An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) (2 page)

The entryphone buzzed, interrupting her thoughts. Mumtaz
got up from her desk to answer it. She heard a man’s voice then saw his face on the monitor. She recognised it immediately. He was called Naz Sheikh.

‘Hello Mumtaz,’ he said. There was a smile in that voice which made it even more oily than usual. He must have seen Lee go out.

Mumtaz stared at him on the CCTV monitor. She wasn’t even frightened any more. Not for herself. She didn’t answer.

‘Just a friendly reminder about your obligation,’ he said. ‘The end of the week. You know what—’

‘You’ll get it,’ she said as calmly as she could.

‘Just making sure, you know, for the sake of your—’

‘You’ll get it,’ Mumtaz reiterated. ‘Go away.’

Naz’s face broke into a big smile. He enjoyed what he did, and that made it much worse. To be so young, so handsome and yet so … Mumtaz didn’t have the words for what he was. She watched him as he turned and walked back down the metal steps, back to whatever he did with the rest of his time. The silver panels on the sides of his trainers caught what little light there was left in the cloudy London sky.

*

The first thing that John Sawyer had noticed about Helmand had been the smell. He’d struggled to describe it for months until he finally came up with ‘seven shades of shit’. Lieutenant Reeve had once asked him to list the seven shades. He’d said, ‘Goat, sheep, man, woman, child, chicken, fucking bastard Taliban, sir.’

Lt Reeve had lost his head less than a week later. He and two others out on patrol, blown into thousands of pieces by the ‘fucking bastard Taliban’. John had seen it. Walking fifty metres behind, he’d got away with a face full of his mates’ blood. Everybody said how lucky he’d been. And he’d agreed with them.

A month, maybe a bit more, had passed then. Out on patrol again – some village in the arse-end of nowhere. He didn’t know its name, he never had. Just like he’d never known the girl’s name. John shook his head as he tried to forget about all that and concentrate on the present. Now, keeping low in the garden undergrowth so that he couldn’t be seen, John watched the young, beautiful woman scrape away at fifty years’ worth of paint on that rotten old doorpost. He had wanted to talk to her ever since he’d first seen her, but he had to be careful not to let her see him. If she did her husband might go mad and chase him away, and he didn’t want that. John didn’t like frightening people, even by accident.

Back in the horror of his past, the girl had frightened him because she’d been bleeding. It wasn’t easy to say where from but it looked to John as if she had been shot or stabbed in the abdomen. He told the Afghan translator to ask her if there was anything they could do to help but he’d been reluctant to do so. John remembered that feeling of impatient agitation he’d had then. Sergeant Willets had told him to ‘fucking pipe down’. But then he’d ordered the translator to ask the girl what was wrong.

‘Don’t do too much.’ The man – the woman’s husband’s voice – ripped through the present and across the ruined, tangled garden. John lowered his head.

‘I won’t,’ the beautiful woman said. Then he heard her scrape, scrape, scraping again. In Helmand he’d tap, tap, tapped his foot as they’d waited in fifty-degree heat for the girl to tell the translator why she was bleeding.

‘She says it’s nothing,’ the translator had said. They’d talked in the local language, Dari. There was no contact on any level with English. They could have been saying anything. The girl, whose head was almost completely obscured by a scarf, began to
walk on, blood dripping down her exposed ankles as she went.

And then the translator had said the fateful words, ‘She must go back to her husband now.’

John closed his eyes, as if by shutting out the grey London light he might also somehow shut out what had happened next in Afghanistan as well. Tears seeped from the corner of his right eye. Then he heard the present reassert itself again. The beautiful woman called out, ‘Abdullah, I’m going to get some cold drinks. What do you want? Coke or—’

‘Fizzy water,’ the man said. ‘That’ll do me.’ He had a northern accent and if John hadn’t been screaming inside he might have found it funny. He was, he had been, the type of bloke who found almost anything funny. But back in Helmand on that hot day he’d turned the girl around, taken the scarf off her head and looked into her eyes. Only after that had everything changed.

Abdullah didn’t like her working at their new home on her own, but Strone Road was close to her mum and dad’s house and Nasreen was anxious to get on. The place was such a mess, it would take them months to make it livable. Her mum wasn’t happy about her act of defiance. ‘If your husband comes home here and you’re still out at the house I won’t lie for you, you know,’ she’d said as Nasreen left.

