by Tony Parsons
The winter was over now but they still wore its clothes, wrapped up in thick fleeces and padded jackets, the clothes of those who wait for the night bus or the first tube trains.
Their faces suggested that they came from every corner of the earth and they stood in silence for Barry Warboys to be brought to the Central Criminal Court, the proper name of the Old Bailey.
I flashed my warrant card to a uniformed officer and made my way to the main entrance where Dejan Jovanović of the Serbian embassy was waiting for me. As we were about to go inside, he tugged my arm.
‘The boy,’ he said. ‘Nenad Novak.’
Nesha was standing at the back of the crowd on Newgate Street and I wondered how many other blood relatives of the victims were in this crowd. It was impossible to know where the curious ended and the bereaved began. I lifted my hand in salute to Nesha but he gave no indication that he had seen me.
‘Here he comes,’ said Dejan.
A prison transport van – a large white truck with eight blacked-out windows on each side – lumbered into view. A murmur ran through the crowd and they pressed closer to the road, held back by a line of uniformed police officers.
A single bottle exploded on the side of the van. A cry went up, filled with something like relief, and another bottle was thrown but the prison transport van was already disappearing inside the gates of the Old Bailey. Nothing in the city works quite as well as the Central Criminal Court. Gangsters, terrorists, and murderers – the Old Bailey sees them come and sees them go with little drama every day of the week.
‘Go inside,’ I told Dejan. ‘I’ll see you in there.’
I pushed my way through the crowd to Nesha.
‘Go home,’ I told him. ‘Nothing’s going to happen today. It’s his first appearance. All they’re going to do is hear his plea and remand him in custody for a later date. The trial will be six or eight weeks from now.’
Nesha shook his head, as if I had it all wrong.
‘I want to see this man,’ he said. ‘And I want to see him punished.’
‘I understand that, Nesha. You’re here for Hana. You’re here for your sister. But today is just the start. You’re not going to see Warboys punished. And you’re not even going to see him. They’ll take him out the back way.’ I gestured towards the far side of the Central Criminal Court. ‘Warwick Square,’ I said. ‘They’re not going to risk this crowd. Go back to the gym, Nesha.’
‘I want to go inside.’
‘The public gallery was full hours ago. There’s nothing to see and there’s nothing to do. Go back to Fred’s and I’ll meet you there, OK?’
But he was not listening to me.
He stared up at the bronze statue of a woman that adorns the roof of the Old Bailey, blindfolded Lady Justice with the scales of justice in one hand and her sword in the other, and he kept staring up at her long after I had turned away, as if expecting her to rise up and strike down the wicked.
The holding cells below the Old Bailey lead directly into the courtrooms and so there was something almost theatrical about the way Barry Warboys suddenly appeared out of the ground and into the glass-walled dock of Court One. He blinked and stared around, haggard and dazed, his thinning fair hair dishevelled, like some subterranean creature dragged up to the light.
A murmur ran through the public gallery. I looked up and saw Billy Greene’s mother and his fiancée Siobhan sitting towards the back. And then it began.
‘All rise,’ the bailiff said.
The judge read out the charges against the defendant.
‘Barry Warboys, you are accused of facilitating the entry of illegal immigrants into the United Kingdom. How do you plead?’
His voice was strong and clear, still the tone of a man who was accustomed to doing business, well used to every deal going his way.
‘Not guilty, My Lord.’
It was all over in five minutes and the disappointment in Court One was tangible.
You come for justice, red in tooth and claw.
And what you get are well-paid men and women in wigs and gowns and bewildering rituals that have not changed in over a hundred years.
Barry Warboys disappeared back into the ground like the punchline of a magic act. Up in the public gallery, those who had queued for seats since the middle of the night loitered as if something else might happen today.
But as I had told Nesha, nothing would. Even my colleague from the Serbian embassy seemed deflated.
‘Not murder?’ Dejan Jovanović said.
I shook my head. ‘Not murder,’ I said. ‘Trafficking.’
‘How long for this crime?’ he asked.
‘Fourteen years,’ I said. ‘Maximum.’
‘I need a cigarette,’ he sighed.
The courtroom slowly began to clear and we went out to Warwick Square. The enormous prison transport van was parked with its engine idling outside the back gates of the Old Bailey. Two uniformed prison officers stepped out with Barry Warboys handcuffed between them.
‘Do you know this girl?’ Nesha said, brushing past me, his voice shaking, as if the words were too much for his throat. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Hey, mister – do you know this girl?’
He was holding a photograph in his hand. A hard copy of that last selfie from Belgrade. A brother and a sister smiling for the camera just before they said goodbye forever.
‘Hey!’
I placed a restraining hand on his shoulder.
‘Nesha—’
‘This was my sister,’ he said, as one of the uniformed officers noted his presence and took a pace towards him.
‘Her name was Hana Novak and she was a nurse from Serbia,’ Nesha said.
Barry Warboys looked at the boy without pity or interest.
The uniformed police officer placed a closed fist on Nesha’s chest. The other officer helped Warboys on to the back step of the prison transport van.
And the boy was suddenly past him.
‘She was a nurse,’ Nesha said as he punched Warboys in the side of the neck.
‘Oh,’ said Warboys, falling sideways, trying to lift his arms to touch his neck but shackled by the handcuffs he wore, and off balance, so that when Nesha hit him in the neck again he went down hard, unable to hold his hands out to break his fall.
And I was screaming Nesha’s name as the uniformed officers threw themselves on the boy, knocking him off his feet and pinning him to the deck with his face buried in the pavement of Warwick Square. And as the fight went out of him and he began to weep for his lost sister and for himself, I saw it all at once.
