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

by Barbara Nadel

  ‘He’s right to be cautious and he’s right about the kind of lawyers Rogers and Ali would have at their disposal,’ Vi said. ‘But there are faster things than him in the morgue, yes.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll go for it, guv?’

  Vi shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘I hope so. If not, everything I told Tatiana I’d do for her is going to fall on its arse and I don’t, as you know, Tony, like being made to look a liar.’

  *

  Sean had called Wendy first thing on Monday morning and so ruined her day.

  ‘I want a little piggy for my party on Saturday night,’ he’d said. ‘You up for it, are you?’

  She’d said yes, because she’d had no choice, and he knew it. She’d tried hard not to take it out on the kids but she’d failed. Sometimes she wondered why Paul wasn’t at Sean’s parties any more, but she never had the balls to ask him. In her head, he wasn’t going to Sean’s any more because he had fallen in love with her, but she knew inside that it wasn’t true. A man like that had to have a wife or a girlfriend. She was just the ‘bit on the side’.

  Wendy looked down at her stomach and wondered whether she could be up the stick. She hadn’t taken her pill that day or the day before. She’d lied to Paul, she’d deliberately encouraged him to come inside her. She wanted his baby. If you had a baby you had a bit of the man who had made it forever. Even though she couldn’t admit it, even to herself, Wendy knew that Paul would go sometime. In the end, everybody did.

  *

  It wasn’t often that Mumtaz had to visit a home where the woman didn’t leave the house at all, but it happened occasionally and it always depressed her. This lady, an Irishwoman by birth, was the wife of a Syrian she suspected of being unfaithful to her. Her husband worked away from home in a Cash and Carry place in Walthamstow for most of the time, and so it had been quite safe for Mumtaz to visit her at their flat in Manor Park.

  The woman, who would only give her name as Zinat, was a true and pious Muslim and, although she wanted to divorce her husband if he was playing away, she told Mumtaz that she would still never go out. Even alone with Mumtaz, she covered her face and wore gloves on her hands and socks on her feet so that absolutely none of her flesh could be seen. Mumtaz told Zinat that she would arrange for one of their male freelance operatives to follow her husband for a few days and try to determine where he went when he wasn’t at work.

  Coming out of Zinat’s flat to a rain-battered, grey London lunchtime, Mumtaz was going to drive back to office when she changed her mind. And although she had told Lee that she would not be visiting Nasreen Khan’s house on Strone Road, that was where she ended up.

  She parked across the road from the house and tried to see if she could detect any movement inside. But with curtains up at all the windows both upstairs and downstairs, it was impossible to tell. She didn’t want to call if Nasreen’s husband was in. Her presence might jeopardise Nasreen’s safety. So what was she to do?

  The house to the right of the Khans’ property – which was separated from it by an alleyway – looked empty. Some of the windows were broken and there were several old mattresses dumped in the front garden. Mumtaz decided to do some property viewing. She got out of her car and crossed the road. Not a sound came from either house and so she walked up the alleyway between the rain-soaked properties.

  Both houses had back gardens that, to Mumtaz, were substantial. No doubt Mr Linn would have described them as ‘pokey’ but they weren’t. What they were, however, was in a state. Both gardens were overgrown, although Nasreen’s did show signs of work in progress. Some trees had been cut down and some patches of earth cleared. At the back of the plot, next to the wall that surrounded the cemetery, there were the remains of what resembled a terrible old shed. There was also a Butler sink just by the back door. They were quite ‘in’ with the young, stylish and ‘ethical’ and Mumtaz wondered why the Khans hadn’t either installed it in their home or sold it. She looked up at the back of the house. They hadn’t done much to it considering they’d bought it at the beginning of the year and lived in it for the last three months or so. It looked really unkempt, almost derelict.

  It was also completely silent, with not so much as a shadow showing in any of the windows. Perhaps Nasreen and her husband were both out?

  Mumtaz walked back down the alleyway and crossed the road to go back to her car. Looking up at the bay window on the first floor she saw a gap between the curtains but she couldn’t see anything beyond it. Aware that she was being watched now by a group of small brown children in the front garden of the house two doors from Nasreen’s, Mumtaz got in the Micra and drove away. When she was only halfway down Strone Road her phone rang and she pulled over and answered it.

