A Private Business

by Barbara Nadel

  “Your Mrs. Hakim’s still working with the well-known comedian who is, I believe, a little bit fond of a bit of Pentecostal Fire from time to time,” Tony said.

  Vi had to have told him. But then, Lee thought, fair dos, DI Collins hadn’t had to go and babysit Mumtaz’s stepdaughter. She generally had far better things to do with her evenings. But she’d agreed to it and Lee, without doubt, owed her.

  “Can’t give you any details, Tone,” Lee said.

  “Ditto, mate,” Tony said. “But, Lee, what I can tell you is that we’ve been looking into the finances of these churches and we’ve found a connection between Pastor Iekanjika’s Peace in Jesus church and Paul Grint’s Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire.”

  “A connection?”

  “The Pentecostalists rent their new Canning Town church, what used to be a pub, from Iekanjika. Bit of a rough old building. In need of TLC, I’d say.”

  Lee shrugged. “Yeah?”

  Tony Bracci smiled. Then he delivered the punch line. “For seven grand a month!”

  “Fucking hell!”

  “Lodged as IOUs, official IOUs, with Iekanjika’s bank.”

  “So Grint can’t just welsh on it?”

  “Not easily. But Pastor Iekanjika won’t talk to us because he says he doesn’t recognize ‘secular authority.’ The kid that killed Jacob Sitole, Matthias Chibanda, one of Iekanjika’s parishioners won’t talk to anyone and looks shit scared, particularly of Iekanjika. Now I don’t think that it’s just DI Collins and myself who smell the faint honk of possible financial shenanigans but I think it might be helpful to both of us if your Mrs. Hakim watches more than the famous comedian.”

  “Watches the church?”

  Tony shrugged. “No pressure.”

  “But …”

  “But I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, Lee, that almost anyone can set up a church in this country. And, under EU human rights legislation, they can do some things that may or may not make sense to the likes of us. The DI received some intel that the Sitole murder could be an African witchcraft affair, but to be truthful there’s no actual evidence to support that. All we’ve got is this weird little bit of finance stuff which might mean something, might mean nothing.”

  “But you have to tread carefully,” Lee said.

  “We all have to do that,” Tony said. “We live in strange times, Lee. Times some, like the happy-clappies, would say prefigure the end of the world.”

  Lee Arnold laughed. “You do talk a load of shit sometimes, Tone!”

  Something very strange and also alarming was going on in the house next door. The older Paki woman seemed to have moved out and had left the girl in the care of that bitch DI Violet Collins. Why? Martin Gold racked his brains to try and remember exactly what he’d said to the girl on Sunday. He hadn’t threatened her, had he? He’d been a bit suggestive about what he may or may not know about her Thursday afternoon activities, but then if she’d had nothing to hide then she would have had nothing to fear, would she?

  Martin couldn’t believe that she’d gone to the police. What with, for God’s sake? As far as he knew the young girl didn’t know anything about his past. That said, he did remember noticing at the time that she hadn’t looked exactly happy when he’d first spoken to her. He watched the girl leave for school and then Vi Collins get in her car to go to the station. She didn’t look up at his house at all, but that didn’t mean anything much. Ever since he’d got out of Wormwood Scrubs the coppers had wanted to somehow put him back in again. But Martin had been good and then he’d been clever. This was a pattern that he followed by turns and at the present time he was in a “clever” phase. That was one of the few benefits of being what his mother had always called “nondescript.” Old Len Blatt had once said he looked a bit like ex-Prime Minister John Major, gray.

  Mumtaz worked her way through the messages on her phone. One was from Lee who wanted to have a meeting at three, another was from a client thanking her for finally confirming that her husband was indeed being unfaithful. There was a resentful little “Good morning” from Shazia and then there was her mother.

  “Mr. Choudhury and his son are coming to eat with us on Thursday night,” she said. “Your brothers are coming. Mr. Choudhury’s son is just fifty and he has his own accountancy practice.”

  Her mother was hopeless at even pretending to conceal her motives.

