Displaced Read online

  She was right. For the police to be involved a missing adult had to have not been seen for a whole day.

  When they left Bijul’s bedroom, Farzana said to Mumtaz, ‘Do you know where Shirin’s husband lives?’

  Mumtaz nodded.

  Amber wasn’t even through the van door, when her mother smacked her round the head.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ Gala yelled at her.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Where? I let you have your way and this is how you repay me? I almost called the police!’

  She hit her again.

  ‘Mum! Stop it!’

  Her father pulled her mother away and said, ‘That’s enough!’

  It took Amber a few moments to get her breath and then she said, ‘It was Misty. She met this boy and she wouldn’t leave him and so Lulu and me had to come home on our own and we got lost on the Tube …’

  ‘She met a boy where?’

  ‘In Camden Market.’

  ‘What boy?’

  ‘I don’t know. He was called Herbert or something; he was posh. He took us to this pub …’

  ‘You got drunk!’

  ‘No!’ she said. ‘But Misty wanted to stay with him. Me and Lulu, we said we had to get home, but she took no notice. So we left on our own and then we got all confused on the Tube. We got the wrong train and then we had to walk, then we couldn’t find the right station. We ran from Barking Tube and then the park gates were shut and we had to climb over, then we heard some boys coming and so we hid in a bush and Lulu ripped her coat …’

  She was covered in leaves and her tights were ripped.

  Gala sat down and shook her head. After a moment she called out, ‘Mama!’

  Amber’s grandmother came out of her room and stood in the doorway. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Young Miss Flier here tells me that Misty Dobos has gone off with some boy. Left her and Lulu alone in the wilds of Camden. Can you go and tell Milos and Amalia their precious daughter is a whore?’

  Amber said, ‘Mum, I don’t know she went with him!’

  ‘She went with him, trust me,’ Gala said. ‘Is Lulu home?’

  ‘Yes. We came back together.’

  Eva slipped on her coat. ‘What do you want me to tell Amalia?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Gala said. ‘What’s the Hungarian for slapper?’

  Eva shook her head. ‘I will make sure that Lulu’s alright too,’ she said.

  ‘Do what you like!’

  Eva left the van.

  Gala turned on her daughter. ‘And you, get to bed,’ she said. ‘And don’t ever ask to go anywhere again. Remember, miss, I will be watching you like a hawk!’

  Lee had sounded groggy when she’d called him. As if he’d just woken up, which was possible. It had been two o’clock in the morning. But he’d understood her fears for Shirin. With no phone on which to contact her, she was effectively incommunicado and, he agreed, she could well have returned to her husband or her family.

  Mumtaz’s first urge had been to go to the husband’s swanky place in Holland Park, but Lee had cautioned her against this.

  ‘If she left the refuge of her own accord, there’s nothing you can do until twenty-four hours have elapsed,’ he’d said. ‘Then it’s a job for the coppers. The refuge will need to report it. Have you given them the husband’s address?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll phone Farzana and tell her.’

  Farzana had said she’d take it from there.

  Now alone in her flat, Mumtaz couldn’t sleep. Although Wahid Sheikh had said nothing to confirm her fears, he’d not dismissed them either. And who did he have to ‘consult’ before he could get back to her about Ahmet?

  Her husband had done something beyond simply owing the Sheikhs money. But what?

  She made tea. As she waited for it to brew she wondered what, if anything, Irving Levy’s dreams about being with people who loved him might mean. He didn’t know who they were, only that they made him feel warm. It was probably nothing, but she hoped, for his sake, that there was some truth in it. He was a nice man and was, she’d noticed, becoming ever more weary. Maybe Berlin had taken it out of him? She wouldn’t be surprised if it had. Even for her, the whole experience had been incredibly harrowing.

  For anyone not to know who he or she really was made her shudder. And if Sara Metzler was right, then there were possibly thousands of people all over Europe who lived in ignorance of their true identities. Jews who were not Jews, Gentiles who were not Gentiles, people whose fathers had been Nazis …

  To be so cut adrift from one’s culture was something that filled Mumtaz with horror. But then if a person didn’t know they were cut adrift, what did it really matter? It mattered in case they found out – like Irving Levy. Now on a quest to find his true ‘blood’ before he died, was he wise to be doing such a thing and was the Arnold Agency correct in assisting him?

