‘Yes.’
Tatiana put a friendly as opposed to a sexual hand on Wendy’s knee. She said, ‘Children make life different, harder. But Wendy, maybe you still find rich man even with children? Even if you don’t really want. Is good, eh?’
*
Abdullah’s answer to her question had made perfect sense.
‘Yes, I’d been practising up north for a few years but I didn’t know how London’d work out for me,’ he’d told Nasreen, ‘so why spend a load of money on property? Uncle Fazal’s place was fine, and it meant that eventually I could buy the house in Strone Road for us when it came on the market.’
She’d wanted to ask him about the rest of the money that he’d made because, even as quite a young solicitor, even up north, he must have made a fair amount. But she hadn’t. And now he was gone. Out working, something to do with drawing up a contract for some businessman in south London, he’d said.
Nasreen, alone in her bedroom at her parents’ house, thought about that word that Mumtaz Hakim had said to her. Mezuzah.
It was Hebrew – so it was Jewish – for that cylinder she’d found on the post beside the back door of their new house. Apparently it contained some sort of scroll that was meaningful to Jews and was part of the traditions they had around living in houses. The small picture behind the mezuzah could be of the woman who had lived in the house years ago, the mother of the odd, reclusive man who, she understood, was Jewish. But Mrs Hakim had not been sure, and was still in the process of finding out more about that family. She was also looking into Abdullah’s background. Not even Nasreen’s own mother knew about that, and just thinking about it made her feel guilty.
But when it had just been Abdullah and her, his past had not been an issue. He’d been handsome, employed in a good job and he’d loved her: loved her enough to make her pregnant, and so there was now another life to consider. She had to know who her baby’s father really was. All the little things that had either not added up or made sense to her about Abdullah had to be addressed.
All the stuff about respecting her and keeping her away from ‘unnatural’ sexual practices set off many alarm bells for Nasreen. She knew that there were some deeply religious men who really believed that and treated their wives like empresses, but a lot of men used the ‘you’re too pure’ argument to go and do ‘dirty’ things with Western women or with prostitutes. She had sincerely wanted to be more sexually adventurous with Abdullah, but what had really hurt when he’d rebuffed her advances had been the thought that he was getting what she was offering elsewhere. He was away a lot.
As yet, Mrs Hakim had found out little about Abdullah that Nasreen didn’t already know. If she found nothing, then all well and good. But then was it? Even if Mrs Hakim found nothing bad in Abdullah’s past, that didn’t mean that he wasn’t doing what he shouldn’t in the present. If that happened, should she have him followed to these business meetings he attended?
She’d had a conversation, once, with John Sawyer about his time in Afghanistan that had stuck in her mind. John had, albeit indirectly, started her thinking about Abdullah and the doubts that she had, in all honesty, always had.
While stationed near a small village in Helmand province, John had seen a girl of twelve running, crying and bleeding into the dust. She’d looked as if she’d been attacked, which she had, by her husband. Given in marriage to a seventy-year-old man, the girl had had her virginity taken roughly. Later, John had come across the husband at a house in a neighbouring village where a troupe of bachabaze boy dancers was appearing. Dressed as girls, the young boys, or bachas, had then been taken for sex by the men who had paid them to dance. John had caught one of them with the girl’s seventy-year-old husband. No doubt doing what the old man would never have asked his ‘wife’ to do, the boy had been petted and kissed by the old man afterwards. He’d then tossed him a low-value note and the boy had run away. John beat the ‘husband’ up when he went outside the courtyard of the house to relieve himself. He’d made the mistake of telling him just why he considered him to be a filthy, psychopathic rapist, not fit to be a husband to anyone, much less a child, while he punched and kicked him.
Only days later, John learned that the old man’s wife had died. Apparently she’d been shot by the Taliban, but John knew better than that. The old man had killed the girl in order both to retain his honour in the face of a foreigner who clearly cared on some level for her, and to punish John. When John told Nasreen about it, he had cried. He’d said that men in Afghanistan used women simply as baby makers. John hadn’t known about her sex life, but what he’d said had made Nasreen think.
