by M C Jacques
As he turned left onto Mill Street, having circumvented the staggering clamour of a few noisy drunkards about him, he began his reconnaissance of the social world of Sarah Millar, a woman he had deliberately not yet faced ‘square on’, as he himself would have phrased it. It was in and around these Victorian, pale-bricked buildings that a gallery, at once motley and noble, of vivid, multi-ethnic and vario-cultural parties, briefly collided or interfaced and then parted either harmoniously or, as was increasingly the case, with mutual abandonment.
These were the social avenues and alleyways of Millar’s dark world; the one she had largely kept hidden from her colleagues at the museum. McKay scanned the facades: an Indian/Bangladeshi mini-market; an Iranian delicatessen with Thai, Vietnamese and Malaysian restaurants nearby; Saladin’s Cave – Turkish Cuisine; the (ubiquitous) Thief of Baghdad – Arabic and Mediterranean Cuisine; then a Lebanese restaurant; Omar’s Take-Away; and any number of kebab and pizza take-aways and outlets. The name of one café bound and tied his immediate attention, jerking the conversation he’d had with Jill Prestons in her office back to prominence in his thoughts. He noted the name and the location of this café carefully, but of still greater interest than that place, or indeed of even the combined sum of all the facades he’d viewed, was a frontage more humble, more remote, and altogether less stark than any of them.
Just before the shady wooded green of the Hostel of St Jude, housed within what had been, until the late 1980s, a sizeable Methodist church, a discreet and narrow alleyway darted off the main concourse. The passage’s narrowness, contrasted with the relative height of the buildings aside it, almost led one into believing that it was actually an indoor corridor; so sudden was the absence of light. But there was one sign which punctuated the twin linearity of the opposing walls.
Before him, to the right side of the passage, was a square sign with an emboldened, dulled silver, crescent-shaped symbol, back-grounded by a familiar pallid hue of green, which couched the words ‘Pan Asiatic’ in aged, greying Perspex. In smaller script, a Koranic quotation of the Prophet Himself was perorated with an exultation of Allah the Almighty One.
McKay surveyed the passageway and strolled down to its end where he emerged in a car park which was, according to the visible signage, shared by the restaurant, the hostel and a number of local residential properties. There were around eighteen parking places in all. In one corner, shrouded on one side by a wall and on the other by an assortment of over-filled bins, was a beaten-up medium-sized saloon (which Mark McKay could not recognise), with gaping cavities between the panels and ill-fitting doors. “Undoubtedly ill-begotten,” sniggered McKay to himself, as he turned back to check the Pan Asiatic’s opening times and menu.
The place opened its doors at six p.m. No closing times were announced but the words ‘until late’ had been biroed in the adjacent column by a non-native English hand. The originally white menu sheet had, like the opening times, once been printed by what would seem to have been some basic or ‘mini’ inkjet printer and placed inside a Rexel plastic document sleeve. A combination of age, condensation and possibly dust and grime had, quite inadvertently to McKay’s mind, lent the once-white office product a dated, burned pale yellow hue which may well have looked more becoming than the bland original.
Although he strained to view the Pan Asiatic’s inner décor and overall appointment, a combination of pitch black reflection and an accumulated layer of dampened grease on the inside of the small, square window aside the green panelled door, meant that no clues were rendered. Turning about, McKay began his stroll back towards the greener aspect of Parker’s Piece, this time with the intention of paying his first call on Cambridgeshire CID.
17
Late afternoon on Mill Road
‘We know that Cambridge, town and gown, has been infiltrated by radicals,’ Burrows had snapped back at McKay. ‘But I can’t go giving you chapter and verse of classified CID info on the say so of an RAF guy; not even a distinguished one such as Wing Commander Mountfitchet. Sorry, but that’s it for now. Oh, and I am aware that you’ve done stuff for the MOD and even managed to break an Al-Qaeda code which was inserting Old Arabic letters into subtitles of news items broadcast by Arabic networks. So, anything interesting you can pick up in Arabic, do let us know. By the way, you meet Mountfitchet in that place on Jesus Lane, don’t you? The old University Club. Interesting place that, you know. Go steady there!’
