by Mike Ripley
‘Come on, before the old man loses his rag.’
She frog-marched me down to the street, leaving Prentice holding the door open.
He made as if to say something, but I just beamed at him and he had to let it go.
As we approached the Mercedes, Bernice said:
‘Was that a friend of yours? Do you want to ask him along?’
‘Never seen him before,’ I said.
Some of the people I know regard Hackney as the sticks and half expect to see herds of grazing wildebeest when they come to visit me. In their book, Leytonstone would therefore be real bandit country, and Romford, once you’d convinced them that it wasn’t actually off the edge of the map, was probably the Twilight Zone.
Barry Tuckett drove smoothly and quietly, not contributing to the conversation in the back seat, which wasn’t really a conversation but Bernice’s potted biography of Billy. By the time we got to Romford, she’d said an awful lot but I wasn’t any wiser.
The Mercedes slid to a halt outside a fair-sized, 1930s detached house set back from the road by a small garden that had thoughtfully been concreted over. There was a sundial on a plinth in the middle of it, which was quite tasteful, and three faded concrete gnomes, which were anything but. From their expressions, they were wondering where all the grass had gone as well.
Mr Tuckett muttered something about having to get back to work, and Bernice said that would be fine, as she could drop me back in her car. She patted him on the shoulder, and he drove off as she plumbed her bag for a ring of keys that wouldn’t have looked out of place at Balmoral.
The house had been furnished with a lot of money badly spent in a mixture of styles. There were also no books anywhere and no immediate evidence of a sound system. I’d noticed two separate burglar alarm circuits on the way in, but I didn’t spot anything that wasn’t instantly replaceable and therefore over-insurable.
I told myself not to be such a snob.
Bernice said she would show me Billy’s room and leave me to it while she made lunch, and did I fancy a drink? I said a large mug of strong, sweet tea would do the job and she agreed, adding that it was the best thing ‘after a shock.’ I hadn’t been thinking of stress or shock, I’d been nursing a hangover. The adrenalin of going to a Court had kept it at bay so far, but now I could feel the walls closing in again.
Billy’s bedroom looked more like a student’s room than his pad at university ever had. The posters on the walls were all reproductions of newspaper adverts showing battery farm conditions or dogs and rabbits with various electrodes attached to them. Under one of these someone had added, in pencil, ‘An Animal Auschwitz?’
There was a desk overloaded with papers and two freestanding bookcases, though they held few books. Most of the space was taken up with piles of pamphlets and hand-outs.
I pulled out the stool that Billy must have sat at the desk on, and began to rifle through things in no particular order.
It all made depressing reading. One four-pager told me that around 500 million animals were killed for food in the UK each year. It made no mention of fish, so I supposed that while ‘meat is murder,’ fish eating is justifiable homicide. Nearly four million animals were used each year for experiments, 80 percent of which were rodents, which gave the activists a problem, as rats don’t have good PR potential. (It’s their naked tails. Can you think of a sympathetic animal with a hairless tail? Especially one that moves quickly?) There were hand-outs on ‘cruelty free’ cosmetics, positively promoting cosmetic companies who did not drip shampoo into rabbits’ eyes in what I knew was called the Draize Test for irritancy. And there must have been a hundred copies of a pamphlet on the campaign against street trading in animals. I remembered reading about the protests over Club Row just north of Spitalfields’ market, where a street market in animals had been held since Victorian times. Those particular Victorian values had been shot down about 1983. One up to the libbers.
There were books – Peter Singer’s, which had popularised the term ‘animal liberation,’ and Robert Sharpe’s The Cruel Deception. And there were photocopies of press coverage of the famous 1982 march on the Porton Down chemical defence establishment and on the activities of the Hunt Saboteurs Association, including the famous quote from one master of
fox hounds advocating that horse-whipping a saboteur was, like beating his wife, a private matter.
Maybe it was true that the Devil got all the best lines.
