The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  D.S. Brenard smiled tightly, revealing networks of wrinkles. How old was he? Perhaps anyone with four children would look old. ‘You don’t know quite as much as we do, then, Rex, do you? Incidentally, before you go off at right angles again, Schild’s got a solid alibi for the morning too. Allergy Clinic at the Homerton. His wife was serving in the shop alone most of that day, except for the period when you went in there sniffing about. Which we also know about.’

  Rex sighed. ‘Customers?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Who came in the shop?’

  ‘Only about half a dozen people all day. I can’t see how that place can keep going, let alone make the payments on that van.’

  Brenard flipped through his notebook, while Rex pondered this brave new world where everyone owned their motor vehicles on the drip. Even so, the van seemed an odd choice for a business like ‘Vegetables’.

  ‘Right. Here we go. Customers. First one was Dr Kovacs. He was the first one every morning, apparently. Bought some biscuits. Next was a couple of Mormon boys about ten forty, trying to save her soul.’ He gave a thin smile. ‘Bit late to the party, I’d have thought.’

  ‘What about the Bettelheims?’ Rex asked. He suddenly wondered if they had crossed paths with Kovacs earlier in the morning on the day they had all died.

  ‘They were customers sometimes, but Mrs Schild didn’t see them that day.’

  ‘Was Bird ever a customer?’

  ‘Who?

  ‘I don’t know his last name. That black bloke who’s always pissed and shouting at people on the High Street. You know the guy I mean?’

  Brenard nodded.

  ‘Well,’ Rex continued, ‘according to the Greek lady who lives next door to Kovacs, he might have been another regular.’

  ‘How would the Greek lady next door to Dr Kovacs know that this Bird visited a fruit and veg shop in Stamford Hill?’

  ‘Sorry. I mean – she told me a black bloke used to call round at Kovacs’ house, just like Yitzie Schild did. And on Tuesday lunchtime, I saw Bird outside the house, shouting at a woman. A blonde woman.’

  ‘He shouts all over the place, doesn’t he?’ D.S. Brenard said. But he made a note. ‘Can’t quite see him and Kovacs being pals.’

  ‘Trust me, Dr Kovacs and anyone being friends was a bit unlikely. He was a nasty piece of work.’

  ‘So we’re told. Not least by the man we’ve got in custody for murdering him,’ D.S. Brenard said. There was an awkward silence.

  ‘What did this blonde look like, then?’

  ‘Medium height. Arty-looking. Sort of bleached, short hair. Leather jacket. She ran away when I shouted.’

  Brenard put his pen down. ‘Well I’d run away if I had you and Bird shouting at me in the street.’

  ‘Terry didn’t do it,’ Rex said. ‘And given that I’ve just given you two useful leads – I know you think they’re useful because you don’t bother writing them down if you don’t – how about a little exchange of intelligence?’

  D.S. Brenard took a deep breath. Rex hastily continued. ‘What about the Muslim boys? I single-handedly brought you them, D.S. Brenard. Come on. I just want to know if you’ve had any joy finding that 999 caller yet? Not to publish anything, I swear. I’m trying to help out a friend. You said yourself, you don’t blame me for that. And I have of my own volition just told you everything I’ve recently found out, so eager am I to co-operate with your investigation. Is that not so, D.S. Brenard?’ Rex realised he didn’t know the man’s first name.

  D.S. Brenard gazed at him for a while, then tipped his head back and scratched his neck. An exhausted man, the rings under his eyes forming a motif with the sticky circles left by coffee mugs on his desk.

  ‘No joy. The caller had what sounds like an Eastern European accent. Then again, it could be Spanish or South American.’

  ‘Can I listen to it?’ Rex was good on accents. He was the only member of the News North London staff who could tell a Turk from a Kurd.

  Brenard chose not to dignify this request with an answer. ‘The call came from a payphone at the bus station,’ he continued, ‘but the CCTV’s been out of order since January. The caller said she lived on Langerhans, and she thought there was something going on over the road. We sent two lads in uniform to every house on both sides of the road, without any positives. But…’

  He rummaged wearily in a drawer. Rex was expecting him to bring out a file, but instead it was a packet of pills. The packet turned out to be empty. D.S. Brenard’s reaction to this discovery was so pitiful that Rex offered him two of his own. Brenard necked them without water.

