A Private Business

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Biographical; Private Investigators

Synopsis

It is London 2012 and Stratford in the East End is at the centre of the world. But next to the Olympic Park are some of the poorest and most crime-ridden streets in the city.

Release date: July 5, 2012

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

The comedian is in full flow, effing and blinding in her
usual style with the late Princess Diana as her target. She
eyes a woman in the front row of the audience.

You look shocked, sweet? Not comfortable with speaking ill of
the dead? Oh, please. That woman flung herself into the public
arena when she told us all about her colonic irrigation. There
was nothing that was private about her! Queen of Hearts? Diana
was Queen of Chat. Empress of the Exposé! Let’s face it, if she
was still alive now she’d be on Jeremy Kyle trailing a whole
tribe of half Egyptian children, weeping because she can’t get
Disability Living Allowance.

The audience laughs, all except one man who yells out,
At least Di never became some old has-been, like you!!

The comedian leans forward into the audience and cups
a hand at the back of her ear to hear better. What’s that?
Is that Bloke with no Bollocks and a Theoretical Dick, I hear?

The audience laughs and the man says something else
but no-one can hear it.

Deal with it, mate. You’re the sort of person who thinks the
Queen’s got no ring-piece, that she can’t fart and only burps rainbows.
A British patriot who lives in a la-la land of ridiculous
military uniforms and the divine bleeding right of kings. You’re
an arsehole. There’s no divine anything. Babies are babies are
babies. They’re all like Joan Rivers when they come out of the
womb, misshapen and screaming with fury. Even the royal ones.

The audience laughs but the comedian’s face has turned
to stone.

Nothing’s sacred, people, nothing’s divine. There’s no such thing.
Jesus was a crazy urban warrior crusty, with a bit of a Paul
Daniels vibe thrown in. But he was just a bloke. He’s not sitting
on a cloud somewhere, blessing all the royal babies and twanging
away on his harp. It’s a fairy story! A fiction! It’s like a whitehat,
black-hat cowboy story for mad people. It’s …

The comedian staggers slightly and looks confused as
if she can’t remember what she’s doing. It’s … She puts
a hand up to her head, her eyes glaze over and then she
collapses.

The woman, who would not give her name, was tall and elegant. A well-preserved fifty or so, she wore a beautifully cut trouser suit with a peacock-blue Hermès scarf wrapped turban-like around her head. Her slim face was almost completely eclipsed by large Jackie-O-style sunglasses which did not, however, manage to obscure her eyes. They didn’t know how to be, those eyes; fearful and elated, ashamed and even possibly guilty and yet, at the same time, furious – intensely, madly furious too. Mumtaz had seen eyes like that before and she wondered what terrible thing was happening or had happened to this woman.

‘Can I get you anything?’ Mumtaz asked. ‘Tea? Coffee?’

‘No.’ There was a pause. ‘Thanks.’

Her voice was cockney with a veneer of ‘proper’ speech laid over the top. Mumtaz imagined that, given the good clothes and the general demeanour of the woman, she came from a ‘nice’ part of the borough, or maybe from somewhere outside, possibly the Isle of Dogs, Ilford or Chigwell. There was also something vaguely familiar about her but Mumtaz couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

The woman stared down at her watch. Mumtaz looked at the clock on the wall and realised that she’d been in her awkward presence for just over an hour. Given her own comparative newness to the business, together with the feelings those eyes were evoking in her, Mumtaz didn’t know whether she wanted to run away or somehow force the woman to tell a story that was clearly bursting to get out of her. In the end she opted for neither and just considered the old computer screen on her desk. She knew why Lee didn’t invest in more modern equipment but it was still annoying to be forced to put up with such antiques. When Shazia had seen her office, she’d laughed. That was the first time she’d done that since her father’s death, so Lee’s old rubbish served some sort of purpose even if the production of a professional-looking letter wasn’t part of it.