His earlier conversation with Burrows echoed and reverberated around his mind like a metaphysical pinball. In short, Burrows had been equally as helpful and as demanding as he could have been when McKay had called him from the safe isolation of his solitary walk between the White Hart and Whittlesford Parkway station that morning. He’d only spoken to him once before and he sensed that DI Burrows was a man of his word and, indeed, that he’d furnished McKay with as much information as judgement and protocol would allow. But he had sensed that Burrows was particularly keen not to disclose or, indeed, to have disclosed to him, anything of moment over the ‘phone. And that interested McKay.
Reckoning that he may have hovered about the place for too long already, and having another two hours or so to hang on before the Pan Asiatic’s opening time, McKay decided to take a trip to Parson’s Manor and at least have a cursory look around it from something of a distance. Also, he was by this time ready for his next coffee; much needed, he reasoned with himself, in order to sharpen him up for what, after all, could prove to be a challenging evening, to say the very least.
Since graduating, a number of unexpected experiences, some fortuitous, some most definitely not so, had taught him that, as a repository of simmering secrets and priceless intelligence the world over, coffee shops and tea rooms still had few peers. The one he had in mind was clearly Arabic, he’d decided, as he’d strolled along Mill Street, and lay equidistant from the Pan Asiatic and Parson’s Manor.
Although McKay tended to lodge an inbred suspicion of the multi-national coffee chains he, as much as any individual of similar thoughts, acknowledged that they had unquestionably ‘raised the bar’ both in terms of the standard of coffee available in and on virtually every High Street in the United Kingdom and, also, in terms of the standard of appointment within.
The Café-bar-Riyadh was to prove no exception to that rather all too general dictum. Its seats were single, separate and sweeping; made from a taut, shiny and hard-wearing leather – the type of leather which often denotes class and luxury that is, according to certain southern European and Mediterranean social creeds, at least.
McKay opted for a seat near the window which faced the bar. It was merely seconds after he had slung his Camel ‘Original’ beige linen jacket across the seat opposite, that a cheerful, dark, swarthy, short to medium-height and ever so slightly bandy-legged male, slender and around the mid-twenties in years, zigged and zagged his way across the chessboard-pattern tiled floor to McKay’s table – the waiter’s arms pumping up and down on either side as his centre of gravity vacillated with each short step. His attire was what would usually be called smart-casual: a white cotton shirt and light brown trousers, not pleated, not especially English, but McKay couldn’t quite decide why this was so. The waiter’s shoes McKay did recognise as being English; they were Loakes, but the style was that known as the ‘Milan’ by that company.
“Hello, sir; what can I get for you today?” He had that ‘all-can-do’ look of a supremely confident Italianate waiter in a top Chelsea ristorante, but even based upon the eleven syllables he had promptly audited so far, McKay deemed that he was North African rather than Roman.
“I’d like one of your Riyadh house-blended filters, large please, with an extra shot, and a shot of vanilla, too, please. Oh, and a Damascus cake, as well.”
“Very well, sir. Give me a minute or two and I’ll be with you.” The waiter beat his brisk, rocking, enthusiastic way back to a dark, sultry looking, diminutive girl standing at the bar and s
ervice area. This area was unashamedly modern and consisted of a dark wood bar surround, brightly polished mirror backings, a myriad of spirits and optics and, surprisingly, placed on a shelf at the rear – just to the left of the cash register – a solitary, rather traditional looking English pint glass, handled, with the pale-green of a dated Pakistani flag peeping out, over its rim. To the right of the cash register at the right end of the bar was an exit to the kitchen, evidenced by an assortment of health and safety signs and notices in bright green, others in red.
Certain people understand the wont of certain cultures and certain types of places better than others. Having spent many a long hour, all too often fruitlessly, in dingy cafés – often situated in the far-flung corners of outlying stations in the old East Germany, or on some down-beaten, ‘left behind’ branch-lined station in the old Czechoslovakia betwixt Vienna and Pilsner, McKay knew the pattern. He knew what to look for and that it would be probably only a matter of time before it happened.
