Brand New Friend

by Kate Vane

  ‘I thought maybe he was just freelancing. He had a ready-made identity, a group of women who were vulnerable to his manipulations, he needed money, he seized the opportunity.’

  ‘And he just happened to meet these women at the funeral of a man who was involved with a campaign group?’

  ‘Coincidences happen,’ said Freddie stubbornly.

  ‘Maybe, but I need to dig deeper. It sounds a bit too much like the old days.’

  He thought suddenly of his first meeting at the city group. How he’d met Mark on the stairs and assumed he was a regular attender because he knew the way. And Mark had walked in with him. But a couple of people had asked his name in the pub afterwards. He hadn’t thought too much about it at the time. He had assumed Mark knew the group, and perhaps other members of the group assumed Mark knew him. And because Claire knew Paolo, Mark got accepted.

  He had read that the undercover officers used to do that. Usually with girlfriends. They’d form a relationship with someone and because they knew the woman, the group would accept the man. Paolo had been Mark’s way in. It seemed Sid had used a dead man in the same way. At least a corpse wouldn’t contradict him.

  ‘I’m going to pursue the asbestos angle,’ said Paolo. He could see that Freddie resented this a little. Freddie wasn’t interested in corporate conspiracy, he just wanted the scam story. He had to move quickly before someone else got wind of it and he didn’t want this to be bigger. He didn’t want lawyers to raise objections.

  Paolo sensed he needed the gig. He was desperate for the money and the validation.

  ‘I owe you one,’ said Paolo. ‘If I find anything you can use, it’s yours. In the meantime, will you settle for a pint?’

  24

  When Paolo and Claire came up the steps from the Phono they found themselves in the harsh bright light of a shopping centre, buffeted by shoppers rushing home for their tea. Teenagers in groups looking bored. That noise like everyone was shouting into a metal bucket at the same time. This was why they’d come, wasn’t it?

  He’d heard it so many times, Saturday afternoon at the Phono, you feel like it’s two in the morning then you come out and everyone’s shopping and it’s just weird! He felt faintly nauseous. He had thought he was too sober in the club but now he felt too drunk for the world. How was he supposed to stay upright, get home? And put up with Claire?

  He felt a welling up of despair. He didn’t even have plans for this evening! He could already feel the coming downer. He would probably stay in his bedroom, drinking cheap red wine and playing Birthday Party really loud.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ said Claire. ‘Like we’re swimming through a shoal of aliens. They can’t see us and we don’t understand a word they say. Take my arm, we’ll get through this somehow. Make it back to safety.’

  She was funny sometimes. She came out with this stuff, and she hadn’t even done acid. They navigated out into the street and crossed to the bus stops that would take them back to the safety of Hyde Park.

  ‘I don’t want to go home yet,’ she said. ‘Who can we go and see?’

  ‘There’s no one,’ said Paolo desolately. ‘No one.’ Everyone worth hanging out with had somehow contrived to be away that weekend, which was how he’d ended up with Claire and Kev in the first place. But he couldn’t exactly say that, or perhaps he just had.

  ‘Ssh, I’m thinking,’ she said. ‘We could try Mark.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You know where he lives?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘We’ve just been clubbing,’ said Claire. It seemed to Paolo there were two expected responses to this, bearing in mind Mark hadn’t been in Leeds long, either an incredulous, Clubbing? In the afternoon? or a bored, Oh, you’ve been the Phono.

  Mark offered neither, he just nodded, as if someone had spoken in a language he didn’t fully understand and he was too polite to ask them to repeat themselves. Paolo recognised the gesture because he employed it frequently with his Arabic Society friends when they did language exchanges, and suspected they occasionally did the same to him.

  He got the best of the deal. They were mostly postgraduates and pretty much fluent. He just helped them tweak their grammar and their writing style. His Arabic was still at the level of telling them what he did at the weekend, which wasn’t always easy to explain to an observant Muslim.

