A Private Business (32 page)

“I heard him talking to that black geezer.”

“What black geezer?”

“Some black pastor. I don't know his name. Anyway, he owns the old pub and so Grint pays him money. Or rather he owes him. Like IOUs, you know.”

“So Grint pays rent to this black pastor, but he doesn't really.” Lee already knew this. Tony Bracci had told him that Grint put an IOU in the bank for a Pastor Iekanjika every month.

“Every month he gives the geezer an IOU for fucking thousands,” Roy said.

“OK. So what's your point?”

“What's my point? Because he's got a job coming along,” Roy said. “That's the point! That's the hooky bit. He knows he's gonna have money and so he keeps this black bloke hanging on with IOUs.”

“So how does he live?” Lee asked.

Roy shrugged. “I dunno. Out the collection plate? People don't half give generous at them services.”

“Not you.”

Roy shrugged again. “I'm the deserving poor. They have to try and save my soul, not empty me wallet.”

Lee leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “So what kind of job is Grint planning?”

“I dunno. He was done for fraud years ago. But who
knows? He told the black guy he was still up for the job and it was worth a mint. That's what I heard.”

“How did you come to hear them talking?” Lee asked. “What were you doing at a church?”

Roy helped himself to another of Lee's fags and then said, “When you beat me up and told me to fuck off I went where I usually go.”

“The hostel down Poplar.”

Roy smiled. “Couple of blokes there said you could get good tucker down some new church in Canning Town.”

Lee remembered the group meals the Pentecostal Fires had had when they were over by the Olympic site.

“I went down and it was true. All I had to do was wave me arms in the air and shout ‘Jesus!' every so often and the job was a good 'un. Most of 'em seemed to be bonkers, but I knew the name Paul Grint and he weren't backward in coming forward about his past. I figured that once a crim always a crim and so I hung about to see if I could find out what his game was.”

“And eat his food.”

“I had to be as near to sober as I ever want to get to do it,” Roy said with a scowl. “I'm fucking sober now. Credit where credit's due.”

“I still don't know how you came to hear them talking, or how you know I'd been involved with someone at the church …”

“People told me about your Paki lady dashing up the
aisle to go and help Maria Peters,” he said. “They ain't got no lives, none of 'em. Still banging on about it now.”

“You never let on you were my brother?”

“Why would I jeopardize tea, cake and the odd buffet just to drop you in the shit? Do you know what the food's like at the Seamen's Mission?”

Lee looked up at the ceiling. Clearly Roy knew something. “How'd you come to find out Grint's up to something?”

“Like I say, he was talking to the black bloke—”

“How come you were there?”

“It was last week. We were all washing up after a meal. You have to do that, it's part of their community fucking doo-dah. Anyway … Just outside the kitchen there's what used to be the old pub bogs. I thought Grint was going outside but then I heard him talking to someone. I put me head round the door and saw this big black fella.”

“Was anyone with you?”

“No. Out collecting plates and cups and that in the church.”

“So you were alone at the sink.”

“When they began to talk, I kept quiet,” Roy said. “That black geezer looked moody and so I thought I'd see what the score was.”

Roy was the sort of person who thought that anyone of Afro-Caribbean origin was automatically dodgy.

“They talked about all these IOUs Grint had outstanding
and how the black bloke wouldn't wait forever. Then Grint talked about the job and how it was coming along nicely. The black geezer said it had better had as he had need of it. Then Grint said that so did he. To use his exact words, he said, ‘I need to get out of here.' I need to get out of here! How about that?”

Paul Grint, as far as Lee knew, was having a new building done up in order to make a permanent church in Barking. Maybe he meant that?

“So if you thought that Grint was dodgy, why didn't you try and get some cash out of him? Some shut-up money?”

Roy looked offended. Lee knew it was an act. When he needed a drink he'd do just about anything to get money and that included blackmail.

“Oh, don't tell me you found a conscience!”

Roy, angry, leaned forward and said, “You wanna get me killed? There's faces up the Mission from up west who say Paul Grint was a bit tasty back in the day when he used to sell hooky houses to immigrants!”