The first indication that ‘it’ was happening was a flutter. A minuscule flutter at that, in the lower left corner of McKay’s deep-hazelnut left eye. Having positioned himself carefully beforehand, McKay turned to his right and fixed his focus on the glass plane of the window. At once, his eyes set on a face peering at him, and it must be at him, for the tables on either side were unoccupied. The face had freshly arrived at the small glass window in the kitchen door: older, rounder, more furrowed than the waiter, the face’s profile remained unmistakeably Arabic; not as angular as Libyan’s usually are. McKay supposed this may well be a chef or possibly a kitchen manager of sorts, although the character was maintaining a minimal presence; at no point did he venture out into the café itself. The second indication occurred some five or six minutes later and, if the truth be told, he should never even have noticed at all. It was due entirely, or so it seemed, to the bar-girl’s inexperience in such matters. By luck rather than judgement, McKay span around to view the rear of the restaurant, looking for the sign to the Gents to the far left of the counter. As he did so, he interrupted a telephone conversation, apparently long underway, between the girl and some other. She was using a corded handset, attached to a fax and credit card processing machine aside a second cash register. Her reaction to being spotted by McKay was as unmistakeable as it was concerning to McKay. On their unwelcome meeting of eyes, her face hardened, quickened, and her rate of speech increased considerably, yet there was a commensurate drop in the volume of her soft, perhaps Moroccan or Algerian inflected Arabic. Even so, McKay could not mistake some of what he had heard. “Sure it’s him. Certain it is. He sees me; I must finish soon.”
Had he had any doubts about the significance of the man peering through the kitchen door, they could now be banished. Mark McKay now knew beyond any reasonable doubt that he’d been expected here at the Café-bar-Riyadh and that, as sure as night follows the day, he’d also be expected at the Pan Asiatic soon thereafter. That is, of course, if he hadn’t been noticed and noted around there already, earlier in the afternoon.
18
Pause for thought…
A further breezy but affable visit from the rocking waiter enabled McKay to receive his tab and to pay generously for services and products rendered. “See you again, sir!” the grateful waiter announced rather than enquired, showing not the merest hint of any predisposition regarding his munificent benefactor.
Outside, the traffic had increased and invisible waves of warmed exhaust gas stroked McKay’s head and hair; summers in the cities all dip into the same traits bin: humming fumes from thwarted high-performance Japanese and German cars, sweat, hurry and, if we’re fortunate enough, heat and business. McKay surveyed the rumbling car park which was, albeit fleetingly, Mill Road.
Now, whether or not it was wise for McKay to venture into the Pan Asiatic’s and Sarah Millar’s provinces at all, was a question he now had to ruminate over. Who would have told them? The finger must point towards Millar, surely, in the first instance. (And to whom had the girl in the café he’d just left been speaking so furtively?) It could be, of course, that another character at the museum was in cahoots with Millar; for he or she – and McKay felt, for reasons even he could not quite understand, that it would likely be a she – must have broadcast some manner of forewarning which had then been disseminated to the characters in the cafés and other environs nearby, to people reasonably close, socially or otherwise, to Millar. And if this had been the case, which seemed to be more than likely, then he knew that he was firmly on the right track; he’d at least smoked out Millar’s stomping ground. That part had been farcically easy.
From one angle, McKay reasoned that his current situation might have seemed helpless, utterly irredeemable; the prime reason for his visit to the restaurant, a little bit like his call to the Café-Bar-Riyadh, was to watch and listen; to eavesdrop under the guise of having some decent nosh. Besides, as far as anyone within Millar’s circle could possibly have known, McKay was trying to track down the murderer of Sergeant Smith and that alone. By adhering to that tack, he may still benefit from the best cover of all: a known reason for being there. Of course, he hoped to be able to take something to DI Burrows, by way of introduction, regarding the sleeping or operational fundamentalist cell the Inspector had mentioned to Mountfitchet, which would earn him some trust and favours, perhaps.
