Divide and Rule

by Solomon Carter

  “Who the hell are you, and why are you trespassing on my property.”

  It was time to uncover another layer of the truth.

  It took all of one minute to explain who she was and explain why Dawn Burton should have listened to her. Dawn blinked at her but her expression didn’t change as Eva spoke. There was a tired and cynical look in her eyes as if she’d seen it, done it, got the T shirt and asked for her money back. When Eva stopped explaining, Dawn Burton blinked a little more then opened the side door.

  “I suppose you’d better come in then.”

  The tall woman went into the empty house, and Eva followed. Mrs Burton walked slowly, her footfall echoing around the big rooms because they were high ceilinged and for the most part empty. There was furniture – all neat and clean – but it wasn’t lived in. The whole thing looked half way between a furniture commercial and set pictures from Right Move property. The woman led Eva through to the fine granite kitchen, and took up a stool which was so tall and thin it looked as if it had been modelled on the woman herself. She didn’t invite Eva to take a stool, but she did pour Eva a cup of coffee from a jug. “Hard night, huh?” said the woman. Eva then knew for sure she looked terrible, and nodded. “Bad night’s sleep, that’s all.”

  “Sure. I get those all the time. Especially now.” There was cynicism and truth in what the lady was saying. The woman knew she was hung over, and she knew Eva knew it. But she was also saying that times had been hard. Good, at least that was a first admission of humanity. Up until this second Eva was beginning to wonder whether Dawn Burton was the kind of mother anyone could like.

  Eva looked around again, involuntarily. The emptiness grabbed her attention.

  “Yes. It looks odd doesn’t it? But there are reasons for the lack of stuff. Since the attack we were in two minds whether we should stay here and fight it out, you know, make a show of it for the election campaign or whether we should just go. I wasn’t happy in waiting. Why risk our own skin for the sake of the party. But Will’s always been so pragmatic when it came to his career, he said we had to stay. I agreed, under duress of course, but on one condition. We move as soon as the election is over.”

  “So you’re leaving in two days?”

  “I wish it could be that quick. Let me show you something, Miss Roberts.”

  The woman slid off her stool, drained her coffee cup and led Eva through into the hallway which split all the ground floor rooms apart. In the big hallway Eva hesitated and stopped in the middle of the tiles and looked around. Her imagination came into play. She saw Burton cradling his son, Dawn Burton insipid, weak, making the call to 999. She imagined the attacker beating on the door, and catching the son unawares. Her imaginings were over in a flash, but Dawn had spotted her eyes glaze and Eva’s thoughtful face inspecting the room. The woman gulped and nodded. “We found him right where you’re standing. They nearly caved his head right in, didn’t they? How could they have done that? How can another human being have possibly done that to him? To my son?” For the first time the warrior-like woman before her began to resemble the image given to her by her husband. Dawn’s eyes gleamed with fresh tears, and her lip trembled, but in an instant her face was transformed back into a rigid anger. Eva tried to take it all in, the nuances, the messages she was getting from Mrs Burton but they were jumbled up and unreadable, like half sentences. So far she sensed the woman was not entirely pleased with her husband’s career focus… maybe not his politics either…

  “I didn’t bring you out here to show you the crime scene, Miss Roberts. I wanted to show you these. Will won’t look at them. He hides the ones he finds before I see them. But I keep every single one, and I make sure he sees them.”

  The woman gathered up a pile of loose papers from beside a letter rack near the door. The papers were all mixed sizes, colours and textures. At first they looked just like a stack of junk mail, but then the woman moved closer to Eva, standing at her side and showed her them slowly.

  “NAZI SCUM. QUIT OR DIE.”

  She flicked to another.

  HATERS WILL BE KILLED

  HITLER LOVING SCUM

  GIVE UP NOW. THE COUNTDOWN HAS BEGUN.

  “This one. When did this come?”

  “Nearly ten days ago. Just before Jerry was attacked.”

  The woman looked across at Eva and now her hard eyes softened. Her face changed as quickly as the clouds on a windy day. Now she looked afraid, hard still, but fragile and ready to crack at any moment. ”What do you think? Of all these?”

  “They’re threats, Mrs Burton. You must have shown these to the police. What did they say?”

  “No. Will didn’t want to involve the police in the threats. He saw them as political. He didn’t want to give the enemy any sign of weakness.”

  “That isn’t weakness. It’s common sense. You need protection here.”

  “For Will everything is political and therefore anything can be used against you.”

  “For a right-wing politician he sounds very pre-occupied with being defensive.”

  “He cares about his presentation. He always cared about that. He doesn’t want the Nazi labels to stick, even if they come from a wild source like this. The N word shouldn’t be mentioned in the same breath as Will Burton or UKFirst.”

  Eva processed the woman’s face, the sad, cynical lilt of her voice, and the bitterness in her eyes.

  “Mrs Burton. My perception is that you’re not at the hospital that much, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “Say whatever you please. No, I’m not there because, as you might have guessed… I’m not ‘on message’. And to be perfectly honest, Will knows he can’t manage me either. Look at me. Do you think I can look good kissing babies and walking arm in arm with my husband in front of the national press right now?”

