Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  He spoke irritably, as if he was in pain. And there was something depressingly dismissive about what he said. As if Mina couldn’t have had a mind of her own, a conscience, a will. She could only have been exploited by a man.

  Sajadi sat back as Aran came into the room. The iPhone ran, with a snatch of German opera. He glanced over. A name flashed up on the screen. MILES. Rex passed the phone over. Miles. He had a sudden vision of a posh boy in tweeds and cords, an auctioneer. Or, more probably, judging by Rostam Sajadi’s suit, a gifted accountant.

  ‘Eric!’ the Kurd said, jovially, like a man walking into a bar. Eric Miles, Rex thought. The Eric Miles?

  Sajadi stalked into some deeper corner of the flat to have his phone call. When Aran returned, Rex asked if he could see Mina’s bedroom. Partly, he wanted more clues as to what the grown-up, politically active and romantically entwined Mina might have been like. He also hoped he might overhear Rostam’s conversation.

  Both objectives failed. Mina’s bedroom was a Spartan cube: desk, textbooks, bed, smart Venetian blind kept closed, a spectral whiff of roses. A solitary sheet tacked to the wall listed times for the Royal Marines Weekend Fitness Classes at Finsbury Park. Rostam, meanwhile, left the flat, still on the phone, slamming the plastic front door behind him with a bang.

  Something caught Rex’s eye as he was leaving Mina’s room. A photoframe on the dressing table. A younger Mina, bad haircut and briefly tubby at twelve or thirteen, was sporting Mickey Mouse ears at the entrance to Disneyland Paris. She had something in her hands, small and red, oval like a tiny rugby ball. And with her, smiling sternly for the camera, an arm around her shoulder, was her Uncle Rostam.

  Aran opened the front door to let him out. His face was blank, he seemed worn out by trying to be courteous. Rex understood that. True grief did these things: when you lost a person you loved, you lost the energy that came from loving. But he still had questions to ask.

  ‘Do you really think someone put her up to it?’

  Aran shook, as if the question required him to think of his sister and he’d somehow, briefly, been managing not to. ‘Mina did what she wanted. Not what other people wanted. So I don’t know. I don’t…’

  His uncle jogged back up the stairs at that point, a laptop under his arm. He barked some words at his nephew, and Aran threw him a set of keys. Sajadi caught them smartly in the damaged hand and headed back out again. The exchange was like a gear-shift for Aran.

  ‘We want to be left alone to bury my sister’s body, and to deal with it,’ he said, firmly.

  ‘Can I have a phone number?’ Rex asked, staying put. ‘In case I need to check anything.’

  ‘The number’s on the front of the shop. You can get out through the back gate. Goodbye, Mr Tracey.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Rex was still mulling over the encounter at Mina’s house as the 43 bus deposited him outside the Metropolitan University building on Holloway Road. He hadn’t been down here in years, recalled it as a place of fried chicken joints, pubs full of slowly dying Irishmen in mismatched suits. And it still was, strangely, aside from the spanking new university straddling the road, and half a dozen tiny Sainsbury’s outlets, a region unchanged.

  On the slow ride over, he’d written Aran’s parting words down. Ellie would have her quotes, but what struck him – saddened him – were the less the words, more the ways in which the young man and his uncle had spoken. Aran had talked about Mina doing what she wanted, about himself being stuck at the shop, as if his obvious sorrow was really for himself. Uncle Rostam, on the other hand, had seemed irritable, almost dismissive, as if his niece’s suicide was just another thing, like God and politics, that got in the way.

  His niece who’d kept a single picture in her bedroom: of herself and her uncle at Disneyland. So they’d been close. Once. What had happened to change that?

  He couldn’t be sure it had changed, of course. Loss twisted things. One September day, he’d visited the parents of a five-year-old, mown down in traffic three days into her school career, who were almost hysterically upbeat. And his own wife’s father had cracked a series of jokes, terrible jokes, as Sybille lay in a coma. The grieving put on shows, for sure – shows for themselves.

