The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  But no other passports. So unless the relations had taken them, and he couldn’t imagine why they would have, the only family-member to have owned a passport was Eytan. Who, according to Toyve Walther, was being pressured to travel to Antwerp.

  Rex returned to the kitchen, noticing for the first time that the Bettelheims had the same decorative scheme going on as Yitzie and Rescha Schild: a few photographs on the walls, but mostly tracts and bright images of the Menorah and the Star of David. Pushing the sticky highchair aside and sitting at the table, amid the toast crumbs of the Bettelheims’ final breakfast, he began to go through the briefcase again, more thoroughly.

  There was no diary. No calendar obligingly marked ‘Antwerp’. No airline ticket. He did, however, notice, in one of the felt-covered corners of the inside, a tiny corner of bright paper peeping out. As he pulled at it, a whole cardboard bottom came away.

  Rex had had the odd secret place as a boy. A cavity round the back of his dressing table, into which he’d occasionally stuffed packets of cigarettes and the odd bit of erotica. The chubby Eytan Bettelheim’s secret vice, it seemed, had been sweets: in particular, judging from the sea of wrappers, Blueberry Hubba-Bubba, Zega-Zoids, Fizznuts and CherryBomz. But these weren’t what caught Rex’s attention. He was too preoccupied with the other items in this hidden museum: dozens and dozens of almost transparent, brown, grease-proof paper triangles, exactly like the ones Dr Kovacs had at his house. He sniffed one. It smelt of vanilla and sugar.

  He stuffed everything back inside and rammed the case under his arm, heading out of the kitchen door into the yard. He knew where he should go next, but to his astonishment the tiny form of Mordecai Hershkovits bowled through the gate.

  ‘Shame you didn’t stay and listen to me,’ he said. ‘You’d have found out who foiled the plan to kill all the Jews.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The King’s wife, Esther, and her uncle – Mordecai.’

  Rex had no time to respond to this before two much larger bodies marched through the gate. One was D.S. Brenard. The other, complete with ribbons and a swagger stick, was the man Rex had clocked as Commander Bailey. They both wore an expression poised somewhere between fury and glee – one that over the years Rex had discovered was unique to policemen in the act of nicking someone.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Rex said, as the briefcase was taken from him and plastic cuffs were fixed around his wrists, ‘but I was just coming to see you.’

  ‘And I’m Tom Jones,’ said D.S. Brenard, encouraging him through the gateway with a knuckle in the back.

  Back at the station, they chucked everything they could at him. Breaking and entering. Burglary. Vandalism. Obstruction. Commander Bailey even discussed the possibility of bringing Accessory After The Fact charges: from his talk with Vik Kumar’s driver up to his arrest on Mordecai’s tip-off, Rex had had evidence pertaining to a murder and chosen not to give it to the police.

  In the cells, between an assortment of ponderous interviews, Rex considered Commander Bailey. The man was an anomaly. Rex had a theory – one he’d developed, tested and more or less proved during his long years as a reporter – that all young policemen were bastards. They were either officious prefect types, or they were straightforward thugs. Those who stayed in the force long enough to become old policemen became lesser bastards, over time, until in the end they were usually all right.

  Commander Bailey, on the other hand, seemed to be travelling in the opposite direction. He had the dark, passionate looks of a Victorian romantic hero, and Rex suspected that he’d had romantic ideas about becoming a policeman, turning angrier and more sarcastic as these fell away.

  ‘Tell me again what motivated you to break into the Bettelheim household.’

  ‘I thought I might find a clue relating to what Toyve Walther told me. Something to prove Eytan Bettelheim was being pressured to donate bone marrow to the Rebbe, as Micah was.’

  ‘I see. And would you mind explaining one more time how exactly this donated bone marrow works?’ Bailey asked, with heavy irony.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not a medic, am I? I’ve read that a transplant can cure certain conditions. And Micah Walther’s father told me they were under some pressure to donate it to the Rebbe.’

  ‘What kind of pressure?’ Bailey asked.

  To that, Rex could only shrug.

  ‘And you know for certain that the Rebbe has actually received this treatment, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I asked, but Dordoff wouldn’t tell me. I do know that the Rebbe is very sick, though.’

