Poisoned Ground: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 3) (13 page)

*

Something hit the window. Rashida looked down into the street and saw a girl wearing a torn vintage dress over a pair of mad candy-striped leggings. MJ.

Tentatively, Rashida tapped the window. Her mother was downstairs somewhere and, although she had the television on, she had good hearing. MJ didn’t respond and so Rashida tapped again, a little harder. MJ’s round, pierced face looked up at her and smiled. Then she gave a thumbs-up sign and mouthed what Rashida reckoned was ‘I’m doing it’.

Rashida’s heart beat so fast it made her dizzy. Still looking at MJ, she sat down on her bed. She waved and MJ waved back but then there was a knock at her door and Rashida’s breathing stopped.

‘Who is it? What do you want?’ Her own voice sounded husky and thick.

‘I did it,’ a much smaller voice said from outside the door.

Rashida flew across the room and pressed herself against the doorpost. ‘Zizi!’

‘MJ’s outside,’ her younger sister said.

‘Yes, I know,’ Rashida whispered. ‘You told her what to do? Exactly what I told you?’

‘Yes,’ the little girl said. ‘Rashida, Baba wouldn’t be cross with me if he found out, would he?’

‘No, Baba would be proud of us,’ Rashida said. ‘But, Zizi, we have to keep this a secret from Omy and the boys. And we mustn’t talk of it again. Understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Promise?’

‘I promise.’ There was a pause and then the little girl said, ‘I’m going to play now.’

‘All right, you do that,’ Rashida said. ‘And forget all about MJ and everything else, Zizi.’

She heard her sister walk down across the landing to her own room and shut the door. Rashida went back to her window and saw that MJ had gone. Then she heard the house phone ringing downstairs and began to smile.

Susan had hoped that Lee would go to the casino with her but apparently that wasn’t possible. He had to go and meet some bloke out of town on business. He’d said he’d be back later in the evening and would join her at work then, but he hadn’t said when. Susan had told him not to bother and just to let himself back into the flat when he got back. Lee had looked hurt.

She listened to him trying to sing. Why he had to take another shower just to go and see some bloke on business she couldn’t imagine. She didn’t trust him. She picked up his phone and looked at the list of calls he’d made that day. Two of them had been to Vi Collins. One a few minutes before he’d returned to the flat. He obviously hadn’t wanted Susan to hear it.

Susan picked up her own phone and put Vi’s number into her directory. She didn’t know what, if anything, she was going to do with it, but she knew she had to have it.

*

When Shirley returned to the Advocacy office it was dark and she was still shaking. When she’d finished her meeting with Mandy and Mumtaz, instead of joining them for the Advocacy Surgery on the acute wards, she’d gone on to Forensic. Against all her self-preservation instincts, she’d marched into ward
manager Timothy Pool’s office and told him that they needed to talk. At first he’d ignored her. But then Shirley had shut his door, plonked herself down in front of him and said, ‘We need to talk about Dylan Smith.’

‘He went crazy and attacked me,’ Timothy had said. He was small but stocky and when he spoke his short hands balled into fists. ‘The Lord is my witness.’

‘Be that as it may,’ Shirley had said. ‘Your staff aren’t so sure, are they?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Oh, come on, Timothy,’ Shirley had said, ‘you must have seen the way they looked anywhere but into my eyes when I talked to them about it. Not one of them can so much as talk to Dylan …’

‘Because he’s a vicious boy who needs to be taught a lesson!’ Timothy had countered. ‘Nothing to do with being mentally ill, he’s a bad character and he must be curbed.’

‘By violence?’

‘No!’

‘Oh, Timothy,’ she’d said, ‘I think you’re lying. In fact, I know it. Service users complain about you all the time.’

He’d looked at her out of the corner of his eye and he’d said, ‘So why, if that’s the case, haven’t you brought my “bad behaviour” up in front of Mr Cotton and the hospital management? That’s your job, isn’t it?’

She’d leant forward in her chair and said, ‘Ah, but you know exactly why I haven’t, don’t you, Timothy?’

‘No.’ But he’d looked away from her as he’d said it.

‘Yes, you do.’

Then he’d looked at her. ‘Why’s that? Tell me.’

And so she had. She’d talked about the culture of automatically disbelieving service users, of wards run like medieval
fiefdoms, where patients had to watch what staff wanted them to watch on TV and where the withholding of privileges was used for the most minor infractions of often imaginary and senseless rules.

As she’d talked, Timothy Pool had looked at her with cold, impassive eyes. Then he’d said, ‘But I ask again, if it’s so bad here, why haven’t you reported it?’

‘And I tell you again, Timothy, that you know exactly why I haven’t.’

He’d gone quiet at first. Then he’d lost it. Trembling with rage, he got to his feet and yelled, ‘What’s got into you, woman? Why do you come to me with this?’

‘Because I’m going to make a formal complaint about you to the hospital management on behalf of Dylan Smith.’ She’d said it very calmly and quietly.

