by Danuta Reah
“Mr Mutombo. I wanted to ask you about what happened last night when Amir Hamade came to the night shelter.”
It was definitely hostility. She fought an impulse to step back. “I have already talked to the police. What else do you want to know?”
“I’m sorry. I just need to confirm some details my colleague…” She could feel a nervous smile starting to stretch her face. Fuck’s sake, Tina. Get a grip.
“Details?”
“Can you confirm the time that Amir Hamade arrived at the shelter?”
His eyes were cold. “As I said, just after 11.”
“And what happened then?”
“He asked if he could leave his bag and go find someone.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t he say?”
“No.”
“He says he went to look for a woman who asked him for help.”
“Maybe. I don’t recall.”
“You don’t remember much.”
He shrugged. “It was just another night.”
“What did he plan to do? If he found her?”
He shrugged again.
“Was he going to bring her back to the shelter?”
“No women there. Men only.”
She was getting impatient with his stonewalling. “I didn’t ask you about the rules. I asked you if Amir was planning to bring her back.”
“Maybe you should ask the woman. She is the one who chases the men.”
“Farah Jafari is dead, Mr Mutombo, so I’m asking you. Did you know her?”
“I did not.” He held her gaze, his hostility almost palpable. He was about to say something else, when feet clattered on the walkway behind her, and a small boy in a red and white striped shirt appeared, one of the footballers. “Dad, I got…”
Mutombo spoke to the child in French, a fast, accented French that Tina could barely understand.
The child’s face crumpled in indignant protest, then seeing his father’s expression, he came to the door.
“You support United?” she said to him as he passed her, pointing at his shirt.
He looked at her doubtfully. Mutombo spoke again, more sharply this time, and the child vanished inside. “Is that everything?”
“Was Amir planning to bring the woman back to the shelter?”
“Ask him. I don’t know. Now, I’ve got things I have to do.”
He was about the close the door on her. “Mr Mutombo, what’s your immigration status?” She didn’t like herself for using this weapon, but he’d rubbed her up the wrong way. If his case was still being decided, or if he had been refused and was trying for an appeal, he wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of the authorities. He was hiding something and she wanted to know what it was.
His eyes narrowed. “Listen, Miss. I have two children. I have leave to remain, you know what that means? I get to stay, for now. I don’t get to work, I don’t get to support my kids, I get to live on handouts and I get to take shit from the immigration. I don’t get to take shit from you.”
The door shut in her face.
As she emerged from the stairway, she saw the children were still playing in the twilight. She stood and watched the game. When the ball came in her direction, she stopped it with her foot, and waited until one of the boys came to retrieve it. “The lad in the United strip – is he Mutombo?”
The boy looked at her warily. “Dunno.” He kicked the ball back into the game.
“Who else lives in that flat?”
The boy glanced up. Tina’s gaze followed his, and she saw Andre Mutombo watching them from the walkway. Before she could move, the football came from nowhere and smacked her on the side of the head. She staggered and tripped, feeling her heel turn in the soft earth. She sat down heavily, catching herself with her hands which stung as they hit the ground.
The children laughed. It wasn’t a friendly sound. “She drunk!” one of them shouted, and the jeer was taken up as Tina scrambled to her feet. She brushed off the dirt and assessed the damage. Her stockings were ruined, her elbow was bruised, and the heel of her shoe had snapped.
When she looked back up to the walkway, Mutombo had gone.
She limped back to her car where someone had written cunt in the dirt on the bonnet. She sat in the driver’s seat and inspected her broken shoe. It looked beyond repair.
What had she found out? Mutombo was supporting his children. There was no sign of a wife or mother to help him. He was a young man, or young enough, and he looked like an angry one. What did he do to satisfy his sexual needs?
She knew there was something – something she had heard, or seen, or thought about, something that she needed to follow up. She ought to go to Farnham, or talk it over with Dave, but she wasn’t sure there was anything useful she could tell them. Please, sir, Amir Hamade didn’t kill Farah Jafari because he doesn’t tell lies. Yeah, right. Good move, Tina.
Time to go.
As she put the car in gear, she realised she was just 100 metres away from a petrol station. She hesitated for a moment, causing the car behind her to sound its horn. She flicked a finger at the driver and pulled into the forecourt. She went in and bought a packet of 20 Bensons.
* * *
The next morning, Tina found herself in Sara Hakim’s office within minutes of walking through the door. “What the hell are you playing at, Tina? I had a complaint from St Barnabas’s. Apparently you walked in and questioned James Radcliffe about the murder.”
“A complaint? Why?” Her ankle was sore from her fall yesterday.
“And gossiping about a case – that you are barely involved in. Is that your idea of professional behaviour?”
“Ma’am, with respect, it wasn’t gossip. There’s a connection. Hamade’s well known and well-liked.”
“So you went and questioned James Radcliffe?”
“I asked him about what happened that night, yes. I didn’t question him.” She wondered if she should express her doubts about Amir’s guilt, but she had nothing to back up her hunch, or nothing concrete. A feeling... That wasn’t enough.
