An Act of Kindness

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Biographical; Private Investigators

Synopsis

Lee Arnold and Mumtaz Hakim run a detective agency in London's East End. But their latest case could have devastating consequences.

A new client, Nasreen, has sought Hakim's help. Recently moved to a new house, and with a baby on the way, this should be an exciting time- but Nasreen has made friends in the community that she cannot tell her husband, Abdullah, about. And when a murder takes place close to their home, Nasreen suspects that Abdullah also has something to hide.

This case is a challenge for the agency, but provides a timely warning to Mumtaz- debts spiralling, her life is in danger of spinning out of control.

Both women are on a path towards destruction, as the consequences of ignoring their instincts become ever more dangerous...

Release date: July 4, 2013

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 464

Sample

It looked like nothing. A tiny piece of paper that spiralled down towards the floor on a parachute of dust. She could have ignored it. If it hadn’t landed face up she certainly would have.

It was a black and white photograph of a woman. Nasreen picked it up. Dark-haired and unsmiling, the woman looked somewhat like her aunt Shahana. But there was something more European about this face. The eyes were heavy, reminding her of the eyes of some of the Romanian boys she saw flogging fake Adidas tracksuits in Queens Market. Too thin and plain to be what Nasreen always thought of as typically Italian, there was a kind of beauty in the woman’s face but it was not of an obvious or comfortable nature. This was someone who, though far from old, had done a lot of living. And even though the image had faded over time, Nasreen could see that the eyes were full of pain. She turned the photograph over in her hands and wondered what had happened to this woman.

Nasreen had been sanding down the front door when she’d spotted it, an ancient paint-encrusted lump stuck to the doorframe. To begin with she’d thought that it was merely a build-up of paint. The house hadn’t been repaired or decorated for decades and she and Abdullah had found layers of paint and wallpaper that probably dated from the 1940s. But this lump was different. As she’d chipped away at it with her scraper, Nasreen had seen that it was some sort of capsule fixed to the doorframe. About the same length as a wide, flat lipstick it was attached by screws, forced through metal loops at either end. She went into the house to find a screwdriver. When she returned, she gave the thing a tug and it came away easily from the rotten wood of the frame. The photograph had floated down to the floor from behind it. Someone had hidden it there. Why?

Nasreen and Abdullah had only just taken possession of the house and were both still excited to be home owners. But, due to the state of it, they hadn’t moved in and were still living with Nasreen’s parents a few streets away. Until they managed to make the place habitable, things would have to stay that way.

Abdullah called down from the bathroom, where he’d been knocking out a sink the colour of stewed tea. Now the banging coming from upstairs stopped. ‘How you getting on?’ he shouted, over the top of the CD player belting out Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’. His accent always reminded her a little of that comedian Peter Kay. It made her smile.

‘OK,’ Nasreen yelled back.

‘I’ve got the sink out. Now I’m going for the bath,’ he said.

‘I’m still scraping off paint.’ Nasreen didn’t tell him about the paint-encrusted lump or the photograph. She put them both into the pocket of her jeans, like secrets. She didn’t know why.

*

Lee Arnold knew that his assistant Mumtaz Hakim wouldn’t join him when he went out to get his lunch from the chippy. Saveloy and chips. He’d explained to her what a saveloy was and that the ones he bought contained no pork products. He’d told her that this kind of saveloy had been created for the Jewish immigrants, and was made of beef and cereal.

‘You should try it,’ he said now, ‘with chips. You eat chips. Everybody eats chips.’

She smiled. ‘I’m just not hungry. Maybe another time.’

‘My treat,’ he tried again. She’d lost weight in recent months and Lee was worried. He wanted to ask her if she was alright, but she was a private person and it was difficult. She hadn’t taken any time off work and she was performing well. But the dark circles underneath her eyes bothered him.

He shrugged. ‘OK.’ He put his jacket on and made his way towards the office door. ‘Call me on me mobile if you change your mind.’

‘I will.’

He knew she wouldn’t. He ran down the metal stairs leading from the front door of the Arnold Detective Agency and in to a rough back alley behind Green Street, Upton Park. A burst of Greek bouzouki music from George the Barbers heralded his arrival on one of London’s liveliest streets. In spite of his concerns about his assistant, Lee Arnold smiled.

