Displaced Read online

  To think that a tiny flash of what could have been a hallucination was a sign that he was going mad was overdramatic. What he was, was tired, ill and upset. Although he would never have said anything to either Lee Arnold or Mumtaz Hakim, he was disappointed in what he, and they, had found out so far. He still didn’t know who his mother had been, and Miriam appeared as illusive as ever. Had he expected too much? Probably, but then wasn’t that the purview of all dying men? To leave everything important in life too late and therefore impossible to fulfil?

  Irving sat down in the chair that had once been his mother’s and lay his head back. He wasn’t mad, he just wanted the world to do what he wanted it to. And it wouldn’t.

  Grace had decided not to go to Barking Park Fair with her boyfriend.

  ‘Thought we could just go together, yeah?’ she said to Shazia.

  They were in Shazia’s bedroom at the top of her amma’s parents’ house in Hanbury Street. The vast weavers window, which took up the whole of the front wall, had a very good view of the street below – and all the tasty young boys on it. Shazia suspected that Grace had become a bit bored with her goody-goody latest boyfriend and was up for going out on the pull.

  ‘That’s cool,’ Shazia said. ‘But I’m not up for getting chatted up.’

  ‘What? Not for free drinks?’

  ‘I don’t drink, dumb-ass.’

  ‘I know,’ Grace said. ‘But I do. Be jokes getting a coupla hot fairground boys to give us free rides and that.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll give us free rides!’ Shazia said.

  Grace clicked her tongue. ‘Not like that, man!’

  Shazia took a pair of black skinny jeans out of her wardrobe and threw them on her bed. Grace looked at the trousers with disdain. She’d already told Shazia what she was going to wear and there wasn’t very much of it.

  ‘I’m off to uni,’ Shazia said. ‘Last thing I want to take with me is some fairground boy’s foetus.’

  ‘Oh man!’ Grace looked disgusted. ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘What, talk about getting pregnant? It happens.’

  ‘Yeah, but …You sayin’ it …’

  Shazia knew that to so many of her friends she was, and probably always would be, the epitome of the chaste Muslim virgin. Except that she wasn’t. Or rather she was chaste, by choice, but she was no virgin. Her father had put paid to that many years ago. And if she was chaste, it was because she wanted to be. As far as Shazia could see, very little that was good came out of what could loosely be called ‘romance’. Mainly because it involved men and, although she knew there were good men in the world, she also knew that finding one of those was very difficult.

  ‘I just want to go to the fair with you and have a laugh,’ Shazia said. ‘Just us.’

  ‘Me too,’ Grace said. But then she looked down at her long, manicured nails with an expression of desolation on her face. ‘It’s cool.’

  Grace would go on the pull whether Shazia joined her in that quest or not. That was just Shazia being real about the situation. She loved Grace and so she wouldn’t cramp her style, even if some of the men she tended to hook up with were well dodgy. Shazia would never leave her friend alone with strangers, but she would also make sure that she had enough cash on her to jump in an Uber if the two of them needed to make a quick getaway.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Lee had no idea how old the man he was looking at was. Although apparently confined to his bed, what he could see of his skin did not have the consistency of crocodile hide often associated with the ancient. Only the eyes, like coal-black currents, gave a clue as to just how much this man had seen in his long life. Lee, instinctively, didn’t like those eyes.

  This was, he was told, the grandfather of the frowzy woman who had let him in to the caravan. Tired and unkempt, Gala Sanders was the wife of the good-looking man who ran the site.

  David Sanders placed a chair down beside the old man’s bed and said, ‘This is Mr Arnold, the man I told you about.’

  The coal-black eyes looked at him with something that could have been hatred.

  ‘If you’ve changed your mind, tell me now,’ David said. ‘Mr Arnold’s got better things to do than be pissed about by you.’

  ‘I said I’d see him, so I’ll see him.’

  The old man sat up.

  David said, ‘Make yourself comfortable, Mr Arnold.’

