A Private Business Read online

  Mumtaz returned to her desk. “You know, Mr. Arnold, I was thinking about our client for a while last night.”

  “Oh?” Where once he would have smoked a cigarette in the office he just fiddled with a pen instead. Hurrah, or not, for anti-smoking legislation.

  “As you know, my house is next door to the multiple-occupancy place that she owns, and only two streets away from where she lives.”

  “Yep.”

  Mumtaz said, “Last night I saw a fox in my garden. I expect you get them where you live too.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “It’s just a thought, but if a person is anxious or maybe anticipating trouble of some sort, sometimes they can see things that aren’t actually there. I don’t mean they experience what we think of as actual hallucinations, not exactly. But movement in a garden, especially in the half light of dusk, can transform a creature, like maybe a fox, into something far more sinister and threatening.”

  “Mmm.” Lee looked unsure. “You think?”

  “I know. The classic example happens with shadows. If you’re in a house at night with another person, a shadow is a shadow, usually, but if you’re alone and maybe tense because you’re alone, a shadow can become a person with malicious intent, a ghost or even a monster.”

  “Doesn’t the person have to be imaginative or …”

  “Suggestible rather than imaginative,” Mumtaz said. “The two are not the same. Creative people can be suggestible, but so can those who are not imaginative. There’s just rather more chance of someone with an active imagination spontaneously having an experience of this sort. I’m always amazed at what the mind can do. The eyes see one thing while the brain interprets that as something quite other.”

  “A fox into a man?”

  “At night all sorts of things are threatening, including foxes and men. Our brains process information from our environment and we don’t even know it’s happening, and that is especially the case if a person is under stress or experiencing anxiety. As I’ve said before, I feel Miss Peters may not be telling us the whole story of her situation.”

  “But she’s asked for our help. Why hold stuff back?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if I’m right, it’s just a feeling.”

  Mumtaz turned her attention to her poor, scarred computer screen, but Lee continued to watch her. Surely theories of the mind and religion had to be mutually exclusive, didn’t they? Especially amongst Muslims. If such a thing could be said to exist, his old mum, Rose, was hard line C. of E., from what some called the High Church, some the Anglo-Catholic wing; Rose was all about original sin, Adam and Eve, God-given rights, anti-abortion and she read the Daily Mail. Muslims, if anything, were even more religiously conservative. If God made man, how could his brain do such crazy things all on its own? Unless of course that brain was possessed in some way. A vision of Mumtaz waving her arms about over Maria Peters’ head in an act of exorcism came and then, thankfully, went from his mind.

  “Of course some of our senses evoke unlooked-for responses in us more easily than others,” Mumtaz said without looking away from her computer. “For instance, can you smell that cumin coming from the samosa stall down on the street? I can and it’s making me hungry and I’ve only just eaten.” Then she looked up and smiled. “If I smell something even approaching curry I start to salivate.”

  “Now look, love, you’ve a whole new generation of trendy Camden wonks out there, so give it all you’ve got.”

  Maria Peters frowned. “Alan, these kids are not like the kids back in the eighties,” she said. “These are affluent, clean living, environmental activists …”

  “And hippies too, there’ve always been hippies.” Alan Myers was, not for the first time that day, getting a little tired of his artist’s objections. Either she wanted to revive her career or she didn’t. And if she didn’t, she could clean up her act as much as she wanted—but without him.

  A tiny cupboard-like space painted dark red constituted the Comedy Ringside’s Green Room. Squashed in with a bloke who took the piss out of his own Parkinsonian symptoms, a woman with a stuffed Yorkshire terrier on her head, Maria and that interfering, churchy friend of hers, it did not do a lot for Alan’s nerves.

  “You can’t bomb out again, Maria,” he said. “Not like New Cross.”

  “They were a much older crowd there, Alan. They really wanted the old stuff. I’m not sure about these kids …”

  “You don’t have to go on,” the friend said.

  Alan felt his whole face explode with heat. “Yes, she does.” The girl with the dog on her head was looking and so he lowered his voice. “She’s contracted to do so and they want all the old stuff.”