  Theoretically, Irving’s case was just another job. He was paying them handsomely to do it. He wanted to know. But was it right, for him, that he did know? And then Mumtaz thought about her dead husband again and realised that she, just like Irving, had to know the truth.

  Whatever the cost.

  ‘He’ll get her married off to her cousin up Liverpool soon as he can.’

  Britannia Lee, like her husband, Ron, was a Romany Gypsy. More Eva’s age than Gala’s, she’d had her youngest girl, Lulu, when she was forty. Eva had delivered her.

  ‘I know it’s your business and your way,’ Eva began. ‘But marrying a girl in haste …’

  ‘It’s the only way to tame ’em,’ Britannia said and that was that.

  The two women shared a cigarette in silence until Britannia said, ‘Amalia Dobos call the police, did she?’

  ‘No,’ Eva said. ‘Milos has gone up Camden looking.’

  Britannia shook her head. ‘How he gonna manage with no English?’

  ‘He can speak a bit.’

  ‘A bit, yeah, but …’ She coughed. ‘Anyway, how do we know our girls told the truth about Misty? Silly tart could be anywhere. Bloody Lulu’s coat’s a rag, tore when the two of them climbed them gates, so she says. Ron thinks she’s been got.’

  ‘By a boy?’

  ‘So he thinks,’ she said.

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘I dunno. Whenever that one makes stories they’re always like a fucking novel – elaborate and that.’

  ‘How’d’ya mean?’

  ‘Well, going on about how they run from the station and got stitches in their sides. Then all that malarky getting over the gate, then boys somewhere so they had to hide …’

  ‘Amber said that.’

  ‘Some bloke looking at ’em from outside the gates …’

  ‘What bloke?’

  Britannia shrugged. ‘I dunno. Some geezer peering in through the bars at ’em.’

  Eva frowned. ‘Amber never said nothing about some bloke peering in,’ she said.

  ‘Probably never noticed,’ Britannia said. Then she stood up and went back into her caravan. ‘Night.’

  ‘Night,’ Eva said.

  But she didn’t go back to her van. She went for a walk.

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘Roman Lester here.’

  It was a cheery voice, annoyingly so. Although he hadn’t taken a drink for well over a decade, Lee Arnold felt hungover. Maybe it was that bloody awful biriyani Lesley had made him eat. Or the guilty sex.

  ‘Lesters Travelling Fair,’ the voice continued. ‘Your Mrs Hakim wanted to know about employees. That is Mr Arnold, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lee said. He cleared his throat and sat up straight. ‘Yes, er, thank you for getting back to us.’

  He wanted to add the word ‘eventually’, but didn’t. Instead, he told Lester about the disappearance of Miriam Levy and asked whether any of his current employees had been with the fair at that time.

  ‘Of course, the fair wasn’t owned by us then,’ he said. ‘It was Mitchells back then. I was ten in ’62. Doesn�
�t time fly when you’re having fun?’

  Lee almost said that he wouldn’t know. But then Lester ploughed on.

  ‘When my father bought Mitchells he bought it lock, stock and barrel, including the employees,’ he said. ‘Of course, not all of them liked the change of management and so some left there and then. But a lot stayed.’

  ‘Are any of them still with the fair now?’

  ‘Now? Not many. Although some of the families of those original employees have stayed with us.’ Then he said, ‘I have to admit that I knew a kiddie had gone missing on the site donkey’s years ago, but my understanding is that all the fairground staff were cleared.’

  ‘The case was never solved,’ Lee said. ‘But you’ve nothing to worry about, Mr Lester. The reason I contacted you was so that maybe I could talk to anyone you still employ who was around at that time.’

  ‘I can’t force anyone to talk to you, Mr Arnold.’

