by M. H. Baylis
Riverside was a quiet street of scruffy semis, fragranced by the salty, muddy tang of the adjacent marshes. A bespectacled, jerky-limbed Hasid boy on roller-skates pointed out the Bettelheims’ house. Its only distinguishing feature was a piece of plyboard over the front door, no doubt where the police had forced their way in. Apart from that, there was nothing to remark and no one to talk to.
Back at Turnpike Lane, he decided to go home for an hour or two. He headed for Get-It-In to pick up a couple of cold Okocim. The weather had turned cold again, the sky had gone a threatening brown, and the lights were on in the shops along the little parade opposite the tube station. Get-It-In smelled good inside, of baking bread and chopped parsley.
The owner, a bald, mahogany-coloured man called Kemal, acknowledged him with a gloomy, upward jerk of the head.
‘You visit Tel-boy?’ he asked. ‘What prison?’
‘Pentonville,’ Rex said. He recalled his conversation with Terry in the police cell. ‘You had some problems with Dr Kovacs, didn’t you?’
Kemal’s face darkened. ‘Police was in here asking about today. I told them, yeah, yeah, sure, a lot of argy-bargy wiv that doctor. Always in here, making difficulties. But no stabbing. You wanna know why it was me that didn’t stab him?’
Rex wondered whether Kemal had said it exactly like this to the police. He probably had.
‘I’ll tell you why. I was Wood Green Crown Court all yesterday,’ Kemal said as he put Rex’s beers in a thin, candy-striped carrier bag. ‘Seeing that wanker sent down.’
The word ‘wanker’ sounded mighty strange coming from Kemal, though the episode he referred to was all too familiar. A crack addict had robbed the place with a fake gun over a year ago; stolen ninety quid, and broken Kemal’s jaw.
‘He got seventeen munf. I thought your newspaper might have been there,’ Kemal said with an aggrieved air. ‘Or wrote something about it. You still write things or it’s just internet nowadays?’ He fiddled with the zips on his fishing jacket – a de rigeur item amongst all Turks over the age of fifty – and awaited a response.
Rex muttered an apology and, on discovering that he had no cash, handed over a card. Kemal looked at it.
‘What you want me to do with this?’
It was the hotel key-card. Rex didn’t know what to do with it either. He paid with his bank card and left. Kemal had a point: the robbery trial was pure local news, with a direct impact on the people Rex was meant to be working for. The recent murders were local too, but was it really his job to solve them? He was a journalist, not a detective.
Then he remembered Terry, gaunt and sweating in the cell, pleading for his help. He owed Terry a lot. When Rex had washed up on the shores of the Wood Green Gazette, his career on the nationals had been in splinters, he’d just had a nervous breakdown, and his wife no longer recognised him. Not that Terry had fulfilled any kind of spiritual role. He’d just driven Rex about, and talked shite with him into the grey hours over countless beers and takeaways. Yet he’d been more instrumental in repairing Rex’s soul than any priest or psychotherapist. So how could he walk away now? How could he not try everything to help?
Making sure the hotel card was safe and separate from the rest of his wallet, he went back into the shop, purchasing from the surprised Kemal a large bottle of the most expensive vodka. It was a brand he’d never heard of, called Dynasty.
‘This your dinner?’ the Turk quipped gruffly, as he put the bottle in another bag.
* * *
It was a gamble, in fact, but one that paid off. Half an hour later, a bony, bearded Russian pulled up outside Rex’s house on a motorbike.
‘You look the same,’ the man said, as Rex opened the door.
‘You look different, Vadim. Where’ve you been?’ Rex croaked, once he’d been released from a violent bear hug.
‘Siberia.’ Vadim grinned, displaying a row of tiny, perfect teeth.’
‘Seriously?’
They went inside. ‘Yes. Implementing multi-platform digi-sec systems for gas plants. Dollar wages, very good. But boring. I grew a beard because there was nothing else to do. Really. I only got back a month ago. Actually you were lucky that number worked – I’m just changing it over.’
‘So you’re back for good?’ Rex asked, rubbing the sore patches on his arms.
