The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘This is a new one,’ Rex said. ‘I had it made.’

  ‘Who by? A plumber? What do you want?’ Hershkovits demanded, in a way that might have seemed unfriendly if you didn’t know better.

  ‘I wondered what people are saying about the Dukovchiner family.’

  Hershkovits wiped sweat from his brow. ‘They are not “the Dukovchiner family”. It’s not their surname,’ he said in the same brisk, argumentative tone. ‘You want to print that, go ahead and print it, but you’ll be printing dreck.’

  ‘I know. I mean – I don’t know what they were called, but I know Dukovchiner wasn’t their name. That’s the name of where their original rabbi came from, right? Like the Lubavitcher follow someone from, er… Lubavitch?’

  ‘It’s Lyubavichi. And Rebbe. You say Rebbe for a Hasidic leader. Yes. Okay, so you’ve looked at Wikipedia, good.’ He paused to nod to a pair of book-clutching, black-hatted men passing by, so serenely detached from the worldly buzz around them that they seemed almost to float above the ground. ‘What else did your website tell you?’

  ‘Erm… that Hasidism is a mystical sect formed in Poland in the 17th century, since when it’s split into hundreds of different groups, some focussed on a strict revival of Jewish law, others more on direct communion with God. But all of them expecting the imminent return of the Messiah.’

  ‘You said that without taking a breath.’

  ‘I’m good at memorising,’ Rex said. ‘I was an altar boy.’

  Hershkovits smiled faintly. ‘The family name was Bettelheim. Yaakov and Chaya Bettelheim. Three children. Eytan, boy of thirteen. Simcha, girl of ten. I don’t know what the baby was called, but it was small. Not even a year old.’ He whistled sadly through his two, slightly prominent front teeth. ‘Their families will be… I don’t know. Destroyed.’

  ‘They have relatives around here?’

  ‘Not many, I think. She came from somewhere… I don’t know, maybe Brooklyn. Yaakov’s family are in Manchester. He moved down here because he divorced, I think.’

  Although he’d struggled to grasp the unfamiliar names and words in the man’s rapid recital, Rex was pleased. This was useful. Unprintable, of course, before the police had told the relatives. But helpful for his own enquiries. He glanced around for Terry, to ask him to take a photo of Mordecai and saw that he was leaning against a lamppost. He looked exhausted. Rex realised he was starting to feel pretty weird himelf, but he pressed on with the interview.

  ‘Only three kids, twelve years between the first and the last. Isn’t that quite an unusual family, by Hasidic standards?’

  ‘Not by Dukovchiner standards.’

  ‘So are they not really part of the community? I mean, as much as the Lubavitch or the Satmar?’

  ‘They’re Jews, so they’re part. But…’ Hershkovits frowned, as if caught by a twinge of toothache. ‘Different in a way that if I was to describe them to you so you would understand we would need to start with the forests in Poland in the eighteenth century, and I’m not going to do that because I’m busy here looking after my people this afternoon, okay?’

  The line reminded Rex of Moses in the Cecil B. DeMille film: ‘Let my people go.’ You had to admire any man who could talk about ‘my people’ outside of a Hollywood epic and carry it off. ‘So what do your people make of what happened?’

  ‘We want those Muslim boys caught and punished.’

  ‘If those Muslim boys did anything.’

  ‘Sure,’ Hershkovits replied, curtly. ‘So with messages on the TV and the radio every hour, why don’t they come forward, if they did nothing?’ He responded to a crackling call on his walkie-talkie, before adding with a vague wave: ‘By all means quote me, but if you want to talk to Dukovchiner people I’m no use, okay? Try vegetables.’

  He left Rex pondering this strange utterance for some time before realising that there was a dimly-lit food shop called ‘Vegetables’, more or less in the direction Hershkovits had waved. Its name – or perhaps another, catchier one – was also written in Hebrew letters, along with a telephone number starting ‘01’, suggesting that telephone calls from the general public were not of crucial importance.

  Terry shook his head when Rex mentioned the vegetable shop. ‘Feeling too rough, mate,’ he said, wiping sweat from his forehead across his scalp. ‘I’m going home for a kip. You don’t look too good yourself.’

  ‘As long as I don’t experience palpitations, blackouts or shooting pains, I reckon I’ll stick at it,’ Rex said.