  *

  ‘One of her neighbours called it in,’ Vi said.

  Lee, on the other end of the line, put his head in his hands. ‘Poor Mumtaz.’

  ‘At least her and Shazia were out.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s small comfort really, isn’t it?’

  Vi had been in the control room when news had come in that the windows of the house belonging to Mrs Mumtaz Hakim were being shot out by a masked man with an airgun. An armed response unit had been despatched, but by the time they got there the shooter had gone. Every window at the front of the house had been shattered.

  ‘Do you know who might do such a thing?’ Vi asked.

  ‘No.’ He didn’t, but he strongly suspected it had more than just a little to do with whoever Mumtaz owed money to.

  ‘Mmm.’ She paused for a moment, then she said, ‘Here, Arnold, the Rogers brothers, Sean and Marty?’

  ‘What about them,’ Lee said. ‘You think they hit Mumtaz’s house?’

  ‘No! Don’t be daft!’

  ‘Debbie Rogers I saw at the weekend,’ he said.

  ‘Did you? Where?’

  ‘Brian Green had a party on Saturday at his place in Ongar. A sort of “I’m still here” after the death of his wife.’

  ‘Oh yeah, which you witnessed, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Green’s retired now, ain’t he?’

  ‘So he says.’

  ‘So what’s he doing inviting the Rogers?’

  ‘Sean Rogers is his neighbour,’ Lee said.

  ‘Mmm. Lucky Brian.’

  ‘You could say the same for Sean Rogers,’ Lee said. ‘Brian’s no angel.’

  ‘No, but he’s served his time,’ Vi said. Brian Green had been to prison on three occasions. ‘Sean and his family have only ever been inconvenienced for a short while.’

  Lee smiled. Vi had a bit of a soft spot for ‘old fashioned gangsters’ – those who did bank jobs, slept with British ‘tarts’ and thought the Internet was a kind of sex aid. Sean and Marty Rogers, with their carefully crafted companies and their desperate women sourced from all over Europe, were far more savvy.

  ‘I should get over to Forest Gate,’ Lee said.

  ‘There’s nothing you can do, Arnold,’ Vi said.

  Lee put his jacket on while holding the phone up to his ear with one shoulder. ‘I can be there,’ he said, and put the phone down.

  *

  Chipboard was placed over the shattered living room window and nailed down. Mumtaz watched it darken the room and she felt despair. How was she ever going to sell the house?

  Her phone rang and she saw the number she’d called before come up on the screen. She answered. ‘Oh, hello, Christine. Thanks for getting back to me.’

  She couldn’t bring Shazia back into this. Once she’d seen the damage and spoken to the police, she’d called Shazia’s friend Maud’s mother to find out whether she could stay there for the night. The girls were pretty inseparable now and were currently in the West End for the day. After a few pleasantries, Mumtaz said, ‘Christine, I’m so sorry but we’ve had a bit of trouble at the house. The police are here now. Some hooligan has shot our front windows out with an air rifle and I don’t want Shazia to come home until I can get the glass c
leared up and can feel a little bit more secure. Would it be OK if she stayed over at your house tonight?’

  Christine said that Shazia could stay with them for as long as she liked.

  Relieved, Mumtaz said, ‘I’ll bring her things over later if that’s alright. I’m so grateful, I really cannot say.’

  It was as she was ending this call that Mumtaz saw Lee walk past the constable at the front door and come inside.

  ‘Mumtaz.’

  She put her phone down on the sofa beside her and stood up. ‘Lee, you didn’t need to …’

  He put his arms out to her and then, when he drew close, he just rested them lightly on her elbows. ‘This is terrible,’ he said.

  ‘Done by some boy for kicks the police reckon,’ she said. She tried to smile but her face wouldn’t move.

  Lee took her arm and led her back to the sofa. They sat down. Behind them a Scenes of Crime officer was examining the back wall of the living room.

