The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  To Rex’s surprise Terry parked up outside his own house. ‘I’ll… see you then,’ Rex said, as they stood awkwardly on the pavement. ‘Tomorrow?’

  Terry sighed. ‘I dunno. Susan says I can stay off for a bit. I’m thinking of going to Riga.’

  ‘Riga?’

  Terry shrugged. ‘I’ve just really got into this Outrage thing, going through the files and that. I want to carry on with it. I want to know what Kovacs was going to say in his book.’

  Without thinking about it, Rex laughed incredulously.

  ‘What’s so funny? Oh, thick Tel, is it? Geordie Tel doing something that involves his brain cells? Yeah. Bit of a laugh. Let me tell you something, kidda, there’s things you don’t know about. Things I’m involved in, that are going to make a difference…’

  Rex put his hands up. ‘Terry. Terry. Sorry. I’m not… I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just a surprise. I mean, you hated Kovacs, and now you’re really into his book. It’s just…’

  Terry tapped his forehead. ‘I’ve beaten this bastard MS before. By being tough inside. Staying focussed. That’s what I’m doing now. If you want to take the piss, go ahead, but I’m doing what I have to do.’

  An aeroplane roared overhead. ‘I’m not taking the piss, and I’m sorry if it sounded like I was,’ Rex said. ‘I’m glad. What will you do in Riga?’ he added, hoping to divert things into calmer waters.

  For the first time, Terry smiled. ‘When I popped in work on Friday night, Brenda give us this envelope to drop round at yours.’

  ‘So you opened it?’

  ‘It wasn’t sealed, man! They dropped it off.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The printers. I just had a look. I was going to tell you! Anyway, it’s not like you’re interested in any of it, are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Can I see?’

  By way of an answer, Terry opened the front door and let him in. Downstairs in the basement, he showed him what had arrived. As the printers had said, there were about a dozen pages of Kovacs’ book, mostly from the index, and a small, old leather-bound booklet. Rex walked gingerly across the space, avoiding the evil wall hook, and picked it up. It smelled damp. He flipped through the pages – written in a sloping hand with ink that had turned a rusty colour with age. He couldn’t decipher a single word.

  ‘I looked some of the words up on Google and it’s Latvian. I thought I’d go over there and see if I could get a bit translated.’

  ‘You know you could just go down Green Lanes to the Baltika Supermarket and the lady in there would tell you what it said.’

  Terry just sighed, and held the notebook out to Rex. ‘Do you want it?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I’m happy for you to have it. I just –’

  Terry stood up abruptly. ‘Right now, Rex, I don’t think we’ve got anything else to say to each other.’

  * * *

  Made sure to hang around and give my statement. Copper who took it, big, tree-trunk Irishman, weeping openly about his mate PC Tyler. ‘You’re a brave maaan,’ he says to me. Wanted to be sick on his boots, I did, for the deceit. What a fucking mess. Supposed to be grabbing a bag and getting out of there. Instead they skipped off down the road, letting off shots like it was a fairground game.

  The street was like it had woken up from a dream. People poured out from shops and houses, the fog lifted. Everyone in little clutches, trading rumours for facts. ‘They’ve slit the King’s throat and now they’re going for the Lord Chamberlain,’ I heard one wobble-chinned dame saying, with the utmost authority.

  Up the street, two big fellows had got inside the barber’s and torn down the Yiddish papers. Didn’t take long to start. No one was leaving Schnurrman’s. All the workers just looked out through the topmost windows, wondering if they’d be safe to go home, even though it was them who’d had their money taken, not the mob of English outside. The chimney stopped belching smoke.

  I refused the assistance of a medical gentleman. I reckoned he’d have enough to do, the number of guns I saw coming out of the houses: pistols, rifles, one old goon with a musket from round about Napoleon’s time. Some more will fall today, I thought, for sure. Besides, I didn’t want anyone patting me down, not with the baby in my coat.

  So I left the commotion and got home. Started shoving what I could in my sack. Leah comes down in her nightdress, face like a fruit pudding she’d been weeping that much.

  ‘Where are you going, Mr Smith?’