  Terry forced a smile. ‘See you in the nearest A&E.’ As he shouldered the heavy bag, his expression changed. ‘Rex. You don’t honestly think…’

  ‘What? We’ve been poisoned? Come off it. Look. They’ve got our numbers, and they said if anyone started feeling ill, we’d all be called in. Has anyone called?’

  ‘Maybe everyone else carked it before they could dial the helpline.’

  ‘Maybe we’ve got both colds coming on, the weather’s suddenly turned ridiculously sodding hot, and your imagination’s working overtime.’

  ‘Aye. Mebbe. I’ll email the snaps in.’

  Rex watched him go, suddenly worried. Terry seemed an unlikely hypochondriac. And he did feel slightly dodgy himself. Then again he nearly always did, more so lately than ever before. But it had nothing to do with mysterious sprays, everything to do with the arthritis in his foot and the stream of Polish lager and painkillers he took on board every day to numb it. He headed over the busy road to the shop.

  Outside ‘Vegetables’ was a brand-new van: a jazzy, modern version of the old, corrugated silver Citroen vehicles you’d sometimes see rusting in the grounds of French farmhouses. Rex wondered if it belonged to the business, which was a shabby place, with grimy windows and a single, fluorescent tube casting a bluish light over the interior.

  Inside, it was cool and dank, and a welcome change from the freak Mediterranean weather outside. A huge, yellow-haired man arranged potatoes and carrots and some twisted root vegetables on a series of tables, while a slender woman stared into space behind an ancient till. Rex was greeted by a smell of male sweat, mixed with brewer’s yeast and a top note of soil. The man stared, open-mouthed, as Rex went in, but the woman seemed not to notice.

  ‘Nice van,’ Rex said to the man. ‘Is it yours?’

  After a pause, the man jabbed a thumb in the direction of the woman. ‘Hers,’ he said hoarsely.

  Rex smiled vaguely towards the woman, whose face didn’t move. He tried again. ‘How much are the red potatoes?’ he asked, alighting upon the first item he saw. He’d remembered the advice of his first boss, who’d been much given to aphorisms and bons mots: the shopkeeper who can’t sell you anything, won’t tell you anything.

  Rex had addressed the question to the large man, but he just continued staring, wiping a hand on his dirty white shirt and silently mouthing words to himself.

  ‘One pound, one pound,’ said the woman suddenly, as if waking from a trance. She had straight brown hair, a weary tone, and her accent was that of someone who’d spent her life in this part of London.

  ‘I’ll take two pounds, please.’

  ‘Yitz.’ At her command, the big man noisily weighed out the required amount, a single tuber at a time, muttering to himself and puffing. The woman returned to her trance, twisting a lapel of her work-coat over and over, while Rex looked around the shop. Its pale green, tiled walls reminded him uncomfortably of a hospital, and were entirely without adornment, save for an ink drawing of a young boy with the same long, tumbling ear-curls that the man wore. There were a few other provisions for sale, besides vegetables: candles in little tin holders, a pile of something or other in neat little brown cones, and some cans covered in Hebrew writing. It was another century in there.

  ‘Your son?’ Rex asked amiably, pointing at the picture as the potatoes were poured from the weighing-scale dish into a carrier bag. The man shook his head. The woman asked him for two pounds, which Rex counted out and held out to her. The silence
grew increasingly tense. She refused the money. He didn’t understand.

  ‘You don’t want the money?’

  ‘I don’t want to touch you,’ she said.

  He felt himself blush. ‘Sorry.’ He put the money on the counter. ‘I’d read somewhere that you had rules like that, but…’

  She held up a finger. She had a long face with wide nostrils – sombre, somehow, but attractive. ‘I’ve got dirty hands.’

  Was she teasing him? He wasn’t sure. The shop was so dark and her manner so unfamiliar.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ he said. ‘I notice there’s no shomer outside your shop. But they’re everywhere else today.’

  The man and the woman exchanged short sentences in Yiddish. ‘We don’t pay shomrim,’ the man said at last, very slowly, brushing some soil from his baggy black trousers. ‘So they don’t stand outside.’ He spoke in a more obviously Yiddish way than the woman, with a guttural r and a luxurious s.

  ‘When you say “we”, do you mean just this shop, or all the other Dukovchiner shops?’

  The woman tutted. ‘There aren’t any other Dukovchiner shops.’

