A Private Business (23 page)

It was really too early for Bob “the Builder” Singleton, but Lee couldn't bring himself to even start to get angry. Some figure had been seen in Maria Peters' garden in the early hours of the morning and his brother Roy had rocked up at his mother's house again. Lee had bigger fish than Bob to fry.

Lee paid for his fags and then pulled Bob out of the newsagent's after him. Wearily he said, “Bob, do you or do you not bang many tired old toms on a regular basis?”

Bob's face went red. Lee lit up a fag. “You do.”

“Yeah, but my Trace—”

“You and your Tracey have both screwed around for years,” Lee said. “But some of the tarts you go with, Bob, as you know, fuck for Britain. They've had most creatures living or dead and as you've got older, mate, you've stopped worrying about safe sex, haven't you?” Bob looked as if he might explode. “So Tracey knows who all your tarts are now and so does her Prideep. He don't want a dose of the
clap or worse and neither does your missus. Tell you what is a scandal though and that's that you still owe me money.”

“You never found no evidence of industrial espionage!” Bob protested.

Two men in shalwar trousers and old Murderer Noakes on his mobility scooter enjoyed the escalating yelling between two well-known local characters.

“That's because there weren't any!” Lee shouted. “The reason you were and are losing business, Bob, is because you're shit. I gave you the truth, and that is either stop wrecking people's fucking roofs and their conservatories or go and do something else! Nobody is nicking your business. You're undermining yourself.”

For a moment Bob, who could usually handle himself in a fight, looked as if he might take a pop at Lee, but then he appeared to change his mind.

“Just fuck off and get me my fucking money,” Lee said. Then he walked away from Bob. Everyone looking on knew that not only did Lee Arnold have the moral high ground, he was also more than just handy in a scrap. Lee Arnold could half kill a man, as he'd demonstrated on several occasions.

Back in the office, Lee steeled himself to speak to his mother. Before he did that though he briefed Amy on the phone about an errant-husband job he'd got for her in Leytonstone. The Arnold Agency didn't usually do honeytrap work, but Lee needed the money and so did Amy.
The Prime Minister could bang on as much as he liked about reintroducing morals to “broken Britain” but while the recession was on people were going to carry on boozing, drugging and shagging their way out of their misery and there was nothing anyone could do about it. Two weeks of Olympic “glory” in 2012 certainly was not the answer.

As soon as he'd finished with Amy, there was a buzz at the door and Lee got up to answer it. Doing everything himself was like being back in the bad old pre-Mumtaz days. “Yeah?”

“Lee, it's Tony Bracci.” Vi's DS. “Let us in.”

Lee pressed the button to unlock the door and Tony Bracci walked in. They'd only really been drinking pals when Lee had worked at Forest Gate police station and after he'd given up the booze and then left the force they'd just had the odd phone conversation or two. So they greeted each other as ex-colleagues and not as mates. It was cordial but Lee knew that Tony Bracci wouldn't come to see him without a good reason and so he was glad when the DS got straight to the point.

“We've got a situation with some black happy-clappy churches,” he said.

Lee nodded. “Kid got knifed.”

“Jacob Sitole, he belonged to a church called the Bethel Revival. He was spiked by a kid called Matthias Chibanda who went to another happy-clappy place called Peace in
Jesus. Both down by the Olympic site. You had Neil West down there a few months ago, didn't you, at the Pentecostal Fire place.”

“Toasting crumpets, yeah.” Lee laughed. “But seriously, that's a mainly white set-up. We never got involved or even close to any of the black organizations.”

“Your Mrs. Hakim's still working with the well-known comedian who is, I believe, a little bit fond of a bit of Pentecostal Fire from time to time,” Tony said.

Vi had to have told him. But then, Lee thought,
fair dos
, DI Collins hadn't had to go and babysit Mumtaz's stepdaughter. She generally had far better things to do with her evenings. But she'd agreed to it and Lee, without doubt, owed her.

“Can't give you any details, Tone,” Lee said.

“Ditto, mate,” Tony said. “But, Lee, what I can tell you is that we've been looking into the finances of these churches and we've found a connection between Pastor Iekanjika's Peace in Jesus church and Paul Grint's Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire.”

