A Private Business Read online

  “They want to close that café down, the police,” Baharat said. “Bangla Town, it calls itself. Huh! A dishonor to the home country. And that ridiculous sod sitting in there all day telling silly boys he’s some sort of sheikh. The man pours pure poison into people’s ears. It’s not right! It’s not moral! It’s not Islamic!”

  He’d been stabbed, Ahmed Hakim. In front of her daughter. Only then had they discovered that all the wealth he’d dazzled Baharat with had been just so much smoke. Now Mumtaz had some job, now she made it her business to look after her husband’s child. Alone. Far away from Brick Lane in that big, lonely house in Forest Gate. Sumita missed her so much she could feel her heart bleeding sometimes in her chest.

  Baharat looked away from the television set and rolled himself a cigarette. He was a good Muslim who prayed five times a day, didn’t eat pork, didn’t drink, but he did smoke and he had a cough that was persistent and impressively loud. Sumita wished he wouldn’t smoke, but then she also wished he’d give up going out six and a half days a week, and that wasn’t happening either.

  Baharat Huq had emigrated to London in the early nineteen sixties. He’d arrived with one suitcase from a country that was then called East Pakistan. He’d worked for an old Jewish man who sold women’s clothes on Petticoat Lane Market and had lived with a group of other young East Pakistani men in a crumbling Huguenot house in Princelet Street, Spitalfields. It had been little more than a squat, really, and when Baharat’s father had decided that it was time that he got married, he’d had to find somewhere more suitable double quick. Baharat and Sumita began their married lives in 1970 in one room above a fish and chip shop on Brick Lane. Tariq their eldest child had been born there but by the time they had their second son Abdul, and daughter Mumtaz, they lived in the house on Hanbury Street that they now owned. As the years had progressed, Baharat’s idea that what Spitalfields needed more than anything was a shop that sold Islamic ephemera, had paid off. A lot of people had since emigrated from what by then was Bangladesh and they wanted prayer rugs, Qur’ans and tasbeeh beads. Baharat had been the first ever trader in the Brick Lane area to successfully import boxes for storing the Holy Qur’an in the shape of the Sacred Ka’aaba in Mecca, which had made him quite the famous chap in the community. And when his clever daughter had married an apparently wealthy and influential local businessman, Baharat felt that he’d made it. His dream of British streets paved with gold had, seemingly, come true.

  But it had been an illusion. First had come the July 7 London bombings, Islamophobia as some called it, and then Mumtaz’s husband had been murdered, leaving her his highly Westernized, privately educated daughter and a legacy of debt so enormous Baharat couldn’t afford to even think about tackling. Ahmed Hakim had not been the man that Baharat thought he was. As if reading his wife’s gloomy thoughts, he said, “You know, I don’t know which is worse: a misguided bugger who kills in the name of God or a liar who drinks and eats pork and has a gangsterly life.”

  Sumita shrugged. “Who can say?” she replied in Bengali. “I just wish that our daughter would come home. That child of her husband should be sent back to his family in Sylhet. Then Mumtaz could remarry. There is no shame in widowhood.”

  But Baharat did not reply. He looked back at the television and then began ranting about the economy. He knew as well as Sumita that there was no point in even talking about trying to make their daughter do something that she didn’t feel right about. Not now.

  Lee Arnold had not understood. He hadn’t said anything, he was too professional for that, but Maria knew. Mr. Arnold didn’t believe in God any more than most of the people she came across. He was an ex-copper—not big on God, ex-coppers. Like most stand-ups really. Like Maria as she used to be.

  Back in the day, she’d based a whole one and a half hour one-woman show around religion, or “your invisible friends who are so much fun to be with!,” as she’d put it. But then she’d been young and on coke and she hadn’t even met Len, much less lost him. The isolation she’d felt after Len died had almost destroyed her, and her mother’s dark Catholicism, the religion she herself had once loved, hadn’t helped. Still praying to saints who had been roasted on gridirons, venerating relics—bones, bodies, beads, the words of discredited priests. She’d gone back on the circuit, not for the money but for the distraction. Then, suddenly, when she wasn’t looking, Jesus had come into her life. Initially via leaflets through her door, then a booklet, picked up and read in the doctor’s surgery; so Maria discovered the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire. And for the first time ever, she’d gone to a real church, a proper place of worship. Like Len, out of the blue, a man had arrived to save her—Jesus.

