A Private Business Read online

  She put her head down.

  “You were a big star for a number of years and I liked your act,” Lee said. “I’ve noticed you’ve been making a bit of a comeback on the comedy circuit.”

  Maria Peters looked up. She remained the beautiful woman she’d always been, if a little older, but, so people said, she still had a mouth like a sewer. Although she’d suffered some ill health a little while back, after collapsing on stage, she seemed to be fully recovered now. “I married in 1993,” she said. “Leonard. We lived … I live in Forest Gate. No kids.”

  Lee pointed at her. “You’re a local girl.”

  “Plaistow.” She nodded. “Me and my parents and my sisters all in a two-bedroom flat on Prince Regent Lane.”

  He smiled; local girl done good. But how good? “What you got now?”

  “Five beds with landscaped gardens, outbuildings, new Merc on the drive.” She sighed. “Got a couple of houses on Plashet Grove, three flats in West Ham, one old multiple occupation in Forest Gate. Inheritances from Len. Leonard Blatt, my Len, was a landlord—he died at the end of 2009.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” Lee hadn’t actually known Leonard Blatt but he had known of him. He’d had a reputation as a mildly dodgy geezer.

  “Len left me well provided for and I’ll be straight with you, I’m worth a lot of money,” she said. “I don’t ever need to work again if I don’t want to. But I do. Len’s death left me … We had a good marriage. I got back on the comedy circuit just under a year ago when my old manager took me on again. It’s still rough out there but it’s what I know.”

  Lee leaned forward onto his desk. “You were good,” he said. “Controversial …”

  “Bloody filthy.” She looked slightly ashamed at first but then she smiled. “It was my selling point, that I’d say anything. I was young and pretty and I had no limits.”

  “You were brilliant.” She looked away. “So now I know something about your life, Miss Peters,” Lee said, “what’s this about you being watched?”

  She frowned. “Started about three months ago,” she said. “Someone out in the garden. Thought it was kids at first and I still don’t know that it isn’t, to be honest. At night but sometimes in the day I see, or think I see, movement in the garden. It’s not cats. There’s a human figure, out the corner of my eye, you know. Then the other day I saw someone in the house.”

  “Any idea who it might have been?”

  “No. Like in the garden, it was just a flash, a corner of the eye job. I think it was a man.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  She turned away. “No, I don’t want to. Don’t know if I’m … Been a bit dodgy, health-wise. Maybe, er … maybe no one’s really there. You know?”

  “Mmm.” Lee looked down at his desk. Of course it was possible that she was just seeing things. Sometimes people under stress, in this case bereavement, did experience hallucinations from time to time. But this was not exactly his area and he knew that he needed help. “Miss Peters, would you mind if I asked my assistant to come in on this interview?”

  “Your assistant?”

  “Mrs. Hakim. You met her in reception.”

  “Oh. I thought she was your secretary.”

  “No, she is my assistant,” Lee said. He mentally crossed his fingers against the almost-lie as he said it. Mumtaz Hakim had indeed been engaged to be his assistant even if, so far, all she’d done was make tea and write letters. Maybe now was indeed the time to employ her expertise? “Would you mind telling her what you’ve just told me?”

  “As long as she takes what I say seriously,” Maria Peters said. “Mr. Arnold, this being watched thing, it … I get so scared, and I don’t scare easily. Just recently my life’s got a lot better. I don’t want that to end, so I want this cleared up. Doesn’t matter what you find, I can take it. And what it costs.”

  Lee agreed to take Maria Peters’ case. If someone was indeed getting into her garden and her house and managing to bypass her own outdoor security camera and internal alarms then that could be serious. And besides, she’d asked for 24/7 surveillance from the Arnold Agency and that represented a lot of much needed money. The only question mark was over her state of mind—although the good thing was that she seemed to be aware of that possibility. Lee sat back down behind his desk once Maria had gone and asked Mumtaz what she thought.

  Sitting opposite, her hands wrapped around a big mug of tea, Mumtaz said, “I don’t really know, to be honest, Mr. Arnold. Having only just met her, Miss Peters seemed to me to be quite a sane person. But that doesn’t really mean very much, I’m afraid. Some people are sane for ninety percent of the time but just have the odd delusory episode, usually when they’re under pressure.”