  ‘There’s a trio of possibles,’ Brenard continued. ‘The lady next door at 326 – a Miss Martell – some sort of human rights lawyer, always flying off to Cameroon or Rwanda. It could have been her – her office say she was in the country Monday and took an afternoon flight to Kigali the day after. But she doesn’t check in all that regularly, so we’re still waiting for confirmation either way.’

  So was the blonde woman Bird had been shouting at Miss Martell, as she made her way from a First World trouble-spot to one in the Third? She’d rushed away, struggling with her coat. Had she had luggage with her? He couldn’t recall.

  ‘I don’t think it was her,’ Brenard went on, ‘because the caller said the disturbance was “over the road”. There is, however, a Polish law student who lives on the other side of the road. She’s gone back to Krakow because her dad died. And there’s also a Brazilian massage therapist, who regularly visits Birmingham for reasons not clear, or allegedly not clear, to the girls she shares a house with. We’re trying to trace all three, currently without success. And you’re running an appeal, aren’t you?’

  ‘We could add the information you’ve just given me.’

  He screwed his eyes shut and opened them again. ‘Do that – it might just improve your reputation in police circles. Commander Bailey has told everyone to make you a focus of special interest. You know what that means?’

  ‘It doesn’t sound good.’

  ‘It means there’s a bottle of single malt for the first person to nick you.’

  D.S. Brenard was in the process of cracking the first smile Rex had seen him crack in a long time, when his phone rang. As he listened, the smile quickly faded. Then he slammed the receiver down and covered his face with his hands.

  ‘Fuck fuck fuck,’ the detective muttered, quietly, into his palms.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The arrival of Typhoon Shit.’ D.S. Brenard took his hands away from his face and gazed at Rex. ‘You want a Scotch?’

  ‘Not got any Welsh then?’

  ‘Ha ha,’ Brenard said, pulling a bottle and a pair of glasses from his bottom drawer. ‘You want a laugh, mate, try this. Anwar Hafeez, aka the misunderstood Muslim medical student you brought to us under suspicion of crimes against perfume, has just been picked up by the anti-terror unit. Blueprints to the service corridors of Shopping City and a bomb-making manual in his college locker. You know what that means?’

  ‘He’s a terrorist?’

  ‘I imagine he’s just another wanker who’s been spending too much time on the Al-Qaeda website. Anyway, I couldn’t give a fuck. The point is what it means here. For me. Terror Alert upgraded to ‘Severe’, all leave cancelled, every officer with a pair of boots diverted to stop-and-fucking-search, and those bell-ends from Anti-Terror crawling all over the shop.’ He held up a glass. ‘Fucking bloody sodding pissing cheers.’

  * * *

  Rex surveyed the busy, drizzle-sprayed High Street from his kneeling position on the Whittaker Twins’ L-shaped desk. Pushed up against the single window in the News North London office that actually opened, it offered the only vantage point.

  The twins neither remarked upon his presence on their desk, nor enquired as to what he was doing, nor indeed gave any sign of having noticed that he was there. The ad-selling pair never ceased to astound Rex in their complete indifference to the people who surrounded them. They came
in at 9, in their identical, ill-cut Byrite suits, and sat at their desks until exactly 5. Yet, awkward as they were when face-to-face with their fellow creatures, over the phone this milky, bulbous-headed duo could bewitch any business in North London, regardless of economic circumstances, into taking out an advert or two. They seemed to charm revenue out of thin air. Rex knew that, no matter how good a journalist he was, or had been, what kept him in work was the Whittakers. The Whittakers knew that too, but they were beyond lording it over him. Beyond anything, in fact, with their identical Tupperware lunches and their school shoes. Where on earth had Susan found them? Was it on earth at all?

  Rex’s gaze travelled up and down the crammed, frenetic, pushchair and burqa-filled High Street. He’d already walked the length of it, from Morrison’s to Turnpike Lane tube, without finding what he was looking for – though he had seen ample signs of what Brenard had called ‘Typhoon Shit’. A walk-through metal detector in the entrance to the Morrison’s. Stop ’n’ Search teams playing tip-out-the-rucksack with every bloke whose skin was darker than a cup of tea. Bad moods everywhere.

