A Private Business

by Barbara Nadel

  Lee nodded in agreement. He’d put one of his freelancers, Amy Reichs, on the Malik job and she had indeed seen nothing untoward in or around Nazneen Malik’s house. She’d only actually seen the girl outside the house with her husband.

  “I think that Mrs. Malik thinks that Nazneen isn’t good enough for her son,” Mumtaz said. “I think she’s seen some other young girl she wishes she’d married him to.”

  Lee, who was casually looking at a pile of flyers that had come through the door earlier that morning said, “You got any evidence for that?”

  Mumtaz shook her head. “Not directly.”

  Lee looked up from three separate fried-chicken take-away menus and said, “OK.” He didn’t know that what was happening to Nazneen had happened to Mumtaz’s cousin Farah. But he had, in a very short space of time, learned to trust Mumtaz’s judgment. After all, what did he know about Muslim women?

  “I’ll do as Mrs. Malik asks,” Mumtaz said. “For the business. But I trust what Amy has said and I don’t think that Nazneen is doing anything wrong.”

  “Mmm.” Mrs. Malik was paying them and so Lee couldn’t really get too worked up about it all either way. If the girl was mucking around with other men, then she was mucking around with other men. If she wasn’t, she wasn’t. What did grab his attention, however, was a flyer that wasn’t for fried chicken. He frowned. “Look,” he said, “there’s a thing here for that church that Maria Peters went to. They’ve moved down to Custom House, not far from my mum, actually.”

  The whole Maria Peters saga had left a very bad taste in Lee Arnold’s mouth and Mumtaz, if nobody else, knew that in Lee’s mind it hadn’t gone away. Like the good copper he had once been, he wanted to know the truth. She’d sacked him, she’d apparently given up her career and yet, as far as Lee knew, she was still going about her business in the same way that she always had. She hadn’t apparently had any sort of breakdown that had necessitated hospital admission, and yet the last time he’d seen her, she’d looked and sounded mad. She’d just received a death threat, albeit probably from herself, but she’d been well and truly through it that day and he had wondered how she had survived.

  Mumtaz walked over to Lee’s desk and looked over his shoulder at the flyer. “It is called closure,” she said.

  He looked up at her. Her beautiful oval face was quite impassive.

  “The Maria Peters case is still really a mystery,” she said. “You need answers.”

  He sighed.

  “You feel that she took us all for a ride and you don’t know why,” Mumtaz said. “It certainly wasn’t to enhance her career, so what was it about?” She sat down again.

  “Still too much of a copper to let it go,” Lee said. “Maria Peters paid for our time and so there’s nothing I can do. Had I still been on the force I could.”

  “Or not. DI Collins came out when Maria found that death threat in her car and then Maria told her to go. If the victim doesn’t want to be helped what can you do? Even if you do suspect them of wasting police time?”

  Mumtaz had met Vi Collins just once since she’d been working for the agency. She’d, as she’d put it, “popped in” to see Lee. They’d worked together up at Forest Gate and remained friends. Mumtaz had freely offered to cover the office while they went to the Boleyn together. DI Collins had been what Mumtaz regarded as a typical white East End woman; in other words she was loud, tough, stylish and genuinely kind. She did, however, wear a very odd necklace. It was a gold chain from which was suspended both a cross and a Star of David. How one could display both these symbols of faith, Mumtaz couldn’t imagine. She couldn’t ask either. DI Collins was not a client, she was Lee Arnold’s friend, it would have been rude.

  Lee flung all the flyers into his waste paper bin and said, “You’re right. Nothing I can do.” He yawned, stretched and then stood up. “I’m gonna go out and get some fags.”

  “OK.”

  He walked toward the door. “You want anything?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He left. She heard what he liked to call his “whopping size twelves” running down the stairs at the back of the barber’s shop and fade into the distance. Only when she was sure that he was unlikely to come back did she go to the waste paper bin and take out the flyer for the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire. There was a picture of a lot of smiling people on it.