  Lee looked her straight in the eyes and lowered his voice. ‘You need to tell me the truth even if you won’t tell them,’ he said, nodding his head towards the officers. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘It was a boy, they say, a—’

  ‘Don’t even try to bullshit me.’ He didn’t move his fierce gaze from her face. ‘If you’d been here, or Shazia …’

  ‘Don’t!’ Tears came, but she wiped them away with the edge of her headscarf. ‘We are all in the hands of Allah and mercifully He saw fit—’

  ‘Yeah, but you have to help him out you know, Mumtaz,’ Lee said. ‘This time the man upstairs was looking out for you, but what about next time? God helps them that help themselves, you know.’

  ‘And yet we are all in the hands of Allah and whatever it is our fate to—’

  ‘How can it be your fate to be bled dry, or even murdered, by a bunch of scumbags? Eh?’ He moved closer to her, so that he could whisper. ‘You’re a good person.’

  ‘No, I’m not!’

  The fierceness of her rebuttal startled him and, in turn, it alarmed her. She put a hand up to her mouth, suddenly afraid that if she didn’t what she’d done to Ahmet would just tumble out and disgust him.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can’t pretend to understand any of this religious business. All I can do is say it like I see it, and I see you as a good woman who works hard and does her best for her kid. That’s it. Whatever your husband did shouldn’t still be affecting your life now.’

  Mumtaz didn’t say anything. The police had taken a description from her neighbours of the man who had shot her windows out. It had almost certainly been Naz. She imagined him enjoying doing it.

  ‘But I can’t force you to do anything that you don’t want to,’ Lee continued. ‘I know that you won’t tell your family about this and I won’t try to persuade you otherwise. I know, remember, how people are around organised crime.’

  She looked round, checking that none of the police officers were listening.

  ‘Now, like it or not, I’m staying here,’ he said. ‘I don’t care where you put us, on the sofa, up the bloody chimney for all I care, but there’s no way that you’re going to be on your own in this house tonight.’

  She had all sorts of arguments against this idea assembled in her head, not least of which was her reputation, but she gave voice to none of them. After a moment’s thought she just questioned, ‘Us?’

  ‘I can’t leave Chronus on his own overnight,’ Lee said. ‘He’ll scream the flat down.’

  23

  Bloated, her feet swollen with fluid, Nasreen felt like a cow that needed to be milked. In addition to that her arms were dead, but that was not connected to her pregnancy. No, that was him. Again Abdullah had left her handcuffed to the bed all day, and this time she had wet herself.

  She thought that he would be furious when he saw what she’d done, but he didn’t say a word. He changed the sheets and told her to have a shower. Then she had to cook. While she did that, he began hammering at the walls of the small utility room behind the kitchen. Nasreen fried off her spices and then she added onions, garlic and tomatoes. When there was a pause in the hammering she said, ‘What are you looking for?’

  It had occurred to her more than once that all the hammering and breaking down of the fabric of the house had to be about more than just remodelling the place, but she’d never given voice to her suspicions before. The hammering did not recommence. With shaking hands, Nasreen added chicken to the pan. She stirred, watching the meat begin to brown and caramelise. And then there was a pain at her throat as her head was wrenched sharply backwards.

  ‘I’m not looking for anything,’ Abdullah said. ‘What makes you think I’m looking for summat?’

  Although her first urge was to back down immediately, Nasreen said, ‘Because you keep making holes in the walls.’

  ‘I’m cutting out rot,’ he said.

  She swallowed hard, it was difficult to talk with your head almost at right angles to your neck.

  ‘You don’t question me.’ He pulled her head back still further, one agonising centimetre more, and then he let her go. The chicken in the pan sizzled furiously and Nasreen smelt a faint burning. She turned the gas down.

  Now back over by the table, he switched his CD player on and ‘Scarborough Fair’ drifted into the room again. He said, ‘The only reason I can see for this lack of respect is that you’ve been talking to your fucking mother.’

  As well as being untrue, under these present circumstances this was impossible. Nasreen’s shell of self-preservation cracked. She’d not been raised to be anybody’s meek and terrified wife. ‘And how would that happen eh?’ she said. ‘Tied to the bed with no phone to—’

  ‘You cannot be trusted.’

