Enough Rope

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Private investigator and ex-soldier Lee Arnold and police superintendent Paul Venus are by no means friends, but when Venus' son Harry is kidnapped and ransom demands arrive from an address in Arnold's patch in east London, the superintendent doesn't know who else to turn to. Arnold and his Muslim assistant Mumtaz Hakim soon find themselves chasing leads into several of the East End's uneasily coexisting communities. Mumtaz uncovers a link to one of the area's powerful Bangladeshi families, whose property empire has always seemed suspicious, while Arnold suspects the involvement of more old-fashioned East End gangsters, and wonders if some of the nastier rumours about Venus himself might be true. And neither Mumtaz nor Lee like the look of the children of the super-rich, arriving in droves in the trendy parts of Hoxton and Shoreditch and living in luxury just a stone's throw from grinding urban poverty. The truth, however, is stranger and more dangerous than either Arnold or Hakim imagine. Enough Rope is a powerful and thrilling novel of London's ever-evolving dark side.

Release date: August 6, 2015

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 306

Sample

All the accoutrements of the last stages of alcoholism were there. Empty bottles, faeces, boots with thin soles, an anorexic ankle. There was also some gear that took DI Kevin Thorpe back to the start of his career in the seventies. When was the last time he’d seen even the most desperate alkie heat up solid polish? Over a bonfire?

The twenty-something constable at his side said, ‘What’s the polish about, then?’

Such innocence, and yet the boy had probably seen more pornography than Thorpe had ever had dinners, hot or cold.

‘They heat it up so they can drink it,’ Thorpe said. ‘Meths Boys was what we used to call them, back when this sort of thing was common. Blokes so poor and desperate they’d drink anything. Polish, methylated spirit, white spirit . . .’

‘Christ.’

Thorpe had hoped he’d seen the last of the Meths Boys back in the early eighties, but in the new shiny London of the twenty-first century, apparently some remnants of the past remained.

‘So, did he set himself on fire?’

The body had been found by a runner. Shaven-headed, he’d looked like a member of the BNP, except he spoke as if he’d been to Eton. Poplar was a funny place in 2014.

‘No,’ Thorpe said.

‘How can you be so sure?’ the kid asked.

The smell was a cross between scorched earth and burnt pork. The sight was worse. The body sprawled out in front of the Children’s Memorial in Poplar Recreation Ground had been damaged by fire, but it was the short-handled knife in his chest that had killed the man. Thorpe pointed at it.

‘Oh.’

‘This is one alcoholic who didn’t kill himself,’ Thorpe said.

Eighteen pupils at Great North Street School in Poplar were commemorated on the Children’s Memorial. They’d died in the first daylight bombing raid on London in 1917. The Memorial had been paid for by public subscription. It was a place Thorpe had always found incredibly touching. That generosity, and a love that some would call sentimentality, was something he’d always taken for granted in the East End of London. Here it was made solid in a white memorial listing eighteen names, underneath a standing angel with its wings outstretched.

Now someone had been killed in front of it, and there was even a mark in what looked like blood on the plinth. Thorpe wondered what kind of person would murder a hopeless drunk in front of a memorial to dead children.

Then, behind the memorial, he saw what looked like a bundle of rags in the middle of a flower bed. All the hairs on his neck stood up.

Eleven days earlier

‘I’ve paid your friggin’ rent!’

Yelling down over a set of rusting banisters at your landlord is not the best way to negotiate financial differences, but Lee Arnold was pissed off. Without any notice his landlord, George Papadakis, had put up the rent on his office.

‘You owe me three hundred pounds!’ the landlord countered.

‘Yeah, so you say. But who’s improved this shithole, eh? Not you, George. When I moved in here, the bog was like something out of the Ark. But you didn’t give a toss, did you? I had a new one—’

‘Only since Mrs Hakim came to work for you. Only then did you put that new toilet in. You didn’t give a shit about it until then!’ George spoke with a typical East End accent, but he waved his arms around as if he were declaiming from the steps of the Acropolis.

