Bright Shiny Things

by Barbara Nadel

‘Get Mumtaz sorted,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, and you.’

  ‘No.’

  Vi squatted. ‘Listen, shitface,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t tell you and I don’t even have to explain why. You were in the job yourself. You know nothing else matters.’ She lowered her voice. ‘So we have some dirty sex from time to time. It’s just shagging. I like you but I don’t owe you shit.’

  She was right, she didn’t. He knew how these operations worked. He’d been used. But this was a terrorism investigation. It was totally justified.

  Vi stood. ‘I’ve got to go and see how the SO15 gang are getting on,’ she said. ‘They’ll want your phone.’

  She left.

  Lee pulled her jacket up round his face and hid his eyes.

  TWENTY-TWO

  When a police car pulled up outside her house, Shereen al’Barri felt her heart rate go up. Were they coming to see her? If they were, why?

  She looked at her watch. Abbas had to have been in Amsterdam for over an hour. And yet every time she’d tried to call him his number had been unavailable. Surely if some sort of incident had taken place at either Stansted or Schiphol she would have seen something about it on the TV?

  When they knocked Shereen almost screamed. But by the time she got to the front door she had composed herself.

  The officer was pleasant enough. A middle-aged white man in plain clothes who was called DS Bracci. He asked her where Abbas was and she told him that he’d gone to visit friends in the Netherlands. It was only partly untrue. Shereen’s brother lived in Rotterdam.

  DS Bracci asked her to sit down. Then he asked her about the children.

  ‘Djamila’s gone away with her boyfriend,’ she said. ‘Hasan and Layla are in their rooms.’

  ‘Can you get them please, Mrs al’Barri.’

  The kids didn’t want to leave their computers but they did, reluctantly. As she led them downstairs, Shereen’s head began to swim. What had happened? What had gone wrong?

  But it would be a while before DS Bracci told Shereen anything. Although not under caution, the family were questioned. Shereen felt sick.

  Where had her husband gone? Why? Did she have a contact number for her brother in the Netherlands? Which airport had Abbas travelled from? What had been the purpose of his journey?

  The kids only knew the cover story and so they clearly thought nothing of it. They just wanted to get back to their games.

  Then DS Bracci said, ‘I’m afraid, Mrs al’Barri, that your husband has been involved in an incident …’

  Lee handed Vi the Tooth of Jonah.

  She pulled a face. ‘That it? Looks better online.’

  ‘It’s been through it a bit,’ he said. ‘But it means a lot to all the people who come from the Nineveh Plain. When I was there it was still in the mosque that no longer exists.’

  She started to leave.

  ‘Vi …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What’s going on? What’s happened?’

  She walked towards him. ‘Abbas and Djamila al’Barri are dead,’ she said.

  Lee felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. ‘How?’

  ‘Not your business,’ she said.

  This was a version of Vi Collins that Lee had never experienced before.

  He pulled her close. ‘Since when did you work for counterterrorism?’

  She pushed him away. ‘I don’t.’

  And maybe she was right. Vi hadn’t been in charge of the operation. That had been someone inside that house. Maybe even someone Lee hadn’t seen.

  Vi said, ‘We’re at war, Lee. And in war you do anything to win. You use anyone and everyone.’

  She walked away.

  What was happening didn’t appear to make sense. The doctor she’d seen in Accident and Emergency had told her there was no effective treatment for broken ribs except painkillers and rest. But she wasn’t going home. Alone except for a plain-clothed policewoman, Mumtaz was locked into a room usually reserved for private patients. She had no phone, her luggage was nowhere to be seen and nobody would talk to her about Lee. There was no point talking to the policewoman because all she did was smile and then go back to her copy of Bella.

  At least the painkillers took the edge off her physical distress. But they did nothing for what was happening in her mind. Had Abu Imad really killed his own father? Who was the woman who had met her at the airport? Was Abu Imad a terrorist or wasn’t he? And where was Lee?