  “Not if she’s ill, she isn’t. She has collapsed—”

  Alan leaned across Maria’s body and hissed at her tiny, boring friend. “But she isn’t ill! She had tests! She won’t collapse!” He wanted to add in all sorts of abuse about how the woman, Betty Muller, looked a damn sight nearer the grave than his tall, beautiful client. But he held onto that. Some of the friends that Maria had these days—mostly religious sorts—were very odd, but she liked them. For some reason.

  Maria put her hand on Betty’s arm. “I have to go on,” she said. “Alan’s quite right, I can’t let people down. It wouldn’t be right.”

  Betty didn’t look happy. But then Alan was beginning to wonder whether she’d come along less to support Maria than to pander to her desire to radically change her act. It had, Alan thought, to be a noughties thing, this PC, religious, hemp skirts and saving-trees-from-McDonald’s trend. The thing was that although young people were into all that, young people who went to comedy clubs were into what young people had always been into—sex, drugs, rock and roll, fags, booze and lots of swearing too. They’d come to see the Maria Peters who said “cunt,” not the Maria Peters who told nice little stories about mildly amusing antics performed by rather sprightly little old ladies. This was, after all, Camden, not bloody Midsomer Bumhole. “Maria, love,” Alan said. “The omens are marvelous. I’ve made sure. No peacock feathers in the place, no mention of the Scottish Play, everyone talking about ‘breaking a leg.’”

  Yes, the old theatrical superstitions were all covered, but still Maria had to concentrate to make her mouth smile.

  Lee put an arm around the woman in the sharp nineteen eighties-style suit and whispered in her ear, “Business or pleasure?”

  Half the audience for the carefully ironically titled Wot Larks!—the comedy showcase at the Camden Ringside—were out on the pavement swigging bottled beer and smoking fags and other things. Detective Inspector Violet Collins was just one of them. She turned her heavily made-up, heavily lined face toward Lee Arnold and said, “I could ask the same of you.”

  He smiled, kissed her on the cheek and then said, “Ah, couldn’t do that, Vi. If I told you what I was up to I’d have to kill you.”

  She nodded her head. “Likewise,” she said. “But without the murder. We’re the good guys, remember? The cowboys with the white hats.”

  “So what does that make me?”

  She took his arm and led him across the cobbles toward the wall overlooking the canal. It was dingy, a bit foggy and cold, but Vi still had a way to go before she got enough nicotine in her system to be able to get through the show. She leaned against the wall and lit up yet again. “A private dick?” she smiled. “Gray hat? Brown? Where d’you think you lot come in the moral color code of the universe?”

  Lee narrowed his eyes. “Come on, Vi,” he said, “don’t keep a fella in suspense—how old is he and is he Moroccan or Tunisian?”

  Vi Collins pursed her thin, red, wrinkled lips. “Oh, no totty tonight,” she said. “I’ve come to see our local girl. Why else would I drag my ass up to Camden?”

  “Maria Peters?”

  “Remember her from the old Comedy Store,” she said. “Now that was a comic that was going at my speed.”

  “She could swear like a sailor.”

&nbs
p; “Still can—I hope.”

  A couple of young girls walked past dressed in nineteen fifties-style dresses with lots of net petticoats underneath, all made up to the nines and sucking suggestively on lollies. As they walked past, Vi muttered, “So much for the Women’s Movement.”

  “Some people think it’s just a modern form of feminism,” Lee said with a smile on his face. He hadn’t worked with Vi for over five years but he still knew how to wind her up.

  “What? All these prats who reckon that these girls getting bling out of thick footballers are some sort of noble feminist army? Sisters with breast implants doing it for themselves?” Vi sucked hard on her fag and pulled a face. “Do me a fucking favor.”

  Lee laughed. “Oh, Vi, you are such an easy mark.”

  She laughed. “And you’re a cheeky sod.”

  He put a hand out, ready to curl around her waist again, but then thought better of it and just lit up a fag. Vi had been his colleague, his best mate at the Forest Gate station and, for just one drunken night, New Year’s Eve 1999, his lover. His lover from another century.

  “So if you’ve come to see Maria Peters, you expecting a car crash?” Lee asked.

  “You mean like New Cross? I hope not,” Vi said. “Just collapsed apparently. Christ knows why.”

