Enough Rope: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery) Read online

  Enough Rope

  Barbara Nadel

  A Hakim and Arnold Mystery

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Also by Barbara Nadel

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Acknowledgements

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Quercus

  This edition first published in 2015 by

  Quercus Publishing Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  Copyright © 2015 Barbara Nadel

  The moral right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 78429 244 7

  Print ISBN 978 1 84866 423 4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by Barbara Nadel

  The Hakim and Arnold series

  A Private Business

  An Act of Kindness

  Poisoned Ground

  The Inspector Ikmen series

  Belshazzar’s Daughter

  A Chemical Prison

  Arabesk

  Deep Waters

  Harem

  Petrified

  Deadly Web

  Dance with Death

  A Passion for Killing

  Pretty Dead Things

  River of the Dead

  Dead of Night

  Death by Design

  A Noble Killing

  Deadline

  Body Count

  Land of the Blind

  The Hancock series

  Last Rights

  After the Mourning

  Ashes to Ashes

  Sure and Certain Death

  To my wonderful editor, Jane Wood,

  and to the memory of Eve & Trix

  Prologue

  All the accoutrements of the last stages of alcoholism were there. Empty bottles, faeces, boots with thin soles, an anorexic ankle. There was also some gear that took DI Kevin Thorpe back to the start of his career in the seventies. When was the last time he’d seen even the most desperate alkie heat up solid polish? Over a bonfire?

  The twenty-something constable at his side said, ‘What’s the polish about, then?’

  Such innocence, and yet the boy had probably seen more pornography than Thorpe had ever had dinners, hot or cold.

  ‘They heat it up so they can drink it,’ Thorpe said. ‘Meths Boys was what we used to call them, back when this sort of thing was common. Blokes so poor and desperate they’d drink anything. Polish, methylated spirit, white spirit . . .’

  ‘Christ.’

  Thorpe had hoped he’d seen the last of the Meths Boys back in the early eighties, but in the new shiny London of the twenty-first century, apparently some remnants of the past remained.

  ‘So, did he set himself on fire?’

  The body had been found by a runner. Shaven-headed, he’d looked like a member of the BNP, except he spoke as if he’d been to Eton. Poplar was a funny place in 2014.

  ‘No,’ Thorpe said.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ the kid asked.

  The smell was a cross between scorched earth and burnt pork. The sight was worse. The body sprawled out in front of the Children’s Memorial in Poplar Recreation Ground had been damaged by fire, but it was the short-handled knife in his chest that had killed the man. Thorpe pointed at it.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘This is one alcoholic who didn’t kill himself,’ Thorpe said.

  Eighteen pupils at Great North Street School in Poplar were commemorated on the Children’s Memorial. They’d died in the first daylight bombing raid on London in 1917. The Memorial had been paid for by public subscription. It was a place Thorpe had always found incredibly touching. That generosity, and a love that some would call sentimentality, was something he’d always taken for granted in the East End of London. Here it was made solid in a white memorial listing eighteen names, underneath a standing angel with its wings outstretched.

  Now someone had been killed in front of it, and there was even a mark in what looked like blood on the plinth. Thorpe wondered what kind of person would murder a hopeless drunk in front of a memorial to dead children.

  Then, behind the memorial, he saw what looked like a bundle of rags in the middle of a flower bed. All the hairs on his neck stood up.

  1

  Eleven days earlier

  ‘I’ve paid your friggin’ rent!’

  Yelling down over a set of rusting banisters at your landlord is not the best way to negotiate financial differences, but Lee Arnold was pissed off. Without any notice his landlord, George Papadakis, had put up the rent on his office.

  ‘You owe me three hundred pounds!’ the landlord countered.

  ‘Yeah, so you say. But who’s improved this shithole, eh? Not you, George. When I moved in here, the bog was like something out of the Ark. But you didn’t give a toss, did you? I had a new one—’

  ‘Only since Mrs Hakim came to work for you. Only then did you put that new toilet in. You didn’t give a shit about it until then!’ George spoke with a typical East End accent, but he waved his arms around as if he were declaiming from the steps of the Acropolis.

  ‘I’ve painted the place, had the wiring done, and if you’ve noticed, George, my sink don’t drip down into your shop any more!’ Lee said. ‘Three hundred quid? You owe me that, mate!’

  George clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘I could get twice the rent you pay from one of these rich people moving into this area. You wanna watch it, Lee, the East End is trendy now for the young people. I could make your office into a luxury flat, just like that!’ He clicked his fingers.

  ‘Then do it,’ Lee said. ‘If you think you can tempt some knobhead hipster kid from Shoreditch all the way out to Upton Park, then knock yourself out.’

  Up in his office, Lee’s phone began to ring. He threw the butt of the cigarette he’d been smoking onto the stair he’d been standing on and stepped on it.

  ‘And stop smoking!’ George said.

