Brand New Friend

by Kate Vane

  So here he was, making his way up the stairs in some draughty community centre on a dark November night. He didn’t even know if he was in the right place until a guy with a ‘Vegans Love Life’ badge on his donkey jacket strode up behind him. He had long legs and was taking the stairs two at a time.

  ‘Animal rights?’ asked Paolo tentatively.

  ‘How did you guess?’ he asked, with a laugh. ‘This way. I’m Mark.’

  ‘Paolo,’ said Paolo.

  It was a big room. It looked like it was normally used for dance classes or keep-fit, with varnished floorboards and bare walls. In one corner, there were about half a dozen people sitting on folding chairs in a circle.

  Claire was already there and seemed to know people. When he and the guy called Mark sat down, she said they should all introduce themselves, which they did with varying degrees of embarrassment, then they carried on talking amongst themselves.

  He gleaned that they’d been discussing leafleting the McDonald’s on Briggate, which made them no different from the student group, he thought, disappointed. Someone called Chet was supposed to be bringing some leaflets but he hadn’t turned up. Paolo had seen the leaflets before – someone had passed one to him at the Green group. They were written by London Greenpeace, which someone had told him was not the same as Greenpeace.

  Apparently several members of the group were up at Faslane Peace Camp. A couple of others had just got back. They explained how they’d been arrested. They had linked arms to form a circle and sung songs when asked to give their names. Paolo had never been arrested. Something else he needed to experience, now he was no longer Swindon Paul and life was rich with possibility.

  Without Chet there, things ground to a halt. They couldn’t do McDonald’s without the leaflets so they went back to chatting. It seemed most of them knew each other well and were talking about the usual stuff – parties, gigs, gossip. It wasn’t the revolutionary ardour Paolo had been anticipating. Claire was undeterred. She was trying to engage the guy next to her, who looked decidedly unanarcho in a checked shirt, straight jeans and brogues (leather?) with John Lennon glasses. Apparently she’d just read Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and was questioning whether a philosophy grounded in liberalism was a sufficient means to effect change for animals, any more than it was for other oppressed groups. He seemed to be mostly nodding.

  In his boredom Paolo looked round the room and his eyes alighted on a woman with peroxide hair whose head was bowed as she spoke to another woman with an anarcho-mullet and a row of piercings in one ear. Despite the cold the woman with the mullet was only wearing a vest-top which showed her muscled arms.

  ‘I know some of you are new,’ the peroxide woman said suddenly, nodding in Paolo’s direction without quite looking at him. He nodded back, hoping to cover his confusion, and that brief absurd moment when he thought she’d read his mind. Even so, he noticed that she didn’t nod at Claire. ‘Shall we go the pub?’

  John Lennon spoke for the first time. ‘Maybe we should give Chet a bit longer.’

  Then Claire piped up and said why didn’t they use the time to organise a committee? One guy who was wearing the dirtiest pair of jeans Paolo had ever seen said he didn’t think the hierarchical approach was what was needed. Claire said it wasn’t about hierarchy, just knowing who did what. Like who was going to book the room, and make sure everyone knew where they were meeting, and bring the leaflets. There was silence at that, the kind of silence where Paolo could imagine people exchanging smirks but in the circle people mostly looked blankly ahead.

  ‘She’s right,’ said Mark suddenly. It was the first time he’d spoken since his introduction, which consisted of little more than his name and the fact he was a gardener who cared about all living things. Claire gave him a heart-breaking smile.

  ‘So who wants to be chair?’ asked Claire quickly.

  Everyone looked at the floorboards. The metal bars of the one electric heater glowed orange. It gave out a smell of burning dust but little warmth.

  ‘Well, I could do it,’ said Claire. ‘If no one minds.’

  It seemed no one did.

  ‘Treasurer,’ she persisted. She looked around the room. Paolo sensed her desperation.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Mark. Claire suddenly glowed when he spoke, her new ally.

  Just then a guy wandered in, the stomp of his boots on the wooden floor at odds with the lethargy of his movement.

