by Mark Dawson
The carol faded out as Milton descended. He took the Victoria Line to Oxford Circus, slowly negotiated the thronged station until he could change onto the Central Line, and then settled down as the train pulled out.
* * *
Bethnal Green had changed since the last time Milton had been here. It had always been a tough, hardscrabble sort of place, a hinterland on the fringes of the city in which hard men and tough women lived their lives in the shadow of the financial district. Its most famous sons were the Krays, the psychopathic gangsters who had ruled over its streets during the sixties. Then, it had been resolutely white and working class, full of straight-talking locals who had fought off both poverty and then the Luftwaffe, sticking two fingers up at the German bombers that had levelled whole streets.
Now, however, the fight against gentrification was evidently proving too much; Milton climbed out of the station to the street and saw the accoutrements of the money that had flowed in with the commuters who were increasingly making the borough their home: coffee shops selling artisanal beans, microbreweries, stationery shops selling leather-bound notebooks that cost fifty quid, warehouses that had been turned into comedy clubs and late-night bars.
Progress , Milton thought as he followed Cambridge Heath Road to the east. Not always to be celebrated.
Milton had reserved a room at the Town Hall Hotel. The building had once accommodated the authority for the borough of Bethnal Green and had been restored so that it was now a blend of historic architecture and contemporary verve. It was separated into two parts: the original town hall from the beginning of the twentieth century that faced Cambridge Heath Road, and the art deco extension from thirty years later that had housed the council chambers.
Milton made his way into the building, past the stained glass and wooden panelling from its recent past, and found the reception. It was a large, double-height room, and a tall Christmas tree had been set up in the space between the two flights of stairs, colourful presents laid out beneath its branches. A fire burned in the grate, and Christmas music was playing over the PA.
Milton went to check in.
“Mr. Smith,” the woman behind the desk said after consulting her screen, “we’ve got you staying for a week.”
“That’s right,” Milton said.
She encoded his key card, slipped it into a paper wallet, and handed it to him. “Good news and bad news, I’m afraid. Bad news is that we’ve overbooked our standard rooms. The good news is that we’ve upgraded you to one of our suites. I hope that’s all right?”
“Thank you very much,” he said. “I’m sure that will be fine.”
“You’re on the ground floor,” she said. “Room twelve. Enjoy your stay, Mr. Smith. And welcome to London.”
7
P inky had looked him up online. Connolly had had ten fights and had won all of them. Most of them looked like they were low-key—small crowds, no money—but the last two had been on the TV. He’d found them on YouTube, someone pirating the Sky Sports footage, and had decided that Connolly was all right. He was slow, didn’t cover up well, but he had a big right hand that had knocked out half of the stiffs he’d been put up against. Ten fights, nine wins and a draw. Not bad.
He had put the word out on the street and had quickly tracked Connolly down to a gym in Tottenham. He had driven over there, nervous at being in the territory of another gang, and had sat in his car and waited for him to show up. He waited there until Connolly came outside again and then followed him, staying behind him and out of sight, a shadow that the man didn’t know that he had. He followed him to a house and, from there, Pinky was able to fill out the details of his life: girlfriend, kid, where the girl worked, what they did with the kid in the day. Pinky got it all down, everything that Sol would need. He did a thorough job with his research and looked forward to delivering the information. Sol would be pleased with him. That wouldn’t hurt at all.
There had been a lot of sitting around, and Pinky hadn’t been able to resist digging into the background of Connolly’s Christmas Eve opponent. He had taken out his phone and started to google.
Mustafa Muhammad.
Fucking JaJa.
He couldn’t believe it was him. He’d watched all the videos that he could find. JaJa was bigger and stronger than he remembered, the skinny little runt filled out with muscle. He had fast hands and faster feet. Pinky could see that he had talent, and that made him grit his teeth in frustration. But he knew that JaJa would be the same little pussy underneath it all. He might have a bit of talent, but Pinky remembered how he had held him down in the playground and rubbed his head in dog shit. He remembered the look in JaJa’s eyes, the fear that Pinky fed off, and he wanted to see it again.
Part V
The Eighth Day
8
M ilton woke at five in the morning; the sky was still dark outside. He changed into a pair of black jeans, a black turtleneck shirt and his black Red Wing boots. He grabbed his jacket and left the hotel. It was cold outside—the forecasters were predicting an outside chance of snow for Christmas Day—and the residue from last night’s grit was still scattered across the road. Milton took out his phone and opened his browser. There was a meeting of the Fellowship in a community centre that was just a short walk away from the hotel on Kedelstone Walk. He bought a coffee from a BP garage that he passed and followed his map to the centre, a single-storey building that had been built beneath the arches of the railway bridge that carried the trains into Liverpool Street.
There were a handful of people gathered outside the entrance to the community centre. Milton found himself thinking back to how he would have reacted to the prospect of going to a meeting the last time he was in East London. He knew that he would have waited at the periphery of the group and, more than likely, would have persuaded himself that it was a bad idea and left before the meeting had started. He would not have said that he was comfortable with the idea of attending the meeting, even now, but he knew that they were important to his recovery and that he always found peace in the sanctity of the rooms.
