by M. H. Baylis
‘The guy what was what?’
‘This other guy was asking after him, few days back. But I…’ She blinked, the toughness fading for an instant. ‘I realised it couldn’t be you because then you’d be dead.’
This was bizarre. ‘Why am I dead?’
‘I’m not saying you’re dead. I’m saying that guy’s dead. The one that came here looking for Aran. Fat bloke, glasses. He came here, then like, a day or two later, I was reading about him on the news? That Turkish guy. Worked for the council.’
As she withdrew into her music, Rex went round the shelves, filling a basket, only half-aware of what he was putting into it. So Bilal had been here, looking for Aran. It was a long way off the council-man’s turf, though not far from his father’s textile factory. What business could they have had together?
Still deep in thought, he took sucuk, pastirma, olives and a wad of the stippled, mattress-like Kurdish bread up to the counter. The girl stowed them wordlessly in a carrier bag. It wasn’t the usual flimsy affair you got in local supermarkets, but something hefty they’d had printed themselves. Bosphorus Continental Market, a yellow sun, a peacock.
‘Nice bags,’ he said to the girl.
She flashed him a disgusted look, snatching one of the headphones out again. ‘What?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Actually…’ He jumped in before the headphone went back. ‘Seeing as I’m not dead, can I ask you a question?’
A faint smile came his way.
‘Do you know what he wanted? The fat man?’
She shook her head. ‘He said he kept trying to call. He said to tell Aran… he was too late.’
‘Too late?’
‘He said he was too late, and he wanted to know what happened,’ she said, nodding. ‘That was it. No. There was something else. When he was going out, he said… I don’t know why he said this… I thought he was a bit off his head… he said, “‘People like you don’t need that sign in the window no more, do you?’”
‘What sign? The magazines sign?’
She nodded, warily.
‘What does it mean?’
She gave him a long hard look and took the other earphone out. ‘It’s meant to be how they raise money.’
‘Who?’
A long pause. She went on, eyes downcast. ‘They go round Kurdish businesses and that, saying it’s raising money for peshmerga. For the PKK. They do where I’m from, anyway.’
‘Where are you from?’
‘Edmonton,’ was the unexotic answer.
‘So why doesn’t this shop want to stock them?’
She frowned at him. ‘Stock them? They don’t exist. There aren’t any magazines. They just say it.’
‘Who’s “they”? And why did Bilal say you don’t need it anymore?’
She shot him a withering look and put the ear-bud back in. As he lugged the shopping back to his house, he wondered about the conversation. He could remember his mother telling him about a Catholic Social Club in Lincoln, where they used to pass a hat round at the end of the night. Everyone said it was for the band, even when there wasn’t a band, because the money was going over the Irish Sea, to the I.R.A. You weren’t forced to give, of course, but it took some nerve to pass the hat on without putting something in it. Perhaps the PKK raised its funds in the same way. And old Keko, with his own brand of Marxist internationalism, didn’t want to play along.
What did any of that have to do with Bilal, though? Perhaps nothing. But Bilal knew Mina. He’d forgotten that. The photo in the student magazine had shown her working with Bilal, and Eric Miles. Could Bilal’s trip to the supermarket have been connected to that?
At home, still mulling it over, he ate a small snack and cleared up. Most of the time he felt as if he’d forgotten all ways of living, other than alone. Occasionally, though, doing the most mundane things, he had a sense of peering down a little hole into another, older life. Putting a new duvet cover on. Scrubbing the bath. And now, as he washed a plate and a cup – something he might once have done with his wife next to him, her putting the food away, or niggling him, half-jokingly, about how much he’d eaten – he felt briefly, intensely incomplete.
OK. See you. That had been Diana’s response to his hurried, lying, bail-out message on Thursday night. Since then, nothing. He remembered Terry’s forceful comments in the car and thought he had a point. Then he thought, uncharitably, that a man in his early fifties who still went trawling Tottenham night-spots for one-night-stands, was bound to have a cynical view of womankind. But perhaps Rex did, too. Otherwise, why do this? Why bugger two people about?