  ‘I know, and if you don’t want to help …’

  ‘Well, of course I want to help, but …’ He paused for a moment and then he said, ‘I can think of a few. A bit long in the tooth now and not all of them can speak English …’ Then Lee heard him murmur, ‘… or speak … But look, let me contact my foreman on the site and I’ll get him to talk to you. He’s down there on the street, as it were …’

  Irving took his morning pills, as usual, on automatic. There were ten of them and so even with a foggy brain he could count them out with ease.

  After he’d taken his tablets he sat, motionless, as if shocked he was still alive, then he drew a cold, dry hand down his lined, stubbly face. What the hell had the previous day and night been about?

  First of all he’d woken from a dream in which he was apparently loved by a group of unknown people. This, after seeing a figure of some sort standing outside his house at midnight. Then a day of lack of appetite, a kind visit from Mumtaz Hakim and then a walk in the moonlight. Why he’d done that, he didn’t know. He wasn’t one of life’s walkers. He remembered he’d been thinking about Jackie Berman, for God’s sake. About how Jackie would never accept women working with diamonds, much less Asian women. Silly old fart.

  So nothing to do with his mother. Nothing. And yet just for a second he thought he’d seen her. Or rather he’d seen an idealised picture of her in his mind. He’d certainly never seen her like that in life.

  Maybe he needed a change of medication? Or maybe his life was starting to flash past his face as it was rumoured to do when a man was drowning.

  The noise coming from the Dobos’s caravan was enough to wake the dead. In spite of Milos’s best efforts he hadn’t found Misty and had returned to the site at six o’clock that morning determined to call the police.

  Five minutes later a very tearful and mud-stained Misty had turned up. Nanny Eva said Milos and Amalia were threatening to kill her.

  Amber, alarmed, said, ‘Don’t you think we should stop them?’

  ‘She’s their daughter; it’s their business,’ her grandmother said. ‘Let what happens to Misty Dobos be a lesson for you. You defy your elders at your peril.’

  Misty screamed and Amber ran in to her nagyapa’s room.

  ‘The Dobos are killing Misty!’ she yelled. ‘You must stop them! They’ll listen to you!’

  Her great-grandfather turned over in his bed and fixed her with his black-currant eyes.

  ‘They won’t,’ he said. ‘They’re just being what your mother calls “Hungarian”. A lot of noise, meaning nothing. They may beat her …’

  ‘Nanny says they’ll kill her!’

  He smiled. ‘Your grandma exaggerates,’ he said. ‘And she doesn’t understand.’

  ‘Understand what?’ her grandmother said.

  He didn’t look at Amber when he spoke, but at Eva.

  ‘Killing her will call attention to them,’ he said. ‘And they wouldn’t want that.’

  It was only later, when the noise had calmed down and Amber had managed to persuade herself that her friend was alright, that his words seemed so strange to her. Surely the Dobos wouldn’t kill Misty, because they loved her?

  ‘If Irving’s with me, they might not talk,’ Lee said.

  Mumtaz looked at him over the top of her computer screen. ‘They might not want to talk to you,’ she said.

  ‘They might not.’

  He looked terrible. She hoped he hadn’t started drinking again. He didn’t smell of drink, but then alcoholics were well-known for their guile. Her husband had rarely smelt of booze even when he’d been drinking all night. A shower plus some liberally applied cologne had always taken care of that.

  An e-mail arrived with an attachment. It was from Berlin. She opened it.

  ‘Herr Beltz has sent through his DNA test results,’ she said.

  ‘Good. I’ll tell Irving.’

  ‘We’ll have to have a comparison done. On their own they mean nothing.’

  ‘I’ll e-mail him,’ Lee said.

  Then his phone rang. She heard him say, ‘Hello, Mr Lester.’

  The owner of the fair. Then her mobile rang. It was Wahid Sheikh. She picked it up and walked into the small kitchen at the back of the office.

  ‘Wahid-ji,’ she said. ‘Good morning.’

  Her heart raced. What was he going to tell her?

  ‘Good morning to you too, Mrs Hakim,’ he said. ‘I trust you are well?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she lied. The niceties of South Asian communication were sometimes hard to bear. Get to the point!