Timothy fell back in his chair and, for a moment, Shirley had thought that he was in shock. But then he started laughing. ‘You?’ he said. ‘You complain about me? Some do-gooder woman thinking she can help these “poor” people somehow?’

What he’d said had hurt. Middle class and middle-aged, Shirley knew that she probably looked like a classic ‘do-gooder’ but she also knew that even at that she had failed so far.

‘Yes, I am a do-gooder,’ she’d said, ‘and so I’m going to do good. I’ll start by stopping you, Timothy.’

For a moment he’d looked a tiny bit afraid, then he’d smiled again. ‘Ah, but I have a far greater power than you on my side,’ he’d said.

‘What? The management and the staff?’

‘No! God’s truth, woman!’

It was at that point that Shirley had risen from her chair. ‘I’m not going to stay here while you bang on about the Lord,’ she’d
said. ‘Apart from anything else, religious talk in a clinical setting is totally inappropriate. Just know that I’m supporting Dylan and you’ll be hearing from me, formally.’

Then, after a short conversation with Dylan, she’d left the ward. However she hadn’t stopped shaking since. She’d heard the stories almost as soon as she’d come to work at Ilford. Staff like Timothy Pool – in fact any senior member of staff – were sacrosanct. Doctors were untouchable, and even junior nurses, if they were liked by senior management, were pretty hard to make complaints about. Cleaners and some care workers were expendable. The Polish girl who had opened the window for Sara Ibrahim had been dismissed.

Shirley sat down at her desk and wondered again why she had actually gone ahead with a crazy idea that would almost certainly see her losing her job. Had it really been for the look of gratitude on Dylan Smith’s smashed-up, sewer-mouthed face? There wasn’t much to love in a young man who called one of the other service users on the ward a ‘fucking Paki’ and routinely stole from other residents too delusional to know what day it was. But that was irrelevant. He was a powerless service user and it was her job to first of all believe him and then to help him obtain justice. But in supporting Dylan she’d made a powerful enemy of Timothy. She looked at her phone and wondered when it would ring to summon her to a management meeting or an audience with Mr Cotton. But it remained silent.

Shirley put Dylan’s file away in her desk and locked it. She looked in her handbag to make sure her car keys were accessible and then counted how many fags she had left. Not enough. She’d have to stop at the garage and buy some more on the way home. Shirley put her coat on.

When she got to the office door she pulled the handle down
but nothing happened. It was old and it did stick sometimes and so she tried to ease it out while kicking the bottom corner, which sometimes worked. Not on this occasion. She banged it with her fist, which also sometimes worked too, but that failed. Shirley bent down to look at the small gap between the door and the doorpost to see if she could locate the problem. Her skin went cold.

The door was locked. Someone had got a key, turned it and trapped her in her own office. Could the caretaker have thought the office was empty and locked it? As far as she knew he was a lazy bugger who rarely moved from his small room down by the old disused laundry block. Why would he lock the door? He wouldn’t. Shirley spoke out loud to herself, ‘It’s OK. There are still people about.’ She took her phone out of her bag and called Acute 2. All the doctors and their admin staff had gone, but the wards would be manned.

No one answered. She tried the door again and then called Acute 1. An over-friendly voice responded and it took Shirley a little while to realize that it was in fact a bipolar patient, who sounded very high, on the end of the line. ‘Get Dawn, you know, the ward manager,’ Shirley said. But the woman said she didn’t know any Dawn and put the phone down.

Shirley tried the door again, but it wouldn’t budge. She called out, ‘Hey, my door’s locked! Can you give me a hand?’ but was met with silence. For a moment, Shirley stepped back from the door and looked at it. She saw the gap between the door and the doorpost go black and realized that someone had turned off the lights in the corridor. The paranoia began. Timothy Pool had done this to frighten her. Shirley ran back to the door and crouched down to call through the gap. ‘Hello? Who’s there? Can you help me, please? I think I’m locked in here.’

But again, silence. Shirley began to sweat. She stood up and pulled at the door handle until her hand hurt. Old and splintered, it rattled and shook but when she stopped there was another noise that sounded like someone sniffing. ‘Who’s there?’ She looked at her phone again and brought up the number for the forensic ward. As she waited for someone to answer she muttered, ‘Think you can frighten me? You can’t.’

But no one answered. And then something new happened. The door began to rattle from the outside. Shirley dropped her phone on the floor, her whole body in a spasm of terror. At first the movement was minimal but, as whoever was out in the corridor put more pressure on the handle, the rattling became ever more intense. And although Shirley wanted to run away and hide somewhere she could no longer move. She heard someone on the end of the phone say, ‘Hello? Hello?’

And then suddenly the door sprang open.

Shirley screamed.

