He had to keep an open mind. And a clear one. The purpose of his visit to Reeds was to see if he could find any clues as to who might have kidnapped Harry Venus and why. Money, of course, but Lee couldn’t believe that it was just cash that had singled Harry out to whoever held him captive. Why him? His parents were wealthy, but he couldn’t believe they were the richest mummy and daddy of a Reeds boy. Most of their dosh seemed to be in property, which meant that to release large sums would take time. The kidnappers had been in touch with Venus that morning, demanding more money. Tony Bracci had told him that this time Venus had demanded proof of life. But he’d also put his flat up for sale. The techs had got the phone number and traced it to the Paddington area. It had been nicked.
Lee wandered into Tesco’s cafe and ordered a coffee and a piece of cheesecake. There was definitely more to this than money, but was there also an element of punishment too – aimed more at Venus than his son?
*
‘Real, proper Indian curry!’
The boy smiled at the tourists and wiggled his head in that way they, no doubt, expected him to.
Baharat Huq shook his head. He said to the boy, whom he knew, ‘What the hell you talk about India for? You’ve never been to India in your life.’
The boy dropped his fake subcontinent accent and said, ‘You think you can get anyone in any restaurant down here without the Indian thing? They don’t know where Bangladesh is, innit.’
‘Ach.’
Baharat walked on. He knew very well that all the restaurants had to be Indian for marketing purposes, just as it was wise always to put a Hindu god in the window to attract punters. Preferably the elephant god Ganesh.
‘Abba.’
His son Ali crossed the road. He’d come out of the Jamme Masjid. Still smarting from their last bad-tempered encounter, Baharat nevertheless let his son hug him.
‘You’ve been at prayer.’
‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘I didn’t see you.’
‘You know I don’t always go,’ Baharat said. ‘Allah is everywhere.’
His son looked down at the ground. In recent years his observance of his faith had grown directly in proportion to a decline in his father’s outward piety. It obviously rankled. Baharat changed the subject.
‘Young Shazia is working for your cousin Aftab in his shop in Forest Gate,’ he said. ‘Heavy work, but Aftab says that she is doing well. She has determination and strength of character, that one.’
‘And my sister allows it?’ Ali said.
‘Your sister who worked in my shop when she was that girl’s age and younger? With you and your brother?’ Baharat said. ‘Why not?’
He was goading his son and he knew it. ‘Why not, Ali?’ he repeated.
‘You know why not, Abba.’
‘Ah, because she is a girl.’
‘You—’
‘The thing you so-called “pure” Muslims always forget is that the Prophet, Blessings and Peace be Upon Him, took as his first wife a woman who had a job. Khadija was a merchant, but she was also the first Muslim. And people like you would put her daughters behind closed doors?’
‘Women tempt,’ Ali said. ‘They can’t help it, but they must be protected and men, in turn, must be shielded from the temptations that they bring.’
There had always been ‘loose’ women. Back home in what had then been East Pakistan, every village had at least one. They were generally shunned by all but their late-night, very guilty, customers, but other women were not looked upon with undue suspicion. Although there had always been a level of sexual violence in heavily populated areas like Dhaka, in recent years it seemed to have risen. Maybe it was because it was more widely reported, but Baharat felt that radicalisation was also to blame. Why were nice Bengali boys with good prospects going to Syria to fight jihad? And why, when they got there, were they turning into rapists and murderers? There was no excuse and there was no connection to religion that he could see. Oddly his son could, and it made Baharat sad.
‘I don’t know who you have been listening to these past years,’ he said. ‘But I worry that what they have been saying to you bears no relation to the religion of your ancestors.’
‘Abba, you are behind the times. Islam is moving.’
‘Ah, to kick the Crusaders out of the Middle East? The Jews out of everywhere?’ He shook his head. ‘Muslims have grievances. They are valid, but so are other people’s. We all must accommodate each other.’
‘No.’ He looked up. ‘Not anymore.’
The old man shrugged. ‘We have to disagree, then,’ he said. ‘It makes me sad, Ali.’
