Poisoned Ground: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 3) (8 page)

Lee had given up booze at the same time he’d given up his painkiller addiction. His divorce, plus memories from his service as a soldier in Iraq in the early 1990s had made him an unhappy man and a very bad cop. It had been Vi Collins who had sorted him out. She’d just appeared one night at his flat carrying a cage containing the mynah bird that Lee ended up calling Chronus. Vi’s theory had been that if Lee had something to look after he’d stop his self-destructive descent into addiction. And she’d been right. But it did mean that Lee rarely drank anything except Diet Pepsi, which got boring after the odd pint or five.

He wandered over to a table where some men were playing mahjong. He didn’t have a clue how it worked and watching it didn’t make the mechanics of the game any clearer. If you wanted to bet there was every opportunity – a craps table, blackjack, slot machines, poker schools for serious punters in the side rooms. Lee did, very occasionally, like the odd flutter, but he’d never been a gambler. Tony Bracci always said it was because Lee was shit at maths and couldn’t work out the odds, which was true. But there was also the fact that gambling wasn’t his poison. Everyone had their preferred addictions and Lee’s were booze, fags and pills. His late father had had a raft of vices to which he’d been addicted and so did Lee’s older brother, Roy. He would rather have died than be like either of them. But when Susan had said she wanted him to give up the fags, that had been a bit of a jolt. He knew he should pack them in, but he didn’t like anyone else telling him to. He’d told her he’d think about it. As if to dispel that memory, Lee walked off the gaming floor and went outside for a fag. The doorman who let him out was more ox than man.

Lee stood in the casino car park and lit up. The ox-like doorman watched him impassively. In common with all bouncers, he was only interested in anyone who made trouble because it gave him a chance to show off his solitary skill, that is, he was handy in a ruck. Otherwise he was just a great slab of passivity, who was probably good to his mum and kind to kittens. Cars pulled up, mainly Range Rovers, stretch limos and Audis disgorging yet more orange women and men whose bow ties threatened to spring away like bullets from their vast, engorged necks. Lee felt like a twig in comparison, even though he knew he could best just about any of these men in a fight. Although not the ox. He was in a league of his own.

Lee smoked his fag and lit up another one. He thought about Ken Rivers and his drinking session with the old lady he’d picked up on the seafront. They’d gone to the Foresters, a pub once famed for its strippers and acerbic gay barmen, where Mavis, the old girl, had bought Ken four pints of cheap bitter. She’d been on the gin and by the time she’d decided it was time to pick up her shopping trolley and leave, Ken had been arse’oled. He’d blown her kisses and shouted at her, ‘Show us your drawers!’ but she’d just gone on her way, albeit with her pop socks down around her ankles. Fortunately for Lee he hadn’t been able to see what Ken and Mavis had got up to underneath their table. But once the old woman had gone, and Ken was obliged to pay for his own booze, he’d left the pub and returned to the flat. Lee had wondered at the time what Bette had thought about the state of her husband when he got home, if anything. Once again Ken had been out of the flat for hours at a stretch and Lee, not for the first time, wondered whether the old woman was even still alive.

But at least if Bette was still living, she wasn’t left alone at night. Ken was not a practised boozer and those four pints in the
afternoon had left him reeling along the pavement like a drunken sailor. Lee imagined the old man sleeping in a chair that smelt of tinned fish and tobacco, his mouth open, the fifty-pound notes he’d taken out of the bank that day spilling out of his coat pocket. Mean old scrote!

Two minicabs pulled up in front of the casino. The first one was full of excited girls in mini-dresses carrying enormous handbags. The ox let them in and then he went over to the second cab and, oddly, paid the driver. Then he held the rear door open for the sole occupant in the back.

Lee distinctly heard the ox say, ‘Good evening, Mr Rivers. It’s a pleasure to see you.’

But even if he hadn’t, he would have known that the man in the cab was Ken Rivers by the way that he walked and the way he lit his cigarette when he got out of the car. He said, ‘Good evening to you, Dale. Nice night for it, I think.’

Lee Arnold turned away and waited until the old man had gone inside before he texted his client, the solicitor Derek Salmon. He had a lot to tell him. First there was the meet with Barry Butler. Now, more importantly, there was Ken Rivers’ appearance at a casino.