  Which could apply to Maria Peters. The main reason why Lee had chosen Mumtaz above all the other candidates who had applied for the job as his assistant had been because she had a degree in psychology. He knew that he probably laid far more store by this than she did, but the potential knowledge that she had about the human mind and behavior had seemed like a good investment when he’d first interviewed her. She did also make a very good cuppa and she was, he hardly dare acknowledge even to himself, very beautiful.

  “But you think I did right to take the case?”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Arnold,” Mumtaz said. “Undoubtedly. The lady is alone. What if someone is trying to frighten her? Although why she doesn’t go to the police I can’t really see.”

  “Doesn’t want them involved, I s’pose. She’s rich and famous and probably doesn’t want some load of coppers stomping around her home pursued by journalists. And she wants someone to watch her back 24/7,” Lee said. “They won’t do that, they can’t; we’re going to be stretched. I’ll have to tap up some freelance assistance and we’ll have to work shifts.” He leaned back in his chair and looked at her. “Course, this could be your big moment, if you want it, Mumtaz.”

  She frowned.

  “You want to learn the business. I took you on to learn the business. A gig like this is a good place to start. You can come out with me to start with, then I could rota you in.”

  It was what she’d wanted. As well as needing the money, Mumtaz had actually been interested in learning about private investigation when she’d applied for the job three months before. By embarking on a new career it seemed as if she was symbolically turning a corner in her life and hopefully leaving a lot of things she didn’t want to think about any more safely in the past.

  “There’ll be no evening or night work, not for you,” Lee said.

  She’d told him about Shazia right from the start. I have a daughter, she’d said to him at the interview. She’s sixteen and she’s just lost her father. I want to be there for her as much as I am able. And Lee had taken her on knowing that and he’d met Shazia. He’d been, she’d felt at the time, like some sort of gift from God. Now he needed her and she couldn’t let him down. “That’ll be fine,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  Lee Arnold smiled. “Great,” he said. “Bloody marvelous money, Maria Peters is minted!”

  “Her eyes were very sad.” She wanted to say You mustn’t exploit her vulnerability, Mr. Arnold. But she didn’t. Rightly or wrongly she found herself trusting him not to do that. “You think she will be able to keep our involvement to herself?”

  “She’ll only tell her mum,” Lee said. “I’m not happy about that but she insisted—the old girl’s a right nosy cow apparently—and at least she isn’t going behind my back like most of my clients. I impressed it upon her, I hope, how to tell all and sundry would just mean she’d be throwing her money down the drain.”

  It wasn’t unusual for clients to undermine the agency’s work by telling people they were either having someone watched or being surveilled themselves. Even in the short time that Mumtaz had been with Lee Arnold she’d learned that probably the biggest threat to the success of an operation was the client him- or herself.

  Lee picked up his BlackBerry and began to work
his way through his phone book. “Have to get a few faces on board,” he said. Then he stopped, looked up and smiled again. “But before I do, I think that we deserve a treat for this, Mumtaz.” He put his hand into his jacket pocket and took out a twenty pound note. “Let’s have a couple of cappuccinos from that Bengali-Italian place up by the station. Get yourself some of that chocolate sesame stuff you like …”

  “Chocolate halva.”

  “That’s the thing. Oh, and get me a packet of Marlboro too. We’ll close the office for the rest of the day and I’ll have a fag at me desk for once.”

  Mumtaz picked up the banknote.

  “And when you get back,” Lee said, “I’ll tell you all I know about Maria Peters.”

  “She was one of the most controversial comedians to come out of the comedy new wave of the nineteen eighties,” Lee said. “They used to call her the English Joan Rivers, except that she was much younger and much prettier. Maria Peters, as you saw, is a beautiful woman. But she had a mouth like a toilet. One of her jokes I’ll always remember was … I’m not sure I should repeat …”

  “Mr. Arnold, I am not made of glass.”

