He could feel Floris’s disapproval. It never showed in his features, but it was there. Land didn’t know how to deal with millennials. Floris’s reaction to incoming news (usually bad) was odd in that he hardly reacted at all. He absorbed, processed and remained silent, never becoming involved or seeking to persuade. When Land had made an effort to teach him a little about the workings of the Unit, he’d said offhandedly, ‘It’s okay, I’m not going to be doing this forever,’ which left Land feeling crushed. Sidney was worse, an extrapolation of what had begun in Floris’s generation.
He had expected Floris to ask him why he was not stopping Bryant from leaving, but no such question was forthcoming. He told himself that the Home Office official was not on his side, or indeed the side of anyone at the PCU because he was duty-bound to report everything he saw and heard. Probably over dinner in Chelsea.
‘Shall we try again with a new email?’ Floris patiently suggested, moving his chair closer. Land was embarrassed at having his technological limitations exposed, but desperately needed help. Banbury had given up on him after realizing that his explanation of how attachments worked was being met with a look that suggested Land was engaged in a staring contest. The Unit chief could no more grasp the concept of cloud storage than he could imagine what the fourth dimension looked like.
As he laboriously opened a new window on his screen he asked, ‘What’s it like working for the Home Office?’ This was perilously close to asking a personal question, so he expected a circumspect answer.
‘Disappointing,’ said Floris with a rare hint of forthrightness. ‘They deal in statistics. They don’t know any real people.’
‘I always suspected that,’ said Land. ‘I applied for a position there once but Faraday turned me down.’
‘Mr Faraday is…’ Floris considered his choice of words. ‘Challenging.’
‘He’s distancing himself from me, I can feel it. He stopped returning my emails but he’s happy to contact you.’
‘It’s different for me. I’m staff. You’re a rival.’
Land showed Floris what was on his screen. Out of the blue, Faraday had suddenly sent a furious demand to see him immediately.
‘He says you’re not answering your phone,’ said Floris.
‘There’s still something wrong with the landlines. Although I have been reluctant to call him, I admit. One hates to be the bearer of endlessly bad news. He wants me to act without his sanction so that he has someone to blame when this is over. Could you possibly have a word with him?’
Floris looked uncomfortable at the turn in the conversation, but Land was always the last one to pick up on such things.
‘You have the ear of the Home Secretary, you’ve been here all week making reports, couldn’t you just—make up a little something extra?’
‘I can’t falsify information, Mr Land, if that’s what you’re implying.’
Land inwardly winced. ‘Of course not, and I would be the last person to ever suggest such a thing.’ He patted Floris on the arm. ‘Let’s forget we had this conversation.’
* * *
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Arthur Bryant and Sidney Hargreaves sat in a small harshly lit room, the cheap furniture and bare walls suggestive of trimmed government funding. A pity, because Senate House was a grand edifice, as solid as a pyramid, the academic heart of the University of London. Its main hall had the solemnity and sweep of a Greek temple, as befitted the home of higher learning, but Eleanor Chester’s room was hidden behind an upper deck of wood-panelled staircases, bridges and corridors, most of them now blocked off by incongruous steel swipe-card barriers.
‘It was designed by the architect who created the art deco tube stations,’ said Bryant, looking about.
‘Not this room, though.’ Sidney looked as if she might pass out from boredom.
‘You’re being paid to observe.’
‘I’m an intern, I’m not being paid anything.’
Eleanor Chester was younger than he had been expecting, but of course everyone was these days. Forget the constables looking fresh-faced, Bryant thought. So do the judges. ‘I’m a musicologist,’ she explained, setting down a tray of tea and biscuits. ‘I see you brought the book with you.’
‘I thought I might get a signature,’ said Bryant, using up one of his big smiles.
‘I wrote it because parents sing these songs to their children without knowing anything about them. Even the simplest songs tell a story. It’s just that the meanings have been lost.’