Shifting in her chair, the woman looked as if she was about to say something but then she appeared to change her mind. Mumtaz went back to composing the letter Lee had asked her to write to Mr Savva, their landlord. He’d put the office rent up but, given the parlous state of the company finances, it just wasn’t possible to pay him. Lee had told her to tell him to shove his rent ‘where the sun don’t shine’. She had translated that into rather more diplomatic language but was now struggling to read what she’d written on the cracked, scarred monitor screen. Looking at it produced a kind of double vision that made her feel vaguely sick, and not for the first time she considered bringing a laptop in from home. There were, after all, several about. Shazia had her own – it wouldn’t be a problem – but just the thought of it made Mumtaz shudder. Those machines had been Ahmed’s. The woman saw her body flinch, but she didn’t say anything to her.

Mumtaz regretted not having brought any magazines in to the office for waiting clients. It had never even occurred to Lee, but then men didn’t generally think about things like that. If they did, the magazines they chose were usually about cars or golf or caravans. The smart woman in the Hermès scarf probably liked to read rather serious women’s magazines. True-life stories of people being incinerated by their ex-boyfriends and celebrities in ‘crisis’ were unlikely, Mumtaz felt, to be her thing. Her handbag was understated quality and she wore a small and discreet gold cross around her neck. In spite of her confusion she had nothing to prove; in some areas of her life, she was as she was and she possessed a degree of comfort with that. Only her eyes, trembling and shimmering with feelings she was clearly failing to cope with, gave her away – that and the fact that she was in that office at all.

‘Mate, I’m not being funny or anything, but quite honestly, I don’t give a flying fuck whether you get paid today, last week, next Thursday or when the saints go marching in. You owe me money.’ Lee Arnold was calm, but the man sitting beside him wasn’t. Lee smiled. ‘Bob, mate, the rent’s due on the office – just gone up as a matter of fact – the oven’s crying out for Mr Muscle, I’m out of bird food and I could do with a diet Coke.’

‘Oh …’ The man, a small sort called Bob Singleton, got up, went straight over to the bar and ordered Lee a pint of diet Coke. The three old geezers sitting by the open door to the public bar looked at Lee. One of them flicked his cigarette ash out into Green Street while the other two laughed bronchitically.

‘You wanna get money out of Bob the Builder you better bring a crowbar with you next time, son!’ the fag smoker said to Lee.

‘Yeah, right,’ Lee said gloomily.

Bob Singleton looked around resentfully at the men but he didn’t say anything. He just paid for Lee’s drink and then took it over to him. The Boleyn was quiet this lunchtime and so Lee’s latest attempt at getting Bob the Builder to settle his bill was just about the only show in town. The three old men watched him sit down.

Bob moved in close to Lee and said, ‘Look, I done this extension for this posh bird over Wanstead and she’s, well, she ain’t exactly satisfied …’

‘So she’s not paid you,’ Lee said. ‘At all.’

Bob, embarrassed, looked down at the floor and said, ‘No.’

It was well known that Bob was one of the few soletrader builders in the East End who didn’t ask for any money up front. It was also well known that all his work was terrible, he suffered from appalling halitosis and was as tight as a gnat’s arse. Was it any wonder that his wife had been having an affair with an Indian restaurant owner for the last six months?

‘Well, you’d better go back and put whatever mess you left that lady in right, then, hadn’t you,’ Lee said. Then he pointed a finger up at Bob’s face. ‘Because if I can’t clean that oven and, more importantly, if I can’t pay my assistant, there will be consequences.’

Bob, who had known Lee Arnold for most of his life, knew when he was being serious and when he was not. He swallowed hard. ‘You have to give me till Friday,’ he said.

Lee Arnold looked down his long Roman nose at the small, grubby man at his side and he said, ‘Friday morning and no longer. If I don’t get it on Friday …’

‘I know! I know!’ Bob Singleton waved his hands in the air. ‘It all comes on top and—’

‘Pay me and you’ll never find out,’ Lee said in a voice the whole pub could easily hear.

The three old men opposite looked very seriously at each other, then two of them lit up cigarettes. Aware that everyone was watching him now, Bob the Builder muttered something to Lee about ‘having confidence in him’ and then he left.

The oldest of the three old men frowned and then said to Lee, ‘You think you’ll ever see him again, do you?’

Lee took a swig from his glass. ‘If I don’t his missus’ll get a visit from me,’ he said.

‘Oh!’ All three old men laughed.

‘What’s that then, Lee?’ the shortest cigarette smoker said. ‘You gonna help yourself to Tracey, are you?’

