A Private Business (24 page)

Exorcism. The casting out of demons by bell, book and candle. Paul Grint would gladly do it. But how could she let him? Exorcism only worked if the source of some evil was exposed for all the world to see, and that couldn't happen. She wasn't ready. But did God or Jesus really care
about that? No, they just wanted her soul. The Rapture was coming.

Maria, unable to think about it, changed the subject. “I've engaged a private detective again,” she said. “A lady, from the same agency that I was with before.”

Betty frowned.

“I can't be alone, Bet.” Maria stood up and then paced once around the sofa. “Maybe I don't know what I'm doing.”

“God does,” Betty said. “You shouldn't have gone back to those people, Marie, there's nothing they can do.”

“They can watch and tell me if I'm doing things to myself, going mad,” Maria said.

“You should trust Paul. You should ask him to come, and put it all into his hands.” Betty was angry.

Maria said, “I may be sick, Bet.”

“Well, have you been back to the doctor?”

“I have but what can he do?” She sat down again.

“He gave you pills?”

“Yes, but I've got pills coming at me from every direction. I need help.”

“But what can this lady do?”

“She's staying with me,” Maria said. “Monitoring what happens, what I do.”

Betty was quiet for a few moments, then she said, “Marie, why didn't you get me or someone else from the church to come and be with you when this first happened? I imagine you're paying this lady—”

“Bet, money isn't a problem!” Maria said.

“No.”

“I don't want to burden you with this. I don't want to burden anyone.” Maria wiped her hands down her face. “If I'm just going crazy …”

“You're not going crazy, you just need—”

“Need what? Deliverance?” Maria shook her head. “I can't do that, Bet!”

“Because you don't truly believe in the unseen? In demons? In the corrosion of sins unrepented? How can you not believe in evil if you do believe in Christ?”

“I do believe in evil and all that, it's just … I don't know. Some of it just doesn't make sense to me.”

Maria's eyes were full of tears now and, from her hiding place just outside the living room door, Mumtaz heard her reiterate, “Doesn't make sense.”

“But Marie, if you talked to me then I would be able to help you,” Betty said. “Or Pastor Grint. There's a terrible sorrow in you, Marie. I don't know what it is, but Jesus does and I think he's trying to get through to you …”

“No!” Maria sat down again and repeated, “No.”

Mumtaz heard her breathing hard as she clearly tried to calm herself. Then she heard her say, “I'm sorry, Bet, I'll have to go and get something.”

As she moved toward the door, Mumtaz ran upstairs and went to her room. Not that hiding herself from this Betty mattered, the woman knew she was installed in the
house now. But she didn't want either of them to know that she'd been listening in on their conversation.

Mumtaz saw Maria go into her shower room and then come out again almost immediately. When she'd gone back downstairs, Mumtaz went into the shower room and saw a strip of diazepam pills on the side of the sink. One tablet was missing.

“Traffic warden,” Vi said as she flicked the ash from her cigarette out of the car window.

“Nah.”

She turned to face Tony Bracci. “Why not?”

“Traffic wardens are hated but it ain't necessarily boring, is it, guv?”

They were on surveillance across the road from Pastor Iekanjika's house in Silvertown. A bog-standard Edwardian terrace, it backed onto the City Airport and so every few minutes they had to put up with noises from jets heading off to Paris and Amsterdam. They were playing a game they often played which was called “What jobs are more boring than surveillance?”

“I don't know,” Vi said. “Not sure I could walk about all day looking at car windscreens.”

“Hated by millions.” Tony picked his nose and stuck the bogey on the roof of the car. He always did this. Vi had long ago become sick of telling him to stop it. “What about magicians?”

Vi turned to look at him and said, “Magicians?” Tony Bracci had an odd mind.

“Yeah, like Paul Daniels,” Tony said. “I can't stand Paul Daniels, he's an annoying little shit. And then there's that American wanker. David something. The one in the plastic box over the South Bank.”

“David Blaine.”

“That's him. People were throwing burger buns at him. Tosser. That had to have been boring, sitting up in that box all day and night.”