  ‘Good. Well,’ he said, ‘I have spoken to my brother Rizwan and he would like for you to come and meet him.’

  Mumtaz felt sick. ‘Meet him?’

  ‘Yes, at his daughter’s house in Dalston. I will text you the address.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘My brother will tell you what you wish to know about your husband, but he prefers to do it in person,’ he said. ‘In spite of his illness, Mrs Hakim, my brother still wishes to pay you the courtesy of discussing your late husband’s case face-to-face.’

  Her late husband’s ‘case’? So, there was more than just money. Of course there was.

  Her throat dry now. She croaked, ‘When?’

  ‘Again, my brother is generosity itself,’ he said. ‘When it is convenient for you, Mrs Hakim. Call me and I will arrange it. After all, my brother, since his unfortunate health problems in the wake of his son’s death, is not going anywhere, is he?’

  She ended the call and sat down. Did she even want to know what that ghastly toad, Rizwan Sheikh, was going to tell her? If anything. That family still believed that Shazia had killed Rizwan Sheikh’s precious thug of a son, Naz, and they were never going to be disabused of that opinion. Especially since Rizwan had suffered a stroke. That, she knew, he pinned on Shazia too. If Naz hadn’t died maybe the old bastard would have had a stroke anyway, but that was not, Mumtaz knew, the Sheikh family’s choice of interpretation.

  ‘Mumtaz, I’m off out.’

  She walked back into the office to see Lee putting on his coat.

  ‘The fair people are going to speak to you?’ she said.

  ‘One or two.’ He put his cigarettes into his pocket and opened the office door. ‘I’ve not e-mailed Irving yet. Can you do it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Ringing him up first might be a good idea,’ he said as he left the office. ‘If I don’t see you before, I’ll pick you up tonight at six.’

  He left.

  There was to be one more visit to the fair with Irving that evening. Neither Lee nor Mumtaz felt that he could take much more. Seeing the freak show van had shaken him considerably and he was beginning to experience rather gentle, if disturbing, dreams.

  One didn’t prod the leaves of the past and not expect to find rats, but this was a man who, though in remission, was still gravely ill.

  To see one’s parents for some time after their deaths is not an uncommon phenomenon. Irving still sometimes saw his father hunched over his old bench in what was now
his workroom in the Garden. He’d seen his mother several times since her passing. Usually in the living room, sitting in her old chair, half asleep.

  What he’d never, ever seen before was his mother as she was when he was a child. Young Rachel was such a dim and distant memory, even looking at old photographs failed to conjure in him little actual recognition.

  So why had he seen just that in Barking Park, through the bars of its closed main gates? The same eyes, same pale skin, a look that could have been fear crossing her fine features. What did it mean? In recent days his dreams had become almost idyllic, and yet now – this vision. And vision it had to have been.

  He’d always had the odd hallucination, even as a child. According to his mother, there had been an invisible friend when he was a toddler, followed by a woman who would sometimes walk out of his wardrobe. Irving could still see her face if he concentrated. His mother had even taken him to see a psychiatrist at the London Hospital when he was about ten. The doctor, who was short and thin and had warts on his head had told her that Irving would ‘grow out of it’. And he had, mostly.

  Perhaps it was the drugs. His latest cycle of chemotherapy had been tough and some of the drugs he had been told to take since the treatment had finished were pretty toxic. It was well documented that corticosteroids could cause confusion and blurred vision. He’d been on those for months.

  The phone rang, but he ignored it. He even shut the door into the hall so he couldn’t hear the answerphone. What good was conversation if he was going mad? If he was going mad …

  His father had never been good with craziness. His opinion had always been that one only went mad if one wanted to go mad. And, in spite of his adherence to the laws and dictates of Orthodox Judaism, he’d never had any time for the supernatural. The only time Manny Levy even became remotely fanciful was when he was looking into the heart of a diamond. Only in the stones, according to him, could a man see the infinite face of God. Diamonds were, he occasionally maintained, windows into reflections on realms humans were not meant to fully comprehend. Looking at them so intently also, as Irving knew to his cost, ruined your eyesight.