  Lee sat in the chair.

  ‘This here’s Bela Horvathy,’ David continued. ‘He was here when the kid went missing in ’62, so he says. I weren’t born, meself. But basically he’s been with the fair since the dark ages. Wanna cup of tea?’

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  David Sanders left.

  ‘Mr Horvathy …’

  ‘Bela,’ the old man said. ‘And I know it’s a girl’s name in this country, but that’s not my problem.’

  His accent was thick, which, to Lee, made him sound like the old film star, Bela Lugosi – also Hungarian.

  ‘Bela …’

  ‘When David told me Roman Lester wanted me to talk to you …’

  ‘All I did was ask Mr Lester whether he knew anyone still with the fair who was around in ’62,’ Lee said. ‘Your name wasn’t mentioned. Although I must tell you that I’ve heard your surname before.’

  ‘You have?’

  As soon as David Sanders had said it, Lee had remembered.

  ‘At the risk of bringing back bad memories, I believe your wife died in an accident here.’

  ‘You are correct,’ the old man said. ‘1968.’

  ‘A fire …’

  ‘A lot of change was happening back then,’ he said. ‘Both my wife and I came from a circus background. We felt at the time that maybe we’d like to return to the circus. Irenka, my wife, was practising an escapology act she used to perform when she was a girl. It was cold; there was a fire. We could make fires in those days. She fell.’

  He showed no emotion. Then, as if to explain this, he said, ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  He smiled. Although discoloured and misshapen, he still had his own teeth. In view of the fact that he was, according to David Sanders, ‘ninety-something’, he appeared to be in reasonable shape. Lee wondered why he was confined to his bed.

  After a pause, the old man said, ‘But you’ve not come to ask about me, have you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You want to know about the child.’

  ‘Miriam Levy, yes.’

  ‘Yes, so tell me what you know,’ he said. ‘And I will try to remember.’

  ‘She said she was happy to stay with him.’

  Mumtaz shook her head. Shirin had been terrified of her husband. When she’d arrived at her palatial Holland Park home to take her to the refuge, Shirin had been shaking with fear.

  Farzana, on the other end of the phone, said, ‘That’s what she told the police when they went round first thing this morning. They told me there was nothing more that they could do. She’s an adult. And I know that even adults don’t always know what’s best for them, but what can we do?’

  Mumtaz leant back in her chair.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘She’s even left a load of stuff here, which, she told the police, she doesn’t want,’ Farzana said. ‘I’ve put it in a cupboard in case she changes her mind.’

  ‘She may well do that,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I think she’s confused. I’ve never been pregnant, but I know it affects hormones, which can affect a person’s judgement. If she’s pregnant, that is. Just missing a period isn’t proof.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I fear she’s clinging on to that because, in her mind, being pregnant is the answer to all her problems. If she’s having a baby, her husband will stop beating her, he won’t get a second wife and she’ll never have to tell her parents what she’s been through. But even if she is pregnant, I don’t believe that her husband will suddenly no longer require another wife.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Farzana said.
‘Once that issue comes up, it rarely goes away. If not now, then he will try again later. Maybe when the child is born.’

  ‘If there is a child,’ Mumtaz said. ‘To suddenly fall pregnant at this time seems so unlikely to me.’

  ‘But if she doesn’t go ahead and have a baby, the abuse will start again …’

  ‘Exactly. It may already have started, for all we know.’ Mumtaz shook her head. ‘I feel I want to warn her, tell her that if this is just a ploy to try and make things better, it won’t work.’

  ‘I fear we were to blame, at least in part,’ Farzana said.

  ‘You? Why?’

  ‘Shirin just hated it here,’ she said. ‘She cried all the time. The fact that she made friends with Bijul was a minor miracle, but that was the only positive. She was horrified by this place. All the poor, broken women …’

  ‘Not your fault, Farzana.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘Not your fault,’ Mumtaz repeated. ‘It would have been impossible for you to accommodate Shirin in the way to which she was accustomed. I didn’t go into her apartment when I went to pick her up, but I could see it was huge. She had servants. She couldn’t adapt.’

