by Eva Dolan
Derek walked away, out through the doors and into the grim morning.
‘He seems determined,’ Sinclair said.
‘Derek’s a good guy, stubborn as hell.’ Ella led Sinclair into the stairwell. ‘His wife’s the same. She had a massive stroke about six months ago and somehow the developers got wind of it, bumped the offer by five per cent and promised them accommodation in an assisted-living facility out in Romford. They should have taken it really, I told them no one would think any less of them if they went. Given the circumstances.’
‘But they’re still here.’
‘She wouldn’t go. She could hardly speak but she made it abundantly clear she wanted to come home. She’s made a bit of a recovery but the state the building’s in . . . it’s not helping.’ Above them a door slammed against the wall as it was flung open. ‘Thing is, her whole life’s been here. She had two kids here, lost both of them. She’s convinced some part of her boys is still in the flat. How could you leave thinking that?’
Ella nodded to a young woman coming quickly down the stairs, saw her eyes flick, predictably, towards Sinclair as she said hello. Ella knew the kind of smile he’d be giving the girl. He liked them young and smart enough to recognise his influence.
‘She’ll be at the party later, if you’re hanging around,’ Ella said.
‘Oxford Union tonight.’ He winced. ‘Sorry. Don’t know how I got double-booked but—’
‘It’s fine,’ she said, hoping her disappointment didn’t show. ‘Way more important that you get to our future overlords than keep preaching to the choir here.’
Up to the fourth floor. Sinclair was dragging his feet as they went to the far end of the hallway, past doors kicked in, standing open on rooms that exuded the smell of mould and rot, dust hanging in the air, dead flies peppering the carpets. Some had been stripped bare, others vandalised by exiting tenants in fits of rage; a few had been left as if their owners were due to return at any moment. Those were the ones that unnerved Ella. So easy to imagine somebody coming out of the kitchen with a cup of tea, or water gushing suddenly in the bathroom, a tuneless whistle rising above it.
Ella unlocked the door of the Moores’ old flat with the key she’d found after they moved.
Everything in the flat was as they’d left it, except for the photographs missing from the walls and the surfaces stripped of trinkets. They hadn’t owned much. Were savers rather than consumers. Had a thirty-year-old three-piece suite, unfashionable shelves and coffee table, pot lamps with cardboard shades scorch-marked from the dusty bulbs inside.
Ella couldn’t work out why they’d left so much behind. Was it simply a matter of speed, or were there too many painful memories bound up in the items? Would it be easier to start again without being reminded of this place?
She hoped they’d bought nice new things for their old age. Allowed themselves to recapture the thrill of decorating a new home they must have felt the first time around.
‘It’s like the Mary Celeste,’ Sinclair said, going through into the kitchen.
‘You’re better than that cliché,’ Ella called after him. She sat down in one of the armchairs next to the electric fire, reached to turn it on, wanting to chase the chill out of the room, and stopped herself, remembering that the power was off.
Sinclair came back, nodded towards the sofa where her sleeping bag was unfurled. ‘Are you living here now?’
‘I’ve just been here for a couple of nights. There’s been a lot to do and,’ she sighed, ‘the developers stepped up the pressure on another tenant. I wanted to be here to help her deal with it.’
He turned the other armchair to face her. ‘You wanted to stop her caving to the pressure, you mean.’
Ella felt her face harden, seeing the amusement in his eyes, hating the insinuation. Had it been a mistake to trust him? He’d promised a sympathetic profile and some positive coverage of the residents’ fight, but he was a hack all the same.
Molly said never to trust the mainstream media. They were just the propaganda arm of the establishment, but that was another cliché and one Ella wouldn’t live by.
The key was picking friendly journalists, watching your words, saying nothing off the record you wouldn’t say on it. And, crucially, giving them nothing to pique their interest beyond the bounds of the story you were selling. Most didn’t have time to go into full investigative mode. Not now. Not like back in Molly’s day.
Even Martin Sinclair, with his big, sexy expense account and his non-fiction bestsellers, was working to tighter deadlines and narrower margins. He would save his splurges for stories much bigger than her and Castle Rise.
‘It’s been a hard winter,’ she said. ‘That takes the fight out of people. Do you think this was a pleasant place to spend Christmas?’
Sinclair nodded his understanding as he reached into his waxed-cotton messenger bag to take out his recording equipment. Primary and back-up, two small devices.
‘What about you? Did you go home for Christmas?’
‘Shall I wait until we’re running to answer that?’
He shrugged, leaning towards her, placing the recorders on the arm of her chair. ‘Up to you.’
‘You want to hear me say it?’ she asked.
A rueful look creased Sinclair’s brow. ‘Ella, I know what it’s like to disappoint a father. Believe me. The only way my old man would think this is honest work is if I filed my copy from the bottom of a coal mine.’
‘Dad doesn’t talk about his work and I don’t talk about mine,’ she said, the lie slipping out with ease, because it wasn’t entirely a lie. They didn’t talk, they argued. ‘We have enough in common – hiking, rugby league, craft beers – we can spend hours together without mentioning our jobs.’