‘I’ve painted the place, had the wiring done, and if you’ve noticed, George, my sink don’t drip down into your shop any more!’ Lee said. ‘Three hundred quid? You owe me that, mate!’

George clicked his tongue impatiently. ‘I could get twice the rent you pay from one of these rich people moving into this area. You wanna watch it, Lee, the East End is trendy now for the young people. I could make your office into a luxury flat, just like that!’ He clicked his fingers.

‘Then do it,’ Lee said. ‘If you think you can tempt some knobhead hipster kid from Shoreditch all the way out to Upton Park, then knock yourself out.’

Up in his office, Lee’s phone began to ring. He threw the butt of the cigarette he’d been smoking onto the stair he’d been standing on and stepped on it.

‘And stop smoking!’ George said.

‘When you do, I will.’

Lee ran inside his small, stuffy office and picked up the ringing phone. ‘Arnold Agency.’

There was a pause. In the years since he’d left the police and started running the agency, Lee Arnold had discovered that private detection services attracted the odd and sometimes the very very timid, as well as the desperate.

‘Arnold Agency. Hello?’

He didn’t like answering the phone. That was one of the reasons why he’d eventually caved in and employed an assistant. But now that the woman he’d taken on to do the ‘officey’ things was frequently busier looking for errant daughters and dodgy husbands than he was, Lee often had to answer his own calls.

‘Mr Arnold?’

It was a man. Well spoken.

‘Yes.’

There was another pause and then, ‘Mr Arnold, I have a problem.’

‘People who ring here usually do,’ Lee said. There was something familiar about the voice, but he couldn’t place it. He knew a lot of people, even some posh ones. ‘What can we help you with?’

‘I don’t know whether you can help me at all,’ the man said. ‘But if we could meet somewhere – I don’t want to do this over the phone – then we could discuss it.’

‘We could,’ Lee said. ‘Although I have to tell you that I won’t meet anyone in a dark alley, for obvious reasons.’

‘Of course not. There’s a pub near your office called the Boleyn. How about that?’

If he knew Newham’s most famous pub he might be local. But the Boleyn was also West Ham United’s boozer – and he was a bit posh even for the most gentrified bits of the borough.

‘OK, when?’ Lee asked.

‘Can you meet me this evening? At five?’

‘Yeah.’ Lee flicked the desk diary open and began to write. ‘Mr . . .?’

‘Smith.’

It was almost certainly something to do with his marriage. They were always ‘Smith’ or ‘Brown’. Lee could see him in his mind: middle-aged, white, miserable. The wife was probably having an email affair with a waiter she’d met in Morocco.

‘And how will I recognise you, Mr Smith?’

There was another pause. Then, ‘Oh, you’ll recognise me, Mr Arnold,’ and he put the phone down.

Lee Arnold went outside and lit a cigarette to steady his nerves. That ‘Mr Smith’ had said he’d recognise him felt ominous.

*

Although she didn’t like to give too much credence to the fantastical theories that some of her clients had about their husbands’/sons’/daughters’ behaviour, when Mumtaz Hakim found herself following Mr Ali to Broadway Market in Hackney she had been surprised. One of the great centres of East End urban cool was not a place she would have associated with a forty-seven-year-old imam from Manor Park. Girls in ripped tights and hipsters on fixed-wheel bicycles were not obviously the kind of company Mr Ali would want to keep. Had he come to the market to taste the forbidden fruit of the excellent pork with crackling Lee Arnold had told her they sold there? She doubted it, though anything was possible. Perhaps Mr Ali had a fancy for outsized lavender cupcakes. His wife was clearly worried enough to pay good money to find out.

As a girl, if anyone had told Mumtaz that overtly religious people did anything wrong, she wouldn’t have believed it. But even at the relatively tender age of thirty-three, she’d experienced enough to know that wasn’t true. Her late husband had been a ‘good’ Muslim, but he had also been a drunk, a gambler, and had sexually abused both his own daughter and Mumtaz. Now there were other ‘good’ men in her life who wore their religious credentials on their sleeves while concealing the foulest sins in their corrupted hearts. Was Mr Ali one of those?