  One thing that Lee had noticed about covered Muslim women was that people, and that included him, had extreme reactions to them. BNP thugs hurled abuse and dog shit at them, while some Asian men, as far as Lee could deduce, appeared to completely ignore their existence. He knew he personally tended to treat them with undue and unusual respect. Somewhere in his head they were ranked alongside nuns who were also pure and semi-divine beings. Except that really they weren’t. No one was and some of them, like Mumtaz, were stunning. Lee took a deep breath and then did Maria Peters’ joke. “What do you call a bearded man with a wide mouth and a clitoris for a tongue?”

  Mumtaz put what remained of her chocolate halva down on Lee’s desk and said, “A clitoris?”

  “Yes.” Lee could feel his face start to burn with embarrassment. Mumtaz had to know what a clitoris was but he really wished he hadn’t just said that word to her. “A clitoris.”

  “A clitoris?” She shook her head. “I can’t imagine,” she said. “What would you call such a person?”

  Lee’s heart began to pound as his face achieved a sunburned look. “Nothing at all,” he said. “Poor bloke’s got enough problems having a face like a cunt.”

  For just a moment there was complete silence. Lee tried to fill it up by audibly puffing on his fag. He almost expected Mumtaz to either storm out or say that she didn’t understand. But instead she said, “Oh, I see. It’s a sort of confounding of expectations thing.”

  For a moment Lee held his breath.

  “The audience think that the comedian is going to say that you call the man a c-face. So when those expectations are confounded it’s funny.” She laughed. “Clever. But then good comedy is clever.” She picked her halva up again and bit another lump off the side. Lee wondered how much comedy Mumtaz had actually seen and how much of that had been for the purposes of her degree. He doubted she’d grown up with The Comic Strip Presents … but then was that just him imposing a stereotype on her? He decided not to continue any further down that road.

  “Maria Peters was one of the first comedians in the country to have a one-person show in the West End,” Lee said. “She started out in pubs back in the eighties, went on to comedy clubs—I saw her at a comedy night at the Hackney Empire. Then she was in the West End, on telly, everywhere. She was a big star who made a lot of dosh.”

  “And she’s originally from Newham.”

  “Plaistow. Went to school in the borough.” Lee drank his cappuccino. “I don’t know much about her early life, she didn’t really go into it. But she gave up her career in the nineties when she married a geezer called Leonard Blatt.”

  “I know that name.”

  Lee smiled. “Forest Gate landlord,” he said. “Mr. Blatt used to own quite a bit of property up around your place.”

  “He owned the house next to mine, which Miss Peters must own now,” Mumtaz said. “I knew she was familiar. She comes sometimes to collect rent from the tenants.”

  “Ah, could be useful.”

  Both Lee Arnold and Mumtaz Hakim lived, in very different circumstances, in the northern Newham district of Forest Gate. Back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Forest Gate had been a genteel suburb of solid Victorian villas and ornate parks and cemeteries. But after the Second World War it fell into disrepair and became one of those areas characterized by multiple occupation. The twenty-first century, however, had seen Forest Gate reemerge as a highly desirable location which was why the house that Mumtaz’s late husband Ahmed had bought back in the nineties was now worth almost a million pounds. Leonard Blatt, the Forest Gate landlord who had married Maria Peters, represented the old, broken-down district, and the company he had bequeathed to his wife still owned one of the biggest and scruffiest multiple-occupation houses that remained. Everyone had known Leonard; fewer people knew his famous wife.

  “As soon as she decided to ditch her career, Maria just retreated behind the walls of her house,” Lee said.

  “Does she have any children?”

  Lee shook his head. “No, neither she nor Leonard. I have no idea why. She’s a very private lady and getting even what I needed to know out of her was no mean feat.”

  “What did you have to get out of her?”

  “Who she thinks might be watching her.”

  “Oh, right.” That, of course, had to be one of the first questions that a private investigator asked a client like Maria. Who do you think is watching you? Sometimes clients had ideas, sometimes they didn’t, sometimes they had a notion of who their tormentor might be but they wouldn’t say. Facing up to a threat from someone the client may have loved or even still did love, was hard. But the question, as Mumtaz had come to see even in her few months with the agency, was one that, if answered, often bore fruit. Often the watcher, the stalker, the sender of spiteful e-mails and letters was exactly who the client feared it was.