  Eva shrugged and looked away for a telling moment.

  “No way, right. It’s a bit hard to spin your way to victory when your wife looks like she wants the world to swallow her up whole.”

  “I have to ask you a couple more questions, Mrs Burton. Then I’ll leave you alone.”

  “If you must.”

  “I must. Do you know who attacked your son, Mrs Burton?”

  The woman sighed and closed her eyes. “No. I couldn’t even imagine the person who would do that.”

  “You’ve got no idea of anyone who had a problem with your son?”

  “No. Will and I were the trouble. Jerry is a good boy. We deserved what happened to Jerry.”

  “No one deserves that, Mrs Burton. One more thing. Do you want your husband to win this election?”

  The woman looked at Eva and held her gaze. Her face travelled from soft and weary to stoic. “When Will was fourteen he was a right-wing young Conservative. When I met him he was a young socialist at college. By the time we got married, he was back with the Conservatives again saying he was being pragmatic, and that this country needed its foundations. Since then the script hasn’t changed. Pragmatic, always being pragmatic.”

  “But do you want him to win?”

  “Of course. He’s forty eight now. That’s long enough to be chasing a dream without a hint of success. And he is where he is now because he’s being pragmatic once again.”

  “You mean with UKFirst.”

  “You said that. They call him Tony, you know, after Tony Blair. You know why?”

  “Why?”

  “Because he can be all things to all people.”

  “Are you saying he’s not actually a believer in UKFirst?”

  “I’d never say that now, would I?”

  Eva Roberts looked into the woman’s face and saw it change again, but the cynical glint remained after her bitter smile waned.

  “It’s been good to meet you, Mrs Burton. It’s been very informative.”

  “Yes, it has, hasn’t it?”

  The woman nodded and showed Eva to the door. Eva now knew she liked neither Will Burton nor his wife. They were caught in a duel which had probably laste
d their whole marriage. The thought prompted her to think of Dan as she walked back to the car, Dan feigning a big cartoon yawn at her leaving him so long. Inside, she shuddered at the thought of such a marriage and was glad they hadn’t yet tied the knot. She also doubted they ever would. Thinking back on Dawn Burton, she saw exactly why Will Burton didn’t want her around. If he was a presentation obsessive, a pragmatist, how could he keep with him the wife who clearly disliked him so? She hadn’t minded dropping enough hints to Eva that she didn’t like or respect the man or his politics. And she had all but said that his current politics were phoney too, that his relationship with UKFirst was a matter of convenience and not political love. And the one question Mrs Burton wouldn’t answer spoke loudest of all. She hadn’t said she wanted her husband to win. So the truth was brutally clear. Yet she was no closer to locating the attacker. Now plenty depended on finding some information in Basildon, before the attacker struck again. Why hadn’t Will Burton involved the police more in his protection? Yes, there was the right wing paranoia about police loyalties, but Eva thought it had to be more than that… The whole thing was becoming a vortex, and Eva felt like she was getting sucked into the middle of it.

  “Get anything juicy in there?” said Dan.

  “Yeah, A headache,” said Eva.

  Dan grinned. “You know what’s good for that?”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “A trip to a food packing factory. Come on. Don’t say I don’t take you anywhere nice.”

  Dan drove while Eva looked out the window and tried to process her thoughts along with her hangover. Maybe Will Burton was a villain after all, once prepared to risk his family for his long term ambitions. But Serge was still the man in Eva’s sights. And she knew he was the man in Dan’s too. But without a shred of evidence, the attacker was gone for good. Until he struck again.

  Fourteen

  Curlon’s Food was a big dilapidated factory out on the edge of Basildon, bordered by fields on three sides. It wasn’t a glamorous setting even by the standards of local factories. The corrugated shed building had once been painted sky blue, but the paint was peeling off like badly sunburned skin. The Curlon logo was partly broken with the ‘n’ hanging at an angle to one side. Even the concrete surface of the car park was breaking up from a lack of maintenance. Eva’s top detective insight was that Curlon’s was on hard times, and it wouldn’t be too long before the factory was either closed down or in the hands of people who had better ideas and deeper pockets. It was past lunch time, and neither Dan nor Eva had eaten and Eva had a funny feeling that Curlon’s was going to be a perfect appetite suppressant.

  “Curlon’s specialises in Macaroni cheese, shepherd’s pie, and the value pastry pie market,” said Dan.

  “Oh? You do impress,” said Eva.

  “If that impressed you then you really need to get out more. All work and no play makes Jane a dull girl.”

  “I’ve been swotting up on things besides food factories. Besides, being a dull girl pays the rent.”

