An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2)

by Barbara Nadel

  Gangsters. Of course. Mumtaz’s throat felt dry and she cleared it with a cough. ‘I’ll call Mrs Mirza in the morning.’

  ‘Good.’

  Mumtaz had asked to meet up at the office before they went home because she’d needed to talk about what she’d seen at the back of that pub. She didn’t want to take those images home with her. But Lee’s assessment of Wendy Dixon’s future was so bleak she could hardly bear it. She changed the subject. ‘What about the police being called out to the Plashet cemetery,’ she said.

  Lee shrugged. ‘Again,’ he said. ‘Something else that just goes on and on and on.’

  ‘Anti-Semitism?’

  He shrugged again. ‘Who knows? But whatever it was it must have been bad because when I drove past earlier, the coppers were still in there. A lot of coppers, judging by the number of cars parked outside.’

  6

  The woman he’d cuffed and then taken back to Forest Gate nick told Tony Bracci her name was Kazia Ostrowska and she was twenty-five years old. She obviously supported a Polish football team called Wisla Krakow, since she wore a Wisla Krakow tee-shirt, scarf and arm bands. She also had a grasp of the English language that she hadn’t exhibited when they’d first caught up with her the previous night. She sounded, Tony thought, a bit like the pretty blonde woman he’d spoken to when he was doing house to house on Colston Road.

  ‘I don’t care for Jews, but I never killed no-one,’ Kazia said.

  ‘What were you doing in the Plashet Cemetery in the dark?’

  Kazia turned her face towards the duty solicitor who was representing her and said nothing.

  ‘I’ll take that as a “no comment” then,’ Tony said. He looked down at his notes. ‘Considering the fact that Wisla Krakow are not playing any games in this country at the moment and you don’t live here, why are you here, Miss Ostrowska?’

  ‘My brother, he lives in Leytonstone. I tell you this I think.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tony said. He looked at his notes again. ‘Lech Ostrowski, your brother, is a cook.’

  ‘A chef,’ she corrected. ‘I come for holiday.’

  ‘For almost three months?’

  ‘Why not?’ She shrugged. She was beyond thin, yet had a sort of sinewy muscularity that suggested time spent in a gym.

  ‘Who was with you in the cemetery last night?’ Tony asked.

  ‘No-one.’

  ‘Oh, come on Kazia. We have a witness who saw at least two other people. Who were you with?’

  ‘A witness?’ she said. And then she laughed. ‘A Paki.’

  Tony saw the duty solicitor flinch. ‘I don’t know a great deal about Polish football violence and far-right racist politics but I’m aware they’re connected.’ He’d seen a documentary with Ross Kemp, who used to be in EastEnders and had knocked about with a load of Polish football thugs for enough time to make a programme about it. They were serious people. ‘You’ve said you don’t like Jews. You were in a Jewish cemetery—’

  ‘The man who was dead, he was white,’ she said. The expression on her face was almost blank. She could have been talking about bus times. ‘So the Paki killed him. Easy.’

  Even if Tony hadn’t known that Majid Islam had handed his clothes over to forensics without a murmur, he still wouldn’t have believed he’d killed the man in the graveyard.

  ‘I don’t think that our witness killed anyone,’ Tony said.

  ‘You think I did.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  The man without a name had been stabbed in the back. Considerable force had been applied, according to the pathologist. Kazia looked as if she both did and didn’t have it in her. The clothes she’d been wearing the night before were also being examined by forensics. But like Majid Islam’s, they’d showed no signs of blood.

  ‘I need to know who you were with last night, Kazia,’ Tony said. ‘Give me their names. If they’re a bit tasty we’ll protect you.’

  ‘I was alone. How many times … !’

  He looked into her eyes. They were as blue and as cold as an Alpine lake. Her lips curled as she regarded Tony with something approaching humour. ‘I want cigarette now,’ she said.

  *

  Mumtaz was on the phone to Ayesha Mirza. Still talking, she picked up her car keys. As soon as she’d finished the call, she’d have to go and pick up Shazia.

  ‘If you like I’ll come round to your house tomorrow morning, I can show you the footage,’ she said. ‘But it isn’t for the fainthearted. I’m sorry.’

