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

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I’m going to go and speak to the neighbours who live on the left hand side of the Khans’ property,’ he continued. At present all the residents of the eastern section of Strone Road were holed up in the hall of Monega Primary School. He looked at Lee and said, ‘I need to have ears in there now.’

  *

  The first time that Mumtaz hit the bedroom wall with the hammer Khan had given her, Nasreen woke up.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Abdullah Khan didn’t even look at her. Instead he said to Mumtaz, who had stopped, ‘Carry on. What are you waiting for?’

  Mumtaz didn’t move. ‘Nasreen,’ she said, ‘she can’t sleep through this.’

  Abdullah raised his gun level with her head again. ‘Do as you’re told,’ he said.

  Mumtaz shook her head, but she did as he asked her. Weak though she was, she found that once she got into a rhythm with the hammer she could make good progress. Old, brittle plaster flew off the wall with comparative ease revealing sometimes brick, sometimes wood or cladding or cavities behind. Every so often he would tell her to stop and then he would sort through the detritus on the floor and minutely investigate the section of wall that had just been attacked. Whenever he did this, when Mumtaz stopped to catch her breath, she could hear the sound of Nasreen crying. Whether it was out of distress or pain she didn’t know, but just by the look of her it was clear that she wasn’t in labour which was the main thing.

  ‘Alright, go on.’ Having looked and found nothing, Abdullah told Mumtaz to smash the wall again. She pulled her arm backwards and wished that she had the strength and the speed to run towards him and bash his skull in. But her eyes were barely focusing and her mouth and throat, starved of water, were so dry. She struck the wall.

  Quite how many times Mumtaz belted that wall, she didn’t know. But every time he looked and found nothing Khan became more agitated. At first he’d just looked nervous and run his fingers through his hair. But then, as time went on he became more vocal, muttering ‘Fuck it!’ underneath his breath and then, later still, shouting the same thing at the ceiling.

  Mumtaz looked through the bedroom window and wondered if the darkness she was seeing outside was in fact real or just an hallucination brought on by stress, hunger and fear.

  ‘Get on with it!’ He shook her elbow and then rammed the muzzle of the gun against the side of her head.

  Mumtaz moved her tongue to try and make some saliva and then she said, ‘What are you looking for, Mr Khan? What is so important …’

  He flicked her head with the gun and then said, ‘We haven’t got time for this! Work!’

  But she couldn’t. Her arms ached, her stomach growled and she felt dizzy. Still she made an attempt to do what he wanted, but as she drew her arm back to strike the wall again she fell over backwards onto the floor. ‘What are you looking for?’ she said weakly. ‘What?’

  He pulled her to her feet by the collar of her jacket and stood her up against the side of the bed. Then he put his face close to hers and he said, ‘I’m looking for my only way out of here.’

  ‘And what’s that, Mr Khan?’ There were strange fairy-like wisps on the periphery of her vision now. Abdullah Khan opened his mouth to speak.

  A ring on the doorbell downstairs momentarily caught his attention. What she heard him say next, however, was to be imprinted on her mind for a long, long time to come.

  ‘I’m looking for diamonds,’ he said. ‘Great big diamonds that once belonged to Jews in this house.’

  30

  Sumita Huq did what she usually did in times of trouble, she cooked. What she cooked was immaterial and so the food that she produced that night was completely random.

  What was becoming known as the Siege of Strone Road had made not only the local but also the national news. Shazia, who had entirely lost her appetite, looked at the pictures of police cars in the middle of an East Ham street with big, horrified eyes.

  ‘What can Amma have been doing there?’ she asked no-one in particular.

  Baharat, Mumtaz’s father, toyed with a date and then put it back down on the tray in the middle of the coffee table again. ‘Well, as Mr Arnold says, she was going to give the lady in that house some information,’ he said. Then he added, ‘I rather like Mr Arnold.’

  But Shazia just stared at the screen, watching as a police officer took a tray of food to the front door of the house. She moved close up to the screen to try and see who came to the door to take the food, but the pictures were too blurry. A reporter kept on saying the words ‘armed siege’ which made Shazia feel sick.

