‘It had to go.’
She turned and saw him standing behind her, panting, a pickaxe in one hand. He smelt of smoke and now she saw that something out in the back garden was burning.
‘I thought you were sanding …’ He’d even removed some of the floorboards.
‘Everything was damp.’
‘But we agreed …’
‘I know you wanted to keep the original stuff, love, but I had a look at it. It were rotten. That’s why I’m burning it now,’ he said. He put the pickaxe down on the floorboards and smiled. ‘We can get a lovely gas fire in there,’ he said. ‘Contemporary.’
‘But … the original features.’
‘I told you, they were rotten.’ His face changed in that way it did when she talked about any other man, or sex. Nasreen’s breath became a little bit more ragged. ‘We can get some sort of Edwardian replacement in there if you want,’ he continued. ‘But the more I think about it, the more I think we should go modern. I think it’d be nice to make one big room down here.’
Again, they’d agreed early on that they would retain the original form of the house, with a separate dining room and living room. She was about to say something to this effect when he pre-empted her. ‘What you doing here anyhow? You were sick this morning, you should be resting.’
‘I feel better now,’ Nasreen said.
‘Good.’ Sweaty and wearing a tee-shirt that was ripped in just the right places to show off his abs, Abdullah looked good enough to eat. He also looked scary.
Nasreen said, ‘I came to help. I thought you were sanding.’
‘So did I,’ he said. ‘But then I took a look at that fireplace …’ He shrugged. ‘This is graft, Nas …’
‘Yes, but I’d like to help.’
Maybe if she stayed around him for long enough she’d get the courage up to ask him just exactly what he did for his company, Rogers and Ali.
‘I wouldn’t mind a cold drink and maybe a butty,’ he said.
‘A sandwich.’
‘If you want to be posh, yes.’ And then he smiled.
For a moment, Nasreen relaxed. This was the old Abdullah, who had wooed her with passion and humour. It was into that one relaxed moment that she inserted the question, ‘Then, when I get back, maybe you can tell me about what you’ve been doing?’
His face instantly darkened. ‘Doing where?’ he said.
Nasreen swallowed, her throat suddenly dry with tension. ‘At work,’ she said. ‘You were away for most of the weekend.’
‘Yes, on business,’ he said. His face still dark, he turned away from her, picked up the axe from the floor and hit a piece of brick that jutted out from the ruined fireplace. ‘Making money to keep you happy and for this fucking house.’
*
‘I didn’t know where else to go!’
Mumtaz put a cup of tea down in front of Ayesha Mirza and said, ‘Just take a few breaths and drink some tea, then tell us about it.’
‘Thank you.’ She wiped her eyes with a tissue. Lee, now back in his own office, looked through the open door at Mumtaz, who indicated that maybe he should close it and give her and the woman some privacy. But Ayesha Mirza had other ideas.
‘Oh, Mr Arnold can hear what I’ve got to say too,’ she said, after she’d taken a few sips of tea from her mug. Lee picked up his chair and joined the ladies.
‘Alright, Mrs Mirza,’ Mumtaz said, ‘tell us …’
‘Dolly phoned me, that’s our Wendy’s eldest,’ she said.
‘This is about your sister, Wendy Dixon.’
‘He beat her up!’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Me sister, Wendy!’
‘No, who beat your sister Wendy up, love?’ Lee said.
‘Oh.’ She took another sip of tea. ‘Her landlord,’ she said.
‘Sean Rogers.’
‘Yeah!’
‘Why did he beat her up?’ Mumtaz asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ayesha Mirza said. ‘Dolly rang me and said that the landlord had just beat her mum up and the telly was broke. I went over. Dolly said she never knew why it happened, even though she did. But I thought it was about what that pig makes Wend do, and then when I spoke to Wendy eventually she said that she’d gone to some sex party of his where she never had enough sex with enough men – or something.’
‘So he beat her up for that?’
