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

by Barbara Nadel

  Breaking news on the TV was that a woman had been taken away from the Strone Road siege house. She was thought to be a young woman who had gone into labour. Mrs Khan, not her Amma. Shazia watched as men with guns escorted two men with a stretcher on wheels up to the house and then waited for the front door to open. Briefly, she thought she saw her Amma’s face, but then the camera followed the stretcher as it sped away from the door, towards a waiting ambulance. Its sirens screamed into the night as the police lifted their cordon to let it go through. Then there were just men with guns in the street again and the front of that terrible house, which had returned to stillness once again. The reporter doing the voiceover said that the woman was being taken to hospital. Shazia hoped that she and her baby would be alright. Then she offered up a prayer for them and for her Amma. It had been many years since she’d prayed. The last time had been for her own mother’s soul.

  *

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  Nasreen had gone now and Mumtaz was alone with her captor.

  Abdullah Khan’s phone rang, but he ignored it.

  ‘My name is Habiba Anwar,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I told you.’

  ‘What do you do?’ Abdullah Khan, his eyes red with sleeplessness, sat on the edge of his bed and levelled the gun at Mumtaz’s chest.

  ‘I am a widow,’ she said. ‘I have a daughter.’

  ‘So you don’t work?’

  ‘No.’

  He stared into her eyes and Mumtaz returned his gaze without blinking. Abdullah shook his head. ‘I don’t know why I don’t believe you, but I don’t,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s like the Americans say, you should never try to kid a kidder.’

  ‘So, are you a kidder?’ she asked.

  He looked away.

  ‘Well?’

  He looked back at her again. ‘Depends,’ he said. ‘I was kidded, that I do know.’

  ‘How?’ He didn’t respond and so she repeated, ‘How?’

  He tipped his head towards the hammer which was now lying on the floor and said, ‘Pick it up, we’ve got a lot more wall to do.’

  His phone rang again, and again he ignored it. Then, as soon as it stopped it rang again, and still he ignored it.

  Mumtaz sighed, and then she picked the hammer up and said, ‘So what do you want me to smash up now?’

  *

  Superintendent Venus had tried to call Abdullah Khan three times in the last ten minutes but he hadn’t picked up. Now the hammering had started again. He took his headphones off and frowned. ‘Doesn’t he want to know that his wife has arrived safely at hospital?’

  Vi Collins, who had just come off the phone to Greater Manchester Police, said, ‘Well, Abdullah Khan’s got no record, but he is known to GMP.’

  ‘In what capacity?’

  Vi looked down at her notes. ‘He liked to leave the nice leafy suburb of Bolton, where he lived, called Ramsbottom, and go and play in the city,’ she said.

  ‘Manchester.’

  ‘Ran with a few juvenile gangs in Moss Side. Nothing more’n kids’ stuff. Then he went to uni there, where he did a law degree,’ Vi said. ‘But he didn’t go on to practise.’

  ‘So what did he do?’

  ‘First off, he got a job in a pawn shop,’ Vi said. ‘Then he went to work for a firm of landlords, not unlike Rogers and Ali. He did that for some years.’

  ‘So why did he stop?’ Venus asked.

  ‘Because GMP shut down his employers – Macaulay’s,’ she said. ‘Drugs, people trafficking, extortion, you name it. They had a man on the inside, but he only fingered Khan as a debt collector. Nothing criminal. So he wasn’t in trouble with the law, but GMP reckon he had some heat from his previous employers.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he got away scot-free,’ Vi said. ‘He was the only one who did. GMP reckon he got threats that came from inside Strangeways. Words like ‘grass’ were bandied about. Also there were rumours that when GMP closed the Manchester firm down, Khan had it away with some of the rent he’d collected for them.’

  ‘So he owes these people.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘These diamonds he’s looking for …’

  ‘Maybe he owes money to more than one set of bad men,’ Vi said.

  Venus’s radio crackled into life and they all heard the voice of SFO Dalton say, ‘In position.’