Hakim frowned. “Tina, we depend on the good will of Nadifa’s House, and people like James Radcliffe. They give us the access we get to the community. We can’t ignore law breaking – we don’t. But within those limits, we have established a good relationship. When a member of my team starts interrogating the people we’ve been working with, it undoes months of work.”
From the point of view of the liaison work, she had abused Radcliffe’s trust. Thank God Hakim didn’t know about Andre Mutombo. “I’m sorry, ma’am. It won’t happen again.”
“OK, Tina, I’m prepared to leave it there. Just remember, you need to focus on your own responsibilities, not someone else’s. Is that report going to be finished in time?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She went back to her desk and opened up the files containing her report, and wearily scrolled down to the paragraph she had been working on the night before, the section on crime levels within the group. She began to read, to remind herself where she was.
Petty crime in the asylum seeker community is rare. An analysis of crime figures from the South Yorkshire area shows that recorded offences within this group relate mainly to illegal employment...
Remorselessly, her mind went back to the killing. The £50 worried her. It was unlikely Farah Jafari would have turned up at Nadifa’s House if she had £50 in her pocket, or if she’d felt able to earn £50. Had she stolen it, and if so, who had she stolen from? Jafari had gone to Nadifa’s House for help, but she had done a runner before they could do anything for her. Why?
She had been destitute, possibly keeping herself alive by casual prostitution. Again, why? Until her case was heard and refused, she had a right to accommodation and a small amount of money. She was safe. It made no sense that she had been on the streets and desperate.
Her phone rang. It was Dave West. “Hi Dave. I was just thinking about you.”
&n
bsp; “Now she tells me. Did you call me ‘Sir’?”
“Sir? Oh, hey, you got your promotion!”
“I got through the board. There’s an inspector’s job coming up on this team. Farnham wants me to go for it.”
“That’s brilliant.” And she was pleased for him. But where was she? Still struggling on the lower grades, still getting bollockings from her boss.
“Yeah. It’s time. Listen, you want to help me celebrate? We’re meeting in The Bath Hotel.” The white-tiled pub down a gennel near the city centre had always been a popular meeting place for them.
“What time?”
“Eight, eight-thirty.”
“OK. Listen, before you go, is there any news about Amir Hamade?”
“Hamade? What’s the big deal about Hamade?”
“Is there something new?”
“Look, Tina, you know I can’t...”
“Come on, Dave. You’re not a DI yet.”
“If you paid me for all the shit you’ve got me into...”
“I know, but you still love me.”
“OK, OK. The money Jafari had on her probably came from Nadifa’s House. One of their workers had her purse stolen that afternoon. And we found Jafari’s phone. Someone had stuck it in a crack in the wall, just behind the body. We nearly missed it.”
“And?”
“And it had two calls on it that evening. Both of them from Hamade. It had his prints on as well.”
He’d handled Jafari’s phone – presumably when he hid it. “What about her other contacts?”
“Not many, all anonymous.”
Most of her contacts would have been fellow asylum seekers. Their phones were usually anonymous, phones they picked up second hand and topped up when they could, unregistered and unrecorded. “Clients?”
“No one with a traceable phone. The boss has got it plugged in, see if anyone calls, but it’s a long shot.”
Those calls meant Amir had lied from start to finish. He had called Jafari, possibly arranged their meeting, and then… He knew how damning those calls were. That was why he’d hidden her phone. Her belief in his innocence was shaken, but she was still not convinced. Something was wrong.
* * *
Tina went back to her flat. She wasn’t meeting Dave until eight. She made herself some toast, then discarded it half-eaten. She wasn’t hungry. Restlessness made her pace the flat: living room, kitchen, bedroom, up and down.
She showered and washed her hair, then went back into the bedroom to rummage through her wardrobe. She inspected her shoes, but the heel had snapped clean off. They were irreparable. Serve her right for sticking her nose in where it wasn’t wanted.
She was putting off getting ready. She couldn’t find the energy to be sociable. She could remember the nights when she danced until daylight, fell into bed, either alone or in company, and was up the next day and ready for work, her mind in overdrive, the energy and enthusiasm fizzing through her veins. Tina Barraclough, marked for great things.
And then there had been the days when she’d had to drag herself out of bed, take something – anything – to give her enough momentum to crawl into work, days when the job was the only thing in her life that she wanted, but the thing in her life she hated the most.
It had started to go wrong in the aftermath of a bad case. A young man had fallen to his death from a tower block, landing almost at her feet. She could still see the smashed wreck of his body on the ground in front of her, his blood spattered across her clothes.
Most of the people she’d worked with then had moved on, but they’d all been affected by that case. Dave was the only one she still saw, and his happy-go-lucky approach to the job had changed that night. He became serious, and he became ambitious. And Tina? She had changed too.
She picked up her phone and texted Dave: Sorry got 2 work another time ok inspector luv t xxx.
The packet of cigarettes she had bought was in her bag, still unopened. She took it out and peeled the cellophane off. SMOKING CAN KILL!
You don’t say.