For the first time that day, Lee Arnold’s face just barely cracked a smile. ‘No, that’d be wrong,’ he said. ‘And anyway, Tracey’s got enough problems of her own, without me. She’s got Bob.’

‘So what’s the plan then?’

As Lee stood up to knock back his Coke, they all huddled around him like a pack of eager, wrinkled puppies. ‘Bob’s got the odd little secret that I’m sure Tracey would find of interest,’ he said. ‘It’s up to him, really, isn’t it. He pays me what he owes me and Tracey’s none the wiser. He doesn’t do that …’ He shrugged.

The oldest old man shook his head appreciatively. ‘You’re a cool customer, Lee Arnold.’

Lee picked his coat up off the seat beside him and put it on. ‘Thanks, Harry,’ he said to the ancient. Then he turned to the others and added, ‘Fred, Wilf, see ya.’

Parting like the waves of the sea as he moved through them, the old men all watched Lee’s tall figure head towards the public bar door. Just before he actually left, Wilf, a fag hanging limply out of the side of his mouth said, ‘Here, Lee, how’s that new girl of yours coming along? She any good, is she?’

Lee turned, his face pulled into a frown now, and he said, ‘Do you know, boys, I don’t really know. Time’ll tell I suppose.’ And then he left.

Once out on Green Street, Lee properly considered what he had just been asked and he decided that it was a real puzzler. Mrs Hakim, Mumtaz, was a religious Muslim widow lady who wrote very good letters and made a mean cup of tea. Well-spoken and very polite, he nevertheless wondered how she’d cope hiding in the back of a van with a load of blokes and no access to a toilet.

As one hour dribbled over into two, she started to think that maybe going to the police would have been the better option after all, but then she pulled herself together. That was impossible and anyway it was too late now. She’d already invested too much time firstly tracking down this place and then sitting about for over an hour doing nothing. Also, it was a private matter. What she’d come to a private detective about was something the world did not need to know.

Every so often the Asian woman, who although not actually covered was well and truly headscarfed, looked up at her and smiled. She was very attractive, probably in her early thirties, and she had enormous moss-green eyes which she made up beautifully and with some skill. Slim and dressed modestly but very stylishly, she was rather a strange character to find working in a private detective’s office. Women like her – from the look of her clothes and her make-up she probably had a wealthy husband – usually stayed in the home.

‘I’m so sorry about the wait.’ She smiled again. ‘I’m sure Mr Arnold won’t be long now.’

But she looked embarrassed, the Asian woman. What Mr Arnold was going to be like was both intriguing and worrying. With a tiny office up a rickety flight of stairs behind a dusty Greek barber’s shop on Green Street, Upton Park, it was unlikely that he was earning enough to pay forty per cent tax. But did that mean that he wasn’t any good?

She had a mental picture in her head of what a private detective was like but she also knew that it was probably very inaccurate. For a start she’d never imagined that any sort of private eye would have a headscarfed Muslim woman for a secretary, but then maybe that said more about her than it did about Mr Arnold’s practice. Was Mr Arnold, in fact, Asian himself? Green Street had had a massive Asian presence for decades and even if ‘Arnold’ wasn’t an obviously Asian name maybe it was the handle he’d taken for some reason best known to himself. Before she’d just turned up without an appointment, she’d had a few fantasies about what he was going to be like. Undoubtedly inspired by the cinema and TV, she imagined Arnold to be either some vaguely dusty East End geezer who smelt of beer and fags or some elegant and dashing Philip Marlowe creation. As it turned out he was something between the two.

The office door opened to reveal a tall, dark, handsome, forty something man with a pronounced Roman nose who smelt of pub and fags and who looked at her and said, ‘Ah.’

She took her sunglasses off and watched his features recognise her.

‘Oh, Mr Arnold,’ the Asian woman said, ‘this lady—’

‘I know exactly who this lady is, Mumtaz,’ Lee Arnold said, and then he turned to her and smiled. ‘Shall we go into my office and have a chat? Assuming that’s what you’re here for.’

‘I’m being watched,’ she said baldly.

Lee offered her a chair opposite his desk and said, ‘Let’s pedal back a bit from that, shall we?’

‘I’m really frightened.’ She sat.