  ‘When you do, I will.’

  Lee ran inside his small, stuffy office and picked up the ringing phone.
‘Arnold Agency.’

  There was a pause. In the years since he’d left the police and started running the agency, Lee Arnold had discovered that private detection services attracted the odd and sometimes the very very timid, as well as the desperate.

  ‘Arnold Agency. Hello?’

  He didn’t like answering the phone. That was one of the reasons why he’d eventually caved in and employed an assistant. But now that the woman he’d taken on to do the ‘officey’ things was frequently busier looking for errant daughters and dodgy husbands than he was, Lee often had to answer his own calls.

  ‘Mr Arnold?’

  It was a man. Well spoken.

  ‘Yes.’

  There was another pause and then, ‘Mr Arnold, I have a problem.’

  ‘People who ring here usually do,’ Lee said. There was something familiar about the voice, but he couldn’t place it. He knew a lot of people, even some posh ones. ‘What can we help you with?’

  ‘I don’t know whether you can help me at all,’ the man said. ‘But if we could meet somewhere – I don’t want to do this over the phone – then we could discuss it.’

  ‘We could,’ Lee said. ‘Although I have to tell you that I won’t meet anyone in a dark alley, for obvious reasons.’

  ‘Of course not. There’s a pub near your office called the Boleyn. How about that?’

  If he knew Newham’s most famous pub he might be local. But the Boleyn was also West Ham United’s boozer – and he was a bit posh even for the most gentrified bits of the borough.

  ‘OK, when?’ Lee asked.

  ‘Can you meet me this evening? At five?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Lee flicked the desk diary open and began to write. ‘Mr . . .?’

  ‘Smith.’

  It was almost certainly something to do with his marriage. They were always ‘Smith’ or ‘Brown’. Lee could see him in his mind: middle-aged, white, miserable. The wife was probably having an email affair with a waiter she’d met in Morocco.

  ‘And how will I recognise you, Mr Smith?’

  There was another pause. Then, ‘Oh, you’ll recognise me, Mr Arnold,’ and he put the phone down.

  Lee Arnold went outside and lit a cigarette to steady his nerves. That ‘Mr Smith’ had said he’d recognise him felt ominous.

  *

  Although she didn’t like to give too much credence to the fantastical theories that some of her clients had about their husbands’/sons’/daughters’ behaviour, when Mumtaz Hakim found herself following Mr Ali to Broadway Market in Hackney she had been surprised. One of the great centres of East End urban cool was not a place she would have associated with a forty-seven-year-old imam from Manor Park. Girls in ripped tights and hipsters on fixed-wheel bicycles were not obviously the kind of company Mr Ali would want to keep. Had he come to the market to taste the forbidden fruit of the excellent pork with crackling Lee Arnold had told her they sold there? She doubted it, though anything was possible. Perhaps Mr Ali had a fancy for outsized lavender cupcakes. His wife was clearly worried enough to pay good money to find out.

  As a girl, if anyone had told Mumtaz that overtly religious people did anything wrong, she wouldn’t have believed it. But even at the relatively tender age of thirty-three, she’d experienced enough to know that wasn’t true. Her late husband had been a ‘good’ Muslim, but he had also been a drunk, a gambler, and had sexually abused both his own daughter and Mumtaz. Now there were other ‘good’ men in her life who wore their religious credentials on their sleeves while concealing the foulest sins in their corrupted hearts. Was Mr Ali one of those?

  She followed him to a second-hand shop that seemed to be full of industrial artefacts – metal filing cabinets, factory lamps and furniture made from what looked like railway sleepers. It was fascinating; she could see why Mr Ali was spending so much time looking around. But then he made straight for Regent’s Canal.

  When she’d been a child, Regent’s Canal had been a drab, smelly and forbidding waterway. Mumtaz and her two brothers had often lurked around it to throw stones at rats and jump out at unsuspecting walkers. But when a young woman was raped and thrown into the canal in 1997, Mumtaz’s parents forbade the children to go. They took no notice, but their adventures hadn’t been the same. In recent years, however, the canal, just like Broadway Market, had undergone a renaissance. Filled with colourful barges, some of which doubled as floating shops, it was like a holiday destination. Mr Ali, smiling as he walked towards one of the barges, obviously thought so too.

  She saw him get on board, to be greeted by a middle-aged white woman who addressed him by his first name and said, ‘We’ve got some lovely stuff for you. Really different.’

  Was she some kind of madam? Mumtaz cringed. She heard a male laugh that was probably his and wondered what the ‘stuff’ the woman had alluded to might be. Was it new young girls brought in for his pleasure? Or some peculiar sex toy? It was only when Mumtaz saw Mr Ali and the woman emerge fully clothed onto the deck in the sunshine, carrying bulging plastic bags, that she began to get a clue that maybe she had misjudged them. Then she saw the name of the boat, The Knitty Nora.