  Paolo wondered if Mark got bored here, living on his own, why he didn’t get a shared place. But if he was this tidy he wouldn’t last five minutes in the houses of most of their friends. The place was pretty bare apart from a couple of books and a few scratchy pamphlets scattered on the table.

  ‘What you been up to?’ Paolo asked Mark.

  Mark gestured vaguely at the table. ‘Making plans for the group.’

  ‘For the Willowview Labs demo?’ Claire turned to Paolo. ‘Chet’s making a banner.’

  ‘Great,’ said Paolo. Willowview was a vivisection laboratory in North Yorkshire which faced a lot of local opposition because it tested cosmetics and household products on animals.

  ‘After Willowview,’ said Mark, ‘do we want to go for something more ambitious?’

  ‘Like what?’ asked Paolo. It sounded like a challenge, which wasn’t what he’d meant.

  ‘Do you two have any ideas? Since we’re all on the committee.’

  Paolo sighed. That committee. Should he resign? But then they never asked him to do much, so he never got round to it.

  ‘You mean like direct action?’ said Claire.

  ‘Any action would be good,’ said Paolo.

  ‘The group’s not as active as I thought it would be,’ said Mark.

  ‘I’ve seen glass run quicker,’ said Paolo.

  ‘You want to speak to Tef,’ said Claire.

  ‘Who?’ said Paolo.

  ‘Is he involved in direct action?’ asked Mark.

  ‘I think he might know people who are,’ said Claire doubtfully.

  This was their life, thought Paolo. They were sure something was happening to someone, that friends of friends were doing stuff that was dramatic or dangerous, but it was always just out or their sight. Which made sense on one level, because if they knew, presumably so, at some point, would the police. But how was he ever going to be a journalist if he didn’t even know what was happening under his nose?

  Then he had an idea. ‘Ratman was hinting at something.’

  ‘Ratman?’ asked Mark.

  ‘He was at that party last Friday. Or maybe it was Thursday. The one where we were on the stairs when the lights went out. Claire?’

  ‘The one on Chestnut Avenue?’

  ‘No, that was the week before, wasn’t it? The one where a fight broke out over who brought the Special Brew.’

  ‘I thought that was Kensington Terrace.’

  ‘No, Kenny Terrace was the one where Kev was chatted up by that guy in the New York Dolls T-shirt and didn’t even realise till later and then wished he could go back and snog him.’

  ‘Wasn’t that the squat?’

  ‘No, it’s the place that Dave shares.’

  ‘Which Dave?’

  ‘We were talking about Ratman,’ said Mark quietly. While they were speaking he had been rearranging papers on the table, but he showed no impatience.

  ‘You remember,’ said Claire. He was in the Fox and Newt that time.’

  ‘He carries a rat in the front of his coat wherever he goes,’ said Paolo.

  ‘You think he’s been involved in direct action?’ asked Mark.

  ‘I don’t,’ said Claire. ‘He’s too open about it.’

  ‘He said the rat was liberated from a cancer research lab. It’s got a tumour.’

  ‘But did he actually liberate it himself?’ asked Claire. ‘I think he’s all talk.’

  Paolo wasn’t thinking about Ratman any more. He was thinking about those two guys in the bar with the Leeds Student crowd. About their big break. You didn’t have to go to India to investigate political activism. Not if it was on your doorstep.
He could already taste the headline, see the moody photos in black and white (assuming Isabel would lend him her camera).

  ‘Let’s ask him. If we want to get serious about this. If we’re not afraid to break the law.’ Paolo looked from one to the other. ‘That’s what we’re talking about, isn’t it?’

  25

  Paolo finally got a chance to think properly about what Afzal had told him. The fire on campus.

  He spent some time researching it online. He remembered the days when this would have meant a trip to the Yorkshire Post archive, straining his eyes looking at microfiche, or perhaps even the original newspapers, under the watchful eye of a member of staff. Now he was able to do it online, thanks to the British Library archive.

