She’d had a far more civilised route out of the Strone Road house. Although grabbed roughly by the SCO19 officer who had taken her to the house next door and safety, she had been quickly placed into the care of Lee Arnold. Then, and only then, had she cried.
*
‘If your dad was such a good person, why didn’t he tell the police about how his stepfather had killed his aunt?’
Abdullah Khan looked down at the floor. ‘Because his brother didn’t want him to. He’d spent his life protecting his parents’ memories – and his aunt’s body.’
‘Mr Khan, my predecessors searched that house and garden for your aunt’s body back in the 1950s,’ Vi said. ‘They didn’t find it.’ And yet, so Abdullah Khan claimed, John Sawyer had found Sara Kaminski’s body in his garden.
‘Reg Smith buried her in the graveyard at the end of the garden until the heat was off,’ Khan said. ‘Where’d you think I got the idea from for putting the soldier, and the remains of Sara, in the graveyard?’
‘So why’d Reg dig her up again?’
‘Apart from the chance that next time there was a funeral at the Plashet Cemetery, some grave digger might find her? My grandmother Lily wanted her close. As soon as I saw that sink outside the back door, I knew she was probably in the garden somewhere. Jews always have running water at the entrances to their cemeteries. That sink were plumbed in for a reason.’
Vi knew that, but she didn’t say anything.
‘I saw what could have been the remains of a Sukkot sukkah,’ he said. ‘That’s the temporary building Jews make every year to commemorate Sukkot, when Moses was wandering with them in Sinai. But I never thought she might be buried under it. I thought she’d be better hidden than that. Anyway, that tramp lived in it. I was going to wait until he was away from the garden one day and go and have a look to make sure but the bastard beat me to it.’
‘So you smashed him over the head, you searched the skeleton for the diamonds and then you decided to do what Reg Smith had done and lob both bodies over—’
‘I never lobbed, I—’
‘Whatever.’ Vi dismissed his words with a wave of her hand.
There was a knock on the door, followed by the arrival of a uniformed officer holding a piece of paper. He gave it to Vi and then left. ‘Abdullah, you ever heard the old saying about how anyone who doesn’t learn from the mistakes of the past is doomed to repeat them? You walked right into that one, didn’t you, son,’ she said, reading with a frown on her face and Venus looking over her shoulder. Then she looked up, ‘So tell me about Wendy Dixon then,’ she said.
‘Wendy …’
‘The woman you shagged up at Sean Roger’s gaff,’ Vi said. ‘The one who liked to call you Paul. The one this ballistics report tells me you killed.’
*
Tony Bracci looked over at Lee Arnold and wondered what was going through his head. The DI, the Super and Tony himself had seen Arnold just about hold back tears when Mumtaz Hakim came out of the Strone Road house alive. Tony knew that they were close, but he hadn’t realised until that moment that Lee felt as strongly as he clearly did.
Lee’s phone rang. He took his fag out of his mouth and Tony saw him smile. ‘Alright,’ he heard him say, ‘I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.’ Then there was a pause and he said, ‘See you soon.’
Tony looked at him and said, ‘Was that …’
‘Mumtaz, yes,’ Lee replied. ‘She’s got a clean bill of health. She’s coming back here.’
*
‘Sean tell you to kill her?’
He paused but then he said, ‘I killed her.’
‘But on Sean’s orders …’
‘No, why …’
‘Oh, you know why!’ Vi said. ‘Wendy was one of Sean’s pigs who owed him money, who sometimes defied him, and she was looking rough. What was the fucking point, eh?’
‘No, no it wasn’t …’ He stopped. He frowned.
‘What you thinking, Abdullah?’ Vi asked.
Was it just in her head or did Venus suddenly look worried?
She pressed home her advantage. ‘We can look after you, you know,’ she said. ‘Just as the Macaulays can get in jails other than Strangeways, we can put people places where they can’t be found provided—’
‘I killed Wendy because she was pregnant,’ Abdullah said. ‘She did it deliberately, to trap me. She loved me.’
‘Oh and why was that?’ Vi asked.
‘Because I was … I was nice to her,’ he said.
Vi looked down at the table in front of her. ‘So you told her you loved her as you stuck your nob up her arse.’
