Bright Shiny Things

by Barbara Nadel

  Rajiv shook his head. ‘I know you, remember,’ he said. ‘Why have you turned against your friends? Your family?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘It is my business if I get this,’ he pointed to the bruise under his eye, ‘from one of those boys you allow to stay in your house.’

  Ali said nothing. He was a tall, good-looking man of forty whose once smiling face was now almost always frowning.

  ‘I don’t know whether those Arabs you’ve taken in are here legally or not,’ Rajiv said. ‘And frankly I don’t give a shit. I also don’t give a shit about what they believe or where they’re from. The only thing that bothers me is what they do. That little bastard with the birthmark on his face punched me when I was on my way home. I know it was him because earlier in the day he’d stuck his head round the shop door and called me a faggot.’

  ‘If you don’t behave appropriately …’

  ‘Appropriately!’ Rajiv said. ‘This, from you! Listen to yourself! I’m not one of you, I can do what I like. And your dad knows about the “faggot” incident. He came to apologise to me. I didn’t tell him about the punch, though. We don’t grass each other up here. But I expect you to put a stop to it. Those fuckers are hassling girls on the street. And they are serious. Not like the Briks Boyz, I can deal with them. Sort it out!’

  ‘Or you’ll do what?’ Ali said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rajiv said. ‘Come round your house and put shit through your letter box? Who knows? But I tell you one thing, Ali-ji, you don’t want to get on the wrong side of a furious tranny. There are laws to protect us these days. And if they don’t work, we can have the loosest lips in town.’

  Ali Huq’s face reddened.

  FOUR

  ‘This is mine.’

  He put his hand on the bonnet of the armoured car and smiled.

  ‘By the Grace of God captured from Assad’s thugs. Now a tool of the Caliphate, inshallah.’

  Abbas al’Barri looked blearily at his wife and his daughter and said, ‘I haven’t got time for this. I have to get to work.’

  ‘This is our son!’ Shereen pointed at the laptop open on the kitchen table. ‘Look at him!’

  Drunk again the previous night, Abbas tried to concentrate. Fayyad looked like a younger version of Abbas’s late father, who had been a goatherd.

  ‘What is this?’ Shereen asked her daughter.

  The young woman, Djamila, closed the laptop and put it in her bag. ‘YouTube,’ she said. ‘ISIS vids are all over it.’

  ‘YouTube? Why can’t they shut it down?’

  ‘Abbas, it’s the Internet,’ Shereen said. ‘It just is. Nobody can control it.’

  Abbas al’Barri looked at his daughter. ‘How did you find it?’

  ‘He’s my brother, Dad,’ she said. ‘I look for him. It isn’t hard.’

  ‘Hah!’

  ‘I have to go to work now,’ she said. She left.

  Abbas looked at his wife and said, ‘I will ring Lee.’

  There was so much blood that, at first, Doris thought that it had to be red paint. She told Stan.

  ‘Last week bloody Chinese takeaway up the wall, now this,’ she said.

  She wheeled him down the passage to the front door. He liked to sit in the sunshine.

  Doris went into her small front garden. ‘All up the gate!’ she said.

  They lived in a council house at the top end of Brick Lane, as it turned into the Boundary Estate. Long ago, Stan had lived in one of the Huguenot houses in Princelet Street. His dad had rented two rooms, which had just about accommodated all eight members of the family. There’d been rats and fleas and Stan had been made to go to Hebrew school but he remembered it with love. Back then he’d been able to walk …

  ‘Oh and look, Stan, some little sod’s left his bleedin’ jacket on the path, all covered in it!’

  She went out into the street. ‘How am I going to clean all this up for Gawd’s sake?’

  Stan said, ‘Call the council. They’re the landlord, let ’em work for the rent for once.’

  And so she did. She said there was red stuff all over her gate and on a leather jacket dumped on the pavement. They said that the police would be with them as soon as they could. Seemed like a bit of an overreaction to Doris. They didn’t explain why.

  Bob ticked off the East End stereotypes in his head. Boozer waving a two-litre bottle of White Lightning and stinking of piss, hipster with a green beard wearing a deerstalker, yummy mummy holding her infant in a baby sling looking anxious, lots of Asian men, staring.

