A Private Business (16 page)

Lee had known about honor killing but he'd told Mumtaz it was none of their concern. Provided Mrs. Butt didn't actually say that she or her husband were going to harm their daughter, they couldn't call the police. What the Butts did with the agency's information was their own affair.

But Mumtaz still dreaded Mrs. Butt's arrival. She was clearly an extremely religious woman. No one ever wore the niqab lightly and so she had to have very high moral standards indeed. What was she going to say? What was she going to do? Anjali was almost Shazia's age, she couldn't bear to think of what a furious father might do to her.

The office door swung open and the black pyramid that was Mrs. Butt entered. She smiled at Mumtaz with her eyes and then sat down. Even her hands were covered by thin, black gloves, her feet swaddled in men's socks and what Mumtaz saw as the obligatory open-toed sandals. Even her mother wore them, just like this lady probably, all through the winter and into the spring. These were spattered with street mud and there was an old cigarette end sticking to one of the straps.

Mumtaz got straight to the point in case her courage
failed her. “Your daughter is not taking drugs,” she said. “But she is seeing a boy sometimes after school.” Knowing that the woman would view kissing and touching as highly undesirable, she attempted to soft pedal. “Nothing sexual or inappropriate. Just young love.”

The woman's eyes narrowed. “Do you have photographs?”

“You wanted photographs and so I have them,” Mumtaz said. She'd had the file ready to view on her screen. Now she turned it around so that Mrs. Butt could see it. Anjali and Bipul were holding hands and smiling at each other.

“Do you know his name? The boy?”

Had he been a Muslim, it would have been bad enough, but this … “He's called Bipul Banergee,” she said. “He comes from Seven Kings.”

Mrs. Butt did not reply. Her eyes, stilled now, could have been expressing anything from disappointment to grief. The name was so obviously Hindu.

“Where do they meet?” she asked.

Mumtaz's stomach turned. Was Mrs. Butt going to get her husband to go out and find them? Beat the boy and do who knew what to the girl? But what could she do? She had to give the client the information that she'd paid for.

“Mrs. Butt—”

“The information—please.” She lowered her gaze.

Mumtaz had never thought that this job would involve something as painful as this. Working in the office only
gave one a distant, academic view of the job, but private investigation was about real people and their real, messy lives. It was grubby, boring, pathetic and visceral. Mumtaz hated herself. “They meet on Wanlip Road, beside the sixth-form college,” she said. “They only spend at the most fifteen minutes together.”

“I see.” Mrs. Butt sat silently for a few moments, her gloved hands clasped nervously in her lap. Then slowly she put her hands inside the folds of her chador and took out a wad of banknotes. “You have my thanks,” she said. She put the notes onto Mumtaz's desk and then withdrew her hands quickly. Mumtaz looked down at the money and began to feel sick.

“Could you keep the photographs here on your system for me?”

“I have taken copies, you may have them,” Mumtaz said. She pushed a large brown envelope across the desk at the woman.

Mrs. Butt pushed it back. “No!”

“But you've paid for them,” Mumtaz said. “They're yours.”

“My husband mustn't see them.”

“You're not going to—”

“I used my own money for a reason. If it had been drugs I would have used more of my money to cure my daughter. My husband is a good man, but …” She stood up. “Your part in this is now over.”

She moved toward the office door and Mumtaz
jumped up. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “With Anjali?”

The woman turned, her chador sweeping the old office carpet. “I will talk to her,” she said calmly. Then she added, “I will tell her how love has to be duty. I will cry with her.”

Betty and Rachel went back with Maria after the service. Unlike many of the other church congregants, all three women were subdued. Betty said that even though it had been a terrible old building, she would miss the church at Hackney Wick.

“Shall we have a cuppa?” she asked Maria when they walked into the kitchen.

