by Jay Stringer
“I’d suggest WTF.”
He paused and mouthed the initials at me. “W?”
“Never mind.” I held out the glass. “So why am I here?”
He leaned across and poured me another. “This is where you should be. Now.”
“Dai—”
“You come into my home and ask me a question, you’re going to hear the answer. They’re coming, Smudge.” My nickname as a child. “I always told you they would, and they are. The police. The law. The bailiffs. The money. They’re all coming, and they’re going to bring weapons and tractors, and they’re going to tear all of this down. I want you here when they come, where you should be.”
“But why? Why be here?”
“It’s home.”
“But I—” I made that noise somewhere between a gasp and a sigh when you can’t put thought into words. “Why? You’ve spent my whole life telling me settling in one place was how the Gorjers trap themselves, with their mortgages and taxes, and now you want to get in a fight over one patch of dirt? Even Gorjers move every few years these days. Nobody is born and dies on the same spot. You’re not even here legally.”
“Says who? This land’s been here for millions of years. One day some men come along and draw a map with lines on it, and now they own it?”
I snorted. “The millions of years speech—I haven’t heard that in a while. It was thousands last time I heard you use it.”
“Well, I’ve read more books since then. Look, the speech isn’t the issue. This land is ours—morally, legally, whatever way you want it, it’s ours.”
“How?”
He poured himself another drink and waggled the bottle at me. I put my hand up to say I was fine. I still had a car to drive.
“The old man gave it to us,” he said after holding his fresh drink up to the light, turning it around as if inspecting it. “He looked me in the eye and said he had left us the land in his will. He showed it to me, an’ all. I saw it.”
“You serious?”
“Of course.”
“You’re in his will?” I didn’t wait for his answer. “Wills have to be witnessed to be valid. His solicitor would have a copy. That would solve the problem.”
He downed his drink and held back a burp. “Your sister’s down in London. We’ve appealed the eviction again at the high court. The decision’s due in the next couple of days. The bastard solicitor claims he never saw a new will. He’s sticking to the old one, which gives everything to the children.”
“And the children are the ones who want you off?”
“The property developers are the ones who want us off. The children just want the money from the developers.”
“What’s the solicitor’s name?”
I saw the second kind of smile tug at the sides of his mouth, the one that said he’d played me. This had been what he’d been leading me toward, the moment he could dole out a mystery to look into. The one thing I could never say no to. He picked an envelope up off the shelf beside him, and tossed it over at me. I opened it and read enough to know it was from the solicitor and had his contact details at the top, an office on Colmore Row in Birmingham. Money Street in the big city.
“You could’ve just called and asked.”
“And you would have ignored me.”
“Yes, I would.”
He nodded, and looked to let that one go. “Come home, Smudge.”
“Let’s see where home actually is, yeah?”
Clouds rolled in above his eyes. “This isn’t about money, you know. Well, it’s always about money, but this is more.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s been coming. Years this has been building. You asked me why here? Because it’s always going to be here, even when it’s somewhere else. We’ve been pushed and pushed, and we need to say we won’t be pushed anymore. The angry people, they keep having their fun taken away. They’re not allowed to beat up black people or Asians. They’re not allowed to threaten immigrants—everyone rallies around and stops them. Nobody cares about us, though. Would Cable Street have happened if it were Gypsies?”
I pointed at his glass. “What size are those measures?”
“Not big enough.”
I stood up and looked out the window, staring at the nearby river, pretending to be lost in thought as I watched the water roll by. This wasn’t the man I remembered. I didn’t want to be feeling sympathy for him. I looked for something sharp. “I saw a friend of yours yesterday. Ransford. He asked about you.”
“I hear that you work for him now. Chorin? Morin?”
“I’m not like you. I’m no thief, and I’m definitely no bloody killer.” I saw the anger fire in his face, and it felt good. “I work with Veronica.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me. No idea what I did for you.”
I’d gotten what I wanted, the familiar way out of a meeting with my father. Blood and guts, fire and brimstone. I threw the letter back at him and stormed out of the caravan. It felt good.
I walked out to the front of the camp.
A large metal gateway had been built across the main entrance, and protesters were beginning to chain themselves to the metal while a line of police watched from the other side. Van tires were lined up behind the gate, forming a low barrier that would stop cars getting through. Someone had painted across them, in childish white writing, “home.” Out of sight from the police, behind a low wall, were four large gas canisters, all roped together like cells of a giant battery.
There were a dozen people milling around on the settlement side of the gate, most shouting abuse at the police as a couple of television cameras recorded news footage. None of the shouting people looked or sounded Romani; there was a distinct smell of middle class credit cards in their unwashed clothes, and their accents all belonged a hundred miles to the south.
“Looks good, yeah?”