‘Set up my own company. Same thing for domestic.’ He looked at Rex with a smile. ‘You don’t know what I am talking about, do you? OK. Basically, you are bastard Russian gangster, with bastard house in Hampstead, you pay me to put in very expensive bastard alarm system you can access and control from yacht in Monaco, or wherever. I had a revelation. You know, after Milda.’
Milda, a Lithuanian artist, had been Rex’s girlfriend. She’d been Vadim’s too, slightly later, and shortly before she died. He and Vadim should have hated each other. But it hadn’t worked out like that.
‘I say to myself, Vadim, you never will be rich doing IT support for the London Underground. You must go back to Russia, broaden marketable skill-set and monetise emerging tech opportunities in London-Russian client base. See?’
Rex smiled. Milda’s death had hardly resulted in a spiritual revelation. But it had worked miracles for Vadim all the same. His long coat was all leather, he realised, and wrapped around the man’s sinewy wrist was the sort of watch Wimbledon champions donned for the cameras.
‘Where is the card?’ Vadim asked, sitting at the table and pouring himself a glass of vodka. Rex passed it across. The Russian tapped the card against his teeth – thinking, Rex assumed, rather than physically checking it for data. But you never knew.
‘Depends if 128-bit or just only Crypt-Cab,’ Vadim said, hauling a satchel onto his lap. ‘How many laptops you got here?’
Half an hour after that, they were both seated at the dining table of the front room of Rex’s small, terraced house, with two laptops, a smartphone and an unexplained flat, grey box, which had all been cabled together like some sort of devilish hi-tech bomb.
They’d discovered that the card had last been used on the afternoon of Monday 18th of April at the Borehamwood Travelodge, to open Room 29. After a brief chat-room consultation with someone calling themselves YURISEXDWARF#, Vadim was attempting to access the hotel’s secure CCTV site. It was proving reassuringly tricky.
‘Who is Yuri?’ Rex asked, topping up Vadim’s glass with more ‘Dynasty’ and taking a sip of Okocim.
‘My friend. A premium hacker,’ Vadim murmured, his fingers whirring over the keys like a swarm of cicadas. ‘Actually he has very high position in Uralsib Bank, also.’
Rex tried not to give this too much thought.
‘What was the date again?’ Vadim asked.
Rex reminded him. As his Russian friend typed on, it occurred to him for the first time that ‘Dynasty’ could also be read as Die-nasty. And given the volume of bootleg on the streets of Tottenham, that might just be a deliberate joke on the manufacturers’ part. This in turn made him wonder something else. If there was bootleg booze, could there be bootleg food too? Could that have been a factor in the Bettelheims’ deaths?
Before he could give more time to this, the laptop screen magically parted into six segments, like a kaleidoscope, each showing a grainy, black-and-white view of the hotel precincts.
‘See?’ Vadim grinned, proud of his work.
‘I don’t know how you do it, Vadim.’
‘Thank Lenin, not me. Serious, Rex. If you say to people, “you must be all equal”, it makes them fight to be not equal. I read your Mrs Thatcher book when I was in Siberia. Great woman. But wrong. If you want to stimulate competition, you don’t say to the people: “Go! Be competitive.” You say, “No. You cannot.” You are laughing at me?’
‘No, I’m not. I just want to know – what’s the time on this footage?’
‘11pm.’
‘Okay, so, go back to 2 o’clock.’
They watched the view over the Reception desk, speeded up so that every figure seemed to be a marionette. Two blonde gir
ls in mauve uniforms did very little, it appeared, except eat biscuits and laugh at things on the screen of some kind of smartphone. A DHL courier came, with an envelope. Vadim chuckled.
‘I saw a porno just like this in Siberia. Two chicks in uniform. Man in leathers. Ah well.’
He sighed as the courier took a signature in return for his envelope and then left. Then a woman came in. She was gaunt-looking and dressed in a long black Puffa coat. Her hair was tied up in a scarf. She glanced up at the camera, and Rex flinched. He felt as though Chaya Bettelheim were looking right at him. Berating him for spying on her. One of the receptionists handed her a plastic card-key – the one, presumably, that was now inside a laptop on Rex’s dining-room table. They also passed her a large, buff envelope from behind the desk. It looked like the one the courier had left, though it was hard to be certain.
