Poisoned Ground: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 3)

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Quercus

This edition first published in 2014 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London
W1U 8EW

Copyright © 2014 Barbara Nadel

The moral right of Barbara Nadel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Ebook ISBN 978 1 84866 421 0
Print ISBN 978 1 84866 419 7

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

You can find this and many other great books at:
www.quercusbooks.co.uk

Hakim and Arnold Mysteries

A Private Business
An Act of Kindness

The Inspector Ikmen Series

Belshazzar’s Daughter
A Chemical Prison
Arabesk
Deep Waters
Harem
Petrified
Deadly Web
Dance with Death
A Passion for Killing
Pretty Dead Things
River of the Dead
Death by Design
Dead of Night
Deadline
Body Count

The Hancock Series

Last Rights
After the Mourning
Ashes to Ashes
Sure and Certain Death

To anyone who has ever been depressed, delusional, heard
voices, suffered from anxiety, self harmed, gone high as a kite
or felt suicidal. For once, this is a book dedicated to you.

She had fifteen minutes and one opportunity.

What nationality the girl who’d opened the window had been was anybody’s guess. Staff could be from anywhere, as long as they were cheap. Indistinct voices from the end of the corridor made her heart pick up its beat.

‘Can you open a window for me, please?’ she’d said. ‘It’s hot.’

The girl, a pale, thin character in a cleaner’s tabard had said, ‘The what?’

‘The window,’ she’d said. ‘Open it?’

‘No.’

The girl had shaken her head. Health and safety.

‘Look, I’m not asking you to open my bedroom window,’ she’d said. That was no good anyway. That had bars. ‘The one in the corridor. Up there.’

The girl had looked up at the window. Its lower sill was two metres off the floor.

‘How I do that?’ the girl had asked. ‘It locked.’

She was new. They always were.

‘You open it with a hook on the end of a pole,’ she’d said. ‘They keep it in the cleaning cupboard. Do you have a key to the cleaning cupboard?’

Her voice had only wavered very slightly. She’d been proud of that.

‘I don’t know.’ But the girl had looked in the pocket of her nylon tabard where she’d found a small nest of keys.

‘It could be one of those. Try them.’ The girl had looked at her as if to say ‘don’t tell me what to do’, but she’d gone to the cupboard anyway and she’d tried each key until she’d found the right one. The girl had quickly found the pole with the hook and opened the window.

‘Better?’ she’d said when she’d finished.

‘Better, thank you, yes.’

The girl had gone on her way to the ward where they stored the old women who smelt of jaundice. The staff liked it over there with them. If you were old and mad, then that was natural.

She carried the chair from beside her bed and put it underneath the corridor window. For a moment she looked at it from the open door of her room. Then she went and stood by her bed. She’d need a decent run-up if she were to get some momentum going.

Treating it like a game. For her it was the only way. Games were exciting and then, when they were over, you went inside the house to your mum and you had your tea. She’d seen kids do that on TV a thousand times.

She hadn’t run for months and at first she wondered whether she could still do so. But when her right foot hit the chair, she vaulted effortlessly up onto the window ledge. It was exhilarating and for just a moment she wondered whether there was some hope, even though she knew that there wasn’t. If she hadn’t looked down at that moment, she would have gone right then. But she did look down.

The drop was enormous, it had to be at least six metres. Bile entered her throat and then, when she heard a door open somewhere behind her in the corridor, she lost control of her bladder.

Someone shouted, ‘For God’s sake!’

This wasn’t how it was supposed to have been. She moved one wet leg out into the nothingness beyond the window. The siren began to scream. Her father’s face smiled in her mind and she began to cry.

‘Come down, love! Come on!’

It was Michelle. She liked Michelle. It wasn’t her fault.

The siren drilled into her head and she felt as if her brain would explode. She closed her eyes. If she looked down at the drop again, or at Michelle, she would be lost. Against every impulse in her body she pulled her second leg out over the ledge to join the first and just hung there. She lay along the windowsill, both her legs out in space, urine dripping down her feet into the void. Would she also soil herself as she fell? She’d never envisaged this. She might have guessed.

She heard Michelle mount the chair even though she didn’t see her. Eyes still closed, she allowed her bottom to follow her legs outside and then, at the end, motivated by fear of capture more than by sacrifice, she just let go.