“A connection?”

“The Pentecostalists rent their new Canning Town church, what used to be a pub, from Iekanjika. Bit of a rough old building. In need of TLC, I'd say.”

Lee shrugged. “Yeah?”

Tony Bracci smiled. Then he delivered the punch line. “For seven grand a month!”

“Fucking hell!”

“Lodged as IOUs, official IOUs, with Iekanjika's bank.”

“So Grint can't just welsh on it?”

“Not easily. But Pastor Iekanjika won't talk to us because he says he doesn't recognize ‘secular authority.' The kid that killed Jacob Sitole, Matthias Chibanda, one of Iekanjika's parishioners won't talk to anyone and looks shit scared, particularly of Iekanjika. Now I don't think that it's just DI Collins and myself who smell the faint honk of possible financial shenanigans but I think it might be helpful to both of us if your Mrs. Hakim watches more than the famous comedian.”

“Watches the church?”

Tony shrugged. “No pressure.”

“But …”

“But I'm sure I don't have to tell you, Lee, that almost anyone can set up a church in this country. And, under EU human rights legislation, they can do some things that may or may not make sense to the likes of us. The DI received some intel that the Sitole murder could be an African witchcraft affair, but to be truthful there's no actual evidence to support that. All we've got is this weird little bit of finance stuff which might mean something, might mean nothing.”

“But you have to tread carefully,” Lee said.

“We all have to do that,” Tony said. “We live in strange
times, Lee. Times some, like the happy-clappies, would say prefigure the end of the world.”

Lee Arnold laughed. “You do talk a load of shit sometimes, Tone!”

Something very strange and also alarming was going on in the house next door. The older Paki woman seemed to have moved out and had left the girl in the care of that bitch DI Violet Collins. Why? Martin Gold racked his brains to try and remember exactly what he'd said to the girl on Sunday. He hadn't threatened her, had he? He'd been a bit suggestive about what he may or may not know about her Thursday afternoon activities, but then if she'd had nothing to hide then she would have had nothing to fear, would she?

Martin couldn't believe that she'd gone to the police. What with, for God's sake? As far as he knew the young girl didn't know anything about his past. That said, he did remember noticing at the time that she hadn't looked exactly happy when he'd first spoken to her. He watched the girl leave for school and then Vi Collins get in her car to go to the station. She didn't look up at his house at all, but that didn't mean anything much. Ever since he'd got out of Wormwood Scrubs the coppers had wanted to somehow put him back in again. But Martin had been good and then he'd been clever. This was a pattern that he followed by turns and at the present time he was in
a “clever” phase. That was one of the few benefits of being what his mother had always called “nondescript.” Old Len Blatt had once said he looked a bit like ex-Prime Minister John Major, gray.

Mumtaz worked her way through the messages on her phone. One was from Lee who wanted to have a meeting at three, another was from a client thanking her for finally confirming that her husband was indeed being unfaithful. There was a resentful little “Good morning” from Shazia and then there was her mother.

“Mr. Choudhury and his son are coming to eat with us on Thursday night,” she said. “Your brothers are coming. Mr. Choudhury's son is just fifty and he has his own accountancy practice.”

Her mother was hopeless at even pretending to conceal her motives.

“You must come,” she continued. “And you can bring Shazia. Mr. Choudhury's son is most open-minded.”

Mumtaz sat down on Maria Peters' linen basket and wound a towel round her wet hair. The comedian's shower room was bigger than most people's main bathrooms, and it was also one of the few places in the house where Mumtaz could be alone. She hadn't told Maria about the figure she'd spotted in the garden the previous night. Maria was very needy and was having panic attacks every few hours and so to cause her further alarm seemed unwise, especially
in view of the fact that the person Mumtaz had seen in the garden could easily have just been a wandering kid. She looked down at her phone and resisted the urge to text back a bald “No” to her mother. But then her mother only just about knew how to answer her mobile phone. If she left a text her mother would have to involve her father in order to get it and that would open her up to conversations with both of them. Much as she loved her parents, Mumtaz most definitely didn't want that. Her father could bang on about her single status just as effectively and irritatingly as her mother. Mumtaz put the phone down, walked over to the sink and began to brush her teeth. She looked at her face in the bathroom cabinet mirror and decided that she could no longer really go out in public without make-up. Not that she ever actually did. But now, to Mumtaz's way of thinking, that wasn't even a viable choice. To her, her eyes looked heavy and washed out and her face was pale and she had a few spots on her cheeks. She didn't look old, she just looked worn out. A set of good cosmetics would help. Maria Peters, for all her distress and her age, always looked attractive and Mumtaz wondered what kind of cosmetics she used.

