Bright Shiny Things Read online

  ‘I can’t advise you,’ Mumtaz said. ‘It’s not what private investigators do.’

  When Mrs Butt left the office, Mumtaz had her lunch at her desk. Lee was out with a prospective client who had looked as if he’d had a very rough night. They’d gone to the Boleyn pub at the other end of Green Street which, given the client’s state, hadn’t seemed like the best idea. But what did she know? The client was, apparently, one of Lee’s old friends from the First Iraq War. An Arab, by the sound of his name.

  ‘Shereen told me everything,’ Lee said.

  ‘She said. You think we should go to the police,’ Abbas al’Barri said.

  ‘I know you should,’ Lee said. ‘You should also stop drinking too. You look like shit, mate.’

  Abbas looked at the double whisky in front of him.

  ‘Hair of the dog.’

  There weren’t usually many people in the Boleyn. There never had been that many on weekday lunchtimes in recent years. But at least up until the previous football season, the pub had done well on match days. Now West Ham United had moved to the Olympic Stadium in Stratford even that trade had disappeared. And when the property developers who’d bought the old Boleyn ground started to demolish it and build posh flats, the pub was probably for the knacker’s yard.

  Lee said, ‘I know he’s your son, but Fayyad openly admits he takes part in ISIS activities in Syria. He’s a terrorist.’

  ‘He’s trying not to be!’ Abbas said.

  An elderly man looked up from behind his copy of The Sun, sniffed and then walked out to have a fag on Green Street.

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘And you don’t know that he isn’t reaching out!’

  ‘No. I don’t. But what I do know is that those counterterrorism officers who worked with you when Fayyad took off for Syria are the best people to help you.’

  ‘This looking for a wife thing is nonsense!’ Abbas said. ‘He never wanted to be married!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He never discussed it with me.’

  Lee sipped his Diet Pepsi. It was probably rotting the hell out of his guts but it was better than the booze and painkillers he’d slung down his neck for more years than he cared to recall. At least Pepsi didn’t make him behave like a twat. Like Abbas.

  ‘Shereen told me you’ve got some idea about contacting him on Facebook.’

  ‘Yes! You—’

  ‘I can’t do it,’ Lee said. ‘Outfits like ISIS monitor social media. Assuming for a moment that Fayyad does want to come home, then I might inadvertently say something to him that would get him into trouble. They could kill him.’

  Abbas looked into his whisky glass.

  ‘You had a family liaison officer, didn’t you?’

  ‘A Sikh woman.’

  ‘Then contact her,’ Lee said.

  He shook his head. ‘She just made tea and said comforting words. She was about twenty at the most,’ he said. ‘What can such a person know? And we can’t contact him, Shereen or me. We can’t bear it. What if we’re wrong? What if this is some sort of cruel joke? Lee, I know you work with that Muslim lady …’

  ‘Mumtaz isn’t getting involved,’ Lee said. ‘I won’t have it.’

  ‘She works for you. She must do what you tell her.’

  ‘Not if what I ask her is bad for her,’ Lee said. ‘And this would be. Believe me, Mumtaz’s got enough shit in her life without getting inside the head of someone who’s been fighting in Syria. It’s fucking dangerous. You should know that.’

  Abbas didn’t answer.

  ‘Go to the police and tell them,’ Lee said. ‘There’s nothing me or Mumtaz can do for you.’ Then he stood up. ‘I’m going out for a fag,’ he said.

  As he passed him, Lee heard Abbas say, ‘You owe me.’

  She was right, the old man was looking at her.

  ‘You think that old bookie want to give you some lovin’?’ Grace said to Shazia.

  The girls were sitting on the wall outside Newham Sixth Form College. Shazia was eating a KitKat while Grace smoked a fag. Grace’s mum and dad belonged to what she called the ‘happy clappy’ church next door to Tesco’s on the Barking Road. They didn’t approve of smoking. Which was why Grace had to do it.

  ‘You know him?’ Grace asked. ‘He, like, an uncle or something?’

  ‘No.’