  *

  Underneath the bay window in the Khans’ bedroom was a windowsill and a set of wooden panels which reached down to the floor. The hammer went through them easily, allowing Mumtaz to pull them away from the brickwork behind. While Khan looked at what had been exposed she sat down on the floor, panting. It was just past midnight and she was exhausted. She wanted to tell him that she needed to rest but she couldn’t. How he would react to such a request, she couldn’t know, and with every passing moment he was becoming more and more desperate and unstable. She knew that a point would eventually be reached where he would feel he had nothing left to lose.

  ‘Fuck!’ He smashed the handle of the gun down on the floor in frustration and Mumtaz winced.

  To distract him – and herself to some extent too – she said, ‘We must tell the police that we’ll need suhoor.’

  His eyes were hooded. ‘How can you think about food?’

  ‘Because we’ll both be fasting again when the sun rises. If we don’t eat suhoor we’ll be starving and weak by midday.’

  He said nothing.

  She changed tack. ‘I wonder how Nasreen is – and the baby,’ she said. ‘He could be born soon. Born in Ramadan. That’s wonderful.’

  ‘Is it?’

  It was an odd thing to say. ‘Of course it is, for a Muslim child.’

  ‘For a Muslim child, yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well, your child will be a Muslim, Mr Khan. That’s why I said what I did.’

  He looked away from the cavities underneath the bay window and sat back against the brickwork. ‘But will my child be a Muslim, Mrs Anwar?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, of course,’ she said. ‘I am sure that you and Nasreen will bring him up to be a good Muslim. You both seem to be – observant.’

  And then he laughed. ‘Oh, I’m observant alright, or I try to be. My wife?’ he shrugged. ‘A jeans-wearing virgin when I met her. Thought I was in love. ‘Thought. Then I thought it through. You don’t get to wipe out the past with a pretty face and a bit of a fast at Ramadan, do you.’

  ‘A good Muslim must try to be virtuous at all times,’ Mumtaz said. ‘But we can only try, we’re only human.’

  ‘Yeah, but trying can only go so far, can’t it? Can’t do anything about contagion in the blood, can it?’

  She didn’t know what he was talking about and was too tired to even speculate. He slumped lower down the wall. He too was clearly exhausted now. He looked down at the gun in his hand. ‘You know we can’t sleep, don’t you, Mrs Anwar? You know that we have to stay awake.’

  ‘You do.’

  He straightened up again. ‘I am you and you are me for the time we’re in here, Mrs Anwar. If I don’t sleep, you don’t. But I’m not a fool, I can see that you need a rest now. Why don’t I tell you a bedtime story? It won’t put you to sleep. If anything it’ll wake you up and haunt you for the rest of your life.’

  *

  Venus was still talking to SFO Dalton. Everyone knew that the house was surrounded. Everyone also knew that Khan hadn’t spoken to the police since he’d called them to come and get his wife. Now all the hammering had stopped too and Khan and Mumtaz were talking.

  Lee Arnold looked at his watch. It was nearly one in the morning. He leaned across and lifted up one of Vi’s headphones. ‘They’ll need to eat before sunrise,’ he whispered, reiterating what Mumtaz had said to Abdullah Khan.

  ‘He’ll have to ask for it,’ Vi whispered back. Then she nodded towards Venus and Dalton. ‘Confab.’

  ‘If Khan won’t talk …’

  She shrugged. What Khan had asked for, transport to Heathrow Airport and a flight out of
the country, was never going to happen and Khan had to know that. He’d told Mumtaz that he didn’t even want to go to Bangladesh. But he still wanted those diamonds. Even if he found them, though, how did he plan to get out of the house and away, with them in his possession?

  Venus ended his conversation with Dalton and put his headphones back on again.

  And then Lee, Vi, Venus and Tony Bracci all heard Khan’s voice say, ‘This is the story of my life …’

  *

  ‘Apart from the fact that I never knew my late mother, I had an ordinary Muslim childhood,’ Abdullah Khan said. ‘My dad had an electrical shop in a town called Ramsbottom in the back end of Bolton. Nice little place, but as soon as I was a teenager I wanted to go into Manchester where there was some life, you know.’

  ‘I hung out with other lads who liked to take cars and muck about selling bits of weed and doing a bit of robbing. Asian lads they were.’

  ‘What did your father make of that?’ Mumtaz asked.