  Martin Gold had a secret—or he thought he had a secret. He wasn’t sure. The young Asian girl next door was bunking off school every Thursday: from about midday onwards she’d be at home doing goodness knew what. It was a mystery to Martin. The kid went to Bancroft’s, a fee-paying school. Surely they would report such a thing to the girl’s stepmother, who was obviously paying a lot of money for her education? But then she herself was hardly at home any more and so maybe the whole thing had just, somehow, gone out of control. The young girl, as far as Martin knew, never had a boy in there with her although there were other girls. There were always other girls.

  Sometimes that young Asian man he’d seen lurking outside the house in the winter, the one he thought was probably the woman’s brother, passed by the house, but he never stopped. He just looked at it as he walked down the road, sometimes even turning his head to keep on looking after he had passed, but he didn’t appear to have anything to do with the kid.

  In theory, he told himself, Martin liked to think about how he might turn the young girl’s naughty behavior to his advantage. Her stepmother was a very proper sort of lady, quite different from the girl’s actual mother, and indeed the girl herself. The girl wouldn’t want the woman to know that she was probably sitting indoors on her mobile phone, watching telly and maybe even smoking and drinking with her mates every Thursday afternoon. He’d tried to find a way to look into the house when the woman was out to see exactly what the girl was doing, but he couldn’t. If he was going to do anything at all, he’d just have to wing it. The first thing would be to talk to her. Martin shuddered. In theory the girl could just shop him to the police straight away and then he’d have that rough old bird Vi Collins on his back for evermore. But all of this was in theory; he’d never do any of it.

  The rumors that Mrs. Blatt was selling up all her rented property wouldn’t go away. Martin felt that they could be, in part, to do with her appearance. She’d given up the silly comedy thing some time ago, but she had also become thinner and ill-looking in that time. Luckily, so far, those magnificent breasts of hers remained impressive, but she was pale and was starting, he felt, to look her age. She’d said nothing at all about selling up to him, but the Asians seemed to be fretting about it constantly. Mrs. Blatt was not, he hoped, the sort of person who would just bung them all out on the street. Len had certainly not been like that. But it was a worry. Martin thought about the young girl next door again and wondered whether he’d be able to drum up the courage to talk to her before Mrs. Blatt sold up. He thought about this only in theory, of course.

  “Sebastian Coe, as he was when I was girl, and me are of an age,” Vi Collins said. “Fucking ‘lord’! Honestly, I’m telling you, you dignify any of these celebrity types with a knighthood and they think they’re bloody beatified.”

  Vi was “on one.” It wasn’t anything that DS Tony Bracci or anyone else in Forest Gate CID wasn’t used to. Someone on the Olympic Committee had called the station superintendent to check up on what was happening about the so-called “Olympic Flasher” and Vi, who made absolutely no secret about her revulsion of all things Conservative, was convinced the complaint had come straight from the Tory peer.

  “Who needs the bloody Olympics anyway?” she continued. “A load of people exerting themselves to the point of aneurysm isn’t my idea of fun.”

  Tony ignored her and looked at his computer screen. “Last complaint was last week, guv,” he said. “Anonymous call from a woman in a phone box at Canning Town tube.”

  “Nowhere near the Olympic site!”

  “She said it happened on Marshgate Lane.”

  �
��So if it happened all the way up there, why didn’t she call from her mobile?”

  “Maybe it was out of charge. Maybe she doesn’t have one.”

  “Don’t be daft!” Vi said. “Everyone’s got a mobile. And anyway if she called from Canning Town there must be CCTV.”

  Tony Bracci wanted to say I told you all this at the time, but he managed to stop himself from doing so. Vi just didn’t seem to get any more that the Olympic Flasher was important—she’d changed her tune. But then he’d not hurt anyone as yet—and in a way, Tony himself could see why she didn’t care. In the past week they’d had two stabbings—one fatal—both in Manor Park. A flasher who just got his dick out was nothing.

  “There is CCTV, guv,” Tony said, “but it’s impossible to ID. She’s white, she’s little, she’s got long dark hair. Interesting thing about it”—he wanted to add as you may recall but didn’t—“is that she said that the flasher was Asian.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Vi said. “She the first to ID him IC4?”