‘What about “Oranges and Lemons”?’ Bryant suggested. ‘I need anything that will spark my thinking in a new direction.’
‘My first thought was George Orwell.’
‘Oh, why?’
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ said Sidney.
‘That’s right. The song is repeated throughout the book and feels more threatening as it becomes harder for Winston Smith to escape. It’s used to show that his chances of survival are becoming impossible. After I spoke to you on the phone I had a quick rummage and found this.’ Eleanor took a long roll of paper from her table. ‘I’ve been following the investigation in the papers. They’re saying some rather rude things about you.’
‘Oh, I don’t mind so long as the reports are wildly inaccurate.’
‘Hold the corners, will you?’
Together Sidney and Bryant rolled the paper out across the table, pinning the edges down with tea mugs and a sugar bowl.
‘This is a pictorial nineteenth-century version of the original song “London Bells.” There are fifteen bells referred to in the rhyme,’ Eleanor explained. ‘People struggle to make sense of the references. For example, there’s an academic theory that this one, ‘ “Two sticks and an apple,” say the bells of Whitechapel,’ refers to a famous crippled beggar who sold fruit outside the church. And a line about the Aldgate parish was supposedly cut because it was colloquially known as “the Prostitutes’ Church.” One of Jack the Ripper’s victims, Catherine Eddowes, was seen outside it on the night she died.’
‘So the nursery rhyme’s tangled up with real-life murders,’ said Sidney before Bryant silenced her with a look.
‘Does it really matter what’s true or false?’ asked Eleanor. ‘Over time all facts become legend. Our memories lie as we seek to humanize the past and rearrange it into something meaningful.’
‘Very true,’ said Bryant, ‘I remember my mother as a joyful woman, but as I grew up I discovered she was deeply unhappy. I suppose false memories are more comforting.’
‘Do the deaths correspond to the words of the rhyme?’ Eleanor asked.
‘At first they did explicitly, with the leaving of fruit and farthings at the crime scenes.’ Bryant donned his trifocals to study the scroll. ‘He’s working from the song’s shorter version so we’ve only the bells of Stepney and Bow left. All I know about the great bell of Bow is that Dick Whittington was called back by it.’
‘Another piece of false witness.’ Eleanor pointed to a drawing of Whittington resplendent in scarlet and green, peering over London with his boot on a milestone. ‘The real Richard Whittington was on his way to Gloucester but turned back at Highgate Hill, so he’d obviously chosen the scenic route and got lost. His sense of direction might have been shot but there was nothing wrong with his hearing: He was over five miles away from St Mary-le-Bow when he heard its call. The great bell of Bow went on to represent London. The BBC always played the peal of Bow bells at the beginning of their broadcasts to occupied Europe during the war. Bow became a symbol of the city.’
‘Which makes me a true cockney,’ added Bryant. ‘Born within the sound of Bow bells.’
‘Yeah, and me,’ said Sidney without looking up.
‘But I think the symbolism of the bells goes deeper than that,’ said Eleanor. ‘You have to imagine what London was like when steeples still dominated the city skyline
. No trucks or planes, no police sirens, no road drills. Religion was stitched through the city like threads in a tapestry. Each peal of bells delineated its neighbourhood. Away from London, chimes carried across counties. If you heard your church bell tolling you knew you were home. And you could sing along because the peals were so familiar and so full of major chords that words have always been affixed to them. The lyrics are largely single-syllable because the chimes are short and we hear one note at a time, hence “When—will—you—pay—me”: simple and memorable.’
‘So if Bow and the bells of London represent England, removing leading figures in our political, cultural and entrepreneurial life could be symbolic of its downfall.’
Eleanor laughed. ‘That’s a rather romantic idea. The Victorians built fake follies to re-create ruined grandeur. The sciences roared towards the future while the arts took a great nostalgic step back. Greek and Roman legends were updated and relocated in mythic English landscapes. When the Victorians attained a great empire they tidied up their backstory. Their confidence became arrogance.’
