A Private Business (3 page)

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 characterized by multiple occupation. The twenty-first century, however, had seen Forest Gate reemerge 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 even in her few months with the agency, was one that, if answered, often bore fruit. Often the watcher, the stalker, the sender of spiteful e-mails and letters was exactly who the client feared it was.

“Maria's best guess is it's some nut-job fan,” Lee said. “She was dead pretty when she was young and that combination of a lovely face and a foul mouth was potent. Men used to chuck themselves at her.”

“She's an attractive woman now.”

“Exactly, so now she's back on the circuit she fears that some of her old fans may have reemerged. She even gave
me a couple of names, but I've already discovered that one of them's dead. The others are old men.” He shrugged. “I doubt that's a goer.”

“Why?”

“Whoever is stalking Maria is managing to evade the CCTV outside her house and her alarms,” he said. “I may be wrong but I don't see some sixty-something obsessive fan being able to do that. What do you think, Mumtaz?”

Mumtaz thought about her short conversation with Maria Peters and found it to contain nothing of interest. But then she thought about how her eyes had looked as she had waited for Lee to return. In light of that she said, “She's probably hiding something from you, Mr. Arnold.”

It was as the tide went out that the water made that special noise. When it flowed over old pieces of glass, it sounded like wind chimes crossed with the noise that glass makes when it breaks and falls onto a pavement. There was something both soothing and sinister about it. Whenever Maria heard it, it reminded her of Len. He had been just five years old when the Nazis broke all the windows belonging to Jews back in his native Germany. By the time he was seven, he and his parents had left the country forever. Len had stepped through the glass shards to an entirely different life. But now the tide was in and there was no tinkling, no stepping through glass. The stone steps known as Wapping Stairs were almost completely covered by gently lapping Thames water that, in the darkness, looked like a great channel of crude oil. Developers could put up as many swanky apartments on the side of the river as they liked, the Thames and its environs would always bear the scars of the ruin it had been back in Maria Peters' youth.

Most of Maria's family had worked either in or around the London Docks. Her dad had been a docker in the old Royal Group just south of Plaistow where they'd lived, while her mum had worked in the Tate and Lyle sugar factory at Silvertown. But her mum's parents had come from Wapping. Wapping Irish, the Fitzgerald family had made its living on the river as lightermen and also, long ago, as mudlarks. Maria had loved visiting her grandparents in Wapping. While her granddad drank pints of thick, black stout in the Town of Ramsgate at the head of Wapping Stairs, her grandmother had taken her and her sisters down on the mud to see what they could find. Clay pipes, fragments of Roman roof tiles, little shards of brightly colored and patterned pottery, nails from Elizabethan galleons. Once they had found something terrible. There were always dead rats but this horror had been beyond that—a tiny fetus in the remains of a cardboard box. Later Maria had learned that it was probably the product of an illegal abortion. Her grandmother had taken it to her priest for a decent burial and he'd blessed it, passed incense across its ruined face and placed a tiny holy medal in its hands. The past could be a malignant country but Maria always felt safe sitting atop Wapping Stairs. Down on the mud was another matter—the river was a law unto itself—but on the Stairs all was safe and dry and solid. The Stairs were stable in a way that the water, the mud and the sky, that shifted and moved, could never be.
Although it was dark now, Maria looked up, aiming her gaze above and beyond the ranks of brightly lit apartment windows on the southern shore. Once the site of abandoned, echoing warehouses, she wondered if the ghosts of old dockers still moved unseen amongst the chichi pot plants and the flat-screen televisions of the rich banker generation that inhabited these places. Nothing, as she knew only too well at fifty years old, ever really disappeared. All you had to do was look in the right place, pound on the right door and you were right back where you started.

Maybe it was this thought that made all the hair on the back of Maria's neck stand up. A shadow, just light and very fleeting, passed over her slightly bowed back and she turned quickly to see who or what it was. But there was nothing to see and Maria accepted the possibility that it was her own thoughts that had spooked her. But in spite of that she was still glad that she'd engaged Mr. Arnold's firm to watch her and her property. They were coming in at six the following morning to install cameras and microphones in the house, and someone would always be monitoring her from then onwards. It was going to be costly, but reassuring, even if the thought of it made her cringe. Maria had to know the truth, one way or another.

Back in the eighties, she'd attracted a lot of flack. Moral and religious groups didn't like her act and she was
actually banned by the BBC at one point—there had even been threats. All a long time ago now and she'd told Lee Arnold about them. Not that they were relevant any more. Her act was different, or rather it was
getting
that way. Five months before, in some pub in New Cross, Alan had insisted that she use
all
the old stuff modified for a modern audience. And, although the crowd had howled with laughter, it had been tough. Too tough for her, and she'd collapsed. Afterward, Alan had issued an ultimatum. “Get fucking smutty, give in to your cruelty, or get another fucking manager!”

Maria looked at the water, the sky and the Stairs once again and knew that even in this, one of her favorite places, she was still trapped. She was trapped all the time, whatever she did, wherever she went. She took a tranquilizer tablet with no water and then walked back to her car and drove home.

“Up the 'ammers!”

Lee closed his front door, put his keys on the telephone table and stared the chattering mynah bird in the eyes. “Who's the patron saint of West Ham, Chronus?”

“Bobby Moore! Bobby Moore!”

Lee took a packet of bird seed out of one pocket and a tin of oven cleaner out of the other. He went over to where the bird sat on a perch connected to a feeding hopper and poured some seed for him. Chronus dipped his head
into the hopper to feed while Lee rubbed his blue black back. Then, as quickly as he'd started, he stopped and said, “That oven won't clean itself.”

The bird continued to feed while Lee went into the kitchen and began to remove all the racks from inside his electric oven. Had Chronus been able to apprehend such things, he would have wondered why Lee was again cleaning an oven he'd scrubbed only seven days before. Lee walked from the kitchen to his bedroom where he changed into a tatty pair of jogging bottoms and an old paint-spattered T-shirt. He then sprayed the empty oven with the cleaner and went into the living room to watch the television. The whole flat reeked of the harsh, comforting smell of ammonia.

The news was on and it was full of the sodding Olympics. Not quite eighteen months away, London 2012 was joyfully dominating much of the news while, in reality, making life for people who either lived near the site or wanted to move through it, difficult. Every day, or so it seemed, public routes around the site changed, and with winter still coldly entrenched, bringing with it mists from the river as well as concentrating the pollution from cars and factories, a hint of old London smog could now be discerned over the city from time to time. Around the still only partly formed Olympic site this lent an even more diffuse quality to the light. Lee didn't know from one day to the next how to drive around there. It was a
good job that Maria Peters, who apparently attended a church just beyond the site up at Hackney Wick, was well accustomed to such things. Lee or Neil West, the freelancer he'd engaged to work with him on the case, were going to have to follow her. It was a bit weird to think about Maria Peters in church. Her act had always taken the piss out of religion and Lee wondered if she'd “found” God. The most unlikely people seemed to.