  ‘Well that would suggest he hasn’t had a transplant, then, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Or he had it, and it didn’t work.’

  ‘In other words, it suggests nothing useful. Nor does the whole scenario you’ve described. If the Bettelheim boy was needed to donate his bone marrow, then why kill him and his family?’ Commander Bailey put his hands together and leant across the table. ‘How would that help to make the rabbi better, Rex?’

  The gesture towards intimacy and the use of his Christian name were not coincidental, and not unfamiliar to Rex. Psychiatrists talked to you like that, and mental health nurses – anyone, in fact, who suspected you were stark, raving mad. And wanted you to know they suspected it.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rex repeated, aware how many times Bailey’s questions had forced him to say this. ‘Perhaps they knew something about what happened to Micah at the clinic in Antwerp, and they were going to go public with it. Or because they were going to leave the fold, they couldn’t be trusted to keep the secret, and Dordoff was frightened…’

  Bailey was silent, looking at his notes. ‘Sacrifice of the first-born. Is that what you’re really getting at, Rex? Like Abraham binding Isaac to the rock? The Old Testament on the streets of Stamford Hill?’

  ‘No, that isn’t what I’m getting at,’ Rex replied coldly. ‘The idea that the Dukovchiner would sacrifice their children for perverted religious reasons hadn’t occurred to me, Commander Bailey, because I’m not a medieval anti-Semite. I’m a journalist who has discovered some information – information that ought, under usual circumstances, to be of interest to you.’

  ‘So why not give us that information right away, instead of waiting to be arrested?’

  Rex wondered at the man’s eyes, with their almost absurdly long lashes. Once upon a time, girls must have fallen in love with Commander Bailey’s eyes. And probably fellow coppers in the locker-room had ripped the piss out of them – no doubt adding to the man’s general free-floating rage and disappointment.

  ‘D.S. Brenard will confirm that I’ve consistently passed on information to you. In this case you simply got to me before I got to you. Which I’m guessing wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t bumped into Mordecai, and he hadn’t done his secret policeman act and followed me.’

  Commander Bailey’s head moved ever so slightly, as if conceding a point.

  ‘Why are you so desperate to nick me for something when I’m telling you Dordoff lied!’ Rex almost shouted. ‘I’ve proved that he lied about going to Antwerp alone.’

  ‘You’ve told us that a Somali man called Jock at a cab-rank told you a man who may have been Dordoff wasn’t alone when he took the cab.’ The sarcasm was back on full setting again. ‘Not exactly proof. Though perhaps journalists have a different understanding of the word.’ Bailey permitted himself a chuckle, before gathering up his papers and clicking his biro off. ‘Okay. Thank you,’ he said, standing up.

  ‘So I can go?’

  Bailey fixed him with a cold gaze. ‘You’ll remain in custody until we’ve made some checks, and sorted out the grains of truth from the make-believe and the hallucinations, Mr Tracey. That might take a while. In any case, you broke into a house and took property – we can still have you for that.’

  ‘Then I want my lawyer. I want Bernadette Devlin.’

  ‘I gather she’s gone to Guyana for a fortnight, which is why there are several people ahead
of you in these very cells, waiting for a locum solicitor. Good luck.’

  The door slammed shut.

  Chapter Eight

  He woke up in the night, sweating and shivering. The slightest movement caused goosebumps to break out and his guts were churning. He was still in the cell. Its walls were throbbing. Had he seen a lawyer? He felt sick. He called for help.

  Luckily a doctor was close at hand, patching up the man in the next cell who’d spent the afternoon and evening hurling himself against the walls. It was the same one Rex had seen taking swabs at the park almost a fortnight ago, boy-faced and snub-nosed. His first question was: ‘What sort of usage are you on?’

  ‘Usage?’ Rex said dimly.

  ‘You’re not injecting, and that’s good. But you’re going through pretty severe withdrawals. You’re “rattling”,’ he added, proud to have thrown some street-argot in.

  ‘I-I’m not a bloody addict. I just take p-painkillers,’ Rex shivered. ‘For my foot.’