In all of it, there was a marked absence of anything actually written by Billy. Perhaps he had just been a delivery boy.
In the top drawer of the desk, I found some more photocopies, and these had at least some notes scribbled in red ink in the margins.
There were four sheets paperclipped together. The top two were extracts from the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act 1986, the Government legislation that established that animal experiment projects, the researcher involved and the premises where it would happen, all required licences. Certain sections had been underlined in angry, wavy red lines, including one that read: ‘… anything done for the purpose of, or liable to result in, the birth or hatching of a protected animal ...’ But there wasn’t enough in the extract for me to get the context.
The other two sheets were copies of short press reports – one from an unidentified newspaper and the other from some sort of scientific magazine – about a Professor Brian Bamforth. Actually, the reports concerned various research grants won by Professor Bamforth, and though the reason for the grants was there in black and white, it didn’t make much sense to me. I could understand the term ‘genetic engineering’ – well, as long as nobody asked me to speak for a minute without hesitation or deviation – and I recognised ‘DNA,’ which was said to be the basic stuff of life. I had friends who thought tequila was.
On both these pages, in red, at top right, was the word ‘Transgenic’ followed by two or three exclamation marks. That didn’t mean much either. Lower down, one reference to Professor Bamforth had his name circled in red, and a red line led off to the margin and another hand-drawn red circle. In that was a plus sign, followed by ‘GB, P & L,’ and the ‘L’ had been underlined twice. There was also the notation of a date, the 31st of the 12th month. New Year’s Eve, in about ten days’ time.
I heard Bernice coming just in time to fold the photocopies and stuff them inside my jacket. By the time she’d elbowed the door open with two steaming mugs of tea, I was reading the first thing that had come to hand.
‘I thought for a minute you could have been Billy sitting there,’ she said as she put the tea down on the desk. ‘But I’d be kidding myself.’
I looked at her with a new respect.
‘Billy used to sit there all hunched over,’ she went on, holding her right arm up to demonstrate. ‘Like he was doing an exam and didn’t want anybody to crib the answers from him.’
She gave me a little ‘that’s-all’ smile and looked around the room. Then came back to me.
‘You interested in filming too?’ she asked, before putting her mug in front of her face.
I looked at what I was supposed to be reading. It was the instruction manual for a Minolta autofocus video camera. I’d seen them in the shops marked down, as a Christmas offer, to around 900 quid. I tended to regard them with some scepticism. People who bought amateur video-making equipment, however good it was (and the Minolta stuff is state of the art), usually had little of interest to actually film. It was people like me, with no money for such things, who led the interesting lives. Well, that’s how I rationalise it.
Still, it was a growing market and there was money to be made there somewhere by somebody. I knew a guy who made a fortune out of CB radio when it became legal in
Britain. Not out of the radio sets themselves, mind you, but – about a month after legalisation – he flogged cassette tapes on ‘How to keep a conversation going on CB,’ with a follow-up manual listing good ‘handles’
(mostly pinched from Lord of the Rings) for Citizen Banders with absolutely no imagination. I thought he was conning me when he told me his plan. He now lives in Jersey. I don’t.
‘Oh ... er ... well, I’ve never been able to afford gear like this,’ I said sheepishly. ‘Was Billy keen?’
‘Seemed to be. All of a sudden, like. He asked for that camera for his birthday this year.’ She looked around the room and frowned. ‘We never saw anything he videoed on it, and it doesn’t seem to be here. He probably loaned it to somebody.’
I knew people who would borrow a video camera, especially if they were throwing a particular kind of party. But I didn’t think Billy knew them.
‘Lunch won’t be long,’ said Bernice, sitting down on the edge of Billy’s bed and letting a hand stray over the duvet. ‘I’ve put the oven chips in.’ She looked towards the window.
‘Worried about the neighbours?’ I asked.
She knew what I meant. We’d arrived and Mr Tuckett had driven off and within minutes I could be seen, from the street, through the open curtains, upstairs in a bedroom. And now she could too.
