Bright Shiny Things

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘Inshallah.’

  He smiled. ‘That’s my girl!’ he said. ‘Soon we’ll be together in the Caliphate, which you are just going to love. And remember, my darling, if you don’t always feel like doing everything for me yourself, we will have slaves. I mean, when I say I’m a big man in the Caliphate, I mean I am a BIG man!’

  Slaves. Little Yazidi or Christian girls she imagined. Tiny little workhorses who were also expected to fulfil their ‘master’s’ baser sexual needs.

  ‘So look, time is short,’ he said. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Where?’

  He frowned. ‘You know, Mishal, you mustn’t question me like this. Out, OK. Just out.’

  She lowered her head. ‘Sorry.’

  His smiles came as quickly as his frowns. ‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘But look, travelling tomorrow, you don’t wear hijab or even a scarf, yeah?’

  He’d said this before.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘People will give you grief. And don’t read your Koran on the plane.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And if a man comes and sits beside you, you’ll just have to put up with it. Don’t ask to move, it will call attention to you.’

  Mumtaz had never even considered it.

  ‘I know you only ever want to be beside me now, my darling, but we all have to make sacrifices if we are to bring about the World Caliphate.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He smiled again. ‘I kiss your eyes, little Mishal,’ he said. ‘My brave girl. When we are together, I will never so much as look at another woman ever again.’

  Mishal hugged herself with pleasure. Mumtaz on the other hand, thought, liar! You’ll be off with your slave girls within a week! Bastard.

  ‘It’s only a question of time before I find your gym buddies,’ Montalban said. ‘If I want to I can close Hanbury Street and go into every house and flat.’

  The solicitor, Mr Dugdale said, ‘I don’t think so, DI Montalban.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  He was an arrogant prick. All Savile Row suit and hair gel. Probably north of five hundred quid an hour. Why would someone like Charleston go to some bloke’s flat in the East End to box? Sounded like fucking Fight Club…

  ‘You need an alibi, Mr Charleston,’ Montalban said. ‘At the moment you don’t have one. You’re not co-operating, which is against your own interests. I don’t understand this. What is this “gym”?’

  ‘It’s a gym.’

  ‘So why not give me the names of the people who go there? They’re your only hope at the moment. If they vouch for your presence with them at the time of the murder, you have a defence. If not, you don’t.’

  He took a piece of paper out of his pocket.

  ‘This was handed to me this morning,’ he said. ‘It’s some brief notes from my officers who have been searching your flat. One of your T-shirts has come up positive for bloodstains using a luminol test. Do you know what that means?’

  The solicitor said, ‘Luminol is a chemiluminescence agent that can detect blood even if objects or clothes have been washed.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Montalban said. ‘And when one of your T-shirts was subjected to testing it lit up like a fairground.’

  Montalban saw the solicitor look at his client in, what seemed to him, a different way.

  Mr Dugdale said, ‘DI Montalban, may I have a moment alone with my client, please?’

  ‘Lee!’

  It was Shereen al’Barri. What was she doing on Green Street? Wasn’t she supposed to be at work?

  ‘It’s the school holidays,’ she said when he asked.

  ‘Oh, right.’

  He had photographs of the actress’s husband kissing a girl young enough to be his daughter inside the entrance to the hotel in Earls Court. It hadn’t been a bad day’s work.

  ‘Lee, you are going away,’ Shereen said.

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s best you don’t know?’ he said.

  She began to cry. He put his arm around her shoulders.

  ‘I can’t bear not knowing!’ she said.

  ‘Come on up to the office,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you a cuppa.’

  Mumtaz was up there but she wouldn’t say anything.

  The police had a lead on Rajiv’s murder. A rumour was going around that he’d been killed by his sister. But Baharat Huq couldn’t believe that. Susi Banergee had always been a strange woman, and very, very acquisitive, but murder? No!