  Lee, the man who was watching her, who believed that Jesus was a myth, looked after her because she paid him well. At massive expense he’d fitted cameras and microphones all over the house, and yet he probably thought that what she was seeing out of the corners of her eyes wasn’t real. She’d asked him about evil and whether or not he believed in it, but he’d seemed unsure. All he would say was that he’d seen some things in his life that people might describe as evil. He was an atheist, what did she expect? Part of her brain, to her shame, was still in that world too.

  It was the wee hours of the morning and Maria stood in her darkened living room and idly fingered one of her many ceramic cat ornaments. In spite of light pollution from the London monster that engulfed her, the sky was as black as a sky could get. Although illuminated by security lights, the garden was frigid with both lack of movement and with the onset of yet another bone-grinding cold snap. Eerie featherings of frost lightly touched the blades of her well-cut grass and not even a distant cough from a sick urban fox disturbed the nighttime peace.

  But Maria knew that he, she, it was out there somewhere. She could feel the tingling knowledge of it at the base of her skull. If she turned around suddenly and quickly she knew with her whole being that she’d see who or what was charting her slightest move, every variation in facial expression. She wanted to know what it was. That was why Lee Arnold and his colleagues were working for her. But then again she didn’t want to know because deep down at the bottom of her soul just the thought of having that knowledge produced an urge to harm herself.

  V

  Words could reach right down into your core with or without your understanding. It had been the spikiness, the furious shape of the graffiti letters that had attracted Mumtaz first. What was being said only became apparent as she drew closer. Filthy homosexuals get out it read, and then a warning: Allah will smite you. People appeared not to notice it. But it made Mumtaz want to howl. She loved going back to her parents’ house in Spitalfields but there was a dark side to it always and it wasn’t just because of the odd religious nutter stalking the streets around Brick Lane.

  Before the area became known as Bangla Town, Spitalfields had been home to generations of Jewish refugees. Their synagogues and ritual baths still appeared like shades from the past in back streets all over town. The Brick Lane mosque had even been a synagogue once and some people claimed that you could still occasionally catch a whiff of the smell of the kosher wine they had once stored in the basement. The Jews had co-existed with their Christian neighbors and some still remained. They’d been grateful for the shelter from pogroms and oppression that London had given them. But there were written words in Spitalfields that indicated that this safe haven had come at a price. As Mumtaz passed in front of the whiteness of the great Christ Church on Commercial Street she recalled them.

  She’d only been nine at the time and together with other children from her school she’d appeared in a musical concert at the church as part of the Spitalfields Festival. Their teachers had led them up the steps and into a sort of antechamber in front of the actual church itself where there had been some stone tablets high up on the walls with wordy dedications to people active in the “Christian Hebrew” movement. Whether it was the possible forced conversions of Jews to Christianity, or the unfamiliar look o
f the few phrases in Hebrew written at the bottom of these tablets that had caused Mumtaz to shiver and sweat, she didn’t know. But every time she’d been back, those tablets had made her feel exactly the same. Even only half noticed, their baleful presence was evident in the way she walked and in the pounding of her heart. To some extent the Jews had been under the cosh in this place even though they, like her own people, had been outwardly tolerated.

  She didn’t go straight to her parents’ house, but stopped off at the other end of Hanbury Street and looked in the condensation-drenched windows of the Royal Raj Cafe (est. 1976). Predictably, her father was chewing the fat and drinking tea with another old, and remarkably pale-looking, man. Even though he went out every day, her father only worked in the shop when it suited him; Mumtaz’s brothers ran things now.