  As much to distract herself from what was going on in East Ham as anything else, Shazia said to Baharat, ‘Do you think that Amma will be alright?’

  She feared that he would come up with a load of stuff she didn’t believe about Allah – as her Amma would have done – but he just said, ‘I don’t know.’

  Shazia looked at him. Baharat Huq was a religious man who prayed five times a day, abstained from alcohol and loved Allah, but in this case it was very clear that he didn’t know what to do or say. When he did finally speak, however, he said, ‘We must have faith,’ as he stroked Shazia’s hair.

  Annoyed that religion seemed to be on the agenda again, Shazia knocked his hand away and said, ‘Faith? Faith in what? Allah? My Amma is being held prisoner by a madman, what should I have faith in? Tell me.’

  But Baharat just smiled and shrugged, and then he said, ‘Have faith in whatever it is that works for you. Have faith in your Amma, my daughter.’

  And then she saw just a tiny bit of moisture leak out of one of his eyes. She put her hand up to his face. ‘Oh, I’m so …’

  He took her hand in his and smiled. ‘Don’t be sorry,’ he said to her. ‘You are young and you are worried too. But have faith in my daughter, Shazia, we both know that she has never let you down.’

  *

  ‘There are four of them.’

  Mumtaz noticed Abdullah Khan’s ecstatic expression, while she held the mug containing plain lassi up to Nasreen’s mouth. It was the first time she had seen his face express anything other than hatred, fear or contempt.

  ‘Four pink diamonds,’ Abdullah said. ‘Or, actually, they are pink purple, which is the most uncommon and valuable colour that a diamond can be. Three are one carat, one is two. Can you imagine what they’re worth?’

  Grateful that Nasreen continued to have the sense not to reveal her real identity, Mumtaz put the lassi down and then fed her a little dhal.

  ‘How do you know that these pink diamonds belonged to Jews?’ Mumtaz asked. ‘How do you know they even exist?’

  But he ignored her questions and just said, ‘When I find them, everything will be alright. They have to be worth a quarter of a million, easily. That’s all I need.’

  ‘Need for what?’

  But this time he just stared at her. In her mind Mumtaz went over the known history of that house. Lily Smith, who had been Berkowicz née Kaminski, had come to the UK with her son Marek and nothing else. She’d almost died in Belsen, but Reg Smith rescued her and her child. That pink diamonds should have come to the house in Strone Road via Lily had to be impossible, but Lily had a sister, Sara Kaminski, who had somehow avoided transportation to the death camps. Had Sara Kaminski used her jeweller father’s stock to buy her way to freedom? That was the story, but what wasn’t the story, as far as Mumtaz knew, was that Sara Kaminski had somehow still had some very precious jewels when she’d come to England back in the 1950s. That had to be very unlikely – surely the Nazis would have taken them? And what was even more mysterious was what this had to do with Abdullah Khan, an Asian thirty-something from Bolton.

  Mumtaz tore off a piece of chapatti and popped it into her mouth. ‘How do you know about these diamonds?’ she asked.

  He looked at her, took a sip of water from one of the bottles the police had given them and said, ‘That’s not your business.’

  ‘I think it is if I’m looking
for them,’ she said.

  He aimed his gun at her face. Mumtaz shrugged, then looked down at Nasreen and said, ‘Time for another antibiotic.’

  Nasreen took the tablet with water and without complaint, then lay back on her pillows. Mumtaz asked her how she felt.

  ‘Tired,’ she said.

  ‘In pain?’

  ‘A bit.’ She tried to sit up a little and Mumtaz helped her. ‘But the baby isn’t moving now,’ she said. ‘I’m so worried.’

  Mumtaz didn’t know what to say. Nothing she could say could possibly reassure Nasreen. So she looked at Abdullah Khan instead. In spite of his wife’s distress he was completely impassive.

  *

  Only Vi and the Super listened in. Lee, Tony and a constable sat on chairs they’d brought up from the kitchen. The house next door to the Khans, which belonged to a single white man, was a rather frou-frou affair inside, with lots of frills and scallop decorations. Lee wasn’t alone in thinking that the owner, whose bedroom they were now in, was probably gay, but nobody said anything – not because they were worried about what the others would think, but because Vi and Venus were listening, via the miracle of electronics, to what was going on in the bedroom next door. Just after the food had gone in, the banging which had made hearing anything impossible had stopped. Then they’d got voices.

