A Private Business (11 page)

“You think that what's-her-name is up to it?”

“Mumtaz? Well the client's covered, so's her kid and so's Mumtaz. So of all of us, she's the one least likely to stick out like a sore thumb.”

“Mmm. Funny, you know I never think of Muslim girls being on drugs.”

Lee rolled his eyes. Neil was a good enough bloke but he did tend to think in stereotypes. “You wanna get out more,” he said.

“Oh! Client slipping out of sight,” Neil said. “Call you later. Putting the phone on vibrate.”

“OK.”

Old Fred sat down next to Lee and smiled. “So what you done about Bob the Builder?” he asked. “He still owe you money, does he?”

“Oh, yes,” Lee said. He didn't look too bothered about it.

They were joined by Fred's mates, Harry and Wilf. All in their late seventies or early eighties, they'd known Lee's late father and, like him, they'd been drinking in the Boleyn since the nineteen forties. Wilf, who had emphysema, rasped, “How come?”

“How come he still owes me money or …”

“How come I just see him walking about down Upton Park Lane,” Wilf said. “He never had a broken leg or nothing. What's up with you, boy?”

Lee looked into Wilf's concerned, watery blue eyes and smiled. Even though he didn't drink any more, this pub was his second home—he'd known it, and these old men, all his life. “But did he look worried, Wilfred?”

“Worried?”

“If he didn't, he obviously hasn't seen his missus today.”

Harry supped his pint and said, “Tracey? Why?”

Some young lads with skinhead haircuts barreled through the public bar doors, already pissed as parrots. Lee watched them lurch over to the bar and made sure they were polite to the barmaids before he continued.

“I told Bob. I warned him,” Lee said. “My money this morning or there'd be consequences.”

The old men leaned forward in their chairs, their ancient eyes big with their desire for a good old mouthful of gossip.

Lee bent down across the table and lowered his voice. “You see, lads, Bob, as I told his Tracey, has a little bit on the side. Name of Kerry, she works out of an old container in Rainham. Entertains gentlemen callers, if you know what I mean.”

“Oh! Never!”

“My dosh aside, in the interests of safe sex, I had to tell poor Trace,” Lee said. “Phoned her up this afternoon. She was none too happy.”

“Don't s'pose she was,” Harry said.

But Fred, who'd sucked on his bottom set of dentures and furrowed his brow when Lee told him what he'd done said, “Bit of a low blow though, ain't it, boy? Grassing on a geezer about his tart to his missus?”

“Depends,” Lee said.

“On what?”

“On how many tarts a bloke actually has.”

Wilf coughed and then spat mucus into a large, tattered handkerchief. “You ain't telling me that Bob …”

“Four, not counting Kerry. She's the best of 'em,” Lee said. “All on the game. One's as rough as fuck, looks like she hasn't bathed for a month. Bob the Builder, my friends, will give me what he owes me because if he doesn't I'll tell Tracey about the others and if Tracey gets to know so will her Indian restaurant-owner boyfriend. Now he is a heavy geezer! The thought of possibly getting a dose of the clap off Tracey via Tracey's husband's rough old toms will not please him at all. Bob'll work that one out quick enough.”

“Mmm.” Wilf looked down into his pint and shook his head.

Harry just sat saying nothing. Then Fred said, “It's like that morning show in the East End these days, ain't it?”

“What morning show? What do you mean?”

“
Jeremy Kyle
,” Fred said. “The whole world's like
Jeremy Kyle
now, ain't it?”

Lee drank his Coke straight down and said, “Always has
been actually, boys.” Then he smiled. “Thank God. If it wasn't I'd be out of business.”

The picture showed a slim young girl wearing a hijab. She was almost the same age as Shazia but she went to one of the local comprehensives. Not for her the wilder reaches of Woodford Green and the delights of Bancroft's. Her name was Anjali and when her mother “Danielle” had come to the office she had been wearing a niqab.

Lee had been a bit taken aback, but Mumtaz had half expected it. When she'd first spoken to the woman on the phone, she'd gathered from her tone and the fact that she whispered that she probably came from the sort of family where full veiling was not going to be a surprise. She wanted Anjali watched because she feared that the girl was getting involved with drugs.