  Dan swerved the old Jag into a visitor space nearest the entrance. There were no other visitors. Old habits remained, and so both Eva and Dan got out of the car and looked around, taking their time looking around like day trippers after a long drive. The air smelt strangely and faintly of a mix of food and chemicals. Cars were parked in four lines outside the building. Eva looked at the lie of the land, appraising the exit routes and looking to the nearest conurbation which could help hide anyone who ran. The surrounding fields would have given anyone a challenging getaway. They’d be spotted easily before they could reach local suburbia. Then Eva looked more closely at the parked cars. If the makes and models of the cars were anything to go by then the firm must have paid as terribly as it looked. Most of the parked cars were well over six or eight years old, and there was no sign of an executive vehicle anywhere in the lot. But there was plenty of evidence of the affiliations of people who worked at Curlon’s. Plenty of the rear windscreens of the Fords, the Vauxhalls and the Volkswagens bore bright yellow stickers. Some were easy spots – the sword wielding crest of UKFirst on some. Eva counted off eight of those. But there were other stickers too. Keep Britain British, and a picture of a Union Jack and a bulldog, with the slogan “If You Don’t Like Us Go Home.” Some of the cars had Union Jack flags and England flags pinned in the passenger windows. This was the weirdest factory Eva had visited, and she had seen some special ones in the course of her career.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked Dan, his face a mixture of strained smile and discomfort etched across his brow.

  “We’re in a unique place right now, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yep. Welcome to the land of the Essex Rednecks. Whoever thought it? This could go seriously wrong if we don’t play it carefully.”

  “My gut is telling me the same thing. I don’t want either of us ending up in a processed meat pie”

  Eva shook her head. “Absolutely. The best idea is follow me, and keep quiet.”

  “Yes, madam, I always love it when you take control.”

  “Shhhh.” Said Eva and walked ahead. Dan looked around for Peter Serge’s car. But none of the vehicles around here were up to the arrogant little bastard’s pretensions. “Remember Dan. We’re not saving the world here. We’re not taking on the Third Reich either. We are at a Basildon pie factory and we are here to investigate this Joe Merton character. We want to find out what happened to Coulson if we can, and hopefully get a decent lead on the Jerry Burton attacker. Just stay on mission, please.”

  “I’m always on mission. You know that.”

  Yes, Dan was. His own mission. Eva didn’t say another word. She pressed into the factory door and found an historic brown Formica reception area which smelt even more of cooked stodgy meats and eggs than outside. The reception walls were a similar crazy blue to the old flaking paint on the corrugated walls outside. Their reception held a big woman behind an even bigger brown desk. She had a big bosom to match and a round face with lots of make up on it. Though she smiled her eyes were hard and small.

  “Good afternoon. We’d like to buy some pies. Stacks of them, actually. But we need to discuss the order first.”

  The woman looked at them both, then her big face cracked a smile. Curlon’s were so badly in need of business that a badly beaten man in a leather jacket qualified as a good business lead. Inside two minutes a manager had arrived to meet them- a man with an old school military moustache and a bald head. He was bulky and moved with care as if parts of him hurt when he walked. Eva looked at Dan to check he wasn’t one of Dan’s opponents back at the pub. Dan shook his head, reading her thoughts. The manager asked details about their fictitious business and what kind of pies they wanted so many times that Eva began to improvise as she went along.

  “So, you’ll be wanting the standard or the premium range?”

  “What’s the difference?” said Eva, her eyes scanning the walls of the factory room as she walked by. She looked at the workers, the men tending the machines and the supervisors keeping them in check. Everyone at Curlon’s wore a white uniform and a baggy white hat. The whites were all grubby, in keeping with the shabby décor. Eva and Dan had to wear the baggy hats too, and in the spirit of cooperation they’d obliged, though Dan didn’t look too happy about it.

  “What’s the difference?” asked Eva. Ahead she caught a glimpse of two younger men in white uniforms throwing something large and flabby between them like a giant pink pancake. The young men must have thought they were out of sight, since they were mostly hidden behind a vast metal vat, but Eva could see them clearly. They were throwing a soft pink material between them, laughing as they hurled it through the air. When at last they spilt the stuff, on the floor with a slap, they cheered. The man with the moustache looked all around him, but he didn’t pursue it - probably in the interests of censoring it from his guests. Eva saw one of the young men pick up the soft pink slab and toss it over his shoulder. Then she watched him lay the stuff out on a stainl
ess steel table, and begin to dice it up. Right then, Eva knew she would never need lunch today and maybe not tomorrow either and she would never buy a Curlon’s pie for the rest of her life. The flabby pink slab was some kind of meat – and they’d tossed it around, and dropped it on the floor, picked it straight up and then simply got on with the business of making food out of it. Seeing Eva distracted, Dan followed her eyes as they passed close by the young men chopping the processed meat. Her eyes fastened to them. One of the men stopped chopping, and nodded at his colleague with a quiet smirk. The other young man looked up, did a double take of Eva and smiled.

  Eva assessed them. They were approximately Jerry Burton’s age. There was also a chance they were younger – too young to work. “Hang on. What are these young men doing?”

  Both men stood a little more keenly and put on the appearance of men doing their duty as Eva, Dan and the manager passed by.

  “That’s processed pork. It goes into some of our ranges. These two lads started with us only recently, but they’ve made a fine addition to our team, haven’t you boys?”

  They looked at Eva with a smile that spoke volumes, grins full of innuendo which Eva knew would rile Dan if he noticed them. “Could you tell me where the ladies loos are? I really should have gone before we left…”

  “I can show you. If you like,” said one of the boys as the other one laughed. Eva looked at Dan to keep him in check. He nodded to show he understood.