One way or another, Lee had been around Green Street all his life. As a kid he’d come with his mum and his brother to Queens Market for fruit, veg and the odd turn around the junk shops. As an adult he’d walked it to the sound of bangra music, past ornate jewellery emporiums run by Sikhs. He’d broken halal bread with owners of money-exchange agencies, restaurants and mobile phone shops. His favourite pub, the Boleyn, still stood at the far end of Green Street, on the Barking Road, and the chippies still sold saveloys, wallies and his favourite fish, rock eel. Managing to get an office on Green Street when he’d set up in business had been a bonus.

Lee lit a cigarette and began walking south towards the chippy. He tipped his head at an old white bloke who scowled back. He’d been a fence, and probably still was. When he was a copper, Lee had arrested him twice.

The sky was as grey as a sewer rat’s tail. London weather. It neither thrilled nor depressed Lee, it just was, and in its ‘just was-ness’ it represented comfort. His thoughts drifted back to Mumtaz. Since she’d joined the Arnold Agency, Lee had gradually been given access to a very lucrative market in troubled Asian ladies. Mumtaz helped them pursue errant husbands, looked into the backgrounds of prospective in-laws, and offered them a familiar and at the same time forceful woman with whom they could discuss their problems. Ever since she’d arrived just over a year before, Mumtaz Hakim hadn’t missed a beat.

Lee stamped out his first fag on the ground and lit another. He knew that Mumtaz had financial problems. She was a young widow with a step-daughter and she lived in a house that was too expensive for her. Clearly things hadn’t yet got so bad that she’d had to move because she was still in it, but she wasn’t happy and whatever was causing her misery was making her pale and gaunt. Lee wanted to tackle her outright about it but something held him back, which made him feel impotent and also vaguely guilty. He knew that if Mumtaz had been a white woman he wouldn’t have hesitated to ask her what was wrong.

*

There was no point going to Lee for more money because he didn’t have any. Mumtaz and Lee had always shared the book keeping and she knew what he did and didn’t have in the bank. The business was prospering but overheads were high and Lee had recently had to update his camera equipment as well as the office computer systems.

Mumtaz looked at her mobile phone and wondered, not for the first time, about calling her father. Her latest payment wasn’t due – yet – but it was only a matter of days away and she was broke. There was just enough food in the house for dinner and Shazia could well have to go in to college with leftovers. She looked hard at her phone again. What would her father say if he knew? What could he do?

She knew that if she told him about her predicament, he would certainly help her with the mortgage. But it wouldn’t be easy for him, he and her mother were old and they needed every penny. No, she couldn’t take money from them. And anyway, even if she did, what would paying the mortgage do on its own?

Her two brothers were also out of the question. They were young men, quick to anger, and if they found out what was really happening to their sister they would be furious. And that, Mumtaz knew, could only end badly – for her brothers.

No. There was only a single realistic course of action and that was the one she had taken the previous month. She extracted a sheet of paper from the office printer and made a list. A lot of her jewellery had already gone and she didn’t want to touch that again for a while. In her head she roamed around her house looking for things she could live without. She wondered whether items like toasters, microwaves and soft furnishings were actually worth selling. Mumtaz baulked at the idea of selling any of Ahmet’s carpets. Her late husband had not been a man of taste – except when it came to carpets. Two Persian and three Afghan remained out of what had once been a considerable collection. Could she bring herself to sell those? If she failed to make the next payment there was more than just an increased rate of interest at stake.

The entryphone buzzed, interrupting her thoughts. Mumtaz got up from her desk to answer it. She heard a man’s voice then saw his face on the monitor. She recognised it immediately. He was called Naz Sheikh.

‘Hello Mumtaz,’ he said. There was a smile in that voice which made it even more oily than usual. He must have seen Lee go out.

Mumtaz stared at him on the CCTV monitor. She wasn’t even frightened any more. Not for herself. She didn’t answer.

‘Just a friendly reminder about your obligation,’ he said. ‘The end of the week. You know what—’

‘You’ll get it,’ she said as calmly as she could.

‘Just making sure, you know, for the sake of your—’

‘You’ll get it,’ Mumtaz reiterated. ‘Go away.’

Naz’s face broke into a big smile. He enjoyed what he did, and that made it much worse. To be so young, so handsome and yet so … Mumtaz didn’t have the words for what he was. She watched him as he turned and walked back down the metal steps, back to whatever he did with the rest of his time. The silver panels on the sides of his trainers caught what little light there was left in the cloudy London sky.

