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

She’d just brought a box of Brillo pads out of the storeroom to put on the shop floor when Shazia spotted Naz Sheikh. He was at the counter choosing a chocolate bar. Cousin Aftab, who had been at the back of the shop filling the bread shelves, walked over to help him.

  ‘Yes, mate?’

  Shazia made herself small behind the Brillo box.

  Naz Sheikh said nothing. Cousin Aftab slotted himself behind the counter and waited. Time passed and Shazia began to wonder whether Sheikh had seen her and was hanging about intending to speak to her. But why? She saw Aftab look at his mobile phone and then scratch his head. Would he say something sarcastic about how long his customer was taking to choose a sweet? He could be quite rude sometimes, she’d discovered.

  A blonde woman in a boob tube and a pair of skanky jogging bottoms was queuing up behind Naz Sheikh now, holding a carton of milk and a loaf of bread. She looked bored and then sighed. Naz Sheikh turned.

  ‘Holding you up?’ he said. He looked at the woman like she was shit on his shoe.

  She said, ‘I must get back to baby.’

  She was some sort of eastern European, Shazia recognised the accent. There were a lot of young women from places like Poland and the Czech Republic in the area.

  ‘What? Have you left your baby on its own?’

  The gangster widened his eyes.

  Shazia saw the woman freeze.

  ‘Ludmilla, love, you take your stuff and pay me later.’

  Naz looked at Cousin Aftab.

  ‘Off you go, girl.’

  The young woman smiled. ‘Thank you, Mr Huq,’ she said. ‘I will pay.’

  ‘I know you will.’

  She began to walk away. Naz Sheikh picked up a chocolate bar, apparently at random. ‘That slapper’s left her baby,’ he said as he handed over a pound coin. ‘That not bother you?’

  ‘It’s why I told her she could pay later,’ Aftab said. ‘I know her. She works hard.’

  ‘You know her.’ There was a sneer in his voice and on his face. ‘She’s a whore.’

  Cousin Aftab didn’t react. ‘Always in and out for bits and bobs, chief,’ he said. He handed a couple of pennies back in change. The gangster began to leave.

  Naz Sheikh and Shazia heard Aftab say to himself, ‘Tosser.’

  She walked out from behind the Brillo box.

  ‘Oh, bung them down by the J Cloths,’ Aftab said.

  ‘OK.’

  She walked between the narrow rows of tinned goods on one side and cereals on the other and made for the household stuff at the front of the shop. She’d just opened the Brillo box when Naz Sheikh walked back in and looked straight at her.

  *

  ‘There used to be some sort of performing arts school off Bath Road,’ Sergeant Connolly said. He was a lot older than she’d thought he would be from his voice. He was probably in his mid-fifties.

  ‘I can remember all sorts of dramatic types in the old Tabard,’ he said, referring to the pub on Bath Road. Alison had been found in the phone box outside. ‘Normal people’d go in there and have a pint, while they’d go in and share a Tequila Sunrise between four of them.’ He shook his head.

  ‘You remember the baby being found?’ Mumtaz said.

  Connolly tended to drift off into his own Chiswick memories whether they were relevant or not.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘My old guv’nor interviewed the nun who found her.’

  ‘Mother Emerita?’

  ‘Don’t remember her name,’ he said. ‘But I do remember Sergeant Piper, my old boss, saying how strange it felt to have a nun in the station. Wasn’t like it is today, with all the security cameras and everyone going about as if they’re on CSI or something. Designer clothes and all that. Back then everyone smoked and drank and the place smelt like a pub. He was quite embarrassed, Sergeant Piper was.’

  ‘Did he tell you anything about the interview?’

  ‘No. But I’ve dug out the paperwork for you,’ he said. ‘I scanned a copy.’

  He pushed a sheet of paper towards her.

  ‘Can I keep it?’

  ‘’Fraid not. But you can read it.’

  Mother Emerita had been going to visit Dr Chitty, the convent’s GP, when she found the baby in the telephone box outside the Tabard. Why she’d been going there wasn’t divulged.

  ‘People like Sergeant Piper didn’t ask too many questions,’ Connolly said when Mumtaz asked if he knew where Mother Emerita had been going. ‘They didn’t then. She was a nun, so how could she lie?’

