by M. H. Baylis
She looked again. No. He hadn’t vanished. He was following her. There was no one else around, and he was following her.
She sped up, feeling a numbness in her arms. She’d had enough. First the burglary. Now this. Being made to feel afraid, by some creep on a bright, cold Sunday morning. Why the hell should she?
She stopped and turned around, planting herself in the middle of the pavement, chin up, hands balled into fists. Fuck you, she thought, preparing to face off the shuffling, grey-clad figure coming towards her.
But there was no one coming towards her. She looked round in alarm. There was a skinny lad walking on the opposite side of the road. Grey top with the hood down, huge, grey tracksuit bottoms. Was that him?
She stared at him. Quite a handsome, fine-featured boy of nineteen or twenty. Golden curls and milky skin, with just a few remaining traces of acne on the cheekbones. The sort of boy girls fancy when they’re twelve. Non-threatening. It couldn’t have been him. But who else could it have been?
The boy seemed to redden under her gaze. He lowered his eyes as he loped past her, as if she’d been the one spooking him. As, perhaps, she was.
Diana watched him until he’d crossed the bus station concourse and disappeared. She let out a long sigh, feeling the distant click of her heartbeat in her throat. She didn’t have a clue what had just happened there – if it had been sheer paranoia, or an abandoned mugging, or worse. She knew something, though. She’d had enough. Even before this, and the burglary, she’d had enough of feeling scared and self-conscious all the time in the streets. Trying to ignore the posturing and the tooth-sucking. Pretending to herself that her puny armoury of anti-depressants and blood-thinners was making any difference to the misery of the place. Rex might bang on about the beauty of it all and the energy and the promise. He was welcome to it.
She had a plan, a plan half-ready for quite a few months now. It was time to put it into action.
* * *
After Diana left, Rex went back inside his house and offered coffee to his visitors. They examined the tin, saw it was Turkish coffee, and declined – exactly the sort of thing Milda would have done. Aguta picked up the autopsy report, and started talking, excitedly, to Milda’s sister. Everything in Lithuanian sounded like an argument. When Milda had been round, talking on Skype to her Mum, he’d feel certain from the pitch of the voices and the sheer speed of the words that the pair were at the inception point of some 20-year-long blood feud. But they had just been swapping gossip. Something they would never do again.
‘She agrees about the heroin,’ Aguta reported. ‘She says it’s a joke.’
‘I just said it to the doctor – she never touched drugs. She was totally against them.’ Aguta and Niela exchanged a look. Rex noticed it. ‘What?’
Aguta spoke a few sharp words of her native language to her daughter, who sighed as only a child can, and went into the garden. When she next spoke, it was in a low voice.
‘Actually, Rex, sorry. You know, when we were younger, we tried some things. All of us. But I mean – just things you smoke.’
Niela let loose another burst of verbal machine-gun fire. Aguta explained. ‘Milda hated needles. At the school, when they gave us all the tuberculosis injection, she ran away.’
Niela added more, running the zip up and down her tracksuit top as she talked. Aguta translated. ‘Forty kilometres she ran away. To the granny’s village. It’s because when she was a little kid, she had to go a lot of times to hospital. Lots of tests and er –’ She mimed sticking a needle into Rex’s arm.
‘Jabs?’
‘Yes, jabs.’
‘Why did she have to go to hospital?’
Aguta shrugged, her electric blue biker jacket creaking. ‘Due to some problem with the head.’
He frowned. Hadn’t someone else mentioned her being ill? ‘What problem? Like headaches?’
There was another short exchange between the two women.
‘She doesn’t remember. She was too young. But she’s sure about the needles.’
Rex sat down on the corner of a chair. He couldn’t remember who had mentioned Milda feeling ill before. Across the little hall, in the kitchen, the coffee pot bubbled away, untended. What Diana had said was right. You could think you knew someone, and later find out you’d been very wrong. But someone who ran away from needles didn’t sound like someone who willingly injected drugs.
‘We need to tell the police. It doesn’t add up. And it doesn’t sound like any of the other attacks that have been happening either.’
