A Private Business (15 page)

“But why?”

“Because he knows that you are both vulnerable and ready.”

“Vulnerable? How do you mean?”

He smiled his gentle smile again. “You are still in sin …”

“You mean my act?” She ran her fingers through her hair. She'd known all along it had been wrong; she'd tried to tell Alan, but he just hadn't listened. “I'll give it up.”

Paul said, “Giving up your act will be a beginning on the road to being reborn …”

“A beginning?” If her act went then in terms of sin what else was there? But then there was the past …

“Other sins,” Paul said. “You have other sins, Maria. Everyone who is not reborn does.”

Maria felt her whole body go cold. Did he mean
Not funny
? How could he know about that? She'd never told anyone. He couldn't. But then someone had to know because of the notes and the shoebox.

“I had to fess up to my rotten past before I could move on. I had to leave a lot of people behind to do that, even my family,” Paul said. “Jesus wants us to lay
all
of our sins before him if he's to make us born again and so ready for the Rapture, his kingdom and an eternity with those we have loved. You have to give it all up or the Holy Spirit'll just keep on using your own fears to prod your conscience into a breakdown for your own good. You're not being stalked, Maria, you're being begged by Jesus to come to him. You have to stop using man's solutions, like these private detectives. You've got to give it all up to God.”

“Then I will.” Maria began to cry again. “I'll never go on stage again. Never!”

“As I said, that's a good start,” Grint said. “We'll get rid of the comedy and then we can work on other things, in time. Don't worry, Maria, the church will support you. Tell us what you want to tell us when you want to. Jesus is always eager for a new soul, but he'll wait for you. I know he will.”

Even though it was nighttime, it was out in the open where anyone could see. But what choice did he have? Jacob was running like a rabbit and if he didn't catch him, who knew what would happen?

Matthias pounded the pavement hard, only just aware of how painful the stones were against his bare feet. His heart was so loud he could hear it in his head and when Jacob turned around to look at him with massive, frightened eyes, it became even louder. Why wouldn't the stupid boy just stop and talk about it? But Matthias had no breath left to call out to Jacob, who rounded the corner that led into his own street. He was nearly home and if he got there, it was all over. Matthias pushed himself so hard his lungs felt like they were bleeding.

Round the corner, racing after Jacob, he was running so fast he almost missed the body on the ground over by the wall in front of Amin's Grocery. Jacob had tripped. Instantly Matthias went down on one knee and leaned on the other boy's rapidly rising and falling chest.

“You know what you must do!” he gasped.

Jacob shook his head.

“You got to be sensible, man!”

“You too late now, Matt.”

There were people in Amin's, shopping, but no one was coming in or going out. Jacob shook his head again.

“You are …” Matthias began. But then he stopped because Jacob had taken something out of the pocket of his jeans. Matthias looked at Jacob's knife and said, “Don't do that!”

But Jacob stabbed the blade into Matthias's arm and blood came out in a river. For a moment Matthias could do nothing but watch his own blood flow down onto the pavement. Then in a last-ditch attempt to stop Jacob yet again, as he tried to get away, Matthias took his own knife out and slammed it deep into the other boy's chest. Tears in his eyes, he twisted it, hard. Just before he staggered away to the side of the road and was sick, Matthias saw the light in Jacob's eyes die.

It was the last time that they would gather in what had once been the old bathroom factory, then a tire warehouse in Hackney Wick. The actual service had come to a close and Pastor Grint was going through the practicalities of where the new, temporary church was going to be.

“The building was a public house, many years ago,” he told the congregation. “The nearest station is Custom House
which is on the Docklands Light Railway. As you come out of the station you turn left along the Victoria Dock Road until you come to a turning called Munday Road which is on your right and the building is on the corner. I know that a lot of you might be disturbed that it's an old pub, but until our new center is completed, God has provided this.” He smiled. “Glass half full. At least we won't have to worry about this man who has been exposing himself around the canal any more.”

People murmured, “Praise God.”

