Her phone rang, and while she answered it Tony Bracci pulled a face. He didn’t like climbing any more than he liked running. But she waved him away. As he left he heard her say, ‘Well, Arnold, I haven’t heard anyone mention the Smiths of Strone Road for at least twenty years. You got a client down there, have you?’
*
‘Why aren’t you at work?’ Nasreen was surprised to see her husband come through the front door. She was pleased to see Abdullah but also a little nervous. He didn’t like her working at the house on her own in case she had an accident or felt faint. She wouldn’t tell him about the sickness.
‘I have to do some odds and sods over the weekend,’ her husband said. ‘So I took myself off early. It’s Friday.’
Nasreen stopped scraping weird moss-green wallpaper off the dining room wall. ‘Don’t you have clients to attend to?’
He shrugged. Then he said, ‘What you doing here? I went to your mum and dad’s and they—’
‘I just wanted to get on.’
‘So what did you do?’
He didn’t trust her, she could hear it in his voice. Did he know about John maybe? Did he think that she was having some sort of affair with John? But John was dead.
‘Just some scraping,’ she said.
He looked at the walls of the dining room. ‘Fun?’
‘No, but it has to be done.’
‘Mmm.’
Nasreen particularly fancied Abdullah when he was all suited up for work – as he was now. Although completely inexperienced sexually before her wedding night, Nasreen had nevertheless educated herself extensively in the art of sex via books, friends and films. Abdullah had known what to do as she had expected and so her first time had been exciting and painless. She’d wanted him so much. After he’d taken her virginity she’d ached to carry on. But he hadn’t wanted to. Now, looking at him, she wanted him even though she knew that part of such a voracious desire was due to her hormones. She walked over to him and kissed him on the mouth and she felt his dick harden against her leg.
When he finally disengaged from her he said, ‘That was nice.’
She took one of his hands and put it on her breast. ‘There could be more …’
He smiled. ‘Maybe when we go back to your parents …’
They hadn’t had sex for over a month. ‘There are things we could do here,’ she said.
‘Yes, but it’s not very hygienic and—’
Nasreen got down on her knees and opened his fly.
‘Nasreen!’
‘Oh, Abi, I really want to do it!’ she said as she reached for his cock.
But he pulled away. ‘That’s disgusting!’ he said. ‘That’s not what married people do!’
‘Yes, it is!’ Nasreen said. Kneeling on the floor in front of him she felt pathetic now, but she still made her point. ‘Oral sex is normal.’
His pale face became red. ‘It’s disgusting and dishonourable. You’re my wife, the mother of my child, not some whore!’
Nasreen began to cry. ‘But Abi, I want our sex to be wonderful,’ she said.
‘By doing …that?’ He did up his fly.
‘Yes, if you …’
‘But I don’t,’ he said. He moved away from her completely. He looked at her with disgust. Didn’t he realise that even if what they occasionally did in bed satisfied him completely, she wanted more? Didn’t she have a right to more?
And then suddenly he was sitting on the floor beside her, kissing her hands. ‘I care for you and our baby more than anything else in this world,’ he said.
‘Then why …’
His eyes were so intense and so passionate they stopped Nasreen in her tracks.
He put his hands on her shoulders. ‘Because we don’t need all that,’ he said. ‘Our love is pure, we’re good Muslims you and me, Nasreen. Sex is good but it’s for babies, you know? It’s to make the baby we’re making now. Anything else is dirty and disrespectful – to you. Don’t you see that?’
How could he be so passionate and yet at the same time so sexually unadventurous? And why was he bringing up religion? Sure they were both Muslims but neither of them were shalwar khameez wearing types. It was one of those moments, which were increasing, when Nasreen didn’t understand her husband.
‘You know I love you. You know I’ll give you everything—’
A noise from outside interrupted him and Abdullah, frowning, said, ‘Sounds like someone in the back garden.’
‘Who?’
He stood up.
‘I’ll go and see,’ he said. ‘You stay here.’
Still on her knees, Nasreen slowly rose and it was then that her phone rang. This time she picked it up.
