A Private Business (7 page)

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 been 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.

“He looks like a pedophile,” Maria said. “Just like his priests.”

Glenys Peters' mouth dropped. But then apparently pulling herself together she said, “You've a gob like a toilet. Ah, what can be going on in your mind! My daughter, a woman who uses the c-word.”

“Cunt? I use it in my act. I don't generally toss it around in normal conversation.”

Maria Peters smiled, but her face reddened in what could have been embarrassment too. In spite of what Lee had told Mumtaz about the comedian having found God, clearly His influence had not yet stopped her from goading her mother.

Mumtaz had thought that Lee might be in the house with her, but he wasn't. He wanted to get her view on who came and went, and how Maria interacted with them, and with her surroundings when she was alone. She was something of a jumble. Apparently involved with an evangelical Christian group of some sort, she demonstrated nothing but contempt for the Roman Catholicism that she'd been brought up to respect which, to Mumtaz, didn't seem to make much sense. Weren't they both kinds of Christianity? But then there were different types of Muslim; Shia, Sunni. Nations had been to war over such differences. They mattered.

“Anyway, cunt is just a word,” she heard Maria say.

Mumtaz looked down at the floor plan of the house that Lee had given her and tried to concentrate on where the microphones and cameras he had installed were
positioned. Ideally, no creak of a floorboard, nor vague shift in the quality of the light was to go unrecorded—not that that was actually possible. But he, she or it was hopefully going to be apprehended, if he, she or it actually existed. Out of the corner of her eye, Mumtaz observed the glee that Maria derived from goading her mother fight with the shame that uttering that word clearly made her feel. In her professional life, on stage, she broke down. She'd told Lee this was because her new-found faith made her feel guilty about saying words like “cunt,” about laughing at the misfortunes of others, about blasphemy. She was a comedian at war with her own material.

“I'll say something for them happy-clappies, they don't swear,” Glenys said. “Can't be in their good books with your effin' this and c-ing that.” Her voice was what Mumtaz would have described as recognizably cockney but there was just a haze of some sort of southern Irish in there too.

Mumtaz noted that there were two microphones and cameras, both hidden in books, in Maria's vast lounge, and then she looked up in time to see the comedian's face fall into a bitter expression that made her appear much older. “Don't call them—us—happy-clappies,” she said. “It's insulting.”

Glenys's pale blue eyes flashed. “Then don't call the Holy Father a pedophile,” she said.

Maria sat down. “He is and he's a purveyor of superstition.
All that Catholic superstition you brought us up with. I still can't get it out of my system, even now. Touch this statue of the Virgin and it'll bring you good luck. Beware of witches and jujus and nonsense. Father this, that or the other always knows best.”

“You used to love going to Mass,” Glenys said. “Couldn't keep you away. Then you got into showbusiness …”

Maria ignored her and turned to Mumtaz. “Would you like a cup of tea or something?”

“No.” Mumtaz smiled. “Thank you.”

She saw Glenys looking at her as if she had a bad smell underneath her nose. “What is it you're doing, love?”

“I'm looking at where Mr. Arnold has sited the surveillance equipment,” she said. The principle thing about Miss Peters' living room was the amount of ornaments that were in it, mainly china cats; they all looked as if they had been very precisely positioned.

“She's learning,” Maria interjected.

“Oh.” Glenys took her eyes away from Mumtaz and said to her daughter, “Anyway, once that church has been demolished, you'll lose interest. I know you. If it ain't on your doorstep …”

“The church is being rebuilt,” Maria said.

“Not where it is at the moment.”

“No. We'll have to move to a temporary building for a while.”

“Then where? This new church? Where's it being built?”

“Why do you want to know? You're not interested, are you?”

The older woman went silent. The ticking of a large baroque clock on the mantelpiece above the fireplace suddenly sounded almost deafeningly loud. This went on for at least a minute until Maria said, “Barking.” Then, pointing at her mother who was now just beginning to smile, she added, “Say nothing, Ma! Say nothing! The church, as in the people, are my friends, they support me. I don't know what I'd do without them.”