  She heard him say, ‘I take your point about the hand-painted cashmere, Dora, but my wife wants a sweater like the one in The Killing, so what can I do? Twenty years we have been together. I want to give her something she will love.’

  Mumtaz wondered how she was going to start the conversation she had to have with his wife.

  *

  Lee Arnold was the same build as Superintendent Paul Venus. Tall and slim, Venus was in mufti when Lee found him sitting in one of the far dark corners of the Boleyn, nursing a whisky.

  ‘I’m assuming it’s you I’m here for, Mr Smith?’ Lee said. Superintendent Venus had come to Forest Gate nick after Lee had left the force, but he had made his acquaintance and still had old mates who worked for him. None of them liked him.

  ‘Yes.’ Venus looked up. In his mid-fifties, he was almost ten years older than Lee, but his skin was smooth and his hair thick, which made him look younger. On this occasion, however, he had very dark circles underneath his eyes. ‘Can I get you a drink, Mr Arnold?’

  Lee asked for a Diet Pepsi. Venus went to the bar.

  The Boleyn, inasmuch as it advertised itself at all, promoted an image of a real East End boozer. And that was no lie. But what it meant in the twenty-first century was not what it had meant when Lee was a kid. Back in the seventies the Boleyn had heaved with boozed-up, white, working-class blokes singing West Ham songs and having punch-ups. Now, although it still retained its early Edwardian décor, plus a faint air of chirpy cockneyism, it was a bit of a quiet billet, with the exception of home-game Saturdays. But even though it was a shadow of its former self and he hadn’t taken a drink for years, Lee Arnold loved it.

  When Venus returned he said, ‘I’m aware of the fact that you’re friends with several of my officers, Mr Arnold. Specifically DI Collins and DS Bracci.’

  Lee had worked with them both years before. He even had an ongoing, ad hoc, fuck-buddy thing happening with Violet Collins. He hoped that Venus didn’t want to talk to him about that.

  ‘But what I am going to tell you, you mustn’t tell them, or anyone else. Not even your assistant,’ Venus said. ‘I can’t stress that enough.’

  Lee frowned.

  ‘Can you give me an assurance that you will adhere to these conditions, Mr Arnold?’

  Vi Collins had a theory that Venus was bent. As she perceived it, he was soft on organised crime in the borough and she speculated he was taking backhanders. Other people in the nick saw him more as a cautious operator. He was, after all, a posh type from out of the area, so fitting in was always going to be difficult.

  Lee took a drink. ‘Depends what it’s about,’ he said.

  ‘Well, I can tell you it’s not about any of my officers.’

  ‘That’s a good start.’

  ‘And it doesn’t have anything to do with any of DI Collins’s theories about me either,’ he sa
id. He moved closer, leaning across the scarred pub table. ‘So please put any notions you may have about my being on the make out of your mind. This is a personal matter.’

  Another story that went around about Venus was that he was shagging women in the station who were half his age. He was married, to a soap star who had a great big gaff in the country that he rarely visited, but he also had a flat in Islington. Had he been taking little PCs there for some extra-curricular? Was he about to get caught?

  ‘I need your help. I need someone who knows about being a police officer, but who isn’t one. I need . . .’

  He stopped. This was serious. The shadowed eyes, together with the tears Lee could see in them, made the private investigator lean in towards the policeman. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘just between you and me.’

  Venus threw what remained of his whisky down his throat. He said, ‘I’ve got a son. Harry. He’s sixteen, attends a public school in Berkshire where he’s a boarder. He’s bright and his mother and I love him very much.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  Venus was crying, tears falling down his cheeks. What was it with Harry? Drugs? Girls? Boys?

  Venus said, ‘He’s been kidnapped.’

  Lee hadn’t been expecting that.

  ‘His mother received a phone call the day Harry disappeared and then a written demand from the kidnappers was sent to our family home in Henley-on-Thames last Friday. They, whoever they are, want a hundred thousand pounds for Harry’s safe return. But if I use my police contacts, if I so much as tell the police, Harry will die. I have complied with that. My wife and I are in the process of assembling the money in the required denominations. Would you mind if I got another drink? Would you like one?’

  ‘No, but you go for it,’ Lee said.

  Venus went to the bar.

  His wife was an actress called Tina Wilton. Lee remembered her from vaguely saucy comedy programmes in the seventies. Blonde, curvy and a bit tarty, she’d gone on to land a role in the long-running soap Londoners, back in the nineties. She played a tough matriarch, head of a crime family who, Lee always thought, were some of the worst caricatures of East End ‘types’ he’d ever come across. But a lot of people loved Tina Wilton and she was a regular on many panel and reality shows. Every time he saw her, Lee mourned for the way she had looked in the past, pre-Botox and plastic surgery. Had she done all that to enhance her career, or to try to please her husband?