  “You must come,” she continued. “And you can bring Shazia. Mr. Choudhury’s son is most open-minded.”

  Mumtaz sat down on Maria Peters’ linen basket and wound a towel round her wet hair. The comedian’s shower room was bigger than most people’s main bathrooms, and it was also one of the few places in the house where Mumtaz could be alone. She hadn’t told Maria about the figure she’d spotted in the garden the previous night. Maria was very needy and was having panic attacks every few hours and so to cause her further alarm seemed unwise, especially in view of the fact that the person Mumtaz had seen in the garden could easily have just been a wandering kid. She looked down at her phone and resisted the urge to text back a bald “No” to her mother. But then her mother only just about knew how to answer her mobile phone. If she left a text her mother would have to involve her father in order to get it and that would open her up to conversations with both of them. Much as she loved her parents, Mumtaz most definitely didn’t want that. Her father could bang on about her single status just as effectively and irritatingly as her mother. Mumtaz put the phone down, walked over to the sink and began to brush her teeth. She looked at her face in the bathroom cabinet mirror and decided that she could no longer really go out in public without make-up. Not that she ever actually did. But now, to Mumtaz’s way of thinking, that wasn’t even a viable choice. To her, her eyes looked heavy and washed out and her face was pale and she had a few spots on her cheeks. She didn’t look old, she just looked worn out. A set of good cosmetics would help. Maria Peters, for all her distress and her age, always looked attractive and Mumtaz wondered what kind of cosmetics she used.

  Brand names like Yves St. Laurent and Clarins came to mind and Mumtaz opened the bathroom cabinet to see if she could discover any cosmetic clues.

  There was a slightly dusty Max Factor lipstick in a vibrant shade of pink but what the cabinet mostly contained, what it had been designed to hold, was medicine. Loads of it. As well as the usual aspirin, paracetamol and aging sticking plasters there was a whole raft of products that contained codeine. One wet afternoon back in February, Lee had told Mumtaz how he’d once had a problem with codeine. He’d started taking it for a pain in his shoulder but when his wife had left him he’d found that it had helped him to sleep. DI Collins had, apparently, been instrumental in getting him off it. But Lee now hated the stuff and Maria Peters had enough of it to kill half the street.

  But that wasn’t all she had. There were boxes and boxes of the antidepressant fluoxetine. Mumtaz looked at the dosage and saw that it was high; twenty milligrams three times a day. At University she’d specialized in what they called “abnormal psychology” and so she knew quite a lot about psychiatric pharmacology. Amongst the fluoxetine boxes there were however also some loose strips of a drug called Ranflutin which made Mumtaz frown. Quite what that was she didn’t know, but she made a mental note to look it up online. Then there was diazepam too. She knew exactly what that was; a tranquilizer that used to be known as Valium and it was in great big ten milligram tablet doses. Again it was loose. Unlike the fluoxetine, neither the Ranflutin or the diazepam appeared to have boxes that would allow her to check whether the tablets had actually been prescribed for Maria Peters or not. The fluoxetine had been prescribed by Mumtaz’s own doctor on Woodgrange Road and, although the dose was quite high, it was a reasonable response to the acute grief Maria was clearly still experiencing. But if one included all the other medication, this was a fearsome and potentially lethal pharmacy by anyone’s standards.

  “Betty.”

  Maria hadn’t been expecting her. It was barely el
even o’clock which, apart from Sundays, was early for Betty. In this instance it presented Maria with a bit of a dilemma too. Mumtaz was upstairs in the shower room and so theoretically she could come down at any minute. Maria had been told yet again, this time by Mumtaz herself, that the surveillance was to be kept from everyone—and that included her mother. Everyone had to be treated with caution and some suspicion. But Betty was her oldest friend.

  The best thing to do was just to get it over with. Maria took Betty into the living room and said, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

  Betty, concerned, said, “Nothing horrible I hope.” She sat down.

  Maria took a deep breath. “I’ve been having … trouble again,” she said. “In the house. Things …” she coughed, “turning up.” She put her head down.

  Betty stood, went over to Maria and hugged her. “Oh, Marie,” she said. “You must call Pastor Grint immediately.”