  The fire happened in a university building, one of a row of former townhouses which now formed part of the campus. A fire had caught hold just after 2am on a Saturday and had led to the death of Alex Ross, a security guard at the university, who was believed to have been sleeping in an office upstairs. Although the building had quickly gone up and the ground floor was badly damaged, it was not fire that had killed Ross, but smoke inhalation. All this was reported in cool, factual terms. But there was something else.

  He almost missed it. In the first edition of the Yorkshire Evening Post, the day after the fire, was a short article confirming the death of the man, and saying that police suspected a political motive. They pointed out that the building housed the office of Professor Philip Morton, who had attracted controversy through his links to pharmaceutical companies.

  The paragraph did not appear in the later edition or in any subsequent coverage of the fire. Thinking of what Afzal had said, Paolo guessed what might have happened. A police officer tipping off a journalist with their current thinking, only for word to come later that the investigation was to take a different direction. From where? The Met? Special Branch? Sid himself?

  The name Philip Morton was familiar. He searched and found plenty of citations in academic papers and he’d made that ultimate guarantee of status, a Wikipedia page, though one that indicated its neutrality was in question. He thought he dimly remembered some controversy.

  It seemed that in the 1980s Professor Philip Morton was an ambitious professor of a newly created department of biochemical genetics. He had signed a lucrative deal with a multinational pharmaceutical company which would fund him to carry out research on their behalf. This was an innovation back then. He found an obituary of the professor, who had died in 2014, in The Times, which gave the background to the controversy.

  The Thatcher government, with its pro-market ideology, wanted universities to work more closely with industry – or as its detractors would have it, to become the research arms of corporations, doing their bidding, going to them cap-in-hand because the state would no longer fund their work. Of course this kind of partnership was mainstream thinking now, no one thought much about it, but back then it had caused outrage. Professors had protested that education was not the same thing as vocational training, and that pure research was as important as bringing the next widget to market.

  This professor had seen an opportunity. Large-scale funding and the chance to raise his profile in both the academic and corporate worlds. He had smiled out of his publicity photos with a look that almost challenged you to have a go.

  Aside from the arguments about neoliberalism and the marketisation of universities, there was another controversy. The money was to be used, in part, to fund experiments on primates to further his research on epilepsy. The experiments would be carried out at the company’s labs, not on campus, but he was employing graduate students to do analysis of the results and undergraduates would have the opportunity to do a year’s work experience on the programme.

  Paolo paused. He vaguely remembered the demos on campus. Had anyone he knew taken part? Perhaps not, precisely because they were on campus. Claire in particular was keen to avoid student politics. Ratman was impatient of leaflets and picket lines. Mark would have been doing gardening jobs on a weekday. Or would have claimed to be.

  Paolo went back to the Yorkshire Post archive for coverage of Alex Ross’ inquest, which was some months later. It seemed that the police were no longer looking for anyone else in connection with the fire, which had been caused by a small incendiary device.

  Paolo looked up from his screen. He had never seen this. He would have been long gone, on his year abroad, by the time the inquest had taken place. He looked at the words again, as if expecting the letters to change shape, as if he might have misread them. He forced himself to read on.

  Witnesses testified that Alex Ross was something of a loner, that he had a record of vandalism and criminal damage, albeit some years earlier, that setting a basic incendiary device could be viewed as an escalation rather than uncharacteristic behaviour. An ex-girlfriend was called who said that Alex Ross had made threats against her when she refused to go back to him, and had talked about killing himself.

  She said he boasted that he knew how to do it, and on one occasion said he would take others with him and it would be her fault. She also confirmed that he was a deep sleeper and frequently slept through his alarm. He was found to have alcohol in his bloodstream but not a significant amount, and there were no illegal drugs, raising the possibility that he may have been slow to wake, particularly since the fire alarm appeared to have been disconnected.