It was the second day that Mumtaz had spent taking stuff from her house down to the council dump in Barking. Getting a skip would have been expensive. And if she’d had a skip outside the house, she would have been nervous all the time about whether she’d inadvertently thrown some vital of piece of personal information in there that the Sheikhs could unearth and use against her. She knew that her thought processes were paranoid, but she also knew that she couldn’t help it. That family had got inside her head and into her bones and, now that it looked like she was going to owe them money for the rest of her life, she wished that there was some way she could die without upsetting her mother and father and Shazia.

Mumtaz threw a pile of old curtains into the textile hopper and then went back to the car to get some boxes of papers and magazines. A last-minute bout of paranoia had her riffling through them yet again, just in case a stray passport or birth certificate had somehow become entangled in the heap. It was torture. But she had to keep it in proportion. She might be in thrall to the Sheikhs, but she was free of Ahmet, she had people who loved her and she wasn’t locked up somewhere – like Ilford Hospital, for example.

Nobody had come to the Advocacy Surgery on the acute wards. Shirley said afterwards that was quite normal, especially in view of the fact that Mumtaz was new. It took service users time to get used to any member of staff, medical or otherwise. Remembering what Dr el Masri had said about the two other advocates, Mumtaz had asked Shirley if they were likely to be coming back to the hospital in the near future. ‘They said they’d try to get in to meet you on Tuesday,’ Shirley had said.

Mumtaz knew that the other two advocates were called Mandy and Roy and that they were both ex-service users, but she didn’t know anything else about them. She was interested to hear what they had to say about the Advocacy and the hospital; hopefully she would get some time with them when they weren’t with Shirley. She finally threw the newspapers and magazines into the paper and cardboard hopper and then went back to the car to get a box of general metal rubbish. It was amazing what a small car like her Micra could hold when you stuffed it to the roof. A man in unseasonal shorts hefted a wardrobe on his back and hurled it into a vast skip while everyone around him looked impressed. There weren’t many times that Mumtaz wished she had a young, fit man in her life to do heavy lifting for her. But she did have a wardrobe just like that at home that could do with getting rid of. Maybe, she thought, she’d ask one of her brothers? Or Lee?

He’d called her quite late the previous night. He’d had what could be a breakthrough in his missing person job. The misper (as such people were called in their line of work) had disappeared with over a million pounds in cash and now Lee had seen the man’s father playing roulette with vast wedges of banknotes at his local casino. It was the one where Lee’s girlfriend worked. But the point was that an old man who should have very little
money suddenly had a lot and Lee was feeling the trail of his misper hotting up. However his client, Derek Salmon, had told him to hold back on confronting the old man while he consulted with the misper’s wife.

Mumtaz flung the contents of the box into a metal dustbin and then emptied out a bagful of dead batteries into a bucket. Lee was going to come back to London later on in the day. She looked forward to having him back in the office on Monday. On her own she was lonely and when she was lonely she was prey to all sorts of unhelpful thoughts. Also, Naz Sheikh nearly always knew when Lee was out of the office and would often make a point of ringing. She feared that one day he’d actually come to the office when she was alone and force his way in.

*

‘Look, I don’t want to talk about this any more, all right?’ Susan said.

But Lee persisted. ‘I was only …’

‘What goes on in the casino, stays in the casino,’ she said. ‘And anyway, why this interest in high rollers? You’re not exactly the last of the big spenders yourself, are you?’

She couldn’t understand men sometimes. They’d come out for a nice walk along the seafront and all Lee had wanted to talk about were the two blokes who’d lost their shirts the previous evening. The black guy from London had lost his at the craps table while the old man she knew as Kenny had had a very bad night at her roulette wheel. To his credit, he’d taken it well, but then he always did. Kenny never won. The black guy often did and so when his fall happened it had hit him hard.

‘The old bloke was so casual about his losses,’ Lee said.

‘Look, I’ve—’

‘Do you think he’ll come back or just not bother?’