  In spite of being in the care of police officers, Mumtaz was afraid. How was her own part in whatever had just happened going to be interpreted?

  She heard the door unlock. The policewoman stood up and smoothed her skirt down to her knees. Then a man walked in and closed the door behind him. He smiled.

  Probably in his early sixties, he was a tall, slim, smart man with a moustache. He was rather attractive in a grey, slightly grizzled way. He sat down on the chair beside Mumtaz’s bed and said, ‘So how are you, Mrs Hakim?’

  Her first urge was just to say ‘fine’ but then she thought better of it. She wasn’t fine and this man wasn’t a doctor.

  ‘Confused,’ she said.

  ‘About?’

  She noticed that the policewoman had switched on some sort of hand-held device.

  ‘Is that a recorder?’ Mumtaz asked.

  ‘What, specifically, are you confused about, Mrs Hakim?’ the man said.

  She didn’t even know his name. ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  ‘Mrs Hakim, I will need to know what was the precise nature of your relationship with Fayyad al’Barri, also known as Abu Imad.’

  It was like talking to a brick wall.

  ‘I know that at the moment you are probably not able to do that,’ he said. ‘But until you are, you will have to remain here. You will be under medical supervision at all times.’

  ‘Where’s here?’ she asked.

  The ambulance she had travelled in had deposited her at a hospital somewhere. She hadn’t been in a position to know where.

  ‘This is Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford,’ he said.

  ‘I have a daughter …’

  ‘Who is with your parents in Spitalfields, yes,’ he said. ‘They believe you are away on business. Your family are safe, Mrs Hakim.’

  How did she know that?

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘who are you? If I don’t know who you are, how can I trust you with my family? How?’

  He sniffed. There was a pause and then he said, ‘Mrs Hakim, the house you were in with Abu Imad and his associates was raided by SO15 counterterrorism officers. I work for Her Majesty’s Government alongside that organisation. My name is of no interest to you but my purpose, which is to debrief you, is. Now, I am aware that you are in pain and I appreciate you remain in a state of anxiety, but I have to know, in your own words, exactly what you experienced today.’

  ‘You have a long history of drug and alcohol abuse.’

  ‘Most people who’ve served in Iraq have problems,’ Lee said.

  The woman sitting in front of him in the familiar surroundings of an interview room at Forest Gate nick had appeared less than an hour ago. He hadn’t seen her at the house in Good Easter and she hadn’t accompanied him in the car back to London. She’d told him her name was Emma. Lee would have put money on the notion that she was telling the truth about that. He’d met a lot of Emmas. Not in the police, but in the upper echelons of the army. Emmas tended to have ‘daddies’.

  ‘Why did you become friends with Abbas al’Barri in 1990?’

  ‘He was a translator, he spoke English. I liked him,’ Lee said.

  ‘You got drunk together.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And he saved your life.’

  ‘He did. And now he’s dead,’ Lee said. ‘You obviously know all this. And I don’t understand.’

  ‘Why did you break off relations with the al’Barri family?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Until Abbas al’Barri contacted you about the T
ooth of Jonah, you hadn’t seen the family for five years,’ she said.

  ‘I meant to. I called Abbas when I heard that Fayyad had joined ISIS. We spoke on the phone a lot. I met him once.’

  ‘But you didn’t visit?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  He shrugged. ‘Life.’

  ‘I didn’t find out the woman’s name until we arrived at the house,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘In Good Easter.’

  ‘Yes. I only know that because she told the taxi driver.’

  ‘Who was, in your words, “one of them”.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So why did the woman have to tell the driver where to go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Ask her.’

  The man looked down at his knees.

  ‘The woman’s name was Umm Khaled,’ Mumtaz said. ‘That’s what she told me and what Abu Imad referred to her as. When she finally took off her burqa I recognised her.’

  ‘As?’

  ‘As the woman who had served me at the Alexander McQueen outlet in Harrods.’

  ‘Where you bought three Ribcage T-shirts for Abu Imad?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The extent of what this man knew was frightening. Nothing she had done had been unobserved. Nothing.

