by M. H. Baylis
There was a radio but no TV. A camping stove, no fridge. The things Mr Pocock wanted to keep cool, like milk and cheese, hung out of the window, student-style, in a thin, candy-striped carrier bag. Mr Pocock had a sherry-glass of rum in front of him on the table, and from the way he kept looking at it, it was meant to last him all day.
‘Kyretia comes back sometimes,’ Eryl said, in a soft, lilting Bajan accent. ‘She has her room here still. But mostly she prefers to stay with friends from university. Well…’ He gestured at the shabby, chilly room. It smelt of yeast and mould. There was a newspaper cutting on the woodchip wall, nothing else.
‘Has she been staying recently?’
Eryl frowned, thinking hard. ‘For the last couple of weeks, yes,’ he said, finally permitting himself a minute sip of the rum. He was a man bewildered, Rex thought, a man who’d seemingly woken up one morning to find everything gone. ‘I don’t think she likes being around people from the university right now, you know. Too painful. She doesn’t like being here, either. Goes for big, long walks on her own, she says.’ He scratched his neck, the cactus-bobbles of Afro-stubble. ‘I don’t know if she’s telling the truth. I don’t know where she goes. I don’t want to push her, you know? But I don’t want the girl to drop out. She’s worked so hard. We all did.’
‘You said she’d been staying a couple of weeks. So she was here before Friday? I mean before the day Mina died?’
‘For maybe a week before that she was here. And there was already something wrong. I thought so, anyway, but she wouldn’t talk.’
‘What made you think there was something wrong?’
‘Anxious. She wasn’t going out all the time before Mina died. Went to the gym once, I think. Rest of the time she was just here, nowhere else, not going out, y’know, constantly checking her phone. Kept going down to the street because she was worried the signal wasn’t strong enough, back up here. Took the thing into the toilet with her. Very, very hard to be around, you know. I’m a calm man. You have to be, in my line of work.’
There didn’t seem to be much work going on. Rex looked at the newspaper article. It was from one of the London-Caribbean papers, dated December 2010. Buck House Boost For Bajan Baker. A taller, stronger-looking Eryl was beaming next to an elaborate, tiered confection. He’d been selected, the article said, from hundreds of independent bakers in the country, to bake the cake for Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding the following year.
‘That was a major honour,’ Rex said. ‘Did they like their cake?’
‘Seven tiers, ten sections each,’ Eryl said, with a cloudy look in his eyes. ‘For the seventy nations of the Commonwealth. First tier was going to be a Tottenham cake. You know Tot’nam cake? You have to use real mulberries…’ He stopped himself, mid-reverie. ‘I never made it. By the time it was due, I was going under. I asked the Palace for a loan, you know… Got Kyretia to write a letter to them, proper-style.’ He snorted at his own naiveté. ‘I’m getting back on top now. Serious. It’s a new age for baking. Like that programme on the TV? Celebrities are into it. My son’s helping me.’
‘Ashley?’
‘A good head for business. Studied hard. I made sure they both study hard, my two. Ashley’s taken charge of the books, the company bank account. We’re going to be back up, baking, very soon.’
He’d straightened in his chair as he spoke, the rum forgotten. Mr Pocock looked so full of hope that Rex tried hard to look as if he shared it.
‘Could I see Kyretia’s room? We might see something, you know, that explains where she’s been going.’
The appeal to his fatherly concern worked. Pocock showed him to a small, cluttered box-room, barely larger than a bed. It was the opposite of Mina’s: a trove, stratified into life-layers of early adulthood, adolescence and primary school. Swimming certificates down low, flyers for club nights high. A photograph caught his eye. Mina and Kyretia at an outdoor pop concert, a gang of friends around them, wide-eyed, all a little high. Mina was waving something, a flag or a pennant. Was anyone else from the university in there – anyone who might know something? There were two boys. Was one of them the alleged lover? Using Terry’s favoured covert technique, Rex snapped a picture while pretending to check his phone.
Soon after, he thanked Mr Pocock and left. The shutters outside were rusted and clearly hadn’t been opened for a long time. Was Ashley Pocock seriously intending to get this place running again?
