An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2)

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Marek.’

  ‘Before he disappeared, yes. Hadn’t seen Lil since the war and so it must’ve been a nice reunion for them both. Never saw her again, I didn’t.’

  ‘Did Lily?’ Lee asked.

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Do you think that Marek could have gone back to Poland or wherever the sister went?’

  ‘No, the sister went afore him. And anyway,’ Arthur said, ‘she wouldn’t’ve gone back to Poland would she? Iron Curtain country by then, weren’t it? And them being posh and all that …’

  ‘Posh?’ Wilf had said that his mum had told him Lily’s family had been wealthy before the war.

  ‘They’d been business people of some sort,’ Arthur said. ‘No, the sister must’ve gone to France or somewhere like that.’

  ‘Couldn’t she have gone somewhere else in England?’ Lee asked.

  ‘No, she was foreign,’ Arthur said. ‘She went somewhere foreign, I remember Lily saying.’

  ‘What, to you?’

  ‘No, that’s what she told the police,’ the old man said. ‘Her sister had gone just before her son went missing, somewhere foreign.’

  *

  Mumtaz turned her phone off. Her landline had been cut off and so once the mobile was disabled, there was no way that they could call her.

  As soon as the Sheikhs had found out she’d put the house on the market they had bombarded her with threats. Because she wasn’t selling to them, she’d never find a buyer because they’d scare them all off – and even if she did, they’d make sure they were ‘dealt with’. She’d still owe them, whatever happened.

  The previous night, when the calls had been back to back, she had been scared, but then, amazingly, she’d slept and woken up with an entirely new perspective. She’d sell her own house in spite of the Sheikhs. And then, at just after midday, the estate agent had called to ask her if a Mr and Mrs Linn could come around that afternoon. She’d said that of course they could.

  Mumtaz stood in front of the couple in the hall and smiled. Mr and Mrs Linn didn’t look older than twenty-five and yet the first thing they’d said to her when they came into the house was how good they felt it was ‘for the money’. And it was a bargain, given the size of the place, but to a pair of twenty-five-year-olds? Surely they couldn’t afford such a barn of a place?

  ‘Here on the ground floor we’ve got a living room, a dining room, a breakfast room, a games room and a kitchen, which also has a small utility room that used to be the old downstairs bathroom,’ she said.

  ‘Four bedrooms?’ Mrs Linn asked.

  ‘Yes, two with en suite and then a family bathroom,’ Mumtaz said. ‘There are also two of what used to be servants’ rooms in the roof, and we’ve still got the old coach house at the bottom of the garden. That has a small studio flat on the first floor.’

  Mr Linn, a thin young man with glasses, consulted his estate agent’s details sheet. ‘Garden’s only ninety feet by a hundred and twenty.’

  ‘Right.’

  He looked at his wife. ‘Rather pokey,’ he said.

  The young woman blushed at his ham-fisted attempt at belittling the house and said to Mumtaz, ‘Can we look around?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She led them into the kitchen. If Mr Linn had any thoughts about trying to reduce the price of the property, he could think again.

  ‘The appliances – gas cooker, fridge, washing machine and dishwasher – are included in the price,’ Mumtaz said.

  Mrs Linn smiled, her husband said, ‘It’ll need updating.’

  ‘And then again, I can take the appliances if you wish,’ Mumtaz said through gritted teeth. Mr Linn, she felt, watched too many property programmes on TV. People on those things always seemed to walk into spectacular kitchens and declare that they ‘needed updating’.

  The front doorbell rang. Shazia was up in her bedroom doing her homework and listening to ‘Plan B’ on her iPod, so Mumtaz excused herself to the Linns and went to answer it. She was ready if it was Naz Sheikh or any of the other members of his clan. But still her hands shook as she unlatched the front door.

  ‘Lee!’ Every muscle in her body relaxed as she looked into his face.

  ‘I’ve been trying to call you, but you’ve been unavailable,’ he said. ‘I was worried …’

  ‘Oh, I have people viewing the house,’ Mumtaz said. ‘But come in.’

  ‘Oh, well I …’

  ‘Come in! Come in!’