‘Miss Peters, before we get into any of that, I have to know what a lady like you is doing in a place like this,’ Lee said. ‘First time I saw you was at the Hackney Empire back in the late eighties. Then suddenly every time I switched the telly on, there you were.’

She put her head down.

‘You were a big star for a number of years and I liked your act,’ Lee said. ‘I’ve noticed you’ve been making a bit of a comeback on the comedy circuit.’

Maria Peters looked up. She remained the beautiful woman she’d always been, if a little older, but, so people said, she still had a mouth like a sewer. Although she’d suffered some ill health a little while back, after collapsing on stage, she seemed to be fully recovered now. ‘I married in 1993,’ she said. ‘Leonard. We lived … I live in Forest Gate. No kids.’

Lee pointed at her. ‘You’re a local girl.’

‘Plaistow.’ She nodded. ‘Me and my parents and my sisters all in a two-bedroom flat on Prince Regent Lane.’

He smiled; local girl done good. But how good? ‘What you got now?’

‘Five beds with landscaped gardens, outbuildings, new Merc on the drive.’ She sighed. ‘Got a couple of houses on Plashet Grove, three flats in West Ham, one old multiple occupation in Forest Gate. Inheritances from Len. Leonard Blatt, my Len, was a landlord – he died at the end of 2009.’

‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ Lee hadn’t actually known Leonard Blatt but he had known of him. He’d had a reputation as a mildly dodgy geezer.

‘Len left me well provided for and I’ll be straight with you, I’m worth a lot of money,’ she said. ‘I don’t ever need to work again if I don’t want to. But I do. Len’s death left me … We had a good marriage. I got back on the comedy circuit just under a year ago when my old manager took me on again. It’s still rough out there but it’s what I know.’

Lee leaned forward onto his desk. ‘You were good,’ he said. ‘Controversial …’

‘Bloody filthy.’ She looked slightly ashamed at first but then she smiled. ‘It was my selling point, that I’d say anything. I was young and pretty and I had no limits.’

‘You were brilliant.’ She looked away. ‘So now I know something about your life, Miss Peters,’ Lee said, ‘what’s this about you being watched?’

She frowned. ‘Started about three months ago,’ she said. ‘Someone out in the garden. Thought it was kids at first and I still don’t know that it isn’t, to be honest. At night but sometimes in the day I see, or think I see, movement in the garden. It’s not cats. There’s a human figure, out the corner of my eye, you know. Then the other day I saw someone in the house.’

‘Any idea who it might have been?’

‘No. Like in the garden, it was just a flash, a corner of the eye job. I think it was a man.’

‘Have you told the police?’

She turned away. ‘No, I don’t want to. Don’t know if I’m … Been a bit dodgy, health-wise. Maybe, er … maybe no one’s really there. You know?’

‘Mmm.’ Lee looked down at his desk. Of course it was possible that she was just seeing things. Sometimes people under stress, in this case bereavement, did experience hallucinations from time to time. But this was not exactly his area and he knew that he needed help. ‘Miss Peters, would you mind if I asked my assistant to come in on this interview?’

‘Your assistant?’

‘Mrs Hakim. You met her in reception.’

‘Oh. I thought she was your secretary.’

‘No, she is my assistant,’ Lee said. He mentally crossed his fingers against the almost-lie as he said it. Mumtaz Hakim had indeed been engaged to be his assistant even if, so far, all she’d done was make tea and write letters. Maybe now was indeed the time to employ her expertise? ‘Would you mind telling her what you’ve just told me?’

‘As long as she takes what I say seriously,’ Maria Peters said. ‘Mr Arnold, this being watched thing, it … I get so scared, and I don’t scare easily. Just recently my life’s got a lot better. I don’t want that to end, so I want this cleared up. Doesn’t matter what you find, I can take it. And what it costs.’

Lee agreed to take Maria Peters’ case. If someone was indeed getting into her garden and her house and managing to bypass her own outdoor security camera and internal alarms then that could be serious. And besides, she’d asked for 24/7 surveillance from the Arnold Agency and that represented a lot of much needed money. The only question mark was over her state of mind – although the good thing was that she seemed to be aware of that possibility. Lee sat back down behind his desk once Maria had gone and asked Mumtaz what she thought.