She heard Venus draw in breath. Vi looked up again. Abdullah Khan was not denying anything. Vi shook her head. ‘So let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You killed John Sawyer because you thought he might have found your diamonds, you—’
‘I hit him over the head. I’d taken a kitchen knife to stab him, but he saw me coming and so I punched him, then I smacked him over the head. I thought I’d killed him, he wasn’t breathing, and so after I’d looked for the diamonds I pushed him over the wall – with – her.’
‘The skeleton of your aunt.’
He looked across at her, and for the first time he seemed to be showing some sort of real emotion. ‘But then he started to come round.’
‘In the Plashet Cemetery?’ Forensics had said that Sawyer had actually died in the cemetery.
‘Yeah. And there were other people in there …’ He looked both surprised and also confused by his own words.
‘And so you …’
‘He started to sit up.’ He ran his hands through his hair and shook his head. He looked down at the table again, and panted. ‘I heard voices. I punched him in the head to get him down and then I stabbed him in the back.’
‘What with?’
‘The kitchen knife.’ He shook his head again. ‘I’d proper lost it by then. I ran. But the voices still kept on coming. I got out of there just before some kids arrived. Like Goths or something they were. I saw them, but they never saw me.’
Vi narrowed her eyes. ‘You sure about that are you, Abdullah? I thought the kids were already in there,’ she said. Bully Murray had been killed pretty soon after the events that Khan was describing and he did, after all, adhere at least in terms of his ethnicity to the ‘other man’ that Bully had briefly described to her. In addition to that, Abdullah had told Mumtaz Hakim ‘I was seen’ when he’d ‘confessed’ to her back at Strone Road. Bully Murray had almost certainly seen him.
But he looked her straight in the face and he said, ‘Yes.’
Vi sighed, but let that go. Bully Murray’s murderer had been caught and was now dead himself. What, really, did it matter any more? It mattered because maybe Abdullah had told the Rogers brothers and maybe they had organised Bully’s death. Maybe …
‘So just to get this straight then,’ she said, ‘you killed Wendy Dixon because she was needy, possibly pregnant and you killed John Sawyer because he appeared to be threatening your fictional diamonds—’
‘They’re not fictional, they’re—’
‘Real?’ Vi smiled. ‘So if they’re real, where are they? You knocked seven shades of shit out of your house for months on end, and you didn’t find them.’
He didn’t say anything.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know what the fuck you thought you were doing, Mr Khan,’ she said, ‘but prospecting for diamonds in East Ham was not one of your better ideas. Now one more chance, Mr Khan, why did Sean and Marty order the deaths of John Sawyer and Wendy Dixon? She was a pig and so I can kind of understand that, but him? What did the Rogers boys have against a tramp?’
‘I told you I was looking for d—’
‘Yeah, yeah, the bloody treasure of the Sierra Madre,’ she said. She stood up, looking at Venus as she did so. ‘Think we’re probably done here for the time being, sir.’ Then she looked back at Abdullah. ‘Psych evaluation next I think, son.’
Venus, apparently relieved, smiled.
Part Four
34
Lee looked out of the window down onto Green Street. A group of men who normally smoked continuously outside the front of their small restaurant now gathered around an old-fashioned portable TV balanced on a footstool. The Olympics were having a good effect upon Ramadan fasters. It was taking their minds off their bellies. Sadly they also seemed to be having a somewhat adverse effect upon the need for private investigation services. But Lee comforted himself with the notion that once the feel-good effect of the Olympics was over, people would start being suspicious of one another all over again.
On a personal level, he was surprised at how much of the Games he was watching on television. And it wasn’t just because Chronus got excited whenever he saw people run. Lee’s mother had made him watch the opening ceremony with her, which he had found surprisingly affecting, probably because it was so very ‘English’ – odd, and rather slanted towards the ordinary person. Thereafter, he’d been suckered at various times into watching cycling, swimming and athletics. The only events he’d switch off immediately were equestrian competitions. What did he, or anyone he knew, know about dressage?
Lee walked through his office to the front door and sat down on the metal staircase outside. Just as he was lighting a fag, he saw Mumtaz coming up the stairs.
‘Morning.’
She looked up at him and smiled. ‘Morning, Lee.’