  DI Montalban had told him to ‘move those fuckers out the way’, which Bob had done. But they’d all come back. They always did.

  The body had been found around 3 a.m. by a young advertising exec rolling home to his funky Arnold Circus apartment after a heavy night at some rooftop bar in Shoreditch. The sight of a dead body with its face stamped to a pulp on the old Arnold Circus bandstand in the middle of the Boundary Estate had caused the adman to bring up yesterday’s bento box, which still lay beside a wooden bench next to the tent SOCO had erected over the stiff. Now they’d just got a call from the council to say that a tenant in one of their Brick Lane properties had phoned to let them know there was a leather jacket lying on the pavement outside her house. Rajiv-ji had never gone anywhere without his leather jacket.

  Like DI Ricky Montalban, Constable Babar ‘Bob’ Khan had been born and bred on Brick Lane. As a kid he’d been fascinated by the exotic, and some said dangerous, owner of the Leather Bungalow. With his eyeliner, his flashy rings and his slim, leather-clad body, Rajiv Banergee had been like a being from another world amid the uniform shalwar khameez that dominated the Bangla Town end of the Lane. Bob’s dad had hated Rajiv, claiming, on no evidence at all, that he was a bad influence on children. But Bob was pretty sure his old man hadn’t got so far as murder. Sadly, though, he knew plenty of men who might have taken that path.

  Montalban, a dark, heavy-set man in his late thirties, walked over to the staring Asian men and said something that made them scatter. The yummy mummy too took fright.

  ‘What was that about, guv?’ Bob said when Montalban came and stood next to him.

  ‘A bit of gentle persuasion.’

  Montalban’s dad had come from what remained of the small group of Spaniards who had once lived at the top end of Brick Lane. He’d been called Felipe and, even in old age, everyone had been afraid of him. Bob’s dad truly believed a story that had been around all Bob’s life about Felipe Montalban punching rats the size of cats to death in the dark days of the 1970s. Back then, when everyone in Spitalfields had been poor, not only rats but also white supremacists had walked Brick Lane. Bob’s dad said that Asians got their heads kicked in regularly in those days. Now in the twenty-first century, here was another Asian, dead with his head smashed in.

  ‘So, Bob, son, think the Briks Boyz are up to doing this?’

  Bob, at only twenty-four, knew the eighteen-year-old leader of the local street gang. Vicious but pathetic, like all of them.

  ‘The Boyz are little shits …’

  ‘Little shits who don’t like anyone who isn’t like them, yeah,’ Montalban said. ‘Give ’em a tug, Mr Khan. A hard one.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what’ll happen if you “like” it,’ Lee said. ‘Maybe nothing. He may not even notice. But if you press that button then Mishal is committed.’

  Mumtaz’s finger hovered over her mouse button.

  ‘I know.’ But she still paused. Then she said, ‘Lee, are the al’Barris paying us?’

  He sighed.

  ‘They’re not, are they?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But it’s not because I’m doing my mates a favour. Or rather it is, but there’s another reason, which is that the coppers should be involved.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But Abbas is on the edge and so if we can somehow work out what Fayyad is really up to maybe we can make the coppers aware of it and, at the same time, stop any bad things h
appening.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like Abbas drinking himself to death or sodding off to Syria.’

  ‘I thought you said that Abbas felt he couldn’t get involved?’

  ‘Not online, but if he carries on thinking about that tooth and what it might mean, in the end he won’t be able to stand it any more and he’ll go out to Syria himself. His drinking’s off the fucking scale, we have to stall him at the very least. What we can’t do is profit by it. If the coppers do find out, they could finish us. We’d lose our ABI memberships, we’d be unemployed. I should’ve done this speech before but … Look better or worse, I’ll do it on me own …’

  ‘No!’

  ‘You know we’re up to our necks in process serving …’

  Mumtaz’s phone rang. She looked at the screen.

  ‘It’s my dad. Can I take it?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Abba …’

  To Lee her conversation was just a rattle of unintelligible Bengali sounds. She rarely spoke her parents’ language. He got up to go out and have a fag and leave her to it. But then, as her conversation progressed, he saw that she had tears in her eyes. He sat down again.

  When she’d finished, he said, ‘What’s the matter? You need to go home?’

  Mumtaz shook her head.

