Capital: A Novel
Page 49
Even Piotr liked Matya. No, that was wrong – of course he liked (and fancied) Matya: who wouldn’t? What was remarkable was that even Piotr was willing to show pleasure in Zbigniew and Matya being together. They’d all been out to Sunday lunch at a Polish pub in Balham, and it had been a success. Piotr had brought his girlfriend, a girl from Krakow who worked as a teaching assistant in a primary school, and the whole occasion had been like a version of the old days which hadn’t actually happened like that the first time round, since they’d never lazed around and hung out with girlfriends in that way. Piotr’s view of Zbigniew seemed to have undarkened, and they would now spend time together without it feeling as if they were constantly having an unspoken argument.
A man with a clipboard came into Petunia’s garden. It was clear that he was in charge of the other four men: he stood and held out the clipboard and compared it to the evidence of work in progress in front of him. It was apparent that something wasn’t quite right. Two of the men straightened and came over, and a discussion between the three of them began, all the men nodding and pointing as they talked about what they would do with the garden once they had got rid of all the plants and greenery that Petunia Howe had loved. Zbigniew turned his attention away from the window and bent to his work.
102
Many things can go concealed in the hurly-burly of family life. Shahid and Usman had not spoken or interacted in any way for four months – and nobody else in the family had noticed. For the last two of those months, Usman had been in Lahore with their mother, taking a break from London, reacquainting himself with Pakistani life, and very nearly arranging to get married to a lawyer’s fourth daughter. He had been so close to deciding to do it that he had had to go away to think it over, so here he was in London again, and much more relieved to be back than he wanted to admit. Usman was coming to think that your roots were not necessarily the same thing as your home, but he didn’t yet know what to make of the thought.
On the morning after he got back, he went to see Shahid at his flat. He noticed that his brother had installed a CCTV camera over the door; there was a pause and he was buzzed in. Shahid was standing at the top of the stairs. It’s not easy to look dignified and outraged while wearing an open dressing gown with a pair of Y-fronts clearly visible, but Shahid was managing to do it.
‘You little shit,’ he said. ‘I know it was you.’
‘This is the part where I’m supposed to say, “Please let me explain,”’ said Usman.
‘Fuck you. Fuck your explanation. I was in a cell for nineteen days because of you. And don’t for a moment, don’t for a single moment, think I didn’t know right from the start who was to blame for that stupid stunt. In fact the only thing I blame myself for is not having realised the first time I saw those stupid postcards. “We Want What You Have”. I should have thought, let me see. Who’s stupid enough to think this is interesting, lazy enough so he doesn’t have a proper job so he has the time to do it, enough of a political cretin to think it’s a significant gesture of some sort, retarded enough to keep doing it even after it starts to get people worked up, and just enough of a geek to do it on the web? Stupid, lazy, politically cretinised, retarded, spends all his time wanking on the internet. Oh of course! My younger brother!’
Shahid was still standing at the top of the stairs.
‘Can I come up now?’ said Usman. Shahid stepped back from the stairwell and Usman took that as a yes. He trudged up. Shahid was stood at the sink with his arms folded. Usman sat down and took a breath.
‘Look, I know it makes no difference, and I know it’s too late, but I’m sorry. I’m genuinely and deeply sorry. When you were arrested I assumed it was to do with that idiot fake jihadi. It was only the day before you got out that the lawyer said something to mother and Ahmed about the blog and I realised that was involved. But it didn’t make any sense! I stopped doing that stuff back at the start of the year! I took the site down, everything. And then someone must have screen-scraped all the pictures because someone puts them back up again and starts doing that extra-freaky shit with dead birds and trashing cars and everything and I didn’t know what to think. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t mean things to get out of hand. I didn’t think people would get themselves in such a twist. And all because they thought it might affect property prices! You make a point about Western obliviousness and they think it’s about property prices. You tell them they’re in a condition of complete moral unconsciousness and they worry about whether their house is still worth two million quid! Unbelievable. Then they decide you’re a terrorist.’
‘It wasn’t you who—’ began Shahid, and Usman held up his hand.
‘I know – it was you who ended up in Paddington Green. But that wasn’t the idea, they got it all wrong, it was that idiot Iqbal, if he hadn’t . . .’ Usman trailed off. Shahid just sat there.
‘You had my password,’ he said. ‘You were logged on through my IP address.’
‘I got it in the café downstairs,’ said Usman. ‘They get your wireless pretty much full-strength. I worked out your password.’
Shahid’s password, as it happened, was Shakira123.
‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
‘Remember when you got the broadband put in? That summer? All the time you were singing and humming that Shakira tune. The one about “I’m on tonight” and “hips don’t lie”. For about six weeks it was all you talked about. I was going through a … through a strict phase and you did it to wind me up. So the first time I tried your password I guessed Shakira. But that didn’t work. So then I thought for a bit and remembered back when we were kids. Remember when you were about ten and I was five? You had a little electronic safe. Dad gave it to you not long before he died. Birthday present I think it was. And you and I spent a lot of time together at that point, you sort of looked after me and we were very close. And you told me your password was Usman123, so I remembered that and I tried it on Shakira. Shakira123.’
There was a long silence.
‘Fuck you,’ Shahid eventually said again. Usman smiled and got up. He fished out his wallet, took out a card and gave it to Shahid. It had a mobile phone number on it.
‘What, I call this and I get to go to jail again, this time for drugs?’
‘Remember that girl you met on the Underground? You liked her, got her number, then lost it, you put an ad in “Lost Connections”, she never saw it, that was the last you heard of her?’
‘How do you know she never saw it?’
Usman shrugged. ‘She told me. That’s her mobile number.’ He made for the door. ‘And in case you’re wondering, no it wasn’t easy.’
‘Fuck you,’ said Shahid to his brother’s back, though with less conviction this time.
103
In the days after his visit to Shahid Kamal at Paddington Green station, DI Mill had come to a conclusion about the enquiries he had been making into the Pepys Road harassment campaign. He had talked it over with the DC who’d been working with him, and they agreed: We Want What You Have was two different series of events, run by two different people or sets of people. For the first few months, the postcards and website and the DVDs were the work of a person or persons with a local interest but no particular animus at any individual. There was something almost abstract about it: no people in the photos, no abuse, no criminal damage. That person, whoever he or she was, had a link to Shahid Kamal; at the very least, he or she had hacked into his internet access; more likely, it was someone known to him. Then the whole thing went away for a while. Then it came back with someone else behind it, someone who did not have that link to Mr Kamal – or if he or she did, he or she was for some reason now eager to conceal the link. This person was much angrier with the people of Pepys Road. He or she had a darker sensibility. His or her acts began with graffiti and abuse and turned to vandalism, criminal damage against property and the use of dead animals. This person or persons seemed to be escalating his or her or their campaign. The first person(s)
had arguably not broken any laws; you could probably slap an ASBO on them, get them to promise not to do anything similar again, and leave it at that. The second person(s) had certainly broken several laws, probably enough to earn a custodial sentence. But the blog was registered behind several layers of anonymous identity, and there were no fingerprints anywhere. Now that police patrols were taking an extra interest in Pepys Road after the cars were vandalised, there had been no further activity. The blog had been taken down. So Mill was closer to knowing the sort of person he was looking for without knowing who it was.
He wasn’t worried. Mill was sure something else would happen. Most detective cases are solved by hard routine work, or by luck – the latter category including stupid mistakes by the criminal. Experience taught Mill that he would have to wait for a piece of luck. Until it came, he mentally parked the issue and got on with other work. His feeling was that he wouldn’t have to wait long, and he was right. The break came out of the blue, two months after Shahid Kamal was released from prison. His DC came up to his desk, smile lines etched deep around his eyes, and without comment passed him an issue of the Evening Standard, folded open to page three. The headline said:
EXPOSED: ARTIST KNOWN AS SMITTY
His artworks are controversial, his stunts infamous. His provocative graffiti have travelled the journey from Underground station walls to prestigious art galleries. He makes collectors’ pieces which sell for millions. But nobody knows who he is. His name is Smitty, but his identity is one of the art world’s best-kept secrets. Until today, when an Evening Standard investigation reveals that Smitty’s real name is Graham Leatherby, a 28-year-old Goldsmiths graduate who lives in Shoreditch, the son of Alan and Mary Leatherby, whose home in Maldon, Essex is worth £750,000.
There was a large photo of Smitty, wearing jeans and a hoodie with the top thrown back.
‘Sweet Jesus!’ said Mill.
‘That’s right,’ said the DC.
‘The Leatherbys owned that house at number 42. The mother died and they inherited it. There must be something to this,’ said Mill. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence. I know this guy’s work. Janie has a book by him and she made me watch a documentary. He’s always doing this, you know, art stuff, installations and pranks and practical jokes. This is right up his street. If you’ll forgive the expression. We’ve got to go and have a word. No way this is just a coincidence.’
The red light on Mill’s phone was winking: a sign that the switchboard was asking if they could put a call through. He picked up.
‘Switchboard here. We’ve got someone wanting to talk to you. Says he has information relevant to an inquiry. Wouldn’t give his full name, but said to say to you that he’s the artist formerly known as Smitty.’
Mill and the DC just looked at each other.