  Perhaps this was the true point of terror. Not blowing a hundred people’s limbs off but making hundreds of thousands of lives more frustrating and difficult than they would otherwise have been. And if that meant more young men made angry enough to become terrorists themselves, then so much the better. He wondered whether the adolescent chippiness of Anwar Hafeez would ever have crystallised into a bomb plot if it hadn’t been for his short, intense encounter with the Anti-Terror Squad after the perfume incident in the park.

  As he watched a pair of Somali boys sulkily doing up their trainers after a street-search, it occurred to Rex that few people would have minded Shopping City being blown to smithereens. So long as the place was empty at the moment of destruction, Anwar Hafeez would probably have been in line for having a primary school and a library named after him. Not that new libraries were a common occurrence these days.

  As he pulled his head back in, Susan was ushering another pair of visitors out of her inner sanctum. Today it was suits – white hair, double chins and pin-stripes. Was that a good sign? He doubted any of the visits amounted to a good sign.

  Susan forced a smile as he went into her office. He’d just sent her a draft of the new police appeal for information and it was on her screen, he suspected, unread.

  ‘Tell me why a man like Dr Kovacs would hang out with Bird?’

  Despite her evident fatigue, her dark eyes widened. ‘You mean shouty Bird on the street Bird?’

  ‘Shouty Bird not on the street, as far as I can see. Constantly out there, rain or shine, with his lager – except on the one day I need to speak to him.’

  ‘What makes you think he was pally with Dr K.?’

  ‘The next-door neighbour said he used to have two visitors all the time. A skinny black bloke, and a fat Hasid.’

  ‘Sounds like the start of one of Terry’s jokes.’

  They were quiet for a moment as they contemplated their incarcerated friend’s fate. ‘A couple of days ago,’ Rex went on, ‘I saw Bird sitting on the wall outside Kovacs’ and Terry’s house. It might just be coincidence. Bird sits on a lot of walls. Anyway, here’s another thing. Kovacs used to go to a vegetable shop in Stamford Hill every morning. He liked to be the first customer there, every day, apparently, and it was the same shop frequented by the Bettelheim family. And he was friends with the man that owns it, Yitzie Schild. A fat Hasid. If the skinny black bloke is Bird, what would three men like that be doing with each other?’

  ‘The mind boggles,’ Susan said drily. ‘I’m also wondering why a man who lives on Langerhans Road, with a dozen, brilliant, cheap Turkish and Bangladeshi fruit and veg stores within a five-minute walk, chooses to go over to Stamford Hill every morning. Did he ever live there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t they tell you in the fruit and veg shop? Rex?’

  Rex didn’t answer. Susan’s point not only made sense, it troubled him. Rescha Schild clearly knew about Kovacs’ murder. But she hadn’t mentioned anything about him visiting the shop. Why was that?

  Before he could say anything more to his boss, a breathless, flustered-looking Brenda came in.

  ‘You need to come down to Reception,’ she said, supporting herself on the back of Rex’s chair. ‘Someone’s here.’

  ‘Who’s here?’ Susan said, standing up.

  ‘You just need to see,’ said Brenda urgently, starting to cough.

  Rex couldn’t help himself. Whenever people said things like this to him – that there was someone here, someone waiting for him, a message, a package, a present – he had the thought that it might be his father. He didn’t have a father. He’d never had one. Which of course explained why a part of him always expected one to show up.

  Today, what had showed up was Terry, in baggy jeans and a shapeless blue T-shirt. Huddled into himself on the orange foam seating at the bottom of the stairs, he gazed up at them.

  ‘Free at last!’ he said, but there was little joy in his voice.

  Susan opened her arms to him, expecting him to stand up. When he didn’t, she bent and hugged him awkwardly around his neck. Rex patted his friend on the shoulder as Brenda came back down, blotchy-faced, wiping beads of sweat from her brow.

  ‘Let me guess. They’ve arrested someone else.’

  Terry just stared up at him with dull eyes. ‘Not to my knowledge they haven’t,’ he said. ‘I’ve been bailed on medical and compassionate grounds.’ He lifted up and clanked against the floor a metal crutch that Rex hadn’t noticed. ‘I’ve got multiple sclerosis, haven’t I? I can barely walk.’