The knife still in Nesha’s right hand.
The blood pouring from the wounds in Warboys’ neck.
As uniformed officers bundled him inside the gates of the Old Bailey, I shouted Nesha’s name.
But the boy was already behind locked doors.
I sat on the steps of the Old Bailey with Dejan Jovanović.
The crowds who had waited for a glimpse of the accused had gone home, sleeping on buses and trains to the faraway edges of the city, and they would not return until the night came and their shift began.
‘What will happen to the boy?’ Dejan said.
‘They’ll put him away,’ I said. ‘In the eyes of the law, Nesha’s still a child so he’ll go to a Young Offenders’ Institution, probably Feltham in Middlesex.’ I thought about Nesha in that place and it was not a good moment. ‘And then, at the end of that, they’ll throw him out of the country. Deport him.’ I shook my head. ‘What a bloody mess.’
‘But this is a kind country.’
‘You think so, Dejan?’
He nodded, staring thoughtfully at his cigarette.
‘You don’t send people back to their own country if it’s too dangerous.’
‘But there’s no war where Nesha comes from, is there?’
‘Not now,’ he said, dragging deeply on his cigarette, and I remembered that Dejan Jovanović of the Serbian embassy was a man who had twice worn a soldier’s uniform, an
d who had picked up broken bodies in two wars.
I watched him smile sadly.
‘But who knows what terrible things will be happening in this world when Nesha Novak finally comes out?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You never know your luck.’
38
The days were growing longer now and for the first time in months, natural light poured through the large windows of our loft as Scout and Stan were fed by Mrs Murphy.
We had put away our winter clothes. We had turned the radiators off. And Scout was suddenly an inch taller. The season had turned.
My daughter and my dog both glanced up from their dinner as I came out of the bedroom.
‘Why are you dressed like that?’ Scout asked with a mouth full of pasta.
I was wearing my new suit, white shirt and blue tie. I usually only dressed like this when I was getting married or going to a funeral.
‘It’s called style, Scout,’ I said, touching her brown bell of hair.
Mrs Murphy smiled.
‘It’s called a date, Scout,’ she said.
I was embarrassed. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not a date.’
‘Go on with you,’ Mrs Murphy said, flicking a tea towel in my general direction. ‘Go and have a good time. You deserve it.’
I was not so sure. I knew I should have done more to protect Nesha and Billy. I felt bad that Edie’s grandmother had been moved from the retirement community she loved. And I knew I would always feel bad about it. But Mrs Murphy kept smiling. More than anyone in the world, she truly wanted a happy ending for our little family.
She chuckled happily as I collected the flowers I had bought.
‘What time is the young lady expecting you?’ Mrs Murphy said.
‘Nobody’s really expecting me,’ I said, and it was only then that her smile began to falter.
I am not one of those people who visit graves.
I never go to the small churchyard on the outskirts of London where my mother and father are buried. If you saw their grave, battered by time and the weather, untended and ignored, then you would think that this woman and man must surely be forgotten, unloved and unmourned.
Nothing could be less like the truth.
But I saw them both after they died, and the spark that had made them the man and the woman they were had gone to some other place or dissolved from the universe. I had no idea. But their souls had flown. So I can never convince myself that the double grave in the little churchyard contains my parents. They are not there. They are in my heart – that is where my parents rest.
And I don’t need to see their grave to remember them.
Yet something drew me back to Chinatown and the place where we had found the lorry. Of the twelve women we discovered on that freezing morning, only Hana Novak was ever identified and claimed. I felt that we had failed them all, and everyone who loved them, and there needed to be some act of remembrance or gesture of apology. So I took flowers to the dim sum restaurant where we discovered Hana and the women whose real names we never learned.
I placed them as far away as I could from the diners passing through the busy doorway. The makeshift shrine that had briefly appeared outside the restaurant was gone now and my flowers were the only sign that lives had been lost on this spot. It was Saturday evening, the weather mild after our long hard winter, the crowds thronging Chinatown, and everything spoke of life apart from the solitary bouquet of flowers, alone in the shadows of the red-and-gold awning. I stood there for a moment, remembering Hana and the others.
But I had no prayers for them and I did not linger.
I let the city swallow me up in another Saturday night, walking down the length of Gerrard Street, the smell of roast duck making my mouth water, and then taking a random side street, where an older, dimly lit Chinatown still exists, and voices from doorways call out to a man walking alone.
I heard the heels behind me.
Click-click, they went. Click-click.
‘Ni hau,’ she said.
She was mainland Chinese, wrapped up for some sub-zero winter in Beijing or Shenyang, still new enough to this life to look nervous as we stood facing each other in the Chinatown twilight.
‘Ni hau,’ I said.
‘Are you alone?’ she said.
It was a good question. I shook my head, smiled, suddenly knowing that Chinatown had nothing for me tonight. I ran back to the car and drove north, parking outside the one-bedroom flat above a shop on the wrong side of Highbury Corner.
There was a light on in Edie Wren’s apartment.
We had not spoken since the end of Golden Years. I did not know if the married man was still in her life. I did not know if she was angry with me for Lil having to leave the best place she ever lived. I did not know very much at all.
But I knew there was nowhere else I would rather be than standing on the street where Edie Wren lived.
It was Saturday night.
What else can I tell you?
I rang her bell.
MAX WOLFE RETURNS IN 2018 …
Tell Him He’s Dead
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Epub ISBN: 9781473537477
Version 1.0
Published by Century 2017
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Copyright © Tony Parsons 2017
Cover photography © Colin Thomas/500px/Arcangel
Tony Parsons has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Century
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ISBN 9781780895932 (Hardback)
ISBN 9781784755324 (Trade Paperback)