  The building did not have sprinklers. There was a committee, buried somewhere in the bureaucracy of the university, that was considering putting them in all the properties in that row, but they were hampered by the age of the buildings, and some were concerned about the effect they would have on the character of the houses which were listed buildings.

  The property had wooden sash-and-case windows locked with ornate metal screws. Even if Alex Ross had woken up and been alert enough to reach the window, he would probably not have had the time to find the locks in the dark and unscrew them.

  It was asked whether it was feasible that he would have used such an oblique method to start a fire. A police officer said that the type of firebomb he had used was relatively easy to make, and the ingredients were readily available. The information on how to make them was circulating on campus due to the presence of animal rights and anarchist groups. The coroner had also questioned why he would have put the device on the ground floor and then gone to sleep on the first floor. If he had intended so kill himself, would he not have put it nearer?

  There were a number of possible answers to this. One was that a ground floor fire would do more damage as the flames rose. Another was that he had intended to harm others. Perhaps he’d meant the device to go off later in the day but had set it wrong? There was even the possibility that he’d dropped or mislaid it. It appeared to have been placed under the sofa but given that very little of said sofa was left, he might have put it on the sofa or it could even have fallen down the back, like the proverbial coin.

  Paolo paused at this point in his reading, imagining the rounded tones of the coroner, his studied pause as he waited for some expression of amusement at this witticism. Even through the careful objectivity of court reporting, it was clear that there was not much sympathy for Alex Ross or compassion for those left behind. The only relative mentioned in the reporting was his mother, Janet Sanders, but she did not appear to have attended the inquest. He searched online for her death certificate and found that she died in 1994.

  The coroner recorded an open verdict.

  26

  They were meeting in the jukebox room in the Fenton. It was early doors. The pub was quiet enough for them to talk, but busy enough that they didn’t seem conspicuous. There was the usual mix of students, Poly lecturers holding forth at the bar, a sound check in the big room for a band due on later, and university staff – people from the bars and catering and stewards – playing darts in the tap room.

  There were a couple of people who looked like BBC types at another table. The studio was over the road. Although Paolo didn’t wat
ch much telly in Leeds, he’d been informed once by Dudley that one of them was a weather forecaster on Look North. The reason he thought they were BBC types was that they were wearing suits and no one else in the Fenton ever wore a suit.

  The jukebox was already playing when they got there. When it went quiet the suits looked relieved, but Mark immediately got up and fed it. He played The Cult, Joni Mitchell and 10,000 Maniacs. Paolo assumed he’d pressed buttons at random.

  Claire was wearing a jumper she had made herself. It was a sort of oatmeal colour. Kev had started the knitting thing and then she took it up. She bought an old jumper from a jumble sale and unravelled it, Kev holding out his hands so she could wind the yarn round them as she went. Then she reknitted the yarn into a new jumper. The back was smaller than the front so it hung unevenly. She said she’d had some problems with tension which had made them all laugh, until she finally joined in.

  Isabel had started knitting too when she saw them. She had a beautiful dark blue wool. He saw one of the labels lying around and it was a mohair/silk mix. It didn’t come in a ball like other wool but was wound in a soft coil. He guessed she didn’t get that at a jumble sale. She was knitting on thick wooden needles which gave it a fishnet effect. Unlike Claire, she hadn’t finished it because whenever she made a mistake she went back to correct it. No doubt it would hang beautifully if it was ever finished.

  Kev’s jumper was all random colours thrown together but somehow it looked good (not that Paolo would ever tell him so).

  Ratman arrived last, then there were four of them. Mark, Claire, Ratman and Paolo. Ratman had a plan. Ratman who until that time had seemed more of a comedic figure to Paolo, one of those bit-players in his life whose main function was to remind him that he was no longer in Swindon, that anything was possible. You could walk the streets with a rat up your jumper and no one cared. It seemed, though, that Ratman had a serious side, even a life where he played a starring role.