*

The first thing that John Sawyer had noticed about Helmand had been the smell. He’d struggled to describe it for months until he finally came up with ‘seven shades of shit’. Lieutenant Reeve had once asked him to list the seven shades. He’d said, ‘Goat, sheep, man, woman, child, chicken, fucking bastard Taliban, sir.’

Lt Reeve had lost his head less than a week later. He and two others out on patrol, blown into thousands of pieces by the ‘fucking bastard Taliban’. John had seen it. Walking fifty metres behind, he’d got away with a face full of his mates’ blood. Everybody said how lucky he’d been. And he’d agreed with them.

A month, maybe a bit more, had passed then. Out on patrol again – some village in the arse-end of nowhere. He didn’t know its name, he never had. Just like he’d never known the girl’s name. John shook his head as he tried to forget about all that and concentrate on the present. Now, keeping low in the garden undergrowth so that he couldn’t be seen, John watched the young, beautiful woman scrape away at fifty years’ worth of paint on that rotten old doorpost. He had wanted to talk to her ever since he’d first seen her, but he had to be careful not to let her see him. If she did her husband might go mad and chase him away, and he didn’t want that. John didn’t like frightening people, even by accident.

Back in the horror of his past, the girl had frightened him because she’d been bleeding. It wasn’t easy to say where from but it looked to John as if she had been shot or stabbed in the abdomen. He told the Afghan translator to ask her if there was anything they could do to help but he’d been reluctant to do so. John remembered that feeling of impatient agitation he’d had then. Sergeant Willets had told him to ‘fucking pipe down’. But then he’d ordered the translator to ask the girl what was wrong.

‘Don’t do too much.’ The man – the woman’s husband’s voice – ripped through the present and across the ruined, tangled garden. John lowered his head.

‘I won’t,’ the beautiful woman said. Then he heard her scrape, scrape, scraping again. In Helmand he’d tap, tap, tapped his foot as they’d waited in fifty-degree heat for the girl to tell the translator why she was bleeding.

‘She says it’s nothing,’ the translator had said. They’d talked in the local language, Dari. There was no contact on any level with English. They could have been saying anything. The girl, whose head was almost completely obscured by a scarf, began to walk on, blood dripping down her exposed ankles as she went.

And then the translator had said the fateful words, ‘She must go back to her husband now.’

John closed his eyes, as if by shutting out the grey London light he might also somehow shut out what had happened next in Afghanistan as well. Tears seeped from the corner of his right eye. Then he heard the present reassert itself again. The beautiful woman called out, ‘Abdullah, I’m going to get some cold drinks. What do you want? Coke or—’

‘Fizzy water,’ the man said. ‘That’ll do me.’ He had a northern accent and if John hadn’t been screaming inside he might have found it funny. He was, he had been, the type of bloke who found almost anything funny. But back in Helmand on that hot day he’d turned the girl around, taken the scarf off her head and looked into her eyes. Only after that had everything changed.

Abdullah didn’t like her working at their new home on her own, but Strone Road was close to her mum and dad’s house and Nasreen was anxious to get on. The place was such a mess, it would take them months to make it livable. Her mum wasn’t happy about her act of defiance. ‘If your husband comes home here and you’re still out at the house I won’t lie for you, you know,’ she’d said as Nasreen left.

It was late afternoon now, the day had turned warm and Nasreen felt happy as she walked out into her garden. She wouldn’t do any more paint scraping today. There was a hideous old sink outside the back door that she wanted to move. But before she did that, she would sit down on one of the deckchairs that Abdullah had brought for them and turn her face to the sun for a moment. Looking up, she caught sight of the back-door frame and the mark where she’d removed that odd lump with the photograph behind it, both still in the pocket of her jeans. She took them both out and looked at them.

The woman was difficult to place in terms of age. Clearly she wasn’t old, but whether she was thirty, forty or even fifty was difficult to tell. Her expression was serious, on the edge of severe, but Nasreen felt a warmth towards her. Maybe the woman was someone who had lived in the house long ago? Abdullah had the deeds and she could maybe ask him to look into who had lived there before them. She’d just started to scrape some of the layers of paint away from the lump when the noise of something snapping behind her made her look round. There was a man, tall, scruffy, his hair and beard in long brown hanks. His eyes looked right through her.

The girl had been twelve at the most. Younger than his little sister.

‘What’s she doing with a husband?’ he’d asked the translator.

The man had looked anxious and shifty – John had never trusted him. ‘It is the custom here for girls to marry when they are young,’ he’d said.

‘She’s a kid!’

Sergeant Willets had put a hand on John’s arm. ‘Leave it, Private.’

