The East Ham Golem (eBook)

From the author of the Inspector Ikmen series, inspiration for the BBC's The Turkish Detective

Barbara Nadel (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
352 Seiten
Allison & Busby (Verlag)
978-0-7490-3140-4 (ISBN)

Infos

The streets of East London are alive with different languages, cultures and religions. Private investigators Lee Arnold and Mumtaz Hakim are well-versed in the community's tensions, the sad day-to-day reality that includes the desecration of graves at Plashet Jewish cemetery in East Ham. The vandalism of these final resting places leads to a disturbing discovery: one of the damaged coffins does not contain human remains but instead a sculpture of a man made of clay. This so-called 'golem', a term from Jewish myth given to a figure brought to life by supernatural means, proves intriguing to Arnold and Hakim, even more so when it is stolen from a police storage facility in an armed raid. The case leads the pair deep into London's past and its connections to wartime Prague, and onto the trail of a priceless jewel worth killing for.

Barbara Nadel was born and brought up in the East End of London and now lives in Essex. Prior to becoming a full-time author, she worked in psychiatric institutions and in the community with people experiencing mental health problems. Nadel is also the author of the award-winning Inspector Ikmen series now adapted by the BBC as The Turkish Detective.

Textauszug

ONE

Plashet Jewish Cemetery, East Ham, London. March 2023

‘Is it me, or does everyone think that whoever did this should be strung up by his nuts?’

The group of uniformed police officers standing beside the tall, middle-aged man struggling to keep upright on the uneven ground beneath his feet looked at each other, but said nothing.

‘’Cause, you see, I find I don’t really give a shit whatever the thinking was behind this – far-right nationalism, religion, madness – I just want to punch whoever did it until his spleen falls out.’

Still nobody spoke. Detective Inspector Tony Bracci was generally a likeable old geezer – family-orientated, friendly, fair. But he had ‘views’ which, if challenged, could land the challenger in a place they wouldn’t like. In other words, Tony had a temper he wasn’t afraid to use.

Looking around the recently desecrated cemetery, he said, ‘Vi’s got family buried here. Don’t know how the hell I’m gonna tell her …’

A female officer said, ‘You mean Detective Inspector Collins, guv?’

‘Yes, God love her,’ Tony said. ‘If she was still in the job she’d be effin’ and jeffin’ and kicking your arses to get hold of every Nazi fanboy and would-be jihadi in Newham.’

‘So why aren’t you?’ the officer continued.

Tony shrugged and then he said, ‘Where to start these days, Siddiqui? Seems to me there’s some sort of two-for-one deal on extremists these days. Can barely turn round for the bastards. No, it’s SOCO slog for now, see whether we can get anything useful from the site, then house to house where we’ll no doubt learn that no one has seen or heard fuck all.’

He lit a cigarette while all but one of his team dispersed around the group of shattered and desecrated tombstones in the middle of the cemetery. Rather closer to the main entrance than the rest, Detective Sergeant Kamran Shah was minutely examining the most egregious offence against the dead, in the shape of a coffin which had been dug up and its lid smashed. Fragments of what could have been the corpse’s shroud stuck up from the broken lid like tiny off-white sails. If the body of Rudolf Bennett – the name he’d finally managed to make out on the scuffed metal plate once attached to the coffin lid – was to be reburied, it had to go through the hands of a police pathologist first. So Shah, as well as examining the site, was also waiting for Dr Gabor, the latest recruit to the tribe of specialists assigned from time to time to Forest Gate CID. He’d never met Gabor before, but he’d been told by his boss that the latest ‘path’ looked about twelve.

Tony Bracci ambled and stumbled his way over to his sergeant and said, ‘So what’s the score then, Kam?’

‘Can’t see much without disturbing it, guv. Path phoned to say he wants to transport the whole thing to the lab so he can maybe see why they picked on this particular bloke.’

‘I can tell you that,’ Tony said. ‘Because he was there and because they’re twats.’

‘Yeah, but …’

Tony put a hand on his sergeant’s broad shoulder and smiled. ‘I know – look for all and any possible motives. Dinosaur I may be, but I’m not stupid. Just pulling your leg, Kam.’

The younger man smiled.

Kamran Shah had joined Forest Gate CID back in 2018 on an accelerated graduate programme. His now-boss had then been a sergeant who had worked with the legendary Detective Inspector Violet Collins. Tall, skinny and foul-mouthed, Vi had retired back in 2019, along with her signature Chanel suits, Opium perfume and famous preference for younger male lovers. What she hadn’t taken with her was the dark sense of humour she had shared with Tony Bracci. It was something Kam Shah had learnt to appreciate – especially during the frightening days of the recent Covid pandemic. Like most police officers, Tony and Kam had worked all through what became known as ‘the virus’, trying, often in vain, to get people to obey the heavy quarantine restrictions that had been in force back then.

