Enough Rope: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery)

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘I want you to tell me what you do for Zafar-ji.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mr Bhatti,’ Baharat said. ‘You know, the deliveries.’

  The boy shrank. The spaces between his spots reddened. Baharat wondered if he’d make up a lot of rubbish about delivering electrical goods for Zafar-ji, but he didn’t. Although trembling, he said, ‘Zafar-ji knows people’s secrets and people are in debt to him. Me too. I need money. Amma won’t take a penny from Amir. He even bought her a Rolex, but she just chucked it on the floor. She says his money’s filthy.’

  ‘She’s a good woman.’

  ‘She’s soft in the head,’ Imran said.

  Baharat clipped him round the side of his head.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Don’t speak about your mother like that! She took pain to give you life.’ He took one of the boy’s hands. ‘Now young man, it’s like this. What you do is not so clean, now is it?’

  Imran just looked at him.

  ‘Taking dirty messages from this man to that girl and what have you. I know how it is. “Will you meet me at dusk by the river, my own true love for whom I will give my honour?”’

  The boy looked shocked. He said, ‘They make arrangements of where to fuck.’

  Baharat almost hit him again, but the boy cringed in anticipation. ‘It’s what they say!’

  ‘I know. I know.’ Baharat sniffed. ‘Sadly. Now, I cannot believe that your dear mother wouldn’t think such employment easily as dirty as the drugs that your brother sells, and yet you are the man of the house. Does your mother think that maybe you do something else for your living, young man?’

  The boy put his head down but said nothing.

  ‘Your silence tells me that she does,’ Baharat said.

  ‘You won’t . . .?’

  The old man raised a hand. ‘Ach! Quiet now! Of course I will not tell your mother, much as it upsets me to fall into the sin of lying. Your mother is a woman who has nothing and you provide for her. I have to say “Bravo”. But in order to keep my silence, you must help me, Imran.’

  ‘What? With messages to a girl?’

  Baharat slapped him. ‘No!’

  ‘Ow! Baharat-ji . . .’

  ‘No. All you need to do is tell me how you pick up the mail from the postal address,’ he said. ‘No one sees that door open or close. You emerge from Zafar-ji’s shop carrying bags. Do you get in around the back somehow? Or through his shop?’

  The boy looked away.

  ‘I will say nothing to Zafar-ji, on my honour,’ Baharat said. ‘But I have to know.’

  ‘Why?’

  He couldn’t tell him it was for Mumtaz. ‘Because I have an interest in the property,’ he said. ‘If it helps, I can tell you that it has nothing to do with the courting couples you enable. It is more serious than that.’

  The boy paled. ‘What?’

  ‘That is for me to know and you to not worry about.’

  ‘It’s not got to do with taking them packages to that weird shop up Bethnal Green, has it?’

  ‘What weird shop, Imran?’

  But then the boy reddened again. He mumbled, ‘Nothing.’

  Baharat took him by the shoulders. ‘No it isn’t,’ he said. ‘It is far from nothing. What do you mean, boy? What weird shop in Bethnal Green?’

  *

  The silence combined with the absolute darkness made for a total loss of orientation. All he knew was that he breathed. That he could feel the tightness of the FlexiCuffs around his wrists. Every time he pulled against them, they got tighter. He should have known better, but then maybe he welcomed the pain because it confirmed he was alive. They’d even put plasticine in his mouth to stop him making any sound through the gaffer tape that covered his face. They’d thought of everything.

  Did his parents think he was dead? Harry Venus knew that his mum and dad had paid up, but where did that leave him? He couldn’t go home. They’d never let him – or rather he wouldn’t. They’d always wonder what he’d say. He’d told them he’d say nothing, but they hadn’t believed him, though they should have done. Because Harry wasn’t going to say anything. Ever. It’s not what was done and they knew it.

  *

  ‘So what did the Little Sisters of Eternal Pain have to say?’

  Mumtaz didn’t often come to Lee’s flat. She sat down.

  ‘Lee, don’t speak about them like that.’

  ‘I’m forever blowing bubbles!’

  Chronus the mynah bird liked to sing his West Ham United songs and chants at every opportunity. Lee and Mumtaz both ignored him.