  Lee wanted to comfort her but he didn’t know how. He let her recover herself. She wiped her eyes. Then she said, ‘I apologise, Lee.’

  ‘No problem.’

  She put a hand on her chest. ‘A family friend has died,’ she said.

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘A man called Rajiv, a Hindu. He ran a leather shop. He’s been in Brick Lane forever. Abba just told me that the police found his body this morning. He was beaten and stabbed to death.’

  ‘On Brick Lane?’

  ‘In Arnold Circus,’ she said.

  ‘That’s all yummy families and trust fund artists these days, isn’t it?’

  ‘Mainly, yes,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t mean the local thugs don’t hang out there too. Crazy jihadi kids who hate everyone. Rajiv was homosexual, flamboyant. He has been threatened many times. Most recently by those boys my brother takes in.’

  ‘Oh.’

  In spite of himself Lee speculated about how the questioning of Ali Huq’s guests could pull the rug out from under the Sheikh family’s plans to use her brother’s extremist tendencies to get their hands on Shazia. If the police were made aware of the boys Ali had given shelter to, perhaps that particular problem would go away.

  ‘Abba doesn’t want to go to the police, but feels that he has to. We don’t grass,’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, but we also don’t let down our friends. Rajiv was a dear man. God will not be happy with his death.’

  ‘Mumtaz …’

  ‘I told Abba I will go to the police,’ she said.

  She was very pale and didn’t look right. Lee said, ‘Are you sure? I could—’

  ‘No.’ She stood. ‘I should have alerted the police to what Ali was doing a long time ago. I can’t leave it any longer. A good man has died and I could’ve prevented it.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ Lee said. ‘This might have nothing to do with your brother.’

  ‘And it also might,’ she said. Then she pressed the ‘Like’ button on the YouTube clip.

  ‘There,’ she said, ‘Mishal likes that crap that Abu Imad spouts, she thinks it’s inspiring.’ She pressed the share icon. ‘And she wants the world to see how fit he is.’

  Then her legs became wobbly and she sat down. Then she cried.

  Bob had Sultan Ibrahim’s number. Sixteen, overweight and sullen, the boy was the pampered only child of pious, well-meaning parents who thought that the sun shone out of his arse. His expensive ‘street’ gear – hoodie, Nike trackie bottoms and massive white trainers – made him look soft, which wasn’t the idea. Sultan, although near the top of the Briks Boyz hierarchy, wasn’t a player, mainly because he was fat. But he always had money, which was why the Boyz let him hang with them. Whether the Boyz also knew that Sultan was, potentially, their weakest link, Bob Khan didn’t know, but he hoped they didn’t. And he hoped that he was right.

  Sultan sat between his enormous mother and etiolated father on a vast royal blue sofa. His father, Parvez, was well beyond retirement age and shook. Maybe he had Parkinson’s? Poor sod looked as if he was about to drop. Not that he spoke.

  ‘My boy is a good boy,’ Mrs Ibrahim said. ‘People are jealous. That’s the truth of it. They make things up about my son because he has the best of everything.’

  It wasn’t easy. Even though Bob didn’t have any sort of connection with the Ibrahims he didn’t feel able to just say Look! Your kid’s a shit who runs with a gang of little bastards who give people grief!

  Instead he said, ‘Sultan, I need to know where you were last night.’

  ‘Last night!’ his mother said. ‘He’s a child! Where do you think he was? In his bed!’

  ‘With respect, Mrs Ibrahim, I need Sultan to tell me.’

  At least the Ibrahims spoke English. Bob’s Bengali was shit.

  ‘Well?’

  The boy didn’t even look at him. ‘It’s as Amma said. I was here,’ he said.

  ‘Why do you want to know?’ Mrs Ibrahim said. ‘You think my son had something to do with the death of that hijra?’

  News travelled fast in Bangla Town.

  ‘I’m not at liberty to talk about the crime that was committed last night,’ Bob said. ‘But I can assure you that no transgender person was involved.’

  ‘Rajiv Banergee was hijra!’

  Bob ignored her. Although born and bred on Brick Lane, Mrs Ibrahim was the kind of woman who liked to live as if she was a moralistic grande dame in some Sylheti village back in the 1960s. Not for her the new Muslim radicalism, rather a brand of old-fashioned bigotry rooted deep in the village culture of Bangladesh where the ‘hijra’ or cross-dresser was a figure of contempt and abuse.