He nodded a greeting to the smokers who were finishing their cigarettes outside the building, and opened the door to go inside. The small meeting room had been prepared with four rows of chairs, and, as was his usual practice, Milton took a chair in the back row where he could keep a lower profile. There was a folding table at the front with two chairs behind it for the secretary and the speaker, and another table to the side held a collection of AA merchandise: new copies of the Big Book, associated texts and the plate that would be used to take the collection.
A banner had been unrolled and hung from the wall: it listed the Twelve Steps. Milton glanced at it, not really reading or taking it in, and found his thoughts drifting to Rutherford. He had met the old soldier at a meeting not all that far from here, and Rutherford had told him that he would get more out of the meetings if he participated. Milton had known then that Rutherford was right; he knew it now, too, and, although he occasionally spoke, especially when he found himself at his lowest ebb, most of the time he preferred to sit quietly and listen. He found the meetings to be the only place where he could clear his mind of the nagging voice that told him he was unworthy, that he had blood on his hands and that he would never be able to atone for the damage that he had done during his career. He listened to the speakers and focused on the similarities and not the differences. He would never find a story even remotely like his, but there were common threads that ran through each drunk’s share: inadequacy, guilt, shame, regret, remorse.
The others filtered into the room and took their seats. There were fifteen of them, a decent turnout for an early morning meeting. The secretary took his seat and cleared his throat.
“My name is Andy,” he said, “and I am an alcoholic.”
Milton closed his eyes and listened.
9
T he meeting finished at six. The others were going for breakfast at the greasy spoon nearby, but Milton politely declined the invitat
ion to go along and made his way back to the hotel. He went back to his room and took a shower. He towelled himself down, dressed in the same clothes, and went for a breakfast of eggs and bacon and orange juice in the restaurant. There was a pile of newspapers on the side, and Milton took copies of the Sun and the Times . He turned to the back of the tabloid and thumbed through the sports section. Most of it was devoted to last night’s football, but, just before the cartoons and crosswords, Milton found a short story on the upcoming fights. The focus was on the super-middleweights who were headlining the bill, but there was also a brief mention of the undercard, including a reference to Mustafa Muhammad. The young fighter was described as ‘explosive’ and an ‘exciting talent.’ Milton felt a fresh buzz of pride.
He finished a pot of coffee and went down the steps to the street outside. He flagged down a black cab and slid into the cabin.
“Where to?” the driver asked him through the open screen.
“Hackney,” he said.
“Where in Hackney?”
“Do you know Blissett House?”
“I know it,” he said. “Why’d you want to go there?”
“Nostalgia.”
Milton sat back as they pulled out into the traffic. The cabbie tried to engage him in conversation, but, to his credit, he quickly realised from Milton’s unenthusiastic responses that he would rather travel in silence. The man turned his attention back to the talk radio that he had been listening to.
They headed east, the new affluence of hipster Bethnal Green gradually replaced by crumbling high streets, shops and businesses struggling to make ends meet in the face of out-of-town malls and the internet. Charity shops had appeared where Milton remembered family businesses, and, as they continued farther east, even those became less and less frequent. Windows and doors were sealed with boards and metal grilles, the blandness alleviated only by the colourful gang tags that had been sprayed on the walls. The pedestrians that slouched along the pavements were a melting pot of ethnicities: Rastafarians with their dreads tied up and covered by knitted tams; Turks gathered outside their restaurants; Hasidic Jews, dressed all in black. The driver took them over a bridge that crossed the A12, traffic jammed up beneath it, then turned left into the estate that Milton remembered from before.
Not much had changed here; it might as well have been frozen in time. The convenience store still had metal bars across the windows, and, from the quick glimpse inside as they drove past, Milton could see that the cashier still sheltered behind a Plexiglas screen. He looked forward, out of the windscreen, and saw the three vast tower blocks that had seemingly sprouted from the grid of streets. He saw the names on the graffitied signs that announced them: Carson House, Howard House, Blissett House. They were still in poor condition; they had not been attended to in the interim. Milton found his thoughts running to Grenfell and the inferno that had fed on the cheap building materials within that building; thoughts of fire and death led him to the blaze in Sharon’s flat, and the consequences that she now bore as a result of Milton’s well-meaning but inept interference in her life.
The driver pulled up outside the tower block. Milton paid the fare, added a tip and got out. The cabbie didn’t delay, turning around and disappearing in the direction from which they had just come.
Milton looked around. Memories came back to him: he remembered the house that he had lived in so that he could be close to Elijah and his mother; he remembered the hot and sultry summer, the pressure-cooker that had contributed to the violence that had swept out of Tottenham and across districts like this all across London.
