‘Why?’
‘You just nearly died, Arnold.’
‘No, I never!’
‘Yes you did. You’ve given me a statement. You can’t do any more here now. Get off to Newham General and get checked out.’
He pulled a face.
She said, ‘Doughnut!’
She put another chip in her mouth and chewed. Then she said, ‘Do as you’re told.’
*
He’d tried bribing her. He’d said he’d cancel all her amma’s debts and leave Cousin Aftab alone. But she’d just laughed at him.
‘Every word you say is a lie. When you talk about my family, about Islam, about anything!’ Shazia said. ‘I can’t let you live. If you live you will carry on persecuting us.’
‘No, no, I—’
‘Yes you will! When you die I expect your dad and your brother will do that anyway. But I will at least have had the satisfaction of seeing you die. You know I came here to kill you myself?’
‘You wouldn’t have been able to.’
‘Maybe I wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘But I can watch you die and I can bless the man who killed you.’
‘If I am dying then there’s something you should know,’ he said. ‘About your stepmother.’
‘More lies. Save them,’ she said. ‘I won’t believe a word you say.’
‘I think you will,’ he said.
*
Mumtaz drank the tea that Alison had made for her in spite of the taste. God alone knew what she’d done to it, but it wasn’t nice. Alison wasn’t well.
‘Charlie had become a horrible little snob,’ she said. ‘Not having anything to do with the neighbours’ kids when he came home on holiday, demanding all sorts of things I couldn’t afford. And that filthy tradition they had at that school . . .’
‘Hadn’t your husband told you about it?’
‘No, he had not!’ She moved her body on the sofa to try to get comfortable. ‘I think about the last week or so and I can’t believe I’ve had to absorb so much negative information. I didn’t have any preconceptions about who I might be when my search for my mother started, but I didn’t think it would be . . . what it was. I feel tainted.’
‘None of it is your fault, Alison.’
She smiled. ‘I know. But where do I go from here, eh? Charlie facing kidnap charges. That poor Venus boy still unconscious in hospital . . .’
‘Maybe when all of that is settled you should try and find some of your relatives in Argentina.’
‘I can’t go there!’
‘Online,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Your grandmother had a family. Maybe you could trace some of them and find out more about her. She was quite famous in Argentina for a while.’
Alison frowned. ‘I’ve spoken to Mother Katerina.’
‘Good.’
‘Sister Pia is very ill now, apparently. She says that if I want to speak to her I should go as soon as I can. But you can see how bad I am.’
Mumtaz’s phone rang. ‘Excuse me.’
She looked at the screen. It was Shazia’s mobile.
‘Hi sweetie.’
There was a pause.
‘Shazia?’
*
Mumtaz got out of her car at the same moment she saw Lee leap from his. An ambulance, blue lights flashing, was in front of the house already. She ran up to the entrance. Lee, behind her, put a hand on her shoulder. Upstairs she heard voices.
‘Let me go in first,’ Lee said.
But she pushed him behind her.
‘She’s my daughter,’ she said and ran up the stairs.
Sirens in the street signalled the arrival of the police.
The ambulance crew had placed some of their equipment on the landing. It led her to where they were. There were two of them. One was putting a mask on the patient’s face. The other one stood up and walked towards her.
‘Who are you?’
For a moment she couldn’t see Shazia. Then she spotted a tiny bundle wrapped in a blanket in a corner.
Mumtaz pointed. ‘Her mother,’ she said. ‘I rang you.’
Lee joined her.
‘You her dad?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘I’m Dave,’ the man said. ‘I’m ambulance crew. With the patient we’ve got paramedic Don. As soon as we can get your mate stabilised we can get him to hospital.’
‘Will he live?’
Dave said, ‘Look, why don’t you take Shazia downstairs. She’s shocked but she talked to me quite easily. We’ll have to take her to hospital, just to check her over, but she doesn’t need to be here now.’
Mumtaz walked over to the girl.
‘Come on, sweetie,’ she said.
Slowly, Shazia looked up. Mumtaz put a hand out, but the girl didn’t move. And now that Mumtaz looked at her, she could see that her daughter’s eyes were not on her, but behind her.
