A Private Business (30 page)

Betty had left her food, but she'd just chucked it in the bin. Everything she ate hurt as it went down inside. It was as if there were sores all the way along her intestines.

The preparations for the Choudhurys' visit started early. Baharat woke up to the smells and the sounds of Sumita preparing a feast. His wife had talked of nothing else for over a week. His daughter, the actual object of the visit, had not spoken a word. Baharat felt a thread of anxiety tighten in his stomach. Last time Mumtaz had been introduced to a man for the purposes of marriage it had ended badly. Ahmed Hakim had turned out to be a handsomely wrapped parcel of trouble whose terrible influence still lingered in his daughter's life in the shape of her poverty.

Baharat knew that the only boy she'd ever really had feelings for had been that Jew she'd gone to university with, the magician. Mumtaz thought that was her secret, but Baharat noticed things. The boy, Mark, had visited them a few times. He'd been a nice boy. Something between him and Mumtaz had of course been impossible, but yes, he'd been a good boy—nicer than Mr. Choudhury's son. And now Mark Solomons was on television. When Ahmed Hakim's death had hit the national headlines, Mark had
called to ask for Mumtaz's number so he could offer his condolences and Baharat had given it to him. But he'd never called. He was a busy man. All that was gone now.

Maybe it was because of Ahmed Hakim, but Baharat was finding he was suspicious of Aziz Choudhury. Sumita was completely captivated by him—or she said that she was. Baharat found him nondescript and it was just that lack of definition that worried him. The man was like a blank slate—he could be anything! Around his own father and his friends he was a deeply respectful and loving son, even when Mr. Choudhury senior behaved like an asshole. But how was Junior around his own friends? If he had any. Baharat couldn't actually see Aziz Choudhury out and about with other people. As well as having no personality he didn't even have his father's cache. Mr. Choudhury senior was a respected man, a hajji, which was something that no one could take away from him, and he had money too. But he was an asshole. He believed the most ridiculous nonsense about people. He actually believed that Hindus mated with cows! Hindus worshipped cows. How could anyone believe such insanity? It was pure blind prejudice and Baharat had no time for it. If only Mumtaz hadn't married that awful Hakim man. Now as a widow and over thirty, her options for remarriage were limited.

Baharat put the radio on and lay back on his bed to listen to the news. Some man had been shot by police up
in Tottenham. They said he was a drug dealer who had been armed but his family said that he was innocent. Baharat found himself thinking
well, they would
and then he felt how uncharitable that was and turned the radio off. It was all bad news lately—bad economy, cuts, unrest all over the place! Greedy bankers and gangsters like Ahmed Hakim had leeched all the money out of the world and just thrown it away on rubbish. People were awful. He'd been cornered by one of those jihadi types in the street the night before. He'd made the “helpful” suggestion that maybe Mumtaz could become his second or third wife. Baharat had told him to bugger off! It was clear that he just wanted to have sex with her.

She was a beautiful woman, his daughter, but some people were talking about her. Alone with a child that was not hers in that great big house in Forest Gate—and working every day alone with an Englishman. And even though Baharat knew that Mumtaz was a girl of pure and honorable heart, he feared the gossips and the troublemakers. Married, she would be protected against such people. But was Aziz Choudhury the right man to do that?

Foxy, and that had turned out to be her real name, had proved to be quite a difficult girl to shake off. She'd stayed the night with Lee, which had been fine, but then she'd made a bit of a song and dance about leaving, which had been a pain. She'd wanted breakfast, which had been a
total non-starter unless she liked old fag butts and sour milk—which she hadn't. With no job to go to, she would have liked to have hung around the flat and have more sex, which was a nice idea—in one way. But Lee had to go to work and besides, in the cold light of morning, he just wasn't that impressed any more. Foxy wasn't a bad girl—she was pretty in a plastic sort of a way and she wasn't in any sense dim—but she was hardly brain of Britain either. She was also twenty-four, which was bloody ridiculous. Under some childish protest, he took her to Upton Park tube station and made a mental note to avoid the Boleyn in the evenings for at least the next week.