  ‘Chet!’ said several people joyously.

  Chet found a seat and everyone began to chat again. It emerged Chet hadn’t got the leaflets. He hadn’t even had them printed yet. His giro was late and he didn’t know who had the chequebook for the group. Nobody minded too much. Chet was here, so they could go to the pub.

  ‘Who does have the chequebook?’ asked Mark.

  ‘Me,’ said the woman with peroxide hair. Paolo noticed she had amazingly blue eyes. Paolo decided he’d try and sit near her in the pub. ‘I do events. So I suppose I’m on the committee. But we need another signatory.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Chet.

  ‘Maybe a vice-chair,’ said Claire.

  There was another long silence.

  Paolo looked at the woman with peroxide hair. She was wearing black leggings, a baggy mohair cardigan that kept falling off her shoulders to show a pale, slim shoulder and a black string vest. You could see the shape of her black bra beneath it. She wore canvas kibbutz boots with chunky soles and had three studs in one ear, none in the other. Her hair was crimped and wild, shaved up one side. He imagined the rough feel of it under his tongue.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ he said.

  10

  After the press conference, Paolo hung around Richard Revell long enough to know he wasn’t going to learn anything useful from him, and not long enough to get cornered by DS Afzal. Then he set off for town to meet Tilda in an espresso bar in Bond Court.

  Tilda had said she’d need an hour to write up the press conference. When he arrived she grinned at him and handed him the tablet.

  She’d led on possible links between the death and Mark’s exposure. ‘Was murder victim mistaken for undercover traitor?’ was given more nuance in the body of the article where it was couched as ‘police have refused to rule out...’ but the headline was what would have the impact.

  ‘A bit tabloid maybe?’ he asked.

  ‘The left needs to reach people in the same way the tabloids once did. I think people are hungry for information but all they get are self-serving billionaires drip-feeding poison.’

  ‘You certainly have a turn of phrase.’

  Was he patronising her? Was he jealous? The excitement she felt when her work was published, hadn’t he once felt that? And the ability to go all out for what you believe in, to not always have to carefully present the perspective of the other side? To be free of the faulty assumption that there was just one other side?

  ‘So what’s your interest in the case?’ she asked. ‘Not really your patch, is it?’

  It was only now that he realised he hadn’t introduced himself to Tilda at the press conference. It could have seemed like arrogance, but he had somehow assumed an understanding between them, which she had been willing to accept. After all, Tilda hadn’t introduced herself either.

  ‘That traitor was my friend.’

  ‘Oh. From your university days?’ He looked askance. ‘I’ve read your Wikipedia page.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, what now?’

  He didn’t answer. Instead he went to get drinks (hot chocolate for her, not a vegan then) and tried to find a small corner of the table to colonise. Tilda’s phone and scarf and notebook and tablet were strewn across it.

  ‘So,’ she said, when he had removed his cashmere coat and arranged it carefully over a chair while she watched with amusement. ‘You’re writing a book about your experiences. How I was fooled by blah blah blah. But you’ve got a day job, and this isn’t within your remit, and so you’ll need a researcher, someone who can do the
legwork but also has a fine journalistic brain –’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I was hoping you’d tell me how you got the story.’

  ‘Ha, ha!’ She mimed split sides. ‘And I want you to tell me all about your student days with Mark. Were you close? Did you engage in any illegal activity? Did Mark deceive people into sexual relationships?’

  She looked at him mock-hopefully.

  He’d looked at her site. It was nicely done, big and bold, a few original stories, but also lots of repurposed content, the proverbial reaction to a tweet about a YouTube clip of a commentator responding to an opinion piece about a tweet...

  He didn’t blame her. That was what you had to do. She had a donations page and Patreon subscribers and Google Ads running but he doubted that the lot of it brought her near the minimum wage.

  He hadn’t answered her question. Why was he here?

  He leaned in playfully. ‘You don’t really expect me to give away my story, do you?’