He was ten minutes late for Bilal. Happily, once you got beyond the UN peacekeeping force at the gates, you encountered more reasonable officials, one of whom gave Rex a pass and directed him upstairs.
He’d been in the Cabinet Office before, of course. Under the old lot, in the Haringey days. It seemed different now – emptier, quieter. Rex could hear phones ringing in distant parts of the building, a loo flushing somewhere below. Where was everyone?
Then he reached the main meeting room. Everyone seemed to be in there – twenty-odd people, all races and ages. All staring hard at the mahogany meeting table. Hands clasped. In silence. He remembered McKenzie’s words.
Eric Miles looked up and saw him at the door. Flustered, he swept the lock of hair from his eyes, made some sort of verbal signal, and everyone broke from their concentrations as the boss strode towards the door.
‘Can I help?’
People often said that, Rex thought. When they meant fuck off.
‘Were you just praying?’
Miles again wiped the long flick of white hair irritably out of his eyes. ‘No we were not,’ he said. ‘We take a little time out, every day, together, to think, in silence. We don’t pray. Now what do you want? You’re the gentleman from the paper, aren’t you?’
Bilal had appeared at Miles’ shoulder. ‘He’s here for me, Eric. Sorry.’
With what seemed like a guilty air, Bilal ushered Rex away down the corridor to his own office, a cluttered cell smelling of bad breath and tuna-sandwich. As Rex entered, he turned back to see Miles still at the door of the meeting room, watching them, a hovering, headmasterly presence.
‘You wanted to know more about the new zoning regulations around Duckett’s Common?’
Not really, thought Rex – but he let Bilal explain and took a few notes, while he scanned the room. There was little of personal note: some jokes along the lines of ‘You Don’t Have To Be Mad To Work Here But It Helps’, at least four bottles of pills. And a medal in a frame.
‘You a military man?’ Rex asked, once Bilal had stopped his ponderous explanation. Bilal followed his gaze to the medal.
‘That’s my dad’s.’
‘Kemal? Who did he serve with? The Brits?’
Bilal shook his head. ‘His dad, my grandfather served in the police under the British, in the 1950s. But my father was later. Siyah Tilki – a Black Fox.’
‘Sounds glamorous.’
‘They were a special unit of the TMT – Turk Mukavemet Teskilati.’ He pronounced the Turkish words with such sudden, unexpected fluency that it was as if he’d become a different person. Perhaps that was what it was like, Rex thought, being here, one person in Wood Green, another heritage at home. ‘They were the resistance movement that campaigned for the north of Cyprus to separate.’
From what Rex had gleaned from conversations with Helena, there’d been another group, called EOKA, doing similar on the Greek side, seeking union with Athens by means both political and explosive. Then there’d been all the people who wanted a state that was Greek-Cypriot, but nothing to do with Greece. And those who wanted to be a fair mix of the two, or simply to get on with their lives. A mess. And still going on, like Israel, like Iraq and Syria and all the other ancient messes in which Britain had, usually, had a hand.
‘And then he moved to Turkey after the war?’ Rex asked, remembering their earlier talk in the Sky City community centre.
‘They looked after the people who’d been in the TMT. He was in the police,’ Bilal said. ‘For a while. Then he got a job at a… something like a zoo,
I think. Not with the animals, just…’ He shrugged. ‘Then here.’ He shuffled printouts. ‘Is there anything about the zoning regs I can email you, or…’
‘I’m fine. Thank you. I see our own zoo is finally happening,’ Rex ploughed on, as he closed up his notebook. ‘Thanks to Mina.’
Bilal blinked slowly – a ponderous bird. ‘Not exactly because of her. Mr Sajadi was intending to make a donation before the events last week.’
And you made out you’d never heard of the man, Rex thought.
‘I’ll see you out,’ Bilal said.
Rex cursed inwardly. The whole point of this meeting had been to get inside and wander about.
‘No need,’ said Rex. ‘I’ve kept you long enough.’
‘I’m going out anyway,’ Bilal said. ‘Aisha in HR is going off on maternity leave, and I’m buying the goodbye cake.’