  At the other end of the line, Mrs Mirza sighed.

  ‘Christ, I knew our Wend was into something horrible. Everyone knows what Sean Rogers and his brother are, but to do that to our Wend … I’ve got to get her and the kids out of there.’

  ‘But you must be careful, Mrs Mirza,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Wendy owes Sean Rogers rent or she wouldn’t be doing this.’

  ‘Then I’ll pay it off for her, I’ll—’

  ‘Rogers may want to charge you interest on what she owes,’ Mumtaz cut in. She wanted to add I know all about this because that was exactly what had happened to her with Ahmet’s debts, but she managed to stop herself. Her problems with the Sheikh family, the gangsters her husband had associated with, were not Mrs Mirza’s. ‘It could be at an extortionate rate. Say nothing until you’ve seen the footage and then speak to Mr Arnold, he was a policeman and he knows the Rogers brothers. He will advise you.’

  She eventually agreed to this and Mumtaz managed to end the call. She walked out of the house and looked at the shabby little Micra on her driveway. When Ahmet had been alive they’d had not only the Mercedes, but a gardener too, and she’d had all her jewellery back then … But what had gone along with all that had not been so pleasant. She looked at the battered old car and smiled. She was about to open the driver’s door when Mr Higgs from across the road, the one Ahmet had always called the ‘Leftie’, stopped trimming his hedge and called out to her, ‘Did you hear they found a man dead in the old Jewish Cemetery?’

  *

  John’s shack was barely a structure at all. Made out of a hood of tangled branches and creepers, it hung between two trees that butted up against the cemetery wall. The branches, which didn’t belong to the trees, were clearly old and dead and, at some point, someone had thrown a sheet of polythene over them.

  Underneath the canopy, on ground that was churned and damp from the recent rain, was a rolled up sleeping bag, a candle that was half burnt down and a tobacco tin. How did John survive?

  Feeling like a burglar, Nasreen ducked down into the shack. The sleeping bag was covered with a camouflage pattern and she wondered whether it was John’s old army one. She opened the tobacco tin and found only a couple of Rizla papers. She hadn’t realised that John smoked. She closed the tin again and unrolled the sleeping bag. There was nothing in it except a spider. Nasreen looked at the uneven surface and she wondered how he ever slept there. She didn’t know anything about the man who had been found dead in the cemetery. It might be John, but it might not. Yet she knew she should tell the police about the man who sometimes lived in her garden, a few metres from the graveyard, and was now nowhere to be seen.

  But then there was Abdullah to consider. She’d kept quiet about the ex-soldier at the end of their garden for a good reason. What would he say if she suddenly went to the police with a story about keeping a homeless man in food?

  *

  Lee went into the Boleyn at lunchtime. Usually on a Sunday he went to his mum’s place in Custom House, but she’d been invited to a friend’s for lunch and Lee didn’t want to spend any time alone with his brother. Roy Arnold, Lee’s older and only sibling, was an alcoholic. In that respect the Arnold boys were the same, except that Lee had managed to stop drinking. Roy, on the other hand, reeked of cheap cider, was lairy most of the time, could be violent and ligged off their mother at every opportunity. Lee hated him with almost the same passion as their mother loved him. He only gave him the time of day at all because of her.

 
; So he read the Sunday papers in the pub, ate a plate of chips and drank more diet Pepsi than he should. Occasionally he went out onto Green Street for a fag. The rest of the time he chatted to various people he knew both on and off the manor. A lot of them were old men, mates of his late father, plus the odd West Ham fan and someone Lee knew to be one of Vi Collins’s snouts, a bloke in an electric wheelchair called ‘Murderer’ Noakes.

  Wilf Cox, one of Lee’s dad’s old friends, bought Lee a Pepsi and himself a pint of bitter. As he walked over to the table where Lee sat flicking through the Observer, he looked over at Noakes.

  ‘Dunno who’s supposed to be looking after Murderer these days,’ Wilf said, as he put Lee’s drink down in front of him. ‘But he smells of piss.’

  Lee knew that Murderer had carers in twice a day, or he always had done.