‘Nasreen,’ she heard Mumtaz Hakim’s confident voice on the end of the line.
‘Yes?’
‘Are you alright?’
She must have heard the tremor in Nasreen’s voice. ‘Yes fine,’ Nasreen lied.
‘Nasreen, a question,’ Mumtaz said. ‘When your husband first came to London why did he stay in the ZamZam boarding house in Poplar? It seems odd to me that a solicitor of some years practice should do something like that.’
Nasreen said, ‘His uncle owns the boarding house.’
‘Oh, I see.’
And yet Nasreen felt that she didn’t – not really. And neither – really – did Nasreen, not now she came to think about it. Why had Abdullah stayed in that dirty place? It wasn’t as if he even liked his uncle. Nasreen saw Abdullah coming back in from the garden. ‘I have to go,’ she said and ended the call.
As he walked into the dining room, Abdullah Khan looked very formal indeed. His suit, straight and smooth again, his hair neat.
Nasreen said, ‘What’s going on? In the garden?’
For a moment he appeared to be lost in thought and then he said, ‘Oh, it’s the police.’
‘What are they doing? Where?’
‘They’re on the back wall,’ he said. ‘I think it’s got something to do with that body they found in the graveyard. You know, the soldier.’
‘Yes.’ Nasreen put her arms around her shoulders and hugged herself.
13
‘The Berkowicz boy just disappeared,’ Wilf Cox said.
The barmaid, Maureen, picked his empty pint up off the table and said, ‘Same again?’
The old man looked expectantly across at Lee Arnold who said, ‘Yeah, thanks Maureen. And I’ll have me usual.’ He handed her his Pepsi glass.
Now that the game had started the Boleyn was very light on football fans of any description and so Lee and Wilf could talk. Lee had been trying to catch up with the old man since the previous day, and later this evening he had to go to a no doubt designer perfume-scented place called ‘Spicey’s’ in Billericay for another obbo on Amy Green. He’d decided to fortify himself in the blokiness of the Boleyn first. It was an added bonus that Wilf had turned up – he rarely did on a match day – so Lee had taken the opportunity to ask him about the house on Strone Road where that client of Mumtaz’s had found a mezuzah.
‘Police looked everywhere,’ the old man continued. ‘Dug up gardens and everything. People whispered about the stepfather, what was his name? Reg. About Reg.’
‘Why?’
‘You mean aside from the fact that he was his stepdad? He was a bit of a lout, Reg Smith, as I remember him.’
‘Drinks.’ Maureen put Wilf’s pint down in front of him and gave Lee his Pepsi.
‘Ta, darling.’
Wilf continued, ‘He had his own son by Lily by the time the other boy went missing.’
‘Eric.’ Mumtaz and Vi had told him the bones of the story.
‘Yes, Eric.’ He shook his head. ‘He was weird. Living in that house all them years all on his own after his parents died. People said he was guarding that first boy’s body in there – until they forgot about it.’
‘Guarding it for who?’
‘The memory of his dad? His mum? I dunno,’ Wilf said. ‘But then Eric died years ago – he
weren’t that old even though he looked it. Far as I know, nothing was ever found in that house.’
‘So Marek Berkowicz could have run away just as the family said.’
The old man shrugged. ‘Possibly.’ Then he said, ‘Here, fancy a fag?’
They both went out onto Green Street which, in contrast to how it had been earlier on when it was riddled with football fans, looked a bit like some recession-hit high street in the Midlands. Only the occasional roar of the crowd from the Boleyn Ground broke the one noise that was always around: traffic.
Lee lit up first. ‘What about Lily Smith?’ he asked. ‘Remember much about her?’
Wilf frowned. He lowered his voice. ‘She’d been in the camps.’
‘What? Like Auschwitz?’
‘Belsen,’ the old man said. ‘We, the British, liberated it in 1945. Reg Smith was one of the soldiers first in. Piles of bodies so high they cut out the sunlight, people said. No wonder Reg took to the bottle.’
‘But he brought Lily back from Germany with him?’
‘And the boy.’
‘Marek.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember what Lily looked like, Wilf?’