  “No—”

  “Marie, this means you still have problems with sin. Paul can help you.”

  “I didn’t mean to tell you, let alone …”

  They sat down side by side on the sofa, Betty’s arms encircling Maria’s shoulders.

  “There were peacock feathers and … other things, just appeared,” Maria continued. “Bet, I don’t know if I’m going mad or what. I would never have put things like that in this house.”

  “Because they’re unlucky? But they’re not really, are they, Marie,” Betty said. “That’s just silly old superstition, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe. But how did they get in here? They just appeared.”

  Betty looked away as if she was nervous about what she was going to say next. “Marie … You know I worry about you. You know I feel that, whatever this is, what you need is to testify and take Deliverance … You may have been doing these things yourself, guided by Jesus, but maybe you’re not. Maybe Jesus is forcing the issue.”

  Exorcism. The casting out of demons by bell, book and candle. Paul Grint would gladly do it. But how could she let him? Exorcism only worked if the source of some evil was exposed for all the world to see, and that couldn’t happen. She wasn’t ready. But did God or Jesus really care about that? No, they just wanted her soul. The Rapture was coming.

  Maria, unable to think about it, changed the subject. “I’ve engaged a private detective again,” she said. “A lady, from the same agency that I was with before.”

  Betty frowned.

  “I can’t be alone, Bet.” Maria stood up and then paced once around the sofa. “Maybe I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “God does,” Betty said. “You shouldn’t have gone back to those people, Marie, there’s nothing they can do.”

  “They can watch and tell me if I’m doing things to myself, going mad,” Maria said.

  “You should trust Paul. You should ask him to come, and put it all into his hands.” Betty was angry.

  Maria said, “I may be sick, Bet.”

  “Well, have you been back to the doctor?”

  “I have but what can he do?” She sat down again.

  “He gave you pills?”

  “Yes, but I’ve got pills coming at me from every direction. I need help.”

  “But what can this lady do?”

  “She’s staying with me,” Maria said. “Monitoring what happens, what I do.”

  Betty was quiet for a few moments, then she said, “Marie, why didn’t you get me or someone else from the church to come and be with you when this first happened? I imagine you’re paying this lady—”

  “Bet, money isn’t a problem!” Maria said.

  “No.”

  “I don’t want to burden you with this. I don’t want to burden anyone.” Maria wiped her hands down her face. “If I’m just going crazy …”

  “You’re not going crazy, you just need—”

  “Need what? Deliverance?” Maria shook her head. “I can’t do that, Bet!”

  “Because you don’t truly believe in the unseen? In demons? In the corrosion of sins unrepented? How can you not believe in evil if you do believe in Christ?”

  “I do believe in evil and all that, it’s just … I don’t know. Some of it just doesn’t make sense to me.”

  Maria’s eyes were full of tears now and, from her hiding place just outside the living room door, Mumtaz heard her reiterate, “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “But Marie, if you talked to me then I would be able to help you,” Betty said. “Or Pastor Grint. There’s a terrible sorrow in you, Marie. I don’t know what it is, but Jesus does and I think he’s trying to get through to you …”

  “No!” Maria sat down again and repeated, “No.”

  Mumtaz heard her breathing hard as she clearly tried to calm herself. Then she heard her say, “I’m sorry, Bet, I’ll have to go and get something.”

  As she moved toward the door, Mumtaz ran upstairs and went to her room. Not that hiding herself from this Betty mattered, the woman knew she was installed in the house now. But she didn’t want either of them to know that she’d been listening in on their conversation.

  Mumtaz saw Maria go into her shower room and then come out again almost immediately. When she’d gone back downstairs, Mumtaz went into the shower room and saw a strip of diazepam pills on the side of the sink. One tablet was missing.

  XIX

  “Traffic warden,” Vi said as she flicked the ash from her cigarette out of the car window.

  “Nah.”

  She turned to face Tony Bracci. “Why not?”

  “Traffic wardens are hated but it ain’t necessarily boring, is it, guv?”