‘I can’t help that.’
‘What we must hang on to is respect,’ he said. ‘Me for you – although I cannot agree with your views – and you for me.’
Ali said nothing.
‘What I’m saying, my son, is that you will not interfere in the life of your brother, your sister or her daughter. I will not tolerate it. And I tell you, I won’t allow it.’
‘Allow it?’ Ali’s face flushed. ‘Oh, and will you not “allow” me to pursue jihad if it is the right thing for me to do?’
‘Is it?’
He felt his heart squeeze.
Ali said, ‘I don’t know. I haven’t made my mind up, but if I do then I have to know that you won’t inform on me to the police. You’re so in love with this country and its culture and—’
‘I will do what I think is right at the time, my son.’
He shook his head. ‘Your son?’
He walked away, leaving what should have been a statement hanging in the air.
Baharat wanted to cry. What should have united them – religion – had somehow driven them apart and he couldn’t understand why. Why would anyone want to go and fight in a country far away that was not their own? And how could the jihadists in Syria even dare to claim that name? They were thugs. Ali was an intelligent man, what did he find to admire so much about these vile people?
Then he looked at the bored kid outside the ‘Indian’ restaurant, trying to tempt tourists inside. Such soul-destroying work. Baharat could understand how kids like that might think that war was preferable to their own dull lives. Maybe they were not bright enough to recognise that real war was not like a video game. But what was Ali’s excuse? A well-educated, prosperous businessman who could go anywhere and do just about anything he wanted? He said that his life lacked direction, but Baharat didn’t even know what that meant.
*
Buildings that were usually full of people were always slightly forbidding when empty. Lee remembered once visiting a deserted hospital. Admittedly he’d been looking for an escaped prisoner, but the place itself had made him shudder.
Reeds was a four-storey red-brick building with a clock tower at its centre. It looked like a grand version of a typical Edwardian school, like the one that Lee had gone to in Plaistow. It was only the size and the massive grounds that made it look different. Also there were no graffiti.
Lee pulled up right in front of the shiny wooden doors that were the main entrance, but he could see no sign of any other cars. A caretaker must have opened up, and McCullough was late. It didn’t matter. It was another warm day and so it wasn’t unpleasant leaning on the car, having a fag in the sunshine. He imagined, given McCullough’s relaxed attitude to smoking, that no one was going to come and tell him off. The posh tended to do what they liked, so they’d probably respect him for having a puff.
How long it took Lee to recognise that the small white blob in the window above the main entrance was a face was something he would later wonder. He had been looking up into the sky for at least a couple of moments, so maybe he’d thought that the pale oval was some sort of after-image caused by bright sunlight. But he couldn’t remember clearly. Then when his vision resolved he saw that the patch had eyes, pale hair and a mouth that moved. He pushed himself away from the car and walked closer to the building. There was no sound. Either the child – it could only be a small boy, as its head was
only just visible above the windowsill – couldn’t shout loudly enough to make himself heard or Lee’s ears were playing up. He moved closer still. The pale head was joined by two white hands, which hammered silently on the window. Lee felt cold. There was still no sound and yet the boy was clearly in distress. He couldn’t just stand there and do nothing.
He looked around for McCullough or anyone else, but the place was like a tomb, except for the white-faced boy. Then he saw what looked like a pair of hands on the kid’s shoulders and the tiny mouth opened in what had to be a scream. Lee ran up the steps to the front entrance, tried first one then the other round handles. The fucking thing was locked! Just in case, he called ‘Help!’ to whoever might be able to hear him. He knew that if he shoulder-charged the doors he’d only injure himself, but he’d give kicking them a go. As he walked back to take a run at them, he called up to the kid ‘I’m coming!’ All he could do was hope that he was. Those doors were bloody solid.
‘What you doing?’
The voice made Lee turn. More of a girl than a woman, she wore a dayglo lemon boob tube and very tight jeans.
‘There’s a boy,’ Lee began. ‘Up there.’ He pointed.