  The word ‘easily’ came into Mumtaz’s head, but she said nothing and read on. Once she’d found the child, the Mother Superior had taken her back to the convent and called the police. She said that she had abandoned her trip to Dr Chitty’s. But when the police had arrived, Dr Chitty had been at the convent. In modern times, Mumtaz would have said that the nun had probably called her doctor from her mobile, but phones had been exclusively land lines back in the seventies. Maybe Mother Emerita had called him from the phone box? But if she had, he had turned up quickly. The police had taken a call from the convent before 7 a.m. and a WPC Martyn had been sent over immediately. Mother Emerita had been interviewed by Sergeant Piper that afternoon.

  ‘There were pictures of the baby in the Chiswick Herald. I remember them.’

  ‘Did the story make the national news?’

  ‘Yes, when they were looking for the mother. Even back then it was all systems go for a while,’ he said. ‘But when no one turned up it all just sort of faded. The baby was taken to Essex, as you know. But going back to the drama school, there were a lot of students of all types staying in this area at the time. It was cheap to rent a room out here back then.’

  ‘You think the mother could have been a student?’

  ‘It’s possible. People didn’t used to talk about that sort of thing too much in those days but I know there were some not very politically correct things said.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like girls who wanted to be actresses were easy. And of course there were loads of crude comments about the girls who lived in the convent.’ He shrugged. ‘Some men have a thing about convent girls, like they’re especially hankering after sex because they’re in a place run by nuns. Sexist nonsense.’

  ‘But the child wasn’t found at the convent,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘Exactly! Plods talk, what can I say?’

  Mumtaz thought about Lee and what he said ‘plods’ had talked about when he’d been in the job. Even now it was mostly sex, sometimes booze, though modern plods wore nicer clothes.

  ‘To be fair though, it was mainly Sergeant Piper who made the convent jokes,’ he said. ‘Kept on about the baby being born to a nice Catholic girl from a good family.’

  ‘You don’t think that he knew something, do you?’ Mumtaz enquired.

  He smiled. ‘I don’t think so. Sergeant Piper just interviewed the nun and then he was finished with it,’ he said. ‘He had what he’d call a bit of fun with the idea of some girl in the convent getting pregnant, then he found something else to laugh at. It was what he was like. He never took anything seriously, and that included the job.’

  Mumtaz looked down at Mother Emerita’s short statement again.

  ‘What about WPC Martyn?’ she asked.

  ‘Didn’t know her very well,’ Connolly said. ‘But I do know she did most of the work to do with Social Services.’

  ‘You don’t know how I can contact her, do you?’

  ‘Not without a medium, no.’

  ‘A medium?’

  ‘She died the year after the baby was found,’ he said. ‘I remember it well. She just dropped.’

  ‘Dropped?’

  ‘She had a heart attack. Came out of nowhere. Funnily – or not funnily – Dr Chitty pronounced her dead.’

  *

  Lee’s phone rang. It was Malcolm McCullough, Harry Venus’s housemaster.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Mr Arnold?’

  ‘Yes.

  ‘McCullough h
ere, from Reeds.’

  ‘Good to hear from you.’

  ‘I’ve managed to arrange for you to visit the school,’ he said. ‘Bit short notice, but is tomorrow at two p.m. good for you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘The gates will be open and if you drive up to the main building I can meet you outside the front entrance.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘OK then. See you there.’

  He ended the call quickly.

  Lee wanted to see where Harry Venus studied, only partly in case it gave him any insight into his abduction. He also wanted to go to Reeds because he’d never been inside a public school, and in spite of what Malcolm McCullough had said when they’d first met, he still had a notion that cruel, weird, upper-class practices persisted. He knew he was almost certainly way off beam.

  A laugh like a donkey’s bray interrupted his thoughts. For a moment, stuck on top of the Circus mound, he couldn’t locate the sound. Then he saw them: four young men, one in a business suit, two in hipster uniforms, and the fourth was that Asian boy he’d seen earlier. The brayer laughed again and he saw that it was one of the hipster kids, a nascent moustache on his lip, wearing clothes that would not have looked out of place on a fifties bank clerk.