A battered old Renault 5 pulled up two cars in front of them and the Reverend Manyika got out. Vi shuffled down a bit in her seat. “Now that, I didn't expect,” she said.

“None of these holy Joes are all sweetness and light,” Tony said.

“I never said Manyika was.” Vi waited until a white woman had admitted Manyika into Iekanjika's house and the door had closed behind him, then she said, “I'm going in.”

Tony Bracci shrugged. “Leave me here like Nobby No Mates …”

“Venus himself ordered this obbo, Tone,” Vi said. “Let's not fuck it up by stomping around in our size twelves, shall we?”

Vi got out of the car and knocked on the front door of the house directly opposite Iekanjika's. A Constable Moss let her in. She nodded briefly to the elderly owner of the
house and then followed Moss upstairs to the front bedroom. Two DCs, Tim Holland and Gazi Hussein, were in situ. Tom monitoring the house through a long-lens camera, Gazi listening in. Iekanjika's house had been wired for sound the previous evening when the pastor and his family had been out at a prayer meeting.

Vi murmured, “Cozy,” as she looked around a bedroom that had probably last been decorated in 1968. The swirling psychedelic wallpaper was faded but it was, unfortunately, still all too recognizable. It wasn't unlike the bedroom Vi had shared with her sisters back in the early sixties.

Gazi Hussein, listening in through headphones via his laptop said, “Ah, crap.”

Vi and Tim Holland looked at him. Gazi pulled one earpiece to one side and said, “Talking in their own language, guv.”

Vi raised her eyebrows. “But you're recording.”

“Oh, yeah,” Gazi said. “And when Manyika first went in they spoke in English.”

“Anything I need to know about?” Vi asked.

“Pleasantries aside, Manyika was a bit lairy, ma'am,” Gazi said. “A bit exercised.”

“About?”

“Before he went off into their own language he asked Iekanjika what kind of Christian allows killing. Iekanjika replied that Manyika was talking rubbish.”

Vi sat down on a candlewick bedspread that was
definitely older than she was. “So Manyika knows or suspects that Iekanjika is involved in a death of some sort then,” Vi said. “How do we get him to share that intel?”

“Ah! Speaking English again.” Gazi listened intently while Vi and Tim Holland looked on.

Gazi frowned.

“What is it?” Vi asked. “What they saying?”

“Iekanjika just said that if Manyika doesn't drop it then Harare will suddenly get a lot closer,” he said.

“I thought they were both supposed to be refugees from Mugabe's regime,” Holland said.

Vi narrowed her eyes. “Maybe only one of them is,” she said.

Mumtaz had just laid out a small sample of the medication she'd managed to take from Maria Peters' medicine cabinet on Lee's desk when her phone began to ring. Thinking it was probably Maria, she answered it without looking.

“Your father would be very grateful and pleased if you would come and have dinner with us on Thursday night,” her mother said. “Did you get my message? I said that you could bring Shazia.”

Mumtaz looked pleadingly across at Lee and said, “My mother.”

“So take it,” he smiled.

Mumtaz turned aside while Lee riffled through the pills
on his desk. She spoke to her mother in Bengali. “Amma, I am at work.”

“But Mumtaz, I have to know for the catering,” Sumita said. “With you and the girl we will be eight, without, six. I need to know. Mr. Choudhury and his son—”

“I know full well that Mr. Choudhury and his son, who is an accountant, are coming and I do know why, Amma.”

“Because Mr. Choudhury is your father's friend.”

“Yes, well, you just keep on telling yourself that,” Mumtaz said in English.

“What?”

“Amma, I have to work on Thursday night,” Mumtaz said, back in Bengali once again. “It's just not possible.”

“Working at night? What are you doing working at night? What's happening to Shazia while you work at night?”

Mumtaz sighed. “Amma, we have a big job on. I have to watch someone, a lady. This lady could be in danger.” And then remembering just how nervous her mother could be she said, “But you don't have anything to fear on my account, I am just watching, I am perfectly safe.”