‘How’d it go?’ he asked.
She carried on climbing until her head was level with his. She shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘They liked it, but …’
‘The boarded-up windows are putting them off.’
‘Of course.’
‘But you haven’t …’
‘Had any more trouble? No.’ She walked past him and went into the office. ‘Tea?’
‘If you don’t mind making,’ Lee said. She was still fasting.
‘I don’t mind making.’
Mumtaz walked into their small office kitchen, switched the kettle on and then put her head in her hands. The latest couple to view her house, that morning, had looked around as if they had bad smells under their noses. Then, on her way from the house to the office, her estate agent had rung to say that the viewers would be interested in the house if she dropped the price by fifty thousand. They, like most of the borough, had read the story about the window-pane shootings in Forest Gate just over three weeks before, but Mumtaz couldn’t drop that far. If she did, she would end up truly potless, possibly even still in debt. She listened to the kettle come to the boil, then pulled herself together. Whether the house sold or not, the bills – including Ahmet’s debt to the Sheikhs – had to be paid, and so she was obliged to work. She put a teabag into Lee’s mug and poured on the boiling water. He’d just given her a pay rise of a hundred pounds a month, bless him. She knew that he couldn’t afford it.
‘Lee, do you want sugar today?’ she called out, as she poured milk into the cup and removed the teabag. Sometimes he wanted sugar and sometimes he didn’t.
‘Yeah, please.’
Then, as she was spooning two heaped teaspoons into his mug she heard him say something else. ‘What?’
Straining her ears, she thought she heard another voice, talking to Lee. She didn’t think anything of it until she came out of the kitchen with the tea in her hands. Through the open office door, and Lee’s thick cigarette smoke, she saw the thin, pale figure of Nasreen Khan.
*
There wasn’t even a pretence of subterfuge. One of Abduljabbar Mitra’s sons came out of what had once been his father’s greengrocer shop on Green Street, and handed a pile of bank notes in through the window of a BMW parked outside. Inside the car, Vi easily recognised the bulky figure of Dave Spall, Marty Roger’s minder.
Once the cash had been passed, Vi threw her cigarette butt down on the ground, crossed the road and let herself into the BMW beside the man who, on seeing her, stuffed the money hurriedly into his pockets.
‘Hello, Dave,’ Vi said with a smile. ‘How’s it going?’
Spall’s face whitened. ‘Get out,’ he said. ‘This is a private car, you’ve no right to get in here.’
She ignored him. ‘Better drive on, Dave,’ she said. ‘You’re on double yellows. Don’t want to get nicked by a warden, do you?’
‘Yeah, but you’re …’
‘Drive on or I’ll find a warden,’ Vi said.
Dave put the car into Drive and pulled out, heading north towards Forest Gate.
‘I don’t know about you, but I quite fancy a little trip up to Wanstead Flats,’ Vi said. ‘Head for Capel Road, just off Woodford Road. Know it?’
Dave made a half grunting, just about affirmative noise.
‘Good,’ Vi said. Then she sat back in her luxurious leather seat and enjoyed the view. Ramadan or no Ramadan, Green Street was buzzing.
*
Mumtaz put a mug of tea down in front of Nasreen and then sat. Because she’d lost her baby and been ill afterwards, Nasreen had not been allowed to fast for Ramadan. Getting her strength and her life back were more important to God than her strict adherence to one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
‘My legs will be scarred,’ she said. ‘But that’ nothing.’
Mumtaz looked at Lee, who she saw was equally at a loss as to what to say.
‘I will be able to have children again.’
‘Oh, that’s good news,’ Mumtaz said.
And then suddenly Nasreen smiled. ‘I’d be dead without you, Mumtaz,’ she said.
‘You would have found a way to get out of there.’
‘No.’ She looked at Lee. ‘She’s too modest, Mr Arnold.’
‘Oh, tell me about it, love,’ Lee said.
She laughed. ‘It’s so good to see you both,’ she said. ‘Even though I feel a fool about not believing you about Abdullah.’
‘He’s your husband, why—’
‘He won’t be my husband for very much longer,’ Nasreen said.