  ‘Tell me about the first time you saw Abu Imad at the house in Good Easter.’

  ‘Why did you think that Fayyad al’Barri wanted to return to the UK?’

  ‘Because he sent the Tooth of Jonah to his family,’ Lee said. ‘One of the rules or whatever you call it that governs ISIS is that they don’t do relics. Even mosques can be considered idols in their world. They blow stuff up, we all know this. So to actually save a relic is wrong, in their eyes. If they’d caught him doing it, they would’ve probably killed him. I served in Iraq, I know how special that relic was to people. Abbas al’Barri saw it as a sign his son had changed.’

  ‘And did you agree with his assessment?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure. I told him to go to the police. But he wouldn’t.’

  ‘So why didn’t you contact the police?’ she said.

  Was she not saying ‘us’ because she wasn’t a police officer?

  Lee didn’t answer. Why hadn’t he contacted the police? It was a good question. It was also one he knew he couldn’t easily answer.

  ‘Was it because you owed Abbas al’Barri?’

  He shook his head. ‘Partly,’ he said. ‘And also,’ he shrugged, ‘I guess I wanted to believe that Fayyad was kosher. Abbas was in such a state, drinking himself to death.’

  ‘And yet even if you had managed to get him into the country …’

  ‘Oh, we all knew we’d have to take him to the authorities,’ Lee said. ‘But if we could just get him here … He was – is a nice kid.’

  ‘You wanted to save him.’

  ‘Yeah. I s’pose.’

  He wanted to ask her what had happened to Fayyad. Vi had told him that both Djamila and Abbas were dead. But what about Fayyad?

  He said, ‘Djamila, his sister …’

  ‘Was radicalised at her place of work,’ the woman said.

  A posh designer outlet in Harrods. But then, why not? Hadn’t the puritanical Wahhabi sect, from which ISIS at the very least took some of its ideas, developed in oil-rich Saudi Arabia?

  ‘You knew?’ he said. ‘About me?’

  Her face expressed nothing. Vi had said she’d known, so this government wonk, whatever she was, had to have known.

  ‘Why didn’t you stop me?’

  It just came out. He knew. No one had stopped him because he and Mumtaz had represented a shortcut.

  She said, ‘Why do you think that Abu Imad chose Mrs Hakim’s character for his bride?’

  He had known. Through Djamila, Lee imagined. Abbas and Shereen had always said they were keeping what they were doing from the children, but Abbas in his cups was a loose cannon. And if Djamila had been radicalised then she would have asked the right questions.

  ‘What’s going to happen to Fayyad?’ Lee asked.

  He’d seen him, briefly, through the smoke back in the Good Easter house.

  She pushed a statement form across the table. ‘You know the score,’ she said. ‘Every detail you can remember.’

  He looked at it.

  ‘Is he alive or dead?’ he asked.

  She said, ‘When you leave here the incident will be at an end.’

  ‘Hi, sweetie.’

  There was a pause. The girl obviously didn’t recognise the number she was calling from.

  ‘Amma?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you? Aren’t you working away or something?’

  ‘I was.’ She made a small laugh in her throat. It hurt. ‘But I fell over and I’ve broken a couple of ribs.’

  ‘God! How?’

  Mumtaz could hear the panic in Shazia’s voice. It was tinged with the disbelief that had been engendered during her young life by all the lies that had always swirled around her.

  ‘I was late, running for the departure gate, I slipped,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘So where are you?’

  ‘I’m in Broomfield Hospital in Essex,’ she said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘And Lee?’ Shazia asked. ‘Is he with you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Just gone to get a coffee.’

  ‘When are you coming home, Amma?’

  Mumtaz looked up at the man sitting beside her bed and said, ‘In the morning.’

  When she’d finished the call, Mumtaz said, ‘Is my daughter safe?’

  He smiled.

  ‘Is she?’