‘I don’t know,’ Susan said. She did. Kenny always came back. He’d been coming back religiously three times a week for over a month with his great big clumps of fifty-pound notes. Dale, the doorman, had even been given cash by the management to pay Kenny’s cab fares for him. But she wasn’t about to share any of that with her boyfriend. The management were very strict about confidentiality. Punters might lose their shirts in what was strictly a public place but it was up to them whether they talked about it outside the casino, not the staff.

They passed the amusement park known as Adventure Island, walking towards Southend Pier. Lee had been grumpy since she’d told him off but Susan was determined to enjoy herself in spite of his mood and the grey clouds in the sky.

‘I want to walk along the pier,’ she said. ‘Fancy it?’

To his credit, she thought, he mustered a smile. ‘All right.’

They paid three pounds fifty each to walk along the old wooden pier, which creaked and had gaps between the planks underfoot through which the grey water below could be seen. It stretched out into the Thames Estuary for a mile and three quarters, it was old – Victorian – and in spite of several fires and shipping accidents it was still, just about, in one piece. Susan loved the pier for its resilience and for the views it offered of both the Kent and Essex coasts. She’d been born and brought up in Southend and, although the place often got on her nerves with its on-going identity crisis (was it still a traditional seaside town or was it changing into something more classy?), she couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

‘They’re gonna build a hotel where the old gasworks used to be,’ she said, pointing back at the Essex coast.

‘A hotel? Who for?’ Lee said.

‘I dunno. Council seem to think there’s gonna be conferences and that sort of thing held here.’

Lee shrugged.

‘Up and coming, is Southend,’ Susan said. ‘Don’t knock it.’

‘I wouldn’t dare.’ He kissed her.

Susan took his arm and snuggled into his side. ‘You ever think about maybe leaving London and going somewhere else one day?’ she asked.

‘What? Like Southend?’ He looked alarmed.

Susan, aware that she might have sounded too keen, said, ‘No. Just outside London.’

‘No. Not really,’ he said. She felt a little crushed. He looked out to sea and Susan wondered whether he was thinking about fags. They’d gone that morning to get a packet of nicotine patches from Boots. She knew she’d have to make allowances for his mood if he was giving up smoking, but she had hoped he’d be more enthusiastic about Southend now he’d spent some time there – doing whatever it was he did. But then maybe she’d started off on the wrong foot with him when he first arrived? Being naffed off that he’d talked about an old colleague on the phone the previous evening hadn’t done her, or him, any good. Even if the colleague was a woman. An
old
woman …

‘But then I suppose it would depend upon why I left London,’ Lee continued. ‘I mean if I left to take a better job or to be with someone, then that might be different.’

‘Oh.’

‘It would depend,’ he smiled again and then he kissed her. Aroused, Susan pushed her body up against his and ground her hips into his crotch.

She said, ‘Here, Lee, you ever had sex on a pier?’

*

Rashida couldn’t believe it. When her mother unlocked her bedroom door to give her her dinner, there was a man standing behind her. It was the old Pakistani imam from the end of the street.

‘What’s he doing here?’ Rashida said as she pushed the food back at her mother, spilling most of it on the floor. ‘Did you get him to help you stop me from getting out? I’m not going to, you know. I’m on hunger strike, why would I?’

Salwa pulled the door away from her daughter and shut and locked it, leaving Rashida alone once more. She looked at the pile of rice and chickpeas on the floor and walked back to her bed.

‘If you are a good Muslim girl, you should do as your elders tell you,’ she heard the old man say in his thick sub-continental accent.

Rashida lost it. ‘Don’t tell me how to be a good Muslim!’ she yelled back at him. ‘My father joined a revolution for the faith back in our country. A revolution of brothers and sisters who worked as equals in the fight.’

‘Islam, for women—’

‘Real Muslim women are strong and brave and they let the will of Allah guide their lives, not the will of their mothers who want to marry them off to atheists!’

She heard a brief, muffled conversation take place between Salwa and the old man and then he said, ‘You mother says that the boy is a good Muslim.’

‘Then my mother is lying,’ Rashida said. If her father had still been around none of this Cousin Anwar stuff would have happened. Cousin Anwar came from her mother’s family and she knew that her father hadn’t liked him. She missed her baba so much!

‘Your father wants you to marry the boy,’ the imam said.

