Read An Act of Kindness: A Hakim and Arnold Mystery (Hakim & Arnold Mystery 2) for Free Online

better tell you about who Wendy’s sitting with. Not that I know who the Asian bloke is, but the white one is Sean Rogers, her landlord.’
    ‘Right.’ He’d told her some details about the Rogers brothers and their business partner Yunus Ali when she’d first run the case by him.
    ‘I know Sean and his brother Marty a bit,’ Lee said. ‘You and me can carry on with the separate act, but I’m not leaving you on your own with this. Sean’s a vicious psycho. If Wendy is working for him or just having sex with him, she’s not in a healthy place.’
    ‘No.’
    The Asian man was smiling at Wendy now, but none of them were speaking.
    Suddenly the relative quiet inside the pub was shattered. Police car sirens tore into the night like swords, rushing past the pub and up towards Forest Gate.
    *
    People, kids usually, were always getting into the old cemetery at the bottom of Majid Islam’s garden. It drove him crazy. He was forever trying to catch whoever was doing or planning acts of desecration because it was wrong and because it offended him. He shone his torch in front of him and then behind. Still panting from the effort of scaling the wall, jumping down the other side,and then calling the police, he put his mobile phone back in his pocket and shouted, ‘I know you’re still in here, you bastards!’
    But he immediately chastised himself. Whoever they were, now he’d alerted them. It was a Jewish cemetery and it attracted both far-right white supremacists and testosterone-fuelled Muslim jihadis. What scrawling a swastika on a gravestone dated 1904 did to alleviate the suffering of the Palestinians was beyond Majid, but some people seemed to think it was a good idea. Majid and his family had had to listen on more than one occasion to the sound of people whooping with delight as they desecrated the graves of the innocent. One time Majid had hauled himself on top of the wall to be greeted by the sight of white men and Asians knocking down gravestones and then fighting amongst themselves. As now, he had called the police.
    But this time was different. This time he’d heard fear in the voices on the other side of the wall. Someone, maybe a woman, had screamed. Once inside the cemetery, he thought he saw a figure disappearing over the main gates onto High Street North, though he could still see movement among the gravestones. Now he could hear sirens in the distance which meant the police were on their way. He narrowed his eyes and looked into the rain-soaked darkness. If he could get his hands on just one of them, and manage to hang on, he could give him to the police who for once might do something. Majid was not a big man and he was scared, but he was also worn out from years of caring about something that few others seemed to give a damn about. What harm were the dead doing to anyone?
    Using his torch to guide him, Majid began walking through the gravestones towards the main cemetery gates where the police would come in. The gravestones were tightly packed. Jews had once been numerous in the area and Plashet Jewish Cemeteryhad provided a last resting place for their dead for generations. Not any more. Occasionally someone came and opened it up for relatives or basic maintenance, but that was all. Majid thought about his own father buried thousands of miles away in Pakistan and fought to hold back his tears. To have a place to come to honour a dead loved one was a right, and anyone who interfered with that was little more than a beast.
    He heard the front gates rattle and saw the dark outline of a figure outside the cemetery. The police. ‘I’m coming!’ he shouted as he began to run towards the gate. ‘Some of them may still be here!’
    He heard the chains attached to the padlocks that secured the front gates clanking as the police unlocked them. There were more police gathering now, more figures seen through the darkness and rain. Then suddenly Majid’s foot caught on something and he tripped. It was