When he arrived at his office Mumtaz was already with a client. It was a white man. From the back he looked thin and a bit down-at-heel, but Lee had no notion of who he might be. It was only when he turned around that he realized it was Roy.

Vi felt ashamed of herself. Last night her mind had been clouded by her need for sex and it had apparently adversely affected her nasal passages too. Mumtaz's house wasn't musty! What it was was something she very much doubted had anything to do with Mumtaz at all. Shazia, however, was, or could be, quite another matter. Kids did that stuff.

Even if she hadn't had a day off, Vi would have made time to go around to Mumtaz's place. Shazia Hakim, as far as she could tell, was a basically good, clever girl who
shouldn't be jeopardizing her own future. When Vi approached the house, Shazia was putting rubbish in the dustbin.

“Hello, love,” Vi said. “Got a minute?”

“Yes.” She smiled but she also turned pale. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

They went inside the house which smelt of something Vi couldn't exactly define except that it was probably some sort of air freshener. As they walked into the kitchen and Shazia began to boil the kettle, Vi considered how she might broach the subject gently, but then decided that she might as well just go straight for it.

“So how long you been smoking dope, Shazia?” she said as she sat down at the kitchen table.

For a moment the girl just stopped what she was doing, with her back to Vi, and said nothing.

“I smelt it in the house last night,” Vi said. “I've worked on enough drugs busts to know what it smells like, love. And I am a mother.”

Shazia turned. Vi very easily saw the fear and she stuck a knife right in it. “Your mum'd be horrified,” she said. “She's a good person, your mum, she don't need this.”

“But I don't smoke weed.” It was said softly and was accompanied by a sudden reddening of the girl's cheeks.

“Oh, so if I order a search of this house you'll be all right with that, will you? If I went through that bin outside …” Vi left that thought hanging in the air and
just sat and waited. Shazia was exhibiting every sign of guilt in the book and so it was only a question of time.

“I don't smoke dope, I …”

“So you'll be happy to take a drugs test then, will you?”

The anger burst onto Shazia's face like a smashed egg. “You can't make me do that! You can't make me do anything!”

Vi took her warrant card out of her handbag and held it up for Shazia to see. The girl knew she was a police officer but now she needed to really think about what that might mean. “Oh, yes I can.” Then she took her mobile phone out of her pocket and held that up too. “I can organize all of that right now.”

As quickly as Shazia's anger had exploded so did the tears behind her eyes burst out and flood onto her cheeks. Vi put her bag, her phone and her warrant card down and went to her. Shazia didn't even try to stop her as she put her arms around her shoulders and rocked her gently from side to side. Really sobbing now, Shazia was unable to speak and so Vi just held her and kissed the side of her face until eventually what looked like the pent-up tears of many weeks and maybe even months began to subside.

Once the girl's head was upright again, Vi took her over to the kitchen table and sat her down. While Shazia hiccupped and gasped through what remained of her tears, Vi made them both tea and then sat down herself. She looked at Shazia and said, “So what's been going on?”

There was a whiff of coercion around this situation which Vi had seen before. She didn't know who was involved but she felt the presence of someone apart from just Shazia in all this.

“Will I go to prison, Vi?” the girl asked.

“Not if you tell me the truth.”

“About my smoking weed?”

“About why you do it, who you do it with and where you get it from.”

She looked frightened again and then she looked away. “I do it on my own.”

“Do you?” Vi didn't believe her and she could see that Shazia knew it. “Not much fun in that. Where'd you get your gear?”

Shazia just shrugged.

“You don't know, do you?”

Still looking away she said, “I get it from a boy.” Then she did looked at Vi and she said, “You won't tell my mum, will you?”

Vi ignored her. “What boy? Where? At school? On the street?”

She didn't answer. Had she had any more tears to cry she would have wept again, but she didn't.

“There is no boy is there, Shazia?” Vi said. “There's no boy because I don't believe that you get the gear yourself. I think someone else does it. Who is it, love? Is it a school-friend? A boy you fancy?”