It boiled down to this: the girl in the café had spoken inflected Arabic within earshot of him, albeit she had attempted to suppress and subdue her voice. Had either she, or her shady, behind-the-scenes boss, known that he was an Arabic speaker, then they would have used a mobile outside, or even delayed calling until a few minutes later, by which time he would have left the place. Simple, so he hoped. They think that I’m here to catch a murderer, and so I am.
But this bout of ruminations also caused him to ponder another question. Why were these people so protective towards Millar even if, indeed, they had been tipped off by her or a crony? What was their interest in the welfare of Ms Sarah Millar, Sales Manager and Visits Co-ordinator at the Royal War Museum, Tuxford. Were they simply being supportive towards her? Were they trying to hide something on her behalf, or on their own behalf?
After a stroll of some six minutes, and having crossed the road at places safe and unsafe, predictable and unpredictable, he allowed his eyes to settle on the house across the road known as Parson’s Manor. It reminded McKay of a place he had once seen... and been to, but where?
Built from the local pale bricks and looking classically Georgian, the reason for the house’s nomenclature was at once obvious. The substantial, but intricately ornate, black iron gates were opened via a square-buttoned, brushed steel intercom system, affixed to one of the sturdy black posts. The opposing post carried a slate sign, earmarking the old cleric’s manor to the eyes of the passerby, be that the elderly, bent-over Chinaman whose eyes flashed at it, or the young, bobbing Japanese princess whose eyes didn’t have time to.
Beyond the gates, a short gravel drive ringed a pristinely presented lawn in a coaching circle, now being utilised as a car park of sorts. The cars themselves, McKay observed, were of a calibre homogenous to the curious ex-wreck, or ex-wrecks he smirked to himself, which he had noticed in the corner of the car park aside the Pan Asiatic restaurant.
Appended to the right-hand side wall of the large, otherwise symmetrical, three-storey property was a rusty-brown fire escape, zigzagging its way to a concreted path which seemed to skirt, as much as could be seen, all around the sides and rear of the place. McKay counted seven near-identical, twelve-paned windows to the front aspect of the house, although the one above the large, pale blue front door, which looked as though it bore period originality, could well have been filled in and acting as a simulated window only – one of numerous victims the ‘daylight robberies’ of the Georgian window-tax scandal.
Within the frames, the window-ware appeared, curiously, to have been uniform throughout: gun-metal grey curtai
n lining, a tad tarnished, appeared to pervade each and every window; the view between these being effectively blotted by coarse, plain, net curtains, equally as uniform. McKay was aware that some landlords or landladies preferred things that way; regular fittings throughout meant ease of maintenance and replacement and were also cost-effective into the bargain.
Of the six labels on the front panel of the intercom system, to the left of the bold, square buttons, McKay could see that only four showed names and illumination. He decided not to walk up, peer at the names and note down the names, for obvious reasons. Besides, he’d hovered around quite long enough and the time was approaching six o’clock or eighteen-hundred hours, as his microwave clock would have insisted.
19
Inside the Pan Asiatic restaurant
As he walked towards his quarry, McKay finally worked out the place which Parson’s Manor had reminded him of. It was that old boarding house – the first and only one he’d ever known from inside, as a pupil. He had only been in his early teens and he’d already been sent down. It had been a misunderstanding and an unquestionable miscarriage of justice, at least so he had assured his mutually despairing and disconsolate parents at the time.
The Old School House had been constructed of a red brick, though, but in format and style – although the fire escape may just have been on the left-hand side as you viewed it from the Hartshorne Road – the two houses were near on identical. The Boarding House had been immediately next to the road, divided only by a narrow and steep pavement. When he’d visited that school years later, in the ‘90s probably, and walked around the bustling village, visited the Saxon crypt in the church, paid his respects to the effigies of old bishops, he’d noticed Willington Power Station for the first time, even though it had been there when he took brief sanctuary at the school in early ‘70s. ‘Lest we think we see it all’ had, since that day, become a precautionary, oft-repeated little ditty of McKay’s self-regulatory manual.