‘Okay, watch second floor…’ muttered Vadim. He enlarged the relevant view, and they watched the empty, flickering space for what seemed like an age until Chaya Bettelheim emerged ghost-like from the lift, carrying her package, and passed down the corridor. A view from another camera showed her using the key-card with smooth efficiency to open the door.
‘That normally takes me ages.’
Vadim grunted in agreement. ‘I think she’d had practice.’
But when? When had a woman from one of Stamford Hill’s most reclusive Hasidic groups learned to check into a hotel with such apparent ease and confidence? What business did she have in this anonymous, air-conditioned conference centre at the bottom of the M1? And where did the package fit in?
‘Wait!’
Vadim froze the screen. A man had appeared at the end of the corridor, through the fire door. His features were hard to make out, but he was tall and had a similarly gaunt look. He was dressed in a dark coat and a black fedora hat.
‘Irish man, I sink,’ Vadim quipped, clicking so that the scene played on. The man walked down the corridor, more cautiously, Rex thought, than she had, until he came to the door of 29. He didn’t knock, but the door opened. He went in. Vadim gave a low whistle. ‘What do you say in English? Forever the quiet ones?’
Rex struggled to think of an innocent, or at least a non-obvious explanation for the sequence he’d just seen. A strictly religious Jewish woman meeting a strictly religious Jewish man in a suburban hotel in the mid-afternoon. Nothing came to mind. Nothing besides the glaringly obvious. His thoughts returned to that strange encounter with Rescha Schild, hesitant in her doorway, wincing as if in pain. Perhaps it wasn’t pain, but immense discomfort, because there was something she couldn’t say, something she wanted him to find out, and it was this; the tawdry scene on the laptop screen in front of him. Why would she have wanted him to know that the murdered Chaya Bettelheim was having an affair, though? How that would that stop the gossip about her? ‘Maybe we should see when they leave,’ Vadim suggested. He fast-forwarded. The woman came out two hours later, and left the hotel. The man followed after a further half-hour, again exiting via the back stairs.
‘Did they come back?’
‘Key was only used once, when she went in.’ Vadim said. ‘I’ll save these for you.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Which Cloud you got?’
‘Eh?’
Vadim tutted. ‘USB then? DVD?’
Rex rummaged in his bag for the DVD he’d been given by the boys at Sylheti Stores. He didn’t care if their video message got deleted. Better for them if it was. ‘You want me to save these two video files on here?’
‘Two?’ Rex peered vaguely at the menu. One file was called ‘Video Press Release’. He smiled at that – at these junior jihadis and their media-savvy lingo. The other was called ‘Khutbah: Malik Waheed al-Shakhrah’. He didn’t know what that meant, but there didn’t seem any reason to keep either file. ‘Not bothered,’ he said. ‘Whatever’s easiest.’
‘OK. Then we drive to Bore Ham Wood to see, yes?’
Chapter Three
Rex was awake early, because a delivery truck-driver had trusted in his satnav rather than in the bleeding obvious. As a result, between 6:30 and 7 am, over 30 tonnes of slowly reversing frozen chicken kievs were stuck down the narrow lane outside his house. Unable to ignore the mechanical voice that announced the same very obvious fact every twenty seconds, Rex abandoned his bed, made a large pot of Turkish coffee to wash his painkillers down, and switched on the news.
Between something about budgets and something else about a Junior Minister in an ill-judged fancy dress costume was a piece from Heathrow airport. Ashen-faced Hasidim were shown arriving on a flight from Sydney, greeting others with handshakes and the odd hug. It was a while before Rex clocked that they were Chaya Bettelheim’s family, and that they were being met either by their own relations or by Yaakov’s. He watched as an apple-cheeked young man from the arrivals party calmly approached the camera and asked to be left alone. ‘We want the inquest to be finished with, so that we can bury our loved ones,’ he said, in what sounded like a pre-rehearsed speech. Then a tall, striking, red-headed Hasid loomed, placing a large, commanding hand over the camera lens.
Rex was so absorbed by this scene that he didn’t notice his phone ringing until it had finished. He picked it up to return the call, assuming it was Susan, who never slept and was no doubt glued to the same news bulletin. But it was a number he didn’t recognise. No message. He was about to put down the phone when it rang again. Same, unknown number.