She followed him to a second-hand shop that seemed to be full of industrial artefacts – metal filing cabinets, factory lamps and furniture made from what looked like railway sleepers. It was fascinating; she could see why Mr Ali was spending so much time looking around. But then he made straight for Regent’s Canal.

When she’d been a child, Regent’s Canal had been a drab, smelly and forbidding waterway. Mumtaz and her two brothers had often lurked around it to throw stones at rats and jump out at unsuspecting walkers. But when a young woman was raped and thrown into the canal in 1997, Mumtaz’s parents forbade the children to go. They took no notice, but their adventures hadn’t been the same. In recent years, however, the canal, just like Broadway Market, had undergone a renaissance. Filled with colourful barges, some of which doubled as floating shops, it was like a holiday destination. Mr Ali, smiling as he walked towards one of the barges, obviously thought so too.

She saw him get on board, to be greeted by a middle-aged white woman who addressed him by his first name and said, ‘We’ve got some lovely stuff for you. Really different.’

Was she some kind of madam? Mumtaz cringed. She heard a male laugh that was probably his and wondered what the ‘stuff’ the woman had alluded to might be. Was it new young girls brought in for his pleasure? Or some peculiar sex toy? It was only when Mumtaz saw Mr Ali and the woman emerge fully clothed onto the deck in the sunshine, carrying bulging plastic bags, that she began to get a clue that maybe she had misjudged them. Then she saw the name of the boat, The Knitty Nora.

She heard him say, ‘I take your point about the hand-painted cashmere, Dora, but my wife wants a sweater like the one in The Killing, so what can I do? Twenty years we have been together. I want to give her something she will love.’

Mumtaz wondered how she was going to start the conversation she had to have with his wife.

*

Lee Arnold was the same build as Superintendent Paul Venus. Tall and slim, Venus was in mufti when Lee found him sitting in one of the far dark corners of the Boleyn, nursing a whisky.

‘I’m assuming it’s you I’m here for, Mr Smith?’ Lee said. Superintendent Venus had come to Forest Gate nick after Lee had left the force, but he had made his acquaintance and still had old mates who worked for him. None of them liked him.

‘Yes.’ Venus looked up. In his mid-fifties, he was almost ten years older than Lee, but his skin was smooth and his hair thick, which made him look younger. On this occasion, however, he had very dark circles underneath his eyes. ‘Can I get you a drink, Mr Arnold?’

Lee asked for a Diet Pepsi. Venus went to the bar.

The Boleyn, inasmuch as it advertised itself at all, promoted an image of a real East End boozer. And that was no lie. But what it meant in the twenty-first century was not what it had meant when Lee was a kid. Back in the seventies the Boleyn had heaved with boozed-up, white, working-class blokes singing West Ham songs and having punch-ups. Now, although it still retained its early Edwardian décor, plus a faint air of chirpy cockneyism, it was a bit of a quiet billet, with the exception of home-game Saturdays. But even though it was a shadow of its former self and he hadn’t taken a drink for years, Lee Arnold loved it.

When Venus returned he said, ‘I’m aware of the fact that you’re friends with several of my officers, Mr Arnold. Specifically DI Collins and DS Bracci.’

Lee had worked with them both years before. He even had an ongoing, ad hoc, fuck-buddy thing happening with Violet Collins. He hoped that Venus didn’t want to talk to him about that.

‘But what I am going to tell you, you mustn’t tell them, or anyone else. Not even your assistant,’ Venus said. ‘I can’t stress that enough.’

Lee frowned.

‘Can you give me an assurance that you will adhere to these conditions, Mr Arnold?’

Vi Collins had a theory that Venus was bent. As she perceived it, he was soft on organised crime in the borough and she speculated he was taking backhanders. Other people in the nick saw him more as a cautious operator. He was, after all, a posh type from out of the area, so fitting in was always going to be difficult.

Lee took a drink. ‘Depends what it’s about,’ he said.

‘Well, I can tell you it’s not about any of my officers.’