‘Leave it?’ He’d grabbed the girl and she’d screamed. John closed his eyes against the remembrance. But a voice in the present made him open them again

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ the beautiful woman said.

She had her hands on her abdomen and her voice quavered. He could see that she was scared.

‘I er, I …’

‘This is my house,’ Nasreen Khan said. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

John looked away.

‘You should go home,’ she said. He didn’t answer. ‘You do have a home …’

‘I live in lots of places,’ John said. ‘Sometimes here.’

‘Here?’

‘I live in the shack,’ he said.

She clearly didn’t understand what he meant, so John pointed through the densest part of the tangle of trees and shrubs towards the back of the garden. She said, ‘You mean the wood pile at the bottom of the garden?’

John said, ‘I can show you if you …’

‘No!’ She took an abrupt step backwards. ‘No. I think you should go.’

John couldn’t remember when he’d first found the shack. The coppers had moved him on from his old billet down in Silvertown some time in the winter. Then there’d been the shack, Central Park sometimes, occasionally down by the river.

‘Where will I go today?’ he said to himself rather than to her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Where do you come from?’

John said it entirely without thinking, ‘Helmand province, Afghanistan.’

And Nasreen Khan’s heart changed in an instant.

*

It was a slow day – a slow week as it went – and Lee let Mumtaz go home early. Whatever was upsetting her wouldn’t be helped by sitting in the office with not much to do. She had a couple of appointments booked for later in the week – a missing husband and a background check on a potential bride from Leeds – so things could pick up. But Lee had bugger all. Clearly the upcoming Olympics were having an adverse effect upon infidelity in Newham. Lee let himself into his Forest Gate flat and put his keys down on the telephone table in the hall. From his living room he heard a low, cawing sound followed by a high-pitched rendition of that famous West Ham United anthem, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’. Christ, he’d taught that bloody bird well!

Lee took his coat off and walked into the living room. The mynah bird eyed him with his usual slight suspicion.

‘Evening Chronus,’ Lee said. He rubbed the bird’s blue-black head with his fingers and Chronus stopped singing and shouted, ‘Up the ’ammers!’

Lee laughed. ‘You’re a poor brainwashed fucker, aren’t you?’

‘Bobby Moore! Trevor Brooking!’

Lee went into the kitchen and took a bottle of diet Pepsi out of the fridge. He poured some into a glass and drank it straight down. He wanted a pint of bitter, or gin, or anything that would get him out of it for a bit, but that was out of the question. He walked back into the living room and put the TV on. It was all gloom as usual: Egypt still in turmoil, the endless civil war in Syria, another British squaddie killed in Afghanistan. Then there was the farce of the London mayoral elections. Bumbling Boris Johnson, the clever, posh boy, not-so-idiot, or Ken – there go my Socialist credentials – Livingstone. He’d have to vote for someone, but who?

His mobile rang. He picked it up and saw that it was Vi. He put it down again and let it ring out. She’d been a bit keen lately and he wanted to nip it in the bud. It was all very well sleeping together occasionally but Lee didn’t want a girlfriend. Well, he didn’t want Vi Collins to be his girlfriend. The phone stopped ringing. Vi didn’t leave a message and Lee thought again about Mumtaz. Not for the first time he wondered whether he could pay her more. Thanks to the internet and modern home security systems, people were doing some forms of private investigation themselves. Not always well, but they were doing them. And that included some of Mumtaz’s covered Asian ladies. He’d thought about a career change, but where, if not to private investigation, did an ex-soldier, ex-copper go? The wonderful world of security? Lee had turned his Roman nose up at that years ago. Nights spent wandering about outside dodgy factories chasing down illegal immigrants jumping out of lorries? No chance.

The telly showed a picture of the squaddie who’d just been killed in Helmand province and Lee felt his blood pressure rise. They’d called the conflict he’d fought in the ‘First’ Iraq War. Then there’d been the ‘Second’ Iraq war and now the endless Afghan campaign. It made him mad. When was it going to end, for Christ’s sake?

*

Nasreen gave John a bottle of fizzy water she’d bought earlier in the day. He took it gratefully and drank it down.

‘Thanks.’ He smiled at her.

‘It’s no problem,’ Nasreen said.