‘He must be proud of what you’re achieving,’ Sinclair said. ‘Even if he doesn’t agree with your politics.’
‘I’m not doing this to get anyone’s approval. Least of all his.’
Another semi-truth and she heard the fierceness in her voice as she delivered it, knew it made her sound defensive. Sinclair could draw whatever conclusion he liked, probably the one every journalist had. That this crusade, as they generally described it, was a rebellion against her upbringing. As if she was solely defined by her father’s career in the police force.
‘All I’ve ever wanted to do is help people,’ she said. ‘That’s what this Kickstarter project is about. Helping people who are being forced out of their homes and economically penalised for simply living on land which now has a frankly obscene market value.’
She kept going, telling him the figures – that these flats were compulsorily purchased at prices decades behind the booming London market; £150,000 for the flat they were sitting in, and the one that would be built in its place would sell for four times as much.
‘These aren’t going to be new homes for London’s keyworkers. They’re safety deposit boxes for overseas buyers, bought with money nobody bothers to check the source of.’ Ella moved forward in her chair. ‘People like the Moores, and Derek and Jenny Kerr, are being economically cleansed from their homes in order to create shiny new money-laundering opportunities.’
‘Can you prove that?’ Sinclair asked. ‘It’s a strong accusation.’
‘I’ll send you the research,’ Ella said. ‘Thirty per cent of new homes in London are bought with money held in complex shell schemes where the actual buyer can’t be identified.’
Sinclair put his hand up. ‘But this development. Can you prove it’s happening here?’
‘I didn’t say it’s happening here, I said it’s a city-wide problem.’
She got up and beckoned him to follow her. Led him out through the sliding doors on to a balcony.
The wind was more insistent on the fourth floor than it had been on the ground, carrying the sounds of the building site in front of them, engine thrum and radios playing, voices shouting. Heavy lorries had been coming and going all morning, working on removing a pile of rubble two storeys high; al
l that remained of the building that had stood there before Christmas.
‘See that,’ Ella pointed to the top of the new apartment block to their right, its vaguely Scandinavian cladding, the gleaming steel and acres of glass. ‘The penthouse sold for one point five million over a year ago. Off-plan. The buyer never even saw it. Nobody lives there.’
‘That’s pretty standard,’ Sinclair said, leaning against the edge of the balcony, close enough to her that their arms were pressed together. ‘It doesn’t mean I should put you in print accusing the developers of facilitating fraud.’ He gave her one of his paternalistic looks. ‘I’m just trying to keep you out of trouble, Ella.’
‘Trouble’s good for the cause,’ she said, smiling slightly.
Sinclair didn’t smile back. He turned and braced his hand against the balcony, almost enveloping her, and she thought of the last time they’d been this close. A bar in Hoxton, a mutual friend’s birthday, kitschy cocktails and a klezmer band playing R&B covers on the roof terrace and then they were going downstairs, silently, him trailing her to the basement and the sudden hush of the ladies’ loo where they fucked urgently in a cubicle while other women came and went and pretended they heard nothing.
‘I saw that piece you wrote,’ he said. ‘About the death threats.’
‘It’s the cost of being a woman in public, right?’
‘But you’re okay?’ he asked tentatively, his thumb brushing across her wrist. ‘It’s not escalated?’
‘Escalated beyond the decapitation and rape threats?’ A deep sigh rose up in her chest. ‘None of them are brave enough to act.’
‘You can’t know that.’
‘I’m still here, aren’t I?’
She squinted into the wind, looking for the part of herself that refused to be scared, the part that had brought her this far and would see her through to the end. Some days it was there and some days it wasn’t and then she had to fake it like she faked so much else. Today she felt thin and brittle, so insubstantial that a strong gust might knock her down. But she couldn’t let Sinclair see that.
She straightened her spine.
‘Nobody’s going to silence me.’
Molly
Now – 7th March
You’re supposed to wake up innocent.
When you’ve done something bad you’re supposed to get a few seconds’ grace, where the morning feels new and clean, before reality rears up and slaps you around the face.
I’ve never been so lucky. No morning serenity for me. Probably because I never seem to dream, not in any coherent way. It’s always just been colours and sensations; I blame the acid I did. And the mushrooms and the weed and the Ecstasy I was too old for by then that I took anyway. All of that stuff and the prescription pills I’m on now, because no woman hits sixty complication-free.
This morning there’s a shadow hanging over me when I come around in the fast-starting fashion I’ve begun every weekday with for the last five years. Ever since the builders moved in. Eight a.m. on the dot. The drilling starts. The boring. Piles being driven into the sludgy Thames-side earth because if you built anything on here without ramming in a hundred feet of reinforced concrete first, it’d fall over.
They say.
Funny, this place wasn’t so carefully constructed and it’s still standing after six decades. The same as me. Crumbling through ill-use and neglect but, miraculously, both of us remain.
The piling shakes the whole site. I’m sure it’s the reason the fissure in the ceiling over my bed is getting wider, dusting my sheets with plaster. Before the builders rolled on to the site it was a hairline crack; now I could fit my fingers in there and wiggle them around in the void. The whole building is shifting and sliding, destabilised by the vibrations.
