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

“One of them eastern Europeans.”
    â€œCouldn’t be one of us then?” Vi said.
    Tony bit his bottom lip. Vi could remember when his Italian father, Vincenzo, had sold ice cream out of a van on the streets of Barking, and he knew it. He also knew she’d almost certainly remember that Vincenzo had been able to speak only the most minimal amount of English at the time.
    Vi put her cigarette out and then lit up another. “You know what Lee Arnold’s working on at the moment, do you?”
    Tony Bracci hadn’t been close to Lee Arnold since the latter had given up the booze. Going into pubs with a sober sort just wasn’t any fun, but they still talked on the phone from time to time and Tony did get to hear things.
    â€œI heard Neil West’s got a gig with him,” he said.
    Vi looked at a vast piece of graffiti on the wall of a half demolished factory. It showed a massive great face, its huge red mouth devouring the Theater Royal, Stratford. Underneath someone had written
2012 Olympic Man
. “Right.”
    â€œNeil don’t go out for just anyone nor for nothing,” Tony said. “Why?”
    â€œBecause I saw Arnold last night,” Vi said. “And he was up to something.”
    â€œWhat?”
    Vi raised her eyes to heaven. “If I knew that, would I be asking you?”
    â€œWhy you so interested, guv’nor? Lee left years ago.”
    A rat scuttled out of one hole and into another on the side of the riverbank. Vi Collins said, “Because, DS Bracci, like it or not, former DI Arnold is now in competition with us. You know the old saying about keeping your enemies close? Well keep your competition closer. And never forget that private tecs like Lee Arnold are members of the public just like anyone else and if I think they know anything I should know, I’ll have any one of them down the station as quick as hot shit falls off a shovel.”
    And then, all of a sudden, what sounded like thousands of voices rose up to sing “Abide With Me.”
    Pope Benedict XVI looked sinister. Fully aware that this impression was probably just her opinion, Maria tried to keep it to herself but without success. Her mother had been baiting her all afternoon and now she just couldn’t help herself.
    â€œHe looks like a pedophile,” Maria said. “Just like his priests.”
    Glenys Peters’ mouth dropped. But then apparently pulling herself together she said, “You’ve a gob like a toilet. Ah, what can be going on in your mind! My daughter, a woman who uses the c-word.”
    â€œCunt? I use it in my act. I don’t generally toss it around in normal conversation.”
    Maria Peters smiled, but her face reddened in what could have been embarrassment too. In spite of what Lee had told Mumtaz about the comedian having found God, clearly His influence had not yet stopped her from goading her mother.
    Mumtaz had thought that Lee might be in the house with her, but he wasn’t. He wanted to get her view on who came and went, and how Maria interacted with them, and with her surroundings when she was alone. She was something of a jumble. Apparently involved with an evangelical Christian group of some sort, she demonstrated nothing but contempt for the Roman Catholicism that she’d been brought up to respect which, to Mumtaz, didn’t seem to make much sense. Weren’t they both kinds of Christianity? But then there were different types of Muslim; Shia, Sunni. Nations had been to war over such differences. They mattered.
    â€œAnyway, cunt is just a word,” she heard Maria say.
    Mumtaz looked down at the floor plan of the house that Lee had given her and tried to concentrate on where the microphones and cameras he had installed werepositioned. Ideally, no creak of a floorboard, nor vague shift in the quality of the light was to go unrecorded—not that that was actually possible. But he, she or it was hopefully going to