  He wasn’t and Shazia didn’t know him, as such. But she had seen him, often. And whenever that happened he always seemed to be staring at her. Was it just paranoia? A lot of girls dreaded being spotted by a single or widowed, much older man. Being taken a fancy to by an old guy with money sometimes meant that an offer of marriage would be received. The only consolation for Shazia was that her stepmother would never agree to such a match. Shazia knew that to the bottom of her soul. What she also unfortunately knew was that her amma was also skint, beggared by those bastards her dad had been in debt to. The old man walked away.

  ‘So you comin’ down the chicken shop after college?’ Grace asked.

  Grace had the hots for a local bad boy who called himself ‘Mamba’. Like Grace, he came from a God-fearing and intensely moral Nigerian family. No one knew what Mamba – whose real name was Benjamin – was like at home, but on the street he was all ‘gangsta’. Grace was besotted.

  Shazia shook her head. ‘Nah.’

  ‘Oh, girl, why not?’

  ‘Got work to do,’ she said. ‘If I don’t do it, mum’ll give me shit.’

  ‘She just your stepmum,’ Grace said dismissively.

  ‘Yeah, but if I’m ever going to get out of Newham, I have to get my exams.’

  ‘To go uni, yeah.’

  She hadn’t told Grace, or anyone apart from her amma, that she was actually going to join the police. If she was. She’d started to rethink her plans in the past few days. Maybe going to university and then joining the police was the way forward? If nothing else it would put off the evil moment when she had to tell her friends that she was going to become a ‘fed’.

  ‘There other ways to get out this shithole,’ Grace said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  Grace caught the downbeat tone in Shazia’s voice. ‘I don’t mean becoming some gangsta’s baby mama. I ain’t doin’ that.’

  ‘Unless Mamba asked you.’

  Laughing, Grace pushed her, ‘Cheeky bitch!’

  ‘Just sayin’,’ Shazia said.

  The girls chatted on until it was time for their afternoon sessions to begin. But when, later, Shazia came out onto the street to go home, she saw that the old man she’d seen earlier had reappeared. Once again, he stared at her. Who was he and what did he want?

  DI Violet Collins might be the rough side of fifty and as curvaceous as a stick, but she knew how to give a bloke a hard-on. Lee put his hands on her waist to guide her as she rose and fell on his erection. When they’d finished and were laying on his bed smoking post-sex fags she said, ‘That’s set me up for a few weeks. Ta, darling.’

  He smiled. Then noticing that her cigarette had a long and precarious piece of ash on the end he said, ‘Don’t get it on …’

  ‘The duvet. I know,’ Vi said as she flicked it off into an ashtray on the bedside cabinet. ‘I know you, remember? Like no one else.’

  She did. As well as being occasional lovers, ‘fuck buddies’ as Vi liked to put it, they’d worked together for ten years when Lee had been in the Met. Also, long ago, she’d saved him from himself. The First Gulf War had left Lee Arnold a wreck. Addicted to booze and painkillers, he’d been on the road to self-destruction until Vi had turned up one day with a cage containing a mynah bird. As she’d handed it over to him, she’d said, ‘You might want to kill yourself, but this poor innocent sod doesn’t deserve to die. Look after him.’

  The bird, who Lee named Chronus, hadn’t been the prettiest pet on the block but he was bright and had very quickly learnt all of Lee’s favourite West Ham United songs and team lists. He also, just by his presence, made Lee clean up his act. Although the
fags remained, the booze and the drugs went. But at a price. Lee Arnold spent at least four hours every day cleaning his small flat in Forest Gate. Nightmares about Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard had been replaced as the enemy by dust.

  But although, as ever, mindful that Vi could be sloppy with her fags, Lee wasn’t thinking about dust as he lay next to her, naked, staring at the ceiling. His mind was still on Abbas al’Barri. Absolutely convinced that his son was reaching out from the heart of ISIS-controlled Syrian territories, Abbas was a man in torment. What he wanted, which was for Fayyad to come home in one piece, was almost impossible. Occasionally someone managed to escape, but those people were always under suspicion, which Lee could understand. However horrific the methods used by ISIS were, recruits to their cause had still gone to them knowing, and approving, of their philosophy. Runaways were watched by the security services, probably, in many cases, with good cause.