“I could do with something a bit stronger than that,” Maria said. On top of the shock of finding out where the temporary church was going to be, she'd seen Lee Arnold. He'd been watching the bulldozers from over by the canal. Her blood had frozen, she hadn't wanted to be reminded of that time. As soon as she'd sacked him, all feelings of being stalked and haunted had just vanished. She'd felt instantly relieved and Pastor Grint had said how much more peaceful she had appeared to be with herself and with Jesus. But then she had also been dealing with her sin. So nothing had “moved,” she'd had no mysterious notes or letters, no boxes. Only now that she learned that the new church was to be in Dave Delmonte's old Fun Palace was she horrified. But she knew she had to keep her nerve.
She'd made her decision back in February. Pastor Grint had been right: it had all been her own guilt. The stalking, the notes, the box. She'd done it all herself. She'd had a breakdown, a God-given breakdown.

And yet that terrible feeling of threat she'd experienced when she first went to the Arnold Agency had been very real and she had been desperate. She'd only been back on the comedy circuit for six months. Had the pressure of that been too much for her? The look on Alan Myers' face when she'd told him she wasn't going to do the gig he'd got her at the Comedy Store still stuck in her mind. The same went for what he'd said.

You cancel the Comedy Store, you're finished!

It had been a few hours after the
Death isn't funny
incident. She'd sacked Lee Arnold and his firm but that didn't mean she wasn't still frightened. She'd actually been more frightened than ever for a while, thinking that someone might,
had to
know. But Paul Grint and Betty had soothed her and later she'd told Alan that she couldn't even think about leaving the house and he'd asked her why, but she couldn't and wouldn't tell him. He'd called the Comedy Store to tell them she was ill and then he'd resigned. No more Alan, no more comedy and for a while it had felt like a relief. For a while it had felt like the old days. But then Len hadn't been there and so it couldn't be.

Maria poured herself a glass of port, took two codeine painkillers and then drank the alcohol down immediately.
Inside she could feel her viscera shaking. She wanted to sit down, preferably on her own, but then she remembered that there was something she had to do. Stupidly she'd promised the old creep in the multiple occupancy she'd go and see him. “One of the tenants down the road has had a new gas fire put in,” she said. “I need to go and check it's OK. I won't be long.”

“Don't you have an agent or someone to do it for you?” Rachel asked.

“Yes, but … Well, this man …” Maria said. “Well, he's quite old and Len always used to go and sort his problems out himself, collect his rent in person. It's not a problem.”

But that wasn't strictly true. Maria hated having to go and visit Martin Gold in his smelly, old man's room. He gave her the creeps. If she were honest with herself, Martin had been one of the first people to come to mind when she'd thought that she was being stalked. Not that she'd told Lee Arnold; she'd hoped that he'd find that out without her help. She did not, after all, want to actively point the finger at any of her tenants. That could be very legally dodgy if said tenant was innocent and took offense, and although Martin Gold was an old flasher, an easy target, and she didn't like him, Maria didn't want to actually put him out on the street unless she had to. For the time being her only profession was that of landlady and so she wanted to do that fairly and well. But Martin Gold's
oily manner was hard work and by the time she got back to the house, Betty said that she looked pale.

“Did that tenant give you grief?” she asked.

“No, I'm just tired,” Maria said. And to be truthful, Martin Gold hadn't been a problem. His room had smelt, as usual, but he'd been pleased with his new gas fire. Maria had been relieved that it worked properly. Problems with tenants on top of everything else was not something she needed. Wondering just how she was ever going to be able to go to church again was what had made her face lose its color. Dave Delmonte's place was just too full of memories. How could she go and pray in a place that was so tainted? How could she be sure, given her recent experiences, that her mind would not just crack apart completely? Was Jesus asking too much, pushing her too hard this time?

She looked exactly the same as the last one had to Lee, but Mumtaz knew Mrs. Malik and she knew Mrs. Durrani and, most importantly, she could tell them apart.

“They both wear dark blue burqas, how do you know?” he asked her when he came back in after Mrs. Durrani had left. None of the excessively covered women would say a word while he was in the office and so, for the duration of their visits, Lee had to sit outside on the stairs.

Mumtaz shook her head. Did he do this ignorant thing deliberately or was it just to wind her up? “Mrs. Durrani is a good five centimeters taller than Mrs. Malik and Mrs. Malik walks with a limp. What's so difficult about that?”