  ‘You know Dukovchiner?’ asked the man suspiciously.

  ‘I heard about the Bettelheim family,’ Rex said. ‘Did you know them?’

  The woman coughed.

  ‘Police?’ the man asked.

  ‘A journalist. My name’s Rex Tracey. From News North London.’ The woman put a hand up to the collar of her high-buttoned blouse. He smiled at her and asked again. ‘Did you know them?’

  ‘Yes,’ replied the man, adjusting his carrots. The woman – his wife, Rex assumed – admonished him, but he ignored her. ‘I used to work with Yaakov. Quiet man. The wife I don’t know. From Peru.’

  ‘Peru?’ Rex echoed.

  ‘Yitzie! She was from Sydney,’ the woman interjected, in a weary way, like a mother tired of a child’s nonsense.

  The bear-like man shrugged. He even seemed to do that slowly, with great effort. ‘Some place crazy. She was crazy.’

  ‘She wasn’t.’

  ‘She comes in looking like a zombie drug-person!’ Yitzie suddenly roared at his wife, growing red at the neck. ‘Remember? When the little girl ran in the road and she just stood here, staring at the beans?’ The big man paused, out of breath, sucking back the bubbles of saliva that had formed on his lip during his speech. He slowly tapped the side of his head. ‘Crazy.’

  ‘She has problems,’ the woman said to Rex. ‘Poor health. Three young children to care for. A husband she barely knew before she married him, and her family’s all in Australia! Anyone would stare at beans, don’t you think?’

  Rex sensed that she was taking him a short way into her confidence. He smiled. She gave the faintest of smiles back. Yitzie, meanwhile, just sighed – out of words, it seemed, for the moment. He shuffled over and locked the shop door, pulling down a dirty, pale-green blind. As Rex watched the big man lumbering across the shop, he realised there was more to the vegetable offering than spuds and carrots. On another table were long, speckled red runner beans; elsewhere, a stack of crooked, hairy, yam-like items. He was about to ask what they were when Yitzie spoke again.

  ‘Who is alone here, Rescha?’

  Rescha made a disgusted noise. Sensing a further chink in the armour, Rex addressed her directly. ‘Did you know Chaya?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, in a thick voice. Rex could see tears forming in the woman’s eyes, because of the dead family, perhaps, or because of the set-to with her husband. ‘I liked her,’ Rescha went on briskly, seeming to put her emotions to one side. ‘But she didn’t come in much.’

  ‘You didn’t worship together? Sing in the choir?’ He felt himself blushing again. Did they have choirs in synagogues?

  ‘I don’t go much,’ she said.

  ‘She prefers to listen to the radio than to God,’ said Yitzie.

  ‘Nothing to do with the Narpal then?’ Rescha shot back.

  ‘How would you describe the Bettelheims? As a family, I mean?’ Rex asked. He wasn’t sure if his informants were really arguing or if it was just a routine they did together. He certainly didn’t know what a Narpal was.

  ‘Like everybody,’ Yitzie said.

  ‘Which is…?’

  ‘Quiet. Religious. Daddy works, studies, prays. Mummy cooks.’

  ‘Because that’s all a woman does,’ said Rescha. She mimed someone idly stirring a pot. Rex couldn’t help smiling. This time she didn’t return it.

  ‘So they weren’t the kind of people to make enemies?’

  ‘You see them now because… because some kind of dreadful accident happened to them,’ Rescha said quietly. ‘But ordinarily, they are the kind of family you wouldn’t even see. Nobody saw. Nobody ever saw them.’

  ‘That’s what you think it was? An accident?’

  She was silent for a while. ‘It’s all I can imagine,’ she said. ‘This isn’t like England… here. People here don’t do the awful things to each other that you write about in your newspaper. People are good.’

  Rex sensed he’d antagonised her. ‘You said that he – Mr Bettelheim – prayed. Is there a synagogue he went to?’

  ‘It moves,’ Yitzie said enigmatically.

  Before Rex could ask more, someone knocked on the shop door.

  ‘Shop closed!’ Yitzie barked.

  The knocking resumed, hard enough to shake the door and make the blind shoot up. A pretty face peered for an instant through the mucky glass, then darted away. Yitzie shrugged, pulled the blind down again, and took up a broom. He began to sweep the shop floor, humming tunelessly.