  Like Abbas, however, Lee was intrigued by the Tooth of Jonah’s Whale. It was the sort of thing the ISIS boys would automatically destroy. Anything that could be considered even remotely idolatrous was either smashed up or, if it was worth something, flogged to some greedy collector online. Had Fayyad sent the tooth to his parents for old times’ sake? If he had, he wasn’t a very good ISIS member. And what, if anything, did his appearance on Facebook so quickly after sending the tooth home mean? If anything? Was he ‘reaching out’ or was he simply trying to reel in young female recruits using his good looks and big muscles as bait? And why was Lee even thinking about it, anyway? He’d told Abbas he couldn’t and wouldn’t help him and he’d advised him to go to the police. He looked at Vi who appeared to be sleeping. Should he tell her?

  Lee knew why he was thinking about Abbas and that was because, as Abbas himself had pointed out, he owed him. The Iraqi translator had taken a bullet in the leg for his British soldier friend and Lee knew that, even now, the nerve damage it had caused troubled him. It wasn’t the only reason that Abbas drank, that had all started when he’d got himself banged up in one of Saddam’s prisons in the 1980s, but that catastrophic leg wound hadn’t helped.

  ‘You’re very quiet, Arnold,’ Vi said. ‘Penny for ’em.’

  She always knew when he was worried about something. She usually knew when he was keeping something from her. Even her own DS, Tony Bracci, called her a fortune teller. It’s what her Gypsy mum had been.

  Lee knew he should tell her about Abbas. Protocols existed to deal with these situations, protocols that were there for a reason. But he was hesitating and he knew he was doing that for a reason. Coppers, even the exalted graduate types who tended to drift towards sexy jobs like homicide and counterterrorism, sometimes got it wrong. Sometimes people who weren’t villains got banged up, sometimes people, whether innocent or guilty, died. None of it was, usually, deliberate. The coppers were under pressure for results and shit happened. But shit couldn’t happen to Fayyad al’Barri. When the family had finally managed to get out of Iraq in ’92, Lee had gone to Heathrow to meet them. He still remembered the sight of Fayyad solemnly carrying his one precious possession, which had been a Frisbee. It was all the ten-year-old had left. Djamila, his eight-year-old sister, had run into ‘uncle’ Lee’s arms but Fayyad had held himself aloof. He’d already been too damaged by war to risk outward shows of affection. But over the years Fayyad had learnt to smile again and, when he’d left to join ISIS, it had come as a shock to everyone, including Lee. Fayyad couldn’t be put at risk, he was too precious.

  And Lee Arnold owed his father. He looked at Vi and said, ‘I’m alright.’

  It was nearly midnight when the front doorbell rang. Shazia was asleep. Mumtaz felt a tiny jolt of fear. The old man had agreed to wait until Shazia had finished her A levels before coming to formally make his disgusting proposal. That was still three months away.

  She spoke into the intercom. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Lee.’

  She let out a shaky breath and buzzed him in.

  Mumtaz made ‘English’ tea with milk, which they drank in her darkened garden so that Lee could smoke. He told her everything about Abbas al’Barri, his family and his son Fayyad.

  ‘Seems it’s normal for these ISIS fighters to go online and use their well-developed pecs as bait,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve heard of such things, yes,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I know several ladies who are worried about their daughters. Not clients, just people I see around. The Internet, useful though it is, has some lethal downsides.’

  Lee looked at his glowing fag end. ‘Shopping,’ he said.

  ‘Shopping?’

  ‘Being a bit glib, I s’pose, but Jodie’s racked up over a grand’s worth of debt online shopping,’ he said. ‘So her mother tells me.’

  Lee’s daughter Jodie lived with his ex-wife in Hastings. To Lee’s horror the nineteen-year-old was, like her mother, interested in little beyond shopping, tanning and celebrities.

  ‘You’re not going to pay it off, I hope,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘Couldn’t even if I wanted to.’ He smoked. Then he said, ‘If I pose as some little Muslim girl already in love with the idea of sodding off to the caliphate and marrying a fighter …’

  ‘You’ll never get away with it,’ Mumtaz said. ‘On Facebook you might just get away with it. But, from what I’ve heard, these men want to see what they’re buying before they buy it.’