“So you thought you'd tell me and get me to give you a bed?”

“Not forever.”

“Too fucking right it isn't!” Lee said. “And it doesn't give you any sort of intro back into Mum's life either. As soon as I get some cash you can have a few bob and then piss off on your way.”

Roy shuffled uncomfortably in his seat. “Nice.”

“Consider yourself lucky I haven't punched your nose off your face.”

Roy was a useless, selfish, vicious waste of time, whose information could be wrong or completely fabricated. But Lee did have an old girlfriend who lived with a bloke who worked for Barking council and he would give her a tug with regard to Grint's new church. It may or may not come to anything, and even if it did it wouldn't earn him any money. Roy had never helped Lee earn a penny in his life. Lee looked at his watch and wondered how Mumtaz was getting on and whether she'd be back in time to see her new client at three.

Everything had gone. The Clarks box, the filth that surrounded it, the blood on her hand. The TV was still on and she was watching some chat thing about people who suffer from sex addiction. It was as if she'd faded out of a nightmare and then faded back into life but it was fuzzy and diffuse. She was also thirsty and her head hurt.

Some time passed, Maria couldn't tell how much, and then the doorbell rang. She didn't want to answer it. What if it was just a parcel? Or Jehovah's Witnesses? Or somebody selling something? But then what if it wasn't? What if it was the solicitor or Betty? She stood up and immediately felt dizzy and sick. She sat down again. She looked
at her hand and couldn't believe it was so clean, so dry. Every small piece of evidence of the horror she'd experienced had just gone. The doorbell rang again and Maria put a hand over her mouth to stifle a scream. What was she going to do? She stood up again and then looked back at the sofa she'd been sitting on and saw that it was covered in a thin layer of her own hair. Had she been sitting there for days without moving or was her hair falling out now? She wanted it to stop. But only telling the absolute truth could even begin to make that happen and she was alone. The doorbell rang again.

And then she heard a voice that she recognized. Pastor Grint called through the letter box, “Maria? Are you all right?” And then suddenly it was OK. Still unsteady on her feet, Maria nevertheless made her way to the front door and let Grint in.

“Oh, my dear,” he said when he saw her, “what on earth is the matter?”

And then the dam burst and she cried. When she finished crying and she could speak again she said, “Pastor, there was a box of blood. I put my hand into it!”

Paul Grint looked around the room and then began to speak, but Maria cut him off. “I know it's not here any more, but it was.”

“Was it?” Paul Grint moved closer to her. “I'm not disbelieving you, Maria, but did it … did it mean anything …”

She managed to say the word “Yes” just once before she
started crying again. Try as he might, Pastor Grint could not get Maria to say what that meaning was.

Baharat knew that look. “There's no point in being angry,” he said to Sumita who now stood, stock-still in front of her cooker, raging. “The child is sick, Mumtaz can't just leave her.”

“That girl should go back to her own family!” Sumita said. “Why should our daughter have to do everything for her? And after what her father did!” She shook her head. “Mr. Choudhury's son won't wait forever. And what will people think?”

Mumtaz had told her parents that she couldn't come to dinner because Shazia was ill. What she was ill with, wasn't clear, but Baharat firmly believed that his daughter was making excuses. She'd met Aziz Choudhury once and it had been quite obvious that she hadn't taken to him—who would? But he had money and the Choudhurys were a respected family. Allah alone knew what Hanif Choudhury, the hajji, would make of it all! But neither he nor Aziz were now coming to dinner. They'd have to share the food with the boys, their wives and the grandchildren. Baharat just managed to suppress a smile at the thought.

“Mumtaz is no longer young. Soon no one will want her and then what will she do?” Sumita had been planning and then working on the meal for days. She was deeply disappointed.

“She will carry on working,” Baharat said. “She has a house to pay for. What else can she do?”

“She can take an offer of marriage from a decent family!”