*

It was ‘Elvis Nite’ at the Riverside Caravan Park. Apparently, vodka was on special offer and the big chalet that was called the Clubhouse was heaving. But Lee Arnold ignored such delights and walked down the side of the building. Finding a caravan wasn’t as easy as finding a house; especially at night they all tended to look the same. Except that Lee knew Leslie’s didn’t. When he’d answered Lee’s call he’d told him that his caravan was ‘down near the River Crouch with Spider-Man in the window’.

Lee walked on into darkness as he closed in on one of Essex’s lesser-known riverbanks. The closer he got to the smell and sound of the water the more the caravans thinned out, until
only one remained. Lit up like a Christmas tree, the caravan had a life-sized model of Spider-Man in one window and a heavily bearded human face in another. It had a name plate which said ‘Fortress of Solitude’.

‘It’s Superman’s secret hide-out,’ the man said as he opened the caravan door, grabbed Lee and pulled him inside.

‘What?’ Lee shook his head. ‘What is?’

‘Fortress of Solitude – it’s Superman’s secret hide-out. In actuality, of course, it isn’t in Essex but in the polar regions …’

‘Yeah, Leslie, great.’ Lee didn’t find it easy dealing with nerds even when they were ex-cons. He looked around the caravan for somewhere to sit but found only boxes of comics and many computers. ‘Leslie …’

‘Oh, chair, yes,’ he said and then left the caravan for who knew where.

Alone, Lee wondered whether he’d made a mistake tapping up Leslie Baum. He might be a genius but he was also mental and sometimes that combination was hard to take. Convicted fifteen years previously of hacking into systems that belonged to several notable scientific research laboratories, Leslie’s aim had been to put a stop to the Human Genome Project. Although both his parents had been ultra-orthodox Jews, Leslie’s objections to the Project had not been religious. He had been afraid that once the code was known, humans would be able to animate robots who, with their superior strength and durability, would make slaves of mankind.

‘Here we are,’ Leslie said as he struggled through the door with a deckchair. ‘I’m afraid I’ve no teabags and the milk’s gone off.’

Lee took the deckchair from Leslie and assembled it, as best he could, opposite the stool where his host sat. ‘That’s OK,’ he said as he very gently lowered himself into the contraption.

‘Refrigerators are not what they once were,’ Leslie said. ‘What do you want, DI Arnold?’

Lee knew that it was pointless trying to get Leslie to drop his old police title or even to call him Lee. ‘I want to find out where someone’s getting money from,’ Lee said.

‘Easy enough.’

‘Someone who doesn’t have either a computer or a mobile phone,’ Lee said.

Leslie shrugged. ‘A little more problematic, but possible,’ he said. ‘Why do you want this information?’

‘I think the money’s hot.’

‘Stolen.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Mmm.’ Leslie rubbed his beard with long, thin fingers. The computer screen he sat in front of was, like all the others in the caravan, covered in what was, to Lee, incomprehensible code.

‘So, just to get this straight, DI Arnold, you’re not asking me to do anything that could possibly result in financial or any other kind of gain for yourself or myself?’

‘No.’ Leslie always asked that question. But then, putting aside the fact that he’d had a terrible time in prison after his conviction, he was a very moral person.

‘Good.’ Although Lee knew that some of the people who could loosely be described as Leslie’s ‘friends’ were usually not so scrupulous. ‘So tell me about the client.’

Ken Rivers’ life was laid as bare as Lee thought Leslie needed. While he spoke, Leslie typed the salient details into a laptop in a language that was unknown to the private detective. Lee hoped it was Hebrew but feared it might be Klingon.

When Leslie had finished he said, ‘I will need expenses. I’ll have to go to Southend once at least and so that’ll mean bus fare.’

Lee took a twenty-pound note out of his wallet and put it on Leslie’s phone, which was shaped like the cartoon cat Garfield.

‘And I will need help.’

‘I don’t wanna know.’ Lee put down four fifty-pound notes. He’d seen some of the types that Leslie hung about with. Mostly kids. They’d want at least a computer game or a bunch of puerile apps for their trouble.

Leslie did something on the screen in front of him, something else on the laptop and then said, ‘Leave it with me.’

‘Thanks, Leslie, I appreciate it,’ Lee said. It wasn’t easy getting out of the deckchair, mainly because Spider-Man was in the way. But he did it.

Leslie, still staring at his computers, said nothing. When Lee had arrested him back in 1997, Leslie had been living in a flat in East Ham. Rejected by his wealthy religious family in north London for being an atheist, Leslie had been on benefits when he was nicked. And because his crime had been so clever, with implications for cyber-security that went way beyond just hacking a few science labs, the judge who’d tried him had thrown the book at him. The prison system had not been kind. When he did get out, only a sudden rush of generosity by his parents had saved Leslie from homelessness. They’d bought him the caravan at the Riverside and for many years no one, including Lee Arnold, had heard a peep out of him. Then rumours began to circulate about a mad super-geek somewhere in Essex who could get into anything, anywhere. Lee had tracked him down. He’d also kept him to himself.