‘Haven’t you had a lot of people leaving lately?’
Bilal made a puzzled look, his jaw vanishing into his collar. Here was a lad who needed no more cake, Rex thought. And what were all those pills for? ‘No one’s left this office. Apart from Jean in Admin Support. But she was only six months off retiring anyway.’
‘Why would anyone leave sa job six months before they retire?’
‘She’d had enough. Never got to grips with new database software. Wouldn’t go on a course.’
Jean had been disgruntled then, Rex thought. They went past a loo on the landing. Never before had the smell of Glade ‘Fruits of the Forest’ represented a life raft.
‘Bilal, I’m going to pay a visit,’ Rex said. ‘Thanks for everything.’
It wasn’t quite the pissy, functional unit he’d expected. The sinks were bowls on dark-wood plinths. Like something up west, a nightclub loo. Nightclubs splashed money on their khazis. And so, clearly, did Eric’s council. He counted to ten, then opened the door. Making sure Bilal was gone, he stepped out into the corridor.
Victor Eastwood had had a good line about snooping: ‘It’s the quietly closed door people notice.’ Years after leaving the Lincoln Daily Despatch, years after Victor Eastwood had himself been dispatched to the great newsroom in the sky, Rex had come across the line again in a spy thriller. It was possible the author had nicked it from Victor Eastwood, rather than the other way round.
Well-schooled, Rex knew not to creep around the place, and when he came upon a tall, frazzled-looking rasta-lady hefting a tower of files, he merely pointed down the corridor like someone every bit as pressed as her and said, ‘Works Department, love?’
‘Not sure any more, darlin’,’ she said. ‘Used to be downstairs, turn left at the staircase.’
And it still was. The door was locked, though. The greyness of the stippled glass panel suggested no lights were on inside. He took out his phone and rang the number. No phone rang on the other side of the door. A woman answered.
‘Works?’
Wherever she was, she wasn’t on the other side of the door. Rex thought quickly.
‘My name’s Yas Khan? Maintenance team at Shopping City?’ he began. Silence invited him to continue. ‘It’s about that new door you installed, between the mall and the flats? The entry codes don’t work and there’s an alarm going off constantly. Someone needs to come, yeah?’
Ten minutes later, damp and breathless, he burst into the s: Haringey office, so excited he barely felt the savage ache in his foot.
‘Can anyone ferry me about for an hour or so? I’ve got a feeling I’m going to be following a van.’
He expected groans, queries, grudging compliance. Instead he got a shocked, silent room.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Rex.’ Ellie spoke from behind him, in the doorway to the inner office. ‘There’s been a serious allegation against you.’
His mind raced. What had he done lately? Snuck around the council building? Impersonated a member of the Shopping City maintenance team? All part of an average day.
‘Ashley Pocock? Says you’re continually following and harassing him, making libellous allegations against him, and you racially abused him at a bookmakers on the High Street this morning.’
‘I didn’t racially abuse him!’
‘You admit to the harassment and the allegations, though?’
‘Get knotted, of course I don’t. He’s lying. I never said anything abusive to him.’
‘He’s got a witness. Someone right next to you in the bookmakers.’
McKenzie, the grim little gambler. Who would say anything for a few quid. Who’d hinted to him, very cleverly, in fact, that the Council Works department was missing. You try and go up there.
‘He’s lawyered up and he’s making a stink. I’ve just spoken to Head Office and they’re very clear on things like this. I’m sorry. I have to suspend you without pay until it’s resolved.’
‘Bollocks! I’m not going anywhere!’ he shouted.
He felt a hand on his arm. ‘Rex, come on man.’
‘Oh, fuck off Terry!’ he snapped, pushing him away. In the process, his arm, or perhaps Terry’s, knocked a cup of steaming coffee over a laptop keyboard. Everyone paused, to watch, in a kind of fascination, as things fizzed and the screen turned a deep, dark blue.
CHAPTER TEN
‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘Don’t do it!’ She slapped at him. ‘If you spray that thing in my car, you’re getting out and you can do this… thing on your own.’