It was late afternoon now, the day had turned warm and Nasreen felt happy as she walked out into her garden. She wouldn’t do any more paint scraping today. There was a hideous old sink outside the back door that she wanted to move. But before she did that, she would sit down on one of the deckchairs that Abdullah had brought for them and turn her face to the sun for a moment. Looking up, she caught sight of the back-door frame and the mark where she’d removed that odd lump with the photograph behind it, both still in the pocket of her jeans. She took them both out and looked at them.

The woman was difficult to place in terms of age. Clearly she wasn’t old, but whether she was thirty, forty or even fifty was difficult to tell. Her expression was serious, on the edge of severe, but Nasreen felt a warmth towards her. Maybe the woman was someone who had lived in the house long ago? Abdullah had the
deeds and she could maybe ask him to look into who had lived there before them. She’d just started to scrape some of the layers of paint away from the lump when the noise of something snapping behind her made her look round. There was a man, tall, scruffy, his hair and beard in long brown hanks. His eyes looked right through her.

The girl had been twelve at the most. Younger than his little sister.

‘What’s she doing with a husband?’ he’d asked the translator.

The man had looked anxious and shifty – John had never trusted him. ‘It is the custom here for girls to marry when they are young,’ he’d said.

‘She’s a kid!’

Sergeant Willets had put a hand on John’s arm. ‘Leave it, Private.’

‘Leave it?’ He’d grabbed the girl and she’d screamed. John closed his eyes against the remembrance. But a voice in the present made him open them again

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ the beautiful woman said.

She had her hands on her abdomen and her voice quavered. He could see that she was scared.

‘I er, I …’

‘This is my house,’ Nasreen Khan said. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

John looked away.

‘You should go home,’ she said. He didn’t answer. ‘You do have a home …’

‘I live in lots of places,’ John said. ‘Sometimes here.’

‘Here?’

‘I live in the shack,’ he said.

She clearly didn’t understand what he meant, so John pointed
through the densest part of the tangle of trees and shrubs towards the back of the garden. She said, ‘You mean the wood pile at the bottom of the garden?’

John said, ‘I can show you if you …’

‘No!’ She took an abrupt step backwards. ‘No. I think you should go.’

John couldn’t remember when he’d first found the shack. The coppers had moved him on from his old billet down in Silvertown some time in the winter. Then there’d been the shack, Central Park sometimes, occasionally down by the river.

‘Where will I go today?’ he said to himself rather than to her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Where do you come from?’

John said it entirely without thinking, ‘Helmand province, Afghanistan.’

And Nasreen Khan’s heart changed in an instant.

*

It was a slow day – a slow week as it went – and Lee let Mumtaz go home early. Whatever was upsetting her wouldn’t be helped by sitting in the office with not much to do. She had a couple of appointments booked for later in the week – a missing husband and a background check on a potential bride from Leeds – so things could pick up. But Lee had bugger all. Clearly the upcoming Olympics were having an adverse effect upon infidelity in Newham. Lee let himself into his Forest Gate flat and put his keys down on the telephone table in the hall. From his living room he heard a low, cawing sound followed by a high-pitched rendition of that famous West Ham United anthem, ‘I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles’. Christ, he’d taught that bloody bird well!

Lee took his coat off and walked into the living room. The mynah bird eyed him with his usual slight suspicion.

‘Evening Chronus,’ Lee said. He rubbed the bird’s blue-black head with his fingers and Chronus stopped singing and shouted, ‘Up the ’ammers!’

Lee laughed. ‘You’re a poor brainwashed fucker, aren’t you?’

‘Bobby Moore! Trevor Brooking!’

Lee went into the kitchen and took a bottle of diet Pepsi out of the fridge. He poured some into a glass and drank it straight down. He wanted a pint of bitter, or gin, or anything that would get him out of it for a bit, but that was out of the question. He walked back into the living room and put the TV on. It was all gloom as usual: Egypt still in turmoil, the endless civil war in Syria, another British squaddie killed in Afghanistan. Then there was the farce of the London mayoral elections. Bumbling Boris Johnson, the clever, posh boy, not-so-idiot, or Ken – there go my Socialist credentials – Livingstone. He’d have to vote for someone, but who?