  The doctor raised his eyebrows. He gave Rex a tiny diazepam pill and two paracetamol. He said they would help him sleep. They didn’t. Rex spent the entire night awake, going through the names in his head and trying to see the connections. Kovacs. Terry. Toyve Walther. Micah Walther. Eytan Bettelheim. Simmy Dordoff. The Narpal. Smith. Kovacs. Yitzie.

  Somehow it became light, and there were bangings and clatterings in the corridor outside, along with smells of coffee and toast. He felt the tiny release from boredom a long-haul air traveller experiences at the first intimations of an in-flight meal. D.S. Brenard – an unlikely air hostess – brought in a blue plastic plate with scrambled eggs and toast on it.

  ‘I hear you had a bad night,’ the detective said, sitting at the end of the narrow built-in bed. ‘You want to sort that pill thing out, mate. It’s bad news.’

  ‘I guess I’ll be able to get the hard stuff in prison,’ Rex said, trying a sip of the coffee. It was surprisingly all right.

  D.S. Brenard shook his head. ‘Come on. You know we’re letting you go. We’d have let you go at 2am, but to be honest you looked so sick at that point, we thought you’d be better off in here.’

  ‘Why 2am?’ Rex grimaced as the coffee reacted with his grisly insides.

  ‘Because that’s when we charged someone with the murders of George Kovacs and the Bettelheim family. Thank you for the leads.’

  Rex sat up, letting the blanket fall. Instantly his skin broke out in sweats and shivers but he didn’t care. ‘You got Dordoff? Is he talking?’

  Brenard shook his head. ‘We got Yitzhak Schild. And he is definitely talking. In fact he’s coughed to the lot.’

  ‘Yitzie? I don’t get it.’

  ‘Simeon Dordoff was cast-iron. The kid he travelled to the airport with was his nephew – his sister’s little lad. She’d run off to Israel because the husband was a bit of a bad lot, but she hadn’t got the youngest out. Dordoff was spiriting the kid onto a dawn flight to Ben Gurion via Frankfurt before he caught his own plane to Antwerp…’

  ‘So his alibi guy – on the phone – was telling the truth when he told me Dordoff travelled to Antwerp alone.’

  ‘Dordoff was nervous in case there were legal comebacks from him taking the kid without the father’s consent, and we let him think there might be for a bit, so he’d give us anything else he’d got. And he did. He told us he’d been asked to lie about Yitzie Schild’s alibi. Turns out Schild wasn’t consulting the rabbi on a religious matter on the afternoon Kovacs was stabbed. Dordoff doesn’t know where he was.’

  ‘So you went back to Yitzie?’

  ‘He folded right off. We didn’t even say anything. It was like he’d been expecting us. Told us he baked a batch of cookies, put cyanide in them and held onto them, biding his time.’

  ‘Didn’t you say you’d searched his place for cyanide? Anyway, I heard it wasn’t cyanide that poisoned the Bettelheims.’

  ‘He had a bit hidden away. And it was cyanide, the Poisons lab think – just very poor quality. You know, kind of cheapie knock-off, probably from the old Soviet Union or somewhere like that. Fits with the kind of outfits Schild worked in.’

  ‘The Schilds definitely sell biscuits in their shop?’

  ‘Fresh. Every morning. That’s what that brown-paper stuff in the kid’s case is. They wrap them up in that. What happened, we reckon, is the kid bought some and gave them to his mum, who put them in a Tupperware box for the picnic and shoved the wrapper in the bin. Collection day is Monday round there, which was why we never found it when we searched the house.’

  Rex recalled his first visit to the shop. A pyramid of things in brown cones. He should have connected them to the triangles he’d seen at Kovacs’ house, with notes scribbled over them. Presumably he’d begrudged spending a few pennies on Post-it notes. Yet – it still didn’t make sense.

  ‘But Rescha Schild said they hadn’t been in that day.’

  ‘She said that because she hadn’t seen them come in the shop that day. There were ten minutes or so at the start where she had to take a call about the mortgage. It all checks out. He saw two of the Bettelheim kids coming in – the older one, the lad, bought a bag of cookies every day, apparently. Schild just decided that was his moment, like, fished his poisoned ones out and sold them to the kid.’

  ‘I thought Dr Kovacs was the first customer every day.’

  ‘On the Monday he wasn’t, probably because the last part of St Ann’s Road had been closed off due to a burst water main. He’ll have had to cut south down to Amhurst Park and go back up the hill again.’

