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

by Barbara Nadel

  Mumtaz made a conscious effort to breathe as evenly as she could. He really had killed that man, John Sawyer. ‘But you don’t have any diamonds and so he—’

  ‘I couldn’t let him live,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know if the diamonds were on her body or not. Not then.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t be, would they? If Reg Smith killed her he would have found them.’

  ‘I had to be sure,’ he said. ‘I always have to be sure. And that is why my bosses have so much confidence in me.’ He pushed the gun into the flesh on her forehead and made her gasp in pain. ‘I clear up after myself. I leave no stone unturned.’ And then he smiled at her. ‘Here and now are no exceptions.’

  ‘Mr Khan,’ Mumtaz said, ‘why did you come here today with a gun in your hand?’

  He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, ‘Because I’d been clearing up after myself this morning, then I came home, Mrs Anwar.’

  ‘Killing …’

  ‘Why not? I’m a Jew and we all know there’s no Paradise for them in the hereafter, don’t we?’

  *

  ‘Wendy Dixon has to be a contender.’

  ‘For his victim.’

  ‘For one of them,’ Vi said. ‘We heard him say he killed John Sawyer. He admitted it. That skeleton we found with him may well have been Khan’s aunt.’

  ‘This is an extremely dangerous man who has lost his identity. He’s only got one thought in his head, so what he’ll do if the diamonds aren’t in that house doesn’t bear thought.’ Superintendent Venus shook his head. ‘We have to bring this to a conclusion and get Mrs Hakim out of there without killing Khan – unless we have to. We need to find out whether he just killed for his own purposes or whether his actions were part of his remit from the Rogers brothers.’

  Vi’s eyes ignited. ‘We could bring them down …’

  ‘Don’t get excited, DI Collins,’ Venus said. ‘I think the man is more mental health case than gangster.’

  Lee Arnold, who had been listening to their conversation, said, ‘But where do the diamonds come into the story? Really? Assuming that Marek Berkowicz was in fact Abdullah Khan’s father, how could he have known that his aunt’s diamonds were somewhere in that house? He left. He never went back. Did he know himself where the diamonds were before his stepfather killed his aunt? There’s a bit missing here that …’ He stopped. SFO Dalton had come into the room and was looking at him and Lee looked back.

  ‘We have to get Mumtaz out of there,’ Venus said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Dalton answered, then said to the Superintendent, ‘Khan’s got nothing to lose, not even Paradise.’

  ‘I know, and we also have to assume that the diamonds don’t exist,’ Venus said.

  ‘Because they are unlikely to do so?’

  ‘What do you think, Mr Arnold?’

  Lee shook his head. Of course Abdullah Khan had to be delusional, although how he had come upon this particular fantasy, he couldn’t imagine.

  Venus looked at the SFO. ‘Have your men managed to break in the back door?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The phone that Venus had dedicated to calls from Abdullah Khan rang.

  ‘Yes?’

  Dalton looked at Lee Arnold. ‘We need to think about when Khan might be alone,’ he said in a low tone. Then he turned to Vi. ‘DI Collins,’ he said, ‘would a man like Khan risk letting Mrs Hakim visit the bathroom on her own?’

  Vi, frowning, looked at Lee. ‘I don’t think she’s been to the toilet, has she?’

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. What if he watches her go? What then?’

  ‘We have to separate them somehow,’ Dalton said. He rubbed his face. ‘We have ingress at the back of the property now but we can’t just go in. He’ll shoot her.’

  ‘Then what can we do?’ Lee asked.

  Venus, off the phone now, said, ‘He wants some food.’

  *

  He wouldn’t think twice about killing her. But only after he’d found the diamonds. There was not, however, much chance of that, Mumtaz thought. If Marek Berkowicz had left that house for the last time the night that Reg Smith had killed Sara Kaminski, then how could he have known where the diamonds were? If the story was true, Sara had died rather than tell Reg their location. Had Marek known, surely he would have told his stepfather where the diamonds were in order to save Sara’s life? The diamonds had to be a story, nothing more.

