A Private Business (2 page)

“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 toward 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 percent 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 recognize 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 percent 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 behavior 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 marvelous 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.”