‘Sod ‘em,’ she smiled. ‘They pay enough rates. Something to gossip about is extra.’
I smiled politely and scalded my mouth on the tea.
‘Is there anything worth keeping?’ she asked.
‘I have to say, there’s nothing personal here that I can see.’ It was true. No family photographs, no girlfriend evidence, no souvenir ticket stubs from plays or concerts or similar. Just animals.
‘We weren’t that close,’ she said softly, and looked down at the floor.
If I’d been standing, I’d have shuffled my feet.
‘You must think we’re a funny family, Roy,’ she said, not looking up.
‘And why should I do that, eh?’ My God, she should see some of my lot.
‘I’m not crying,’ she said. ‘I feel I ought to cry more than I have. It’s expected, isn’t it? Billy, our only child, dead. All those years together ... All the sacrifices … Oh, bugger it. Who am I trying to kid?’
Yourself, Bernice. But I kept it zipped.
She sniffed loudly and looked at me.
‘Billy was a disappointment to his father. They’ve had nothing to do with each other for damn near 20 years. And I suppose I’ve always sided with Barry. I had to. It was him I married, after all. Billy went his own way. Don’t get me wrong, Roy. It’s not that we didn’t get on together, it’s just we had nothing in common. He was like a stranger. And now he’s gone, and it ... it really hasn’t made that much difference.’
I moved towards her and sat on the bed and put an arm round her. It wasn’t that my shoulders are broader than anyone else’s or that I have the most understanding nature in the world. I was just the one who was there.
‘We just … we just didn’t love him, Roy,’ she breathed. ‘Is that really bad?’
‘It happens, Mrs T, more than you’d think.’ I gave her a squeeze. ‘Are those chips done yet?’
‘Five minutes,’ she said, standing up. ‘How do you like your steak?’
We ate in the kitchen, though if my steak had been much bigger, we would have had to move into the garage as well.
‘We’ve a bottle of wine somewhere,’ said Bernice, ‘if you fancy it.’
The spirit was willing, but the flesh was still recovering. And I was eating steak for the second time in less than 15 hours. How could I do that after what I’d read in Billy’s bedroom? Aw hell, this cow was past saving.
‘No, thanks,’ I said with noble restraint. ‘I’ll be driving again this afternoon.’
‘I’ve got some of those no-alcohol lagers in the fridge, if you’d prefer,’ she said enthusiastically.
‘That’ll do fine.’
She left her plate, eager to please. Eager to do something.
Mothers. Who’d have ‘em?
‘Where exactly was Billy living?’ I asked when we were munching again.
‘Here,’ she said, forking chips. ‘Well, as much as he ever did. He would sleep here maybe one night in five. The rest of the time, he’d stay with one of his friends when they were out campaigning for the animals.’
‘Anyone in particular?’
‘Mostly his friend Peter, in Islington.’ She saw my next question coming. ‘No, I don’t know what his last name is. The police asked me that as well. And I don’t know exactly where he lived either. Billy used to take his bicycle up to town on the train. Did I tell you he even used to have a name for it? Larry. He used to call it Larry. Have you ever … Oh, I have told you that, haven’t I?’
‘Is it still here?’
‘No. He took it with him when he went to see Peter last Friday. It’s not that I mind. Maybe Peter has a use for it.’
‘You’ve never met this chap Peter?’ I was perking up under the influence of what seemed like half a ton of protein.
‘Not really. Saw him once. Well, I saw his van really, once when he came to pick up Billy when they were going off somewhere for the weekend. They used to travel around a lot, handing out leaflets and things. I remembered the van because it was just like the ones Barry bought for the business, except it was red, not white.’
‘Did Billy take the camera with him as well?’ I asked to keep her talking, but I was thinking of the scribble on the photocopies I’d found.
‘P & L’ couldn’t be Peter and Larry, could they? A mountain bike called Larry? And there was ‘GB’ as well.