‘Shazia?’
‘Lee.’ She raised her arms.
Why did she want Lee? Why? Mumtaz turned to look at him.
‘Lee, will you take me home, please?’ Shazia said.
Mumtaz felt slapped. But she moved aside so that Lee could get to Shazia.
He crouched down and put an arm around her shoulders. ‘No, not yet, babe,’ he said. ‘But I’ll take you and your mum home once you’ve been checked out at the hospital.’
The sound of several pairs of running feet on the stairs caused Mumtaz to look round.
‘Who’s that?’ Shazia said.
Lee said, ‘It’s just the police. Nothing for you to worry about, kiddo.’ Mumtaz knew that wasn’t true. When Shazia had called her, she’d been hysterical, but Mumtaz had managed to gather that Naz Sheikh had been stabbed and was at a house on Capel Road. That was when she’d called the ambulance. But Shazia hadn’t said who had stabbed the gangster. Had she done it herself? And what about the other thing Shazia had said?
‘I know, Amma, about you.’
Mumtaz looked down at her daughter, who was crying in Lee Arnold’s arms.
*
Paramedic Don Phillips knew it was a losing battle. Once it was just him and Dave again, he said, ‘He’s all over the place.’
Dave knelt down beside his colleague and looked at the screen on the monitor attached to the patient’s arm. At 150 beats per minute he was tachycardic, his blood pressure was falling and his skin was white and clammy.
‘Do you think he’s gone too far?’
‘What do you think?’ Don said. ‘We can’t move him while he’s like this. We’ll have to ride it out.’
Dave nodded. Extreme blood loss, or hypovolemia, was usually fatal. They’d both seen it as a result of gang warfare in the borough and Don had come across it in Afghanistan. This guy had been stabbed in the gut, and when they’d got to him he’d already lost consciousness.
‘What did the girl say?’ Don asked Dave.
He hadn’t had a chance to speak to the teenager who’d been with the man, and it was, in his experience, best to keep Dave talking until either a doctor arrived or the man died. Not that any doctor would make any difference to the eventual outcome. The man was still breathing, but what his brain was doing was anyone’s guess.
‘Said she found him,’ Dave said.
‘How?’
‘Didn’t say. I didn’t ask.’
‘You think she did this?’
‘I dunno. Not our worry.’
Don looked at the face behind the oxygen mask and knew what he thought. He’d seen things like this in Afghanistan. Girls who’d just had enough of their men. Although most of them had been covered up; they certainly hadn’t been wearing miniskirts and ripped tights.
26
Shazia had always liked Tony Bracci, and he liked her. Unlike Vi Collins, he wasn’t too close to the kid, but he could and did put her at her ease. He’d taken the knife she’d been carrying and her phone away from her at the scene. She’d seen a doctor and now she was in the soft interview room with her mother. She wasn’t talking to Mumtaz, he’d noticed, but
when asked whom she wanted in the interview with her, she’d chosen her mother.
‘Shazia, I have to understand why you was in that house at that time,’ Tony said. ‘OK?’
‘Yes.’
She looked down into her lap, saying nothing.
‘Shazia . . .?’
She was on a fair old whack of tranquillisers, but she was far from drowsy.
‘Oh,’ she looked up. ‘I wanted to talk to him.’
‘Who?’
‘Naz Sheikh,’ she said.
‘What about?’
‘He keeps calling me bad names,’ she said. ‘In the street. He’s one of those men who think that all Muslim girls should be covered. I’ve told him to stop in the past, but he won’t.’
‘What type of names does he call you?’
‘Horrible stuff. “Whore”, “slut”.’
‘Do you know him?’
‘No,’ she said.
Mumtaz put a hand on her shoulder, but Shazia shrugged it off.
‘If you just wanted to talk to Mr Sheikh, why’d you have a knife on you?’ Tony asked.
‘I always have a knife,’ Shazia said. ‘Most kids do. It’s rough round here.’
Mumtaz looked as if she might be about to say something, but then seemed to think better of it.