It was Terry. ‘The gangs make you pay extra to use the phones,’ he said, in a low, urgent voice Rex had never heard before. ‘The only way to get round it is to get up before they do. So – sorry if it’s early, like.’
‘It’s fine, Terry. How are you doing?’
‘Me cellmate’s got schizophrenia,’ Terry went on. ‘He doesn’t wash. Just sits there all day, wanking into his tracksuit. It’s fucking terrible, Rex.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Is there anything?’
‘I’m going to talk to all your neighbours today,’ Rex said. ‘Who’s been there the longest?’
Terry sighed at the memory of life before the hell he was in now. ‘There’s a Greek lady at 322. Sixty-odd, always sniffing about, that sort. She’s all right though. On the other side, 326… I dunno, it’s a girl. Woman, I mean. Hardly ever there. When she is, she’s leaving or arriving with a suitcase. Does some sort of posh job.’
‘Blonde?’ Rex asked.
‘Dunno.’
Rex felt the painkillers kicking in. At last. They seemed to act more slowly on him these days. As the relaxing, unlocking sense of warmth spread from his foot up to his arms and his head, he thought about what Terry was saying. He remembered the blonde woman Bird had been shouting at in the street. Was that the neighbour then? Had she been carrying a case? He couldn’t remember. Her hair had certainly been blonde.
‘What about over the road?’ he asked. ‘The person who made the 999 call said she thought something was going on over the road. That means someone opposite. Any idea who she might have been?’
‘It’s all just Polish kids over the road. And students. All rented out, like. Coming and going. I did remember something, though.’
‘What?’
‘I’m hardly ever around in the day, with the job and the driving lessons and that. There’s only been two times. That day in January I had the shits, and… when I found him. And he had visitors. Each time. Two visitors, both times I was there. Not together, separate. He buzzed ’em in, then played his music.’
An hour later, Rex was sitting in the stuffy, over-trinketed sitting room of Number 322 Langherhans Road. Mrs Gia Christodoulou began by saying that she didn’t talk to the press. She added that whatever the doctor got up to had been his own business, and that she wasn’t one to judge or interfere.
But of course she couldn’t help noticing things, and one of the things she had noticed was that Dr Kovacs had two regular visitors.
‘Proper little United Nations it is,’ she said, quickly adding that everyone was welcome as far as she was concerned,
just as long as they didn’t lounge about on the dole making bombs, and didn’t force their women to wear bin-bags. Rex steered her gently back to the topic in hand.
‘There’s an old black man. He’s round almost every day. Has been for years.’
Rex remembered seeing Bird outside the house the day before. Was it possible?
‘Do you mean Bird? Wears a sheepskin coat. Drinks lager on the High Street.’
She flinched, as if the mere mention of such behaviour might sully the Doulton figurines and the Avon glassware. ‘I don’t know who does what where round here. If I go out, I keep my head down and get on with it. I certainly don’t look anyone in the eye.’ She briefly looked Rex in the eye. ‘Well, you don’t know if they might be someone with a knife or a gun, do you? So many crazies around.’
Rex felt a wave of sympathy for Mrs Christodoulou. His own mother had ended up like her: afraid, paralysed with anxieties that were stoked by the very newspapers she chose to read. Perhaps Mrs Christodoulou would have a happier outlook on the world if she’d moved northwards with the bulk of her fellow Greeks who’d abandoned Wood Green to the incoming Turks. Now, assailed by wave upon wave of fresh arrivals, she was like a miniature island-state, marooned and paranoid.
‘Dr Kovacs had another regular visitor too?’ he prompted.
‘Long black coat, black trousers, all black, black, black hat.’ She adjusted her hairdo, which looked like it had been glued in place, strand by strand. ‘You know. Siddicks Jew. That’s what they’re called, isn’t it?’
‘What did he look like?’ Rex asked.
‘I already told you.’ She picked up a tiny, yappy dog that had begun to eat Rex’s shoelaces. ‘A Siddicks Jew. I don’t look at his face. I don’t sit by the window all day. He hasn’t been coming all that long. A year maybe. Not like the black one. Can I say he’s black or do I have to say something else now?’
‘I believe black still covers it. Were you close to Dr Kovacs?’
‘Close?!’ The tiny Greek lady looked scandalised.