He puffed on his fag and then he smiled. ‘Like a little fairy, she was.’ he said. ‘A nice pretty lady with long, blonde hair. I thought she was German – you know, proper German – not a Jew. My mum told me not to speak to her because of it – until she realised, like.’
Wilf was sure that Lily Smith had been blonde, but the little picture that Mumtaz’s client had found behind the mezuzah had been of a dark-haired woman. Who was she? For the moment at least, it seemed unlikely that she was Lily Smith.
‘Actually, my mum got to know Lily Smith a bit before the boy left,’ Wilf said. ‘She, Mum that is, she always said that Lily Smith was quality.’
Lee frowned. ‘You mean …’
‘She come from a well-off, educated family.’ Wilf shook his head. ‘Dunno what her first husband was like, but Reg Smith must have been a come-down.’
‘He saved her,’ Lee said.
‘Oh, well that was the story, yes,’ Wilf said. ‘Her and the boy was close to death on the floor of some hut and Reg took them out of there. That’s what my cousin Arthur always said anyway, and he knew them well.’
‘What, Arthur Dobson?’ Lee asked.
‘Yeah.’ Wilf shook his head. ‘We could ask him if he weren’t in hospital.’
Lee, who knew Wilf’s much older cousin a little bit, said, ‘What’s he in there for?’
Wilf leaned towards him and whispered, ‘Cancer.’
‘Oh. Sorry.’
Across Green Street the lads in the local barber’s shop came out onto the pavement for a smoke and one of them, Kumar, waved at Lee.
‘Alright, mate,’ Lee called out.
‘Yes, yes.’
Lee turned back to Wilf. ‘You said that your mum knew Lily Smith until Marek went missing. What happened after that?’
‘Oh, Lily Smith never went out again,’ Wilf said. ‘Only once, which was when she was took out feet first in a box. Buried in the old Plashet I think.’
‘When was that?’
He shrugged. ‘Must’ve been sometime in the 1960s. Eric went to the funeral of course, and I have heard it said that that was the last time he ever left that house.’ Vi had told Lee that Eric Smith had been a recluse. ‘Then he died,’ Wilf said, ‘and then the place just went to rack and ruin. Arthur’d know more about it than I would, but …’ He shook his head. ‘Not a good house that one, I wouldn’t live in it. Here, Lee, is it true it’s been bought by some young couple?’
*
The woman behind the toughened glass window looked down at the ring with nothing but contempt. Mumtaz said, ‘It’s a onecarat solitaire diamond.’
The woman shrugged as if to say, So you’re another skint woman with another onecarat diamond, so what?
‘We have to verify it,’ she said. She put the ring that Ahmet had bought Mumtaz for their first wedding anniversary in a battered cardboard jewellery box and passed it to an old man who sat behind her. ‘Can you move out the way so I can serve the next customer?’
Mumtaz stood aside to let a big-haired woman, who looked like she was probably a traveller, push a load of gold chains underneath the toughened glass and say, ‘Eighteen carat.’ Her economy of speech and her tone made Mumtaz feel that she hated what she was doing. That was understandable.
Mumtaz had come to Manor Park to sell her final piece of valuable jewellery because the pawn shops on Green Street had become too familiar and public and she needed to go somewhere anonymous. This place, however, made her shudder. Part of a chain that had expanded massively since the onset of the credit crunch of 2007, it dealt in anything anyone might want to sell. It was the sort of establishment that attracted men in their early thirties pushing babies in buggies, looking to sell guitars that had once been imbued with their dreams.
The woman behind the toughened glass took the traveller’s chains wordlessly and then she beckoned Mumtaz back to the counter.
‘Our expert says we can advance you eight hundred on it,’ she said.
Mumtaz remembered what Ahmet had paid for the ring, because he had been the sort of man who told a woman such things. Look, I paid three thousand pounds for this, for you! he’d said as he’d hurled it at her after she’d said she’d rather have a few less beatings than a ring for their first wedding anniversary. Now it was the last valuable piece of jewellery that she had, it was the most beautiful and she hated it. It was a no brainer.
‘OK,’ she said.