‘That’s a good start.’

‘And it doesn’t have anything to do with any of DI Collins’s theories about me either,’ he said. He moved closer, leaning across the scarred pub table. ‘So please put any notions you may have about my being on the make out of your mind. This is a personal matter.’

Another story that went around about Venus was that he was shagging women in the station who were half his age. He was married, to a soap star who had a great big gaff in the country that he rarely visited, but he also had a flat in Islington. Had he been taking little PCs there for some extra-curricular? Was he about to get caught?

‘I need your help. I need someone who knows about being a police officer, but who isn’t one. I need . . .’

He stopped. This was serious. The shadowed eyes, together with the tears Lee could see in them, made the private investigator lean in towards the policeman. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘just between you and me.’

Venus threw what remained of his whisky down his throat. He said, ‘I’ve got a son. Harry. He’s sixteen, attends a public school in Berkshire where he’s a boarder. He’s bright and his mother and I love him very much.’

‘That’s good.’

Venus was crying, tears falling down his cheeks. What was it with Harry? Drugs? Girls? Boys?

Venus said, ‘He’s been kidnapped.’

Lee hadn’t been expecting that.

‘His mother received a phone call the day Harry disappeared and then a written demand from the kidnappers was sent to our family home in Henley-on-Thames last Friday. They, whoever they are, want a hundred thousand pounds for Harry’s safe return. But if I use my police contacts, if I so much as tell the police, Harry will die. I have complied with that. My wife and I are in the process of assembling the money in the required denominations. Would you mind if I got another drink? Would you like one?’

‘No, but you go for it,’ Lee said.

Venus went to the bar.

His wife was an actress called Tina Wilton. Lee remembered her from vaguely saucy comedy programmes in the seventies. Blonde, curvy and a bit tarty, she’d gone on to land a role in the long-running soap Londoners, back in the nineties. She played a tough matriarch, head of a crime family who, Lee always thought, were some of the worst caricatures of East End ‘types’ he’d ever come across. But a lot of people loved Tina Wilton and she was a regular on many panel and reality shows. Every time he saw her, Lee mourned for the way she had looked in the past, pre-Botox and plastic surgery. Had she done all that to enhance her career, or to try to please her husband?

Venus returned. ‘We have to deliver the money to a PO box address on Brick Lane,’ he said.

‘Hold on,’ Lee said. ‘Do you have any proof these people have Harry?’

‘Proof? What do you mean?’

‘Did your wife ask to speak to Harry when they called? Have they called since? Have you spoken to them?’

‘No, no.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘Look, I should have, but I didn’t. I just need to deliver the money they’ve asked for.’

Lee sighed. OK, it was his son, but Venus’s copper’s instinct should have told him to ask for proof of life. He said, ‘When?’

‘Monday morning at ten.’ He downed his latest whisky. ‘I have to do it and I’m fine with that. I just want my son back unharmed.’

‘But . . .’

If that had been all he had wanted, there would have been no need to tell anyone, let alone Lee Arnold.

‘I also want to know who they are,’ Venus said. ‘My wife picked Harry up from school last week. Two days later he left on his bike to go and visit his friend George in Twyford, but he never arrived. Then came the phone call and the following day his mother received the demand.’

Harry was sixteen. Lee could remember being sixteen. He said, ‘Look, I have to ask this – have you or your wife been having, well, issues with your son lately? Forgive me, Mr Venus, but I know you and your wife live apart. I’m just wondering how that’s affected Harry. Whether it’s made him—’

‘Harry wouldn’t put his mother and myself through something like this!’ Venus said.

‘I have to—’

‘My wife and I haven’t lived together, apart from the occasional week during school holidays, for a decade. He is accustomed to our separation. Nothing has changed for him, and in fact I would venture to guess that he has probably done very well out of having a father in London and a mother in the country.’

People often spoilt kids when their marriages failed. Lee wondered whether Harry had learned to exploit his situation. Or whether the boy, secretly unhappy, had just decided to take off with a heap of his parents’ money.