It was colder now, and the sky was a leaden grey rather than the deep blue that he remembered, but the atmosphere felt the same. There was an oppressiveness as he looked up at the ugly block, with its chicken-coop flats, too many people living in close proximity to one another, pressed into a space that was too small for them, a building that had been neglected by the council, slowly rotting a little more every day.
He zipped up his leather jacket and started to walk.
10
I t was ten in the morning and the courtyard at the foot of the block was quiet. Milton set off, walking by the red brick wall of a shed that housed the large industrial waste bins that served the building. The wall had become a canvas for gang tags. He saw the words FATSO and EMZEE and, over the top of them, black lettering that simply said LFB.
Milton remembered that, too.
LFB.
It stood for London Fields Boys.
He remembered Pops, the young man who had found himself unable to live with his conscience and who had been murdered for his honesty. He remembered the teenage boys, thirteen and fourteen and fifteen, who had caused such chaos in the estates. And he remembered Bizness, the charismatic rapper whom they all wanted to be, the Pied Piper who would have led the local boys away.
Milton took it all in, scanning his surroundings quickly and methodically as he always did. It was second nature to him now, a reflex that he didn’t even notice. He looked for people who might be watching him, he looked for choke points and escape routes, all of it done in the blink of an eye. It had been three years, but it could have been three minutes. Nothing had changed, down to the same old detritus strewn outside. Burned-out cars, abandoned fridges and washing machines. Locals shuffled on the walkways overhead, and youngsters kept watch as they leaned against the railings.
Milton had thought about what he might do when he was putting the plan together in Tenerife. Blissett House had been the obvious place to start. He knew that Sharon and Elijah had moved on: Google said that Mustafa fought out of Sheffield. There had been nothing here for them before, and then Milton’s meddling had made things worse. Sharon would have done anything to get Elijah somewhere safer.
Milton still wanted to go back.
He went into the piss-stinking lobby. The lift wasn’t working, so he climbed the steps until he reached the sixth floor, where Elijah and his mum had once lived. Milton passed along the walkway. Some of the flats had Christmas decorations in the windows: tinsel drooping from one corner to the other, candleholders left on windowsills, fake snow sprayed across dusty panes. He walked on until he reached flat 609. He was depressed—but not particularly surprised—to find that the flat had not been repaired after the fire that had torn through it. A replacement front door was secured behind a heavy metal door that had been fitted to deter squatters. The windows were similarly protected, ugly orange metal boxes screwed into the frames. The brickwork, still blackened from the soot, bore the scars of the fire that had ripped through the flat. Milton thought, not for the first time, that it had been a miracle that the entire tower block hadn’t gone up in flames.
He heard a noise from flat 607. He took a step back and set himself. The door opened a crack and then a face peered out. It was an elderly white woman; she looked him up and down, then made as if to shut the door again.
He recognised her: the Warriners’ old next-door neighbour.
“Excuse me,” Milton said, making his way towards the door. “I wonder if you can help me?”
“What do you want?” she demanded, speaking through the space between the door and the frame.
“I’m looking for someone who used to live here,” Milton replied, keeping his tone jovial and straight. “Sharon Warriner?”
“Who are you? You the police?”
“No.”
“Bailiff, then.”
“Neither. Just an old friend. I’ve been away for a few years and wanted to get back in touch.”
The door opened a little more, and the woman’s full face came into view. She looked him up and down again, then shook her head. “Can’t help you.”
“Please,” Milton said quickly, risking another step towards her. “I just want to see how they’re doing now. I was around when the fire happened. I’ve just come back from working abroad, and I’ve misplaced the telephone number I had for Sharon.”
The woman eyed him suspiciously. “They moved.”
“Sorry,” she said. Milton noticed her eyes flashing over his shoulder. “I don’t know. Goodbye.”
11
S he shut the door; Milton heard her locking it and fastening the security chain. He turned to glance back in the direction that the woman had looked and saw four young men sauntering towards him along the walkway. They were nineteen or twenty, Milton guessed, older than most of the kids who had been hanging around in the open spaces at the foot of the block. They were all dressed in matching outfits—hoodies and jeans and white trainers—and had the same look of lazy, insouciant hostility.
Milton turned to face them. “What can I do for you?”
The tallest of the group was over six feet and heavily built. He stepped forward. “You lost?”
Milton checked them, one at a time, looking for any sign that they might have a knife. He could see the hands of the big man: they were empty. One of the others—just behind the first man and wearing a purple bandana—had his hand in his pocket. His face twitched, little tremors that might signal the anticipation of violence. Milton had seen that particular tell on many occasions before.
“I’m not lost,” he said.
The man took him in, perhaps working out what he was going to do next.
“You’re not the police?”
“I’m not.”
“So what you doing outside JaJa’s house? They ain’t been there for years.”
“I’m a family friend. I’m looking for him and his mother. Do you have a number for them?”
“I don’t believe you,” the man said. Milton tensed up as he reached into his pocket but, instead of the blade that Milton feared he might withdraw, he pulled out his phone. He held it up and took a picture of Milton.