  He stepped over the threshold. ‘Mumtaz, do you remember that Nasreen Khan woman and the mezuzah she found on her back door? You know, the Jewish thing with the little picture behind it?’ There was an excitement in him that was unusual for Lee.

  ‘Yes? Lee I have to go and see to my—’

  ‘I might know who the picture is of,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, but Lee, I don’t have it any more. I gave it back to Mrs Khan.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘but … Look, I’ll wait till you’ve done with these people and then we’ll talk.’

  ‘OK.’ She was taken aback, and it was a Sunday, which was her day off, but Mumtaz was intrigued. It had been months since she’d so much as thought about Nasreen Khan, but she and her mezuzah, not to mention her husband, had been unfinished business. ‘Go and sit in the living room and I’ll be with you as soon as I can,’ she said.

  Lee went into the living room and Mumtaz made her way back to the kitchen. Just before she walked in she heard Mr Linn say to his wife, ‘It’s the smell of curry Abigail, it gets into everything.’

  *

  ‘The Boxer’, ‘Sound of Silence’, ‘Cecilia’ – Nasreen knew them all by heart. She’d been listening to them for months. Abdullah’s father had been a big Paul Simon fan. He’d grown up with his music which, so Abdullah said, had consoled his father after his mother’s death. Or rather that was what he used to say. On this occasion, his story was different.

  ‘When she left him, he only had me and his music.’ Sitting at the rickety structure that passed for a kitchen table, Abdullah watched Nasreen cook.

  She fried off spices and then added onion and garlic. Her wrists hurt where she’d been tied to the bed for most of Saturday and her heart pounded with fear. ‘Your mother died.’

  He didn’t contradict her, but he looked at her from underneath his thick eyebrows with resentment. ‘She wasn’t there.’

  She couldn’t bring herself to agree with what he was saying but she couldn’t face challenging him on it either so she remained silent. The shift from the idea that his mother had died when he was a baby to the notion that she had somehow abandoned him and his father, had grown over the past six weeks or so. With it had come more playing of Paul Simon, more smashing up of the kitchen and an instability that frightened Nasreen. Months ago, Mumtaz Hakim had confirmed that Abdullah’s mother had died just after she’d given birth to him. Not that Nasreen could ever tell Abdullah about Mumtaz.

  She added lamb to the onion, garlic and spices. Whenever he was out, she was imprisoned because he said he feared that she’d run away, just like his mother. He couldn’t bear the thought of having a motherless child, he said. As her husband, if he wanted her to stay indoors then she had to stay indoors and yet she’d married Abdullah as an equal – or so she thought.

  But then wasn’t there also something in his eyes that told her he wasn’t right in his mind? All the bashing about of the house, even back when they’d first bought it, had been excessive. Now it was even worse. Now he was smashing up walls he’d already smashed up months before and made good. Why was he doing that?

  Nasreen stirred her curry. She couldn’t say anything to her parents. Her dad had a heart condition and she didn’t know how he would take it. And she was frightened about how Abdullah would react. Would he smash them all to pieces like the walls? Her mind clicked one stage further and she wondered, Did he kill John?

  She still thought about John Sawyer. Abdullah had cut down most of the trees in the garden now, leaving part of the old shac
k that John had lived in open to view. He never talked about it and Nasreen never brought the subject up. It just stood out there naked and frightening in its emptiness.

  Abdullah stood up, walked over to the CD player and put ‘The Boxer’ on again. Nasreen fought to retain her composure. He was driving her mad. He was pushing her closer to hating him every single day. Was that what he wanted? Was that why he left her on her own for hours on end almost every day? Nasreen remembered what Mumtaz Hakim had said about the company that Abdullah worked for and she wished she’d taken her words more seriously. Were Rogers and Ali in fact a bunch of criminals and, if they were, did Abdullah work to protect them whatever they did? Was he even a lawyer? According to Mumtaz there was some doubt, but what could she do about any of that now?

  Nasreen added chilli paste and coriander leaves. ‘I do hope that you like this,’ she said, without raising her eyes to her husband’s face.