  “Maria’s best guess is it’s some nut-job fan,” Lee said. “She was dead pretty when she was young and that combination of a lovely face and a foul mouth was potent. Men used to chuck themselves at her.”

  “She’s an attractive woman now.”

  “Exactly, so now she’s back on the circuit she fears that some of her old fans may have reemerged. She even gave me a couple of names, but I’ve already discovered that one of them’s dead. The others are old men.” He shrugged. “I doubt that’s a goer.”

  “Why?”

  “Whoever is stalking Maria is managing to evade the CCTV outside her house and her alarms,” he said. “I may be wrong but I don’t see some sixty-something obsessive fan being able to do that. What do you think, Mumtaz?”

  Mumtaz thought about her short conversation with Maria Peters and found it to contain nothing of interest. But then she thought about how her eyes had looked as she had waited for Lee to return. In light of that she said, “She’s probably hiding something from you, Mr. Arnold.”

  II

  It was as the tide went out that the water made that special noise. When it flowed over old pieces of glass, it sounded like wind chimes crossed with the noise that glass makes when it breaks and falls onto a pavement. There was something both soothing and sinister about it. Whenever Maria heard it, it reminded her of Len. He had been just five years old when the Nazis broke all the windows belonging to Jews back in his native Germany. By the time he was seven, he and his parents had left the country forever. Len had stepped through the glass shards to an entirely different life. But now the tide was in and there was no tinkling, no stepping through glass. The stone steps known as Wapping Stairs were almost completely covered by gently lapping Thames water that, in the darkness, looked like a great channel of crude oil. Developers could put up as many swanky apartments on the side of the river as they liked, the Thames and its environs would always bear the scars of the ruin it had been back in Maria Peters’ youth.
r />   Most of Maria’s family had worked either in or around the London Docks. Her dad had been a docker in the old Royal Group just south of Plaistow where they’d lived, while her mum had worked in the Tate and Lyle sugar factory at Silvertown. But her mum’s parents had come from Wapping. Wapping Irish, the Fitzgerald family had made its living on the river as lightermen and also, long ago, as mudlarks. Maria had loved visiting her grandparents in Wapping. While her granddad drank pints of thick, black stout in the Town of Ramsgate at the head of Wapping Stairs, her grandmother had taken her and her sisters down on the mud to see what they could find. Clay pipes, fragments of Roman roof tiles, little shards of brightly colored and patterned pottery, nails from Elizabethan galleons. Once they had found something terrible. There were always dead rats but this horror had been beyond that—a tiny fetus in the remains of a cardboard box. Later Maria had learned that it was probably the product of an illegal abortion. Her grandmother had taken it to her priest for a decent burial and he’d blessed it, passed incense across its ruined face and placed a tiny holy medal in its hands. The past could be a malignant country but Maria always felt safe sitting atop Wapping Stairs. Down on the mud was another matter—the river was a law unto itself—but on the Stairs all was safe and dry and solid. The Stairs were stable in a way that the water, the mud and the sky, that shifted and moved, could never be. Although it was dark now, Maria looked up, aiming her gaze above and beyond the ranks of brightly lit apartment windows on the southern shore. Once the site of abandoned, echoing warehouses, she wondered if the ghosts of old dockers still moved unseen amongst the chichi pot plants and the flat-screen televisions of the rich banker generation that inhabited these places. Nothing, as she knew only too well at fifty years old, ever really disappeared. All you had to do was look in the right place, pound on the right door and you were right back where you started.

  Maybe it was this thought that made all the hair on the back of Maria’s neck stand up. A shadow, just light and very fleeting, passed over her slightly bowed back and she turned quickly to see who or what it was. But there was nothing to see and Maria accepted the possibility that it was her own thoughts that had spooked her. But in spite of that she was still glad that she’d engaged Mr. Arnold’s firm to watch her and her property. They were coming in at six the following morning to install cameras and microphones in the house, and someone would always be monitoring her from then onwards. It was going to be costly, but reassuring, even if the thought of it made her cringe. Maria had to know the truth, one way or another.