He looked at his phone. It rang. His spirits lifted – it was Helena.
‘How are Scotland’s Cypriots?’
‘Cold,’ she said. ‘Cold and fat. Do you know, they’ve invented a new dish? It’s deep-fried halloumi. In batter. But this is the best bit. They put the battered halloumi into a pie. With curried macaroni. You would probably like it. I am going to bring you one.’
‘One? I want six.’
‘You can have one, and me. That should be enough for you.’
He paused, more surprised than embarrassed by her sudden switch into phone-vamp. She seemed to sense the pause.
‘Are you okay, sweetie? I sent you a lot of messages.’
It was true, she had. On Friday, making her slow, hungover way to Scotland, Helena had sent him a slew of photos: the train indicators at Tottenham Hale all saying cancelled, her big, frosted, hair-of-the-dog G&T in the Stansted Airport bar, an entire family dressed in tartan. He’d replied to the first two, had meant to reply to the rest, then given up. The frantic messaging didn’t bother him, exactly, but nor did it seem quite like her. Or quite like he’d thought she was.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Sorry I didn’t reply. It was another frantic day.’
‘I thought Fridays were your easy day.’
‘They are when no bodies show up.’
She laughed, but then realised he was serious. ‘Really a body?’
‘Bilal Toprak. The guy whose dad died in the social club.’ The club right opposite the Bosphorus Cafe, Rex suddenly thought. Keko’s place. Bilal had told the shop-girl he was ‘too late’. As, indeed he had been, arriving at the scene of the accident to find his father breathing his last. He wanted to know ‘what happened’. That, surely, was why Bilal had gone round to the supermarket. The café had been shut, ordered to close by the police. So he’d gone, agitated, upset, to the supermarket, hoping Aran could tell him.
‘Are you still there?’
‘Sorry, yes.’
‘I said what happened? To Bil – to that man?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows what happened.’
‘But they’re trying to find out, right?’
‘Of course.’
She said something indistinct. He asked her to repeat it.
‘I miss you, honey,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday night, yes?’
‘With the pies.’
‘With one pie. Unless I’ve eaten it for insulation.’
‘Cold in those churches?’
‘I haven’t even seen inside a church. That’s the main difference. Everything I’ve done in London – with Greeks, I mean – it’s in a church. That one in Palmer’s Green, Twelve Apostles…they even sent me a link, to a website, about their church, before I came. In Glasgow, no. Everything in this one, horrible old library.’
He suggested that perhaps Glasgow’s Greek Cypriots were all communists. She said that was unlikely. They said their good byes, and hung up.
He realised, as he finished the washing-up, that something was bugging him, like an item of shopping he knew he needed, but wasn’t on the list. It was Helena, or to do with Helena. Not just her behaving in ways he didn’t expect. Something else. A feeling he was sure he’d felt before, but equally, couldn’t recall when. Had she said something? Something that didn’t make sense?
At the same time he was looking forward to her return on T
uesday night. And he couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked forward to seeing someone. Terry was right. Why mess that up?
His hopeful mood lasted as long as it took him to wring out the dishcloth and drape it over the taps. There was a knock at the door. Ellie was standing on the porch with a copy of yesterday’s s: Haringey.
‘Thanks, but I’ve already read it.’
‘Let me in, Rex.’
As she went past him down the hallway, her smell made him feel a brief tug of desire, not for Ellie, but for the situation. Of a woman coming in, from the outside: a unique mix of the rain and the streets, perfume and hair. The musk of assignations, lovers coming back.
On Rex’s kitchen table, Ellie spread the paper out. Flipped past the news, the diary, the arts round-up, Lawrence’s page of witticisms, the teaser section for the parent paper’s weekend edition. To the Announcements. An In Memoriam.
Tarcey, Rex (30.9.1973-5.4.2015). Beloved friend.