  DI Montalban would neither confirm nor deny Susi as a suspect. But then the police were always cagey about these things. He had also been very clear that he didn’t want Ali to know. Not yet. Baharat felt this keenly. Surely his son had to know something was happening? Or maybe Montalban was keeping him in the dark on purpose. Perhaps he felt that Ali would soon tire of being disconnected from the world and leave the church of his own volition. Why the DI wasn’t just dragging him out and taking him to the police station was beyond Baharat. There had to be a reason. The Reverend Reid had called Baharat that morning to report that Ali was as well as could be expected. But the vicar was worried about some of the graffiti that had appeared on the building overnight. He didn’t specify exactly what it said, but Baharat took it to mean that some believed his son to be a paedophile. He knew that he wasn’t and it seemed possible that soon his son would be exonerated – at least of Rajiv’s murder. But he feared the mud would stick. Accusations of sexual abuse did, whether the person was guilty or not. That was at least how it seemed from reading the newspapers.

  At least Sumita was eating again and he’d finally managed to persuade Asif to go home to Tracey. Mumtaz was going away on business and so he felt he should talk to her, but he really didn’t feel up to it. If Ricky Montalban called to say that he had arrested someone for Rajiv’s murder, then he might. But that still left the problem of the two Syrian boys and their accusation against his son.

  Did the police really have Susi Banergee in custody? He hadn’t seen her, but then he’d hardly left the house.

  DC Iqbal had gone out to buy tea and cigarettes. Baharat had drunk so much tea he’d feared he might wet himself. As for the cigarettes? It had been really stupid to start smoking again, but what else could he do? He’d never felt so helpless.

  The flat, which was in an old council block called Casson House, was owned and apparently occupied by a man called Taha Mirza. This was probably the man Charleston had known as ‘Grasshopper’. Christ, it was all so bloody James fucking Bond! Charleston caved in at the end – he had no choice. But it was obvious he was afraid of this character.

  Mirza didn’t have a record but had been a professional boxer in his twenties. Now forty, he worked as a bouncer at a nightclub in the West End. Charleston claimed to have met him at a fun run around Victoria Park in Hackney. They’d bonded over fitness and Mirza had invited Charleston to his home boxing gym.

  When he’d gone along to the first training session, Charleston had met other men. But he wasn’t going to say who they were. Mirza, he said, would vouch for his presence at the gym at the time of the murder. Apparently he thought that once he had an alibi that would be that.

  Ricky knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat and waited. When nothing had happened for over a minute he knocked again. A bleary-eyed Asian man came to the door wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

  ‘Taha Mirza?’ Ricky asked.

  ‘Yeah. What is it?’

  ‘Police.’

  The door slammed in Ricky’s face and he cursed himself for not wedging it open with his foot. But it didn’t matter too much. He had the back of the flat covered. And so five minutes later, he saw Taha Mirza again; this time he was being escorted by a uniformed constable.

  The other thing that was known about Taha Mirza, which Mr Charleston did or didn’t realise, was that back in his boxing days, he’d gained a bit of a reputation for being a religious zealot. Although not obviously allied to organisations that supported
terrorism, Taha Mirza the boxer hadn’t liked ‘queers’ attending his matches and had been very vocal in his opposition to women’s boxing. ‘Sisters,’ he had once claimed, ‘have their husbands to fight for them.’

  ‘Hello, Mr Mirza,’ Ricky said. ‘I’m DI Montalban. We want to talk to you about your boxing gym.’

  He looked as if he’d been struck by something.

  ‘A friend of yours, a Mr Charleston, says he was with you and some other men at this property on the night of the 5th April.’

  Mirza just silently stared.

  Ricky looked at the uniform beside Mirza and said, ‘I think we need to continue this conversation inside Mr Mirza’s flat.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No!’ Mirza repeated.

  And if he hadn’t said that then maybe Taha Mirza could have got himself out of trouble.

  Ricky smiled. ‘Take him inside Constable Erikson, will you?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Mumtaz, though champing at the bit to tell Lee about Abu Imad’s possible change of plan, nevertheless made the tea. Shereen al’Barri was not a guest she had expected.