  After a while, Vi took her headphones off and handed them to Tony. She walked over to Lee. She whispered, ‘Khan’s talking about diamonds belonging to Jews hidden somewhere in the house. Know anything about that?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Except that Lily Smith, Reg’s Jewish wife, was the daughter of a jeweller. And there was talk that her sister managed to escape the concentration camps by giving her old man’s stock to the Nazis.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘But that was the sister, not Lily. She went back to Europe as far as I know.’

  ‘We are in Europe, Arnold,’ Vi said.

  He rolled his eyes. They’d never agreed on this subject. She was a European and he just wasn’t. ‘On the mainland then,’ he said. ‘If the sister came here, then why leave diamonds hidden in that house? If she still had some, she might’ve given them to her sister, who hid them, I suppose. Old Reg Smith was fond of the sauce and if he’d got his hands on them …’

  ‘You got any idea why Khan might know about it?’ Vi asked.

  ‘Not a scooby,’ Lee said. ‘Khan didn’t come to London until Lily’s son, Eric Smith, had been dead for years. What do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know either,’ Vi said. ‘But I do remember Eric and I know that the gossip around here was that he was hiding something in that house.’

  ‘The body of Marek Berkowicz?’

  ‘His half-brother, maybe,’ she said. Then she shook her head. ‘But the coppers scoured that house and its garden back in 1955. They found bugger all.’

  They both went silent. The police had indeed taken the house on Strone Road apart in 1955. Marek Berkowicz had apparently evaporated. Then a thought struck Lee and he said, ‘Here, do you know whether they had any of the old cemetery up when they dug the garden?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Vi said. ‘I think they must’ve searched it, but I can’t see why they’d do any more’n look for freshly turned earth or something. Anyway, there wasn’t anything.’

  ‘And the skeleton you found in there …’

  ‘Was a woman,’ Vi said. She shook her head. ‘Sounds to me like Khan’s losing it.’

  And then the banging from the Khans’ bedroom started again.

  *

  Once Mumtaz had made a big enough hole in the wall to satisfy Abdullah Khan she stood back and let him investigate it. Looking down at Nasreen on the floor, she couldn’t bear her strained expression.

  ‘Can’t Nasreen lie down in another bedroom?’ she asked. ‘She can’t sleep with all the—’

  ‘No,’ he said. Then he glanced back at the hole in the wall and added, ‘Fuck! No, she needs to be where I can see her.’

  Mumtaz saw that he was sweating and she said, ‘Why are you so afraid of not finding these diamonds, Mr Khan?’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ he said, ‘because my future depends on it. I owe some men some money.’

  ‘Here, or where you come from?’ she asked.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ He crumbled some plaster between his fingers and mouthed the word ‘cunt’.

  ‘It matters to me because you keep threatening me with a gun,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Before you kill me, I’d like to know why.’

  He looked at her, and for a moment she had the feeling that he might just have some understanding about her predicament. But then he said, ‘Get battering that wall. We’ve got all the bits I haven’t searched already to do tonight. That is if you’re interested in carrying on living.’

  *

  ‘He has to mean the Rogers’, don’t he?’ Vi said to Lee.

  A pair of headphones had been purloined for Lee Arnold, ‘so he could also hear what was going on in the Khans’ house. He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ Then his face suddenly went red. ‘He just threatened her. Bastard.’ He shook his head. Anger wouldn’t do him any good and it certainly wouldn’t help Mumtaz. ‘Do we have any idea about what he was up to in Bolton?’

  The hammering stopped again and they all strained to hear what was being said on the other side of the wall.

  A woman’s voice that Lee recognised as Mumtaz said, ‘What about going to Bangladesh, Mr Khan? Don’t you want the police to arrange transport for you?’

  There was a pause, and then Abdullah Khan said, ‘I’m not going without the diamonds.’