Since she’d arrested Abdullah Khan, all Vi Collins had told Lee and Mumtaz about him, beyond what was in the public domain, was that his psychiatric assessment had been inconclusive. Logically, some of his ideas and beliefs about people around him, his past and his family were quite outlandish. But whether they were actually untrue was very difficult to ascertain. His father, Mursel Khan, hadn’t looked at all like either of his parents or the one sister, now deceased, he had been raised with. But on the other hand, Mursel had possessed what was at the time, before the formation of Bangladesh, Indian birth documents. According to these he had been born, under British rule, in Sylhet in 1940. Could such documents have been falsified by the Khans for their stray Jewish boy in what by then must have been 1956?
‘You’re divorcing him.’
‘Eventually,’ Nasreen said. ‘As you know he’s been charged with John Sawyer’s murder and the killing of a woman called Wendy Dixon.’ She looked down at the floor. ‘He was having an affair with her. She was a prostitute.’
That had been another blow to Nasreen’s pride, and neither Mumtaz nor Lee considered it politic to tell her what they knew about Wendy.
‘That he killed a total innocent like John over a delusion …’ She shook her head. ‘Diamonds!’
Once Khan had been arrested, the police had also looked for the diamonds and found none. In addition, the skeleton thought to be that of Sara Kaminski showed signs of the kind of wear associated with a hard life. On that basis, the notion that she had been the daughter of a rich jeweller who had then comfortably sat out the Second World War seemed unlikely. At some point Sara Kaminski had worked, and worked hard.
‘The police have asked for Abdullah’s father’s body to be exhumed so they can compare his DNA to the skeleton,’ Nasreen said. ‘It’s all so horrible.’ Then she looked at Mumtaz. ‘Do you think that my husband is mad?’
‘I’m not qualified to say.’ Abdullah Khan had been in the grip of an obsession that had caused him to k
ill when Mumtaz had come upon him, but whether that made him insane or not was another matter.
Nasreen drank her tea.
‘DNA testing like that’ll take time,’ Lee said. ‘Where old bones are involved, they generally have to look at mitochondrial DNA through the mother’s line of inheritance, and that is not done in five minutes.’
‘Yes, the police said it would take some time.’
‘So what about the house?’ Mumtaz asked. ‘What’s happening about that?’
Nasreen put her cup down. ‘Abdullah’s employers paid for it and so they own it. I thought that the deeds were in our names but they’re actually in the name of Sean Rogers.’
Lee snorted.
‘Yes, I know he’s a gangster, and his brother too, but I have to say he’s been very kind to me,’ Nasreen said. ‘I mean, when you think about all the damage Abdullah did to the house it has to be worth less now than when it was bought. But Sean Rogers is planning to do it up at his own expense and has already told me that I don’t owe him anything.’
Lee and Mumtaz exchanged a look. Given the circumstances, with the police investigation in the affair still on-going, the Rogers boys could do little else.
‘So you’re back with your parents?’
‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘It’s such a relief after …’
She looked for a moment as if she was about to cry, so Mumtaz placed a comforting hand on her arm. Nasreen smiled. ‘I’m OK.’
‘I know that. You’re strong, Nasreen. Look at what you’ve come through.’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t allude to the loss of her child and neither did Mumtaz, but for a few moments its loss sat in that office and chilled the air around all three of them.
Nasreen lifted her handbag up onto Mumtaz’s desk and began to sort through its contents. ‘I actually came to give you this,’ she said.
A clunk of metal against wood signalled the return of the mezuzah to the Arnold Agency’s office. ‘The police have taken the photograph they think might be of Sara Kaminski, but they didn’t want this as well and neither do I.’ She smiled. ‘Or, rather, I don’t know what to do with it. If you assume that Reginald Smith did kill Sara, and then hid her body with what had to be the collusion of his wife at least, then hiding her photograph behind the mezuzah must have been like keeping her memory alive in just one very small place.’ She turned the mezuzah over in her hand for a moment. ‘You know, I read that the Jews consider the fixing of a mezuzah to a door as an act of kindness to the world. Maybe hiding Sara’s photo behind this mezuzah was an act of kindness to her. Maybe Lily, her sister, did it.’ She put the mezuzah back down on the desk again and said, ‘Will you keep it for me – and for Sara too?’
An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) Page 27