“But we still must pray for him and for his victims too,” the pastor said. “There are a lot of unhappy people who have lost their way out there and remember, guys, it's our mission to get as many folk saved as we can before the Rapture. The more souls we can bring to Jesus the more pleased the Lord will be with us, and His pleasure is all we want, right?”

Some said “Yeah,” others “It's the truth,” while others still just prayed.

“So it's a priority to get the new center up and running as soon as we can. Easter's on our doorstep, guys, we all need to make that little extra effort. Let's do it for the souls of the lost sheep we're gonna save, people!” He began to clap his hands. “Let's do it for the Glory of God! Come on!” He waved his hands, encouraging everybody to clap, and almost five hundred people smiled and then complied. Grint walked up and down the front of the stage, a look
of pure joy on his face. “Let's do it for all the people hungry for the love of Jesus! They are starving, people, starving for the Word, the Love, the Peace of Almighty God! We gotta give it to them! We gotta take that soul nourishment to them!”

“We have to save everyone!” a woman yelled. The whole crowed swayed in time to their clapping.

“Yes, we do, Sylvia!” Pastor Grint said. “You are ambitious for the Lord and that is a good thing, my friend!” Again he threw his arms out and waved his hands in the air. “Let's all be ambitious for Christ! There is no soul so lost, so blackened and corroded by sin that it cannot be washed clean by Jesus. His love is endless, it is mighty and it can be seeded in the hearts of everyone in the whole world. All we need is the will, the ambition as Sylvia said, the faith, the glory and the sheer courage to build our chapel high, build it strong, build it so great it can take in each and every soul that each and every one of you goes out there and saves!”

Maria Peters put her head in her hands and silently screamed.

“Still being given the runaround by your flasher?” Lee asked.

Vi Collins looked at him and scowled. “What you doing here, Arnold?”

Two bulldozers revved their engines in front of the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire. The happy-clappies
didn't usually meet on a Tuesday morning, but the pastor had wanted to have just one more service before the developers reduced the place to rubble.

“Don't worry, I won't bother Miss Peters,” Lee said.

“I should hope not, she sacked you. She sacked us an' all,” Vi said.

“Your boffin proved that only Maria touched that death threat note,” Lee said. “Either whoever put it in her car had gloves on or she did it herself. Personally I'm inclined toward the latter. There's something well adrift with that woman. You could do her.”

“For what?” Vi lit up a cigarette and then smiled at one of the young men sitting in the cab of one of the bulldozers. “Neil West called us in, and
he
gave us the sample we needed for comparison, not laughing girl. Anyway there's no CCTV footage to back it up. Sod all cameras in this area that work.”

“I still think she did it herself,” Lee said.

“Then she must be ill, which is not my problem.”

Lee looked at her and smirked. “You just don't want to get old Sid in trouble for using his lab inappropriately. Still doing him favors are you, Vi?”

She pulled her coat closely around her shoulders. It wasn't cold, it was late March, but it was damp and what with all the churned up dirt on the roads from the construction, it got into your bones. “The last time me and Dr. Smith had relations, Princess Diana was still happily
married to Charles,” she said. “Fucking grow up will you, Arnold! I did you a favor, it came out how you predicted it would. What more do you want? The woman's a nutter and she sacked you, deal with it.”

She was right, of course, but Lee had never been sacked before and although that was over four weeks ago now, it still irked him. Mumtaz had even tried to explain why he should feel sorry for Maria Peters, but he couldn't. Everything that had happened had done so because she had made it happen. On the day that she'd sacked the Arnold Agency, Maria herself had been dropped by her manager Alan Myers, for canceling a gig he'd had lined up for her at the Comedy Store.

And yet questions still remained. Lee had checked the security tapes from the house again and again and he hadn't once been able to record her putting items where they shouldn't be. He hadn't caught anyone else doing that either. But then nothing, as far as he could tell, was moving on its own. No stalker had once been detected in Maria's garden or following her anywhere. The only slightly dodgy thing was the way that shoebox Maria wouldn't talk about had definitely turned up at the end of one of the big prayer meetings she sometimes had at her place. But that didn't mean that she hadn't put it there. Maria had been at the prayer meeting as well as all the other weirdos. Vi was right, she was cracking up. She was a poor mad comedian who was attempting to
make some sort of pathetic comeback but it was all too much for her.