‘Something happened to my son between Henley and Twyford and I want you to go over there and find out what,’ Venus said. ‘I also want you to follow me when I drop the money on Brick Lane. I’ll pay you whatever it takes. You can rip me off to your heart’s content, Mr Arnold. I really don’t care.’

‘I won’t, Mr Venus. I’m not like that.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Lee could have done with a fag to help him think it over, but that meant going outside, and he didn’t want to leave Venus on his own. Much as he was indifferent to him, this man was clearly very vulnerable.

‘When would you want me to start?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Venus said, ‘and I’ve got five hundred pounds for your immediate expenses on me now.’

‘You want me in Henley-on-Thames tomorrow?’

Venus took a folder out of his briefcase and pushed it across the table. ‘Yes. Here’s some information about Harry, his friend George and significant locations like our family home. Plus my wife’s mobile numbers and the address of the hotel I’ve booked you into tomorrow night.’

‘You’re very confident I’ll say yes, aren’t you?’ Lee said.

Venus leaned back in his chair. ‘I know you’ve not got a lot of work commitments, that your landlord has just put up your rent and that your assistant doesn’t usually work at weekends. Your friend DI Collins has, as you know, a very penetrating voice.’

*

She could hear Lee’s mynah bird going through his usual repertoire of West Ham United songs and lists of players as she picked up the phone. Mumtaz heard Lee yell, ‘Shut up, Chronus!’

She laughed. She was in a good mood. Mr Ali had not been playing around with a long-legged blonde in Hackney, which had curtailed her job, but she’d enjoyed telling his wife about the Killing sweater. It was an unusual thing to do, and yet Mumtaz could see how it could happen. Some Muslim men, her own father included, had a masculine image to uphold, but inside they were really soft as butter. Mr Ali had so wanted to make something for his wife that she would treasure, that he had resorted to clandestine knitting classes. When she told Lee, she thought he’d be disappointed that the job hadn’t lasted longer. But oddly, he wasn’t.

‘Sometimes it goes that way,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Yes, but with the office rent . . .’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that either,’ Lee said. ‘That’ll get sorted. Look, the reason I phoned was to ask if you or Shazia could feed Chronus for me this weekend.’

Until recently, DS Tony Bracci had lived in Lee’s spare room. His wife had thrown him out in favour of a younger man, but she’d just taken him back and so Tony was no longer available for bird-sitting.

‘Yes, that’ll be fine,’ she said.

‘Just tomorrow,’ Lee said. ‘I’ll be back Sunday night.’

‘No problem.’

‘Great. Thanks.’

She didn’t ask why he wouldn’t be around to feed Chronus at the weekend and Lee didn’t volunteer the information. It wasn’t her business.

Just as the call ended, Mumtaz heard the front door open, then close, followed by the sound of her stepdaughter going to her bedroom.

‘Shazia?’

The girl, a bright, tall, skinny seventeen-year-old, didn’t answer.

Mumtaz left the kitchen and walked the few steps to Shazia’s room. After living in a five-bedroom house, the flat they shared now was cramped. It felt like living in a doll’s house.

Shazia’s door wasn’t closed and so Mumtaz walked into her room. ‘How long is this going to last?’ she asked the girl.

Shazia, who was sitting on her bed emptying her bag, did not look up.

‘Well?’

‘I told you, as long as you insist on playing the victim, I don’t want to talk to you,’ the girl said. ‘Go to the police or speak to Lee and I’ll talk to you.’

‘You know I can’t do that.’

Shazia looked up. Her eyes, which were dark and huge, were also very heavily made up. She looked stunning. She said, ‘I saw that Naz Sheikh today. He watched me get on the bus to college. He was smirking. Next time I see him, why don’t I just punch him, eh?’

‘Oh no! No!’

‘Why not? He deserves it.’

Mumtaz felt her heart flutter. ‘Shazia, you mustn’t.’

‘Mustn’t?’ She went back to looking at the stuff in her bag. ‘Oh, just go away, Amma,’ she snapped. ‘Go away and leave me alone in my little rabbit hutch.’