  ‘The Mother Superior of the Siena Sisters was very sincere,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘Good for her.’ Lee sat down. Religion, of whatever sort, was just beyond him. ‘Anyway, useful?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think I have a direction now. But Lee, I didn’t come here about me. I gently put the word around that your postal address on Brick Lane was a bit of a mystery. Everyone knows what it is, as I told you, but how the post was being collected when the door never opened . . .’

  ‘You found out?’

  ‘According to my source, the electrical shop is connected internally to the house next door. To get in, one has to go up a flight of stairs and then through a hatch, which leads to the head of the staircase in the empty property. Whether the owner of the house knows or not, I haven’t been told. The boy who collects the post cannot be seen from the outside, thereby ensuring some measure of security for Mr Bhatti’s guilty clients, while also making sure that the owner can’t be told about any comings and goings from his property. It’s very Bengali – clandestine, but not.’

  ‘And religion makes people behave like this?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Sorry, Mumtaz, but it’s like the nuns are behaving like, well, they’re frightened to live.’

  She leaned forward in her chair. ‘Lee, forget religion,’ she said. ‘The point is that the boy gets in through the electrical shop. So when you observed him he could well have picked something up from the postal address. And there’s something else. My contact . . .’

  ‘Mumtaz, it’s me,’ Lee said. ‘It was your dad, wasn’t it?’

  Mumtaz said nothing for a moment. They both knew her contact was Baharat Huq.

  ‘The boy says that a few days ago – he couldn’t be specific, he’s not the brightest star in the sky – he took some parcels from the postal address to a shop in Bethnal Green. These were heavy packages and he remembers them because packages are unusual. In general he delivers letters to and from illicit lovers and final demands to unscrupulous businesses who like to remain hidden behind a PO box. But this was different. It was a series of heavy parcels addressed to an Englishman – a Mr Shaw. He has no idea who that is, but he does know that he delivered these parcels to a young Asian man.’

  ‘In Bethnal Green.’

  ‘He called it a “hippy” shop, but I suspect that is Mr Bhatti’s word,’ Mumtaz said. ‘He couldn’t remember the name of the shop or what street it was in, but I managed to deduce it was somewhere round Arnold Circus.’

  ‘The old flats with a garden and bandstand in the middle. Know it well.’

  ‘Once council-owned, now very chic,’ she said. ‘There are hippy shops all over the place up there now. By “hippy” I mean vintage, organic, you know the score. I thought you’d find it of interest.’

  He leaned back in his chair.

  Chronus yelled, ‘West Ham till we die!’

  ‘Useful,’ Lee said.

  ‘Good.’ She made as if to go.

  Then he said, ‘Especially now the coppers are involved.’

  ‘What?’

  He could tell her now.

  ‘If you sit tight for moment, I’ll make you a cuppa and tell you about it,’ he said. ‘You got time?’

  ‘Of course,’ she nodded.

  ‘Who are ya? Who are ya? Who are ya?’

  This time they both looked at the yelling mynah bird and Lee said, ‘Oh wind it in wil
l you please, Chronus.’

  When he’d gone to make the tea, Mumtaz took a small plastic container out of her handbag and gave the bird a piece of pineapple she’d kept from the Florida salad she’d had for her lunch. She’d spent a lot of time at Chiswick police station making an appointment to see someone who probably wouldn’t be able to help her. The luxurious salad had been her reward. And the bird’s.

  10

  Vi Collins looked at her boss, who, weirdly, blushed.

  ‘You must think I’m a prize idiot, DI Collins,’ Paul Venus said.

  ‘What, for doing what you thought was right for your boy?’ Vi shook her unnaturally dark-haired head. ‘No, sir. Off course you might’ve been, but an idiot? No.’

  ‘I’ve parted with a lot of money and I still don’t have Harry.’

  When Venus had been discharged from the Whittington, he’d been met by two SOCO officers who were now examining his flat. Out in the garden in the summerhouse, he sat with Vi Collins drinking Starbucks coffee and letting her smoke.

  ‘Why’d Brian Green’s new missus come and see you?’ Vi said.