One day the front of the place is going to collapse. Leaving us all exposed in our flats like the world’s grimmest doll’s house. Most rooms abandoned and sad and the little figures inside so forlorn. We’ve been played with too much. We’re almost broken.
Six of us left. Almost three hundred gone.
And one more resident this morning than there was last night. Lying at the bottom of the lift shaft.
Poor Ella.
She probably hates me this morning. I don’t feel so great about myself, but the right thing is never the easy thing. It would have been easy to call the police and sit there, watching him cool and stiffen as we waited for them to arrive. They wouldn’t have believed us. The scene was too neat, no signs of a struggle. Even if we’d staged it better, if I’d punched Ella in the face and smeared her blood on his fist, they would have concocted a narrative to make it her fault.
Because Ella Riordan is a scalp too big for any copper to lose.
It’s not vanity to say I’d be a nice bonus for them as well.
When I sit up a muscle in my shoulder screams and I collapse again, waiting for the pain to ease. It feels like a tear. I’ve shredded something moving that huge, dead weight.
He was bigger than he looked. Solid in the way some apparently slim men are, all the muscle lean and hard rather than bulky. He must have been twelve stone, easily, maybe thirteen, and cumbersome as we manoeuvred him along the corridor towards the lift.
Ella took his legs; I didn’t want her to hold his head, thought that such close proximity to the wound might tip her over the edge. She was hardly breathing as we struggled along with him. All the colour drained from her face, her eyes wide and bulging, but she kept moving and I’d never been prouder of her than I was at that moment.
Now it all feels sick and unreal to me. How we approached his body like an awkward sofa to be twisted and turned through a slightly too narrow doorway, dealt with him as if he was nothing more than a logistical challenge. I know we needed to behave that way – self-preservation, I suppose, emotional insulation against the fundamental horror of what we were doing. You have to make your enemy less than human.
You have to call him enemy rather than victim.
And at the time I had no problem doing that. He attacked Ella; he got what he deserved. And I had – still have – no qualms about helping her hide his body.
Maybe the guilt will come later.
This morning I have the fear instead. Percolating through my bloodstream, carrying the gnawing dread into every atom of my being, making me feel sick beyond my stomach, driving the sensation into my face and fingertips and sending it crawling across my scalp. I am wrapped in fear now, wearing it like a second skin.
Because he’s going to be discovered, sooner or later. Even in the dead of winter in a draughty building where the condensation ices over on the inside of the windows, he’ll eventually begin to smell. But there’s no reason for anyone to think it was murder.
I need to keep telling myself that.
I need to construct a narrative that I believe or I’m not going to be able to function, and if I can’t function then who’s going to pick Ella up?
Just an accident. Another drunk, stumbling into a lift shaft in a badly lit corridor. Blame the neglect of the council or the developers, who didn’t come and attend to the lift doors that were stuck half open or change the dead bulbs in the caged strip lights.
Isn’t that the most perfectly credible explanation?
We’ll need a story for the time Ella was away from the party, but that can wait. Today’s going to be tough enough on her. I’ll let her work through the worst of the shock before I bring it up. Work through it myself, too, because I’m no good to her like this, shivering under my duvet and grinding my teeth, the tension on a time delay.
How we managed to return to the party after that I’ll never know. Adrenaline, I guess, and necessity. You can make your body do amazing things with that combination, they say. We smiled and laughed and made small talk with people and every now and again – too often, probably – we made eye contact with each other, wordlessly checking, desperate for reassurance that we were doing okay, and I remember how manic she looked and I must have looked the same. But the only
person who might have noticed was Carol and she’d already left. Most of Ella’s friends were drunk or a little high and I don’t think they realised how edgy she was under the hyper attitude she’d struck to cover it up.
It bodes well for when the police come. I’m trying to take some comfort from that, because her composure is by no means a given and so much is riding on how we both react to those first tentative enquiries. I’m an old hand, of course, and Ella’s been on the receiving end of their attention before. Nothing as serious as this, but she’s learned the drill.
The photograph hangs on the gallery wall in my living room. Only my best shots go up there, the ones that would be called iconic; miners’ wives breaching the gates at Orgreave, women linking arms around the perimeter of RAF Greenham Common, burning cars overturned during the Brixton Rising, bloodstained banners and felled police.
And Ella.
May 2016, student and faculty members out on the streets of Camden to protest against the introduction of zero-hours contracts for lecturers. After UCL and Exeter, it was one peaceful protest too far for the police, who decided to make an example of this group, stamp down hard in the hope of staving off another summer riot season. Those kids weren’t going to smash up shops and nick trainers, anyone could see that. They were soft, naïve, allowed themselves to be kettled, because at heart they still believed the police existed to protect people like them.
Afterwards the Met branded Ella a ringleader, but she wasn’t.
She would become one, later.
Their doing.
And mine.
I wasn’t going to go along. I’d done the others, got some decent shots, sold a couple for a pittance. There was no real drama at the earlier ones and no reason to think the St Luke’s sit-in would be any different. Two hours into the kettling I got a call from a lecturer I knew from way back, stuck at the centre of the sweating, increasingly agitated group, saying things were about to kick off.