  Rescha put the money in the till, handed Rex his potatoes, and moved to open the door. Before she got there, the telephone rang in a back room, and she went off to answer it. Yitzie looked as astonished as Rex felt: perhaps the phone really did only ring once every decade or so in that shop. At any rate, this didn’t sound like a social chat. Rescha could be heard giving a series of stark, one-word answers, before hanging up and heading deeper into the building’s interior. Yitzie carried on sweeping, leaving Rex to see himself out, potatoes in hand.

  Further down the hill, ‘Mega Glatt Meat Mart’ had about as much in common with ‘Vegetables’ as Reuters did with News North London. It was a dazzling, chilled hall, with prices on digital displays, and staff in white coats and matching plastic trilbies. No one wanted to speak to him, though, until he asked what ‘glatt’ meant. At that point, a ruddy-faced butcher, who wouldn’t – minus the ear-locks – have looked out of place selling sausages in the Lincolnshire market-town Rex grew up in, gave him a detailed lecture about the kosher slaughtering process, and the extra-rigorous demands of the Hasidic meat clientele.

  ‘So did the Bettelheims come in here?’ Rex dared to ask, as the man wrapped up six beef frankfurters for him.

  ‘They stopped eating meat,’ the butcher said. ‘They all did. All the Dukovchiner. About a year ago. Something to do with their Rebbe.’

  ‘They seemed to do a lot of things that put them outside the rest of the community,’ Rex said. ‘Did that make them unpopular?’

  The butcher shrugged. ‘We don’t understand what happened. The Dukovchiner are very quiet, peaceful people. But bad things keep happening. First the boy, Micah Walther. Then this…’ He paused. ‘Maybe it’s what happens when you don’t have a leader.’

  Before Rex could ask why their Rebbe didn’t count as a real leader, an old, fork-bearded man rasped, ‘A Bratslaver can say this?’ Everyone except Rex laughed. ‘He follows the Rabbi of Bratslav,’ the old man wheezed, pointing to the butcher. ‘Who died in 1810. They still can’t find anyone else for the job!’

  There was a gale of further laughter but it quickly died away. It was as if the entire shopful of people had simultaneously remembered what had happened in the park. The old man tutted softly. Rex felt it too, an overwhelming sadness. He hadn’t been able to get certain shards of the scene out of his mind. The baby’s hand, hanging in space, chubby and still
mottled. That petal of pink blossom on the discarded skullcap.

  As in ‘Vegetables’, he got the sudden impression it was time to leave. He wanted to know more – wanted to understand why the man had said the Dukovchiners’ vegetarianism was to do with the Rebbe, then seemed to say they didn’t have a Rebbe. He was starting to sense how complex the picture really was. Stamford Hill wasn’t one community, but dozens: some on jovial terms, others distinctly cool towards one another; some in step with 21st-century London, others in Neverland. Somewhere on this spectrum were the Dukovchiner – vegetarian, eschewing the local security service, quiet, reclusive. Who were they? And would answering that question help explain the strange, quiet death of a whole family of them, in the midst of a crowded Haringey park?

  He scanned the street. In spite of the warmth, everyone still had their coats on. It seemed to be a world of coats: double-breasted crombies and thin gaberdines for the men, padded anoraks for the women, cagoules for the girls. By their coats shall ye know them. He tried a few more shops: Solly Scissorvitz, in spite of its jaunty name, was a melancholy, fungal-smelling unit where no one would venture beyond monosyllables. In the baker’s, on the other hand, they were garrulous, but only on the subject of the new parking restrictions. It was frustrating, especially because the streets were full of women – always the best source both of opinion and hard fact, especially on a subject like the death of a young family. But he knew none of these pious women would welcome being approached in the street by a strange, limping gentile in a crumpled suit. He needed an ‘in’. An introduction. But who would give it to him? He scanned the streets for Mordecai Hershkovits, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  It was late afternoon now, the day’s sudden warmth turning almost muggy. An odd, scratching sensation had started to make itself known at the back of Rex’s throat. Was it what the leaflet termed a ‘shooting pain’? He didn’t think so. He jumped on a bus, heading south towards the edgier, trendier Stoke Newington, and found a pub in which to sip a brandy while he formulated his thoughts. The brandy turned seamlessly into a pint, then a number of others.