‘My point entirely,’ said Bryant. ‘To undermine a city you first destroy the self-assurance of its people. Churchill’s propaganda machine convinced Londoners that they could never be beaten. It was a brilliant trick, but a trick all the same.’
‘What you’ve described is the opposite, a nemesis seeking to destroy morale,’ said Eleanor. ‘But to what end? Public confidence is shaky but it isn’t going to collapse because a few familiar faces disappear. The city has changed. In 1984 Winston Smith tries to recall the words to “Oranges and Lemons” because if he fails to do so the memory will die, taking history with it. I hate to inform you, Mr Bryant, but that kind of history has gone.’
Told you, Sidney mouthed.
Eleanor rolled up the rhyme scroll. ‘Only academics remember the bells or their meanings, or think they’re of any importance at all. Now the city barely even takes a tangible form. It’s a ghost version of itself that loosely inhabits the land plots of the past. Bomb it flat and it will still be there, an idea as much as a place.’
‘Maybe he wants to become part of the legend,’ said Sidney, and for once Bryant could not disagree with her.
I remember my mother smiling but she was never happy. Why would she have been? Her grandmother opened the door for her and kicked her through it, although she slipped her some money to help her survive. I later discovered that the same thing had happened to her when she was young.
We moved from one rented room to another, my mother and me, only stopping until the money ran out. Catford, Stonebridge Estate, New Cross, Dog Kennel Hill Estate, Tottenham—everywhere we lived had a bad reputation. ‘ “From Putney, Hackney Downs and Bow, with courage high and hearts aglow,” ’ my mother said, because her name was Mattie, short for Matilda, and when she was little she read ‘Matilda, Who Told Such Dreadful Lies and Was Burned to Death.’ It was the only poem she could recite, written for children. Pretty downbeat, but I guess it left an impression.
The flats got smaller, the houses shabbier, the neighbourhoods more dangerous. We always moved on before the back rent got too high, and left a trail of debts and false promises. I was never christened. I didn’t have an NHS number. It was as if I didn’t exist. At first my mother was too ashamed to admit I was hers, although everyone knew. It’s because she was raised religiously, with the burden of original sin. I was the memory of what had happened to her in a church.
We lived in streets that reeked of junk food, where sooner or later every dark trash-filled corner filled with kids planning raids on each other. Any emotion other than hate was considered unmanly. I learned to keep out of everyone’s way.
My mother was horrified by the idea of relying on anyone because she had been raised in gentility, and that meant being independent. Everyone on my grandfather’s side of the family had been connected with the church and in her hour of need none of them wanted anything to do with her—so much for the milk of human kindness. Soon we couldn’t afford even the smallest rooms in the worst neighbourhoods, and began sharing illegal sublets.
By the time I was eight (and living, I recall, in a squat in Kensal Green) she and I had started to fight. Maybe it was because we spent all our time together but we seemed unable to sit down without an argument. I loathed the way we lived, always on the move, and locked myself away in libraries just to be alone. Learning became the only thing important to me. My mother worked here and there, finding jobs the old way by knocking on doors: cleaner, shelf-stacker, bed-&-breakfast staff, those were the jobs that paid, even though it was cash in hand so she could be dumped at a moment’s notice. Sometimes I stole for her. It didn’t bother me. There are ways to survive.
When you move around a lot, sharing accommodation and using public spaces like parks and libraries, you talk to a lot of strangers and you get good at it. You listen for clues, study body language, spot weaknesses, watch out for tells. I read about the great magicians and how their understanding of audiences was as important as the mechanics of a trick.
When I was eleven I had a friend, Atena. Her parents ran a Greek restaurant in Green Lanes and Atena waited on tables, which was unlawful because she was not quite ten. She was small, and most nights she slept behind the serving counter on a specially made shelf, which would have given all the nice liberal London diners heart attacks if they’d known they were eating their salt-baked sea bass three feet from illegal child labour.