From inside the building, voices shouted “Praise the Lord!” Lee rolled his eyes. Sounded like one of those African churches. The older of the two blokes up on the bulldozers lit a fag and then leaned onto his steering wheel looking bored. To Lee, he looked like a foreigner of some sort—a Serb or an Albanian—there were a lot of them about on the Olympic site. Poor sod! All he probably wanted to do was get the job done and then go back to lie down in whatever rancid little room he'd managed to rent.

“So what about your flasher then?” Lee asked Vi again. She was on site, together with Bracci and a load of uniforms, to supervise the safe destruction of the church and the derelict building next to it.

“I'm not here about that.”

“Yeah, but I read in the
Recorder
some old dear had an eyeful last Wednesday. You got a description?”

“From a myopic eighty-five-year-old?” Vi threw her dog-end onto the ground and then lit up another fag. “I'm still not sure she even saw a knob. Could've been wishful thinking. He, whoever he is, was lucky she didn't just walk past him.”

“What about known faces?”

“I've a few on the bubble,” she said. “Nothing useful. I give old Martin Gold a nudge a few weeks back though, remember him?”

“Bit before my time. Wasn't he the cemetery wanker?”

“In the mid-seventies you couldn't walk safe in the East London, no,” Vi said. “Not if you were a woman. It was Martin Gold I was going to see that morning I saw you outside Miss Peters' place. Martin's one of her tenants.”

“In the Forest Gate multiple-occupancy place?”

“Yeah.” She looked up at him and smiled. “Old Len Blatt never gave a toss, if you'll excuse the expression, about who he put in his rotten old dumps. He was a nice enough bloke, but he was a slum landlord and his missus seems to be continuing the tradition. Place is a shit hole. But then Martin said that one of the Asians had told him Maria Peters was thinking of selling up the rental places.”

“She never mentioned anything to me,” Lee said.

The old double doors of the bathroom factory opened and what looked like a load of people about to go on a particularly jolly trip spilled out onto the street. The bulldozers both revved their engines, but the happy-clappies didn't seem in the slightest bit fazed by this. For some reason, in spite of the fact that their church was about to be demolished, and that many of them were poor, they appeared to be in very good spirits.

“Just look at them!” Lee said with contempt. “Happy as Larry, silly as assholes!”

“You're just jealous,” Vi replied.

Lee looked down at her and scowled. He hated it when she told him the truth about himself.

* * *

Young Anjali Butt was not, as far as Mumtaz could tell, taking any sort of narcotic substance. Anjali Butt was distracted from her school work, vague and not very communicative because she was in love. This was a very big love that encompassed her entire mind, body and soul, and contemplation of it left her little time for anything else. But it was also Anjali's great and very guilty secret because the object of her affections was a boy called Bipul, from a very nice family from Seven Kings who were all devout Hindus.

Now Mumtaz was waiting for Mrs. Butt to come into the office to talk about Anjali and she felt terrible. Good Muslim woman that she was, Mumtaz knew more than people would have guessed about infatuation and desire for someone “unsuitable.” Anjali and Bipul were just having little conversations, kissing, looking longingly into each other's eyes. They weren't having sex, they weren't even indulging in heavy petting. They were just kids who had fallen in love for the first time and it was really quite sweet.

When she'd first told Lee about it, he'd seemed sympathetic too. But then when she'd said that she was reluctant to tell Mrs. Butt about her daughter, he'd become angry. “We have to be honest with clients!” he'd said. “Otherwise what's the point? Whatever you find out, you have to pass that on to the client. That's why they're paying us.”

“But if Mrs. Butt thinks that Anjali has dishonored the family, if she tells her husband then it could go badly for the girl!” she'd said. “I don't know this family, but some families, they can do terrible things!”