I turned to face the voice. Its owner was chubby and looked not much older than twenty. His dark hair was cut into an ill-advised pageboy, and his face was made rounder by a pair of small circular glasses. His clothes were a size too large, and he was self-consciously hiding behind a brown canvas satchel. He was holding a small notebook in his left hand, but I couldn’t see a pen.
“Let me guess.” I gave him my best Clint Eastwood stare-down. “You’re a blogger.”
“Journalist.”
“Right.”
“And you’re Aaron’s son, the one he always talks about.”
I had him wrong. He wasn’t a writer, he was a comedian.
“I don’t know about that last part, but yeah, I’m his son.”
“I’ve been writing stories about your dad, trying to get people from outside to see what a hero he is, why this place is important.”
“For a newspaper?”
“Blog.”
“Right.”
I looked back at the gate where people were working to build up the defenses. It was beginning to look like every camp siege in every news story. I realized there was a plan for this sort of thing, for how to draw the most media attention. People had worked out the best place to put things for the camera. I started to doubt their motives.
“What are you here for?”
“I told you, I’m writing—”
“No.” I pointed out beyond the gate at the cops and cameras. “I know why they’re here. And I know why the people who live here are here. But why are you here? All of you? Is this what kids do instead of gap years now?”
He didn’t take to confrontation well. His face flushed, and I saw his fingers twitching. “I thought you’d be glad of the support.”
“You don’t want support for this settlement, you want a story. You want a war. And when you’re all done the people here will give you one, and the whole world will see it on TV for ten seconds, between some celebrity s
hite and the football, and then in another year there will be another one.”
“Just trying to make a difference.”
“How many of these evictions have you written about?”
“I did both the Irish traveler camps that got turned over last year, so this will be the third.”
I noticed the will be.
“And the first two, you manage to make anything go differently?”
He eyed me for a couple seconds and I figured out he was looking for a weak spot, trying to think of a way to push me back in my place. He went with, “Your dad’s right about you. You’re an angry young man.”
Was that the best he could do?
“I’m not young.”
I went to walk past him, and he stepped aside quicker than I had thought possible.
I paused for a second. “Wait. The shit my dad pulled last night, visiting the council members. You got him the addresses, right?”
He grinned, thinking he had me back onside. “Good trick, right? We’ll get a good story out of that one, probably get it in the Guardian. Hey, you heading into Wolverhampton, can you give me a lift?”
“No.”
Shit to do, shit to do.
The clock was ticking on the cartel’s threat to Gaines, and I’d been wasting time playing catch-up with my old man. I took the direct route back to the city, along the M54 motorway. During the morning and evening rush hours this could be a concrete strip of hell, but it only took people to and from work; at midday I had the road to myself.
I called Matt at work and told him to be outside in twenty minutes with Simon’s address. I hung up before he could give me any objections. I found him standing outside the sports hall, scrunched up in his jacket as if he was bracing against a cold wind. He’d told me once that cold hurt him, that ever since he’d cleaned up, the wind cut right through his joints. He never went outside without at least three layers on, and even then he would cower into the clothes, terrified of the cold. I slowed the car without killing the engine, and he climbed in.
“If I ask you any questions,” he said. “You’re going to say that I don’t want to know, right?”
“Try me.”
“What’s going on?”
“You don’t want to know.”
He laughed. “See, when I say something that sounds like a question at the end? Means I want to know. What’s going on?”
I’d decided not to trust anyone. But Matt wasn’t anyone. I could give him an edited version of the truth. “Okay, listen. Jelly got some information, and he tried to blackmail Veronica Gaines with it. He tried to do the same with an even bigger fish, a group from abroad, and now he’s missing and the information is out there somewhere.”
“You mean missing or missing?”
I shrugged. “Both.”
He sat and processed this while we waited for traffic lights to change. Then he scratched his hair and tugged on it, pulling a face. He didn’t take bad news well. He’d never developed a coping mechanism for stress that didn’t involve better living through chemistry, so bad news always seemed to knock the wind out of him.
“Thing is, we both knew—know—Jelly. I can’t see him settling for some tacky photography-slash-porn business in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere. And I say that as someone who used to live in Wednesbury. Whatever it is he’s hooked up with your man Simon for, it’s got to be something more than a day job at Studio Noir.”
“So you think Simon’s in on the blackmail.”
I nodded. “I tried the shop, but I think Simon is going to be similarly unavailable for comment.” I watched Matt tug at the front of his hair again. “So the next best thing is to try his house and see if I can find anything there to clue me in.”
“Simon’s house?” Matt stopped pulling at his hair. “Wouldn’t it make sense if we tried Jelly’s place first?”
I looked across at him, then back at the road, then back across at him again. “You know where he lives?”
“Sure.”
“Then why the fuck—”
“You never asked.”
If Matt had told me where Jelly lived in advance, I might have changed my mind about going. Instead I let him direct me step by step, and realized too late that he’d led me onto the Moat Farm estate in Tipton.
