records and discovered that the last individual the house had belonged to was a man called Eric Smith,’ she said.
‘Not very Jewish.’ Lee put the mezuzah back on her desk. He’d called Brian Green first thing and told him about his wife hurting her hand on the thing on his doorpost and the blown kiss she’d made at her chauffeur. Brian had growled out the detail about the mezuzah. Lee had told Brian not to make assumptions about Amy and the chauffeur. She was the sort of girl who blew kisses at the bloody dog. But apparently Amy was going to be out with her mates again on Saturday and Brian wanted Lee to be there at a price that he couldn’t even think about refusing.
‘No, but his mother was Polish apparently,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Her name before she married Eric Smith’s father was Lily Berkowicz.’
‘That sounds Jewish to me.’ Lee went into their tiny office kitchen, picked up the dustpan and brush and swept the paint shavings from the mezuzah off the floor.
‘There was another son too,’ Mumtaz continued, ‘besides Eric, a boy called Marek.’
‘From a previous marriage?’
‘Must have been,’ she said. ‘The information I found about Marek Berkowicz on line was very scant.’
‘Why would it be anything else? I mean he must be quite old now …’
‘Wherever he is, yes,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Lee, Marek Berkowicz went missing from his home in 1955 when he was fifteen and hasn’t been seen since.’
Lee, now back at his desk, said, ‘I’ve never heard anything about that.’
‘It was before you were born.’
‘Yes, I know, but you hear stories as you’re growing up, don’t you?’
‘But you come from the south of the borough.’
‘Yeah.’ Custom House, down by the old Victoria Dock. When Lee had been a kid it had been a whole distinct and separate community from places like Upton Park. Then the Docks had been alive and trips to places like Upton Park for Lee and his brother had been rare. ‘My mum might remember,’ he said. ‘Or maybe me dad’s old drinking mates.’
‘I found one newspaper report,’ Mumtaz said. ‘From the Recorder. Marek went missing one night in December 1955. No-one saw him go, no-one knew where he might have gone. The police even dug up the Smith family’s garden.’
‘Mmm. Perhaps I’ll speak to Vi. Her dad was Jewish.’
Mumtaz picked up the small photograph that had been hidden behind the mezuzah and said, ‘I wonder if this is Lily Smith.’ Then she looked up again. ‘Lee, do you know what’s written on the scroll inside this … mezuzah?’
‘Not a clue. But it’ll be in Hebrew and so neither of us’d be able to read it.’
‘Oh, I wasn’t thinking about opening it. I don’t think that would be right. We’re not Jewish,’ Mumtaz said, and she put the mezuzah to one side.
*
‘DS Bracci tells me he reckons you’ve a tale to tell, Mr Murray,’ Vi Collins said, as she sat down in front of one Mark Murray aka Bully. A pale, skinny lad, Bully had apparently got his nickname because of the black metal ring that he’d stuck through his nose. It made him, he’d told Tony Bracci, look a bit like a bull. Tony Bracci felt it made him look like a twat.
Bully didn’t say anything.
‘What were you doing in the old Plashet Cemetery on Saturday night?’ Vi asked. ‘Fiddling about with the dead?’
He looked up at her from underneath heavy eyelids. ‘I don’t do that.’
‘Don’t you?’ The notion that Bully was a necrophiliac had only come from that deadbeat Deserts Disease and so it was hardly gospel. But Vi had to see how Bully would respond.
‘No.’ He looked disgusted.
‘So what were you doing?’ Vi asked.
‘Hanging out.’
‘In a cemetery?’ And then something occurred to Vi, something she’d once talked about to a drag queen she’d met on a night out up west. ‘The old Plashet’s not like Brompton Cemetery is it, Mark? Brompton Cemetery is well known as a place where men go to meet other men for sex …’
‘I’m no fuckin’ Iron!’ Bully’s face had gone from spotty white to spotty red in an instant. It either meant that he was deeply offended by the suggestion that he might be gay or he was so far in the closet he was out the other side.