  ‘We can share,’ she said. ‘Yours will be personal, mine political. I’m not so concerned about the soap opera, I want to know about the role of the state in spying on legal protest.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to be popular.’

  ‘You can be popular and serious.’

  ‘It’s the human angle that gets people’s attention. I wish it wasn’t true but –’ Didn’t he know this? You could report hundreds of deaths in the war in Aleppo or at sea fleeing persecution and no one listened. Get one picture of a bloodied – or ideally dead – child and people suddenly opened their hearts and their wallets.

  ‘So give me a human angle,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’

  Was he angry? Should he be? At the moment he felt a strange blankness. The friend he thought he’d known didn’t exist. How could he be angry with a ghost?

  ‘I can’t talk about it. Why don’t you ask Mark?’

  ‘I tried. I knew he wouldn’t respond. He never gives anything away. He’s like, always pleasant and never personal.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Of course. He didn’t tell you?’

  ‘No,’ said Paolo, realising that Mark hadn’t told him very much at all. ‘Clearly you don’t like him. The traitor.’

  ‘I did,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘I don’t know him that well, but I don’t suppose anyone can claim to know him well now. I’ve met him a few times at anti-fracking demos and direct action. He’s involved in the protests at Threapton. That’s –’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ he said. It was a planned fracking site in North Yorkshire. ‘So Mark’s been active all this time?’

  ‘I’ve only been involved at Threapton about a year. Before that I was involved in anti-austerity campaigning and before that I was at university. I got the impression he was quite new to it, but then the group hadn’t been going long.’

  ‘Your source was someone close to him?’ he asked, hoping that his casual tone might trick her into revelation.

  ‘It came anonymously, via Secure Drop. And that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘How did your source get his real identity? Say you thought someone was iffy, you might watch them, try to catch them out, but that wouldn’t lead you to their real name, would it?’

  ‘I’m not playing.’

  ‘Unless they were careless. Left their real ID where it could be found. Or they told someone. Or someone from their old life spotted them and recognised them.’ If Mark was the intended victim of the murder, any of those people might also be suspects. ‘What if this has been leaked by someone from the police? They would be able to connect the two identities.’

  ‘What would be the motive?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Disgruntled former officer with a grudge, someone who had a personal difficulty with Mark – They might have thought it was wrong that he got away. They might see it as breaking the code. Treachery.’

  ‘Well, it is, isn’t it?’ said Tilda. She gave him a challenging look but he had no response. ‘So, you’re going with the police theory. Do you know something about the murder?’

  ‘Do you?’

  She sighed wistfully. ‘I don’t exactly have a close relationship with the police media team.’

  ‘I’m surprised you’ve got accreditation.’ He knew that the debate about online news sites and the access they should be given was ongoing. There was even talk of issuing them with passes to the Westminster lobby, the cosy club that gave journalists access to off-the-record briefings from politicians on condition they played by certain rules.

  ‘I got commissioned by the Guardian to write about a death in custody last year. Once I got accreditation I don’t think they could justify taking it off me. They’re co-operative as far as it goes but I don’t get anything more than the minimum. No tip-offs at cosy lunches.’

  ‘This murder could be linked to your story.’

  ‘I’m not responsible,’ she said, but beneath the defiance was a suggestion she was convincing herself.

  He felt for her. And she might yet be useful. He finished his tea and spoke quietly. ‘Sid Jenkins.’

  11

  After Paolo was elected unanimously to the lofty position of vice-chair of the city animal rights group, they adjourned to the Fox and Newt. Paolo had ordered a fine pint of Speckled Hen and the peroxide woman had looked at it and said nothing and he remembered what Claire had said about fish finings but it was bought now so he might as well finish it. Claire was telling the guy with the John Lennon glasses (who Paolo never saw after that night, perhaps she drove him away with her zeal) how she was going vegan as soon as she got out of halls.