Eventually the inspectors caught her parents out and they lost the restaurant, and I thought: What if that happens to me? What if they come to our place in the middle of the night and find me sharing an illegal room with my mother and two complete strangers and their drugs or whatever illegal stuff they had on them? Where will I be sent? And how could I be sent anywhere when I wasn’t even given a Christian name? When I’m just a ghost kid?
To block out the sights and sounds of my life I read books on showmanship and magic; not the mundane manuals that showed you how to produce sponge balls or link metal rings, but ones that explained how deception worked on the mind. I was a fast learner. People are ready to believe anyone with more authority. They secretly want to have their choices praised. Deception works because people are lazy thinkers.
I returned to the library and started reading about the British police services so that I would be prepared for the day I would eventually have to meet them. Even then the idea had already formed in my mind. I just didn’t know it was there yet.
PART FIVE
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The Bells of Stepney
Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
—JAMES ‘MAD DOG’ MATTIS
SCRIPT EXTRACT FROM ARTHUR BRYANT’S ‘PECULIAR LONDON’ WALKING TOUR GUIDE. (MEET AT STEPNEY GREEN TUBE, KEEP YOUR HAND ON YOUR TUPPENCE AND YOUR WITS ABOUT YOU. PLEASE NOTE THIS TOUR IS CHEAPER BECAUSE IT’S NOT VERY INTERESTING.)
When Chinese billionaires decide to buy their houses in London because their kids liked the Paddington films, the same shortlist of place names always appears: Belgravia, Kensington, Holland Park, Notting Hill, Hampstead, hollowed-out neighbourhoods that look so much like film sets you wonder if a stroll behind them would reveal only chipboard and scaffolding.
The names of places in London’s East End resonate for a different reason. Whitechapel, Limehouse, Shadwell and Bow were marshy medieval villages built around churches that became central to the lives of immigrants. From the seventeenth century onwards the French and the Irish and the Ashkenazi Jews arrived, Chinese and Italians and Germans, then in the 1960s the Bangladeshis.
In Stepney one house in three was destroyed during the war, and the effects can still be seen: small pockets of Georgian elegance left between the flat-packs of social housing. The area had a reputation for violence, overcrowding, poverty and political discord. Now it is quiet and residential, with a young
middle class moving in. But those new residents would do well to look across at the Church of the High Seas, St Dunstan’s, which dominated the area for so many centuries. They’ll see what you see right now. A vast graveyard with hardly any headstones. That’s because thousands of plague victims were hastily buried here. Did no new coffins enter the ground because the sexton dared not disturb the foul soil? After all, this was an area that believed the air was so pestilential it could only be halted from entering wealthy London by the erection of leafy barriers.
Over the church’s main door are two carvings, one showing a ship, the other the Devil armed with a pair of red-hot tongs, because Saint Dunstan pinched Lucifer’s nose to make him fly away.
As a child I played on the bomb sites here, re-creating Spitfire battles, forever being warned by my mother not to fall through the rusty corrugated roofs of Anderson shelters. The neighbourhood children limped home with cuts and scabs and unspent bullets that they hadn’t been able to discharge despite pummelling them with bricks. Sometimes a child would bring an unexploded mortar bomb to school, which was usually good for half a day off. There was a breezy carelessness about the neighbourhood, held in shape by the rigid structure of family loyalty. I look at it now and feel the lack of atmosphere: no kids playing outside, no games, no songs, no Flash Harrys loitering on street corners. Now the dangers come from frightened children after dark, dying to claim their turf.
There’s a tip box on the way out, if you would be so kind. Don’t talk to strangers outside the tube station.
Stepney on a wet spring evening.
An ancient avenue of tall claw-armed plane trees, their barks green from incessant rain, no passersby, no one even walking their dogs.
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