  ‘I cannot be trusted?’ She stirred her pot, the sharp smells of cardamom, curry leaves and cumin making her eyes begin to water. ‘What is wrong with you? Why are you treating me like some sort of—’

  He hit her so hard that she fell sideways onto the floor. It was just luck that she didn’t take the pan of boiling food down with her.

  He screamed into her face, ‘You daft cunt! What you trying to do to me, eh? With your endless yack, your fucking family, your fucking friend in the fucking garden!’

  He wasn’t like a lunatic, he was one. His face was red from shouting, his eyes bulged and now she knew that he’d known about John.

  ‘So you killed him, did you?’ she said. ‘My friend in the garden? That was you, was it?’

  He didn’t say anything.

  Emboldened by his silence, in spite of the pain in her back and her side, Nasreen said, ‘Because somebody killed him. Was it you? Was it?’

  He stood up and for a moment she thought that he might be about to kick her. But instead he said, ‘When the baby’s born you can fuck off.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that, I will,’ Nasreen said.

  And then he smiled. ‘Oh, but not with the baby,’ he said. ‘I’ll take that.’

  ‘No, you bloody won’t!’ Nasreen put a protective hand over her stomach. ‘You think I’d leave my baby with a psycho like you?’

  His smile turned into a laugh. Nasreen began to feel cold. Maybe if she’d kept on appeasing him he would have eventually let her have more freedom and she could have escaped. But now that time was long gone. As he moved towards her, Nasreen tried to pull her legs as far up towards her body as she could.

  He pulled down the cooking pot onto her feet and burning hot spices and chicken scalded her legs. Nasreen was suddenly in so much pain she couldn’t even scream.

  *

  Vi watched the house in Manor Park whenever she could. She saw it as protecting her investment. The girl Tatiana had come to her to shop Sean, Marty and Debbie Rogers. Vi had trusted her about as far as she could shove her and so she’d followed her home. Now she kept an ‘eye’. The house where Tatiana lived with two other girls wasn’t obviously a brothel, but then operators like Sean and Marty were too clever to run loads of girls out of one house. Appare
ntly respectable, the girls were just like any number of eastern European women in the borough. But Vi knew the signs: men arriving and leaving at odd times, permanently closed blinds, girls leaving to go places in the middle of the night … And then there was Dave.

  Dave Spall was a great big ox of a thing who’d been employed as one of Marty’s minders for years. Like Marty he came from Custom House, where he’d built a reputation as a dirty fighter. Dave’d do just about anything to win. He smashed heads because he liked it, and Marty Rogers gave him free rein to do just that. In return, Dave seemingly allowed Marty to treat him like shit. Wherever they went together, Dave had to sit or stand outside the door or across the room, and although the Rogers brothers gave a lot of their employees perks Dave always appeared to be exempt. Vi had a theory about this, which went back to a time when Dave and the Rogers boys were kids. Dave, though no angel, wasn’t a psycho like the others. He wasn’t as clever as they were either. They’d frightened him into submission at an early age and now they were all too old to change.

  Dave didn’t often do anything much without Marty, but he did visit this house in Manor Park. So far that first evening, she’d seen him twice – with flowers. Who they were for and why, Vi didn’t know. But if they were for Tatiana, she had to wonder whether Dave knew that the girl grassed up his bosses. As Vi watched, Dave came into view with flowers, and a big smile on his fat face.

  Or had Marty finally let Dave have the odd free shag? It didn’t seem likely. Dave was the male equivalent of one of Sean’s ‘pigs’ – someone who would do anything, however degrading, to please. Vi frowned. She thought she’d sold the idea of raiding Sean Rogers’s place in Ongar to Superintendent Venus, but even if she hadn’t, she knew she wanted to do it.

  Vi watched Dave Spall go into the house and heard a female voice squeak with what sounded like joy. As a general rule, Vi tried not to get too excited about bringing villains down, but in this case she couldn’t resist a small shiver of pleasure. The Rogers brothers, together with their business partner Yunus Ali, had preyed upon the poor of the borough for long enough. Get rid of the Rogers, then she could start on the Sheikhs; and maybe by the time she retired there’d actually be a power vacuum in Newham for once. But then Vi frowned at the thought. Vacuums were dangerous things.