  And where, if anywhere, did strange Eric Smith, Marek’s younger half brother, fit into the story? People talked about Eric ‘guarding’ something in that house. But what was it? The diamonds? Sara Kaminski’s body? Eric had been out with Lily when Sara was killed so what, if anything, had he known about any of it? And, anyway, wasn’t this all just a tale? A good one, which fitted some of the facts admittedly, but no more. Mumtaz smashed another hole in the wall and stood back to let Abdullah Khan look at it. He’d finally asked the police to provide some food for the early morning meal known during Ramadan as suhoor. And, although really too anxious to be hungry, Mumtaz knew that she should eat and drink more than she had done for iftar.

  Khan moved back from the wall and told Mumtaz to carry on destroying the fabric of his house. She was finding it very hard to focus now so, also with half her mind on the police and what she hoped they could hear, she said, ‘Wasn’t the body of the man in your garden found in the old cemetery?’

  ‘I dragged it over the back wall,’ he said. ‘Keep working.’

  She pounded the wall. ‘The police found a skeleton with it.’

  ‘I dumped him, why shouldn’t I dump Sara? She had nothing on her,’ he said. ‘Actually I tried not to just dump them, to be honest. I tried to lay them out decently, but when I got in there the place was full of kids desecrating graves and then some lunatic shouting his head off.’

  ‘But you can’t have been seen, or the police would have come for you.’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, I was seen,’ he said. ‘Just not by the police.’ He looked at what she’d done, put his hand in the hole and said, ‘Shit.’

  She said, ‘What happens to me if you don’t find your diamonds?’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Will you kill me?’ she asked. ‘Will you tidy me up after yourself?’

  Again he didn’t say anything, but this time she waited. He looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘You and I will leave in that case, and when I’ve got as far away as I can I’ll either let you go or I’ll kill you. Same if I do find the diamonds.’

  *

  Lee Arnold shook. He looked down at the food that was about to be taken into the house next door and realised that he was not only anxious and tired but he was hungry too. In spite of having just heard Abdullah Khan say that he was likely to kill Mumtaz, he was still hungry. He found it odd and disturbing, and he couldn’t convince himself that he liked himself for it.

  He went and looked out of the back window at the darkened garden of the house next door. If he hadn’t known that anyone was in there, he would have thought that it was empty. Vi, just off her mobile, came over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Nasreen Khan’s baby boy was stillborn,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, fuck.’

  ‘Good news is they think she’ll be alright.’

  She started to move away, but he stopped her. ‘This’ll work, right?’

  She sighed. ‘We either move when the food goes in or …’ She shrugged. ‘The hammering’s given the FOs in the garden cover to get the back door open. Khan’s concentrating on Mumtaz and his diamonds. If we’re lucky, when they go downstairs to get the food, we’ll have a chance …’

  *

  They called up to let him know that the food was ready this time. Abdullah took Mumtaz with him to the window and pressed the gun to the side of her head.

  He watched as a figure wearing a helmet and a bulletproof vest put something down in front of the door and then left. Last time an officer had handed the food over to Mumtaz at the door. Why the change? He was suspicious.
He called Venus. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean, Mursel?’

  ‘Leaving the food on the doorstep. Last time it was handed over.’

  ‘Do you have a problem with it being left? We thought if we left it for you, you’d feel less concerned about what our officer might be doing at your door. It’s supposed to be less confrontational. For you.’

  Abdullah Khan thought about it. When the iftar food had been delivered he had worried about the possibility of the police officer who had delivered it grabbing Mrs Anwar and taking away his bargaining chip. This way, that couldn’t happen. But he was still suspicious, even though he said, ‘Alright,’ to Venus and then ended the call. Unlike last time, this time he was hungry. Maybe it was because the woman had talked about food and woken his stomach up. He looked down at Mumtaz with hatred in his eyes. Who was she, and why had he spent so much time talking to her? He’d spoken to the police hardly at all, why had he spoken to her?

  He pulled her away from the window and pushed her onto the landing. ‘Go down the stairs in front of me,’ he said. ‘And don’t try to run when you open the door.’