Sitting opposite, her hands wrapped around a big mug of tea, Mumtaz said, ‘I don’t really know, to be honest, Mr Arnold. Having only just met her, Miss Peters seemed to me to be quite a sane person. But that doesn’t really mean very much, I’m afraid. Some people are sane for ninety per cent of the time but just have the odd delusory episode, usually when they’re under pressure.’

Which could apply to Maria Peters. The main reason why Lee had chosen Mumtaz above all the other candidates who had applied for the job as his assistant had been because she had a degree in psychology. He knew that he probably laid far more store by this than she did, but the potential knowledge that she had about the human mind and behaviour had seemed like a good investment when he’d first interviewed her. She did also make a very good cuppa and she was, he hardly dare acknowledge even to himself, very beautiful.

‘But you think I did right to take the case?’

‘Oh, yes, Mr Arnold,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Undoubtedly. The lady is alone. What if someone is trying to frighten her? Although why she doesn’t go to the police I can’t really see.’

‘Doesn’t want them involved, I s’pose. She’s rich and famous and probably doesn’t want some load of coppers stomping around her home pursued by journalists. And she wants someone to watch her back 24/7,’ Lee said. ‘They won’t do that, they can’t; we’re going to be stretched. I’ll have to tap up some freelance assistance and we’ll have to work shifts.’ He leaned back in his chair and looked at her. ‘Course, this could be your big moment, if you want it, Mumtaz.’

She frowned.

‘You want to learn the business. I took you on to learn the business. A gig like this is a good place to start. You can come out with me to start with, then I could rota you in.’

It was what she’d wanted. As well as needing the money, Mumtaz had actually been interested in learning about private investigation when she’d applied for the job three months before. By embarking on a new career it seemed as if she was symbolically turning a corner in her life and hopefully leaving a lot of things she didn’t want to think about any more safely in the past.

‘There’ll be no evening or night work, not for you,’ Lee said.

She’d told him about Shazia right from the start. I have a daughter, she’d said to him at the interview. She’s sixteen and she’s just lost her father. I want to be there for her as much as I am able. And Lee had taken her on knowing that and he’d met Shazia. He’d been, she’d felt at the time, like some sort of gift from God. Now he needed her and she couldn’t let him down. ‘That’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘I’d like that.’

Lee Arnold smiled. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Bloody marvellous money, Maria Peters is minted!’

‘Her eyes were very sad.’ She wanted to say You mustn’t exploit her vulnerability, Mr Arnold. But she didn’t. Rightly or wrongly she found herself trusting him not to do that. ‘You think she will be able to keep our involvement to herself?’

‘She’ll only tell her mum,’ Lee said. ‘I’m not happy about that but she insisted – the old girl’s a right nosy cow apparently – and at least she isn’t going behind my back like most of my clients. I impressed it upon her, I hope, how to tell all and sundry would just mean she’d be throwing her money down the drain.’

It wasn’t unusual for clients to undermine the agency’s work by telling people they were either having someone watched or being surveilled themselves. Even in the short time that Mumtaz had been with Lee Arnold she’d learned that probably the biggest threat to the success of an operation was the client him- or herself.

Lee picked up his BlackBerry and began to work his way through his phone book. ‘Have to get a few faces on board,’ he said. Then he stopped, looked up and smiled again. ‘But before I do, I think that we deserve a treat for this, Mumtaz.’ He put his hand into his jacket pocket and took out a twenty pound note. ‘Let’s have a couple of cappuccinos from that Bengali-Italian place up by the station. Get yourself some of that chocolate sesame stuff you like …’

‘Chocolate halva.’

‘That’s the thing. Oh, and get me a packet of Marlboro too. We’ll close the office for the rest of the day and I’ll have a fag at me desk for once.’

Mumtaz picked up the banknote.

‘And when you get back,’ Lee said, ‘I’ll tell you all I know about Maria Peters.’

‘She was one of the most controversial comedians to come out of the comedy new wave of the nineteen eighties,’ Lee said. ‘They used to call her the English Joan Rivers, except that she was much younger and much prettier. Maria Peters, as you saw, is a beautiful woman. But she had a mouth like a toilet. One of her jokes I’ll always remember was … I’m not sure I should repeat …’

‘Mr Arnold, I am not made of glass.’