  ‘I know.’

  By the time their conversation ended, Mumtaz felt that she’d probably made Farzana feel a little better about Shirin. Her decision to leave the refuge really was more about how she couldn’t adapt to what everyone knew was a stressful situation. And of course, Shirin didn’t want to be a ‘failed’ wife. Who did?

  But Mumtaz remained uneasy. Ahmet had put pressure on her to get pregnant and she remembered that she often missed her period because of the strain it put her under. She couldn’t believe that Shirin was magically pregnant any more than she’d ever thought she had been with child. But what could she do?

  Legally there was nothing. She’d gone back to her husband of her own free will and had told police officers that she was fine. Mumtaz was certain that she wasn’t. She knew the syndrome too well. So much of what women like Shirin did was done to retain their dignity and please their families. Involving herself in Shirin’s life again could do more harm than good. But that didn’t stop Mumtaz feeling bad. That woman was in danger in ways those police officers would never have been able to detect.

  Mumtaz stood up and put on her coat. So going out meant leaving the office unmanned for a while, she didn’t care. She had to see Shirin for herself.

  ‘I don’t remember the little girl’s brother,’ Bela said. ‘A lot of children used to scream when they went inside the freak show. In those days tattooed men and big fat women were rare.’

  ‘Mr Levy was really frightened by the Siamese twins,’ Lee said. ‘Ping and Pong.’

  ‘Oh, Ping and Pong!’ He laughed.

  ‘Not real Siamese twins …’

  ‘No!’ he said.

  ‘And are they still …’

  Horvathy’s face became grave. ‘They remain with the fair, but they don’t speak English,’ he said.

  ‘What do they speak?’

  He looked away briefly. ‘Hungarian.’

  ‘So you could translate …’

  ‘For the Twins? No,’ he said.

  ‘What, you don’t speak the same dialect or …’

  ‘The Twins, as the Levy boy has told you, were in the freak show when the little girl went missing,’ the old man said. ‘They can tell you nothing.’

  ‘They might have seen something.’

  Lee took a swig from the mug of tea David Sanders had brought him. It was so dark, it was almost black. Just how he liked it.

  Horvathy shook his head. ‘You have clearly looked into this,’ he said. ‘You know the police questioned people at the time.’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘The Twins included,’ he said. ‘I translated for them myself. Now they’re old men, they do odd jobs for the fair. Leave them in peace.’

  Bela Horvathy had told Lee nothing he hadn’t known before about Miriam’s abduction. She’d been left in her pram by her mother while she went to the toilet and then she had vanished. Every van and attraction on the site had been searched as well as the park outside the fair.

  ‘Small children were paraded for the mother to see, but she identified none of them.’

  This was new, however.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lee said. ‘What? Babies were shown to Mrs Levy?’

  ‘My own young daughter too!’ Horvathy said. ‘But the woman identified no one.’

  ‘You had to parade your kids?’

  ‘If they were babies, yes,’ he said. ‘But only us, only travelling folk. I never heard of any people in these streets around here having to do that.’ He smiled. ‘But that is the story in so many countries, isn’t it, that the Gypsies take the children from the people who live in houses?’

  ‘I think we’ve moved on from that.’

  ‘You think?’

  Lee knew he’d said a stupid thing. What was all the hysteria that had accompanied the Refugee Crisis, if it wasn’t fear of the ‘other’? He shrugged.

  ‘The child disappeared and I was sorry for that,’ the old man said. ‘People who lose children or cannot have them are sad souls. I wouldn’t wish that condition on anybody.’ He paused, then he said, ‘You work for the girl’s brother?’

  ‘I’m working for interested parties,’ Lee said.

  ‘They lived close to here, I remember. Do they still?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ Lee said.

  ‘You won’t?’

  He changed the subject back to one the old man seemed reluctant to address.