Brand names like Yves St. Laurent and Clarins came to mind and Mumtaz opened the bathroom cabinet to see if she could discover any cosmetic clues.

There was a slightly dusty Max Factor lipstick in a vibrant shade of pink but what the cabinet mostly contained,
what it had been designed to hold, was medicine. Loads of it. As well as the usual aspirin, paracetamol and aging sticking plasters there was a whole raft of products that contained codeine. One wet afternoon back in February, Lee had told Mumtaz how he'd once had a problem with codeine. He'd started taking it for a pain in his shoulder but when his wife had left him he'd found that it had helped him to sleep. DI Collins had, apparently, been instrumental in getting him off it. But Lee now hated the stuff and Maria Peters had enough of it to kill half the street.

But that wasn't all she had. There were boxes and boxes of the antidepressant fluoxetine. Mumtaz looked at the dosage and saw that it was high; twenty milligrams three times a day. At University she'd specialized in what they called “abnormal psychology” and so she knew quite a lot about psychiatric pharmacology. Amongst the fluoxetine boxes there were however also some loose strips of a drug called Ranflutin which made Mumtaz frown. Quite what that was she didn't know, but she made a mental note to look it up online. Then there was diazepam too. She knew exactly what that was; a tranquilizer that used to be known as Valium and it was in great big ten milligram tablet doses. Again it was loose. Unlike the fluoxetine, neither the Ranflutin or the diazepam appeared to have boxes that would allow her to check whether the tablets had actually been prescribed for Maria Peters or not. The fluoxetine had been prescribed by Mumtaz's own doctor on
Woodgrange Road and, although the dose was quite high, it was a reasonable response to the acute grief Maria was clearly still experiencing. But if one included all the other medication, this was a fearsome and potentially lethal pharmacy by anyone's standards.

“Betty.”

Maria hadn't been expecting her. It was barely eleven o'clock which, apart from Sundays, was early for Betty. In this instance it presented Maria with a bit of a dilemma too. Mumtaz was upstairs in the shower room and so theoretically she could come down at any minute. Maria had been told yet again, this time by Mumtaz herself, that the surveillance was to be kept from everyone—and that included her mother. Everyone had to be treated with caution and some suspicion. But Betty was her oldest friend.

The best thing to do was just to get it over with. Maria took Betty into the living room and said, “I've got something to tell you.”

Betty, concerned, said, “Nothing horrible I hope.” She sat down.

Maria took a deep breath. “I've been having … trouble again,” she said. “In the house. Things …” she coughed, “turning up.” She put her head down.

Betty stood, went over to Maria and hugged her. “Oh, Marie,” she said. “You must call Pastor Grint immediately.”

“No—”

“Marie, this means you still have problems with sin. Paul can help you.”

“I didn't mean to tell you, let alone …”

They sat down side by side on the sofa, Betty's arms encircling Maria's shoulders.

“There were peacock feathers and … other things, just appeared,” Maria continued. “Bet, I don't know if I'm going mad or what. I would never have put things like that in this house.”

“Because they're unlucky? But they're not really, are they, Marie,” Betty said. “That's just silly old superstition, isn't it?”

“Maybe. But how did they get in here? They just appeared.”

Betty looked away as if she was nervous about what she was going to say next. “Marie … You know I worry about you. You know I feel that, whatever this is, what you need is to testify and take Deliverance … You may have been doing these things yourself, guided by Jesus, but maybe you're not. Maybe Jesus is forcing the issue.”