A Private Business Read online

  Back in the eighties, she’d attracted a lot of flack. Moral and religious groups didn’t like her act and she was actually banned by the BBC at one point—there had even been threats. All a long time ago now and she’d told Lee Arnold about them. Not that they were relevant any more. Her act was different, or rather it was getting that way. Five months before, in some pub in New Cross, Alan had insisted that she use all the old stuff modified for a modern audience. And, although the crowd had howled with laughter, it had been tough. Too tough for her, and she’d collapsed. Afterward, Alan had issued an ultimatum. “Get fucking smutty, give in to your cruelty, or get another fucking manager!”

  Maria looked at the water, the sky and the Stairs once again and knew that even in this, one of her favorite places, she was still trapped. She was trapped all the time, whatever she did, wherever she went. She took a tranquilizer tablet with no water and then walked back to her car and drove home.

  “Up the ’ammers!”

  Lee closed his front door, put his keys on the telephone table and stared the chattering mynah bird in the eyes. “Who’s the patron saint of West Ham, Chronus?”

  “Bobby Moore! Bobby Moore!”

  Lee took a packet of bird seed out of one pocket and a tin of oven cleaner out of the other. He went over to where the bird sat on a perch connected to a feeding hopper and poured some seed for him. Chronus dipped his head into the hopper to feed while Lee rubbed his blue black back. Then, as quickly as he’d started, he stopped and said, “That oven won’t clean itself.”

  The bird continued to feed while Lee went into the kitchen and began to remove all the racks from inside his electric oven. Had Chronus been able to apprehend such things, he would have wondered why Lee was again cleaning an oven he’d scrubbed only seven days before. Lee walked from the kitchen to his bedroom where he changed into a tatty pair of jogging bottoms and an old paint-spattered T-shirt. He then sprayed the empty oven with the cleaner and went into the living room to watch the television. The whole flat reeked of the harsh, comforting smell of ammonia.

  The news was on and it was full of the sodding Olympics. Not quite eighteen months away, London 2012 was joyfully dominating much of the news while, in reality, making life for people who either lived near the site or wanted to move through it, difficult. Every day, or so it seemed, public routes around the site changed, and with winter still coldly entrenched, bringing with it mists from the river as well as concentrating the pollution from cars and factories, a hint of old London smog could now be discerned over the city from time to time. Around the still only partly formed Olympic site this lent an even more diffuse quality to the light. Lee didn’t know from one day to the next how to drive around there. It was a good job that Maria Peters, who apparently attended a church just beyond the site up at Hackney Wick, was well accustomed to such things. Lee or Neil West, the freelancer he’d engaged to work with him on the case, were going to have to follow her. It was a bit weird to think about Maria Peters in church. Her act had always taken the piss out of religion and Lee wondered if she’d “found” God. The most unlikely people seemed to.

  Chronus, having had his fill of seed began to sing “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” It almost completely drowned out the news and made Lee regret, not for the first time, that he’d indoctrinated the bird so thoroughly in West Ham United chants and songs. It had been to impress Jodie, except that now she was “off” West Ham and “into” Man United and whenever she came to stay the bird just got on her nerves. Whenever Chronus went into his West Ham routine she’d yell at Lee, “Can’t you make him say nothing else? God, Dad, West Ham are so lame!”

  According to her mother, Jodie had ambitions to be a Manchester United WAG. It was a long way from wanting to be a vet, which had been her choice of career all the way from primary school until she’d hit fourteen. Then, overnight or so it seemed, all her ambition had melted into demands for posh make-up, ridiculous handbags and a sunbed. Lee blamed his ex; silly cow spent most of her time chasing after blokes who looked like bit-part players from EastEnders. What kind of a role model was that for a young girl?

  His landline rang. Only a very few people had that number so he picked it up quickly, looked at its LCD screen and said, “Hello, Mum.”

  His mother’s thick, phlegmy voice coughed at him. “Lee, sweetheart, it’s our Roy, he’s done it again. Can you come?”