  “Hello, Abba.”

  He looked up and smiled at her. Baharat’s two sons had always honored their father and did as they were told, but he knew that they only paid lip service to him. Mumtaz, however challenging she was, was always honest and Baharat liked that. He clearly and very obviously practiced favoritism.

  “Mumtaz!” he beamed. Then turning to his companion he said, “Mr. Choudhury, this is my daughter. She has a degree in psychology from London University. You know she was in the same set as the famous stage illusionist, Mark Solomons.”

  The other man, who Mumtaz didn’t know, looked impressed. She resisted the urge she always got at times like this to add that upon graduation her father had very passively aggressively made sure that she nevertheless didn’t get to use her precious degree. She similarly failed to allude to the fact that she had also had a massive crush on magician Mark Solomons, a Jew.

  Mr. Choudhury said, “It is a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Mr. Choudhury is a hajji,” her father said as she moved to the other side of the table.

  Mumtaz nodded her head. Of course going on pilgrimage to Mecca was a huge achievement, but good Muslim as she was, she didn’t envy Mr. Choudhury in any way. By the look of him, he probably had a serious heart condition. Praise be to Allah that he had managed to go to Mecca before his death. While her father ordered her tea, Mumtaz sat down.

  “Abba,” she said, “I have good news.”

  Her father leaned across the table expectantly.

  “My boss, Mr. Arnold, has promoted me,” she said. That afternoon she was going to do half of Lee’s shift inside Maria Peters’ house.

  “So how much more money is he paying you?” Baharat asked.

  Mumtaz suddenly felt stupid. Why on earth had she thought that telling her father about her try-out as a private investigator was going to be a good idea? She wasn’t getting any more money. Mumtaz knew from long experience that elderly Bangladeshi gentlemen were generally only interested in academic qualifications, marriage, fertility and money when it came to their children, especially their daughters.

  “So are you a proper detective now, Mumtaz?” Baharat turned to Mr. Choudhury. “Such a tragedy when a woman’s husband dies! But see how my daughter, in spite of that, climbs the career ladder. What an inspiration, eh?”

  Mr. Choudhury nodded appreciatively while Mumtaz’s heart sank. The next thing to happen would be that her father would offer her hand in marriage to this gray old man.

  Carefully easing her way past her father’s awkward questions, Mumtaz said, “Things will get easier now, Abba.”

  It wasn’t exactly a lie. True, Lee hadn’t said that she could have more money if she went out into the field, but Mumtaz knew what he paid his freelancers and it was more than she earned. With luck she’d prove herself; with even more luck she’d get fieldwork more and more often.

  “Inshallah,” Baharat said with a smile.

  Mr. Choudhury echoed with a whispered “Inshallah” underneath his labored breath.

  Mumtaz’s tea arrived and so she had to sit with them to drink it. She wished she’d just gone straight to see her mother, but showing an interest in Mr. Choudhury’s haj was something she knew would very quickly and easily deflect all and any of her father’s inquiries. He was always so happy to talk about religion. Baharat told her all about Mr. Choudhury’s travels without once including the old man himself in the conversation.

  Nodding and shaking her head in all the right places, Mumtaz let her mind wander firstly into the realms of shopping she needed to do, then onto a damp patch she’d found on the bathroom wall until, eventually, it settled on the mythical manly face her mother had described to her many, many times in the past: the Silver Prince of her childhood bedtime stories. The handsome, good and faithful savior of all Bengal who rode a flying horse and whose shoes and clothes were made from pure silver from the moon. Her mother had made him up, but Mumtaz had loved him. Once she became an adult, though, she had, like her father, considered such stories so much foolishness, especially after she married Ahmed Hakim. But then one day, quite out of the blue, she saw the Silver Prince in all his glory just north of her house, on Wanstead Flats. Beautiful and regal, he had stood with his head held high, his blue-black hair shining like a crow’s wing. But then momentary elation had given way to such awful disgust that Mumtaz felt instantly sick. She felt sick again at the thought of it and so she drank her tea quickly, excused herself to her father and his friend and went out to take the air in the street. As she put her head down over the mud-and-fag-end-filled gutter, a white man passed by and looked at her with sympathy. But he didn’t ask her what the matter was or whether he could help her or not. At times like this Mumtaz felt the scarf across her head wind itself tightly around her neck like a noose.