His mobile rang. He picked it up and saw that it was Vi. He put it down again and let it ring out. She’d been a bit keen lately and he wanted to nip it in the bud. It was all very well sleeping together occasionally but Lee didn’t want a girlfriend. Well, he didn’t want Vi Collins to be his girlfriend. The phone stopped ringing. Vi didn’t leave a message and Lee thought again about Mumtaz. Not for the first time he wondered whether he could pay her more. Thanks to the internet and modern home security systems, people were doing some forms of private investigation themselves. Not always well, but they were doing them. And that included some of Mumtaz’s covered Asian ladies. He’d thought about a career change, but where, if not to private investigation, did an ex-soldier, ex-copper go? The wonderful world of security? Lee had turned his Roman nose up at that years ago. Nights spent wandering about outside dodgy factories chasing down illegal immigrants jumping out of lorries? No chance.

The telly showed a picture of the squaddie who’d just been killed in Helmand province and Lee felt his blood pressure rise. They’d called the conflict he’d fought in the ‘First’ Iraq War. Then there’d been the ‘Second’ Iraq war and now the endless Afghan campaign. It made him mad. When was it going to end, for Christ’s sake?

*

Nasreen gave John a bottle of fizzy water she’d bought earlier in the day. He took it gratefully and drank it down.

‘Thanks.’ He smiled at her.

‘It’s no problem,’ Nasreen said.

Nasreen knew a little about men like John, if that was really his name. He was one of those ex-soldiers that were sometimes spoken about on the TV. Unable to adjust to civilian life after the rigours of Afghanistan, they drifted, homeless and often ill, on the outside of society. Her cousin Abbas had fought in Helmand. He’d lost an eye and his faith and was hiding from his nightmares in drug abuse. Before she’d married Abdullah, she had done some temporary office work for a mental health charity which had tried to help sick soldiers. She’d been touched by some of their stories, which had chimed with what Abbas had experienced. She knew that most people, for all the talk of the soldiers as ‘heroes’, didn’t give a damn.

‘The thing you call the shack …’ she began.

‘At the bottom of your garden,’ he said.

‘It’s just a woodpile.’ She paused. She still wasn’t entirely easy being on her own with him in her ruined garden, with evening coming on. If Abdullah ever found out he’d lose his mind. ‘My husband and I bought this house in an auction six weeks ago,’ she said. ‘How long have you been coming here?’

He didn’t know. Nasreen looked down the tight, rough tunnel John had forged to get from his ‘shack’ and into the part of the garden nearest the house and she said, ‘Did you rearrange the woodpile to make a shack out of it?’

‘A bit,’ he said. ‘It was something, a structure, once. But it collapsed, I reckon. It’s old.’

Although she knew what he was talking about, Nasreen couldn’t see much apart from branches and leaves. Again John asked her if she’d like to see his shack, and again she declined. At the end of the garden there was nothing of interest except the high wall that enclosed the old Plashet Jewish Cemetery. And if John suddenly ‘lost it’ or went for her, down there, no-one would know. As if reading her thoughts, he said, ‘Why are you here? On your own?’

‘Why do you ask? Why shouldn’t I be?’

‘You’ve always been with your husband when I’ve seen you before.’

‘He’s gone to work,’ she said, then thought that maybe that was a stupid thing to say when she was alone with an unknown man. ‘He’s a lawyer,’ she added. ‘He works strange hours. He could be back any minute.’

But John had drifted off. ‘Why are you here?’ he repeated.

Nasreen changed tack. She pointed at the old sink by the back door. ‘I wanted to see if I could move that,’ she said.

John looked at the large, heavily stained Butler sink. There was even what looked like the remains of a tap on the side of it. ‘On your own?’

It did look heavy and she wasn’t sure how she was going to move it, or even why she wanted to move it. It was probably just a case of striking one more thing off the long list of tasks that needed to be done in the house and garden. It wasn’t easy for her
or Abdullah, living with her parents. Everyone was perfectly civilised and polite but she knew it was a strain – especially for her husband.

‘I’ll move it for you, if you like,’ John said.

‘Oh, no it’s not your—’

‘It’s no problem.’ He walked past her, his eyes fixed on the knackered old sink.