One thing that Lee had noticed about covered Muslim women was that people, and that included him, had extreme reactions to them. BNP thugs hurled abuse and dog shit at them, while some Asian men, as far as Lee could deduce, appeared to completely ignore their existence. He knew he personally tended to treat them with undue and unusual respect. Somewhere in his head they were ranked alongside nuns who were also pure and semi-divine beings. Except that really they weren’t. No one was and some of them, like Mumtaz, were stunning. Lee took a deep breath and then did Maria Peters’ joke. ‘What do you call a bearded man with a wide mouth and a clitoris for a tongue?’

Mumtaz put what remained of her chocolate halva down on Lee’s desk and said, ‘A clitoris?’

‘Yes.’ Lee could feel his face start to burn with embarrassment. Mumtaz had to know what a clitoris was but he really wished he hadn’t just said that word to her. ‘A clitoris.’

‘A clitoris?’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t imagine,’ she said. ‘What would you call such a person?’

Lee’s heart began to pound as his face achieved a sunburned look. ‘Nothing at all,’ he said. ‘Poor bloke’s got enough problems having a face like a cunt.’

For just a moment there was complete silence. Lee tried to fill it up by audibly puffing on his fag. He almost expected Mumtaz to either storm out or say that she didn’t understand. But instead she said, ‘Oh, I see. It’s a sort of confounding of expectations thing.’

For a moment Lee held his breath.

‘The audience think that the comedian is going to say that you call the man a c-face. So when those expectations are confounded it’s funny.’ She laughed. ‘Clever. But then good comedy is clever.’ She picked her halva up again and bit another lump off the side. Lee wondered how much comedy Mumtaz had actually seen and how much of that had been for the purposes of her degree. He doubted she’d grown up with The Comic Strip Presents … but then was that just him imposing a stereotype on her? He decided not to continue any further down that road.

‘Maria Peters was one of the first comedians in the country to have a one-person show in the West End,’ Lee said. ‘She started out in pubs back in the eighties, went on to comedy clubs – I saw her at a comedy night at the Hackney Empire. Then she was in the West End, on telly, everywhere. She was a big star who made a lot of dosh.’

‘And she’s originally from Newham.’

‘Plaistow. Went to school in the borough.’ Lee drank his cappuccino. ‘I don’t know much about her early life, she didn’t really go into it. But she gave up her career in the nineties when she married a geezer called Leonard Blatt.’

‘I know that name.’

Lee smiled. ‘Forest Gate landlord,’ he said. ‘Mr Blatt used to own quite a bit of property up around your place.’

‘He owned the house next to mine, which Miss Peters must own now,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I knew she was familiar. She comes sometimes to collect rent from the tenants.’

‘Ah, could be useful.’

Both Lee Arnold and Mumtaz Hakim lived, in very different circumstances, in the northern Newham district of Forest Gate. Back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Forest Gate had been a genteel suburb of solid Victorian villas and ornate parks and cemeteries. But after the Second World War it fell into disrepair and became one of those areas characterised by multiple occupation. The twenty-first century, however, had seen Forest Gate re-emerge as a highly desirable location which was why the house that Mumtaz’s late husband Ahmed had bought back in the nineties was now worth almost a million pounds. Leonard Blatt, the Forest Gate landlord who had married Maria Peters, represented the old, broken-down district, and the company he had bequeathed to his wife still owned one of the biggest and scruffiest multiple-occupation houses that remained. Everyone had known Leonard; fewer people knew his famous wife.

‘As soon as she decided to ditch her career, Maria just retreated behind the walls of her house,’ Lee said.

‘Does she have any children?’

Lee shook his head. ‘No, neither she nor Leonard. I have no idea why. She’s a very private lady and getting even what I needed to know out of her was no mean feat.’

‘What did you have to get out of her?’

‘Who she thinks might be watching her.’

‘Oh, right.’ That, of course, had to be one of the first questions that a private investigator asked a client like Maria. Who do you think is watching you? Sometimes clients had ideas, sometimes they didn’t, sometimes they had a notion of who their tormentor might be but they wouldn’t say. Facing up to a threat from someone the client may have loved or even still did love, was hard. But the question, as Mumtaz had come to see e. . .