An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (22 page)

‘If he owed money to a crime firm—’

‘He owed money to people I call criminals but then I am—’ ‘You’re as bad as Nasreen Khan, protecting bloody scumbags!’ And then he shook his head and put a hand up to his temples. He’d said too much and he knew it. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not my business.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ she said, but she didn’t raise her voice. He meant well, but the world of Ahmet’s financial obligations to the Sheikhs was somewhere he could not go – not least because her guilt meant that she couldn’t possibly take him. She had wanted Ahmet to die.

‘Oh, hi Lee.’

And now Shazia had come downstairs. She broke the tension immediately.

‘Hi Shazia,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

She flopped her long thin body down onto the sofa beside him and said, ‘A levels.’ She shrugged. Then she looked at Mumtaz, ‘So Amma,’ she said, ‘did those people like the house?’

The ‘Super’, as was his custom, didn’t even look at them. Vi Collins and Tony Bracci stood in front of his desk observing his back. It was Monday morning and he wasn’t enthusiastic. But then Tom Venus had never taken any risks in his professional life. He kept that side of his character for his personal relationships with younger women.

‘Sean Rogers is having one of his sex parties at his gaff in Ongar this Saturday night,’ Vi said.

‘Which he is perfectly entitled to do provided those attending are consenting adults, and no money is changing hands.’

‘And our intel is that he’s shipping in a fresh bunch of East European girls.’

‘Which again—’

‘Just because some of ’em can come here legally now doesn’t mean that they don’t still get trafficked for sex,’ Vi said. Venus had to know that was what was happening, he was just too cautious to do anything about it. ‘Sir, the girls our informant told us were coming are Russian,’ she said. ‘Not EU citizens. They can’t work here.’

‘And most of them won’t be able to speak any English,’ Tony Bracci said.

‘No, so Sean and co are going to exploit them,’ Vi said. ‘Sir, if
we catch Sean and Marty red-handed with these girls, we can have a go at taking them down. People trafficking—’

‘And if the girls, who don’t speak English, won’t inform on them?’

‘Our informant will,’ Vi said. ‘She does speak English.’ She’d called herself Tatiana, although whether that had been her real name Vi didn’t know. But the girl had told her about torture, about sexual abuse by a woman Vi recognised as Debbie Rogers, and had stated emphatically that what had been done to her had not been consensual. She’d become what was known as one of the ‘pigs’, women who would do anything and everything.

‘You
think
your informant will, DI Collins,’ Venus said.

‘I think she will too,’ Tony Bracci said. He’d been in on the second interview Vi had had with the girl, and although he was overstating his case by saying he felt she’d be as good as her word, he was desperate to bring Rogers and Ali down. He’d seen a few of the girls that they’d ‘worked’ with before – in hospital – and he’d never heard any of them speak, until he heard Tatiana. But he’d read a lot of gut-churning accounts of their wounds.

‘Our informant says he keeps the girls’ passports in his safe at his house,’ Vi said. ‘She’s seen him put them in there.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘Sir, we can bring Rogers and Ali down.’

‘When you bring down an empire, DI Collins, you have to be very sure you are in the right. Because empires have teams of rapacious and very smart lawyers who can twist the notion of things like consent, collusion and entrapment into barely recognisable creatures that have the ability, metaphorically, to kill us. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’ Vi looked briefly over at Tony, who flashed her a very small smile. ‘But we know they run brothels on this manor.
According to our informant, some girls are picked from the brothels for the parties.’

‘I don’t like Sean and Martin Rogers and Yunus Ali operating on our patch any more than you do, but an observation of the one you propose is not without its complications. And then we have the Olympics to think about. That must take priority over everything.’

‘I’m aware of that, sir.’

‘And because the property in question is in Essex then we will have to gain the support and co-operation of Essex police.’

‘I know that.’

Venus rubbed a hand against his chin and sat down behind his desk. Small-time crooks and hustlers were really his thing. Men of power like Sean and Marty Rogers made him feel nervous, and he had what amounted to a morbid fear of lawyers that went back so far into his past nobody could now say what its origin had been. Why anyone, least of all Venus himself, had ever thought he was suitable for a high-pressure nick like Forest Gate was well beyond Vi’s ken. Tony Bracci liked to use a blanket term for why Venus was where he was, which was ‘politics’. All Vi and Tony knew was that having him as their superior was a fucking great pain in the neck if you wanted to get something done a bit pronto.

‘I will consult with Essex,’ the Super said.

‘That’s a great leap forward, sir, thank you,’ Vi said.

He looked at her and scowled but he didn’t say anything. He knew of old that reacting to Vi Collins’s little straight-faced sarcasms wasn’t worth the trouble. Vi and Tony celebrated by going out into the car park for a smoke.

‘You can see how the public can sometimes think we’re in bed with the villains, can’t you,’ Tony said.

‘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 cleared 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.