‘Yeah. I told her, Wend, that she had to go to the police now that she was in such a state and the telly was broke, but she said no. Then when she sent Dolly off to go and get some fags for her from the old woman next door, she told me that Sean Rogers had directly threatened her daughter. She said she had to do what he wanted ’cause she was frightened for Dolly.’
‘Do you know what he wants Wendy to do to “make up” for the party?’ Mumtaz asked.
‘Well, she wouldn’t tell me, but Dolly did,’ Ayesha said.
‘And what was that?’
‘She’s to meet him in the pub on High Street North him and his people always go to,’ she said. ‘Sean and his brother use it like a sort of an office’ so Wendy says. He wants her to have sex with a couple of blokes.’ She looked first at Mumtaz and then at Lee. ‘I don’t know what time or nothing. She won’t go to the police. She told me not to go to the police.’
Lee leaning back in his chair his arms across his chest said, ‘And I can’t fault her for that. Sean Rogers and his brother are very dangerous people and your sister owes him money.’
‘She does.’
‘She could go the whole police protection route if she was prepared to grass Sean up and give the law everything she knows about him and his sex parties and his violence – and maybe the names of other girls he’s abused, and possibly even trafficked into the country. Sean, to my recollection, always liked foreign women. But that’s a big risk.’
‘Mr Arnold, I’m not being funny, but going with who knows who or what tonight is a risk too,’ Ayesha said. ‘Wend’s on the Pill, she says, but there’s worse things to catch than another baby and I can’t see any of these men having condoms in their wallets.’
‘No.’
‘So what we gonna do?’ Ayesha said. ‘I can’t just sit about and wait for my sister to be abused – again.’ Mumtaz looked expectantly at Lee who realised that, as the ex-police officer on the team, he was expected to provide some sort of solution.
*
Tony Bracci had thought that the girl had been the baby’s mother when he’d knocked on that door in Colston Road the night John Sawyer’s body had been discovered. But Dorotka Walensa wasn’t baby Henry’s mother, she was his nanny.
‘Someone made an emergency call from the landline in this house on Saturday night at 8.46 p.m.,’ Vi said. ‘Mr and Mrs Bancroft, your employers, were out at a concert and so, assuming it wasn’t baby Henry, that just leaves you, Dorotka.’
The girl was blonde and pretty but her face was pulled into a scowl.
‘That call,’ Vi continued, ‘led directly to the arrest of a man we found smoking cannabis in the Plashet Jewish Cemetery. And while we’re pleased that we managed to collar someone smoking illegal drugs, we are concerned that whoever phoned us was either in or watching a graveyard where we found the body of a man who was murdered only last week. We’re not accusing anyone of anything …’
Her phone started to ring and Vi looked at its screen to find out who was calling her. She decided she had to take it.
‘’Scuse me,’ she said to Dorotka and to PC Finn who had accompanied her to Colston Road. She left the tastefully middle-class living room, belonging to a chartered accountant and his architect wife, and wandered up the staircase to what she hoped was the bathroom. She could do with patching up her lipstick. She answered the call.
‘Lee,’ she said.
‘Vi,’ he responded.
‘What can I do for you, gorgeous?’
‘It’s about Sean Rogers,’ he said.
She stood on the first-floor landing and saw the bathroom strai
ght ahead of her. She went in.
‘Invoking the Devil today are we? What about him?’ Vi asked.
‘I’ve got a situation, with a client and Sean Rogers,’ Lee said.
‘So? What you want me to do about it? Your client want to shop Sean, Marty and the fragrant Debbie?’
‘No, of course …’
‘Then I’m at a loss as to how I might help you, handsome.’
‘Then pin ’em back and listen,’ he said.
And then, while Vi repaired her lipstick in front of the Bancrofts’ bathroom mirror, Lee Arnold explained – no names – that the sister of a client of his might be in danger from Sean and his friends.
When he’d finished she said, ‘Look, I’m busy at the moment, but I’ll ring you back later on this.’
He sounded miffed but he said, ‘Yeah, alright, thanks Vi, I appreciate it.’