To be fair to Lee, he’d told her he didn’t often eat a proper lunch. His thing was usually a sandwich, or a bag of cakes at his desk. But even so …

‘Babe, you know if you keep on pushing that fish around it’ll sit up and lump you one,’ she said.

Lee Arnold looked at her with his big, brown eyes and Susan felt herself come over all maternal. There were times when he looked just like that sad-eyed cat in the Shrek movies. So what if he didn’t want his dinner?

She put a hand on his and said, ‘Sorry, darlin’, don’t mean to nag.’

He shook his head. ‘You’re not.’

He’d suggested they go to Lake Vembanad, a small Indian restaurant tucked away at the top of High Street North, East Ham. Specializing in food from the south Indian state of Kerala, Lee had taken Susan’s love of unusual curries seriously. They were sharing something called
meen pollichathu
, a fish curry, with
kappa
, a tapioca dish.

‘This is gorgeous,’ Susan said as she helped herself to more food. ‘Don’t know how you can resist it.’

He shrugged. He’d shut his office to come and take her out for lunch and, even though Susan had only been with Lee for a
month, she knew already that this was some concession. Although she was desperate to celebrate their first full month together, Susan hadn’t been able to persuade her bosses at the Southend Casino to let her have the night off. It had been Lee who had suggested lunch. That assistant of his, Mumtaz, could look after the office while they were eating – and maybe, later, something more. But then bloody Mumtaz had been called out on some job …

Susan looked up from her plate but Lee had his profile to her, staring out of the window. She’d met him when he and a load of his old copper mates had come for a night out by the seaside. Lee had been tagging along behind some rough old female bobby who had got visibly narked when he’d hooked up with Susan. At first, Susan had thought he was a copper himself. He’d only told her he was ex-job, now a private detective, once he’d jumped into her bed. But she hadn’t cared. He’d been on holiday, and so three more days of great sex had followed and now Susan was hooked. She pulled her dress down a little further than she should at the front, just to get a bit more tit on show for him.

‘I don’t have to be at work ’til eight tonight,’ she said. She had to drive back to Southend, which was thirty odd miles, but that was nothing.

Lee turned back towards her and smiled at the adjustment to her clothing. Then he sighed. ‘But I can’t leave the office for more than an hour …’

‘What about Mumtaz? When will she be back?’ Susan asked. Bloody woman! Why was what she was doing so important?

‘I dunno,’ Lee said. Leaning on the table, over his uneaten food, he took out a packet of cigarettes, which he turned over in his hands.

‘Why not?’

‘Because it’s delicate, what we do. Often we have to talk to people when they’re at their most vulnerable. Know what I mean?’

‘So how vulnerable are these people Mumtaz is talking to, then?’

‘Can’t tell you,’ he said. But Susan reckoned that he could, if he’d wanted to.

‘We have to operate according to strict rules regarding confidentiality,’ Lee said. ‘And that includes our partners and children.’ He smiled and Susan suddenly felt as if everything was all right again. ‘It’s not personal, darlin’.’

‘I know. And yet it does sort of bleed over into your personal life …’

‘Take me on and you take on what I do, I’m afraid,’ Lee said and then Susan didn’t feel all right any more.

She frowned and began to push her fish around on her plate. She looked up at Lee, and saw that he had turned his head away to look into the street again. She’d never known him as distracted as he was now. It was almost as if closing his office down for an hour had somehow brought him to a halt.

*

Mumtaz knew that haunted look. Even though the woman was smiling, the expression hung around her eyes. Once you had it, it was impossible to shift. When she passed her a tiny cup of coffee, Mumtaz wondered if the woman could see the same thing in her own eyes.

‘Thank you.’

The woman nodded her head. Then she went and sat on a cushion in a dark corner of the room. She said, ‘I imagine, since I told you my name on the telephone, that you know I am a person of interest to the police.’

‘Yes.’ Mumtaz, unlike her hostess, sat on a chair. It was hard and she shuffled about, trying to make herself comfortable in vain.

‘My husband has been in prison for eight months for something he did not do.’

Nobody had ever really done anything wrong. Lee had taught her that. ‘Nobody in Stir is ever guilty,’ he’d told her. ‘It’s bullshit, but that’s how we all think about our own. We have to, to stay sane.’