Shazia hadn’t had an easy life. Her mother had died when she was a child and her father, while fulfilling her every material whim, had sexually abused her. After his death and despite Mumtaz’s best efforts, she’d also had to suffer the trauma of having to move from their lovely family home to a tiny flat so that her father’s debts could be paid.

In his ignominious career as a gambler, Ahmet Hakim had got himself in hock to a local crime family. The Sheikhs did it all. Slum-landlording, money-laundering, illegal gambling, people-trafficking and blackmail. And when the need arose to give their errant clients the occasional reminder about money owed, the Sheikh family were not backwards in coming forwards. Naz Sheikh, the youngest member of the clan, hadn’t so much as flinched as he’d stabbed Ahmet Hakim to death in front of his wife on Wanstead Flats almost two years before.

‘I can’t believe my father still owes those people money,’ Shazia said. ‘They’re ripping you off!’

They were. The debt Ahmet Hakim had died for had been paid in full, with interest, when Mumtaz had sold their old house. But what Shazia didn’t know was that Mumtaz herself was in debt to the Sheikhs. When Naz Sheikh had killed Ahmet she’d seen him so clearly she would have easily been able to give his description to the police. But she hadn’t. Instead, she’d watched her husband bleed to death into the scrubby Wanstead Flats grass. And the Sheikhs knew why. She’d hated Ahmet. He’d made her life unbearable. Naz Sheikh had been her hero, and he knew it. He played on it. But no one else knew, especially not Shazia.

‘These people add interest payments onto interest payments,’ Mumtaz said. ‘As long as they say I owe them money, then I owe them money.’

‘That’s insane. You should stop paying them.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘You know why not, Shazia.’

They’d talked about this.

‘Because they’ll hurt us? Amma, if you told the police, if you told Lee—’

‘It wouldn’t get any better!’ Mumtaz was yelling now. She didn’t like to yell. She made a conscious effort to slow her breathing. ‘Just leave it to me, Shazia. Leave it to me.’

Naz Sheikh, her one-time hero, had her. The deal – pay up or Shazia gets told her precious amma had a hand in killing her own father – was unbreakable. Even though the girl had suffered so badly at her father’s hands he had still been her abba. Shazia would never forgive her. She would never get over it.

Mumtaz changed the subject. ‘Lee wants us to feed Chronus tomorrow,’ she said. ‘He’s away for the weekend.’

‘With a girlfriend?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t ask.’

Mumtaz walked towards Shazia’s bedroom door.

‘You know you’re forcing him to look elsewhere because you won’t acknowledge what’s happening,’ Shazia said.

The girl had some notion that Lee Arnold had romantic feelings for her. It was absurd.

‘Don’t be silly, Shazia. I’ve told you about romanticising.’

‘What, because he’s a white man? What does that mean, Amma? My father, the one who got us into this mess in the first place, was a Bangladeshi Muslim, and look how well he turned out. Eh? God, you’re so thick sometimes. Love is rare and you should never just ignore it. I know that and I’m only a kid.’

Mumtaz dismissed her with a wave of her hand. Then she went back into the kitchen and put the radio on.

Lee Arnold had not been the sort of kid who willingly read Enid Blyton books. In fact, any sort of book was a rarity in his parental home and his older brother usually used those that did get in as missiles. But he did get exposed to the Famous Five and the Secret Seven at school.

In an age of Glam Rock and skinheads, the characters had seemed like beings from another planet. All picnics and affectionate dogs, kids like George and Julian never said ‘fuck’ and certainly never got smacked by their alcoholic dad. Custom House was then one of the poorest parts of the London Borough of Newham. With the Royal Docks dying around them, none of the locals could afford holidays to Dorset or anywhere else. Lee and his brother Roy were lucky to get a day out to Southend-on-Sea and a hotdog while their father got pissed in a seafront pub.

Now he was in Blyton land, and it was weird.

Venus had booked him into a country pub, the Flowerpot, at a place just outside Henley-on-Thames called Remenham. He’d ar. . .