  “There was always some bloke everyone called a flasher even if he wasn’t,” DS Tony Bracci said. “Turned out he was usually harmless.”

  Vi Collins slid her lizard eyes across to observe his plump, still young-looking face. “And everyone could leave their doors open day and night and we all had such a laugh singing round the old joanna down the pub? Do me a favor, Tone.”

  They stood on Marshgate Lane looking across one of the many tributaries of the River Lee at the beginnings of Hackney. Behind them the Olympic stadium sat with a half jaunt in its demeanor, like a hat that can’t decide whether or not it is stylish. A man had been seen here with his penis hanging out of his trousers.

  “I know it doesn’t always follow, but a bloke getting his knob out in public can be the first step on a career leading to rape,” Vi said. She sucked hard on a Marlboro and imagined what was going through DS Bracci’s mind. Just ’cause she’s got some tin-pot degree in sociology …

  “I base that on thirty years coppering,” Vi added.

  Tony Bracci hadn’t been at the “coppering” for many years fewer than Vi. “Yeah, well …”

  “Yeah, well, we need to apprehend this villain,” Vi said with a smile. “All right?”

  Tony looked over at Hackney and found it just as shabby and in need of attention as Newham; everything except the Olympic stadia and the massive great media center was still shit. The whole area still reeked of shit from the old northern outfall, just like it always had, and once the games were over he, like most people in the borough, was prepared to bet that the whole lot would end up going to shit. Just another in a long line of attempts to “regenerate” the old East End …

  “He’s whiteish, medium height, sort of middle-aged,” Vi said. “Victim didn’t notice what he was wearing except his CAT boots.”

  “Could be a workman on the site,” Tony said. “One of them eastern Europeans.”

  “Couldn’t be one of us then?” Vi said.

  Tony bit his bottom lip. Vi could remember when his Italian father, Vincenzo, had sold ice cream out of a van on the streets of Barking, and he knew it. He also knew she’d almost certainly remember that Vincenzo had been able to speak only the most minimal amount of English at the time.

  Vi put her cigarette out and then lit up another. “You know what Lee Arnold’s working on at the moment, do you?”

  Tony Bracci hadn’t be
en close to Lee Arnold since the latter had given up the booze. Going into pubs with a sober sort just wasn’t any fun, but they still talked on the phone from time to time and Tony did get to hear things.

  “I heard Neil West’s got a gig with him,” he said.

  Vi looked at a vast piece of graffiti on the wall of a half demolished factory. It showed a massive great face, its huge red mouth devouring the Theater Royal, Stratford. Underneath someone had written 2012 Olympic Man. “Right.”

  “Neil don’t go out for just anyone nor for nothing,” Tony said. “Why?”

  “Because I saw Arnold last night,” Vi said. “And he was up to something.”

  “What?”

  Vi raised her eyes to heaven. “If I knew that, would I be asking you?”

  “Why you so interested, guv’nor? Lee left years ago.”

  A rat scuttled out of one hole and into another on the side of the riverbank. Vi Collins said, “Because, DS Bracci, like it or not, former DI Arnold is now in competition with us. You know the old saying about keeping your enemies close? Well keep your competition closer. And never forget that private tecs like Lee Arnold are members of the public just like anyone else and if I think they know anything I should know, I’ll have any one of them down the station as quick as hot shit falls off a shovel.”

  And then, all of a sudden, what sounded like thousands of voices rose up to sing “Abide With Me.”

  Pope Benedict XVI looked sinister. Fully aware that this impression was probably just her opinion, Maria tried to keep it to herself but without success. Her mother had been baiting her all afternoon and now she just couldn’t help herself.