Shazia remained silent.

“Is it someone you're afraid of?”

The girl looked up.

Vi said nothing but she noted it. “Shazia, whatever you may think about dope smoking it is a criminal offense and so you shouldn't do it. Personally, I don't think the odd joint is the end of the world, but that all depends on why you're doing it and I'm not sure you're doing it because you want to.” She put her hand on Shazia's hair. “I know you've had a hard time, love. You lost your dad and—”

“I don't want to be split up from Amma! I don't want to be taken away from her!”

Oh, there was a fierceness here, a connection to Mumtaz that was desperate. With luck it gave her a way in. “Then tell me,” Vi said. “Tell me the truth and I swear to you on my children's lives that you and your mum will not be parted.” She hoped to Christ that she wasn't going to be told something so bloody awful that she'd have to break her oath.

The pause that followed seemed to disappear into the far, far distance. Time extended and then pushed out still further and then, just as Vi was beginning to feel she couldn't bear it any more, Shazia said, “Since my dad died, I haven't been able to do anything.” She cleared her throat which was threatening to close up on her every time she spoke. “When he was alive, he gave me money. I could have anything I wanted: clothes, holidays, anything. Amma
does her best but it's … different. I used to go everywhere with my friend Adele …”

Another silence opened up which Vi filled. “And now?”

Shazia lowered her head. She was ashamed of what came next. “I couldn't go shopping all the time any more. Then Hilary Proctor invited Ady to go to Bluewater with her and her mum and then they were, like, joined at the hip. Ady didn't drop me or anything like that, it was just that I couldn't do much stuff any more.” She swallowed and then she blurted, “But then they both started smoking, you know …”

“Dope.”

She looked away. “Yeah. But they had nowhere to keep it. Their mums don't work so they're always in the house when everyone else is out. Ady and Hilary were afraid their mums would find their weed and so I said they could keep it here. They were really made up, you know.”

Vi moved her head so that she could look into Shazia's frightened eyes. Poor kid. She'd so wanted to keep in with her old friend! “When did you start smoking it in the house then?”

Shazia shrugged. “Don't know. Back in the spring … I don't like it much. Ady says it helps her to forget her troubles. But it doesn't do that for me.”

“Has Ady lost her dad?”

“No, her parents are divorced,” she said dismissively. “It didn't help me to forget that Amma was having to work so hard. And I was scared.”

“Scared she'd find out?”

“Yeah. She'd be so, like, disappointed! But once I'd started, I couldn't stop. Ady and Hilary come here to smoke. They expect it, especially now it's the holidays.” She shook her head. “And it's nice for me to be with Ady again.”

“What do you think the girls would do if you said they couldn't keep their dope here and come round to smoke it?”

Shazia shook her head. “I don't know.”

“Have they ever threatened you, as in maybe not being friends with you any more if you don't carry on with this?”

There was a slight pause before she said, “No,” but again Vi took note. It sounded like Shazia was, at the very least, having pressure exerted on her by what sounded like two over-privileged little madams. Of course the kid had been vulnerable after her father's death, which had been compounded by the fact he'd left both her and Mumtaz potless. Rumors had floated around about Ahmed Hakim and his somewhat dodgy business dealings for years.

“So do you have any dope in the house at the moment, Shazia?”

She nodded her head. “In my jewelry box in my bedroom.”

Vi sighed and then she stood up. “Better have a look then.”

“Oh, but Ady and Hilary are coming this afternoon and then there's Mr. Gold,” Shazia said. And then suddenly
realizing the full import of her words she put her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide and frightened.

Vi's eyes, by contrast, narrowed. She leaned down toward Shazia and she said, “Mr. Gold? As in Martin Gold, your neighbor? Now where the fuck does
he
come into this?”

“That's no fucking way to talk to me, you scabby cunt!” Roy Arnold roared at his brother.

Lee, appalled almost beyond words to be in Roy's presence again, flung him through the door of his office and said to an amazed Mumtaz, “My brother. Sorry. Try not to be long.”