  He stood up. ‘She’s safer than you can imagine, Mrs Hakim,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  He shrugged.

  Was he deliberately behaving in a cloak-and-dagger fashion because it was expected of him or because that was how he really was? Mumtaz didn’t know but it irritated her. In spite of the fact that he frightened her.

  ‘I think I deserve to know whether we were right about Fayyad al’Barri,’ she said.

  ‘You saw him kill his own father, what do you think?’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t see him kill his father. I saw him deposit his father’s body on the floor in front of me,’ she said. ‘Read my statement.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘And?’ she said. ‘Fayyad …’

  ‘Fayyad al’Barri is nothing to you,’ he said. ‘You’ve never met him and possess no information about him or his family.’

  ‘Yes, but is he—’

  ‘You’ll never see or speak to Fayyad al’Barri again, Mrs Hakim,’ the man said.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Vakeel Uddin the solicitor wasn’t at home when the police finally arrested him. He’d been under close surveillance since the previous morning. Now balls deep in a woman he’d met on the Tube, he was at an address in Barking. Unable to comprehend anything except his own pleasure, he’d not heard the knock on the door at 4 a.m. But the splintering of the front door had got his attention.

  Aziz the tailor, on the other hand, had known they’d come. When they knocked, he’d opened his door and let them in without a murmur. He was a legitimate man who had helped Syrian refugees in good faith. How had he been expected to know that the boys Ali Huq had taken in had been radicalised? How had he been expected to know that Huq was homosexual? Old Zafar Bhatti in the electrical shop had intimated that he was, but only to that lawyer, Vakeel Uddin, not to him. He didn’t personally import poisonous ideas into the country. He didn’t promote them either. Not like the boxer, Taha Mirza. What Aziz didn’t know when he started spilling his guts about Mirza, however, was that he was already dead.

  ‘How?’

  Amir Charleston was a funny colour. He looked as if he’d just seen a road accident.

  ‘Topped himself,’ Ricky Montalban said. ‘Pills.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

  Charleston looked at his
lawyer who shook his head.

  Amir said, ‘No comment.’

  Ricky shrugged. ‘If that’s the way you want to play it …’

  ‘My client has told you that he had nothing to do with the death of Rajiv Banergee …’

  ‘Yeah, and I’ve told him, and you Mr Dugdale, that Banergee’s blood is on his T-shirt. You were there, weren’t you, Mr Charleston? Just because Taha Mirza’s dead doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. He taught you and Mr Lewis and Mr Cranmer to box while throwing in the odd religious justification, but there’s no forensic or other contact between Mirza and Banergee. He didn’t kill him and Cranmer and Lewis have alibis for that night. That leaves you. That’s why you’ve been charged.’

  The solicitor said, ‘And my client’s motive for killing Mr Banergee, Inspector Montalban?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, Mr Dugdale,’ Ricky said.

  ‘Has it occurred to you that he doesn’t have one because he didn’t kill him?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Ricky said. ‘But if I look at where your client was that night, who he was with and what he was doing, oh and the forensic evidence, that doesn’t really work for me.’

  ‘I won’t plead guilty,’ Charleston said.

  ‘That’s up to you.’

  ‘I’m not a Muslim fanatic. I just, I …’

  ‘Please don’t say any more,’ Mr Dugdale said. ‘You don’t need to. Not at this time …’

  Amir Charleston rubbed a hand across his face. Ricky saw the internal struggle. He’d seen it many times before. He stood up, ‘I’ll give you a moment, shall I?’ he said.

  What remained of the al’Barri family were inside the nick. Tony Bracci didn’t know who they were with and he didn’t want to know. Vi Collins joined him and lit a fag. Leaning against what was called the Smoking Wall at the back of the car park, they puffed in companionable silence until Tony said, ‘So …’

  ‘Quite a little network, as I understand it,’ Vi said. ‘Dunno how it’s gonna shake out though.’

  ‘What do you mean, guv?’

  ‘I mean, Tone, you never do with go-rounds like this.’