A Private Business (29 page)

If she looked for long enough at the cats in the fireplace, she could make them disappear. Had Mumtaz still been in her life, she would no doubt have been able to explain that scientifically. But Mumtaz was not in her life because Mumtaz had betrayed her. She'd watched what went on in church and no doubt mocked and she'd managed to prevent her from testifying and accepting Deliverance. That moment of clarity and grace she'd felt on that evening, now almost three months ago, had disappeared never to return. Maria despaired that it ever would. She put a pill on her tongue while Betty was out of the room and swallowed it.

Betty knew that she had to take medication; sometimes she went and got it from the chemist for her. Sometimes she even gave her some of her own pills when she was in danger of running out.

“Would you like a cup of tea?”

Maria jumped. She hadn't heard Betty come in from the kitchen. “No. Thanks.”

There was a look on her friend's face that could have been pity but then she smiled, said, “OK,” and went back into the kitchen. If Betty did pity her, then Maria could understand it. She was still outside God's grace, how could she not be pitied? And Betty didn't even know why.

Betty came back into the living room and Maria listened to her talk about “designated charities.” Every month, the church nominated a designated charity to give a proportion of its donations to. This month it was some organization to do with rehabilitating child soldiers in Africa, but Maria didn't really listen. Distracted by her own problems, she cut into Betty's explanation and said, “I'm going to ring Mr. Allitt. Could you get me the phone please, Bet?”

Betty looked at her questioningly, as well she might. The phone was on the coffee table, only a short stretch of the arm away. But everything ached and she felt sick and tired and she just didn't want to make any effort. Betty handed her the phone and then left the room. Maria dialed Mr. Allitt's number and instantly began to feel relieved.

* * *

It was Adele and Hilary! Shazia slumped down underneath her bedroom window and wondered what to do. The old man next door was in and so he'd know they were there. He'd guess she was in, even if he didn't know.

She heard Hilary call, “Zia, hon, where are you?”

They would have brought fags and enough of Hil's mum's fridge cake to sink a ship. Shazia bit her bottom lip. Now it was the school holidays they were always round. The landline rang and she knew that she was going to have to leave it. But she didn't want to ignore them! When they did finally catch up with her they'd want to know where she'd been and what she'd been doing. The phone continued to ring until the machine cut in. She heard Mumtaz's voice ask callers to leave a message and then a long beep.

Outside Adele yelled, “Oh, come on, Zi, shift your ass!”

Shazia heard someone on the other end of the phone take a deep breath and instantly she knew it was
him
. “Oh, Mrs. Hakim, this is most respectfully Mr. Aziz Choudhury.” He took another vaguely asthmatic breath. Shazia pulled a face. He sounded like some sort of comedy Paki, this man her stepmother's parents wanted so much for Amma to like! “I would be very grateful if you could call me at your earliest convenience. Thank you.”

As well as talking like a comedy Paki, Aziz Choudhury was completely hideous and old and wore horrible, stinking shalwar kameez. Ugh. Shazia didn't want a man in the house with them, not ever again.

“Zi!”

They weren't going away. Shazia looked out of the side window at the house next door and then, keeping low so that she couldn't be seen, she ran to Amma's bedroom at the back. Being careful to remain down and out of sight, she looked out into the back garden just in time to see the old man slip through the hole in the hedge and hide himself amongst the plum trees. What was she going to do? She felt her eyes tear up but quickly wiped them away with her sleeve. She'd already hidden from her friends once that week. If she denied them again they'd really make her life crap. As for the old man, well who knew what he'd do?

He walked along beside her, making them look like a couple, smiling his lime-white smile. Through a mixture of guilty desire and absolute disgust Mumtaz made herself look up at him. Then she said, “I don't know what you want with me. I don't know why you killed Ahmed, but you must realize by now that I'm not going to give you to the police.”

“Why not?”

“That's my business,” she said. “Go away.”

It was the first time he had ever spoken to her and his voice was very deep and very posh British-sounding for an Asian boy of his age.

They were just turning out of Windsor Road and into Claremont and she was beginning to suspect that he might be walking her home. She didn't understand why and she didn't want it. “My stepdaughter will be in,” she said. “I don't want her seeing you. Whatever the … You killed her father. Please go.”