She took the photograph of Farah Jafari out of her bag. Nineteen. Farah Jafari had been nineteen. She left the chaos of Somalia and came to the UK because someone had promised her safety. She had come here for sanctuary, and she had found violence and death. Tina was supposed to do something about things like this.
She opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a large glass, her first drink in weeks. She put the open packet of cigarettes and her lighter on the desk beside her and started work. She sat up that night working on her report, finishing everything she should have been doing while she was chasing around after Amir and Farah Jafari.
By six in the morning, she was finished. The glass of wine was untouched beside her, and the cigarettes were still in their packet. She poured the wine away, threw the cigarettes into the kitchen bin, then went and stood under the shower, turning the control round to cold, until she was halfway to alertness.
She heated up last night’s coffee in the microwave, but she couldn’t face breakfast. She stood in front of the mirror, and put on her makeup. The face that looked back at her was pale and drawn.
* * *
Like all big organisations, South Yorkshire Police suffered from gaps in internal communication. There were times when the left hand not only didn’t know what the right hand was doing, it didn’t even seem aware that the right hand existed. Tina was banking on this gap today.
The first thing she did was to call Nadifa’s House. “I’m calling from St Barnabas,” she said. “Can I just check the rota? Is Andre at the shelter tonight?”
He was.
Andre Mutombo knew more than he had told her, and she wanted to find out what it was. He’d been at the shelter when Amir had arrived that evening – she wanted to hear his account of the events of that night herself. The problem was, she’d alienated him with her last visit. His hostility had unnerved her, she’d been impatient, and she’d made a stupid mistake. OK. First thing to do was apologise, the second thing to do was get him to understand she wasn’t working with the investigating team, she was trying to help Amir.
It would be a calculated risk going back to St Barnabas.
Left hand, right hand.
Would she get away with it? Mutombo was the key to this case, she was sure of it.
* * *
It was after ten-thirty when Tina drove out of the city centre. The streets were empty. There were few cars on the dual carriageway that led out of the city, just the relentless rumble of lorries heading west to Manchester, to Liverpool, the great cities of the industrial age.
She turned off the main road up the hill past the gennel where Farah Jafari had died. The railway viaduct loomed above her, then she was at the top of the hill and into the narrow back streets where red brick terraces lined the road.
The factory owners had built row upon row of these houses for their workers. The factories had gone, but the terraces still stood in ranks, lining the valley sides, the rows broken occasionally by lines of shops: insurance brokers, oriental grocers, budget supermarkets, villages in the middle of the urban sprawl.
It was quiet. Ice gleamed on the pavements. An owl hooted somewhere in the night, and then it was silent again. In the far distance, Tina could hear the hum of traffic, but here, there was nothing.
The low building by the church, the place where the night shelter was located, was in darkness. She checked her watch. It was almost 11. The doors should be opening soon. As she got out of the car, she could see a dim light outlining one of the windows. Behind her, the church spire rose into the night, and the full moon turned the car park into a pool of grey and silver.
As she walked towards the entrance, she expected to see people approaching, people coming to the shelter for protection from the fierce cold of the winter night, but there was no one.
She tried the handle on the front door. It turned, and the door swung quietly open. She was in a small lobby where a notice, yellowed with curling edges, welcom
ed her to St Barnabas Church Hall. She went on through the doors facing her, and found herself in a dark corridor that smelled of dust and emptiness.
“Hello?”
Nothing.
She went along the corridor. An open door on her right led into a large, empty room. The floor was carpeted, and chairs were pushed back against the wall. There was a pile of bedding on a table under the window. A plug-in radiator leaked warmth into the air. This was where the homeless men could sleep away from the rigours of the weather and the dangers of the night streets.
Someone was expecting them. Someone had turned on the heater. She left the room and went further down the corridor. There was a small kitchen, and beyond that, an office. The office door was open, but the light was off and the room was empty.
“Hello? Mr Mutombo?”
Silence.
She went into the office and looked round. Again, there was evidence of recent activity. Papers were spread out on the desk. Someone had been in here, working. Her eyes scanned the walls, taking in the list of volunteers, the addresses and phone numbers, like the one in Radcliffe’s office at the church, except it was covered with scrawled amendments.
Many of the volunteers were failed asylum seekers, and their phone numbers and addresses changed constantly. The exception was Andre Mutombo. His address was neatly typed, the one she had visited the day before. His phone number had been crossed out, and a new one written in.
She tried the desk drawers, but they were locked. Her gaze moved to the filing cabinet. She tried the top drawer, and it slid open smoothly. It was packed with ring-binders, all with hand-written labels on the spines: Events, AGM, Accounts – the records of the running of the church hall. Towards the back, she found one marked Night Shelter. She pulled it out.
She knew she was snooping, she had no right to look at this, but all her instincts were telling her to check, and to keep checking. She glanced over her shoulder, and lifted the folder out of the drawer. She put it on the desk and started turning the pages.
The shelter had been running for less than a year, and the binder was only half full. There were the names and contact details of asylum seekers who were working as volunteers for the shelter, the same list as the one of the wall, but without the crossings out and amendments. No one had updated this list.