‘Oh, I haven’t seen that for over a month.’ Bernice speared her last chip. ‘He probably lent it to Geoffrey.’
‘Geoffrey?’
‘Geoffrey Bell. Used to be a great friend of Billy’s until he moved away, but Billy still used to go and see him.’
‘You know Geoffrey Bell?’
‘Of course I do. He used to be the vicar.’
After lunch, Bernice and I armed ourselves with black plastic dustbin liners and we made a concerted attack on Billy’s room. I found nothing else of interest, but Bernice turned up a couple of old school exercise books of Billy’s and decided to keep them in remembrance. The piles of pamphlets and the hand-outs went in the bin. The books and clothes we put into boxes for Oxfam.
She thanked me every five minutes or so until we’d finished. Then she got a brand new Ford Fiesta out of the garage and drove me back to where I’d left Armstrong in Leytonstone.
Before we left Romford, though, she made a minor detour to see Mr Tuckett at work. In fact, she wanted to get me ‘a little something’ for my trouble from the shop we parked outside.
The little something was a nine-pound leg of lamb, and it came in a plastic carrier bag that bore the same legend as the shopfront and the two white Escort vans parked at the side: ‘B. TUCKETT – FAMILY BUTCHER.’
Chapter Eight
Back at Stuart Street, I cemented my new-found friendship with Doogie and Miranda by presenting them with the leg of lamb. Let’s face it, not even with Springsteen’s help could I munch through that alone. It might have come in handy frozen, as a weapon in case Pointy-Beard and Shifty-Eyes turned up again, but then I now had Doogie on side. Lisabeth, from the middle flat, was in danger of losing her unpaid job as my unofficial bodyguard.
Miranda even managed a smile, revelling in the fact that someone apart from herself appreciated Doogie, if only for his street-fighting qualities. I tried to look pleased when she told me that Prentice had been ringing at half-hourly intervals since mid-afternoon and had left a multiple-choice list of numbers where I could get him that evening.
But first, I had my own problems to sort.
It took me ages to get Iris, the landlady of the Duke of Wellington, to answer the phone. It couldn’t have been because the pub was busy; it was more likely she’d just forgotten where the phone was. But eventually she did.
‘Hello, Iris, it’s Mac. Mac Mac
lean. I called in the other day to see if there was a package for me. Remember?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said vaguely, sounding as if she’d got her valium tablets on optic.
‘Has there been anything?’
‘Through the post?’
‘Yes.’
‘For you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not through the post, luvvy.’
‘Has anything come by carrier pigeon, then?’ I snapped, regretting it immediately.
‘There’s no need to adopt that tone of voice. This place isn’t run just for your benefit, you know. I’ve had enough of men just thinking they can ride roughshod over …’
‘Look, I’m really truly sorry, Iris, but this is important.’
I smiled my best smile down the line. ‘Did somebody leave something for me?’
‘Well ...’ She paused to consider if I was sorry enough. ‘She didn’t actually leave anything, but she had a parcel with her.’
‘Who had, Iris?’
‘The girl who came yesterday.’
‘What girl, Iris?’ I asked patiently.
‘The foreign one. More than a tint of the tarbrush there, if you ask me.’
I hadn’t, but never mind.
‘I think she fancies you, Mac. She kept calling you “Angel” all the time.’
‘Did she leave the package, Iris?’
‘What? No, she took it with her.’
‘Any message?’
‘No, she just went when I said you didn’t actually live I here. Though the way some people treat this place, I might as well be running …’
‘Thanks a bunch, Iris.’
I hung up and rested my forehead against the wall in despair. Then Fenella tapped me on the shoulder and I almost had a heart attack.
Our communal phone is on the hallway wall by the front door. Fenella, Lisabeth’s younger, slimmer room-mate, had sneaked down the stairs from their flat without making a sound. I suspected she was taking lessons from Springsteen.
‘Oooh, sorry, Angel. Did I make you jump?’