Nasreen knew a little about men like John, if that was really his name. He was one of those ex-soldiers that were sometimes spoken about on the TV. Unable to adjust to civilian life after the rigours of Afghanistan, they drifted, homeless and often ill, on the outside of society. Her cousin Abbas had fought in Helmand. He’d lost an eye and his faith and was hiding from his nightmares in drug abuse. Before she’d married Abdullah, she had done some temporary office work for a mental health charity which had tried to help sick soldiers. She’d been touched by some of their stories, which had chimed with what Abbas had experienced. She knew that most people, for all the talk of the soldiers as ‘heroes’, didn’t give a damn.

‘The thing you call the shack …’ she began.

‘At the bottom of your garden,’ he said.

‘It’s just a woodpile.’ She paused. She still wasn’t entirely easy being on her own with him in her ruined garden, with evening coming on. If Abdullah ever found out he’d lose his mind. ‘My husband and I bought this house in an auction six weeks ago,’ she said. ‘How long have you been coming here?’

He didn’t know. Nasreen looked down the tight, rough tunnel John had forged to get from his ‘shack’ and into the part of the garden nearest the house and she said, ‘Did you rearrange the woodpile to make a shack out of it?’

‘A bit,’ he said. ‘It was something, a structure, once. But it collapsed, I reckon. It’s old.’

Although she knew what he was talking about, Nasreen couldn’t see much apart from branches and leaves. Again John asked her if she’d like to see his shack, and again she declined. At the end of the garden there was nothing of interest except the high wall that enclosed the old Plashet Jewish Cemetery. And if John suddenly ‘lost it’ or went for her, down there, no-one would know. As if reading her thoughts, he said, ‘Why are you here? On your own?’

‘Why do you ask? Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘You’ve always been with your husband when I’ve seen you before.’

‘He’s gone to work,’ she said, then thought that maybe that was a stupid thing to say when she was alone with an unknown man. ‘He’s a lawyer,’ she added. ‘He works strange hours. He could be back any minute.’

But John had drifted off. ‘Why are you here?’ he repeated.

Nasreen changed tack. She pointed at the old sink by the back door. ‘I wanted to see if I could move that,’ she said.

John looked at the large, heavily stained Butler sink. There was even what looked like the remains of a tap on the side of it. ‘On your own?’

It did look heavy and she wasn’t sure how she was going to move it, or even why she wanted to move it. It was probably just a case of striking one more thing off the long list of tasks that needed to be done in the house and garden. It wasn’t easy for her or Abdullah, living with her parents. Everyone was perfectly civilised and polite but she knew it was a strain – especially for her husband.

‘I’ll move it for you, if you like,’ John said.

‘Oh, no it’s not your—’

‘It’s no problem.’ He walked past her, his eyes fixed on the knackered old sink.

He took hold of it, a hand on either side. His fingernails were black, she noticed. He tugged and pulled and Nasreen began to feel guilty that he would strain himself. Suddenly he stopped and turned a red face towards her. ‘It’s plumbed in,’ he said.

Nasreen went over to see for herself and, yes, the old sink was attached to a pipe. ‘That’s odd isn’t it? To have a sink outside?’

John looked vague again. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe. You’ll have to get a plumber, I think.’

‘Yes.’ She looked up at him. He was well over six feet tall and behind all the hair and the unkempt beard, he had the look of someone kind.

‘What do you do for food, John?’ she asked.

*

Dinner was a basic dhal with rice. Luckily Shazia had been anxious to finish her homework so that she could watch TV later and so the food, or lack of it, hadn’t bothered her much. Mumtaz was so glad that her stepdaughter was enjoying college. She was just anxious that nothing should stop her from doing so.

Now that the girl was up in her bedroom doing her work, Mumtaz could roam the house looking for things to sell. She’d given up on the idea of selling kitchen equipment; it just wasn’t worth it. Even one of the many canteens of cutlery that Ahmet, her husband, had liked so much would barely fetch the price of a week’s shopping. Mumtaz went from the kitchen and into the room Ahmet had called ‘the games room’. It was where he’d sat with his friends, smoking, drinking and playing poker. Even with his friends, for fivers and tenners, he played it badly. With other people it was worse. She opened the large teak chest in the corner by the window and took out a bundle enrobed in sheets of tissue paper. She laid it on the larger of the two card tables and began to unwrap it, removing layer upon layer of thin, white tissue – a modern and, she felt, deserved mummification.

Her red wedding sari came into view. Made of banarasi silk and decorated with zari and buta work, it was a sari fit for a Bollywood superstar. Ahmet had spared no expense and Mumtaz and her family had been dazzled. How happy she’d been! Not even a scowling Shazia, re. . .