  ‘You veggie? Vegan?’ asked the anarcho-mullet woman, but not in a rude way, in the same casual flat tone that she had used earlier when she asked if he was a student or unemployed. It had made Paolo smile, this variation on the straight world’s ‘what do you do?’

  ‘I might go vegan next year too,’ he said. ‘Going veggie has been easier than I thought.’

  Chet said, ‘Maybe you’re not doing it right. Are you one of those so-called veggies who eats fish?’ He looked at the Speckled Hen and there was an awkward silence.

  Mark spoke up. ‘We’re all here because we want change, and we’re all starting from different places. We do what we can, whether we bring knowledge, commitment or organisation.’

  Paolo didn’t know if Chet took that as a rebuke for being late and without the leaflets but he shut up after that.

  The woman with the peroxide hair said, ‘I’ll drink to that!’ and smiled warmly at Paolo and took a swig from her bottle of Pils. Paolo was still basking in that smile when the anarcho-mullet woman turned and kissed her.

  Then Ratman walked in wearing a fur coat and ordered a pint of Fighting Cock.

  Paolo knew he was called Ratman because Chet’s face lit up and he said, ‘Ratman’s here!’ and everyone immediately looked happier.

  Ratman smiled as he sat down, displaying a row of discoloured, uneven teeth. Ratman did a lot of speed, Paolo learnt later.

  ‘Been doing some action,’ said Ratman. He sounded like he’d been eating gravel washed down with gin. ‘Pissed through the letterbox of South African Airways.’

  A couple of people laughed. The guy in the John Lennon glasses nodded with earnest approval. Claire said, ‘That will really bring down apartheid,’ but she was looking at her beer, so Paolo wasn’t sure anyone else heard her above the laughter.

  When they were quiet, Mark said, ‘There isn’t a South African Airways in Leeds.’

  Ratman thought for a moment. ‘Manchester. Must have been yesterday or – what day is it?’

  Chet said, ‘Nice coat, mate.’

  ‘It’s for the demos. We’ll splash red paint on it, make it look like blood.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’ asked Paolo.

  Ratman tapped the side of his nose and winked. It was an exaggerated gesture Paolo had only ever seen on TV. As he did so, the coat seemed to squirm, as if it was still alive. A little face popp
ed out of the front of it. The face of a rat. Ratman stroked its head and spoke softly and the rat disappeared back inside the coat.

  ‘So, where’s the party?’

  12

  Why had he done it? Paolo had given the name of the dead man to Tilda. At least, the dead man according to Mark, though he had already revealed that they couldn’t believe a word he said. And then, for good measure, he told her that Sid was Mark’s boss when he was undercover.

  He couldn’t decide whether it was a shrewd move or a crazy one. He knew nothing about her, but then he knew nothing about Mark either. He couldn’t investigate when, as she pointed out, there was a risk he might become the story. This might be good for him and for Tilda.

  Afterwards they’d swapped phone numbers. He’d thought of giving her the number of the burner but then decided to respect Mark’s wishes in this at least (he had ignored his injunction and programmed the number for Mark’s burner into it).

  Paolo took the phone out now and tried Mark. He had to speak to him. He had to know why he wasn’t telling the police the truth about Sid. They’d find out sooner or later so why hold them up? Mark’s shock had seemed genuine last night, but if he was lying then he could be buying time to cover his tracks.

  Mark’s phone was switched off. He looked up the number of Acorn Community Garden online and tried that but just got voicemail. A woman’s voice. Authoritative, matter-of-fact, saying the garden was closed following a criminal incident and giving the number for Crimestoppers and 101 for anyone with information. It sounded like police-speak so he assumed they’d dictated the message.

  Mark could be at the garden and not answering the phone. Or he could be at home. Paolo walked the short distance to the railway station and got a taxi from the rank and gave the driver Mark’s address. She nodded and set off.

  When he got there he could see journalists loitering outside. He recalled how Mark had been surprised last night that his story hadn’t generated much interest. Paolo didn’t want to think he’d been disappointed. Now that there had been a murder, Mark was considered worthy of attention.