  ‘Shouldn’t let him out smelling like that,’ Wilf said. He sat down and looked idly at a bit of Lee’s paper. ‘Bleedin’ country’s going to pot. Run by rich boys for rich boys. But no-one cares about the poor anymore do they? Look at old Murderer. I mean I know he was in that bike gang—’

  ‘The Hells Angels.’

  ‘Yeah, but now he’s a cripple and nobody wants to know!’

  In principle Lee agreed with what Wilf was saying. He hated the cuts the government was making to public services, he hated the resultant unemployment and the complete absence of punishment for the big City financiers who had brought about the economic crisis in the first place, but Murderer Noakes was hardly the epitome of want. He’d come off his bike back in 1979 while riding to some Angels orgy out in Hertfordshire. He’d had every benefit and perk the State would give him. On top of that was the money Vi Collins bunged him from time to time for keeping his ear to the ground. If Murderer smelt of piss it was possibly because he wanted to.

  Wilf read the cookery section of the Observer while continuing to witter on about politics. Lee’s own thoughts were still with the events of the previous night. Mumtaz had been right about Sean Rogers. Something needed to be done about his business practices. Sean, Marty and their silent partner Yunus Ali had been abusing their tenants for years. There were loads of stories about how they put young girls out on the streets, how they gave them as presents, and rumours about orgies, drugs, protection, and their occasional spats with the Asian Sheikh brothers organisation. Years ago, Marty’s wife Debbie had allegedly cut girls for failing to please their customers. Now it seemed Sean took the lead. But how to get either Wendy Dixon or any of the tenants of Rogers and Ali to grass on the bastards was a puzzler. There wasn’t enough property on the manor as it was and so the poor were pushed into ever smaller and more squalid spaces for more and more money.

  The door from Green Street burst open and everyone in the pub looked up. Framed in the doorway was a middle-aged woman holding a roll-up in her right hand. She was swaying. ‘I need a light for me fag,’ she said. ‘Anyone got a light for me fag?’

  Wilf said, ‘Christ,’ but Lee stood up and took his lighter out of his pocket.

  ‘You can’t smoke in here, Cheryl!’ Maureen the barmaid yelled.

  ‘Yeah, I know that, I …’

  Lee braved the hum of cheap cider that always came off Cheryl’s clothes and led her outside. She was, as usual, arse’oled. ‘I went to Mass, but they chucked me out,’ she said.

  ‘Stick your fag in your gob,’ Lee said, ‘and I’ll light it.’

  Once Cheryl had had kids, a husband and a life. But then her husband had lost his job, then she’d fallen out with him, then they’d lost their home and Cheryl had gone on the booze. Now she was homeless and drunk while her husband and her kids lived in some damp flat in Barking. She put her roll-up in her mouth and sucked hard as Lee lit it.

  ‘Ta, darling.’

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he said.

  He was just about to go back into the Boleyn when she said to him, ‘You know they found a dead body up the old Jewish Cemetery last night?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lee said. ‘Terrible.’

  ‘Not really,’ Cheryl said. She burped. ‘He was grave robbing.’

  Lee walked back towards her. ‘Who was?’

  ‘The dead geezer.’

  ‘How do you know he was grave robbing?’

  Cheryl smirked. ‘Can I have a Kronenbourg?’ she said.

  She was always ligging booze off everybody, using all sorts of weird stories. Even through the booze Cheryl knew that Lee was an ex-copper and that stories about crime would get him going.

  ‘You can have a Kronenbourg if you tell me,’ Lee said. ‘Story first, Cheryl.’

  She swayed. Stained teeth made a brief appearance as she smiled.

  ‘Because they found him with a skeleton.’

  ‘Who did? The coppers?’

  ‘Yeah. Can I have that beer now?’

  ‘No, not yet. How do you know this, Cheryl? And why should I believe you?’

  Cheryl put a finger to her nose and tapped it. ‘Because I was up there, you stupid arse.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The fucking cemetery.’ She waved a hand in the air. ‘They was talking about it. I was walking past.’

  ‘The coppers?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I dunno. It was dark.’

  ‘What did they say?’