  ‘I’d like to meet the Twins, anyway,’ he said. ‘By your own admission, you weren’t anywhere near the scene of the crime when the little girl was taken. But they were. The old freak show van was close to the toilets. That was why Mrs Levy went to those toilets, because they were close to where her son was. The Twins are, as far as I know, the only living connections we have.’

  Last time Mumtaz had come to Academy Gardens, Shirin had been waiting for her. Now she had to contend with a uniformed man who called himself a ‘concierge’.

  ‘Mrs Shah doesn’t know you,’ he said, once he’d put the internal telephone down.

  ‘Yes, she does,’ Mumtaz said. ‘My name is Mumtaz Hakim. We’re friends. I’ve been here before.’

  ‘Mrs Shah is adamant that she is to have no visitors.’

  Knowing that Shirin had servants, Mumtaz said, ‘Did you actually speak to Mrs Shah?’

  ‘Mrs Shah is not to be disturbed …’

  Which meant that he hadn’t.

  ‘Speak to Mrs Shah in person and tell her that I am here,’ Mumtaz persisted.

  He paused for a moment, took a breath and then said, ‘My instructions are that Mrs Shah is not to be disturbed at this time.’

  ‘Instructions from her husband?’

  ‘Instructions.’

  Shirin and her husband lived on the first floor of what was an extremely exclusive red-brick mansion block. It was one of those properties that had been built in a square that overlooked the very neat communal gardens Mumtaz could just see through a window at the back of the entrance hall. Apart from the sound of her own voice and that of the concierge, there was absolutely no sound at all.

  ‘Well, can you please tell Mrs Shah that I came,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Not her husband or any of her members of staff, Mrs Shah herself.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  But he didn’t smile. Nor did he write down her name. What he did do was stand. A tall, white man wearing the type of uniform more suited to Honduras than Holland Park, he loomed over Mumtaz until, eventually, she left.

  Once outside the manicured front gardens, which, though well past their best, still smelt fragrant, Mumtaz looked at her watch. She had to be in Barking at six to meet Lee and Irving. Walking out of the idyllic ambiance that surrounded Academy Gardens, she went back to her car and rang her boss, but Lee didn’t pick up. She wondered what, if anything, he was learning from the fairground
folk about Miriam Levy’s disappearance. She also found herself longing for the days when he would have picked up a call from her whatever he was doing.

  Lee Arnold had learnt many things about the mysteries of life during his time in the army, then in the police and now as a private investigator. One of the most valuable lessons he’d learnt was that you could get a lot of information out of people who said they’d given up smoking if you offered to share one of your fags with them. He passed the cigarette to David Sanders who said, ‘I don’t pay them no wages and I’ve managed this fair for the last fifteen years.’

  David inhaled and passed the fag back to Lee. Then he said, ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Your wife’s grandfather told me that Ping and Pong do odd jobs. I think he was implying they were employed,’ Lee said.

  ‘Well, they’re not.’

  ‘So how do they live? On pensions?’

  ‘Pensions? I’m not even sure they’re allowed to live in this country,’ David said. ‘They came over here with him.’

  Lee smoked and then passed the cigarette. ‘Bela? When?’

  ‘Yeah. After the war. I don’t know the story, but what I do know is that he pays them.’

  ‘Bela pays the Twins?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  He shrugged. ‘There’s another Hungarian family on the site and they do a lot of things that make no sense. Can’t work ’em out.’

  Lee lit another fag and told David he could finish the first one.

  ‘So what is the connection between the Twins and Bela Horvathy?’

  ‘I dunno,’ David said. ‘And to be honest with you, I’ve never asked. Gala don’t speak Hungarian and don’t know much more than me, I don’t think. As for her mother …’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Her and her old man are always talking in their own language,’ he said. ‘Then there’s my girl, Amber.’

  ‘She speaks Hungarian?’

  ‘No, but she’s always in with the old man, listening to his stories about the old days in the old country when he was a flier, a trapeze artist, with a circus.’