Kam said, ‘But they are twats anyway.’

‘’Course.’

The entrance gates to the cemetery swung open and a black transit van reversed in. When it finally stopped, a young man with flaming-red hair and Harry Potter glasses got out and opened up the back doors. Dr Benedict Gabor, police pathologist and, it was said, a practising pagan, was not a man who waited for ‘inferiors’ to do the donkey work allied to his profession. Pulling a trolley out of the van while two of his mortuary attendants looked on, he nodded at the coffin and said, ‘This our man?’

‘Yes, Doctor,’ Kam said. ‘Called Rudolf Bennett.’

Dr Gabor liked to have names for his ‘people’ where possible. Observing the shattered coffin, he said, ‘Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?’

‘Wonder what?’ Tony said.

‘Why …’

‘As I said to Kam here earlier,’ Tony said, ‘it’s because they’re twats.’

Gabor nodded and then said, ‘It’s as good an explanation as any.’

While Tony Bracci and his team were searching Plashet Jewish Cemetery for clues to who had desecrated the site, Private Investigator Mumtaz Hakim was drinking masala chai at a house that backed onto the graveyard. The owner of the house, a Mrs Meera Dhawan, had invited her to talk about her younger sister, Lakshmi.

‘She’s what my husband calls an “airhead”,’ Mrs Dhawan said as she crossed one elegant leg over the other. ‘Thirty going on seventeen.’

It was nice to be given a cup of proper home-made masala chai. The spice-flavoured milk tea was ubiquitous all over the entire Indian subcontinent – though in the UK, as Mumtaz knew all too well, a lot of British Asians now opted for pre-mixed spice blends. But then Mrs Dhawan was the proprietor, with her husband, of three Indian restaurants across the London borough of Newham, as well as the ‘star’ of a highly regarded Asian cookery blog. Her masala chai was heavy on the ginger, which Mumtaz loved.

‘Maybe,’ Mumtaz said, ‘that is why she is attracted to this much younger man.’

‘You could have a point,’ Mrs Dhawan said. ‘But to want to marry an eighteen-year-old! I mean, who does that?’

‘Other teenagers? If as you say your sister is still behaving like a teenager herself, she may very well find this boy appealing.’

‘Yes, but she’s a lawyer!’ Mrs Dhawan said. ‘I mean think about the optics of that? What on earth will her clients think of her? Lakshmi works with our father at his solicitors’ practice in Chingford. Together with our brother Dev, they have some very important clients, high-profile people in our community.’

Unlike Mumtaz, a Muslim, the Dhawan family were Hindus. Meera and Lakshmi’s father Dilip Dhawan was a well-known and respected solicitor across east London, especially amongst Hindu families. It must have come as a huge shock when the younger of the two Dhawan sisters announced that she wanted to marry a white teenage boy she’d met at the gym.

Shouting voices from the nearby cemetery insinuated themselves into Meera’s smart, very grey living room and she looked towards the patio doors. There was no way she could see anything, but the police had been in there since very early that morning and their presence was unsettling – because it probably signified that the cemetery had been vandalised again.

Mumtaz, who had noticed the clutch of police vehicles at the entrance to the cemetery, said, ‘It must be worrying for you when people get into the old graveyard.’

‘It is,’ Meera agreed; then she turned back to Mumtaz and said, ‘All this hatred these days. Even levelled at the dead. Just because they were Jewish. I mean look at us. You are a Muslim, I a Hindu, but we get along with each other, we do business, talk like rational human beings.’

‘It’s men mainly, who do these things,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Most women don’t have time for such things.’

‘Oh, that is so true!’ Mrs Dhawan said. ‘Men and boys chewing betel all day long and talking about politics they barely understand. They want to try raising children, keeping house and pandering to the orders of men like themselves all day long!’ Then she shook her head. ‘Sorry, Mrs Hakim, ridiculous men are my bête noire. Like you, I’m a working British Asian woman who really doesn’t have time for the prejudices of men. And I don’t just mean Asian men either. I told Lakshmi, this white Christian boy of hers will be no better. I give it a year before he’s got her picking up his dirty socks and...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 20.2.2025
• Reihe/Serie: Hakim & Arnold
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller
• Schlagworte: Barbara Nadel • Crime • Hakim & Arnold • investigation • London • Thriller
• ISBN-10: 0-7490-3140-9 / 0749031409
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7490-3140-4 / 9780749031404