“Nothing.” He didn't want to say
they both look like walking fabric rolls to me actually
to Mumtaz and so he shut up. To complain about the clients was unprofessional and churlish and besides, since Mumtaz's success with Mrs. Butt and her daughter, Anjali, word was clearly out about her amongst the Asian ladies of Newham. Whether Mumtaz actually did the surveillance or security work
that the ladies required was sometimes irrelevant; they could talk to her about it without embarrassment and they knew she was discreet. And although the demography of who did and who didn't use the Arnold Agency hadn't changed completely, it had shifted. Whereas before Mumtaz's arrival most of their clients, such as they were, had been white men, now they had a lot of Asian women too. Lee had to wonder just how much, or how little, the ladies' husbands, fathers, brothers and sons knew about all this. They always paid their bills in cash. For women, basically in purdah, they were proving themselves not only financially independent but also very far from being pushovers. It was not all plain sailing, however.

“I may be wrong, but I do not think that Mrs. Malik has good intent toward her daughter-in-law,” Mumtaz said. “I tell her that Nazneen never leaves her marital home except with her husband, but Mrs. Malik doesn't believe me. Now she wants that I mount the surveillance myself. Amy, I think, is too European for her. I hate prejudice like that.”

Lee nodded in agreement. He'd put one of his freelancers, Amy Reichs, on the Malik job and she had indeed seen nothing untoward in or around Nazneen Malik's house. She'd only actually seen the girl outside the house with her husband.

“I think that Mrs. Malik thinks that Nazneen isn't good enough for her son,” Mumtaz said. “I think she's seen some other young girl she wishes she'd married him to.”

Lee, who was casually looking at a pile of flyers that had come through the door earlier that morning said, “You got any evidence for that?”

Mumtaz shook her head. “Not directly.”

Lee looked up from three separate fried-chicken take-away menus and said, “OK.” He didn't know that what was happening to Nazneen had happened to Mumtaz's cousin Farah. But he had, in a very short space of time, learned to trust Mumtaz's judgment. After all, what did he know about Muslim women?

“I'll do as Mrs. Malik asks,” Mumtaz said. “For the business. But I trust what Amy has said and I don't think that Nazneen is doing anything wrong.”

“Mmm.” Mrs. Malik was paying them and so Lee couldn't really get too worked up about it all either way. If the girl was mucking around with other men, then she was mucking around with other men. If she wasn't, she wasn't. What did grab his attention, however, was a flyer that wasn't for fried chicken. He frowned. “Look,” he said, “there's a thing here for that church that Maria Peters went to. They've moved down to Custom House, not far from my mum, actually.”

The whole Maria Peters saga had left a very bad taste in Lee Arnold's mouth and Mumtaz, if nobody else, knew that in Lee's mind it hadn't gone away. Like the good copper he had once been, he wanted to know the truth. She'd sacked him, she'd apparently given up her career
and yet, as far as Lee knew, she was still going about her business in the same way that she always had. She hadn't apparently had any sort of breakdown that had necessitated hospital admission, and yet the last time he'd seen her, she'd looked and sounded mad. She'd just received a death threat, albeit probably from herself, but she'd been well and truly through it that day and he had wondered how she had survived.

Mumtaz walked over to Lee's desk and looked over his shoulder at the flyer. “It is called closure,” she said.

He looked up at her. Her beautiful oval face was quite impassive.

“The Maria Peters case is still really a mystery,” she said. “You need answers.”

He sighed.

“You feel that she took us all for a ride and you don't know why,” Mumtaz said. “It certainly wasn't to enhance her career, so what was it about?” She sat down again.

“Still too much of a copper to let it go,” Lee said. “Maria Peters paid for our time and so there's nothing I can do. Had I still been on the force I could.”

“Or not. DI Collins came out when Maria found that death threat in her car and then Maria told her to go. If the victim doesn't want to be helped what can you do? Even if you do suspect them of wasting police time?”