  Lee’s eyes flicked over toward the door into the kitchen. He breathed in the oven cleaner ammonia and frowned, then he said, “Course. Is he conscious?”

  “Oh, yes,” his mother said, “he’s conscious all right. Conscious and locked in the khazi.”

  “All right. I’ll be over.”

  “Thanks, darling.”

  Lee ended the call and then threw the phone onto the coffee table.

  He knew that he should phone Mrs. Blatt and tell her about it, but he didn’t like to. Leonard, Mr. Blatt, had been one thing, but his widow, “Mrs.” as Martin liked to call her, was quite another. Why Len’d ever married her, Martin couldn’t fathom; there’d been loads of nice Jewish women and girls who would have been delighted to marry Len Blatt over the years. Then he goes and marries some bloody Wapping Irish bird, some terrible comedian who thought it was big, clever and funny to say the c-word every five seconds. Martin had never got it—it had just been smut. Smut admittedly said by a very pretty girl with legs up to her armpits, but smut nonetheless.

  Martin looked back down at the dormant gas fire lurking uselessly against his chimney breast. Bloody thing had to be from the nineteen seventies. When Len was alive he’d always sent some old frummer who could do a bit of DIY round to fix it. But now both Len and the frummer were dead and Mrs. used all sorts of types, usually young and lairy. And they never did anything properly.

  Not that he could blame Mrs. Blatt for everything—Len had been no saint. Not only had he sold the houses either side to Pakis but all the rooms in number 35, except Martin’s, were let out to them too. Men in long white robes with overcoats on top and women with their faces covered looking like long, black tubes, and there were babies everywhere. Depending upon who was in and who was out at any one time it was sometimes impossible to sleep, and then there was that wailing music they all liked, and the praying. The house on the left, the one where a load of old frummers used to live in what Len always said was a “care home” now belonged to some long-bearded Muslim religious type and his family. Men in skullcaps and sandals were always in and out and there was Arabic writing on a square green plate on the front door. A prayer, he imagined, a Muslim mezuzah.

  As the last of the old tenants, Len could have left Martin something in his will; he’d been in number 35 for decades, he must’ve bought the bloody flat many times over. But now Len was dead and one of the older Pakis had told him that Mrs. wanted to sell up 35 and have done with having tenants altogether. Now that her career was up and running again she could do whatever she liked. Cow. Where was he supposed to go at his time of life if she did that? Ever since he’d heard the rumor, Martin had been down there many times, to confront her. Not that he had. He’d just stood outside that great big gaff of Len’s and he’d stared. Oh, she’d been in there, Mrs. with her foul mouth and her tits like Marilyn Monroe. Years ago he’d looked over the garden wall and seen her sunbathing naked on the lawn. He remembered she’d had no pubes and that had been exciting. He tried not to think about that when he gave her the rent.

  The smell of frying onions followed by the sharp complex aromas of spice alerted Martin to the fact that people were cooking. It was nearly eleven o’clock. What was it with these people and cooking in the middle of the night? And yet Martin knew full well that it didn’t have to be that way—the family who lived in the really big house on the right were Pakis too but they were very different. The woman covered her head but not her face and she always wore very smart, very Western clothes. Her husband, now dead, victim of an horrific knife attack so the papers had said, had been very Western too. They all spo
ke English and the daughter—the man’s child, not the woman’s—was just like every other teenager who liked fashion and was always plugged into one of those pod music things. She was very pretty, that girl. Martin liked that family. But then they, unlike all the babbling foreign sorts he had to live with, had money.

  Even now that she was working, the bills were still a problem.

  “Shazia!” She called from the kitchen into the drawing room where the girl was watching TV.

  “Yeah?”

  She was watching some stupid thing like Hollyoaks or The Only Way is Essex, some mind-numbing trash about young people having everything they wanted including lots of sex. Kids on such programs were always glued to their mobile phones.

  “Your phone bill is over seventy pounds,” Mumtaz said. “That’s over three times what mine cost.”