  Lee heard him say, ‘Well my little horrors, what would you say to champagne?’

  The Asian boy said, ‘Hello, champagne!’

  The older man in the business suit raised his eyes to the sky. ‘Oh, please, not that old chestnut.’

  They all laughed. Lee grimaced. Pitiful. Obviously an in-joke or some sort of catch-phrase bollocks. Youth was a weird country that he found more and more incomprehensible. What were posh kids doing in the East End? Yeah it was funky and edgy and all that nonsense, but what was so good about that? Lee had spent most of his life living the funky-edgy ‘dream’. It was overrated.

  The other hipster kid, who was clearly going for a Victorian undertaker look, danced in the road for no apparent reason, and again, all the boys laughed, especially when he narrowly missed being killed by a white van. Lee wondered how the one in the modern business suit was putting up with them – and why.

  The heat of the day had given over to the gentler warmth of early evening, and Lee could smell and hear people preparing their evening meals. He felt happy when he heard a few voices that had very obviously originated in the area.

  ‘Shut the fuck up and eat your pie!’

  But then the boys started again.

  ‘I know,’ the one with the nascent moustache continued, ‘let’s have a night out. There’s this pub that does lock-ins round here somewhere.’

  And then they all fell quiet for a moment – even grave. The Asian boy’s face first contorted, then it laughed. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘that would just be so fucking exquisite!’

  The undertaker shoved him and said, ‘You are such a twisted bastard!’

  ‘And you’re not?’

  Business Suit said, ‘Look, if you kids get into trouble for underage drinking, you’re on your own.’ He looked at the undertaker. ‘I’m off home, OK?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  He left.

  They all howled with laughter again. Youngsters. Lee had no idea how old any of them might be and even less interest in finding out. But he did wonder whether Harry Venus was like them. He too was posh, moneyed and probably full of raging hormones. When they could go to Monte Carlo or Marrakesh for the summer, what were they doing hanging about Bethnal Green?

  Lee watched the boys smoke joints and talk nonsense until finally they left the Circus. By that time the light had faded and what had once been the Old Nichol, the darkest slum in London, slipped back into something approaching Victorian gloom.

  11

  ‘And again please!’

  High-pitched and hysterical, the voice sounded to Paul Venus like a maniacal clown.

  ‘What?’ He watched Tony Bracci pick up the extension.

  ‘Money,’ the voice said. ‘Same as last time. That way Harry stays alive.’

  He resisted the reflex to scream that he’d need time to sell things if they wanted another quarter of a million, and instead he said, ‘I’ll need proof. That Harry’s still alive.’

  Tony gave him the thumbs-up. Venus knew that he should have asked for proof of life right from the off, but he still felt that Tony was being patronising.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Are you there?’

  Another pause. Could he hear whispering in the background at the other end of the line, or was it just in his head?

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  The panic built in his chest and created a pain. Oh, God a heart attack was all he needed now! If he dropped dead, what would happen to Harry?

  ‘Hello?’

  Tony Bracci moved one hand gently downwards and mouthed, ‘breathe’.

  He wanted to say, ‘It’s all right for you, with your tribe of kids safely at home,’ but he didn’t.

  ‘Eeeerrrrr . . .’

  The screeching clown was a new voice and it ramped up Venus’s anxiety. He’d always found clowns sinister and this was like the Coco the Clown of his youth, but on crystal meth.

  He made himself speak. ‘You can have your money, but I must have proof that Harry’s still alive first.’

  ‘Mmmmm . . .’

  The screechy noises caught the raw edges of his nerves.

  ‘Well?’

  Tony Bracci turned away. That had been a bit imperious. Had it been too much? God almighty, they knew who he was and what he did, wouldn’t they be expecting that?

  ‘We’ll send you a little DVD, Mr Venus,’ the voice said. ‘Then the money. Now we’ve been chatting for far too long . . .’

  The line went dead. Venus put the phone down.

  Tony Bracci said, ‘Let’s see what the technical bods got from that.’

  *

  A woman with a rasping voice like a macaw was very firm about Dr Chitty.