104
No one was answering the buzzer at Smitty’s warehouse studio, so Mill buzzed another of the entryphones, identified himself as a policeman, and he and his DC were let in. They clanked up the metal stairs to Smitty’s floor and walked into a huge, high-ceilinged workspace with a blackboard all across one wall, an enormous wooden desk, and a young man sitting in front of a PC.
‘He’s not here and anyway he’s not talking to the papers,’ said the young man, without fully taking his attention away from the screen in front of him.
Mill held out his warrant card.
‘Oh. OK. He said there might be police. He’s in the office. His other office. The Bell. Off Hoxton Square, yeah?’
The two policemen went back down and out. The pub was about a five-minute walk away, through the mixture of semi-gentrified and still-slummy streets. Mill shoved through the heavy door into the saloon bar. It was empty apart from three or four people sitting at the bar and, at a table facing the entrance, the man who was recognisable from the newspaper photograph as Smitty. He sat to the left of the dartboard, beneath a huge old Watneys mirror. In front of him was a mobile phone, a pint and a packet of crisps. The two policemen went over and stood in front of him. Smitty looked up.
‘Hello. You look like coppers,’ he said.
Mill held out his warrant card. Smitty gestured at the seats opposite him.
‘You ever watch The Simpsons? Bart. I love Bart. You know one of Bart’s sayings? “I didn’t do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can’t prove anything.”’
‘We’re not here about anything in that Standard article. I don’t care what you’ve done in the course of doing your, er, stuff,’ said Mill. ‘In the course of your legitimate art work. Actually, I have your book.’ That wasn’t strictly true, since it was Janie who owned a copy of Smitty, Smitty’s lavishly illustrated book about himself. But he thought that would be gratifying to the artist, who indeed did look a tiny bit pleased. ‘I’m not talking to you under caution. I just want to ask about something. Another pint?’ He pointed at Smitty’s drink. Smitty thought for a moment.
‘IPA,’ he said.
‘Pint of IPA, bottle of Kaliber, and whatever you’re having,’ he said to the DC, who headed off to the bar. Smitty stretched his arms out and looked around the pub.
‘I love this place. Know why? It’s what I call PM. Proper Manky. Hasn’t been cleaned up and tarted up like most of London. I love this mirror. When did Watneys go out of business, what, twenty years ago? And they’ve still got the mirror. Formica tables. Beer towels. Everywhere else round here, it’s caipirinhas and Perrier-Jouët. See those regulars at the bar? See any of them move or speak? Exactly. They never do. Fancy some food? They’ve got crisps, pork scratchings, or if you’re feeling really flash, pickled eggs. That’s Proper Manky. In another few years, there won’t be anywhere like this left anywhere in London. It’ll all be lychee martinis, decaf vanilla lattes, and complimentary Wi-Fi.’
The DC came back from the bar and put down the drinks. Mill took a swig of his no-alcohol lager.
‘So, this is about Pepys Road,’ Smitty said. ‘Where my nan lived.’
‘Exactly. And where there’s been a long-running campaign of harassment, postcards, graffiti, videos, a blog, and now acts of damage and vandalism and animal cruelty.’
As he had done with Shahid Kamal, Mill was looking very closely at Smitty while he said this. The artist’s reaction didn’t seem to be one of guilt or concern. Mill opened his briefcase and took out a folder with photocopies of the inquiry’s Greatest Hits, mainly postcards and stills from the DVD but also pictures of the graffiti and the defacements and a series of photos of the dead birds and scratched cars. Smitty looked at the pictures.
‘I remember this stuff starting, what, must have been about a year ago. Before my nan got ill. I went around there, she’d had a few cards with pictures of her house. And then she’d just had a DVD which she hadn’t played because she didn’t have a DVD player. I passed them on to my mum and that’s the last I heard of it. I assumed it had just stopped. My mum did the place up and then she sold it. We Want What You Have. A good line, I remember thinking. Funny that it kept going.’
‘We wondered if it might have something to do with you. It feels like your kind of thing.’
Smitty snorted. ‘My arse it does. Animal cruelty? I was a vegan for five years and I still hardly ever eat anything with a face. And I assure you I’m very bloody careful about not breaking the law. I have quite a lot to lose, guys. I can see why this feels arty and see why you made the connection but trust me, it’s two plus two equals eleven.’
He kept on looking through the pictures. Smitty’s mind went back to the time he had gone and seen his grandmother, the last time he had seen her in full health – if indeed she had been in full health, because in retrospect he’d thought that she seemed a little weak, a little peaky. If he’d only known, then . . . then what? Then, not necessarily anything different. But he still would rather he’d known than not known, and just gone back to his studio, back to work, just like on any other day, back to his desk, his known surroundings, his incredibly annoying assistant whom he’d sacked not long after.