  ‘I hope I do too,’ he said. There was an implicit threat in there but Nasreen took her courage in her hands and ignored it.

  ‘I just want to please you,’ she said.

  He got out of his chair so quickly that it fell over backwards behind him. He shot a hand up to her throat, grabbed it and squeezed. He leaned forward and looked into her eyes, searching. ‘I do hope this isn’t some sort of way you think you can get me to have sex with you,’ he said.

  ‘No … of course … not,’ Nasreen spluttered. It was difficult to breathe. ‘Why would …’

  ‘Because it’s what women do,’ he said. ‘They tempt. They lead men astray.’

  ‘I’m not …’

  ‘Even pregnant they do it. It’s disgusting.’ Abdullah let her go. He walked back to the table and sat down. ‘You have no idea,’ he said, without looking at her, ‘how it was to be a child in a house with no mother.’ And then he added something that he’d never said before. ‘My father was a very bad person. She shouldn’t have left me with him.’

  *

  ‘Lily Smith had a sister,’ Lee said.

  Mumtaz put a mug of tea down on the coffee table in front of him. The Linns had finally gone and she was now free to talk.

  She sat down.

  ‘She came the previous winter, old Arthur Dobson thought, and then left just before Marek Berkowicz disappeared. He seemed to think that the sister had come from France.’

  Mumtaz leaned back in her chair. ‘Did he know the sister’s name?’

  ‘No. Didn’t really know much about her at all except that she’d been in a camp too. Not Belsen, he didn’t know where. But he was pretty sure that this woman was dark haired. I was thinking the woman in the photograph …’

  ‘But why put her image behind a mezuzah?’

  ‘To keep it safe? Keep it hidden? Protect it? I don’t know,’ Lee said. ‘But the Khan woman was interested, wasn’t she.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Although I don’t know how much. I think her real concern was her husband. She used the photograph she found as a way to engage my attention. Then she brought up the husband. I think it was difficult for her. Nasreen is a bright girl and her husband had clearly omitted to tell her that his bosses were a firm of gangsters.’

  ‘Rogers and Ali.’

  She shrugged. ‘She must be due to have her baby soon.’

  ‘Then maybe you should pay her a visit – when her old man’s out of course,’ Lee said.

  But Mumtaz shook her head. ‘I don’t think so, Lee,’ she said. ‘Nasreen was clearly frightened of her husband and if I interfere it could make things worse.’

  ‘But if he’s out …’

  ‘Men like that have eyes everywhere,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t put her at risk.’

  ‘Yeah, but if it was just a social call, it’d be OK, surely?’

  She shook her head again. ‘No, Lee, trust me on this, it’s best left alone,’ she said.

  ‘Like the identities of the people you owe all this money to?’ He couldn’t help himself.

  ‘Lee …’

  ‘I only want to help,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, but you can’t.’

  ‘Why? Because they’re your own people? Because—’

  ‘Whether they are “my own people” or not, is neither here nor there,’ she said, her face reddened now with both embarrassment and anger. Why did Lee and so many other white people think that they had some sort of right to pry into everyone’s private business? Was nothing off limits to them? ‘It is my concern,’ she said. ‘Ahmet was my husband and so it is up to me to deal with those business associates that he owed money to and—’

  ‘If he owed money to a crime firm—’

  ‘He owed money to people I call criminals but then I am—’ ‘You’re as bad as Nasreen Khan, protecting bloody scumbags!’ And then he shook his head and put a hand up to his temples. He’d said too much and he knew it. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not my business.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ she said, but she didn’t raise her voice. He meant well, but the world of Ahmet’s financial obligations to the Sheikhs was somewhere he could not go – not least because her guilt meant that she couldn’t possibly take him. She had wanted Ahmet to die.

  ‘Oh, hi Lee.’

  And now Shazia had come downstairs. She broke the tension immediately.

  ‘Hi Shazia,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

  She flopped her long thin body down onto the sofa beside him and said, ‘A levels.’ She shrugged. Then she looked at Mumtaz, ‘So Amma,’ she said, ‘did those people like the house?’