She was going to end the call with a bit of mild flirtation and had even started to smile in anticipation of it. But then, in one of the bedrooms, she saw something that both made her frown and struck a chord in her mind. When she went downstairs she said to Dorotka Walensa, ‘So you’re a Wisla Krakow fan are you, Dorotka?’
‘Yes.’
‘You know, I know another girl who’s a big Wisla fan,’ Vi said. ‘Do you know someone called Kazia Ostrowska, Dorotka?’
17
In the 1950s, London had been another city. It had been dark and smoky and boarding houses had had notices in their windows saying ‘No blacks or Irish.’ Sadly, racism hadn’t disappeared in the intervening years but life had become easier for people from foreign lands. Mumtaz’s father, Baharat, hadn’t arrived in London until the 1960s, her mother Sumita, not until 1970, but they both remembered how the old ’50s city had lingered on.
‘There were still holes where bombs had dropped in the Second World War,’ Baharat told his daughter. ‘Children used to play in those holes. Can you imagine? And then every so often someone would find an unexploded bomb.’
Mumtaz had been due to visit her parents, with Shazia, and although part of her had wanted to stay with Lee while the police observed Wendy Dixon, she was also glad to be away from the situation. Much as she felt for Wendy, the inevitability of what would happen depressed her. Vi Collins would observe Wendy going with whatever men Sean Rogers ordered her to go with and then they’d contact her to offer her a deal, which she would refuse. Rogers and Ali, property developers, purveyors of loans, pimps and women, were powerful and vicious. They were also, at the most basic level, men, and sadly that was all too pertinent because women feared men. Nasreen Khan feared her husband, who also worked for Rogers and Ali. Mumtaz smiled at the circularity of her own thinking. What, she wondered, did Abdullah Khan do for the Rogers brothers? Was he their own, personal lawyer? If he was, then he wasn’t doing a terribly good job. A cheap house in East Ham was hardly the reward given to a man of power.
‘Mumtaz, are you listening, or am I talking to myself?’
She looked up. ‘Oh, Abba, I’m sorry. I was miles away.’
‘You ask me to talk to you about the old days and then you drift off!’
‘I’m sorry.’
From her place, scrunched up in a chair over by a window, Shazia looked over at Mumtaz and raised her eyebrows. Being in that old house in Spitalfields was always a trial for the youngster. But one evening every week she had to put up with it.
Mumtaz, who had indeed asked her father about the ‘old days’, said, ‘Abba, I know that a few Jewish people do still live here, but were there many when you first arrived?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Baharat said. ‘I myself knew a Mr Klein, a family Rosenberg and my first employer here, Mr Braverman, was a Jew.’
‘Did you ever meet anyone who had been in a concentration camp?’
The smell of mutton biryani hung tantalisingly in the damp air. Sumita Huq, Mumtaz’s mother, would delay serving food until everyone was almost mad with culinary desire.
Baharat said, ‘Concentration camp? No. I believe that some Jews came to this country after the war, some of whom had been in the camps. But most of the East End Jews had been in London for generations. Now they all live in Ilford or Finchley or some such.’
‘Do you think that Jews who had been in the camps would have stood out?’
Baharat thought. ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘But why all of this interest in Jews and concentration camps? Did you not study about all that at school?’
‘Yes.’
‘So?’
‘So, I am just interested, Abba.’
‘Ah. Private detective.’ He tapped the side of his nose with his finger. Mumtaz inclined her head in agreement.
Nasreen Khan was no longer paying her to look into the lives of Reg Smith and his Jewish wife Lily, but Mumtaz was still intrigued by those lives. How had Lily Berkowicz and her son Marek managed to adjust to life in the UK after Belsen? How had they survived the camp? And what were their relationships like with Reg Smith? Did either of them actually love him or had it all just been about gratitude?
Ignoring his daughter’s thoughtful silence, Baharat continued, ‘You ask would foreign Jews have stood out in the old days? Not to look at maybe and only if they didn’t speak any English. When the uneducated come from Bangladesh it is the same thing. If they can speak the language they can do things and pass amongst people without comment. If they can’t, then the silly buggers must rely on their family members who can make themselves understood.’