  ‘Me dad never knew,’ he said. ‘He knew I went into the city from time to time, but … Anyway I grew out of all that. I went to uni in Manchester. I spent a lot of money while I was there and so after my degree, I had to get a job to pay off me debts.’

  ‘What had you spent the money on?’

  He shrugged. ‘Shite. Stuff. I dunno, enjoying meself. I’ve always needed money, I’ve only ever been happy when I’ve been spending. So I had a crap job first off, then I got debt-collecting for these white middle-aged gangsters. I was good at it and they paid me well. But I spent what they gave me just like I’d spent me student loan and so I robbed them to keep me head above water. I couldn’t do it for long, they found out. That was when I had to come down here to London to stay with me uncle. When I had to go back to Ramsbottom when me dad was dying early last year, I couldn’t go through Manchester just in case anyone who knew me before recognised me.’

  ‘When I saw me dad, I knew he was on morphine, so you have to remember that, just as I do. But he were lucid, or he seemed to be.’ He shook his head. ‘He had cancer, it were … Dad told me things, about himself.’

  ‘What things?’

  There was a pause. Then he said, ‘He wasn’t who I believed he was. He wasn’t called Mursel Khan, he hadn’t been born a Muslim, he wasn’t even Asian.’ He shook his head again. ‘Then he told me he was skint too. I nearly lost it. I’d banked on money from his shop to pay off me debts. I told him. I said, What the heck did you spend it all on, you silly old man? And what you doing telling me all this crap about yourself? And it was then that he told me.’ He looked into Mumtaz’s eyes. ‘About the diamonds.’

  ‘The diamonds you say are here in this house?’ she said. ‘How did your father know about them?’

  Abdullah Khan looked down at the floor. ‘Because they’d belonged to his aunt,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t northern either.’

  ‘He was a Londoner?’

  ‘No, he weren’t even that.’ He said.

  Mumtaz didn’t know what to say, but in her head connections of an almost unthinkable nature had begun to form.

  ‘You know that when I bought this house there were a small pile of wood that had once been a little building in the back yard. Right at the back, almost against the wall of the cemetery. I knew instantly what it was as soon as I saw it.’

  ‘Did you?’ Her voice was tight now but, as he had predicted, she was wide awake.

  ‘It’s still there,’ he said. ‘What’s left of it.’ He leaned towards her, smiling, his gun aimed at her heart. ‘They call them sukkah, the Jews. They’re temporary shelters they build to celebrate the festival of Sukkot which commemorates the time they spent wandering in Sinai with Moses. You know the story.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I looked up everything to do with Jews once I’d spoken to me dad. I knew fuck all about them. Do you know why I did that, Mrs Anwar?’

  ‘No.’ But she did – or she thought that she might. Mumtaz hardly dared to breathe.

  ‘Because my dad wasn’t a Muslim, an Asian or a northerner, or anything else he’d told me about himself over the years. He was a Jew and his name, his real name, was Marek Berkowicz.’

  32

  Venus used Tony Bracci’s headphones while he shared with Lee Arnold, and Vi listened on her own. For the moment, SFO Dalton and his team had fallen silent.

  ‘My dad left London in 1955,’ Abdullah Khan said. ‘One night, in that December, he told me, he saw something he shouldn’t in this house and so he left.’

  No noise came from Mumtaz. She, Lee Arnold knew, just like him, was thinking Did Marek Berkowicz just leave? Is that really possible?

  ‘His stepfather, a Christian called Reg Smith, was left alone with my dad and my dad’s aunt, Sara. His mum and his little brother had gone out. Me dad was supposed to be asleep, but he wasn’t. He heard a row between his dad and his aunt. His dad kept on shouting at her to tell him where they were. The diamonds.’

  He stopped for a moment.

  ‘Aunt Sara had come to England to give her sister, my grandmother Lily, these diamonds. Their father had been a jeweller, and although Sara had given the Nazis almost everything she had, including her body, to keep herself out of the camps, those four pink diamonds remained. Lily had been in a camp and so when Sara eventually found her over here she gave them to her. Reg wasn’t supposed to know because he was a drinker and violent, but he found out and he shouted at Sara to tell him where they were hid. But she wouldn’t and so he strangled her.’