Tipton lies in the heart of the Black Country, halfway between Birmingham and Wolverhampton. There was a time when it was said to have more canals than roads, and many Romani families settled there after the work on the boats went away. The skies back then had been full of the smoke of local factories and foundries, but all signs of the industrial glory days were long gone.
The Moat Farm estate had been built to provide social housing for the working class in the thirties. And like most social housing projects, it was cramped, small, and located far away from all the nicer neighborhoods. It had been built on a desolate patch of land, cut off from the rest of Tipton on three sides by train tracks and canals. Its isolation had earned it the nickname Lost City. What had started out as a nickname based on geography gained a sick meaning after the town hit the skids: it was a fitting label for the lost generations housed on the estate. A lot of work had gone into cleaning it up over the last twenty years, including building newer houses and more roads onto the estate, but to paraphrase a song by the Selecter, there are certain things that are just too hard to forget. As we turned onto the estate and drove along its winding maze of roads, we passed way too many children for one in the afternoon, and they weren’t even in uniform. These kids were on a permanent lunch break.
Matt directed me onto a quiet cul-de-sac lined with depressing two- and three-story apartments, all painted the same shade of gray. Laundry hung from balconies, and stair rails led down to ragged yards and concrete patios.
Last time I was in a building like one of these, it blew up.
And that’s only a slight exaggeration.
I parked between two vans, hoping to be the least noticeable thing in the street, and Matt led me up a set of stairs. As we approached the door of Jelly’s place, I wondered about his house keys. They hadn’t been in his pockets or on the floor near his body, but his wallet had been there. I doubted he would have gone to a hotel tryst without his house keys. Someone must have gone through his pockets before me. I stepped forward and tried the door handle a couple of times, putting some weight into it.
Matt stepped back. “Not going to knock?”
I knocked on the door theatrically to humor him. I stepped back and pretended to wait for movement inside.
“You already know, don’t you?” Matt gave me a look. “You said in the car he was both kinds of missing, and now you’re not waiting to see if he’s in there before trying the door. What have you done to him?”
That hurt. Matt had seen me do some dodgy things but I’d thought he trusted me more than that. “I didn’t do anything to him.” I skated by on the lie; in my head it was true, because all I’d done was dispose of his body after the fact. “If I had killed him, don’t you think I’d have his keys? Someone got to him before I could help, and I need to find whatever it was they were after before they come back again.”
He waved to the door handle again, giving me permission to carry on, but he didn’t look convinced. I put my weight back into the door but it wasn’t for moving it. The wood of the doorframe had been varnished recently, but beneath the varnish were older scratches and chips near the lock. This flat had been broken into in the past, and that gave me an advantage because some of the wood had already been cleared away. It looked like a cylindrical lock, which meant it would be a piece of piss. I slipped two bankcards out of my wallet and put them together, doubling the strength. I pushed them into the gap between the wood and the door, at an angle at first, until I got purchase. While the cards looked for a gap to slide into, I put my foot against the base of the door, pushing my weight into it. Sure enough, the d
oor gave a little. Nobody ever shuts their front door gently; they’ll let it slam, or kick it shut while they carry shopping. Often the security feature that needs the most care is the most overlooked, and over time it all adds up to a loose door. With the gap I’d created, I could wiggle the cards in to push between the door and the metal strike pad set into the doorframe, until they connected with the latch.
“Someone might see.” Matt was looking behind us, down at the road. “They might call the cops.”
“Nobody gives a shit. Look around. The cops don’t come out here, anyway.”
I pushed the cards further inward, and soon they were easing the latch out of the strike pad, slipping it back into the door. It didn’t need to go all the way in, just enough to—
Click.
There.
The door swung inward. The hallway was dim. At the far end was an open doorway into the kitchen at the rear of the flat. I could see a sink and a window above it, with daylight streaming in. To my left was a staircase, and on the right was a closed door. There was woodchip on the walls. Jelly had never struck me as a Pulp fan.
The most noticeable thing was the smell: cats and urine. Matt pushed past me, clucking and calling, making that noise like a lazy rattlesnake that seems to be the universal human greeting for a cat. He stooped down just inside the kitchen doorway and started fussing over something out of sight. I followed and peered down over his shoulder at two skinny kittens hiding beneath a small table. They looked underfed and had scratches on their faces where it looked like they’d gotten rough with each other. On the table was a box full of cat food, still sealed. The box was scratched and torn, but the food had remained out of reach.
Matt ripped open the box.
“Hello,” he said. “You hungry? Yes.” His voice was morphing into baby talk. “You’re hungry. Let’s see what we’ve got, shall we. Yes.”
They forgot their shyness and ran headfirst into his legs, rubbing against him as he looked for plates.
“Matt, you’re talking to cats.”