  She said nothing as she began descending. Following her, he wondered – and not for the first time – why he’d let that shot off through the bedroom window when he’d first come into the house. Had he still been hyped up after Wendy? Had he been upset after Wendy? Maybe, in a sense. He’d never initially planned to kill her. She’d just been a lot of sexy fun, until he’d realised what she could know, until his vulnerability through her had been revealed when the police raided Sean Rogers’s house. Sean didn’t know yet, and Abdullah wondered how he’d feel when he did. Wendy had been one of what Sean always called his ‘pigs’. Abdullah had liked that about her. Women were mothers or dirty whores, they couldn’t be both.

  By the time they reached the hall, Abdullah knew about the bedroom window. He’d shot it out because he’d needed to stay in the house to find the diamonds. Sean and Marty were getting impatient for the money they’d lent him. Once the paramedics had seen Nasreen’s legs they would have called the police anyway. It was obvious she’d been left like that for days. The shot had bought him time.

  ‘Open the door,’ he now ordered Mumtaz.

  She unclipped the latch.

  ‘Don’t pull it wide open, just …’ He positioned himself behind the doorway into the living room so that he could see outside the front door without revealing himself. ‘ …open it enough so you can get the tray and then get back in again.’

  She opened the door. He pointed the gun at her back and moved it downwards as she bent to retrieve the tray. He heard rather than saw her pick it up. And then suddenly there was a pain in his shoulder.

  *

  Mumtaz heard a noise behind her, but she had no idea what it might be. She was straightening up when all the commotion began. First there was shouting, none of which she could decipher, and then a figure appeared from nowhere, ripped the food tray out of her hands, threw it to the ground and picked her up in one smooth movement. The figure was matt black with no face, just a shiny visor. But it told her not to be frightened and she believed it.

  Then, from inside the Khans’ house she heard a sound that made her blood still in her veins. It was a howl which was furious, wretched and heartbroken all at the same time.

  33

  ‘If your father, Marek Berkowicz, left what had been his house, now your house, in Strone Road, East Ham, in 1955, what made him think that his aunt’s – Sara Kaminski’s – diamonds would still be in the building?’ Vi leaned across the table and looked into the blood-stained face of Abdullah Khan. He’d put up quite a fight, even when an SCO19 officer had jammed a gun against the side of his head. ‘Eh?’

  Superintendent Venus, who was sitting beside her, cleared his throat. He wasn’t comfortable around emotion, and that included gloating. And Vi did like a gloat.

  ‘Sean and Marty Rogers, your employers, don’t just buy people houses for the hell of it,’ Vi continued. ‘We could hear every word you said, Mr Khan, and you said that you had to get the diamonds because you owe some men some money. You said your future depended on finding those diamonds. If that isn’t, in some way, to pay off Sean and Marty, then I don’t know …’

  ‘Sean and Marty kindly lent me the money to buy Strone Road, but they never knew why I really wanted that particular place,’ Khan said. He looked up. ‘They’ve got nothing to do with any of it.’

  ‘Really.’ Vi looked down at her notes. ‘But you told Mrs Mumtaz Hakim, and I quote, “I owe some men some money.” What men?’

  Abdullah Khan looked up at the ceiling. He’d been told who Mumtaz Hakim was and what she did at the beginning of this interview. When Vi had uttered the words ‘private detective’ he’d laughed. A Muslim woman who did that?! But he’d known about her, he’d even had her pointed out to him once, by one of Sean’s Asian handymen. He knew he’d known that woman all along.

  ‘What men?’ Vi repeated.

  He looked away, and Vi looked down at her notes again. Tony Bracci had placed a pile of relevant paperwork beside her own stuff just before the interview had begun. It was six o’clock in the morning and Vi hadn’t been to bed, so a lot of the words she was reading were a bit blurry. But she made out the picture of the Strone Road house in the ad that had been placed by the auction house in the Recorder the previous November.

  ‘You bought the place, with Sean and Marty’s money, just after you got married to your wife, Nasreen.’ She paused for a moment and then she said, ‘Did you love her, or did you marry her just to give yourself an air of respectability? You do a dirty job, don’t you, Abdullah – or is it Paul? – tossing Sean and Marty’s tenants out of their homes, parting poor people from their extortionate rent?’