  “Yes, guv, although a couple of the victims plumped for IC2.”

  Vi crossed her arms over her chest. She put the last inch of a Curly Wurly in her mouth and chewed. It was no real substitute for a fag. “So he’s dark then,” she said. “Dark European, Asian, could be an Arab of some sort, or a Turk maybe.”

  “He’s circumcised.”

  Vi raised her eyebrows. “Can’t get a decent ID on his face, but his knob …”

  “Guv, I’ve—”

  “Tone, I know you’ve strained every nerve,” Vi said. “But, if you remember, a boy called Jacob Sitole has just recently died on our patch—he was stabbed. He was fifteen. I’m sorry all these women keep on getting an eyeful …”

  “They’re all white.”

  Vi frowned.

  “All the women who’ve seen the flasher have been IC1,” Tony said. “No black girls, no IC4s, 5s … One I’d describe as IC2—that woman with the Spanish surname. But he, whoever he is, likes fair skin and likes ’em a bit older too.”

  “Oh, well then, I’ll have to keep topping up me tan then, won’t I.” Vi shook her head. “Tone, we keep on it. Keep his lordship happy but—”

  “Guv, it was you who said flashers’ behavior can escalate, not me.”

  Vi knew that Tony Bracci, as well as quite a few other officers in CID, viewed what she had learned on her Open University Sociology and Criminology course as just south of useless. But she’d picked up enough on her degree course as well as on the streets of Newham to know that flashers who just stopped at flashing were rare. Eventually an opportunity would arise for actual contact with a woman; that, or the urge to masturbate in front of a particularly frightened victim would become overwhelming. Fear could be very erotic and, in the mind of the flasher, very provoking. Vi was aware that the Olympic Flasher could just take off at any minute. But one boy had been killed and another wounded in a fight between two Zimbabwean lads in Manor Park and that was her priority. Vi stood up. “Tell the super we’re on it and throw in the stuff about all the victims being white,” she said. “I’m off out.”

  “Where?”

  “I’ve got an appointment to see Murderer,” Vi said. “At the Royal Pie and Mash.”

  “Murderer? What do you want to see him for?”

  Vi smiled. “Murderer tells me that he has some intel on Jacob Sitole’s death.”

  Tony Bracci pulled a face. “Yeah and I’m Johnny Depp.”

  Vi raised a warning finger. “Now, now, DS Bracci, we cannot discount any possible source of information, however peculiar.” Then she leaned down and whispered in his ear. “And if you were Johnny Depp I’d’ve had your trousers round your ankles long ago.”

  Jesus was more than just nudging her now and there was no way she could have engineered this herself. There was a big cloth banner right across the front top story of the building which said Jesus is Alive! Come and meet him here every Sunday at 10 am. Then in smaller letters underneath were listed other meeting times and days and a website, www.chapelofpentecostalfire.com. The mission was growing in strength and yet still just the look of the old Fun Palace made Maria shudder. Dave Delmonte had had her thrown out of there like a bag of rubbish. Guessing she was pregnant when she chucked up all over the place, he’d said, You up the duff? in front of everyone. She’d just managed to mutter No at the time, but of course she had been and Dave Delmonte had said, I think you are, love! Then he’d laughed and in the days and weeks that had followed she’d realized that he was right. Then she’d given her soul, free, to the devil. Could even Jesus forgive such a thing? Maria turned away and looked across the road toward the ranks of brand new apartment blocks that now ringed the old Victoria Dock. In comparison to the vast brick and concrete structure that was the old Millennium Mill on the other side of the dock, they looked very flimsy and impermanent. Her dad had worked in the dock next door, the Albert, until the industry came to a halt in the nineteen seventies with the advent of shipping containers. Then the whole thing had moved down to Tilbury and that had been that. Maria wondered what her dad would have made of the blocks and blocks of tiny, flimsy flats. She knew what he would have made of her pregnancy had he ever found out about it.

  Girls who go with boys outside of marriage are no better than common tarts, was all she’d ever heard him say about women who “got into trouble.” Her mother hadn’t been quite so condemnatory but she’d had no sympathy with such behavior either. She’d always favored the word “loose” in that context.