‘Well, we’ll be able to see whether you used it or not once SOCO have worked their magic.’
‘I didn’t use it.’
‘Did you see who did attack Mr Sheikh?’
There was a knock on the door. Tony said to Shazia, ‘Just a minute.’ Then he called out, ‘Come in.’
A uniformed constable entered and put a slip of paper in front of DS Bracci.
‘Shazia . . .’
‘I didn’t see anyone,’ she said. ‘When I found him he was already unconscious. I don’t know what happened.’
‘Why’d you go into the house in the first place?’
‘I saw him go in and I wanted to talk to him.’
‘So who opened the door for you if he was already unconscious?’
‘No one; the door was open.’
‘You must’ve seen him go in. Who opened the door for him?’
‘No one.’
‘So he went into a derelict house on his own, leaving the door open behind him, and you did what?’
‘I waited for him to come out,’ Shazia said.
‘To tackle him about the verbal abuse?’
‘Yes. I’d followed him. I saw him in the Lucknow Cafe . . .’
‘By Forest Gate station?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t want to have a row in there.’
‘You’d rather have a row in a deserted house?’
‘No. But I didn’t notice that the door was still open after he went inside for a long time,’ she said. ‘When I did I went inside. I went upstairs because I heard noises.’
‘What noises?’
‘Groaning . . .’
‘So you went upstairs, you found Mr Sheikh lying on a mattress on the floor, and then?’
‘I was afraid. I phoned my mum.’
‘I called the emergency services,’ Mumtaz said.
‘And yet, Shazia, although you couldn’t dial 999, you seemed to be able to call your mum and take a photograph of Mr Sheikh on your phone.’
He saw Mumtaz look at her quickly and then look away.
Shazia didn’t speak for a moment, then said, ‘I thought you might need it.’
‘Me? What for?’
‘The police,’ she said. ‘As evidence.’
Tony didn’t say anything. Forensics would prove whether or not Shazia was telling the truth about not stabbing Sheikh. What was harder to establish was whether, if she hadn’t stabbed him, she knew who had. The Sheikhs were gangsters who had many enemies both inside and outside the Bangladeshi community. Tony could think of a lot of people who might want one of them dead, but he couldn’t think of any who would actually do it. Because if the rest of the family found out who the culprit was and it turned out to be a member of a rival clan, that could cause all sorts of bother in Newham and beyond. Not that Naz himself was going to say anything. Not after Tony had read what Constable Mills had written on the note he’d handed him.
*
There was nothing he could do. The fucking street was full of police cars and ‘Police Line Do Not Cross’ tape, and although Mumtaz had told him not to wait around in the nick, he didn’t want to go home. Lee sat in the office and smoked. Bollocks to not smoking in the office. George wanted them out anyway, what did he care? And what was Shazia saying to Tony Bracci? What had she done?
He knew someone had been hounding Mumtaz for money ever since her husband had died. Was that the Sheikhs? They were good candidates. Should he tell Tony? He knew the answer to that, but he also knew the situation was complicated. Mumtaz wouldn’t want anyone to know about her involvement with the Sheikhs. He also knew that ethnic and religious loyalties that he didn’t understand were in play. There was nothing he could do, not until he knew more.
Had Shazia known that her mother was being hounded? All he knew was that Mumtaz’s late husband had owed money and she had inherited his debt. Families like the Sheikhs had expensive lawyers, and so he was sure that legally she was indebted to them. She was no fool and the Sheikhs were not the sort of outfit to leave anything to chance. Like any good crime family, they used the law. They rarely, if ever, fought it.
He’d have to speak to her. He’d have to somehow break through that brittle outer shell she always raised whenever her financial situation was mentioned and find out exactly what had been going on. Her husband had been murdered, but no one knew by whom. Had one of the Sheikhs killed him? Had Shazia somehow found out who had killed her dad? Ahmet Hakim had not, by all accounts, been a nice man, but his unsolved murder had to still rankle with his family. But could Shazia, even if she knew that, kill?
*
‘You lied.’
‘So did you.’
Mumtaz felt her stomach turn.