  London Met, the site of the old North London Poly, was all hefty slabs and modernist horrorscapes, knifed up the middle by the A1. It was like Shopping City, so unapologetically grim that you had to admire its nerve. Rex walked down the pavement, past a building like a squashed battleship, towards the main entrance. A lecture must have just finished close by, and he found himself struggling against a flow of headscarved girls with folders, African boys in smart, church-going outfits, everyone wearing a pass on a lanyard. It was like the headquarters of a multinational, not somewhere girls were radicalised to death.

  Then again, he thought, as he entered the main building and instantly came upon a steel turnstile and a guard behind a desk, Rostam Sajadi had a point. Time was, a local hack could have wandered over a city university campus at will. Terror, and the terror of terror, had made everything difficult.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the bored man in uniform asked him. Rex was studying the Students’ Union board in the lobby. Mina’s picture was still there.

  ‘I’m here to see the Union President,’ Rex said brusquely, flashing his card. He darted a look back at the board. ‘Jan Navitsky.’

  The Security Guard, a burly lad sporting one buzz-cut, one exquisitely sculpted line of beard and one black eye, frowned. ‘You say it “Yan” yeah?’ He picked up the desk-phone. ‘Is he expecting you?’

  ‘Should be,’ Rex said carefully. He glanced back at the board. Navitsky’s face caught his eye again. Was that because he was the only, strictly speaking, white person on the board? Or because he looked familiar? He took a deep breath.

  ‘There’s no one picking up,’ said the guard, whose name-badge said Haluk. A Turkish name. ‘What time was your meeting?’

  ‘Five minutes ago,’ Rex said. ‘The traffic was mental.’

  Haluk made a sympathetic noise. He picked up a walkie-talkie and stood up, extra-chunky in his ribbed sweater. ‘I’ll walk over to the Union building with you.’

  Rex nodded gratefully. His first boss, Victor Eastwood, on the Lincoln Daily Despatch, had had an aphorism for moments such as this. God loves a tryer.

  They crossed a precinct, with shops and seats and a cute little truck selling coffee. It looked like the sort of area that Holloway Road would have liked to have turned into, but hadn’t – a VIP Holloway reserved for higher learning. They crossed the plain of students and into another building, down a bright corridor lined with computer terminals. It all seemed so alien, so modern, yet the notices fluttering on the walls might have been the ones a younger Rex had walked past, in Manchester, a quarter century before. Bassist Needed. Women’s Boxing – All Welcome. Auditions, Tuesday: Arthur Miller’s ‘All My Sons’.

  ‘You are now entering the Union State,’ said Haluk with a grin. They were passing through double doors, emblazoned with flags and slogans. Hate Free Zone, said one. Another read: Les.Gay.Bi.Trans.3rdGender.NoGender.

  The Students’ Union office was reassuringly old-fashioned: filing cabinets, cast-off furniture, a grotty kettle on a tray and the distant smell of Instant Noodles. There were more posters on the walls, covering every topic from a new confidential harassment hotline to striking miners in Chile.

  ‘Jan’s usually in here if he’s not in the…’

  Haluk stopped talking. At a desk in the far corner, a black girl with braided hair was being helped into her coat by a grey-haired, outdoorsy-looking woman in a fleece.

  ‘Right, Kye?’ Haluk said. The girl cast him a disgusted look as she went past, her face glistening with tears.

  ‘I’m getting her a taxi,’ the woman said. ‘She shouldn’t have come in.’ Rex thought for a moment that he recognised her, but she was gone with the crying girl too quickly for a second look. Some days, he thought he recognised everyone.

 
And then they were alone in the scruffy office. The Security Guard looked awkward.

  ‘Er – Kyretia’s the one who sorts out the appointments and that – she’s like the receptionist? But she’s the one that just…’

  ‘Just went home. She looked very upset. Could that be anything to do with the girl who died?’

  ‘Mina?’ he said. ‘Could be.’

  ‘So you knew her?’

  ‘She was on my course,’ Haluk said. He twanged one of the epaulettes on his grey jumper. ‘This is just what pays for it –’ He looked around the empty office, suddenly awkward. ‘Wait a minute, yeah?’