“Her school grades have slipped and she's always tired now,” she'd told Mumtaz. “And she is sometimes disrespectful to me.”

Mumtaz had, gently, tried to point out that tiredness, slipping grades and the odd bit of disrespect for her mother were really rather small crimes for a teenager to commit. When she had first met Shazia and the girl had gone on a full-scale offensive against her, it had been bad. But then Shazia had had a very good reason.

“Anjali was always such a good girl,” her mother had continued. Then she'd added, “I don't want her father to
know.” She'd turned her veiled face to Lee. “I have some money of my own so I can pay you. Just … discretion. Please.”

Looking at Anjali's photograph, Mumtaz struggled not to experience an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. Her father had been so different from everybody else's father. She'd gone to university, he'd left the covering or not covering of her head up to her. He hadn't forbidden her from working outside his shop even though he'd employed a good, solid dose of emotional blackmail, which had worked. Then Ahmed. But Ahmed had lied to her father, he had tricked him as surely as he had tricked and cheated everyone.

From the sound of it, Anjali was just being a teenager. Her family were religious and had high standards and so they saw what was quite natural in a girl of her age as worryingly divergent—maybe. Mumtaz had thought that Shazia's crazy tantrums were just teenage angst allied to the inevitable protest a child would make at the prospect of a new mother coming into its life. And Shazia with her fashionable clothes, her private school and her every material whim catered for had looked like a very typical spoiled little princess. It was only when Mumtaz actually witnessed Shazia's pain that she discovered the truth.

Mumtaz bit down on any tears she may have left inside her and concentrated on Anjali. The child was to be her first real case out in the field and part of her relished it.
Lee Arnold was trusting her to put into practice techniques she had only observed and talked about—and he was going to pay her a bit more to do it. It was a pity that she hadn't been able to carry on with the Maria Peters job but she also saw the sense in it. Unlike Lee and Neil she would not look out of place waiting outside school gates, following young girls along the street.

Downstairs she heard the front door open and then close.

“Shazia!” she called down. “You OK?”

“Yeah. Why?”

She wanted to ask her whether or not she'd seen anyone, any man wearing silver trainers lurking around the house, whether anyone had followed her back from the bus stop. But she didn't. She'd warned her, now she had to leave it at that. To do anything else would raise the girl's suspicions and Mumtaz didn't want that.

“I'll be down in a minute,” Mumtaz said. She put Anjali's picture back inside her file and then went over to her bedroom window. It was dark but by the light of the street lamp outside, she could see that there was no one out there. If not with words, she had warned him to go on his way and she prayed with all of her soul that he had heeded the pleading in her eyes last time she'd seen him. He was not wanted. He never could be. She just wanted to forget about him, for both their sakes.

It had been late, after four, when Maria had driven to East Ham Jewish Cemetery. But it had still been open. Maria didn't tell the Jewish lady she saw on the path that she was going to pray to her messiah at Len's grave. This woman, like all the Jews, still waited for their deliverer. Except that He'd come.

Maria put her hand in her coat pocket and felt for the stones that she'd brought from her garden at home. Len had never had much interest in the garden and had once even suggested that they concrete part of it over. But it had been his and she hoped that putting the pebbles she'd carefully selected on his grave would please him. Pebbles placed on a Jewish grave indicated that the dead had not been forgotten; they were calling cards.

As Maria bent down she saw that Len had two other stones. One had probably been placed by his cousin, Karl—an old man himself now, he was the only blood relative, apart from his parents, that Len had ever been able to find after the Holocaust. They'd loved each other in that intense way that those who are stuck with each other do. And then there was another stone which, as Maria began to pray, she saw had a piece of paper underneath it. Maybe that was from Karl? Maybe some private message to Len in Yiddish or German or Hebrew?