Shazia threw herself down into her favourite chair. ‘Would you have wanted me to tell DS Bracci that we are slaves to the Sheikhs?’
Mumtaz sat down. ‘No.’
‘Well, there you go then. I lied about why I was following Naz Sheikh, not about what happened in that house.’
‘You didn’t see anyone?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I got there and he was lying on that mattress, and the rest you know.’
‘But why did you have that knife with you?’
‘Because I wanted to kill him! After what he did to Cousin Aftab, he deserved it! I know you tried to keep it from me, but when I was staying with Dada I heard Uncle Ali talking about how someone, he didn’t know who, was demanding protection money from Cousin Aftab.’
‘How did he know?’
‘Ghazal told him. She was worried. I knew you wouldn’t do anything. I thought enough was enough.’
‘So you intended to kill him.’
‘But I couldn’t,’ she said. ‘All I did was watch him bleed and listen to him.’
Mumtaz knew that Shazia had become confused when she’d found Naz Sheikh bleeding out in that house. When she’d phoned her at Alison’s she’d said she didn’t know whether to let him die. Mumtaz had called the emergency services immediately.
Had he known he was dying? He must have had some sort of awareness.
‘Did he tell you who stabbed him? Are you protecting—?’
‘No, he didn’t,’ Shazia said. ‘But he did tell me something else. About you.’
When she’d arrived at that terrible house, Shazia had rejected her in favour of Lee. Mumtaz felt as if her head were splitting. ‘What?’
‘What? He said you know who killed my father,’ she said.
Mumtaz, her heart thundering, said, ‘Who did he say that was?’
‘He didn’t know. So he said.’
‘What else did he say?’
‘Nothing. Should he have?’
‘No.’
&n
bsp; ‘Anyway, he’s dead now and I’m not sorry,’ Shazia said. ‘Maybe they’ll leave us alone now.’
‘What, with you there, in the room where that family’s most pampered son died? Shazia, they will never leave us alone now!’
‘I didn’t kill him!’
‘You think they will ever choose to believe that?’ Mumtaz said. ‘Even if the police do find out who killed him?’
‘Then you’ll have to tell them what’s been happening, won’t you? And you’ll have to tell me who killed my father.’
What could she do? Mumtaz knew she was facing some choices that could mean life or death for them both. ‘Naz Sheikh lied,’ she said. ‘Why do you think he wouldn’t?’
‘He was stabbed . . .’
‘He was a gangster, Shazia,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Lying was just one of the many bad things that he did. I don’t know who killed your father.’
‘You hated him.’
‘So did you.’
‘He was my father.’
They sat in silence for a moment and then Shazia said, ‘Did Naz kill Dad, because of his debts?’
Mumtaz had to limit the enmity between Shazia and the Sheikhs. She said, ‘No. A man ran up, he stabbed your father and then he ran away. It happened quickly. I didn’t see him because I was attending to your dad. I may not have loved him anymore, but I never sought his death, Shazia.’
The girl looked down at the floor. ‘Neither did I.’
She’d said some hard things about Ahmet since his death. Sometimes it was almost as if she revelled in it. She’d always been good at bravado. Mumtaz wanted to go and hug her, but she knew that it was too soon. She’d heard a rumour that her mother was a liar, from a very bad man, and part of her had believed it. She would need time to absorb and totally believe Mumtaz’s words. And in the meantime, Mumtaz herself would just have to pray that Shazia had not been lying to her.
*
Ah, but the world was a wicked place sometimes. Baharat pulled down a poster some moron had put on the wall of what was once the old Katz Paper and String Shop, which said ‘Death to Zionists!’
He crumpled it up and put it in his pocket. That would do for the incinerator in the backyard. It had been a sad day. Somehow his little Shazia had found herself in a house with a member of a criminal family, the Sheikhs. He’d been stabbed. Later he died and now the police were investigating whether the girl had killed him. Of course she hadn’t, but why had she been there, with him? Mumtaz said something about the man insulting her, but that didn’t seem very plausible to Baharat.
Enough Rope: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery) Page 28