“And …”

“Shazia is being looked after by a friend. A nice woman.” She didn't add that Vi was not only not Muslim but clearly not anything. That would have been way too much. “Amma, you know I need the money. Please don't be difficult about this.”

“But Abba—”

“And Abba can stop trying to marry me off too,” Mumtaz said. She felt her face go hot and red. “Amma, I don't want to be married off to anyone. Not Mr. Choudhury's son, not that Pakistani dragon man from the television, not even Imran Khan.”

Mumtaz ended the call. Lee looked at her quizzically for a moment but he didn't ask her anything about her conversation. Hands amongst the tablets, he said, “So Miss Peters takes a lot of medication.”

Mumtaz, still a little wound up, said, “I saw her take ten milligrams of diazepam and it barely affected her. I assume that she is taking the sixty milligrams of fluoxetine that her doctor has prescribed for her but I don't know about the Ranflutin—which incidentally is the same as fluoxetine, I looked it up—or the codeine meds.”

“You asked her about it?”

“No.”

“Mmm. She doesn't present as drugged up,” Lee said. But then neither had he all those years ago. Not until it got really bad.

“If the diazepam incident is anything to go by then she has built up tolerance,” Mumtaz said. “Ten mils is a lot and she just carried on as normal. But Lee, any of these drugs, or the interactions between them, may explain some of her experiences. They can make you forget things you've done, make you fearful, they can even induce hallucinations.”

“And yet you saw an actual figure in her garden last night.”

“There were lots of kids out last night, I heard them,” she said. “It could have been one of those.” She shrugged. “But then maybe it wasn't. If Maria is, in effect, stalking herself then she is doing it in a way that has to be increasing her drug dependence. Those peacock feathers had her in bits.”

“What's she doing now?”

“Her friend Betty is with her,” Mumtaz said. “They're baking.” She shook her head. “One of the first things Maria did when Betty arrived this morning was to tell her about me.”

Lee raised his eyes to the ceiling. “Christ.”

“Betty felt that Maria would have been better served having someone from the church, preferably Pastor Grint, to be with her. I think they, the church, feel that all Maria needs is exorcism.”

Lee put his head in his hands. “They would.”

“But she was very against that, Lee,” Mumtaz said. “And I was surprised. For a woman who is as religious as she is, who has given up her career for this religion, well, it is odd.”

Lee looked at her. He knew little about Islam but he did know that some of their beliefs were kind of parallel to some Christian traditions. He wanted to formulate some sort of question that was not either stupid or offensive, but she beat him to it.

“It's like me covering my head and yet at the same time eating pork,” she said. “It's strange. It doesn't make sense.”

“You think maybe she's a hypocrite?”

“I don't know, I don't think so. I think she's sincere. But she's also afraid.”

“Obviously.”

“No, not just of whatever or whoever she believes is watching her, but of something else too,” Mumtaz said.

“Like?”

“I don't know.” She shrugged. “But all the medication … She's damping her grief down, I know, but what else? You know, Lee, the fact that fluoxetine and Ranflutin are the same thing makes me uneasy. Why have Ranflutin if she has fluoxetine, and why all that possibly unprescribed diazepam too?”

“She could have the boxes they come from elsewhere or she could have thrown them away.”

“True. But the fact remains, Lee, that Maria has a huge amount of medication in her house and I heard her say herself that she gets it from ‘all directions.' To me, that means not just the doctor, and I am going to have to ask her about it. If she is, in effect, frightening and haunting herself then she has to know that. And if someone who isn't a doctor is supplying her with extra medication then we need to know who that is.”

Lee shook his head. “You know I took you on, in part, because of your psychology background. These meds are
of interest but I wouldn't ask her about them just yet. I'd keep that in reserve,” he said. “This client seems to be turning you into some sort of therapist.”

Mumtaz didn't reply. Had she done so, he would have been able to see the really quite unseemly delight she was taking in her new role. After all, while she was thinking about Maria she wasn't thinking about herself—or anything else.

Lee cleared his throat. “Anyway,” he said, “that to one side for a moment, I've been asked by DI Collins to ask you to keep your ear to the ground with regard to the Chapel of the Holy Pentecostal Fire.”