  Lee had brought her in. They’d met on Green Street and, during a conversation about her son, Shereen had burst into tears. Once he’d settled her in the office, Lee joined Mumtaz in the small kitchen area and said, ‘She wants to know when we’re going to meet Fayyad.’

  ‘You didn’t tell her, did you?’

  ‘Course not!’ he whispered. ‘But then she started crying and I couldn’t just leave her in the street.’

  ‘No.’

  He started to return to the office when Mumtaz said, ‘Oh Lee I heard from Fayyad – Abu Imad. I must remember to call him by his jihadi name.’

  ‘Right. And?’

  ‘He’s not sure he’s going to be able to meet me in person at the airport. He’s such a wanted man it might be too great a risk.’

  ‘Christ,’ Lee rubbed his face.

  ‘I’m to meet him or whoever at McDonalds at Schiphol. I’ve to order a Big Mac meal and wait.’

  ‘For?’

  ‘Who knows?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll speak to you later.’

  He went back into the office and asked. ‘Do you want sugar in your tea, Shereen?’

  Ricky Montalban had once had a mate who’d lived in the Casson flats. Taha Mirza must have had to take down the wall between the lounge and one of the bedrooms to make way for his boxing ring. It was a good job they were decent-sized rooms. It was an even better job that there was no flat underneath.

  As well as the boxing ring there was also a three-piece black leather suite and a large flat-screen TV. When they first walked in, Ricky thought that Mirza had a war film on. And so it was. But it hadn’t been made by Hollywood.

  A group of terrified men were being herded to the edge of a rooftop by hooded characters dressed in black who pushed them to their deaths on the ground below. This was accompanied by a hysterical commentary by a man speaking what Ricky imagined was Arabic.

  He looked at Taha Mirza. ‘Into this, are you?’ he asked.

  He said nothing.

  Ricky took his phone out of his pocket. ‘I s’pose I’d better get a warrant to search this place,’ he said.

  EIGHTEEN

  Aftab hadn’t slept. He’d gone to bed but he’d just laid down and looked at the ceiling, seething. Had Mumtaz really agreed to marry Shazia to that vile old man? Had she really not told the girl? His cousin had always been a caring person, how could she do such a thing?

  He managed to stop himself phoning her until 8 a.m. and then he rang. Shazia had told him she was going into college early to do some reading in the library. She’d said she was getting the 7.30 bus. He hoped she’d made it.

  And, luckily, Mumtaz was alone. Aftab didn’t mince his words.

  ‘Are you marrying Shazia off to Wahid Sheikh?’

  There were a few seconds of silence, then she said, ‘How do you know about that?’

  ‘Because I had to go and see the old bastard and he told me!’

  ‘Why did you have to go and see him?’ Mumtaz said.

  But Aftab didn’t want to talk about George and Heidi. He also wanted Mumtaz to stick to the point.

  ‘You’ve not answered my question,’ he said. ‘Do you intend to marry—’

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘Of course not!’

  ‘Well, Wahid Sheikh thinks you are!’

  ‘Wahid Sheikh is wrong,’ she said. ‘Listen, Aftab, I know this is going to be difficult, but there are things you don’t know …’

  ‘Bloody right!’

  ‘I mean things that mean that my daughter will not even get close to marrying Wahid Sheikh.’

  ‘He knows that, does he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, well it’s gonna be fun for all the family when he does find out!’ Aftab said.

  ‘Everything will be alright!’ she said. ‘You have to trust me!’

  ‘You think? Mumtaz, if you’re planning some sort of revenge …’

  ‘I’m not!’

  ‘Your mum and dad can’t take no more,’ he said. ‘All this business with Ali … The whole family’s up in arms. I can’t believe he’d hurt anyone but nobody cares what I think …’

  ‘Look, Aftab,’ she said, ‘I can’t tell you why, but you have to trust me. Shazia will not marry that old man.’

  ‘Bloody right she won’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll go and take her away from him myself!’