  22

  The ‘Super’, as was his custom, didn’t even look at them. Vi Collins and Tony Bracci stood in front of his desk observing his back. It was Monday morning and he wasn’t enthusiastic. But then Tom Venus had never taken any risks in his professional life. He kept that side of his character for his personal relationships with younger women.

  ‘Sean Rogers is having one of his sex parties at his gaff in Ongar this Saturday night,’ Vi said.

  ‘Which he is perfectly entitled to do provided those attending are consenting adults, and no money is changing hands.’

  ‘And our intel is that he’s shipping in a fresh bunch of East European girls.’

  ‘Which again—’

  ‘Just because some of ’em can come here legally now doesn’t mean that they don’t still get trafficked for sex,’ Vi said. Venus had to know that was what was happening, he was just too cautious to do anything about it. ‘Sir, the girls our informant told us were coming are Russian,’ she said. ‘Not EU citizens. They can’t work here.’

  ‘And most of them won’t be able to speak any English,’ Tony Bracci said.

  ‘No, so Sean and co are going to exploit them,’ Vi said. ‘Sir, if we catch Sean and Marty red-handed with these girls, we can have a go at taking them down. People trafficking—’

  ‘And if the girls, who don’t speak English, won’t inform on them?’

  ‘Our informant will,’ Vi said. ‘She does speak English.’ She’d called herself Tatiana, although whether that had been her real name Vi didn’t know. But the girl had told her about torture, about sexual abuse by a woman Vi recognised as Debbie Rogers, and had stated emphatically that what had been done to her had not been consensual. She’d become what was known as one of the ‘pigs’, women who would do anything and everything.

  ‘You think your informant will, DI Collins,’ Venus said.

  ‘I think she will too,’ Tony Bracci said. He’d been in on the second interview Vi had had with the girl, and although he was overstating his case by saying he felt she’d be as good as her word, he was desperate to bring Rogers and Ali down. He’d seen a few of the girls that they’d ‘worked’ with before – in hospital – and he’d never heard any of them speak, until he heard Tatiana. But he’d read a lot of gut-churning accounts of their wounds.

  ‘Our informant says he keeps the girls’ passports in his safe at his house,’ Vi said. ‘She’s seen him put them in there.’

  ‘Yes, but—’
>
  ‘Sir, we can bring Rogers and Ali down.’

  ‘When you bring down an empire, DI Collins, you have to be very sure you are in the right. Because empires have teams of rapacious and very smart lawyers who can twist the notion of things like consent, collusion and entrapment into barely recognisable creatures that have the ability, metaphorically, to kill us. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Vi looked briefly over at Tony, who flashed her a very small smile. ‘But we know they run brothels on this manor. According to our informant, some girls are picked from the brothels for the parties.’

  ‘I don’t like Sean and Martin Rogers and Yunus Ali operating on our patch any more than you do, but an observation of the one you propose is not without its complications. And then we have the Olympics to think about. That must take priority over everything.’

  ‘I’m aware of that, sir.’

  ‘And because the property in question is in Essex then we will have to gain the support and co-operation of Essex police.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Venus rubbed a hand against his chin and sat down behind his desk. Small-time crooks and hustlers were really his thing. Men of power like Sean and Marty Rogers made him feel nervous, and he had what amounted to a morbid fear of lawyers that went back so far into his past nobody could now say what its origin had been. Why anyone, least of all Venus himself, had ever thought he was suitable for a high-pressure nick like Forest Gate was well beyond Vi’s ken. Tony Bracci liked to use a blanket term for why Venus was where he was, which was ‘politics’. All Vi and Tony knew was that having him as their superior was a fucking great pain in the neck if you wanted to get something done a bit pronto.

  ‘I will consult with Essex,’ the Super said.

  ‘That’s a great leap forward, sir, thank you,’ Vi said.

  He looked at her and scowled but he didn’t say anything. He knew of old that reacting to Vi Collins’s little straight-faced sarcasms wasn’t worth the trouble. Vi and Tony celebrated by going out into the car park for a smoke.

  ‘You can see how the public can sometimes think we’re in bed with the villains, can’t you,’ Tony said.