‘So why were you there?’ Vi asked. ‘Tell us and you can go. Don’t tell us and …’ She held up the very small wrap of cocaine Tony Bracci had found in one of Bully’s pockets.
Bully looked at it with what could have been hunger in his eyes. ‘You’ll do me for that anyway.’
Vi, smiling, dropped the wrap onto the floor. ‘You’ll have to find that out,’ she said.
Tony Bracci looked across at his superior nervously.
‘Tell me the truth,’ Vi said.
The boy had refused a Brief. He’d done that for a reason.
Bully moved his head to the left, then to the right, and he sucked his teeth. He said, ‘I go to get laid.’
‘Oh, so you—’
‘Not by no man!’ He sniffed. ‘I like girls, you know what I mean?’
‘In a graveyard.’
‘Yeah, man!’
Bully was one of the whitest people Vi had ever met and yet, in common with a lot of young people, he spoke in a semi-Caribbean, semi-London/Essex dialect that, to her, sounded weird.
‘Goth girls go to boneyards, yeah? They like to get laid on the gravestones and they are reem, man. ‘
‘Easy, tiger.’ Vi raised a hand. ‘So let me get this straight, you go to graveyards to pick up Goth girls?’
‘They’ll do it with anyone as long as you do it on a tomb,’ he said. Then he went red again when he realised what he’d just said. ‘Not that I couldn’t get laid by other girls but, you know, I like the Goth girls.’
‘So is Plashet Jewish Cemetery a known place for this sort of activity?’
Bully looked back again. ‘No.’
‘So why were you romping about in there last Saturday night?’
For a moment he didn’t say anything.
‘Well?’
‘I saw this bitch,’ he said. ‘Sort of gothy but also she had a swastika tattoo and other symbols and stuff on her garms, you know? She was vaulting over the railings into the cemetery and she looked at me like …’
‘Like she wouldn’t be averse to letting you slip her a length.’
‘Eh?’
Inwardly Vi laughed. How quickly slang changed. ‘Fuck her,’ she interpreted.
‘Oh, er, yeah.’
‘So did you? Fuck her?’
Kazia Ostrowska had been the only female, as far as they knew, who had been in the Plashet Jewish Cemetery that night. Kazia it had been who was tattooed with a swastika.
‘Did you fuck her?’ Vi reiterated.
Bully put his head down again. ‘No,’ he mumbled.
‘What?’ Tony Bracci only pretended he hadn’t heard. The little scrote had made him run, he was ripe for a bit of humiliation.
‘No, I never,’ Bully said. He looked up.
‘Why not? If she give you the eye and all that?’
Bully sighed. ‘Because she wasn’t alone,’ he said.
‘Who was with her?’
He shrugged. ‘Dunno.’
‘How many of them were there?’
He shrugged again.
‘Did you see what any of them looked like? Hear how they spoke?’
‘Foreign.’
‘What sort of foreign?’
‘I dunno.’
Kazia was Polish and so it was possible she had been in the graveyard with other Polish people. The only other person who could definitely be placed in the graveyard was Majid Islam. Would Majid, a British-born Asian, have cried out or spoken in any other language apart from English in that co
ntext?
‘Did any of the voices you heard sound Asian?’ Vi asked.
‘What like Pak—’
‘Asian,’ she cut across.
He thought for a moment and then he said, ‘No. No it was like … foreign, you know.’
Like it or not, and even among those of a decidedly right-wing nature, Asian voices had become native to Newham, even when they were speaking Urdu or Hindi. Like the Jews before them, their language had become accepted. Now it was other European tones that were ‘foreign’.
‘No,’ Vi said, even though she did know. ‘And anyway what’s this “it”. How many voices did you hear, Bully?’
‘Oh, just hers.’
‘The girl you took a fancy to?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So you saw more than one person but only actually heard one foreign voice?’
‘Yeah. But there was a bloke, a Pak … an Asian in there too,’ Bully said.
Majid Islam, who had found the body.
‘So what made you run away?’ Vi said.
‘Oh, that was the stiff on the ground,’ Bully said.