  He sighed. ‘I knew you’d recognise her,’ he said. ‘As you know, Brian was a villain long ago.’

  ‘Still is.’

  Venus drank his latte and didn’t comment. Then he said, ‘My wife knew him in the seventies. This is all on record, DI Collins. I called Brian as a friend of the family.’

  ‘In case he could dig out some old contacts.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ He put his head in his hands.

  ‘We’ll know when the kidnappers call, sir . . .’

  ‘They haven’t called since they took the money,’ he said. ‘Presumably they still have my son . . .’

  ‘Not necessarily. Sometimes kidnappers release their victims miles away from where they’ve been held, in order to put us off their scent. I’ve tapped up a few old colleagues to keep an eye open. No details.’

  ‘And only you, Chief Inspector Stone and Tony know, apart from SOCO . . .’

  ‘We’re on a special assignment,’ Vi said.

  Venus managed a smile. ‘Imagine us talking like this, DI Collins,’ he said. ‘Talking at all.’

  Vi sat back in what she would have described as a ‘posh’ deck-chair. No one was listening. She spoke her mind. ‘You don’t like what I am – sir,’ she said. ‘You never have.’

  He didn’t deny it. How could he?

  ‘Might seem like I’m kicking you when you’re down, but to be frank with you, I’m a bit surprised you chose a middle-aged, hard-smoking, drinking woman to find your son. Because you know that’s how you’ve always made me feel.’

  ‘Like a middle-aged, hard . . .’

  ‘Like an old lump of sirloin, past its sell-by date,’ she said.

  He looked down at the floor.

  ‘I’ve felt as if my job’s been on the line ever since you came to us,’ she said. ‘Like I’m out the door for not being into Zumba and having unwhitened teeth. I’m guessing that in spite of that, you think I’m good enough at my job to find your son.’

  ‘You’re also a mother,’ he said. ‘And a good copper.’ He looked up. ‘I’m sorry, DI Collins. We’re very different people. I’ll be honest, your personal habits appal me. They have no place in the modern police force.’

  ‘Your midlife crisis appals me,’ Vi said.

  In spite of his need to keep her on side, Venus bridled. ‘Having my staff make up stories about affairs I haven’t had doesn’t help,’ he said.

  ‘And looking down young DCs’ tops does?’

  He knew he did that and he visibly deflated.

  ‘But all that’s bollocks at the moment, anyway.’ Vi had had her say. It was time to get on with the job. ‘We have to find Harry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now Lee Arnold called me this morning and told me he may have a lead on that PO box in Brick Lane you took the first lot of money to,’ she said. ‘So he’s checking that out. He’s also planning to go to your son’s school.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Invited by his English teacher, Arnold told me. Your wife gave him the bloke’s details and they met up when Lee went to Henley.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Mr McCullough.’

  ‘Don’t know the geezer’s name, but Arnold reckoned he knew something weren’t right and that was why he offered to help.’

  Venus looked confused. ‘Help? In what way?’

  ‘Maybe someone at the school has your son,’ Vi said.

  ‘That’s ridiculous! Why . . .?’

  ‘I don’t fucking know, do I? But Arnold wants to check out every possibility and I’m with him on that score. And he has the contact with this Mr McCullough, so why not? You told Arnold yourself you were keeping him on because he can go places more easily than us coppers.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘You think it’s a waste of time? Fine,’ she said. ‘But you’ve brought me in to run this investigation and you’ve retained Lee Arnold, so let us get on with it.’ Then she added, ‘You’ve not exactly covered yourself in glory so far, have you?’ Then, regretting what she’d just said, she shook her head. ‘That was uncalled for. Forget I said that.’

  Venus said nothing for almost a minute. Then he shook his head. ‘No, you’re quite right, DI Collins,’ he said. ‘I either let you run this investigation or I don’t. Please do what you think is best.’

  Then he stood up and walked out into his small garden. Everything in it looked dead.

  *

  Mumtaz took the Tube back to Chiswick for her meeting with Sergeant Connolly. On the phone he’d portrayed himself as some sort of Chiswick historian, but he’d sounded as if he were only about thirty. And if that was so, then there had to be a limit to how much Chiswick history he had actually experienced. Not that it probably mattered too much. He’d said he ‘knew of’ Alison’s case, which was more than anyone else had.