  He went across the corridor, leaving Rex alone. He had just long enough to investigate the girl’s desk and discover that Kyretia’s surname was Pocock, like the man who’d been at his house, looking for a bung. There were coincidences like that all the time in his life. It was his job to ignore them.

  Rex heard a door and voices further down. Haluk came back. His manner had changed. He barrelled right up close to Rex, challenging.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Rex acted puzzled. ‘Just looking out of the window.’ He moved away from the desk. Haluk was uncomfortably close. Rex could smell his aftershave. Tommy Hilfiger. A Wood Green favourite.

  ‘When did you say you made your appointment with Jan?’

  ‘I didn’t. It was this morning,’ Rex bluffed.

  A smile crossed Haluk’s face, thin as his beard. ‘Yeah? That’s funny, ’cause on Friday afternoon, he cancelled all his appointments and flew home. Family emergency.’

  Everyone’s luck runs out some time, Rex thought, as he was gently frogmarched back out.

  ‘I’m not trying to make trouble. I just wanted to talk to some people who knew Mina. People don’t understand why she did it.’

  Haluk stopped and took his hand off Rex’s arm for a moment. He seemed about to say something, then rubbed the corner of his bruised eye. Rex wondered if he was going to cry.

  ‘You’ll have to go through the Press Office,’ he said, his jaw setting. He walked on, through the coffee-drinking, texting, note-swapping gaggle of students, his hand no longer on Rex’s arm. He almost seemed to have forgotten about him.

  As he reached the pavement outside, the fleecy woman was waving Kyretia Pocock off in a cab. For some reason Rex thought of vicars. He caught her eye.

  ‘Was she friends with Mina?’ he asked.

  ‘A lot of people have been affected by Mina’s death,’ said the woman carefully. She looked to be in her early sixties, with a northern accent, big teeth and thin, bob-cut, salt and pepper hair. ‘And no, I don’t mind you quoting that in your newspaper.’

  Rex frowned. He hadn’t mentioned his job.

  ‘You were in one of my groups, Rex. At Highgate Hill.’

  It came back to him. Maureen. She went on Youth Hostelling trips and took disabled kids sailing. She’d presided over a therapy group he’d been in, years back, after Sybille’s accident. He ought to feel awkward, bumping into Maureen like this, in his new, reformed life, but he didn’t. In an odd way he almost felt glad.

  ‘Is this what you do now? You run therapy groups here?’

  ‘Groups, individual counselling and psychotherapy. With supreme munificence, the university also permits me to treat private patients here as well.’

  Patients. Maureen had insisted on the term. If you were in therapy, you were a patient, she said, because you needed to wait. Rex had hated that word as much as he had always hated waiting.

  ‘Was Mina a client?’

  ‘You know I wouldn’t be able to tell you if she had been a patient.’

  ‘If she had been…’ Rex echoed. ‘Did you know her, though?’

  Maureen smiled. ‘As Diversity Officer for the Students’ Union, she had dealings with the Counselling Service. Referring students in need, that sort of thing. She was one of the Union officers who took the job seriously.’

  ‘Meaning some don’t?’

  ‘For some, perhaps, it’s more of a means to an end.’

  ‘What end?’ He shifted his weight to the other foot. Standing was hard.

  ‘A job in politics in their home country. There’s usually a home country, in the case of Union delegates. One that isn’t this one.’

  Rex remembered the panel of photographs – mainly African and Asian faces. Except for one, so incongruous it almost shone.

  ‘Mina was different,’ Maureen continued. ‘She seemed to be doing it because she cared. I’m not saying some of the others don’t, and I’m not saying it wouldn’t have looked good on Mina’s CV, as well. It’s not easy for graduates, these days. Not unless your father’s the Lord Mayor of Minsk.’

  ‘Is that Jan Navitsky’s background?’

  She nodded. ‘Most of the committee have an uncle who’s a big cheese in Luganda or Dhaka or somewhere. Everyone except poor Mina.’

  He thought about Mina’s uncle. What variety of cheese was he? ‘So she was out on a limb, a bit?’

  ‘I don’t think that affected her working relationships with most of them, no.’

  ‘Most?’

  ‘Gosh, you’ve got a way of pouncing on every word, haven’t you?’