“Dear Lord Jesus Christ,” she murmured. “Please have mercy upon Leonard Blatt and …”

Aware of slipping into the Catholic prayers of her youth
from time to time, she was entirely sincere, but she was distracted. She wanted to see what was on the piece of paper underneath the stone. Even if she couldn't understand it, she still wanted to see it; Len had been her husband. She said “Amen” and automatically crossed herself. Then she bent down and took the piece of paper from underneath the stone. Something was printed on it but, because of the darkness of the evening and her own increasing long-sightedness, she had to dig in her bag to get her glasses before she could see it. It was in English and it said
Not funny
. And in spite of knowing what a common expression that was and how it could be used in any number of contexts, Maria's first thought when she saw it, when her hands began to shake was,
How does anyone know?

His name had been Dave Delmonte and he'd started what he called a “fun pub” down on the Custom House/Canning Town border. Years before it had been an old dockers' gaff, and after that it had lain derelict for years. Dave had bought it in the late seventies and when he renamed it Dave's Fun Palace, Maria had gone down there to audition for a resident comedian spot.

The whole alternative-comedy thing had only been in its infancy then and so a lot of the young comedians, like Maria, were just gingerly feeling their way. They went from clubs, to pubs to strip joints—anywhere that would have them, testing the water.

Maria, so nervous she shook from head to foot, turned up for the comedian auditions on a gray day in January. Half of London's comedy scene arrived with her and so she joined a queue that went outside the old pub and along the Victoria Dock Road. So many were on the dole then that even some folk who were not comedians had come along, chancing their arms. She remembered easily
how terrible she'd felt; just trying to concentrate on remembering her material had completely filled her mind.

The first half hour was spent outside in the drizzle and so by the time Maria got inside the pub her hair was plastered down flat on the top of her head and her make-up had run. When she finally got into the wings of the tiny stage that she hoped might be hers in the near future, she looked out from behind the curtains. Some rough sorts plus Dave Delmonte were in the audience. He was fat, middle-aged, and he was pissed, knocking back pints of lager—he gave each act less than a minute. There were four people in front of her when she first saw Dave and he dismissed them all with the same, growled out words,
Not funny!

The place had smelt of stale beer, of smoke-soaked curtains and carpets and of toilets that were only used by men. Maria had felt sick even before she'd started her set, but as she walked onto the stage, looking scraggy, misshapen, scruffy and unattractive, she began to feel acid rising up into her throat. It wasn't easy looking straight at Dave Delmonte anyway, but when she heard him say, “Not exactly Bernard Manning, are you, love?” she just fell into a blind panic. Bernard Manning was old school, mother-in-law and Paki jokes! People who liked Bernard wouldn't like her! But she'd only prepared one small set and so she had to do that because she didn't have anything else. It had been about periods.

She heard Dave Delmonte mutter the word “lesbian” underneath his breath less than thirty seconds in. Then he waved his pint in the air and he said,
Not funny! Not funny! Not funny!

As far as Maria could tell, no one else had had three
not funny
s. Only her. She must have been
really
not funny. Oh God. She'd only just started out, she was young, she was also, unknown to her at the time, pregnant. Maria threw up on the stage then and there in front of Dave Delmonte and to the sound of laughter from some of the auditionees behind. Dave snapped his fingers and two blokes with faces like smashed assholes came on and dragged her off. As she passed him, Dave said something about being “up the duff” and then he'd yelled again,
Not funny!
She'd run home immediately, alone and weeping.

Her confidence was so knocked that she almost gave up. And then there was the pregnancy. That time, when the pregnancy and everything that both preceded and superceded it was so intimately connected to her failure as a comedian, was far too painful to recall. It was why those two words on that little scrap of paper on Len's grave hurt her so much and frightened her.

How she held back her tears and got back to her car, Maria would never know. She dropped the awful little paper and ground it into the mud with her foot and then she left. That was not her life—not any more.

* * *

Lee watched Maria cry. She knew where the cameras in the living room were and he saw her turn away from them. But he could still see her shoulders heaving and hear her sobs. She'd been to visit her husband's grave and so she was bound to be upset. Neil hadn't seen anything untoward happen at the cemetery. The viewing screen started to go on the blink and so Lee did what he always did and hit it. Normal service resumed immediately.