‘Is that what my mother said? She’s lying! Baba can’t stand Anwar.’

‘Rashida, you can’t stay in your room forever,’ her mother said. ‘You must stop this starving! You must come out. You must go to school …’

‘To school? Omy, don’t be ridiculous, you won’t let me go to school. Anyway, you put me in here.’

She heard the old man ask her mother whether that was true.

Salwa said, ‘Of course I had to restrain Rashida. But I do want to let her out. I want her to go to school.’

Rashida shook her head in frustration.

‘Your mother says—’

‘My mother is a liar,’ Rashida replied. When they’d got home from her father’s lock-up, Salwa had taken away Rashida’s keys and locked all the doors and windows. If she didn’t agree to the match, Rashida would be on the first flight to Cairo. But Salwa had misjudged her daughter’s resolve. ‘If you try to come in here, I’ll kill myself.’

‘Oh no, killing yourself is a sin!’ the imam said. ‘Don’t do that!’

‘A bigger sin than marrying an atheist and having his children?’ Rashida asked.

For a moment he seemed stumped and so she said, ‘Don’t answer that. I don’t care what you think.’

‘Rashida!’

‘Oh, Omy, shut up and take him away, will you? If Baba wants me to marry Anwar then I will, but I know he doesn’t. Let me talk to him on the phone or go to see him in Belmarsh.’

‘You can’t go to a prison!’

‘Oh, well, then I’ll have to die in this room, won’t I?’ she said. ‘And it will be all your fault, Omy.’

*

Lee didn’t feel too well. Before he’d left her, Susan had insisted on cooking him a bloody great roast beef dinner with all the trimmings and he’d felt duty-bound to eat the lot. Unaccustomed to pushing down big meals, especially at night, Lee felt sick and bloated. Now he was driving through Dagenham, trying to remember where the old ‘village’ was without having to resort to the sat nav. His phone needed charging and he couldn’t do that and use the route finder. When he was a kid, a couple of his cousins had lived on what had once been the largest social housing estate in Europe, which was what Dagenham had become. Nowadays most people had bought their properties, as evidenced by PVC double-glazed windows, storm porches and concrete lions sitting on front walls. Kids of a vaguely menacing type lurked and smoked on street corners. Lee, gagging for a fag, envied them.

What was known as old Dagenham village was actually a small collection of buildings centred around the parish church of St Peter and St Paul on Church Lane and the Cross Keys pub next door to it. The church had a large graveyard that provided a rare green space in the middle of the housing estate. Lee turned left off Siviter Way and onto Church Lane. If he remembered correctly, Crown Street, the pub’s address, was somewhere on the right.

He saw the church, a square-towered squat building surrounded by trees. Beyond it, on the right, just as he’d thought, he saw the lights from the pub. He pulled up in the car park and looked at his watch. It was only just past eleven o’clock and so
he’d have to wait for Barry Barber. Some drinkers were already leaving, laughing their way from the old white coaching inn towards their cars. Lee wanted a cigarette more than anything else he could think of. He poked the nicotine patch on his arm with a finger and resented his girlfriend. Two Subaru Imprezas, one with ‘Arsenal’ emblazoned on the side, roared off into the night, followed by a pimped-up Golf GTI.

Lee took his phone off charge, chucked it onto the passenger seat and got out of the car. His memory of Barry Barber was dim. About his own age now, mid-forties, he’d looked a bit like his father but with less paunch and no cauliflower ears. But that had been years ago and Barry had been inside since then.

‘Got a light, mate?’ The voice was young and local.

Lee instinctively looked down at his pockets. ‘Oh, yeah …’

The first punch floored him.

‘What the fuck!’

Then he got a boot in the groin and the world became pain and bright silver stars in that order. As far as he could tell there were two of them, one kicking him, the other one landing punches on his head in quick succession. He moved his arms, but they were useless. Then there was a crack somewhere and he knew they’d broken something but couldn’t say what. When he tried to yell, he found out. His jaw was fucked. Then one massive blow came, delivered by something that felt like a concrete block, and split his cheek. Amazed he was still conscious he tried to speak again, but couldn’t. They picked him up and slammed him back onto the ground again in a wrestling move and Lee heard laughter. Then he passed out.