Read Online A Private Business by Barbara Nadel - Free Book Online

so she had to sit with them to drink it. She wished she’d just gone straight to see her mother, but showing an interest in Mr. Choudhury’s haj was something she knew would very quickly and easily deflect all and any of her father’s inquiries. He was always so happy to talk about religion. Baharat told her all about Mr. Choudhury’s travels without once including the old man himself in the conversation.
    Nodding and shaking her head in all the right places, Mumtaz let her mind wander firstly into the realms of shopping she needed to do, then onto a damp patch she’d found on the bathroom wall until, eventually, it settled on the mythical manly face her mother had described toher many, many times in the past: the Silver Prince of her childhood bedtime stories. The handsome, good and faithful savior of all Bengal who rode a flying horse and whose shoes and clothes were made from pure silver from the moon. Her mother had made him up, but Mumtaz had loved him. Once she became an adult, though, she had, like her father, considered such stories so much foolishness, especially after she married Ahmed Hakim. But then one day, quite out of the blue, she saw the Silver Prince in all his glory just north of her house, on Wanstead Flats. Beautiful and regal, he had stood with his head held high, his blue-black hair shining like a crow’s wing. But then momentary elation had given way to such awful disgust that Mumtaz felt instantly sick. She felt sick again at the thought of it and so she drank her tea quickly, excused herself to her father and his friend and went out to take the air in the street. As she put her head down over the mud-and-fag-end-filled gutter, a white man passed by and looked at her with sympathy. But he didn’t ask her what the matter was or whether he could help her or not. At times like this Mumtaz felt the scarf across her head wind itself tightly around her neck like a noose.
    â€œThere was always some bloke everyone called a flasher even if he wasn’t,” DS Tony Bracci said. “Turned out he was usually harmless.”
    Vi Collins slid her lizard eyes across to observe his plump,still young-looking face. “And everyone could leave their doors open day and night and we all had such a laugh singing round the old joanna down the pub? Do me a favor, Tone.”
    They stood on Marshgate Lane looking across one of the many tributaries of the River Lee at the beginnings of Hackney. Behind them the Olympic stadium sat with a half jaunt in its demeanor, like a hat that can’t decide whether or not it is stylish. A man had been seen here with his penis hanging out of his trousers.
    â€œI know it doesn’t always follow, but a bloke getting his knob out in public can be the first step on a career leading to rape,” Vi said. She sucked hard on a Marlboro and imagined what was going through DS Bracci’s mind.
Just ’cause she’s got some tin-pot degree in sociology
…
    â€œI base that on thirty years coppering,” Vi added.
    Tony Bracci hadn’t been at the “coppering” for many years fewer than Vi. “Yeah, well …”
    â€œYeah, well, we need to apprehend this villain,” Vi said with a smile. “All right?”
    Tony looked over at Hackney and found it just as shabby and in need of attention as Newham; everything except the Olympic stadia and the massive great media center was still shit. The whole area still reeked of shit from the old northern outfall, just like it always had, and once the games were over he, like most people in the borough, was prepared to bet that the whole lot would end up goingto shit. Just another in a long line of attempts to “regenerate” the old East End …
    â€œHe’s whiteish, medium height, sort of middle-aged,” Vi said. “Victim didn’t notice what he was wearing except his CAT boots.”
    â€œCould be a workman on the site,” Tony said.