For just a second his eyes flickered in a way that could
have signaled some sort of conscience. But then he smiled again and she knew that really he was a reptile—a coldblooded silver lizard.

“I will not expose you and I am grateful, but you also disgust me,” she said. She began to walk faster, but he lengthened his stride just a little and very quickly caught up with her.

She hadn't seen him for almost two months. His appearance, seemingly waiting for her outside the police station, had come as a shock. She'd just walked past, avoiding eye contact as she did so, but he'd followed her. She didn't know why any more than she knew why he'd lurked outside her house in the past. Surely he had to be afraid she'd call the police even if she said that she wouldn't? Now she was almost home and she wondered what he would do. Head down, she powered forward. Intent upon just getting away from him and into her own house, she didn't notice the thin, elderly man walk out in front of her.

“Oh, I'm so—”

Flustered, she looked up at him. “I'm sorry, I …” He was old, thin and white and she recognized him.

“No, no, no,” he said. “It's my fault, I wasn't looking where I was going.”

He smiled. He was the solicitor who worked near to her office on Green Street—the one she'd seen at Maria Peters' church. Mumtaz looked up and, suddenly aware of her
surroundings, saw that he'd just come out of Maria's house.

“Are you all right?” She'd made him stumble slightly.

“Oh, it's nothing, my dear,” he said. “Nothing at all. Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes, I …”

“Well, that's jolly good then.” He smiled again and then walked, large briefcase in his hand, to a Bentley that was parked across the road.

Once the solicitor had gone, Mumtaz looked around for
him
. But he'd gone. Feeling grateful for that, if nothing else, she put her hand on her chest and then stood still for a moment while she caught her breath. Then just for the smallest of seconds she looked at Maria Peters' house and saw a thin, white face that could have been the comedian looking back at her.

His dad had called it ligging—turning up in a pub with no money and expecting to be bought drinks. But he was skint. Bob the Builder still owed him a ton, but no one seemed to know where he was. Depressed, Lee tried to kid himself that because he didn't drink booze his ligging wasn't “real.” But it was and when the old men, his dad's old mates, who usually haunted the outer reaches of the Boleyn had gone, Lee was left alone with a pint of ligged diet Coke, the bar staff and a load of strangers. He looked around, half hoping and half dreading seeing Roy. But his brother was nowhere—unlike what looked like a random
selection of Newham's indigenous white tribes who sat and drank and flirted, laughed and sometimes shouted. Contained in the pub they were, Lee thought, a bit like a band of well fed refugees. Many of them, and that included his mother and his brother, saw themselves very much as an endangered minority. For some reason the coming of the Hindus and the Sikhs back in the sixties had gone on almost without comment. But first the Pakis and then the eastern Europeans had struck some sort of nerve with the locals that Lee didn't entirely understand. In a sense he could see that some of the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis kept themselves to themselves but then so had some of the Sikhs and the Hindus. As for the eastern Europeans, many of the Jews who still lived in the borough had come originally from places like Poland and they were just part of the community.

That said, and as old Reverend Murkoff the rabbi once told Lee, “Trouble is, son, a lot of these Poles and Lithuanians have anti-Semitism stamped through them like Southend rock. Some of their ancestors worked in the camps during the war.”

That something that had happened such a long time ago was still having an effect upon the present was both understandable and horrendous at the same time. It made Lee feel bleak and he knew that had he actually had any money he may well have bought a pint.

“On your own?”

He didn't recognize the girl at all. He saw a curtain of straightened blond hair, a face and shoulders unusually brown for an English summer and he smelt a very strong waft of perfume. “Hello.”

Lee Arnold didn't need some young Essex girl to come on to him to confirm that he was attractive to women. But he looked at her with a slightly crooked half smile and asked her her name.

Her laugh was pleasantly deep and throaty even if her make-up was thickly appalling. She said, “I'm Foxy.”

“Are you now.” If she came from Romford or Basildon or Southend-on-Sea that was probably her real name. “And what can I do for you, Foxy?”

“A WKD and Coke?”

He laughed. Somewhere at the bottom of his left-hand jacket pocket there was a twenty pence piece. “And if I can't buy you a drink?” he asked. “What then?”

He knew how avaricious girls of her age were. He was prepared for the abuse, the imagined slight she would make to his manhood. But strangely Foxy just kept on smiling.