  * * *

  I thought she was crying again this morning. Heard a sobbing sound from her room. But she went down the stairs before me, carrying her pot with a muslin over it and I knew from the stink that followed her she was vomiting. She looks unwell. Always wants to sleep. Never eats. Mind you, I never much want to eat the stuff Missus Cutter destroys in her kitchen. She cooks everything until it bends. I’d kill for a simple bowl of kasha.

  The old lady had already gone to her work at the laundry, and I thought to ask after Leah’s health, but going back in from the yard I saw the sign. Elephant’s idea: if they want to meet me, they throw a little ball of red wool, over into the Cutters’ yard. Stupid idea. First reason: a rat or a dog might have it away before I’ve seen it. Second reason: Missus or Leah might see it and keep it for darning, throw it away. Third reason: anyone following E or T follows them right to my back yard. Once upon a time I’d have carried on fighting, insisted we use a chalk cross on a busy street, like we did in Riga and St Petersburg. But I’ve given up. Let Elephant have his small victories.

  Today he hands me the message to decode, although I know he’s read it himself, and shared it with Torch. They come inside the bindings of Hebrew books, sent upstairs to the Litvaker. It says that the committee has given approval to the robbery. Funds are to be returned to the struggle, to Riga. By me. Elephant raises his eyebrows when I’ve finished reading it, going over my face to see my pain. There isn’t any. None I’d let him see.

  ‘Time I went back,’ I say, flat as a June sea.

  ‘Plenty more knaidlach in the soup, eh?’ he says.

  I didn’t answer. You know why this little turd thinks he has power over me? Because in prison, he was the one in charge of the shit bucket. That’s true. The apes conferred a little power on the monkey, and he started to think he was one of them. He’s no more an anarchist than I’m the miracle-working rabbi of Rujiena. I begin to wonder how many anarchists are left. Sending me their orders. ‘The committee approves’. Like the navy, only in the navy there were a few men you could respect.

  So I say we need to go over to the place and have a good look, work out how it’s to be done, what routes are to be taken away. So we set off down the High Street in the slush. Hot coals and horse-dung smells. The pair of them walk with their shoulders hunched and their collars up and t
heir hands in their pockets, swivelling about to check the street as if their necks don’t work. Pricks. Like the famous clown double-act in the Yiddish Theatre – the pompous fool and the cry-baby – and this week, they’re being burglars. The more they try to escape everyone’s attention, the more everyone notices them. I kept back, minded my own business, bought chestnuts from a girl with a barrow and concentrated on them.

  Then we stopped. The factory right opposite us, across the road. Schnurrman’s, the rubber works, sending its rotten-egg, charred-corpse smell all about the place.

  ‘There’s the gate,’ says Elephant.

  Torch takes his knuckle out of his mouth just long enough to say: ‘And just to the left of the stairs for the workers, see, just there… that’s where the cashier’s office is. The car docks there when it’s come back from the bank.’

  They might as well have been saying Kaddish for all I was listening. For they’d as good as signed their death warrants. Mine too.

  ‘And you’ve not yet mentioned what lies opposite the factory,’ I says. ‘The building whose windows we’re standing by.’

  And they looked at each other, and then at the building behind us, for, I honestly think, the first time.

  In this part of the world they call it ‘the Nick’. It’s the police station.

  Baruch ata, Adonai Elohainu, Melech ha-olam… Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the World, who put all that time into creating man. And ended up with this pair of turnip-tops.

  * * *

  It had been a long time since Rex had had a houseguest. In fact, he wasn’t sure it had ever happened, although he possessed a sofa that turned relatively easily into a bed, and enough towels in the back of his wardrobe to accommodate a large family. These were relics from the time when he’d lived with Sybille, and people had overnighted in their Camden flat in a proper, grown-up way, kitted-out with sheets and flannels and even dressing-gowns.

  Terry had arrived with nothing apart from the clothes he’d been wearing, which stank of Dettol and rolling tobacco, a watch, and a St Christopher medal, which slid about in the awful, clear plastic property bag he’d been given on exiting Pentonville’s Remand Wing. So, leaving his guest gazing blankly at an episode of ‘Murder, She Wrote’, Rex had gone over to Terry’s house to collect a few things.