  ‘Sultan, I know you run with the Briks Boyz,’ Bob said.

  Mrs Ibrahim’s face flushed. ‘Briks what? What are you talking about, Officer? What is this idiocy …’

  ‘Prove it,’ Sultan muttered.

  ‘I don’t have to prove it,’ Bob said. ‘I’ve seen you. Hassling girls on the street, shouting obscenities at shopkeepers not halal enough for you, writing racist graffiti, homophobic graffiti …’

  ‘I’m a Muslim,’ Sultan said.

  ‘Yes,’ Bob said. ‘Which is why you shouldn’t do such things.’

  ‘We are persecuted.’

  ‘Everyone’s persecuted,’ Bob said. ‘You’re doing better than most. As your mother has pointed out, you have everything. Just tell me where you were last night.’

  ‘I was—’

  ‘And before you just say “here” again, let me tell you that if I’m not satisfied with what you tell me, I can take you down the station.’

  Mrs Ibrahim fanned her face, ‘Allah!’

  Everyone in the flats must have seen Constable Khan arrive. If they then saw him leave with Sultan and his parents, what on earth were they going to think?

  ‘I ain’t done nuffink …’

  ‘Speak properly, for God’s sake!’

  The boy visibly trembled. It was the first time his old man had spoken.

  ‘You are neither a cockney nor are you from the Caribbean,’ Mr Ibrahim said. He looked at Bob. ‘Elocution lessons I pay for! Why?’

  ‘Abba, I was in, you know—’

  ‘I do not!’ the old man said. He pointed at his wife. ‘You say he will grow out of it, my wife, but so far he is not.’

  ‘Parvez-ji …’

  ‘You prattle about how this idiot does what he does because he is such a good, pious boy!’ Mrs Ibrahim began to cry. Her husband addressed Bob. ‘I know it is Rajiv-ji that has died,’ he said. ‘I never knew him, but what I do know is that taking any life is wrong. My son was out last night, Constable. Between
eleven and midnight. In spite of his great fat belly he gets out of his bedroom window on many nights to go and be with that Chaudhuri boy.’

  Zayn Chaudhuri was the Boyz uncrowned emperor. At eighteen he was older than the rest of the crew. He was also vicious, prejudiced and venal. Zayn was known to all the local coppers. Many of them had also had the pleasure of meeting his crackhead of a father. His mother, a white girl originally from Norwich, had buggered off years ago, leaving her son to stew in his own resentment about being both half English and the son of an unbelieving crackhead. Zayn had eventually resolved this existential crisis by creating his own version of fundamentalist Islam via the medium of a street gang. It attracted every disaffected kid in the area. Zayn had God and he knew the word ‘sharia’ and he had a knife. He also said it was OK to rob people who weren’t Muslims – and some who were.

  ‘Daddy-ji!’

  Sultan began to cry. Had Bob suspected that the kid was the Boyz weakest link, just because he was fat? He didn’t like to think so. But then again he knew he was kidding himself.

  The old man leant across and raised a shaking hand in front of the boy’s face. Then he slapped him.

  ‘Mummy’s boy!’ he said. ‘Stupid, spoilt, mummy’s boy!’

  ‘Ricky Montalban’s on it,’ Vi said. ‘Took over from Kev Thorpe last March.’

  Lee had been at DI Thorpe’s retirement do. With over forty years’ service to the people of Tower Hamlets under his belt, Kevin Thorpe had deserved to get so plastered he put himself in A&E. He’d been well looked after by a big, dark bruiser of a bloke called Rick.

  ‘Looks like a bull?’ Lee asked.

  ‘He’s Spanish, of course he looks like a bull,’ Vi said. ‘They all do.’

  ‘Bit racist.’

  ‘So sue me,’ she said. ‘To answer your question, it’s Ricky Mumtaz’ll see. I’ll have a word.’

  It was typical of Mumtaz that she’d phoned Limehouse CID as soon as she’d made up her mind. Lee had heard her say that she had information about a family member, possibly in connection to the murder of Rajiv Banergee. Then she’d left.