  Rex was silent, recalling Dr Kovacs’ complaint as they’d sat at the café. An unexpectedly long walk. Another event that was out of the ordinary that day – the kid, Eytan, instead of wolfing all his cookies straight away like normal, selflessly contributed them to the family picnic. Probably because he had his sister there spying on him.

  ‘But what about the passport? Eytan Bettelheim had a passport. No one else in his family did.’

  ‘He’d won a scholarship. He was going to spend six months at a yeshiva in Israel. It’s like a special religious school, but… a lot broader than the kind of education he was getting here. We think maybe the family were going to join him later. Finally escape the fold.’

  Rex asked the final, crucial question. ‘But… I don’t understand. Why did Yitzie want to poison the Bettelheim kids?’

  ‘Revenge. They were going to leave, and that meant the kid, Eytan, wouldn’t help the Rebbe.’

  Rex nodded. It made sense. And yet it didn’t.

  ‘That wouldn’t have helped the Rebbe though, would it?’

  ‘No. But Dordoff confirmed they still need a donor. So Yitzie was sending out a message to everyone. Don’t let us down. Point is, Rex, he’s coughed.’

  ‘So what about Kovacs?’

  ‘Kovacs saw Eytan and Simcha Bettelheim coming out of the shop with the biscuits. Then he saw them all dead at the park, with the remains of the picnic all around them, and he twigged. Instead of calling the police, he rang Schild. Maybe it was the historian in him, wanting to check the facts himself. Or maybe he just got some kind of kick out of knowing something no one else did – the power… I don’t know. He wasn’t a nice bloke by all accounts, was he? Anyhow, Schild panicked, went round there and did him in.’

  ‘With Terry’s knife?’

  ‘Says he found it in the front garden. We haven’t tested the knife, but there are soil traces in the handle.’

  ‘What about the garden gate? Remember it’s got those massive knife-gouges on the reverse side. How do you explain those?’

  ‘They don’t tell us anything, Rex, other than that, like me and probably 99% of the garden gate-owning population, Kovacs needed to give his a new coat of paint.’

  ‘Did Yitzie say anything about the gate?’

  ‘No he didn’t, and we haven’t asked him. I’m not his defence brief, bach!’ Brenard said, slipping into dialect. ‘In any case, there isn’t a defence, is there, since
the man’s coughed? End of. You know your problem, Rex? You think too much. That’s what made you nuts in the first place!’ There was an awkward silence, before Brenard added, ‘I didn’t mean that. Sorry. Do you want a lift home?’

  Rex sighed. ‘Can we have the siren on?’

  The lift never materialised, because as Rex was being ushered out, Terry was limping into the station foyer in his blue tracksuit bottoms and stonewash jacket. The two men performed a sort of awkward dance, all the more awkward due to the audience of local constabulary, before they finally managed a sheepish embrace.

  ‘It’s 8:50,’ Rex said, looking at the clock over the duty desk. ‘So, Tel, by the time we get down Green Lanes and park, The Salisbury will be doing breakfasts. I reckon we start with two bloody marys and stay in there until closing time.’

  Terry looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t really want alcohol to be honest.’

  In the car, he elaborated in the same low, almost toneless voice. ‘I might be in the clear. But this has been the worst thing I’ve ever gone through, man. There’ve been times when I’ve…’ He put a hand up to his mouth. ‘Well. I reckon you know… And I’ – his voice contorted – ‘I HATE those bastards in there for what they fucking did to me. I hate them, man. And I can’t just go, you know, howay, bit of a mistake that, let’s have a couple and forget about it. I can’t. I can’t forget it. I’m too fucking angry, Rex. I’m just… full of hate. Sorry.’

  ‘Fair dos.’

  ‘And can you please stop calling me Tel? I’ve put up with it for years, man, and, actually, it’s time to be honest about it, right. I really don’t like it.’

  ‘Okay. Sorry.’

  They drove back towards Wood Green in silence. Rex had so many things to ponder, but the pain in his foot and the shivering-feverish thing were taking over most of his consciousness. Maybe the pub would have been a bad idea. Especially given the way his putative drinking companion was behaving.