  ‘It will work out,’ she said. ‘And also, Aftab, know that he can’t touch her until she’s finished her exams. Again, I can’t explain. But that is a fact.’

  Aftab shook his head. ‘This is all fucking beyond me,’ he said.

  ‘I know. I’m sorry.’

  He put the phone down. Could he trust Mumtaz? The idea of not trusting her was more to the point, and so he had to ignore that. But he didn’t feel good about it.

  ‘My client doesn’t know anything about ISIS.’

  Montalban stared. Amir Charleston’s face was a classic depiction of guilt. Taha Mirza had given him the names of the two other men who attended his ‘gym’ without a murmur. Both highly paid City whizz-kids, both white, they’d shaken with terror when they’d been dragged from their beds and brought to Limehouse the previous night. One of them, some sort of analyst, had bleated on about ‘meaning’. Ricky hadn’t understood. The geezer lived in a fucking mansion in Blackheath and drove a Ferrari, how much more ‘meaning’ did he need?

  ‘So what was your client doing hanging around with someone like Taha Mirza?’ Ricky asked.

  ‘Mr Mirza runs boxing sessions …’

  ‘Yes. He also has more radical material on his computer than most terror suspects we’ve arrested and put away.’

  ‘Mr Charleston has no knowledge of that.’

  ‘Really? That’s not what his boxing mate Mr Lewis says.’

  ‘What does Mr Lewis say?’

  ‘Mr Lewis says that Mr Mirza is training fighters for Syria. He also says that he, Mr Charleston and Mr Cranmer were put in touch with Mr Mirza when they joined an Islamic study group in south London. All young and fit and apparently sold on the idea of fighting for something. I didn’t get the impression from Mr Lewis that what they were fighting for mattered too much.’

  ‘DI Montalban, you’re going off the point,’ Mr Dugdale said. ‘How does this relate to the accusation of murder that has been levelled at my client?’

  ‘Oh, I think that Mr Charleston knows the answer to that,’ Ricky said. ‘Don’t you? You didn’t meet Mirza on no fun run did you?’

  Charleston turned away.

  ‘But seeing as he’s been struck dumb, I’ll tell you,’ Ricky said. ‘The aim was always to train for something. Religion was the hook, but it wasn’t the reason. Some stressed-out City lads need some sort of physical outlet, that’s not unusual. What is unusual is to find City lads being trained by a bouncer with dodgy views about women and gay people. But then, for
reasons I’m sure we’ll find out in the end, Lewis, Cranmer and your client were attracted to Mirza and his gym. How am I doing, Mr Charleston? Right so far?’

  Mumtaz walked through the door of her parents’ house and into her mother’s arms.

  ‘Do you have to go away now?’ Sumita asked.

  Mumtaz put Shazia’s suitcase on the floor and said, ‘I’m sorry, Amma.’

  Her father came into the hall from the living room.

  ‘Oh course you do,’ he said. He kissed her. ‘But come and sit with me, just for a moment.’

  Mumtaz didn’t really have time for small talk with her father, but she followed him into the living room. Her mother said, ‘I’ll make tea.’

  Mumtaz knew that was more for her mother’s benefit than for her. Bengali milk tea took at least ten minutes to brew. She’d have to be on her way back home by that time.

  But she sat down with her father.

  ‘How is Ali?’

  She felt guilty for not going to see her brother, even though Asif had told her that Ali wanted no visitors.

  Baharat Huq lit a cigarette. Mumtaz hadn’t seen her father smoke for years, it saddened her, but she ignored it. He was dealing with a terrible situation in his own way, she had no right to criticise.

  ‘I am told he is managing,’ Baharat said. ‘Maurice Glass is visiting him. But I have also been told, by the police, that they have another suspect for the murder of Rajiv-ji.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘They will not say. There are rumours that Susi Banergee was taken to Limehouse Police Station and, yesterday, a flat was raided in Casson House.’

  ‘Down the road?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know if it was connected to Ali, but I hope,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve not been around to help,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘Ah, you mustn’t worry!’