  ‘Probably all that time I spent with therapists.’

  Maureen made a wry face. ‘It was common knowledge she didn’t see eye to eye with Jan. I think there was a joke in the last issue of the student paper. When will those two cut the bickering and “get a room”, that kind of thing.’ Maureen made quote marks with her fingers as she spoke.

  A thought struck him. ‘When did that come out? The paper, I mean.’

  ‘Just over a week ago.’

  ‘Just before she vanished?’

  Maureen looked startled. ‘Did she vanish? I hadn’t seen her for a while, but that doesn’t mean anything with youngsters.’

  ‘Do you think there was anything in the joke?’

  She laughed. ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Weren’t you fond of quoting that one? I think they hated each other’s guts. Navitsky’s a spoilt young… prat. Mina was a smashing young woman. Really. A fighter. You know – when they had that… doofus from the Foreign Office come here on a visit, she got right in there and shook a tin under his nose for the Kurdish refugees. Nearly got herself arrested.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘She had to bat off a few admiring young men after that.’

  ‘Any young man in particular?’

  Maureen shook her head straight away. ‘She didn’t have time for boyfriends.’

  ‘Bit of a zealot, then?’

  Maureen looked faintly rattled. ‘A committed and eloquent activist.’

  ‘Who suddenly abandoned eloquence for suicide. Doesn’t that surprise you?’

  ‘Must I be surprised? I can’t say I was au fait with Mina’s politics but I understand she was a passionate “blogger”.’ More finger quote marks adorned Maureen’s point – like the doofus, her way of seeming modern was about a quarter-century out of date. ‘If you’re interested in being fair to her, I’d look at the blog.’

  He thought Maureen was right. And, enduring Haluk’s steely stare, he nipped back in the foyer to grab a copy of the student paper, too.

  * * *

  The office was empty when he got in, just after midday. Ellie’s desk-phone kept ringing, and the printer periodically gave out a noise to indicate that something was stuck, but apart from that, he was alone. He wondered if they’d all gone for lunch without him.

  He stitched together a quick piece for Ellie, going off into the expected flights of fancy about the normally bustling supermarket, the shock hanging over the close-knit community and the emotional paralysis of the respected, café-owning father. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t what he wanted to say. It would do. He sent it to Ellie.

  Then he started on the piece he wanted to write. Not in any form that could ever be published, just symbols and queries in amongst documents he cut and pasted from the web. It was how he’d always worked: free association meets print.
>
  He started, not with Mina’s assorted web-pages, but by returning to the two Kurdish girls who’d burned before. Neither case was very recent. In May 2011, a girl called Rojda had set light to herself outside the Turkish Consulate in Knightsbridge, part of a wave of protests in Turkey and across Europe. She’d survived for a few months, but her blog posts and her Facebook updates had all stopped on the Thursday of her solitary, extreme revolt.

  Rojda had penned reams of bad poetry about sacrifice and martyrs, replete with references to seeds and soil, wombs and blood and tears. Alongside it, there were photographs of her in army fatigues, draped in a Kurdish flag. Before her, another girl had trodden the same path, at a rally in Dalston, in 2002. She’d written only in Kurdish, but her words were adorned with the same, artless kind of image. She had even photoshopped herself, like some eager groupie, into a picture of strapping, tousle-headed peshmerga fighters with a captured tank. She had not lived.

  Both girls had come to London direct from conflict. Both girls had been protesting about distinct events: a fresh wave of anti-PKK action by the Turkish military in 2011, the abduction of the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öçalan, in 2002. Other girls across the Kurdish diaspora had been doing similar things: two in Stockholm in 2002, one in Berlin in 2011.

  Yet Mina had acted alone. As Rex watched her YouTube address for the fourth time, he struggled to define what made him so uneasy. She had a style of delivery that was passionate; perhaps, like her uncle’s, over-dramatic. But it didn’t quite match the words. Apart from the title – ‘Dying For Peace’ – and her ‘flames at the door’ reference, the speech about the barracks bomb was without the gothic adornments of the others girls’ outpourings. She’d posted links to them, it seemed, not to glorify their actions, but to point out that they’d been futile. Peace had not been won.