  Shazia didn’t reply. The TV banged on inanely and Mumtaz imagined the girl making a big “W” with her fingers at her. “Whatever!” Mumtaz hated that word—it was so casual, so dismissive. Mumtaz went back to perusing the bills on the kitchen table. Mobile phone bills came to ninety pounds, landline was a hundred and two, the gas bill was so huge she hardly dared look at it. Winter was still very much with them and so they had to have the heating on almost all the time when they were indoors. Mumtaz would have to switch radiators off in rooms they didn’t use, and there were a lot of those now. The house was dominated by unused rooms full of overstuffed sofas, flat-screen TVs and onyx chess sets, which she’d have to get around to selling at some point.

  “Amma, I’m eating the chocolate in the fridge.”

  Shazia had known her real mother and at first she’d failed to address Mumtaz by any sort of title whatsoever. Now she called her “Amma,” Mum, and it softened Mumtaz’s heart. But then it was designed to.

  “Say please,” Mumtaz reminded her.

  “Please,” she heard Shazia parrot.

  The sound of oversized flip-flops flapping across the floor heralded the entrance of her stepdaughter. Tall, slim and sporting a very stylish asymmetric haircut, Shazia Hakim was an attractively gamine girl of sixteen. Wrapped up in a purple fleece blanket, it was impossible to see the vaguely Gothic clothes underneath; the short black and purple ruffle dress, the fashionable ripped up fishnet tights. Long hands topped off with slim, multicolored fingernails briefly let go of the blanket and dived into the refrigerator.

  “Yummy,” she said as she pushed a big chocolate truffle into her mouth.

  Mumtaz looked up. “Go easy on the chocs though, Shazia,” she said. “Another tight month.”

  The girl pulled a face. “Oh my God, I thought it was all right now you’re working,” she said.

  “But it took me time to get a job. I have a lot of ground to make up.” She didn’t talk to Shazia about the debts; she hadn’t told anyone about their full extent. “I think we’ll have to have fewer chocolates and more lentils.”

  Shazia pulled another face.

  “And I’m going to switch some of the radiators off and close up bedrooms. We only need two.”

  Shazia said, “Grim,” and then took another truffle from the fridge and went back to the drawing room.

  It was ridiculous even trying to run such a vast house on not much more than minimum wage. But the job at the Arnold Agency had been the only one she had been able to get. Not that that was strictly true. Mumtaz could easily have gone back to her old job in her father’s shop, working for her brothers, but the prospect of becoming a private detective had been so—tantalizing.

  She’d been so low when she saw that carefully printed little ad for a “Trainee Security Operative—some Secretarial Duties” in the window of George the barber’s. In the previous week, she’d had a lot of knock-backs, including one from a firm of solicitors who, she suspected, found her far too Muslim, and a shop on the Romford Road who considered her far too Western. By the time she’d arrived on Green Street, she’d all but given up hope. Quite why, apart from the fact that she had a sort of relevant degree, a white ex-police detective like Lee Arnold had taken her on she still didn’t really know. As a Muslim woman who covered her head she wasn’t the most obvious choice for a potential private detective, but he’d taken her anyway and that was that. Maybe it was because she was cheap? Maybe it was because he found her attractive? But Mumtaz dismissed that thought immediately—that was silly. Why would he?

  Shazia went up to bed at eleven thirty, leaving Mumtaz alone in the silent kitchen with the bills. She could only pay some of them and so it was no use just staring at the ones she couldn’t even begin to tackle. It was just fortunate that Ahmed’s ancient mother back in Bangladesh sent money to pay for Shazia’s school fees. Had Mumtaz had to find the cash for that too, she would have been sunk. She wrote a check out to BT for the landline and put it in its envelope with the payment slip, then she got up and switched out the kitchen spotlights. But before she went up to her bedroom, Mumtaz walked over to the back door and looked out into the garden. Since Ahmed’s death it had really gone to pot. No more gardener, no more Mercedes Benz on the drive, no more gold and silver and bright shiny bangles now that Ahmed had gone.