Was she just a ‘baby maker’ for Abdullah? If so, how would her life be when she moved out of the security of her parents’ home and into that strange, unhappy house in Strone Road?
14
There were three girls in the swimming pool, all naked, playing catch with a football. Around the pool a load of scantily clad middle-aged and old men leered at them. It was, Wendy felt, a bit like watching a scene from a cheap 1980s porn film. When, she wondered, will a naked German with a moustache arrive to fix the outflow?
The blind room hadn’t started yet and so far she hadn’t had to do anything except allow herself to be fondled by any man who wanted her. No-one had taken enough coke or drunk enough booze for all their inhibitions to disappear. But it wouldn’t be long. The sky was blackening and the laughter and the talk were getting louder.
Wendy walked past the pool and then wobbled on her wedges onto the finely manicured lawn that led down, so Sean said, to a stream at the bottom of the garden. If she could spend a few minutes just looking at something pleasant before it all started she might feel better. But for some, it seemed, the sex had already begun.
Watched by Marty’s wife, the vicious and terrifying Debbie, Tatiana was kneeling down in front of a man twice her age, who then roughly assaulted her mouth. Debbie, urging the girl to ‘do better’, spanked the man’s bottom to increase his pleasure. Once Debbie had threatened to kill Wendy when she’d refused to let some man who looked like a pit bull terrier bugger her.
Now just the sight of Debbie made Wendy shrink back into the small amount of cover afforded by some trees. She couldn’t help Tatiana. Nobody could. If Debbie noticed you, then you suffered because that, as well as watching her husband have sex with other women, was what Debbie liked.
Shaking, Wendy looked at the row of fir trees behind the stream that marked the limits of Sean’s property, and fantasised about making a run for it. But she couldn’t. If she went, what would Sean do to the kids? What specifically would he do to Dolly?
‘Would you like a drink?’
Wendy didn’t turn around at first because she thought that whoever was talking couldn’t be addressing her. Girls at Sean and Marty’s parties were just for sex, they weren’t for wooing with promises of drinks. But if he wasn’t talking to her, then who was he talking to?
Wendy turned around and saw a man who was more her age than most of the blokes she’d seen so far. And although she couldn’t see him properly through the unlit dusk she gained an impression that he was handsome.
Before she’d thought it through, Wendy found herself saying, ‘Who are you?’
Asking men at Sean’s parties who they were was strictly forbidden. They could be judges, captains of industry, in entertainment – anything. Sean and Marty always promised their rich and famous guests complete anonymity, it was how they entertained and did business with them.
Wendy opened her mouth to say that she was sorry but the man pre-empted her. ‘I’m Paul,’ he said. ‘Would you like a glass of this champagne cocktail? It’s proper nice.’
*
Lech Ostrowski had told his sister Kazia not to go anywhere near the Plashet Cemetery. He’d said she shouldn’t go to East Ham at all. But then Bully had called her up and she fancied him and so she’d gone.
When she got there, just as Bully had said, there were no police. He’d sent her a text to let h
er know he’d meet her inside and so Kazia walked down to Colston Road and knocked on the door of the house where her friend Dorotka lived. Bully had a meeting with someone somewhere else first and he’d told her he’d probably have some gear. It was irresistible.
Once over the wall beside Dorotka’s garden, Kazia scoured the graveyard for Bully. She’d met him the previous year at a BNP rally in Luton. Dorotka had encouraged her to come over to Britain for the rally, and so she’d gone with her and a group of skinhead boys from East Ham, including Bully. If the police hadn’t been protecting the Luton Pakis they would have taken them down. Kazia didn’t understand why the British allowed so many of them to come to their country and also protected them. Sometimes she found the British very soft and stupid. Even Bully, for all his fascist opinions, could be cowardly. When the police had arrested him he’d just given in to them like a pussy.
Kazia took a small torch out of her pocket and shone it on the ground. Everywhere she looked there were those blocky Hebrew letters on gravestones. She looked for Bully. She didn’t know how he’d got in last time and assumed he had his own method just as she did. He’d vaulted the gates to get out. There were no cameras at the gates, only one at the back of the cemetery. Bully said someone had tipped off the police about him.