‘My husband was framed,’ the woman said. Both Mumtaz and Lee had known who Salwa el Shamy was as soon as she had given her name over the phone. Originally an Egyptian national, Salwa el Shamy was married to Hatem el Shamy, another Egyptian, in whose work locker police had found a homemade bomb. Hatem had used the ‘framed’ defence, but no one had believed him. A known hard-line Islamist, Hatem had left Egypt with Salwa during the President Mubarak years, when people like him were routinely tortured and sometimes ‘disappeared’ by the regime. Logic would dictate that once Mubarak was ousted, Hatem and Salwa would have returned to Cairo, but they hadn’t. Salwa said it was because their children were happily settled at schools in Newham.

‘How was your husband framed?’ Mumtaz asked. ‘And by whom?’

Salwa shrugged. She was a large woman, with meaty shoulders that were only barely contained by the sleeves of her kaftan. ‘I don’t know how. But the pig who did it was el Masri.’

‘El Masri?’ Mumtaz sipped Turkish coffee, which burnt her lips. She put it down beside her on the coffee table, leaving it to cool. Salwa drank hers down in one gulp. It was clearly something one had to be born to.

‘He is a psychiatrist,’ Salwa said. ‘A blood-soaked follower of the criminal Mubarak.’

So it was personal, too. Lee had warned her about this. Hatem el Shamy had been a psychiatric nurse at Ilford Hospital, across the border in the London Borough of Redbridge. It had been well known that he’d had political issues with a fellow Egyptian who had been one of his superiors at the institution.

‘Your husband named a psychiatrist at the time of his arrest,’ Mumtaz began. ‘He was exonerated.’

‘He framed my husband,’ Salwa said. Having finished her coffee she put a sweet into her mouth.

‘And why was that?’ Mumtaz asked. ‘Was it because of their political differences?’

Salwa looked down at the floor. ‘Not just that. It was because of a shameful thing.’

‘Which was?’

Mumtaz was aware that she was coming across as abrupt. It was difficult for her not to. She remembered the el Shamy case well. When police had found the homemade bomb in Hatem el Shamy’s locker at Ilford Hospital, they’d worked out it contained enough explosive to destroy the two wards in its immediate vicinity. Had it detonated, fifty people could have lost their lives. That was a difficult statistic to forget.

‘El Masri was taking sexual advantage of his patients,’ Salwa said. She looked up into Mumtaz’s eyes. ‘And Hatem knew.’

Mumtaz felt a shiver. She’d not heard this story before. ‘Did he tell anyone?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He told the hospital.’

‘And what did they do about it?’ Mumtaz asked.

‘Nothing. They didn’t listen. Why would they? My husband was just a nurse and el Masri was a doctor. Which one do you think, Mrs Hakim, is the more valuable?’

Mumtaz’s parents had always been great believers in the
National Health Service. Free to all, it had saved her mother’s life when she’d suffered an ectopic pregnancy. Compared to what her father always described as the ‘nothing health service’ back in Bangladesh, it was marvellous. But in recent years a succession of scandals regarding hospital funding, death rates and sexual abuse had brought certain institutions and some clinicians into disrepute. Salwa’s story was not without precedent.

Mumtaz picked up her coffee again and sipped. This time it was cooler. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘To begin with my husband admired el Masri,’ Salwa said. ‘Not for his politics, but for the way he was with his patients. He listened to them. But then Hatem also noticed how he was sometimes different with vulnerable young women. Too familiar. He touched them, usually when they were sedated. And such patients were often sedated. In fact, that was what Hatem originally complained to the hospital management about.’

‘Over-medication?’

‘Yes. But they did nothing. They said that issues of medication were for doctors to decide.’

‘What did your husband do then?’

‘He began to stay late a lot, to protect the patients. Then one night he told me he saw el Masri violating a female who was entirely unconscious,’ she said. ‘The next day he went straight to Mr Cotton, the chief consultant psychiatrist and el Masri’s immediate superior.’ Her eyes became wet. ‘Mr Cotton said to Hatem that he must have been mistaken and told him to take some time off. Then, after Hatem had gone back to work, a woman under el Masri’s care took her own life.’

‘Had el Masri been abusing her?’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ she said. ‘Hatem never said he had seen that patient being assaulted by him. But that doesn’t mean
that he didn’t touch her. She was only a young girl. She had her whole life before her.’