  ‘I –’ I lost my words for a minute. ‘I have to go to my family. My wife is gravely sick.’

  Then a voice comes from behind the kitchen door. ‘Your wife in Goff’s Oak is that, Mr Smith, or in Russia?’

  Parks. Been in there all the time.

  ‘George – sorry. He pushed his way in and he made me –’

  I nodded to her to be quiet.

  ‘I saw you, just now, fighting those robbers. Mighty heroic. Not so many people know what I do, Mr Smith. That you’ve been walking up and down the High Street with that very pair these past six months, in and out of the Yid bookshop and the library. I’ve seen you. I’ve been watching. So now you’re going to tell me just who you are.’

  I looked at him, not sure what to do. My pistol was still outside in the yard, under a water-butt, wrapped in rags. Then there was a noise – noise like a gong, and before my eyes, Parks simply crumpled to the floor like his legs were cut from under him. Behind him stood Leah with the coal shovel.

  ‘Let’s get out of here before he comes to!’

  I looked down at Cuthbert Parks. ‘He won’t be coming to or from, Miss. You killed him.’

  She started weeping and I shook her.

  ‘Get upstairs, get dressed and put some clothes in a bag. You’ll go to your aunt’s.’

  She hesitated and I roared at her. ‘DO IT GIRL!’

  While she was banging away up there, making little sobbing noises all the time, I set to, arranging the body where it would need to go, hunting in the cupboards for all the things I needed. Those clowns might have shat all over the robbery. But Grigoriy Kuznetz still knew how to set a good fire, a proper blaze that left no traces of whatever you wanted no traces left of. Not even traces of a Mr Cuthbert Parks.

  So I got it going and I hauled the girl into the street. Reckoned we could cut south towards Hackney, avoiding whatever chaos might be underway in Tottenham. Then she drops it on me. Moist-eyed in her cheap little coat with the stuffing come out of one sleeve and a bit of soot on her cheek.

  ‘Take me with you, George,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  * * *

  It was almost dark when Rex woke up. He didn’t feel hungry but his stomach was rumbling, so he got up, in clothes cold with sweat, and shuffled into the kitchen. He drank orange juice straight from the carton. Once that had cleared the clag in his mouth, he bit into a cold, slightly curling lahmacun from two days before.

  As he sat munching the cold, stiff, fatty bread at the table, he remembered how he’d been cowering under it not too long ago. His mind kept going back to Terry. He hoped he’d be okay. He’d never seen him like this before. Maybe he just needed time.

  And maybe the same was true for himself, he thought, as he poured himself a shot of raki, watching as the water worked its milky magic inside the tulip glass. In time, perhaps just a few more hours, some similar chemical transformation would take place inside the corridors of his mind, and he’d accept that what was, simply was.

  He’d read about a serial killer once – a good-looking young American boy, who in all his interviews and statements had only given one explanation for the trail of deaths he’d left behind him: ‘I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.’ Could Yitzie’s actions be explained in the same vague way? He was an odd man, slow and unhealthy, and trapped, Rex was pretty sure, in a loveless, sexless marriage. No doubt he was the object of people’s scorn and contempt. Perhaps that had all just built up. Things did build up, and then they came out, in odd ways. And he had suspected Yitzie befor
e. Had thought Rescha had been trying to tell him something about her husband: to warn him, or show him where he might find something that pointed to Yitzie’s guilt.

  It did seem very strange, though, that Kovacs could have worked out what had happened just from seeing the Bettelheim kid with his biscuits, and then the family dead in the park. The man must have had an inordinately suspicious mind. That, or Yitzie had already said something to him, about seeking revenge, or deserters deserving some punishment.

  He tried to imagine Yitzie, in the shop, behind his trays of cassavas and beans, promising death. The man had a quick temper, Rex had certainly seen that. But every time he thought of Yitzie, he saw him at the tish, pulling Toyve Walther out of the room. That was a far more ambiguous scene: he’d seemed to have been acting on Simmy Dordoff’s orders, but he’d also seemed concerned for the man he was chucking out. The image kept coming back to Rex, and for reasons he didn’t grasp, it bothered him.