  ‘He’s too old and sick to see anyone,’ she told Mumtaz.

  Early that morning Mother Katerina had phoned with the name and number of the nursing home where Dr Chitty was living. Mumtaz had called the place at once.

  ‘I accept that,’ Mumtaz said. ‘But could you please let Dr Chitty know I called and take my number?’

  ‘I’ve told you, he . . .’

  ‘Tell him it’s about baby Madonna. Just take my details and tell him that.’

  Across the kitchen table, Shazia was stirring her scrambled egg without eating it.

  The woman at the other end said nothing.

  ‘If it wasn’t a matter of life and death, I wouldn’t be asking to disturb Dr Chitty,’ Mumtaz said. ‘But it is. Please just tell Dr Chitty and let him make his own choice.’

  ‘We don’t tell ’em what to do and when to do it here,’ the woman said, obviously offended.

  ‘I . . .’

  ‘It’s his doctor says he has to be quiet, not us.’

  ‘Yes, but even so, if you could . . .’

  ‘I’ll do what I can.’

  She sounded peeved, but she took Mumtaz’s name and number, by which time Shazia had gone, leaving her breakfast uneaten. It wasn’t like her. She’d always had a good appetite. She’d looked glum too, which was strange considering that according to Aftab, she was doing well in the shop. Maybe it was teenage stuff? As far as Mumtaz knew there was no boy on the horizon, but she did have a lot of work to do over the holidays and perhaps she was worried about that.

  She just hoped that the girl wasn’t still brooding over the situation with the Sheikhs. There was nothing anyone could do, least of all Shazia. Mumtaz automatically looked at her phone. Naz had rung her twice in the last twenty-four hours. He was trying to find out why, according to a rumour he’d heard, DI Collins and Superintendent Venus seemed to have suddenly disappeared from Forest Gate police station. He wanted her inside news. The Sheikhs had other sources in Forest Gate police station, but no one, they felt, as close to Violet Collins as Mumtaz. S
o if Collins and Venus were coming after the Sheikhs and their drug business or their rented flats, their money laundering or their people-trafficking activities, Mumtaz could find out about it. That was Naz’s thinking. And of course she did know what was going on, but she wasn’t telling.

  She liked Vi and knew her socially, but what Naz and his family were counting on were indiscretions made by DI Collins while in bed with her occasional lover, Lee Arnold. Everyone knew they had a ‘thing’ from time to time and Mumtaz was sure that Lee had passed information on to her that had come unofficially from Vi. But she was never going to make that available to anyone, least of all the Sheikhs. She’d made a deal with Naz to let him know about any proposed police action against the family in return for some concessions on what remained of her late husband’s debt to them. And on condition that they left Shazia alone. But she’d never planned to make good on that agreement.

  Mumtaz put her phone in her handbag and made ready to leave. She was in the office all day because Lee was out on Harry Venus business. She hoped that the poor boy was discovered soon.

  *

  When he’d been a kid, Lee Arnold’s parents had always told him that if he ‘made it’ in life he could go and live ‘out west’. This meant anything from Earl’s Court to Oxford, but didn’t include Notting Hill, which was ‘full of blacks’. Living in places like Chiswick, Henley-on-Thames or Windsor said to the world that you had arrived. Quite what Bracknell, the largely modern new town where Reeds School was actually based, had to say, Lee didn’t know. There were a lot of traffic roundabouts and new houses, which put him in mind of Basildon in Essex.

  He’d arrived early. Keen to get a jump on the often congested M25, he’d left his flat at ten for a 2 p.m. appointment. Now he was at Tesco in Bracknell and it was only one o’clock. He’d driven past the entrance to Reeds, which was in a pleasant green area called Bracknell Forest, but the gates had been closed. He got an impression of a large red-brick building in the middle of a lot of grassland. He wondered what the boys did in terms of sport in all that wide open space, and imagined tennis courts and stables. It was little wonder that the boys who attended such places did so well later in life. A rigorous education combined with loads of improving activities and the opportunity to meet other future movers and shakers beat the hell out of sleeping through French, playing football in the street and smoking in the toilets. He’d met a lot of good people when he’d been at school, but none of them had ever got him a job.