She looked. She had some of the biggest hair Lee had ever come across, and one of the biggest bodies.
‘What you mean?’
‘There!’
Now he looked. There was no boy. Nothing.
She said, ‘What?’
‘There was a kid,’ he said. ‘A boy, up there, in that window. Yelling for help.’
‘A boy? School’s closed. No boys here. Who are you anyway? This is private property.’
Lee noticed she was chewing, which annoyed him. Gum made everyone who chewed it look thick.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘None of your business,’ she said. Then, suddenly, her face changed. ‘Here, you that bloke Malcolm asked us to open up for?’
‘If you mean Malcolm McCullough, yes,’ Lee said. ‘But about this boy—’
‘Ain’t no boy in there,’ she said. ‘School’s closed, like I said. My old man’ll be along soon with the keys. Once Mr McCullough gets here, then you’ll see.’
Lee looked up at the window again and shook his head. There had been a boy up there. He’d seen him, even if he hadn’t heard him. And someone had placed hands on his shoulders.
‘Well, can I go in and check?’ Lee said.
She adjusted her jeans. ‘When me old man gets here.’
Seeing the look of impatience on Lee’s face she said, ‘There’s no one in there. Big windows in an old place like this. Trick of the light. Boys see all sorts in them windows all the time.’
*
He’d shat himself. He didn’t know how, he hadn’t eaten for . . . He didn’t know how long. In such complete darkness there was no point of reference and there had been no sound for a very long time. Harry knew he had been left to die. What he couldn’t understand was why.
His parents would have coughed up. They had coughed up. So what had gone wrong? Something must have. But then as Harry began to shiver in the coldness of his own shit, he knew the answer. They couldn’t let him go. They’d never been able to. And it was the perfect crime.
12
Baby Madonna.
The nurse with the red hair had yelled her name and then smiled inanely at him, as if she were talking to a moron. Admittedly, most of his fellow residents were morons. Looking at them now, lurking round the walls in plastic padded chairs, gurning at a TV show about cooking, it was difficult to see why any of the staff would think they were worth speaking to like human beings. They were barely alive, most of them. Francis Chitty was just the same on the outside. Inside, however, he knew what was going on and he was well aware of the fact that he was not dementing. He’d diagnosed enough of that in his time. He knew what it looked like and it wasn’t like him. Hard of hearing, underweight and nursing a dodgy ticker, Dr Chitty still had his marbles, even if the staff of the Lilacs Residential Care Home chose to ignore that fact.
A woman wanted to see him about baby Madonna. It was a name he hadn’t heard for decades, and for a moment his old heart had stuttered. Red nurse hadn’t said why this nameless woman wanted to see him about Madonna, but he could hazard a guess. A lot of time had passed since those events of 1971, and although he had thought about them from time to time, he’d begun in recent years to think that he’d never hear about them again. But even with a brain softened by years of Eamonn Holmes, Jeremy Kyle and Strictly Come Dancing, he had to know deep down that the baby wouldn’t just go away.
Was the woman who wanted to see him Madonna, all grown up? How had she found him? And why after all this time? She had to be middle-aged. Mother Emerita had died a long time ago. All the nuns from that time had gone, dead or back to Italy, except for Sister Pia. She, he’d heard, was dying. And death had a way of opening mouths, as he knew. It was natural for people to want to clear their consciences prior to death even if they weren’t religious. One of his patients, a married man with five children, had told him he was actually gay as he lay dying in what had been his marital bed for over fifty years. Dr Chitty had never told anyone. Baby Madonna was the same. Since the moment she left the Sisters of Mary Immaculate of Siena to go to the orphanage in Essex, he had not so much as breathed her name.
Red nurse had said to him, ‘You don’t have to see the lady. Don’t worry. I’ve told her Dr Saleh wouldn’t like you to be bothered.’
So he did have an ‘out’. Except that he really didn’t. Now that Madonna had somehow moved into the light, he would have to deal with her. The only question he had to think about was when.