Niela reeled off a great long speech, in which Rex recognised the word ‘Klaipeda’, and something that sounded like ‘carpe’. Carpe diem? They all had cause to think of that one.
Aguta glanced outside at her daughter, then interpreted in a voice so low Rex had to strain to make out the words. ‘She is worried, if she makes a fuss, they won’t let her take the body back home. That’s why she didn’t mention about moving house. It’s not going to bring her back, is it?’
‘What do you mean – moving house?’
‘Milda sent her an email. A few weeks ago.’ She checked a detail with Niela. ‘On the 13th of September. She said she was going to move in for a while with a little friend.’
‘A little friend?’
‘That’s the words she used. Move in for a while, with a little friend carpe.’
‘Wait a minute. Carpe? That’s the name of the little friend?’
Niela nodded. Aguta shrugged. ‘It’s not carpe, Mama.’ Dovila said defiantly from the doorway. ‘She’s saying the letters like Lithuanian letters. It’s Kay. Pee.’
K.P. Keith Powell. Two weeks before she was found dead, Milda had moved in with Keith Powell. Did that explain the strange array of herbal teas and the feminine touches in the bathroom? Had she been living there at the time when Rex visited to interview Powell? He felt his heart fluttering. ‘Did she keep the email?’ He didn’t wait for Aguta to translate, he just grabbed Niela by the hands and spoke directly to her. ‘We need to tell the police. It could be very important. Please.’
He looked into Niela’s grey blue eyes. For a moment or two, they were Milda’s. A colour like the Baltic Sea. She pulled her hands away.
‘We want –’ she spoke falteringly, in a surprisingly deep voice. ‘To bring her to home.’
‘So why did you come here today?’
Niela spoke again to Aguta, looking directly at him. Aguta translated. ‘Because Milda said she loved you. Niela wanted to see him. The last man her sister loved.’
‘But –’ She’d never told him she loved him. It hurt him to hear it. He swallowed. ‘Don’t you care that the person who hurt Milda might never be caught? You want him to live free when she’s dead?’
Niela looked unsure. Rex turned to Aguta. ‘I know who K.P. is. It has to be Keith Powell. The man who’s organised the march today. He knew Milda. He told me they were friends.’
‘And that means he killed her? Rex, you heard her. She just wants to bring Milda home.’
‘It means there’s a detail they haven’t looked into. And they need to. Please.’
Aguta relayed this to Niela, who was silent for a long time, chewing her lip. Finally, she said she would go with him to the police station. Tomorrow. Aguta would bring her to the newspaper office, then she would go with him.
‘Maybe you could come along too,’ Rex said, to Aguta. ‘For moral support.’
She didn’t answer, merely frowned slightly. Rex supposed it wasn’t so easy for her to get time off work. In any case, he guessed, when it came to taking statements, Bond and Orchard would be able to rustle up an interpreter.
He walked them to the bus station – they were taking Dovila to a birthday party in the café in Finsbury Park. All down the road, across the over-grown green in the middle, and along the low parade of afro-barbers and takeaways, he kept up a playful interrogation of ten-year-old Dovila, who had wanted to dress up as a soldier, but lacked the necessary items of costume. It was eas
ier to talk children’s parties than to think about what Niela had told him.
The streets were swelling with people. All around the bus station, and coming in twos and threes up the steps from the tube station were men. They were dressed as if they were on their way to a football match: in clean, pressed, casual clothes, amongst which, on baseball caps and shirts, the cross of St George seemed to be a prominent theme. Some carried cans of lager. But unlike a football crowd, they were quiet. They streamed, in orderly, serious fashion, down to the crossroads, and over Green Lanes to Duckett’s Common, which was ringed with orange-coated stewards and policemen. Inside the cordon, in the little park, were gathered more men like them. The local population – the Kurds at the cab-stand, the Bangladeshi lads who sold fruit from trestle-tables in front of the station, the Polish girls who ran the florists – had either disappeared, or else were watching the proceedings from behind closed doors. It was an eerie scene, full of movement, yet silent. Rex fancied public executions might have been a little like this.