‘But she was mentally ill,’ Mumtaz said.

‘And that is exactly el Masri’s defence! And the hospital’s!’ Salwa said. ‘All the girls were mad and my husband hated el Masri because he was a supporter of President Mubarak.’

‘The girls were ill and it is well known that your husband …’

‘You know how it was in Mubarak’s Egypt?’ Salwa’s face had gone red and her English crumbled. ‘They have dogs to train to rape Muslim women. The prisons, full of brothers torn to … to … into pieces. They … Mubarak was … I …’

‘Mrs el Shamy, I don’t know how it was for you in Egypt. My knowledge of your country comes from newspapers and the internet,’ Mumtaz said. ‘But I do know something about psychology and about hospitals and so I am aware that the mentally ill are not always believed.’

‘The Muslim women here in Manor Park say you have a degree in psychology. I chose you for that, and because of your faith.’

‘Yes.’ Mumtaz was, as far as she knew, the only female Muslim private detective in Newham, if not the whole of London. And in a borough where a lot of Muslim women lived, that gave her both a certain reputation and some responsibilities. The reputation meant that she never turned a woman away, whatever her religion, while her main responsibility was to be honest with her clients. Many of the women’s partners and husbands were not worth the anxiety, work and love that these women lavished on them.

‘The hospital, they know about el Masri,’ Salwa said. ‘But they say nothing and they don’t want to do anything. The police know only that el Masri and my husband came from different political directions.’

‘Your husband didn’t tell them that el Masri abused his patients?’

‘No.’

‘Why not? If he had cited the sexual abuse the police would have had to contact the hospital management.’

Salwa shrugged. ‘I can’t say. He still won’t. I’ve tried to persuade him.’

Mumtaz didn’t like this. Why would anyone withhold information from the police, whatever its nature, if that information might get one released?

‘Hatem is innocent,’ Salwa said. ‘When he went back to work after Mr Cotton gave him time off, el Masri tried to make him abuse women too. He said, “Be quiet now, Hatem, and you can have pretty girls also.” He thinks Hatem is one of those bad Muslims. But he isn’t. Hatem refused and one week later the police arrive and find a bomb in his locker. Hatem wouldn’t know how to make a bomb. The police ask him how he made it and he couldn’t tell them. He was framed by el Masri. That is for certain.’

But then why, Mumtaz wondered, had el Masri gone to all the trouble of building a bomb to frame Hatem if the hospital either chose to believe or were convinced by the consultant’s story anyway? Putting an explosive device in Hatem’s locker seemed like using a hammer to crack a nut. She felt there had to be something else that connected the men. ‘Did Hatem know el Masri back in Egypt?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘El Masri comes from Heliopolis, it is like the Kensington of Cairo. Hatem was born in Boulaq. That is like those places you hear about in south London where young people get shot – worse
than that even. How could they meet? No, Hatem and el Masri met first at Ilford Hospital.’

‘How did Hatem know that Dr el Masri was a supporter of President Mubarak?’

‘Because they are two Egyptians at the same place of work,’ Salwa said. ‘They had a conversation about our country. And my husband has a beard, el Masri didn’t like that. I am sure that you have seen pictures of Hatem on the television.’

She had. Hatem el Shamy’s bearded face, his skull cap – the classic radical Muslim look for a lot of people – was well known.

‘The only way to prove that Hatem is innocent is to prove el Masri’s guilt,’ Salwa said. ‘To me this means that someone has to find him committing lewd acts on his patients. That person must also be prepared to tell the police.’

‘Hatem’s colleagues …’

‘No good,’ she said. ‘They are frightened for their jobs. They will be called liars and make-believers, just as Hatem was. Hospital has a service called advocacy, made up of volunteers, that is supposed to report patient complaints, but that too is threatened if it makes trouble.’

‘So what is the point of it?’ Mumtaz asked.

Salwa shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Hatem didn’t know. But advocacy could be a way in. It can be useful to us.’

‘What do you mean?’ Mumtaz said.

‘A person needs to get into the hospital to watch el Masri and find the truth,’ Salwa said. ‘It must be someone who knows how to watch and also someone who knows about mental illness, too. Hatem always told me that advocacy group all the time need people. Few want to work with the mad. A person of education, like you, would be valuable to them.’