*
‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’
Malcolm McCullough shook Lee’s hand. Wearing a jacket with elbow patches and cords, he looked every inch the archetypal teacher. He also reeked of fags. ‘Hope Lila’s been keeping you entertained.’
Lee just smiled. Lila, the boob-tube girl, was the caretaker’s wife. Her ‘old man’, Bob, had turned out to be just that. It had taken him a while to find the right key to open the school front entrance, mainly because he couldn’t see much without the glasses he needed but didn’t possess. As soon as the door had opened, Lee had dashed inside and up the stairs that were straight in front of him. The window where he thought he’d seen the child let light onto a landing that was completely deserted.
Lila and Bob had let Lee run through Reeds’ corridors looking for his pale boy, until McCullough had turned up.
Now they all stood inside the main entrance. Lila lit a fag. ‘Been looking for some boy,’ she said to McCullough as she nodded towards Lee.
‘What boy?’
Lee told him what he’d seen. Malcolm McCullough nodded. ‘Old buildings like this can do weird stuff to our perceptions,’ he said. ‘Boys are always imagining they’re seeing ghostly faces at these windows.’
‘Trick of the light,’ Lila reiterated.
‘Yeah, but I’m not a hormonal fourteen-year-old,’ Lee said. ‘What I saw was a real face of a real boy in trouble.’
‘So where is he?’ the caretaker asked. ‘Mr McCullough, soon as I opened up, this bloke runs in all over the place. Never found nothing though, did you?’
‘I ran down a few corridors,’ Lee said. ‘Couldn’t get into any of the rooms. Can we go and do that now, please?’
McCullough smiled. ‘Of course.’
He took two bunches of keys from the caretaker. ‘I promised you a full tour and that is what you’re going to get. Would you like to start upstairs, Mr Arnold?’
‘Yeah.’
They left the caretaker and his wife at the main entrance. The girl was smoking and whispering in her husband’s ear.
‘Traffic in and out of Henley was atrocious,’ McCullough said. ‘We’re on the countdown to the regatta and so the town’s full of rowers and boaters doing their prep. And tourists. If I’d been on time you wouldn’t have had such a fright. I do apologise.’
‘I saw w
hat I saw.’
‘It’s hot today,’ McCullough said. ‘And you’d been driving. Believe me, Mr Arnold, no one can get in here when school is closed. As well as Bob we’re also bristling with alarms, CCTV cameras . . .’
‘At the front entrance?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’d like to see what it caught,’ Lee said.
‘Well, it won’t have recorded the window where you said you saw something,’ McCullough said.
‘Then which one would?’
‘I don’t know. We’d have to ask our security providers and the headmaster.’ He opened a door to a large room that smelt of paint. ‘If anyone had been in here the motion sensors would have picked it up. Alarms would have gone off and Bob would have called the police. This is one of the art rooms.’
There were two half-finished canvases on easels. Oil paintings of what Lee knew were called ‘still life’. A pear, a bunch of flowers and a wine glass. A nice picture for a proud mother to display over her fireplace. Painting materials of all sorts – oils, watercolours, pastels – were ranged in neat drawers beside reams of paper, buckets of pencils and felt-tipped pens. There were clay ovens too. Surrounded by the usual array of deformed pots and surreal attempts at modelling dogs. Possibly underneath there were a few clay penises. There always had been at Lee’s old school.
‘The boys also work with textiles, wood, metal and whatever other medium they feel inclined to explore,’ McCullough said. ‘Most of ’em will end up in business or the military and so this is often the only chance they’ll get to explore their creative potential. A few of ’em opt to take the GCSE, but art is generally an extra-curricular.’
‘Does Harry Venus like art?’
They walked out and McCullough locked the door.
‘Not unduly.’
‘What does he like?’
‘Can’t say I really know. He’s not one for interests or hobbies; he’s academic. History, English, but his real talent is for languages. French, German, Arabic and now Mandarin. One day he’ll become an academic or a diplomat. Mind you, Tom de Vries is the one who really has a shoo-in for the diplomatic corps because of his father. Bit of a waste really.’
Enough Rope: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery) Page 13