Rex and his little party crossed onto the concourse of the bus-station just as a 253 was disgorging a further load of marchers. They had the collars of their shirts pulled up. A couple wore scarves around the lower part of their faces, as if deliberately hiding their identity. Rex suddenly saw that they were surrounded on all sides by strong, stony-faced, staring men. No one did or said anything: the men just filed past, the mood tense and hostile. One of them banged into Niela with his shoulder and carried on walking, not even turning around.
Shaken, they made their way to the bus, and Rex said goodbye. He wished Dovila a good time at the party. To Niela, he said one of the twenty-odd words of Lithuanian he could remember. Rytoj. Tomorrow. But she just sat on her seat, next to Dovila, staring ahead, seemingly lost in fresh grief over her sister. He hoped she wouldn’t be too full of sorrow to talk to the police tomorrow. They needed to hear what she’d said, directly from her.
He considered nipping across the street to the Mini-Mart and buying a cold Okocim. Just one, enough to take the edge off his hangover. He caught sight of himself in the window of a parked taxi. As ever, he was dressed in a crumpled suit. If he took the jacket off, rolled up his sleeves, clutched a can of lager, he could look like one of the marchers, and that would be less conspicuous, easier to get the inside track. But he couldn’t bear the idea of it.
He looked at his watch. There were twenty minutes before the march was due to leave the common, and make its way up Turnpike Lane, under the railway, past the old Pumping Station and the Saxon church tower to the Palace where Milda had been murdered. He bought his can and took it home to change.
Less than ten minutes later, he was back again, half a litre of Poland’s strongest lager sloshing around his empty stomach. He felt better and worse in equal measure: stronger, healthier, but less in control. Perhaps it was not a good way to be going into that paddock of testosterone. He thought about buying another can. What stopped him was the singing.
The silence of the crowd had given way to something halfway between a melody and a chant. The tune, incongruously, was that old Junior School favourite, ‘Sing Hosanna’. But the words came from a place that had nothing to do with hosannas, or Junior Schools.
‘No surrender, no surrender, no surrender to the Ta-li-ban.
No surrender, no surrender, no surrender TO. THE. WOGS.’
The singers, a knot of about a dozen men, were some distance away from the main gathering on the common, but there was a steady stream away from the main body of the marchers to join them. They were young and drunk. They didn’t seem to notice the stern-looking Bangladeshi elder who walked past them and up the High Street with a shopping trolley. Nor did he seem to notice them. Rex wished Terry were there to take a photograph: of the two groups, the bald and the bearded, sharing the pavement and so indifferent to one another.
Now that he thought of it, Terry probably was somewhere in the vicinity. Hadn’t they arranged to meet?
‘I’m stuck in a queue between the third and the fourth floor of the Morrison’s car park,’ Terry informed him, tersely, when Rex finally reached him on the mobile. ‘I had to do the shopping.’ He said the word with distaste, making Rex wonder if domestic life in the gated mews was beginning to lose its charm. ‘You go and stand round the back, I’ll chuck me cameras down and you can do the photos.’
Rex hung up and crossed the road to get a closer look at the choral society. He was held up, mid-way across by one of the cruising Romeos who used the High Street to show off their sound-systems. This seemed to be an exclusively Turkish pastime, indulged in mainly by young men with good jobs who dressed up as gangsters at the weekend. All the real gangsters were up in Hertfordshire, of course, sitting in their hot-tubs, counting their money. Down on the mean streets, meanwhile, off-duty insurance executives and estate agents played booming Turkish pop from their open-top cars, crawled up and down in the weekend traffic between the Mothercare and the Morrison’s, and, occasionally, got a girl to look in their direction.
Marooned at the traffic lights, this particular Romeo increased the volume on his stereo to drown out the singers. When this attracted no attention, he tried turning it repeatedly down and up again. And when that failed, he revved the engine angrily. It cut out, ignominiously, just as the lights changed, prompting the delivery van behind to beep its horn in derision. A classic Tottenham moment. Attention-seeking, mockery and aggro – those words could have been on the little civic crest over the library.
By the time Rex made it across to the singers, they had been joined by a number of BWAP stewards in bright orange tabards, who were trying to silence them.