  A fat, fast-food-stuffed urban fox ambled past the silent water feature in the middle of the lawn and made a loud coughing noise. They were everywhere. They probably even got into Maria Peters’ no doubt very beautiful garden. Maria Peters, her client, the one that Lee Arnold would allow her to practice on. Just the thought of it made something inside her fizz with excitement. Then she thought, Maybe Maria Peters is just seeing a fox? Maybe her fear is causing her to make that into a man? But even so, why was she afraid? Why was her fear making her hallucinate what wasn’t there? To make a man out of a small, feral animal was quite a feat.

  III

  “I know, Paul, I know,” Maria said. Looking out of the front room window, she could see Alan Myers’ car pulling up outside. It made her face crease with anxiety.

  “I don’t think that going back to what you did before all the time is good for you,” Pastor Paul Grint, the person on the other end of the phone, said. “Not if you think about it in terms of where you want to be with God.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t want to lay a load of guilt on you, Maria,” Pastor Grint said. “But you’ve some making up to do, you know.”

  “Because of my act?”

  “I guess. You know your own sins better than I do.”

  She didn’t want to hurt God, but she wasn’t keen on hurting Alan either.

  “Mocking God and blaspheming rots the soul, Maria,” Grint said. “God is love and he forgives—he’s a fantastic guy, which is why we love him, but we have to try and be better people ourselves.”

  Maria watched Alan Myers get out of his car and begin to walk up her drive. Soon he’d be in her house, telling her to do the exact opposite of what Pastor Grint was saying.

  “But Paul,” Maria said, “I have to do my old act tonight, it’s what I’ve been contracted to do.”

  She heard him sigh. “Well, if you have to …”

  “I—”

  “Maria, just remember that God, though all great and powerful, can be hurt by humanity. You don’t want to hurt the King of the Universe, do you?”

  The front doorbell rang and Maria had to say “goodbye” quickly and put the phone down.

  When Lee called her later on that day, Maria Peters claimed to have had no idea about who was watching over her. All the surveillance devices were in place and Neil West—a retiree from Lee’s old Met Police days, who now worked freelance—was monitoring them. He told Lee nothing untoward had happened so far. But then most of the sightings of the strange figure or man happened to Maria at night and by that time Lee would have taken over.

  “A middle-aged bloke with red hair went in at ten thirty,” Neil told Lee. “Alan Myers, Miss Peters’ manager.”

  “Yeah.” Lee scanned the list of people and appointments that Maria Peters had e-mailed to him the previous evening. He was still worn o
ut—hauling his brother, Roy, out of their mother’s toilet had been no mean feat, especially with Roy wielding an almost full bottle of vodka. Then, after that, there had been all the usual abuse. “Miss Peters has a gig tonight at the Comedy Ringside in Camden.”

  Neil laughed. “You looking forward to it?”

  Lee shrugged. “A bit.” Enthusiasm for anything amongst coppers of a certain age could be misconstrued as weakness or even effeminacy.

  “You know Myers wants her to get ruder,” Neil said. “They had a little bit of a barney about it in her kitchen.”

  “She didn’t want to do it?”

  “She wants to get cleaner apparently,” Neil said. “Got no idea why. Fuck, shit and bollocks were like her catchphrases, weren’t they?”

  Lee looked across the office at Mumtaz who was carrying some women’s magazines to the table in the reception area. Maybe Maria Peters’ churchgoing was really serious? “Yeah, and the rest,” he said. “She’s happy though.”

  “Is she?”

  “With us and what we’ve put in place. She’s unaware, so she says, about where you’re hiding your ugly mug, which is great.”

  Neil laughed. “Still the invisible man, boss.”

  “Still the invisible man.” Lee cut the connection and replaced the phone on its stand.

  “Going well?” Mumtaz asked.

  “Neil was a good copper,” Lee said. “Always knew how to keep a low profile.”