  ‘Fucking hell, don’t you listen?’ Cheryl said. ‘They said the stiff had been grave robbing. He had a skeleton. Can you get me a beer?’

  *

  Vi was alone in the cemetery. She’d asked for a moment by herself and so SOCO had gone off to have a break. She didn’t have a clue where her Nana Faye was buried. She remembered her dying but she hadn’t gone to the funeral. She’d only been eight and Nana Faye hadn’t liked her anyway. Or rather she hadn’t liked her mum. Her dad’s people had been Orthodox Jews and so her gentile mum had never gone down well.

  She looked around at the gravestones but it was hopeless. The inscriptions were in English as well as Hebrew but half of them had been worn away or vandalised. Nana Faye had called Vi’s mum a ‘gypsy’ because she was Irish. She’d felt keenly and bitterly the dilution of her own Jewish blood. Vi’s dad, her son, had hated her for it. But in spite of this, Vi was relieved that it didn’t seem as if their unknown dead bloke had dug anyone up from the graveyard. The Polish skinhead girl they held in custody was denying any sort of involvement too and, so far, the forensic evidence from her clothes didn’t point to any either. SOCO had already checked out the one pathetic camera on the site, but it hadn’t shown anything of interest. But if the skeleton hadn’t come from the graveyard, where had it come from? And why had the dead man been lying beside it when Majid Islam tripped over him?

  Vi looked around the cemetery. She put one hand up to the Star of David around her neck but she knew that she was as much of an intruder there as the Polish girl had been.

  7

  Monday morning was dull, but at least it wasn’t raining. Nasreen sat on the back step looking at the tangle of trees and bushes that concealed John’s shack. To distract herself from thoughts of him, she took the photograph and the thing it had been hidden behind from her pocket and looked at them again. It was weird to nail a photograph behind something like that, on a doorpost. Maybe Abdullah would know what it was. He was the one who’d chosen this house, after all. He had to know more about it than she did. But did he? He’d bought the house at auction, which meant that he’d only viewed it very briefly and in a group of other potential buyers. As far as Nasreen could tell, it had been the price that had attracted him to it more than anything else. Although why that should have been of concern to a man who bought her emeralds she couldn’t always square in her mind. But since they’d got married, and particularly after she became pregnant, Nasreen had found it hard to talk to Abdullah. If he wasn’t busy, he was distracted, and if she talked about something he wasn’t interested in, he would cut her off.

  They’d met, indirectly, via her father’s brother, Uncle Salim. He lived
in Poplar where he owned a boarding house that was used by men who had come to London to work. All the landlords in the area knew each other and Uncle Salim was particular friends with a certain Fazal Bashar, who had his very personable nephew Abdullah staying with him. A thirty-seven-year-old lawyer from Bolton, Abdullah had impressed Uncle Salim from the start. After consulting Fazal Bashar and Nasreen’s father Imran who, like her mother, was a liberal, western-leaning person, Uncle Salim had introduced Nasreen to the young lawyer. The attraction between them had been immediate. Within weeks they had announced their engagement.

  During the months leading up to the wedding, Abdullah had taken Nasreen everywhere. They’d been to high-end restaurants run by celebrity chefs, to cinemas and theatres. Together they had chosen the most beautiful wedding cake and wedding rings, which Abdullah had paid for with his gold credit cards. But as the wedding day approached he had, she’d noticed, become nervous – and increasingly jealous. Later, he’d put extra pressure on himself by buying the house. He’d told Nasreen it was a bargain because it had been empty for so long and he just couldn’t let it slip through his fingers. However, there was something else too. Unlike her, Abdullah had no real family. She’d only ever, briefly, met his uncle Fazal once. Abdullah was an only child, both his parents were dead and, although he was paying his share when it came to the wedding, he was ashamed that he was doing it on his own.

  ‘But can’t your uncle help out?’ Nasreen had asked him when he’d told her. ‘Don’t you have cousins or whatever?’

  But he’d said, ‘No, there’s nobody. I left Bolton because there was no point in being there anymore. Everybody was gone.’

  ‘What about friends?’ she’d said.

  Abdullah had shaken his head. ‘All the local lads were losers,’ he’d said. ‘When I went off to uni I lost touch.’