‘Which was?’
‘Holding a fucking skellington. Fuck man!’ he put a hand up to his head. He was sweating now. ‘All on its own holding a fucking skellington!’
But if that was the case, then how had he seen Majid Islam? While Kazia and who knew who else cavorted around the graveyard, according to Mr Islam, he had not moved from the dead man’s side.
‘So where was the Asian bloke you claimed you saw?’ Vi asked.
‘Oh, he was off on his toes,’ Bully said.
‘To where?’
He shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘The railings? I was shitting myself at the skellington, what did I care? So you gonna do something with that wrap or not?’
12
It was difficult for Mumtaz to concentrate. The mezuzah kept on catching her eye. She was supposed to be looking into the background of Nasreen Khan’s husband, Abdullah, but it wasn’t easy. In spite of what she’d said to Lee, who had disappeared down to the Boleyn to try and meet up with some of his dad’s old mates in order to help her, she wanted to take the back off it and look at the scroll inside. But that was so wrong. She could hear her father’s rebuke in her head, That’s not for you, leave it alone!
Growing up just off Brick Lane in Spitalfields, Mumtaz had been brought up with a strange view of Jewish people. On the one hand, the area her family lived in had once been Jewish, the mosque her father and her brothers attended had been first a church and then a synagogue. Her parents had Jewish friends, Mumtaz herself had once loved a Jewish boy when she was at university and yet hatred of Jews was common. White racist lunatics preached it, those who sympathised with the Palestinians and opposed Israel often resorted to it and some of her fellow Muslims felt that if you really followed Islam, then you had to do it. She disagreed. She could see why the Palestinian cause was a just one, but she could also appreciate why Israel existed and why it was so important to world Jewry. In addition, she’d worked out long ago that there were Jews and there were Israelis and the two were not necessarily the same. But did her sympathy for the Jews permit her to open that mezuzah?
Mumtaz turned back to her computer screen. So far her researches had taken her to Abdullah Khan’s parents who had been called Mursel and Meena Khan. They’d lived just outside where Abdullah had told Nasreen he came from, the town of Bolton, in a place called Ramsbottom. She’d Googled some pictures of it and it was not what she had expected. Ramsbottom looked middle class and quite trendy. It even had a ‘heritage’ steam railway.
Mursel Khan had had an electrical shop in the middle of the town and had been something of a local character on account of his heavy involvement with the heritage railway. He had died, according to an article in a local newspaper, in 2011 at the age of seventy-one. His wife, Meena, had died in 1974, which was the same year in which her only child, Abdullah, had been born. She’d only been twenty-three. Mursel had not remarried. Thus Abdullah and Mursel had lived as, she imagined, a fairly isolated unit in what seemed to be a white, Christian town. Bolton itself, which was where Meena, if not Mursel, had been born, had a high proportion of Asian people and in the racially tense 1970s surely the Khans would have felt happier and safer living there. Mumtaz’s father had told her about the ‘Paki-bashing’ that had gone on all over the country at that time even though she had no memories of it herself. Back then there had been a lot of activity against immigrants by far-right groups like the National Front. The British National Party, their successors, were still around but they usually operated in a far less confrontational way than they had in the 1970s. Long before the 1970s, back at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jews had been treated badly too. Mumtaz’s eyes, yet again, were drawn to the mezuzah. She looked away.
Abdullah Khan had, so he’d told his wife Nasreen, entered Manchester University’s School of Law in 1992. Via the Law Society’s website, Mumtaz learned that he would have done a three-year degree course, after which he would have had to complete a one-year postgraduate Legal Practice Course in order to qualify for a training contract with a firm of solicitors. Only after completing that contract would he have become a fully-fledged solicitor. That would have taken him up to approximately 1997/8. He had come to London in 2005 which meant that he had to have been working as a solicitor for about seven years prior to that. So why had he, when he first came to the city, stayed in a cheap boarding house in Poplar?