  ‘Buy?’

  ‘It’s a figure of speech,’ she said. ‘They want to know what these prospective brides look like. They want to be sure they’re not too old or scarred, fat or have, I don’t know, big noses or something. They want young, pretty women they can breed with. So they use Skype.’

  ‘Fayyad is on Facebook.’

  ‘Yes and if a girl with a pretty photo on her page contacts him then he’ll want to Skype her,’ she said. ‘And even if you cover and say you’re way too religious to show your face on Skype, your voice and your size will give you away.’

  ‘So I have to find a girl …’

  ‘A woman,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Girls are way too vulnerable. Spending time inside the head of a man who, even if he is now a reluctant terrorist, may have killed people, is not something with which a girl could cope. The police have people who will be able to do this sort of thing.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘But Abbas doesn’t trust them. And he’s sick, in his head. I’ve never seen him so bad. He thinks they’ll do so many checks to make sure they’re not being duped that they’ll lose him. And that may happen.’

  ‘And it may not,’ she said. She paused. ‘But I know that in your awkward, round the bushes British way, you’re asking me if I’ll help you and I will.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Yes. I know you owe Abbas your life and I owe you.’

  ‘You owe me nothing,’ he said. ‘I haven’t done anything. Not yet.’

  ‘But you will,’ Mumtaz said. ‘You will speak to my brother Ali and persuade him to change his ways and I know you’re gathering intelligence on the Sheikhs.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘I’ve seen your files!’ she said. ‘Don’t try to tell me you’re doing nothing!’

  He didn’t. He just sat.

  Having beggared her for her husband’s gambling debts, the local crime family, the Sheikhs, were now coming for Shazia. Although the girl hadn’t killed him, Shazia had been with the family’s favourite son when he’d been stabbed. She hadn’t known that it was Naz who had killed her father, but she had been aware that he had been taking money from Mumtaz. And so in spite of the fact that Naz had been killed by a Pole employed by a rival Asian gang, because Shazia had been at the scene, Sheikh family honour had to be satisfied. This was to be done by Mumtaz giving Shazia in marriage to the current head of the Sheikh family, seventy-year-old Wahid. If she failed to deliver the girl when she finished her A levels the Sheikhs would inform the police on Mumtaz’s brother, Ali, who was giving shelter to radicalised young men in his house on Brick Lane. Lee had offered to help. But what he didn’t
know was that Mumtaz and Shazia had more in common than he thought. Even Shazia didn’t know that her precious stepmother had watched her father bleed to death when Naz Sheikh had stabbed him. In that moment, she’d had enough. The Sheikhs had never let her forget that or the idea that they could tell Shazia her secret any time they wanted.

  ‘I don’t want you to do this,’ Lee said as he lit another cigarette. ‘You’ve enough on.’

  She ignored him. ‘So this Abbas and his wife,’ she said. ‘What do they do? Do they work?’

  ‘Abbas works for the BBC Arabic service, Shereen teaches maths.’

  Mumtaz leant back into her chair and looked into the candle flame on the patio table.

  ‘I saw when ISIS blew up the Mosque of Jonah on the news,’ she said. ‘Whatever one may feel about relics they have value for a lot of people. Whether they are genuine or not is almost immaterial. People make an emotional investment in such things and it is that which makes them meaningful.’

  ‘With your psychology grad’s head on,’ Lee said. ‘What about as a Muslim? How’d you feel about the Tooth of Jonah’s Whale with that hat on?’

  She shrugged. ‘The al’Barris are Shia, I am Sunni. We are more austere in our relationship to buildings, tombs, relics. But some amazingly ornate monuments are Sunni and we do revere the inanimate. What is the Holy Kaab’a in Mecca if not an object of veneration? Ordinary Sunni people have no problem with any of this. Difficulties arise with people like ISIS who have this notion that any form of man-made structure, any artefact that is revered is an abomination. Their caliphate, as I perceive it, should it come into being, will be a twelfth-century environment with selective modern graft-ons like mobile phones, modern weapons and the Internet. Without those things they couldn’t survive, which is, of course, one of their great weaknesses.’