When Kazia became aware of that slight but familiar smell in the air, it made her smile. Bully’s meeting had come good and he had some weed. First they could get fucked in the head and then they could shag each other stupid. She thought about calling his name but then she felt that it would be more fun if she just crept up on him and maybe pulled the ring in his nose or something. Following the cannabis smell as it strengthened, she found herself veering towards the south side of the cemetery. And then she saw him. Kazia had to put a hand up to her mouth to stop herself from yelling.
Dressed, as they always were, in shalwar khameez and waving some beads around his wrist with one hand was that Paki who had got her arrested. Oblivious to his surroundings, he was smoking a massive joint. Bully was nowhere to be seen but Kazia’s evening had just cheered up considerably.
*
Lee felt his heart sink. There was no way of wrapping up the fact that Amy Green was having an affair, even in his own mind now. Quite how he’d put it to her husband, he didn’t know. Although he’d never been convicted of murder, Brian Green had killed people in the past – Lee knew it, everyone knew it.
In a far distant corner of ‘Spicey’s’ car park, Amy and the driver he’d seen her with outside her house were kissing up against a tree. Amy’s skirt was so short that Lee could see one of the man’s hands was down her knickers and she was, in turn, making noises like she was having an orgasm. Discreet was not a word that either of them clearly had any sort of acquaintance with. Lee felt conflicted and then he felt angry. How could either of them be so fucking stupid? If Amy Green felt she had to have more carnal fun than Brian’s wrinkled todger could provide then why couldn’t she have been a sensible girl and found a way to meet her bloke somewhere nice and off the beaten track?
People’s stupidity never failed to depress Lee Arnold. Just when he thought he’d plumbed the depths of human ridiculousness, along came something even more pathetic. And what was he supposed to do now, he wondered, as he watched the driver unzip his fly and lift the squealing girl onto his knob? He had a duty to his client to tell him the truth, but knowing how Brian could be, and what he was capable of, gave Lee a headache. Should he tell Amy and her beau to just pack it in or he will tell Brian? Would it help to tell the girl just what Brian might do to her if he ever found out?
Lee didn’t see the BMW 320 convertible until it was halfway across the car park doing about fifty. He did see that it was headed for the couple shagging up against the tree, but by the time he’d opened his mouth to warn them, it had slammed into them. It reversed quickly, just once, so it could smash into them again, but by this time they were almost certainly dead.
Part Two
15
‘Why?’ Vi Collins handed Majid Islam his personal effects and began walking with him towards the Station’s back exit.
Majid Islam shrugged. ‘Can a man not have a small vice?’ he asked.
Here was a man who presented himself as the virtuous guardian of the Plashet Jewish Cemetery. He didn’t drink, eat pork, smoke fags or go out. He portrayed himself as a person who didn’t ‘do’ vice.
‘The only regret I have is that everyone will point the finger at me now,’ he continued. ‘If Muslims are found to have vices everyone does that.’
‘You set yourself up as a paragon of virtue, Mr Islam,’ Vi said.
‘And yet if I were an atheist or a Christian …’
‘Look, I know what you mean, Mr Islam,’ Vi said. ‘People will jump on this story about you because you’re a Muslim. I’m not a fool, I know what goes on. But you’ve only got yourself to blame.’
‘Because I smoke a little cannabis from time to time?’
‘And because you were doing it in that cemetery.’
He looked outraged. ‘You’d rather I did it in my home? Around my kids?’
‘No, of course not!’
‘I thought I wasn’t doing any harm,’ he said. ‘I work for myself, it’s stressful and living near to the cemetery—’
‘But you were found.’
She swiped her station pass over the sensor that unlocked the inner back exit door.
‘I don’t know …’
‘You were seen,’ Vi said.
‘By whom? I was alone.’
‘I don’t know,’ Vi said. ‘As I told you, it was an anonymous tip-off.’