  Maria had told Lee that she’d fainted during the New Cross gig, in part because of the stalking. That made sense; one of the consequences of stalking was that the victim slowly but surely lost confidence in themselves, stopped eating, got sick. But he wasn’t about to share that with Vi. Maria had come to a private detective and that was what she was getting.

  Vi said, “Why you here, then? Thought you spent most of your time with your parrot.”

  “Mynah bird,” Lee corrected.

  “Whatever.”

  “You should know. Anyway, maybe I’m on the pull too,” he said with a twinkle in his eye.

  Vi narrowed her eyes. “I’m not on the pull,” she said. “I’m here with our Ronnie. Don’t be a funny bugger, Arnold, you know I’m a strictly holiday romance girl these days.”

  “Up for a bit of Moroccan.”

  Vi looked about her anxiously. “Don’t fucking say that! Ronnie don’t know about any of that!”

  “I bet he does,” Lee said.

  “Oh, fuck off.” Vi laughed. Lee Arnold was a strange but sexy fella and she still carried a torch for him from way back in the twentieth century. “Anyway, who you with then? On your Jack as usual?”

  “Unless you want me to join you and your son, Vi …”

  “Not a good idea.” Then she frowned. “You really on your Jack Jones, Arnold?”

  His face was open and innocent. It was a face Vi knew very well. “What are you up to, Lee?”

  “Having a night out at a comedy club, Vi. What’s the matter with that? Am I not allowed entertainment or something?”

  Vi rocked back on her high, spiky heels and said, “No, you do what you like, love. But I know you, remember? And the Lee Arnold I know don’t go anywhere just to entertain hisself. You, you little bugger, are here for a reason.”

  IV

  Catholic youth camp in Epping Forest—it was like a cross between a David Attenborough documentary and a porn fest for paedos. The life cycle of the centipede as witnessed on the front of Father Fernandez’s cassock. Each tent contained at least ten plaster saints with terrible, suffering eyes which, if you put your hands inside your sleeping bag, would start flashing an eerie blue light until Father Richards’d come in and spank you till he could take no more. Masturbation alarm systems—what a great idea that was! Comedians need gimmicks. Ken Dodd has his tickling stick, I have a statue of St. Augustine which flashes blue and plays the theme from The Omen every time I come.

  Out in the audience, someone shouts, Which isn’t very often! There’s laughter.

  Ah, Maria Peters says, the gentle sound of spotty youth! One mention of masturbation and all the boys start to get nervous. People laugh. So Catholic Youth Camp was the first occasion I’d ever spent time away from home. Let’s face it, I come from Plaistow, it was the first time I’d ever seen grass. I didn’t know what the fuck it was. Or trees. As soon as the tents were put up, I went inside and I stayed there.

  Someone in the audience yells, What? Your priest want a blow job, did he? Maria laughs.

  No. Actually, Father Fernandez, God rest his soul, wanted to take me up the ass. There’s laughter but also a few gasps of shock too. Not real sex, is it? Can’t get pregnant doing the back door boogie, can you? Or can you? Maria’s face changes, her smile drops a little. She forces a laugh. Mind you, bit of a dated view these days, isn’t it. We’re all down with sodomy now, aren’t we? The whole place becomes suddenly and strangely silent. Can’t say that anything’s wrong any more, can we? However weird.

  Someone in the audience yells, Fuck you, bitch!

  Maria’s face twists with bitterness. Not sodomy, not sadomasochism, not priests fiddling with children! It’s all just a laugh, or your “right” to do, because it makes you happy … A sob brings her diatribe to a close and she runs off the stage, crying.

  “You have to help me out here, Maria,” Lee said. “I can’t assist you unless you’re a hundred percent honest with me.” He passed her the glass of brandy she’d asked for and then sat down. They were in the now empty Green Room of the Comedy Ringside, the other performers, the audience, Betty Muller and Alan Myers having left over an hour ago. Maria took the brandy and downed it in one. She didn’t so much as wince.

  “I have to be honest,” Lee continued, “I know you’re holding back on me about something.” He failed to mention that had actually been Mumtaz’s notion. “So I’m sorry but I just don’t buy that you’re getting this upset about a possible invasion of your privacy just glimpsed out the corner of your eye. You can’t concentrate and your career’s going down the pan and you’re turning on your audience!”