‘If you want to sing that, go home. It’s not what we’re about.’ The speaker was none other than Keith Powell, kitted out with a flashy earphone and mouthpiece set. Beneath the orange vest he was wearing a dark suit, giving him the look of an architect visiting a construction site. And that was what Powell was. An architect of destruction. A builder of walls.
‘So what exactly are you about, Keith?’ Heads turned in Rex’s direction. Rex was, himself, a little shocked that he’d spoken.
‘Rex – can we have this out some other time?’ A frown creased Powell’s chubby, good-natured face.
‘Why? You keep saying you want an open debate. Tell me: what’s the difference between this lot here, and that lot over the road? Oh, I get it. This lot hate Muslims. And that lot hate Eastern Europeans..’
He was in the crush now, jabbing his finger at Powell. Smells of beer and aftershave and sweat were all around. Rex felt a familiar buzzing at the top of his skull.
‘It’s a peaceful march and we’re not here to antagonise…’
‘You fucking hypocrite!’
As he hurled himself at Powell, Rex felt as if he was in a dream, launching himself off a cliff. For a moment it felt strangely liberating, until his arms were jerked back, an expertly-placed knee jabbed his own legs to the ground and he found himself kissing the pavement.
‘You want to be arrested?’
D.C. Orchard was on top of him, speaking, almost lovingly, into his ear. Rex bucked and kicked, but he was pinned by an expert, someone who had studied the practice of causing maximum discomfort with minimum effort. Rex swore into the paving stones.
‘Let him up!’
Rex felt the pressure ease for a moment, then he was hauled to his feet. Mike Bond was there, now, grey-faced and wet-lipped.
‘Move on, Rex.’
‘Ask him,’ Rex shouted. ‘Ask that bastard about Milda. Ask him why she was living in his house. Go on!’
Bond looked at Powell.
‘I don’t know what he’s on about. He smells of booze.’
‘KP!’ Rex spat. ‘My little friend KP!’
‘Rex, you need to go home now, or I’m going to arrest you.’ Bond was out of breath, but he spoke calmly and firmly, as if to an excitable dog. There were people all around, uniformed and otherwise, videoing everything.
‘You’re in
it, too, aren’t you?’ Rex said quietly, looking Bond in the eye. ‘All that stuff you told me in the police station – immigration upsetting the delicate ecosystem. Very clever. Whatever’s going on here, you’re part of it. Aren’t you?’
Bond turned and walked away without answering. One of Powell’s minions put a hand on Rex. He responded by giving the man a huge shove. The steward toppled back into one of the masked ‘No Surrender’ crew, and within seconds the two factions were trading punches. Those who weren’t fighting struck up a chorus of ‘The Long and the Short and the Tall’. Powell gazed at the scene in horror.
‘Stop all this fucking about!’ he shouted. ‘This is about the future!’
‘None of you’ve got any future,’ Rex said, trying to swipe away a video camera that was being pointed right in his face. There were several blasts on a whistle, and those of the stewards not actively involved in the punch-up began to gesture up the street. People began moving. Incredibly, the march was still going ahead.
‘Quite a party atmosphere,’ said Terry, who appeared at his elbow with cameras slung across his football shirt like Christmas tree baubles. The crowd was moving west. The fighters dusted themselves off, and the singing was replaced by whistles and klaxons.
‘Why does the devil have to have all the best tunes?’ Rex muttered. ‘That’s why the Nazis did so well.’
He and Terry joined the march, filing slowly past a mysterious, barely-used Somali internet café and a shop specialising in parts for hookah pipes. Suddenly D.C. Orchard emerged from the doorway of the Gujarati Sweet Centre, swooping down on them like a vengeful prefect.
‘You were informed that you would be arrested if you didn’t leave the area,’ he hissed, flecking Rex’s ear with spittle.
Before Rex could answer, an explosion ripped through the air. It was less like a bang, more a sudden blow. People began to run back the way they’d come, terror in their eyes. Wisps of cordite rose amongst the panicking stewards and the police. Rex’s ears were humming from the initial blast, but he felt certain he heard more bangs, a succession of them, one after another after another, like firecrackers.