  He poured himself a second raki and drifted into the sitting room, not sure what to do with himself. He wasn’t good at relaxing at the best of times. He didn’t fancy Sunday night TV – a mix of rural, retro police dramas and earnest programmes about Islam – but thought there might be something on the news about the arrests, so switched it on.

  He couldn’t remember when he’d last watched a DVD, but someone, presumably Terry, had hooked the player up to the TV, and when he flicked the switch, the disc that was inside the machine started playing.

  He was about to eject it when he saw what was on the screen. Shaky, barely audible footage of some kind of lecture. A fierce, clean-shaven man in sports clothes before a crowd of men kneeling or sitting cross-legged. A talk at a mosque. The talk the boys said they’d been to, before going to Finsbury Park. Recorded on the disc Anwar Hafeez had given him. He’d assumed Vadim had saved the CCTV footage over it, but obviously not.

  He turned the volume up. Over the buzz, he could make out what the man was saying. He spoken in an intense voice with faint hints of Dewsbury or Sheffield.

  ‘Terror has nothing to do with the Twin Towers, brothers. Terror has nothing to do with bringing down aeroplanes full of people. Terror is about what you can do with people’s minds, and how all those frightened minds add up to a frightened nation.’

  The camera, inexpertly operated, swung down to a pair of trainers as another voice raised a question or an objection that was inaudible. It swung back up to the main speaker as he gave his reply.

  ‘I dress like this, brother, because they do. Haven’t you understood anything? Go round the place in a beard and bullet-proof jacket, and they’ll be on their guard. Do you want to bring terror to them or dress up as a terrorist? Same with your targets. Forget rush-hour tubes and packed-out sports stadiums. It’s not an episode of ‘Homeland’. People are already on their guard in those places. People already expect something to happen. No. Think normal. Think about the lone wolf. The sole operator. The lone wolf’s terror starts on the night bus, at 2am on a Sunday morning, in Enfield Lock. His terror starts in the local baker’s or the sweet-shop after school. The places people feel safest – that’s where he will strike. Push a Jew under a bus on the High Road. Stab some kuffar soldier on the jogging track in the park. Let them know, as individuals, nowhere is safe.’

  He remembered what the detective had said about ‘some nutter’ pushing people into traffic. He also wondered whether Sky News had been so daft when they suggested the Bettelheims’ deaths were a terror incident. Wrong, of course, in light of the perfume, and Yitzie’s confession. But based on this film, justified. The DVD needed to go the police, he thought, but not before he’d made a copy.

  Then, suddenly, he stopped. Stopped listening. Stopped thinking. Just stared. As the speaker carried on, the cameraman had moved to the side of the room, and from his new position one of the attendees stood out in a way that was both recognisable and, to Rex, terrifying.

  It was Terry.

  He paused, skipped back. It was still Terry. Wearing the same awful, stonewash Eighties jacket he wore just about all the time. He had certainly worn it on the day they went to the park.

  He’d even mentioned that he’d been somewhere else in the vicinity earlier on in the day, Rex now remembered. And hadn’t answered him when he’d asked where. Now he knew why.

  Rex sat back, his heart banging. Then the banging was outside him. He looked around him in alarm. Someone was banging violently at his front door, shaking it in its frame. Trying to smash it down.

  He pushed himself back in the sofa, ridiculously, as if that might stop him being seen. The hate sermon still played on the TV screen. Vadim had left the DVD on the coffee table, Rex now remembered. So the only person who could have put it in the machine was Terry. Had he left it there on purpose, for Rex to find? If so, why not mention it?

  The hammering on the door got fiercer. It could only be Terry.

  Rex jumped up, and crossed into the kitchen, grabbing the largest knife he could find. Sybille had once cut her hand on it, he remembered, preparing soup.

  ‘What do you want, Terry?’ he shouted, in a high, nervous voice, from just behind the front door.

  The banging stopped. ‘Who’s Terry?’

  He pulled the door open.

  It was Rescha Schild, red-eyed and agitated. ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Of course.’ She walked into the sitting room and perched primly on the edge of an armchair, clutching her tan handbag close.

  ‘Do you want tea – or… I’m drinking raki. Would you like some?’