A sad loss.
‘Well they got my birthdate right.’
‘Let’s hope that’s the only thing,’ Ellie said, glancing up.
The death date was the 5th of April. Next Thursday.
‘I might just stay in bed on Thursday if it’s all right with you,’ Rex said.
She ignored him. ‘I did the final check before lock-off. I guess ’cause of the typo it just didn’t register. Any ideas who might be behind it?’
‘Thousands. Ranging from Ashley Pocock to a girl whose vintage scarf I ruined at a dance in Louth Scout Hall in 1990. Can’t we trace the payment?’
‘It’s not that simple. The classifieds are all handled centrally now, and they can be placed via the web. Like this one. They used a Hotmail account and a top-up debit card. The police could find out more, and as your de facto line manager, I am…’
Ellie was slipping before his eyes into the check-sheet, tick-box, brain-off droid persona she’d learnt on her grown-up, modern paper. He dived in before her.
‘It’s a joke, Ellie. A prank. When I was at university, I said I’d be dead by the time I was 44. Every now and then, a few of my old chums like to remind me. Nothing to worry about.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘That’s bullshit. If you thought that, why ask me if the payment could be traced?’
‘I just wondered which of my old chums had done it.’
‘You haven’t got any old chums, Rex. You don’t want the police involved because you think it’s got something to do with the council, or your Mina-obsession, and if they go charging in now, you’ll lose your scoop. Rex, this is a death threat!’
‘It’s a joke.’
‘You’ve lost your grip.’
‘I’ve never felt in more control in my life.’
‘You’re such a dickhead. Am I going to have to sack you to keep you safe?’
She left soon after that. Later, he couldn’t recall if she’d gone before he necked the three Codilex with the mug of neat raki, or while he was doing it. He wasn’t sure it mattered. The end point was the same, after all. Someone, apparently, planned to kill him on Thursday.
* * *
Another Miles-masterstroke had been the flogging off and conversion of the Borough’s two handsome Magistrates’ Courts into a mix of private flats and social housing. This meant that the Petty Sessions now took place within the same impressive, 1950s-built complex housing as the Crown Court and the Town Hall. s:Haringey had benefitted, not just from having less mileage to cover, but also from the occasional, comedy snarl-ups engendered by the close clustering of so many civic offices. A blushing bride had been nicked on her way out of the registry office, for failing to appear before the Crown on fraud charges. One morning, a magistrate sent a man to prison, for failing to pay child maintenance, unconcerned that the same man was due in Crown Court in the afternoon to give key testimony in a murder trial.
The Coroner’s Inquest into the death of Bilal Toprak was unlikely to deliver comedy gold, but the press section was packed out. It usually was when the North London District Coroner, Peter Duncan, was doing the honours. A sparse, nimble-looking man in his mid-sixties, Duncan cycled between his appointments on a folding bike, and spoke like someone from the pages of Little Dorrit.
‘The unfortunate gentleman’s constitution was assailed, not merely by the sudden loss of his father, but by high blood pressure and a recent but persistent history of fainting and occasioning unto himself significant injuries thereby.’
Rex glanced around him. Many of the kids sent by the nationals weren’t even bothering to take notes. At this Monday morning inquest, they were just waiting for the verdict, and hoping in the interim that Duncan might say something antiquated and quotable.
The cub-hacks’ inactivity might also, in fairness, have been because they were as baffled as everyone else at the way things were heading. Eve Reilly, wan and black-suited, had just given her evidence, describing how she’d been canvassing and leafleting in the area when she’d come across an open door, two bags of untended shopping, and a great deal of noise from the stereo. Noticing that water was dripping through the ceiling, she had gone upstairs to the bathroom, to find the bath overflowing, and the body of Bilal, fully dressed, with a head-wound, half-in, and half-out of the full bath.