  It was a long journey from Upton Park to Turnham Green and so Mumtaz had a lot of time to think. Normally she would have taken a book, but she had too much on her mind. As well as from Alison’s case, she had a vision of Shazia trying to lift boxes of tinned goods out of Cousin Aftab’s van. But the girl had been so keen to start, she’d had to let her. Aftab was paying her well and they needed the money, what was to argue about?

  The thing that really disturbed Mumtaz, however, was what Lee had told her about Superintendent Venus’s son. It had made her shake. That was her worst nightmare and the one that Naz Sheikh and his family exploited to the full. She hoped that what she’d told Lee about Imran Ullah would help in the search for Harry Venus, and when a young boy of about Harry’s age got into the carriage at Tower Hill, she felt tears start in her eyes. Chastising herself for being so soft, Mumtaz looked away.

  There was nothing she could do for Harry Venus except keep her ear to the ground with regard to the Brick Lane connection. Her job was to find Alison’s parents, if she could. As the Tube pulled out of Blackfriars station, the ecclesiastical reference struck her and she thought about Sister Pia. She wasn’t alone in thinking that the old nun knew more about Alison than she was letting on. She’d seen some doubt in Mother Katerina’s eyes when Sister Pia spoke about the baby. And then, just before Mumtaz left, Mother Katerina had taken her to one side and told her that she would do what she could to find out where the old convent doctor was living. The last thing she’d said to her was, ‘I’ve been told that Dr Chitty attended the baby every day during her stay with this Order. He may know things about her that the Sisters didn’t.’

  *

  Lee had always liked Arnold Circus. A raised green space in the middle of an estate of council-owned mansion flats in Bethnal Green, his mum Rose’s friend Eva had lived there years ago. Built on the ruins of the poorest, roughest part of the Victorian East End, known as the Old Nichol, Arnold Circus, next door to the bars and clubs of Shoreditch, was very trendy. It also, he noticed, seemed to have been invaded by young men from an Edwardian photograph. Bearded and moustachioed,
they seemed to like wearing old suit jackets that smelt of mothballs. They either rode or had bicycles with them, and very pretty girls too, in floral dresses.

  Hipsters, the press called them. The sons and daughters of the rich who liked an urban vibe in their lives, who wanted to live in a flat in a tower block, or an old mansion building. Where Lee came from they were called twats.

  He walked once round the bandstand at the centre of the circus. Old Eva had lived at the top of one of the blocks. She’d been a council tenant until her son bought the flat. Lee wondered how much money he’d made out of it, when he’d inevitably sold it on to a boy with a taxidermy collection.

  Imran Ullah had told Mumtaz’s ‘connection’ that the shop he’d taken those heavy parcels to sold food. He either couldn’t or wouldn’t say exactly where it was. It had been ‘weird’ because there had been sawdust on the floor and the fruit had been in wooden boxes. Lee took a stroll. It was hard to find a food shop that didn’t conform to that description. Everything foodie was organic and wrapped in either paper or wood. If only Imran had been able to remember the name of the fucking place! He had given Baharat Huq the name of the man the parcels had been addressed to – a Mr Shaw – but he could hardly walk into every food shop in the vicinity of the Circus and ask. It was probably a pseudonym anyway. It was anodyne enough. According to Mumtaz’s ‘informant’, the Ullah boy wandered about in a dream most of the time anyway.

  There were more shops on Calvert Avenue than anywhere else, but there were also some on Navarre Street. They had names like ‘Organiks’, ‘Apples and Pears’ and ‘Veg’. Names that made Lee have to face just how fucking cynical he was. Skinny daughters of Sloane Rangers carefully examined new apples in baskets and all Lee could think about was how much they all needed a bag of chips.

  He walked down Navarre Street. An Asian boy with dyed blond hair and jeans that left nothing to the imagination strolled out of Veg and lit a cigarette. He was as far from Imran Ullah and his saggy shalwar khameez as it was possible to get. For a moment their eyes met and then the boy looked away, his nose in the air as if he’d just detected a bad smell.

  *