  Silence.

  ‘My dad went to help her, but it was too late. He stood in the doorway of the living room and watched Reg Smith choke the life out of Sara, and Reg saw him. Dad said that their eyes met. Reg looked like an animal gone mad, so me dad ran. Out of the house, up the street, eventually on a train to anywhere. He never paid, he had no money. He only got off when he was thrown off, which was in Manchester. At first he lived on the streets, robbing and going down bins. He kept around the old Piccadilly Station because that was all he knew of the city.

  He didn’t realise for a while that one of the guards was watching him – the man I always thought was my grandfather. He tried to get Dad’s name and who he was out of him, but all he’d ever say was that he was a refugee and that all his family had died in the camps. My granddad took him in. He believed him. Later, I believed him. Me dad told me the truth about himself because he was about to die – no one lies when they’re just about to die – and because he wanted me to have the diamonds.’

  Abdullah paused, and then he said, ‘I know you think I’m just a greedy bastard – and I am – I’ve only myself to blame for the mess my life has become, but I did right by my dad. He lived as the Muslim he became when he went to live with the Khans, but when he died I got a rabbi from Manchester to say Kaddish for him. He wanted that and I got it for him. Know what Kaddish is?’ There was silence. ‘It’s the Jewish prayer for the dead. And I honoured my father by doing that last thing for him. But it means I’m not a real Muslim. My blood’s wrong, which is why I’m like this.’

  ‘That’s nonsense. And anyway, like what?’ they heard Mumtaz say.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve never managed to find the right words for it, but it makes me unhappy. It means … It means … I can kill people.’

  ‘What people, Mr Khan, have you …’

  ‘I think we should look for those diamonds now,’ he said calmly. ‘I do the talking, Mrs Anwar, and I do it when I like, not when you like.’

  Lee Arnold tried to speak but found that he had no saliva.

  Vi said, ‘He is clearly off his rocker. We need to get Mumtaz out of there.’

  *

  He took her into a small boxroom behind the bedroom he’d once shared with Nasreen. Its walls were not pockmarked with holes like so many of the other rooms. He told her to make a start by the door and work her way around. She should, he said, tap the walls gently at first to try and locate any cavities.

  Mumtaz tapped. O
ccasionally, she glanced at him, and thought he looked more awake. He had also started to smile. Was he experiencing relief now that he’d got the truth about his father – if it was the truth – off his chest? And what did he mean about killing people? Who had he killed? Perhaps Nasreen had been right, and he had murdered the Afghanistan veteran John Sawyer … But why?

  Outside in the street, and at the back of the house, there was an unknown number of police officers. Mumtaz wondered whether she knew any of them, and also whether Lee was with them. He’d been a police officer and so he might be. Having found no cavities, Mumtaz hammered. At the very least, Lee had to know what was happening, and she knew that he would have organised care for Shazia. Poor Shazia, she was probably terrified. And her parents! She hadn’t thought about them earlier; now she saw their faces in her mind.

  Plaster flew up and made her cough as she smashed away at the walls. She looked over at him and heard him say, ‘Carry on.’ She carried on.

  What would he do if he didn’t find the diamonds? Why did he think they were in the walls of the house? Reg Smith might have found them, or Lily Smith could have taken them to her grave – or sold them … But then why was she even thinking about jewels that couldn’t possibly exist? And then, being a private investigator and knowing what she did about surveillance, Mumtaz realised that even if the police hadn’t been listening in to their conversations earlier on in the day, they had to be by this time.

  She stopped hammering.

  Abdullah Khan said, ‘I’ve not told you to have a rest.’

  She said, ‘How do you know that these diamonds you’re looking for are behind these walls?’

  For a moment he said nothing, then he walked over and stood in front of her. Mumtaz felt her heart begin to pick up its beat. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘But I’ve had everything else apart in this house. Floorboards, doors, units, the garden – even that old Sukkah at the bottom, the Jew’s shack. All I found there was her body.’

  ‘Whose body?’

  ‘Auntie Sara’s body. Some old tramp that my wife liked to feed had dug it up.’ He jammed the pistol against her forehead. ‘I killed him before he got to her diamonds.’