  Maria walked back toward Appleby Road where her car was parked. At the side of the building she saw the door Dave Delmonte’s men had thrown her out of. They’d said she should consider herself lucky that Dave hadn’t wanted her to pay to have the sick cleared up. Maybe the presence of the church on the site of that awful place would somehow negate its former evil? Perhaps it would take away the visions of Dave and his awful henchmen, of Maria’s own humiliation at their hands? Maybe, but it would never take away her crime.

  With thick, green liquor running down his chin, Eric Noakes looked like a man locked in a life or death struggle with really bad snot. Vi Collins, sitting opposite, tried not to take her eyes off her plate of jellied eels and said, “So, Murderer, what you got to tell me?”

  Eric “Murderer” Noakes had once been a Hells Angel. He still wore all the leather, still showed his tattoos of demons and of famous hangings to anyone who was interested, but he hadn’t walked since he came off his motorbike on a run down to Brighton in 1979. Paralyzed from the waist down, Murderer used an electric wheelchair to travel round the streets of Upton Park. Except when he was eating, he always had a roll-up in the corner of his mouth and a stick in his hands to swipe pedestrians out of his way. As he delighted in saying to women who tried to be nice to him and asked after his health, “I haven’t had a shag since September 1979, how the fuck do you think I feel?”

  He turned his cold eyes on Vi. “It’s all to do with God,” he said.

  “What is?”

  As a person, Murderer was pretty much straightforwardly odious, but as an informant he could have his uses.

  “All this malarkey up Manor Park. With the blackies,” he said.

  “You mean the Zimbabweans.”

  Murderer lobbed a large lump of meat into his mouth and said, “I don’t do political correctness, DI Collins. I’m too old and I can’t be assed.”

  Vi sighed. Her eels were lovely, her company not so much.

  “Them two boys what fought; it was over God,” Murderer said. “One of ’em belongs to one type of happy-clappy church and the other lad to another one. One of them churches says the other lot are all witches. Dunno which one.”

  Murderer wasn’t the most articulate person in the world, but Vi had got the gist. One of the churches that one of the boys belonged to adhered to the notion that witches existed among them. Said witches were always evil and needed to be either exorcised in some way, or killed, or both. Sometimes witches could even be children, like Ja
cob Sitole. As yet, they didn’t know for certain who had stabbed the boy but Vi had a very good idea that it was probably the other, injured, lad, Matthias Chibanda. Other sources had it that the two families had some sort of feud going, but no one seemed to know what it was about, or they weren’t saying.

  “So you’re telling me this is a witchcraft death?” Vi said.

  This wasn’t the first and probably wouldn’t be the last African witchcraft death in London. Just because people emigrated thousands of miles to another continent it didn’t mean that their beliefs would change in line with their location, and Vi had read several accounts of young African girls forced to work in the UK as virtual slaves because, supposedly, some ju-ju man back home had said if they didn’t they would bring bad luck on their families.

  “All religion’s magic at the end, isn’t it?” Murderer said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bloody belief in spirits, waving incense about, all that,” he said. “Smoke and mirrors. And I don’t mean that stuff that Mark Solomons does on the telly. They get people under their spell, these religious types, and make ’em do things ’cause God says so. They do exorcism at them churches and all sorts of mad shit.”

  “Why you never joined up, Murderer?”

  A single middle-aged white woman came into the shop and ordered pie, mash, peas and a cuppa. It was lunchtime and the place was like a tomb.

  “I had the chapter,” Murderer said. “As well you know.”

  Vi remembered the Hells Angel chapter that Murderer had belonged to. She’d nicked at least five of its members in the past. “How does an old racist like you know about these Africans then?” she said.

  Murderer, who didn’t mind in the least bit being called a racist, said, “No names, no pack drill. I have women all colors, shapes and sizes in and out my place. Know what I mean?”

  He was talking about the small army of carers who went into his ground floor flat on Plashet Grove to put him to bed, change his inco pads and look for pressure sores on his bum. So one of those girls had said something to him.