Although only formally educated until the age of twelve, Baharat Huq nevertheless considered himself a man of learning, mainly because he had always spoken English and because he read multiple newspapers. One of his favourite sayings was How can one get a balanced view of the world unless one reads The Guardian and The Daily Mail?
‘And then it is that they start with all the jihad talk,’ Baharat said. ‘They come here, knowing nothing of this country and they want to start jihad immediately. Uneducated and with no understanding of Islam!’
Mumtaz shook her head. Her father had it fixed in his mind that only recent, non-English-speaking immigrants from the sub-continent wanted to destroy Western society and impose a Caliphate. She knew a few boys who had been born and bred in the UK who were enthusiastic about that. Religious zealotry was not limited to those with no education. But Mumtaz hadn’t just come to see her parents to socialise with them or talk about mid-twentieth-century Jewish immigration.
‘Abba, is it OK if I go to my old room for a few moments, please?’ she asked.
He shrugged. ‘This is still your home.’
‘I think I’ve still got my copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare here.’
‘Oh, one cannot do without Shakespeare! Go! Go!’
She knew that he’d never read a word of Shakespeare in his life. ‘Thank you, Abba.’
She stood up, noticing that Shazia was frowning at her. There was a Complete Works at the house in Forest Gate and they both knew it, but Mumtaz couldn’t think about that now. Once the meal had started she wouldn’t be able to leave the table except to go home. She had to get into her old bedroom, pick up her old complete works and look for some Mughal coins her Uncle Asif had given her when she was little. They had to be worth something.
*
He was still angry with her when they went to bed. Nasreen reached out to touch him when she thought that he was half asleep, but even then her husband pulled away from her.
They hadn’t exactly had a row back at Strone Road, but he had shouted at her for questioning him. He’d said some horrible things about her parents, accusing them of poisoning her mind against him even though she’d not actually got anywhere near to asking him about what he did for a living. All she’d done was ask him about what he’d been doing.
Of course she had been digging, but he hadn’t known that. He hadn’t known what Mumtaz Hakim had said about him. Although Nasreen still didn’t believe what the private detective had told her, she nevertheless felt that Abdullah’s reactions to h
er questions had been overly confrontational. But then he’d always been volatile, even – as she thought about it now – when they’d first met he’d been so very keen to pander to her every whim that he’d come across as a bit of a desperate case. Her friends, Julie and Rachida, had found him ‘over the top’. Not that she’d seen either of them since her wedding.
Just before they’d gone to bed, Abdullah had broken his silence to her with, ‘We’ll move into the new house the day after tomorrow.’
She’d been horrified, but she’d said nothing: just turned away from his fierce, disapproving eyes and got into bed. The new house was still a wreck! What was more, Abdullah was now knocking down the wall between the living room and the dining room. Against everything they had agreed, he was turning their home into a modern house. Nasreen fought not to cry. There was plenty to be done at the new house and there were few places to rest; and now that morning sickness had become a regular feature, she needed a quiet place in which to recuperate. But there was nothing to be done. Abdullah wanted them to move in and so move in they would. Now that she was married, her father wouldn’t interfere. Nasreen was Abdullah’s wife and therefore his responsibility and his property now.
*
‘You know as well as I do that she’ll say she went willingly,’ Vi said.
It was just gone one in the morning and she was in Lee Arnold’s Forest Gate flat, drinking tea and talking about Wendy Dixon.
‘And I can’t prove nothing,’ Vi continued. ‘She had a black eye and was walking a bit unsteady before she went into that flat on Forest Road with them two blokes.’
‘How long was she in there?’ Lee asked.
‘Three hours. But she come out much the same as she looked when she went in.’
‘Did you know either of the blokes?’ Lee asked.
‘I knew one,’ Vi said. ‘Do you remember George White? Conman.’
An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) Page 13