  She shook her head. He sat down opposite her, feeling his heart rate slowing down. He rode out the silence, as he’d been taught to do, waiting for her to speak.

  ‘I need your help,’ she said finally.

  He tried not to show any reaction. Since she’d arrived, he’d suspected what was coming. ‘You think Yitzie’s innocent?’ he said.

  There was a pause, during which she seemed to process his question. She shook her head violently. ‘No! I know he did it. He’s a crazy person. I’ve been frightened to live with him for years. He has these rages and…’ She collected herself. ‘No. He is not innocent. Do you believe that?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s confessed, hasn’t he, but… there are some things I don’t understand. Anyway… you said you needed my help?’

  She looked at him. ‘I haven’t got anybody to talk to.’ A tear formed in one of her eyes. ‘I just haven’t got anybody. I know you don’t really know me and… actually for me to be here, alone with you, is an outrage. It would be an outrage, but I’m already nobody to them all now. And I just… I feel like I can talk to you. I don’t know why, but I like you.’ She bit her lip.

  He didn’t know what to say. His heart was still thumping. In the end, he said the most banal thing imaginable. ‘I was thinking about getting a takeaway.’

  She wiped her eye and smiled. ‘Chinese food?’

  ‘You eat Chinese?’

  She laughed. ‘Of course. There’s even a kosher Chinese restaurant.’

  ‘I don’t think the Wing Lee Loi is kosher.’

  ‘So I’ll have spring rolls, vegetable fried rice and Chinese greens,’ she said. ‘And nobody’s God will be offended.’

  He went through the motions of ordering the Chinese and making tea. Rescha didn’t leave his side for a moment, and he kept up a nervous, trivial chatter throughout – about his house, the wonky door on the kitchen cupboard, the vintage Paris photos he had put up throughout the house, Paris itself… Daft as it was, he sensed it might be doing her some good. If Yitzie was as crazy as she made out, perhaps his wife never got to have this simple, boring kind of birdsong conversation with another human being.

  She didn’t eat much, then offered to wash up. She seemed amused that he had a dishwasher. They went into the kitchen to look at it.

  ‘Why would a man on his own need a dishwasher?’

  ‘It was in the house when I bought it. I wasn’t planning to use it, really. I just started, and
then I found I couldn’t stop.’

  ‘Like Yitzie,’ she said enigmatically. It was the first time she’d mentioned him since arriving three hours before.

  ‘What couldn’t he stop?’ Rex asked, shutting the dishwasher door.

  She raised a hand. ‘Hitting. Afterwards, he’d be horrified. But then he’d do it again.’

  ‘Why did you stay?’

  ‘It’s my shop,’ she said, simply. ‘My house.’

  ‘You could have reported him,’ he said, as the water began to surge through the machine. ‘If not to the police then to the shomrim or someone like that.’

  ‘We have nothing to do with the shomrim. And Dordoff? As far as he is concerned, Yitzie is a mamzer, and I am a mamzer, so we’re already halfway to being savages.’

  He recalled that word, from the interrupted phone call with the young academic, Tim. ‘What’s a mamzer?’

  ‘Bastard,’ she said.

  He blinked. The word sounded so surprising, coming from her.

  ‘Both kinds of bastard,’ she added. ‘It can mean, like an insult – you bastard. But it really means something else. If a woman is married, and she has a child by another man, then the child is a mamzer. When the mamzer grows up, they can only marry another mamzer. And the children they have, they will all be mamzers, too. And their children.’

  ‘And that matters?’

  ‘The old rabbis said no, it only affects who you can marry, nothing else. But what’s written and what’s done in every corner of every community are two different things. If you want to borrow some money, maybe someone on the committee will say, ah, but it’s a mamzer. If you want, maybe, to get some important kind of job, like to be the gabbay, or look after the shtib, then, if you’re lucky, no one will stand in your way, but if you’re unlucky, somebody, maybe more than one person, will say, let’s have the other guy, he’s not a mamzer. You see?’

  ‘I think so.’ It sounded like the Indian lady, Reena, in the jeweller’s had been right. There was a caste system, with the Hasidim at the bottom. And the mamzer below even them, like some sort of an Untouchable.