Vi swiped her pass over yet another key pad to unlock the outer back door, which buzzed as they both walked through it. Out in the rain-soaked car park he said, ‘So what happens now?’
‘You’ve been charged and so you’re free to go,’ Vi said.
Majid Islam walked away, head down, his hands in the folds of his shalwar khameez. He’d said he hadn’t been smoking cannabis the night he’d found John Sawyer’s body and the skeleton, but was he telling the truth? As a habitual cannabis smoker, could he actually be trusted? Bully had talked about an Asian who had apparently ‘left’ the body of John Sawyer after doing God alone knew what to it. Could that Asian be Majid Islam after all?
But then Islam had been the one who had called the police in the first place, so to effectively shop himself didn’t make any sense. Also, there had been no significant forensic evidence on him. However, John Sawyer had died, according to the pathologist, many hours before Majid Islam had found him. Could Mr Islam have murdered Sawyer much earlier, changed his clothes, and then returned later in order to very publicly ‘find’ his body?
Vi hadn’t been able to discover any sort of connection between Majid Islam and John Sawyer the first time around. Apart from the fact that Islam didn’t approve of the war in Afghanistan there was none.
*
Lee was shivering slightly. Mumtaz put the cup of tea she’d made him down on his desk and said, ‘Drink it while it’s hot.’
He didn’t reply but he followed her advice. He’d been questioned about what he’d seen in ‘Spicey’s’ car park by the Essex police for hours. They’d wanted to know why he’d been in the car park, what he’d seen and whether he’d got the registration number of the car that had killed Amy Green and her lover, Dale Champ. He had.
Lee had been completely honest with the coppers who had taken him up to Chelmsford HQ for questioning. He’d told them about Brian, what he’d seen Amy and Dale doing up against the tree and as much as he could about the car that had killed them. What he hadn’t managed to clock was the driver of the car. He had feared it might be Brian, but whatever else he was Brian Green was no fool. To employ him to watch Amy and then kill her on only the second obbo wouldn’t make any sense.
He’d told Mumtaz some details about what had happened when he’d phoned her to let her know about the previous evening. It was she who had suggested that they
meet up at their office even though it was Sunday. Now he told her the rest. She said, ‘So where is Mr Green now?’
‘He had to identify his wife’s body,’ Lee said. ‘Then the coppers had him in for questioning.’
Mumtaz shook her head. ‘Even if she was being unfaithful …’
‘I’d’ve been amazed if she hadn’t been playing away.’ Lee shook his head. ‘Brian can be charming, don’t get me wrong, but he makes Andrew Lloyd Webber look attractive and he is almost old enough to have been Amy’s granddad.’
They sat in silence for a few moments. Love and lust were emotions so frequently born of moments of madness. When Mumtaz had first seen Naz Sheikh, when he’d walked towards her husband with murder in his face, she’d been horrified by her own lust for him. Then she didn’t know him and she’d kept any details about her husband’s murderer secret from the police in order to protect him. He’d killed her tormenter and she was attracted to him. But now that she knew Naz, hatred had overwhelmed all her other feelings.
‘So do the police have any idea about who might have killed Mrs Green and her lover?’ Mumtaz asked.
‘No, but it’s early days,’ Lee said. ‘They have to follow up on the number plate I got for them and see if it’s kosher, then they have to find out who knew about their affair and who could’ve been pissed off about it. Brian’s obvious, but I don’t know who else. Maybe lover boy Dale had a missus? Or a boyfriend … That whole glossy Essex world is so fucked, er, messed up.’
‘In what way?’
‘In the way that nobody’s who they seem. They’ve all got fake boobs, fake teeth, fake hair. I think a lot of the friendships they seem to have, which tend to be all lovey-dovey and over the top, are fake. Some girl takes her top off for some dirty old man to take her photograph and suddenly she’s a glamour model. Know what I mean?’ He shook his head. ‘Any one of them might have secretly hated Amy and her boyfriend.’ Lee leaned back in his chair and rubbed his reddened eyes with his fingers. ‘Anyway that’s me unemployed again on Monday. Thank God you’ve got some on.’
An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) Page 11