*
She’d been sick. It was the first time it had happened since Nasreen had learned that she was pregnant and it had come as a shock. It was after all barely still morning. But as she stripped thirty-year-old-plus wallpaper off the kitchen wall, she suddenly felt nauseous. Her mobile rang as Nasreen flung herself out of the back door and into the garden where she threw up her breakfast. As soon as she’d finished retching she felt instantly better. But she made herself sit down on the back step for a moment anyway.
Nasreen took deep breaths of the torrid London air. Looking up at the sky she could see that it was going to rain again soon. She couldn’t help thinking that if John had still been alive she would have been embarrassed by what had just happened, but comforted too. John would have been concerned, he had been kind. He’d killed people and yet he’d also been very kind. How could that be?
Nasreen heard her mobile phone bleep, letting her know that she had either an ansaphone message or a text. It was probably from the person who had called while she was throwing up. She didn’t much care. It could wait. Oddly, she was elated all of a sudden and she wanted to enjoy it. Being sick, even more than the test results she’d got from the doctor, meant that she really was pregnant.
*
‘Once I’d found that body, I didn’t leave it for an instant, I can assure you,’ Majid Islam said. ‘Such strange people cavorting around in the graveyard. Who knew what they might do to it?’
Vi Collins’s officers had told her that Majid Islam had been standing over the body when they’d arrived and she had no reason to disbelieve either them or him. The only jarring theme to the melody was being provided by a cokehead and general oddity known as Bully. But Vi had to check his story out.
‘Apart from the girl we arrested did you see anyone else in the Plashet Graveyard that night?’ Vi asked.
She’d gone round to Islam’s house, keeping it informal. As Plashet Cemetery’s unofficial guardian, he was alright with the police and she wanted to keep him on side.
Majid Islam twirled his tasbeeh beads around his fingers and said, ‘I saw a boy jump over the gate.’
‘But there were three figures in the graveyard when you got there weren’t there, Mr Islam?’ Vi said. ‘That’s what you told us. The girl, the boy who jumped the gate and …’ She shrugged.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I saw a figure and then …’ He snapped his fingers.
‘Did you get any sort of idea about whether it was male or female, white or …’<
br />
‘Oh, no, it was just an impression,’ Majid Islam said. ‘A silhouette.’ Then he paused for a moment, his face creased into a frown. ‘But I suppose I would have to say, at a pinch, that he was a man.’
‘Why do you say that?’ Vi asked.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t really know. An instinct perhaps you’d say?’ He looked over at his fifty-inch television screen which was playing children’s afternoon programmes to no-one and said, ‘Perhaps it was the way that he moved?’
‘Which was?’
‘Like a man.’
‘Which is how?’ Vi asked. She’d often been told she walked about like a bloke when she had flat shoes on.
He held his hands out. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I know it when I see it. But I can’t be sure.’
Vi left Majid Islam’s house and went back to the station. Both Kazia and Bully had been released on bail pending possible charges, but there had been nothing – forensic or otherwise – to connect them to either of the bodies in the graveyard. There was Majid Islam who was an unlikely culprit on account of his history with the graveyard and some shadowy figure that could have been male. Where had he gone? And had he, this shadowy figure, actually been the ‘Paki’ that Bully had seen running away from the bodies when he approached them?
He hadn’t jumped over the gate into High Street North and it was unlikely that he could have hidden in the graveyard during the time she and all the other coppers had spent in there. Logically the only way he could have got out of there without being seen was over that fucking wall. Visions of Spiderman invaded Vi’s mind. She replaced them with more sensible pictures of ladders.
When Tony Bracci came in from his protracted smoking session out in the car park she said, ‘I think we need to have another look at the wall around the old Plashet Cemetery.’
‘We’ve had a look at the wall, guv,’ Tony said. ‘We looked at it when we found John Sawyer. There was nothing to see.’
‘Not at ground level, no,’ Vi smiled. ‘We need to get on top of it, Tone.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s alright,’ she said. ‘I’m not asking you to do something I wouldn’t do myself.’ And then she added. ‘In theory.’
An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) Page 9