  They were on surveillance across the road from Pastor Iekanjika’s house in Silvertown. A bog-standard Edwardian terrace, it backed onto the City Airport and so every few minutes they had to put up with noises from jets heading off to Paris and Amsterdam. They were playing a game they often played which was called “What jobs are more boring than surveillance?”

  “I don’t know,” Vi said. “Not sure I could walk about all day looking at car windscreens.”

  “Hated by millions.” Tony picked his nose and stuck the bogey on the roof of the car. He always did this. Vi had long ago become sick of telling him to stop it. “What about magicians?”

  Vi turned to look at him and said, “Magicians?” Tony Bracci had an odd mind.

  “Yeah, like Paul Daniels,” Tony said. “I can’t stand Paul Daniels, he’s an annoying little shit. And then there’s that American wanker. David something. The one in the plastic box over the South Bank.”

  “David Blaine.”

  “That’s him. People were throwing burger buns at him. Tosser. That had to have been boring, sitting up in that box all day and night.”

  A battered old Renault 5 pulled up two cars in front of them and the Reverend Manyika got out. Vi shuffled down a bit in her seat. “Now that, I didn’t expect,” she said.

  “None of these holy Joes are all sweetness and light,” Tony said.

  “I never said Manyika was.” Vi waited until a white woman had admitted Manyika into Iekanjika’s house and the door had closed behind him, then she said, “I’m going in.”

  Tony Bracci shrugged. “Leave me here like Nobby No Mates …”

  “Venus himself ordered this obbo, Tone,” Vi said. “Let’s not fuck it up by stomping around in our size twelves, shall we?”

  Vi got out of the car and knocked on the front door of the house directly opposite Iekanjika’s. A Constable Moss let her in. She nodded briefly to the elderly owner of the house and then followed Moss upstairs to the front bedroom. Two DCs, Tim Holland and Gazi Hussein, were in situ. Tom monitoring the house through a long-lens camera, Gazi listening in. Iekanjika’s house had been wired for sound the previous evening when the pastor and his family had been out at a prayer meeting.

  Vi murmured, “Cozy,” as she looked around a bedroom that had probably last been decorated in 1968. The swirling psychedelic wallpaper was faded but it was, unfortunately, still all too recognizab
le. It wasn’t unlike the bedroom Vi had shared with her sisters back in the early sixties.

  Gazi Hussein, listening in through headphones via his laptop said, “Ah, crap.”

  Vi and Tim Holland looked at him. Gazi pulled one earpiece to one side and said, “Talking in their own language, guv.”

  Vi raised her eyebrows. “But you’re recording.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Gazi said. “And when Manyika first went in they spoke in English.”

  “Anything I need to know about?” Vi asked.

  “Pleasantries aside, Manyika was a bit lairy, ma’am,” Gazi said. “A bit exercised.”

  “About?”

  “Before he went off into their own language he asked Iekanjika what kind of Christian allows killing. Iekanjika replied that Manyika was talking rubbish.”

  Vi sat down on a candlewick bedspread that was definitely older than she was. “So Manyika knows or suspects that Iekanjika is involved in a death of some sort then,” Vi said. “How do we get him to share that intel?”

  “Ah! Speaking English again.” Gazi listened intently while Vi and Tim Holland looked on.

  Gazi frowned.

  “What is it?” Vi asked. “What they saying?”

  “Iekanjika just said that if Manyika doesn’t drop it then Harare will suddenly get a lot closer,” he said.

  “I thought they were both supposed to be refugees from Mugabe’s regime,” Holland said.

  Vi narrowed her eyes. “Maybe only one of them is,” she said.

  Mumtaz had just laid out a small sample of the medication she’d managed to take from Maria Peters’ medicine cabinet on Lee’s desk when her phone began to ring. Thinking it was probably Maria, she answered it without looking.

  “Your father would be very grateful and pleased if you would come and have dinner with us on Thursday night,” her mother said. “Did you get my message? I said that you could bring Shazia.”

  Mumtaz looked pleadingly across at Lee and said, “My mother.”

  “So take it,” he smiled.