  ‘So you don’t want to pay your debt to bad men …’

  ‘What I want to do ain’t none of your business!’ he shouted. This was followed by what could have been the sound of a slap. Lee winced. He half rose to his feet and then sat down again.

  ‘Don’t hit her!’ another female voice cried. Nasreen Khan.

  ‘Shut up!’ Then there was nothing until Abdullah Khan said, ‘What would I want to go to Bangladesh for, eh?’

  ‘Well, it’s where your family …’ Mumtaz began.

  ‘Nobody over there wants me!’ he said. ‘Why would they want me? Eh?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know, I …’

  ‘Well, shut the fuck up then!’

  For a moment they all went silent. It was obvious that Abdullah Khan was becoming more agitated. Night had fallen and he had to be tired, but his thoughts were unclear now too. He’d told the police initially that he wanted transport to Heathrow and a flight to Bangladesh, and he’d implied that if that didn’t happen he’d kill his hostages. But suddenly Bangladesh was no longer on the agenda. Suddenly he only seemed to have hatred for the place. Where did he want to go and what did he really want to do with the mythical diamonds – if he ever found them?

  The banging resumed. Lee said to Venus, ‘He doesn’t know what he wants.’

  ‘I wonder if he ever did,’ Venus replied. He looked at his watch. Khan hadn’t made contact for nearly two hours.

  Vi felt cold. The sound of the hammering bruised her nerves; so did the thought of Mumtaz smashing away at something that made her captor ever more angry every time she failed to reveal what he wanted to see. She thought too of Nasreen Khan, the man’s wife. How was she?

  The hammering stopped. There was a moment of utter silence and then the most terrifying scream. A woman’s scream.

  *

  Liquid was suddenly everywhere. Without even looking at Abdullah Khan, Mumtaz ran across the room to Nasreen and took her in her arms. She looked up at what appeared to be the bemused face of her husband and said, ‘Her waters have broken, we have to get her out of here.’

  ‘So her …’

  His phone rang, but he ignored it. ‘She’s going to go into labour!’ Mumtaz shrieked. ‘Didn’t you ever go to any antenatal classes with her?’

  He said nothing, his silence telling her everything that she needed to know.


  Shaking now, he said, ‘But if I let her go, then I lose one of my bargaining chips.’

  ‘She’s not a chip, Mr Khan,’ Mumtaz said. ‘She’s a human being. What do you want to happen here? Do you want her to die on the floor in front of us? Do you want your child to die too?’

  He said nothing. His phone stopped ringing and then started up again immediately.

  ‘You’ll still have me,’ Mumtaz said. ‘While you have me you still have one bargaining chip, right?’

  He’d walked in on the women, clearly unprepared for Mumtaz’s presence or her insistence upon staying with Nasreen. The arrival of the paramedics, who had then called the police, had to have stunned him. But why, if he hadn’t known that he was going to be in any danger, had he come into that house with a gun in his jacket? Because he had entered the house with that gun, Mumtaz remembered it distinctly. And then, for no reason she could imagine, he’d fired off a round.

  She looked down at Nasreen, whose face became very red and then she screamed again. ‘Oh, it hurts!’

  Mumtaz held her as the second contraction took hold of her and Nasreen’s legs flopped open. Khan’s phone stopped ringing.

  ‘She’ll have this baby whether you want her to or not, Mr Khan,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Now …’

  He pointed the gun at her head and then took his phone out of his pocket. Nasreen, wet with amniotic fluid and sweat, looked up at him with terrified eyes. ‘What’s he doing?’ she said. ‘Who’s he calling?’

  Mumtaz continued to hold her. Then she heard Khan say, ‘Venus? My wife is going into labour. I need you to come and get her – now.’ Then there was a pause and he said, ‘No, the other woman stays with me.’ He looked across at Mumtaz and added, ‘Isn’t that right, Mrs Anwar?’

  31

  Shazia couldn’t sleep. Her Amma’s Amma had gone to bed hours ago, as had the old man, but she was glued to News 24. DS Bracci had offered them someone called a ‘Family Liaison Officer’ which Lee had urged them to take, but the old people had insisted they could look after their own. Shazia hadn’t wanted some police officer about the place either if she was honest. But now she wasn’t so sure.