Rex put the can of RightGuard back in the Boots bag. He’d only just bought it, conscious that the day’s exertions had made him smell like a pack of out-of-date bacon.
‘I like the way men smell,’ she said. ‘I had a teacher at primary school, and I used to volunteer to clean the board at the end of every day so I could smell his jacket. Everybody said I loved him. Actually I only loved the smell of his jacket on the chair. Cigarettes… Hair… I guess because there was no Dad at home.’
‘You had two smelly brothers, I imagine.’
She scowled, briefly. ‘Boys. They are still boys, my brothers.’ She sighed, looking out of the window. ‘That’s what it’s like in Cyprus. All the men are still boys, looking for their mummies. All the women looking for fathers. Nobody finding what they are looking for.’
The rain had given way to hot sunshine, the puddles turning to vapour all around as they waited, in Helena’s absurd prawn-pink hire car, at the back of Shopping City. No one noticed them; the kerbs always seemed to be lined with cars with people inside them. Helena, who’d never done anything like this before, had accepted the mission with enthusiasm, perhaps not realising how tedious it might be. She didn’t seem to mind though, seemed happy to sit with him, talking and waiting.
‘I don’t understand why you’re doing this if your newspaper suspended you.’
‘Because they’re going to un-suspend me, and when they do, I’m going to have a story for them, that’s going to make them very sorry they ever thought about suspending me.’
‘Turk’s words,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Something my mother says. If someone is being, you know…’ She put her fists up. ‘Probably the Turks say ‘Greek words’. I don’t know.’
‘You were speaking Turkish at the community thing.’
‘Sure. Lots of people speak both. It’s not what everyone thinks. The house we lived in, in Nicosia, it had been a Turkish house, that the people had left very suddenly. And we put all the things they’d left in one room at the top. We looked after them. In case they came back. We weren’t supposed to touch the things in there, but sometimes I went in.’
‘What was in there?’
She shrugged. ‘Same things we’d left behind. Cushions. Records. Pictures.’ She smiled. ‘There was a photograph of a Turkish man with a big moustache. I used to go and look at it. I don’t know why. A kind of crush, almost!’
‘So what happened to all the things in the room?’
She shrugged. ‘No one came for them. My brother, Yiannis, he broke the picture and hid it.’
‘Why did he do that?’
‘I don’t know. Well, I do. He took it and then he shut me in the room and he said I was a dirty Turk so I should stay with the Turks’ things, and he shut me in there for a day and a night. There!’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘I never told anyone that!’
‘Why did he do that to you?’
‘He hated me,’ Helena said simply. ‘My younger brother, Alex, not so much, not when we were alone together, but Yiannis and the cousins…’ She shook her head. ‘It was my cousins, my mother’s sister’s family, who bought us to Nicosia. They were the ones who found us the house. A Turk’s house. Most of those places were looted, straight away – the people either took everything, took them over, or just burnt them down. But this one… nobody touched it, so we went there. And so the cousins said it was haunted, that was why nobody else wanted it. And they called me a dirty Turk, a Turk’s bastard.’
‘Nasty kids.’
She shook her head. ‘They were just children! They only said it because they heard their parents saying it.’
‘But… I don’t understand… Why would their parents say that?’
She seemed to be wrestling with something heavy, but before she could master it, a scruffy yellow van pulled up outside the entrance to the Sky City flats. Three men got out, all young, scrawny, a trio of nationalities: Somali, Chinese and someone from the vodka-drinking lands. A paint-spattered toolbox followed them out of the van. The Chinese man had a council digi-pass on a lanyard and they got straight in.
‘Do we go after them?’ Helena asked. ‘How do we get in?’
‘We don’t,’ Rex said. ‘We wait.’
They waited. She checked her phone, sent a text, squeezed his hand. It was the first time she’d shown him any affection since they’d left the hotel bed. He leant in and kissed her.
She smiled, in the midst of their lips. ‘So you still like me?’
‘I thought maybe you didn’t like me,’ he said.
‘It should get easier, being older,’ she said. ‘It just gets worse.’