Back at the flat Chronus went into a frenzy of excitement when Lee walked in with a visitor.

“Bobby Moore!” he shouted. “Geoff Hurst! Bobby Moore! Trevor Brooking!”

Lee and Foxy took their clothes off in the living room and then went to the bedroom and shut the door on the
bird's endless yelling. After almost a year without sex, Lee was both happy and grateful that Foxy was an enthusiastic and proficient young lady. His phone rang once just as he was about to come and so he threw it across the room, much to Foxy's delight. It was only later, when the girl was on top of him, that Lee wondered if the call might have been from Mumtaz. And although it was a thought that didn't cool his ardor in any way it was distracting because from then on he could only continue if he closed his eyes and completely cut himself off from the girl having sex with him.

“I was just passing,” Vi Collins said.

Mumtaz knew that was probably a lie, but she was still glad to see her. Shazia had gone to bed early and she was lonely. “Come in.”

Vi put the mobile phone she'd just attempted to call Lee Arnold on back in her bag and went inside. She'd actually fancied a shag if he'd been up for it, but obviously he wasn't.

Mumtaz led Vi into her living room and the two women sat down. “So finally the one Zimbabwean boy who killed the other has explained what happened,” she said. “That must be a relief to you and to the victim's family. All over a mobile phone.”

“Mmm.”

“Sign of the times.”

Vi could have said that she didn't believe Matthias Chibanda but she didn't. In all probability his version of events that night would be accepted by whichever jury tried him and what she still believed would be lost forever in one boy's fear. Or maybe she was just so anti-religion she couldn't bring herself to believe that the happy-clappy churches were not involved in one way or another. Or perhaps it was because all these churches seemed to have so much money?

“Tea?”

Vi looked up. “Oh, er, yes, ta, Mumtaz. Lovely.”

Mumtaz went into the kitchen and put the kettle on. She was, Vi sensed, a little tense.

“Shazia's gone to bed,” she heard her say from the kitchen.

It seemed very early for the girl to have gone to bed but there it was. Vi was actually rather more distracted by a slight musty smell that she'd never noticed in Mumtaz's house before. Big Forest Gate gaffs like this one often had cellars which could get damp. Maybe it was that? Vi didn't really care. For the first time in ages she'd wanted some comfort sex, with a man as opposed to a boy, with a mate and not a stranger. She'd wanted Lee Arnold. But she couldn't have him. And so instead she talked about not much at all to a woman whose head was covered with a scarf because of her religion.

Only as Vi was leaving did Mumtaz's tension seem to
lift. Vi was at the front door when she said, “I saw Maria Peters today. At least I think so. She was staring out of her living room window and she looked awful. She had a solicitor at the house with her.”

Vi sighed. “Up to her who she sees and why, love,” she said. “I know she's unfinished business for you …”

“Those church people are with her all the time now. I see them coming and going. Whatever they're doing, her health seems to be suffering. I'm sure she's ill.”

“Possibly.” Vi put a hand on Mumtaz's shoulder. “But we're not doctors. Unless she commits some sort of offense or makes a complaint against someone there's nothing I can do.”

Betty didn't seem to see the shoebox at all. But then Maria didn't bring it to her notice. Lurking in the corner by the television, stinking of death. Even when she wasn't alone, Maria couldn't clean in that corner any more. In comparison to the rest of the room that area looked unkempt and dirty.

Maria stared at the box. Clarks. Her mum had always taken them to Clarks, in Ilford, to buy their school shoes. They'd all hated going, Maria and her two sisters, Ursula and Teresa. Urs had been particularly vocal about it, going on about how ugly the well-made but unfashionable shoes were. Now she was a nun and went about in shoes that made Clarks' school range look like Jimmy Choos. Maria
hadn't seen either Ursula or Teresa, who had a ton of kids and lived in Edinburgh, since Len's funeral. She'd chosen a Clarks box because it had been all that she had and because, down on the mud of the river, it was what people did. Now it was all coming back because what goes around comes around. You couldn't have the charmed life she'd had in recent times and not expect to pay a price for it. Pastor Grint was right; she couldn't be at peace with Jesus until she'd properly admitted her sins and she couldn't do that. She took some codeine.