A cool, cocky young pathologist had then taken the stand to explain his findings. Bilal, it seemed, had sustained more than minor injuries when he fainted and fell at the Trabzonspor collapse. The fall had caused some swelling on the brain; he had also had two long-term conditions: diabetes, and high blood pressure, and the combination of these things had led to him, in a confused and debilitated state, forgetting his shopping, going upstairs to run a bath before suffering a stroke, knocking himself unconscious as he fell and then drowning in his bath.
‘My arse,’ said Terry. The coroner had given him a sharp look through his tiny round glasses, but it was what many in the room clearly felt. And Duncan paid some recognition to that in his final summing-up:
‘Many elements of this regrettable case seem unusual – the shopping bags in the doorway, the stereogram at high volume – yet they are clearly indicative in themselves of a man in the state of diminished cognitive capacity that can precede a stroke. This is confirmed by the subsequent misfortunes with which Mr Bilal Toprak met upstairs in his bathroom, as well as by what the autopsy was able to conclude, with acceptable levels of scientific certainty, after examining a body that had rested in running water for a number of hours. My verdict is inadequate and imprecise, given the complexities of the matter, but it is the only one permissible in the circumstances. Since we cannot determine whether Bilal Toprak would have survived his stroke had he not banged his head and fallen into the bath, it would be agreeable if we could give a verdict of accidental death and natural causes. Since such a capacity does not exist in English Law, we must instead declare a narrative verdict. Thank you.’
Amid the ensuing chatter, Mike Bond, Brenda’s husband who now worked as a Coroner’s Officer, stood and asked people to leave quickly and to refrain from discussing it in the corridors. Another inquest, he explained, was taking place straight away – the sudden death of a three-year-old girl in her bed. Out of consideration for the family, he urged people to let it start with speed and dignity.
Everyone complied, shuffling out of the court-room in one subdued group, eyes down, trying to avoid looking at the pale, red-eyed, ruined people waiting their turn. Rex found himself next to Eve Reilly as they emerged onto the street.
‘Christ, I could murder a smoke,’ she said.
He sensed a touch of the matey gambit. ‘Not one my vices,’ he said, with a smile. ‘Sorry. Been to the Bosphorus, I see,’ he added, pointing at her carrier bag.
‘They’re my constituents,’ she said.
‘You mean they might be.’
She made a brief sideways gesture with her head, as if deflecting a blow. ‘Was that you loudly expressing your doubts in there?’
‘That was me,’ said Terry, joining them. ‘I dunno,
though. The pathologist bloke’s probably right. Just looks weird, because Bilal was acting weird. I definitely saw him whack his head when he fell at that club place.’
‘What do you think?’ Eve Reilly asked, looking at Rex.
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Jesus – is he always like this?’ she asked Terry. Eve Reilly strode off, stowing the carrier bag inside her voluminous handbag. Rex watched her go. He could have been more pleasant, acted a little less awkward. But something about her seemed to bring it out. He also hadn’t known what to say to the woman. The truth was: he couldn’t decide what to feel about the verdict. The circumstances around Bilal’s death seemed to involve so many events and factors: long-standing illness, a shock, a blow to the head, a bereavement, a radio on, shopping on the door-step, a slip in the bath. It was like all the deaths he’d ever reported on, rolled into one, yet pronounced, bizarrely, an act of chance. That was, of course, what Peter Duncan’s ‘narrative verdict’ meant: you had to know the whole story. And when you did, it made sense. It made sense, too, of what the headscarved girl in the Bosphorus supermarket had told him: Bilal, going round there in search of answers, agitated, out of sorts. What term had she used about him – a bit off his head?
He turned to Terry.
‘Going back?’
‘Going to Soho,’ Terry said. ‘Might have something for ye. See ye after.’
Rex turned back to the young crowd milling about around the entrance. They reminded him of the uneasy gatherings he’d seen, and taken part in, outside the university exam halls, nervous about what was to come, shitting it over what had just happened, comparing notes without any joy. In the midst of them, a genuine student appeared, a constellation of multi-coloured beads sewn into her braids. Kyretia Pocock.