The woman behind the counter began to fill out paperwork and quoted a figure that Mumtaz would have to pay if she wanted to keep the ring ‘in’. She knew that unless some miracle happened she’d never redeem it, and nor did she want to, not for herself. The only reason to pawn it at all was so that maybe one day she could redeem it to give to Shazia. The girl had no jewellery from her own mother; Ahmet had sold that long ago.
Once she’d completed her business, Mumtaz put the eight hundred pounds in her purse and left the shop as quickly as possible. Once outside, even though it was raining and grey, she breathed more easily.
*
Some of the girls she’d seen there before. A lot of them were eastern European – generally of the blonde, long-legged variety – who sat in one corner of the room talking and laughing among themselves. Over Wendy’s side of the room were two black girls whom she knew, and four others, white and British, that she didn’t.
Sean Rogers’s house wasn’t beautiful but it was fabulous. The girls had been put into what Sean called the ‘Granny Flat’ which was an apartment on the first floor of the pool house. It had a vast living room, two bedrooms and two bathrooms. This was the ‘holding pen’ where the girls who would provide Sean and Marty’s business associates with ‘entertainment’ that night would prepare themselves with fake tans, perfume and makeup. The Rogers had their reputations to think about while Wendy just concentrated on how much this would knock off her debt.
She was wearing a thong, a bra and a pair of six-inch wedges which took her to almost six feet tall. There were mirrors all over the living room and she sat in front of one to do her make-up and put on her false eyelashes. A black girl, Harmony, smiled at her, but it was a leggy East European who came and sat down at the mirror beside her.
In comparison to this fake-tanned girl, Wendy was pallid. Her face looked grey and for a few moments her own deathly pallor gave her pause.
‘This waterproof is very good.’
Wendy looked to her left. The girl, blonde and unsmiling, was offering her a tube of foundation cream.
‘Is a little dark for you but it do not run,’ the girl continued. ‘Take it.’
Wendy took it. ‘Thank you.’
‘Do you work here before?’
‘Yes,’ Wendy said.
‘Is very nice house.’
‘Yes.’
A house with a room th
at would later be darkened and packed to the ceiling with bodies fucking and being fucked like pieces of meat.
The East European shadowed her eyes in green and then picked up a set of false eyelashes with a pair of tweezers. ‘I would like to live in a house like this one day,’ she said.
Wendy didn’t answer. All she wanted was her own flat with the kids in Plaistow.
‘But I must have a lot of sex before I can do that,’ the girl continued.
Was she a professional prostitute? The few East European girls Wendy had met before at Sean’s parties had been, like this girl, very calm about it all. But then maybe that was just how they were. Coming from poor places like Romania and Albania maybe you did whatever you had to to survive … But then wasn’t Wendy’s own situation rather like theirs?
‘Anyway, perhaps we meet rich men who want to keep us or maybe marry,’ the girl said. She saw Wendy shudder and she asked, ‘You don’t like?’
‘I don’t want to marry a bloke like that,’ she said.
‘But if he is rich …’
‘Even if he is rich,’ Wendy said. The other girl had put her false eyelashes on now, Wendy was just getting going with hers.
‘Why not?’
‘Because to marry a bloke I’d have to love him, and I can’t love anyone who abuses me.’
The girl stopped what she was doing and turned to Wendy. This time she smiled. ‘When I see you come here I see there is fear in you.’
‘I’ve been before and it’s …’
‘It is a way for women like us to survive. You would not be here if you had trouble with that.’
In the past, Wendy had always fought shy of these foreign girls. She’d found them unintelligible and even a bit cold. This one was no different, but she had a nice smile. ‘What’s your name?’ Wendy asked.
‘Is Tatiana. You?’
‘I’m Wendy.’
‘Wendy.’
‘Yeah.’ Tatiana smiled again and the feeling that Wendy had that she could talk to this girl increased. ‘I’ve got kids,’ she said. ‘Children.’
‘Ah.’ Tatiana’s face became grave. ‘The same for my friend Masha.’ She pointed to one of the other East Europeans, a slightly smaller girl with red hair. ‘You do for them.’
An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) Page 10