  “I know.” She looked across at him with tears in her eyes. “I know.”

  Alan Myers had nearly lost his mind. He’d been the first one she’d bowled into when she ran off the stage. You have one more chance and that’s it! he’d growled at her. Do this to me again and I’ll fucking finish you, darling! Betty had been sympathetic but with an element of I told you so and so Maria had had to send her away. She’d offered to stay, of course, because she was a true friend but …

  “I have to know about any threats,” Lee said. “Real threats, not just some memory of some randy fan from 1989.”

  “I haven’t had any actual threats at all,” she said. “I used to get them years ago.”

  “Who from?”

  “I told you. But then there were also people who thought I should be censored,” Maria said. “Mary Whitehouse types, religious people. I offended everybody.”

  “You still do, or you try to. That’s still the point of the act, isn’t it?”

  She looked down. “Yes.”

  “So, you getting direct threats now, Maria, or what?”

  “No! But I might do after tonight!”

  He moved in so that he could see her face. She was only a few years older than him and she was lovely. There was something of the Katharine Hepburn about her. Lee loved the old movie stars, they were so much more glamorous than modern people. But she still wasn’t telling him everything. Lee had been a good, instinctive copper and that hadn’t changed. “So if you’re not getting threats, then what is going on? Why are you intimidating your crowd? Why are you alienating your audience?”

  She looked into his eyes.

  “Is it simply your fear? About what you’re experiencing at home?” He didn’t use the word “imagine” or talk about what she “thought” she might be seeing. “That stuff you do about priests, is that true? Is it?”

  She said nothing. Lee, helpless, shrugged.

  And then she said, as if it were the most obvious explanation in the world, “I’ve found God.”

  “You go to church, I know,” Lee said. “So do lots
of people.”

  Maria shook her head impatiently. “No,” she said, “I don’t just go to church. As you say, a lot of people do that, pedophile priests do that. I’m not talking about Catholicism. No, I am being born again. I’ve committed to take Jesus into my life. I’ve found God and I know that he loves me. I also know that he wants what is best for me, and it isn’t this act.”

  * * *

  “These fundamentalist chaps dishonor God.”

  Baharat was holding forth again, distressed by the ten o’clock news. Some Muslim boys had been arrested in Manchester for apparently plotting to blow up a church.

  “They think they’re doing jihad.” Baharat shrugged his shoulders. “What do silly bloody kids from Manchester know of jihad? Like those silly bloody buggers meeting at the café, talking nonsense.”

  Sumita pulled her sari down across her shoulders and carried on folding the ironing. Ranting in English was one of her husband’s very few pleasures and so she just let him get on with it.

  “I mean, what do these sods think that the Brits will do now, eh? Islamophobia is what that character from the Muslim Council of Britain calls it. Islamophobia! But who can blame them? They see these silly buggers and their hatred and of course they think we’re all the same!”

  The television was turned up so loudly, Sumita could hardly hear herself think. Baharat was over seventy now and as deaf as a post. He shouted, always in English. His father, even though he’d never left Dhaka in his life, had always believed that English was “civilized.” Sumita’s grasp of it was at best adequate.

  “They should hang them,” Baharat continued. “That ridiculous bugger in the café and those boys he has with him too. Talking about beating up the girls who don’t cover their heads. Modesty is what a Muslim woman should display, whether her head is covered or not. That is a choice. We are not fanatics in this society!”

  Baharat made her tired, but Sumita couldn’t charge him with hypocrisy, not exactly. Their only daughter, Mumtaz, had never been obliged to cover her head by her father. Her brothers had gone through a phase of thinking that this was shameful, but Baharat, as usual, had had the final say on the matter. “If the girl wants to cover, then that is down to her,” he’d said. “If she doesn’t, that is her business too.” But he had kept her close. Working in the shop until she married that man that Sumita had never liked. She’d admired him, she’d wanted her daughter to marry him, but … A man with Savile Row suits, a Rolex on his wrist and perfume in his dyed black hair. She’d never liked Ahmed Hakim. He’d made Mumtaz cover her head.