  ‘What I do is quite legal.’

  ‘Oh, so says the lawyer!’ she laughed. She checked her notes again. ‘You did the same gig for the Macaulay family up in Manchester, didn’t you?’

  Again he didn’t answer.

  ‘My understanding is that Christopher Macaulay, the head of the family, is still in Strangeways and you still owe him money,’ Vi said. ‘And as I’m sure you as a lawyer know, Mr Khan, criminals in one nick can and do get word out to criminals in other nicks about who they’d like to hurt. Just because Chris Macaulay won’t be able to get you hisself, up there in Manchester, don’t mean to say that you won’t be got. Know what I mean?’

  Abdullah Khan was silent.

  ‘By your own admission you killed a man called John Sawyer who, you suspected, may have beaten you to the diamonds,’ Superintendent Venus said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Vi looked across at her superior. He wanted Khan convicted of the murder, or murders, he had committed and then moved along. Talk about organised crime, in this case in the shape of the Rogers brothers, unsettled him. Talk of that nature always did. Was it really because he didn’t possess the stomach for taking on gangs or was there a more sinister reason? Vi had never trusted him, but was she just allowing her prejudices to obscure her vision? Venus was irredeemably middle class, and with a penchant for very young women, but did that necessarily make him corrupt? Would he even have the wit to take bungs from people like Sean and Marty Rogers, even if his latest bit of totty did want a holiday in Barbados … ?

  Leaning back in her chair now, Vi said, ‘I still want to know how you knew about those diamonds being in that house. Until I understand that, I’m either gonna think you’re a fantasist or mental. What is it, Abdullah, are you a—’

  ‘My dad came back,’ he said.

  Vi leaned forwards. ‘When?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly,’ he said. ‘But his mum were dead by then. He saw his brother and he told him?’

  ‘About the diamonds?’

  ‘Amongst other things, yeah.’

  ‘But if Eric Smith knew where the diamonds were …’

  ‘He didn’t.’ Abdullah looked up. ‘That’s what he told my dad.

&nb
sp; *

  What was more, he didn’t want them. Eric knew his dad had killed his auntie over them. He and his mum knew on the night Reg killed her, they saw her dead when they got in from the cinema. Eric wanted nothing to do with those diamonds.’

  ‘But your dad did?’

  ‘No!’ He shook his head which hurt just like his eyes, which had been punched when he’d fought the coppers who arrested him ‘No, he wanted nothing to do with them either. He told me about them because he wanted me to have them. I wasn’t involved, like, and so if there was something of value there …’

  ‘Why didn’t he tell you about the diamonds before?’

  Abdullah Khan’s face changed then and he looked at Vi with contempt. ‘Well, why’d you think?’ he said.

  ‘I dunno. Why?’

  ‘Because for me to understand, he had to tell me I was a Jew,’ he said. ‘And he didn’t want to do that.’

  *

  Mumtaz hadn’t been able to see Nasreen. She’d been transferred from Newham General’s maternity department over to the burns unit at the London. Her parents, who had been contacted by staff at the General, had gone with her. This had left Mumtaz on her own, to be checked over by doctors at Accident and Emergency while an armed officer waited for her outside her cubicle. Until Abdullah Khan had been properly interviewed there could be a danger from whoever he had been working for or with, although Mumtaz believed that he had operated, at least in the Strone Road house, entirely on his own. When she’d met him he’d been at the height of his obsession with that house, entirely in thrall to a fixation he believed would save him both on a financial and a personal level. He believed that those diamonds were his right. Compensation, Mumtaz thought, for the loss of identity his father’s story had engendered in him.

  In reality, Abdullah Khan wasn’t Jewish at all. Judaism passed only through the matriarchal line, and it was Abdullah’s father who had been Jewish, not his mother. Besides, what difference did it really make? In the brief moment that she’d seen Khan before the police had taken him away, she’d seen a man who had resisted arrest and been beaten. Jew or not, he bled just like anybody else.