Baharat shrugged. “Mumtaz was always an independent girl. She's a clever girl. Neither of the boys could have gone to university if we'd held guns to their heads. But Mumtaz—”

“No husband, no children, her life is a disaster! A waste.”

Baharat was a very even-tempered man. But this he would not take. Not about his Mumtaz. “Sumita, my wife, if our daughter's life is a disaster it is partly because of us,” he said.

She made a noise in her throat like a squeak and then she moved forward, her hand raised as if she wanted to hit him.

But Baharat retained his calm gravitas, as well as his anger. “We married her to that man because he was rich,” he said.

“Yes, but he wasn't rich, was he, he was—”

“He was rich, so we thought, he was good-looking and he came to me with all sorts of nonsense about how he was such a good Muslim, such a nice, nice man for my daughter.” Just the thought of it made Baharat suddenly shout with fury. “But he lied! The bugger lusted for our girl only, he treated her badly, he was a gangster and a criminal and if he was still alive now and I knew what I know, I would kill him with my own hands!”

“Baharat—”

“How do we know that Mr. Choudhury's son will not do the same, eh? A man of nearly fifty, never married …”

“He has been waiting for the right girl,” Sumita said. “Everyone says.”

“Everyone?” He looked at her, remaining harsh in spite of the tears in her eyes. “Gossiping women? Mr. Choudhury has only lived here for a year. What does Mrs. Khan or Mrs. Dar or any of these women you speak to know about it? Eh?”

Silent for a moment, Sumita was simply reordering her argument and Baharat knew it.

“Well, you were just as keen for Mumtaz to meet with Mr. Choudhury's son at the start.” she said.

And he knew that was true. He also knew that quite early on in the process he had changed his mind, although why, exactly, he didn't know, but suddenly it had all seemed like a very bad idea. Baharat got up from the kitchen table, picked up his mobile phone and walked toward the living room. “I am going to watch the news on the television,” he said. “There are protests, apparently, about the man who was killed by the police in Tottenham. There have been some riots. Some families have such terrible tragedies to bear.”

Sumita wanted to say that their own family was one of them, but she didn't. She just looked at all the pans on the cooker and shook her head in frustration. So much chicken! So much lamb!

Maria prayed. Betty was with her and they had the television on with the sound off, but the images that played out on the screen were horrific. Suddenly, London had just erupted. Only two days before, a man had been shot by police in Tottenham and now people were rioting all over the city, from Barnet to Croydon, from Ealing to Barking.

Pastor Grint, having seen Maria through her tears, had gone to the church to meet with other members of the congregation to see if there was anything they could do. Buildings were burning, shops were being looted and kids who looked not much more than ten years old were hurling bricks at the police. It was a world of anarchy, of lack of respect, of frustrated opportunism. It was a world that Maria and her smart, comedy mouth had helped to fuel—so she believed.

Her tears had made her feel no better. Pastor Grint had just sat by her side. He hadn't punished her. But then why would he? “What,” he'd quite logically asked
her, “am I supposed to be punishing you for?” She had to reveal whatever this sin was that appeared to be ruining her life and he didn't know what that was unless she told him—and she wouldn't speak. Besides, only God should punish, not man. She had tried to take Jesus into her heart, she had tried to repent and deny the devil but it wasn't enough. As she knelt on the floor in front of her TV she felt sick. She looked at the pictures on the screen and she wondered why all these kids who were rioting thought that smashing up shops was such a good idea.

She looked away from the TV and into the corner and there was the Clarks box again. Large as life, but without a speck of blood in sight. She looked at Betty and wanted to ask her whether she saw it or not, knowing that she didn't want to know the answer. The kids breaking in to PC World and Phones 4u didn't have a clue either. No one did. Not even Pastor Grint. She was alone. But then it had always been that way—really. It had always been that way and now it had to end.

Eventually she managed to say to Betty, “You know I want to be with Len.” And Betty had looked at her and she'd smiled.

“Oh, my goodness, what a nice surprise!” Mumtaz felt her face flush. It was the shock. Out of the blue, Mark Solomons had phoned her.