Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘People are justified in saying that their sacrifice has been futile,’ she was saying, in the over-blown fashion of a person acting up to a role. ‘Justified in saying that two more burned girls have changed nothing. Blame the parents. Blame the schools…’

  Terry paused it. ‘See it?’

  ‘See what?’ Lawrence peered at the screen. Terry reversed the footage and put it on a slower function, so that every movement and gesture of the speech bore the portentous quality of ritual.

  ‘Look at the back-drop.’

  Another siren-bearing vehicle drove by outside, its progress a little smoother. They waited for the noise to fade, then watched. Brenda joined them, wheezing from the stairs. The slowed-down footage revealed a minute interval, where the slatted blind parted, as if in a breeze, and a distant, glowing yellow peeped briefly through the gap.

  ‘The NCP sign on the shopping centre,’ Lawrence said. ‘She recorded this at Sky City. I’m afraid we got there already, Terence.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ said Terry. ‘Not the window. These bits.’

  He rewound again and let it play. As Mina’s lips began to form the initial ‘B’ of ‘Blame the parents’, there seemed to be a minute jump. Terry’s bitten thumbnail jabbed at the screen.

  ‘It’s a different blind,’ Brenda said. ‘Nice pine toggles on the second half. Knotty bits of string before.’

  Terry played it all again. Even the Whittaker Twins watched this time.

  ‘The wooden one looks like the one in her bedroom,’ Rex said.

  ‘Someone’s stitched two bits of film together, haven’t they?’

  ‘Why would anyone blame the parents for a girl setting light to themselves?’ Brenda asked. ‘Or the schools? It sounded like it made sense when I heard it the first time, but it doesn’t really.’

  ‘Because whatever Mina really said in the last video before she died,’ Rex said, ‘Someone got rid of it.’

  Before he could say anything else, his phone rang.

  ‘Rex, you must to come,’ said a hoarse, urgent voice. It was just recognisable as Sister Florence. ‘Please. There is a fire.’

  Terry drove him. Fast. ‘I’m hoping some sarky bastard copper will pull us over and ask us “where’s the fire?”’ Rex tried to smile. He leant his forehead against the cold glass of the passenger window, trying to calm the inferno of visions. Smoke, screams, shattering windows. Sybille, unable to move, to escape the flames. Was this all just coincidence? Mina dies in flames. Someone threatens his life. A nunnery, a hospice, full of the weak and the sick, including his wife, starts to burn.

  Fate always finds a way to cheat us. We think we can prepare for the worst, by picturing the worst. But then what happens is the un-pictured worst, the thing we never envisaged.

  There was a fire engine sitting in silence at the top of Muswell Hill. No smoke. No ladders. No crowds. No one to ask what was going on – only his imaginings in the void. Across the road, an ambulance, also eerily at rest. As he walked through the trees down the blossom-covered pathway, Rex saw only what he’d seen on every visit to his wife, for more than a decade. The low porch. The word PAX in wonky, crafty letters over the door. There was an unfamiliar smell – something chemical and unpleasant – but there was nothing else. He rang the bell, as he always did.

  The fire, Sister Florence explained, as she led him through, had started in the back lounge. The sliding doors had been open, but for reasons unknown, the ancient curtains, made to 1970s standards of combustibility, had begun to burn. They’d caught, and spread to an equally unsafe pair of armchairs before someone had seen the flames and the smoke.

  That someone, Sister Florence explained, as they stood in the damp, black, reeking lounge while two firemen took readings and samples, was Peter. Unconcerned for himself, the man had picked the unconscious Sybille from her armchair and borne her out into the safety of the back garden before heading back in to alert the rest of the house. Without him, the whole place might now be gone.

  Sybille had been taken to the Whittington in the first ambulance, but was thought to be recovering from the smoke inhalation. Peter, the nun told him, rolling her eyes, had refused medical attention, saying doctors were for the body, not the soul, but accepted the offer of a bed upstairs for a lie-down.

  ‘How does a pair of curtains just burst into flame?’ Rex asked.

  ‘I don’t know. But there is near to one side the electric socket. Regarde – là!’

  Sister Florence pointed to a plug socket, scorched at the side of the sliding door. One of the Fire Investigators, white haired and stocky, caught Rex’s eye and shook his head conspiratorially, one bloke to another.

  ‘That wouldn’t have done it. There must have been a heat source right up close. Lighter. Ciggie. Candle.’

  ‘Nobody smokes!’ retorted the nun hotly. ‘And candles? Inside here at the daytime?’

  The fireman shrugged, looking out to the trees and the park beyond. ‘Easy for some numpty to get over that fence.’

  The police were on their way. Rex knew he had to talk to them. An ad in the Personals, he could ignore. An attempt on his wife’s life was something else. Someone meant genuine, permanent harm, someone trying to get at him, through the people he loved. But a pair of goons in a squad car would do him no good. He had to take this higher.

  Before he talked to the police, he had to see Sybille. Before that, though, he wanted to see Peter. Sister Florence looked doubtful.

  ‘He saved my wife’s life,’ Rex insisted. ‘I want to see him.’

  Reluctantly, dodging firemen and frowning at the thick, almost shitty smell of the extinguisher foam, Sister Florence led him upstairs to a small room where relatives sometimes stayed, close to the end. She opened the door gingerly, a priestess tending a mystery. Peter was snoring. The room smelt awful – not the downstairs odour of smoke and wet cloth, but the ripe, cheesy one of a long-unwashed man. Peter stank. His nails, fastening a rough blanket around his thin body, were yellow, dirty clasps. He had his back to them.

  ‘Il dort,’ said Sister Florence, trying to close the door. Rex pushed it open.

  ‘I know he’s asleep. I just want to see him.’

  He crossed to the other side of the room, from where he looked at Peter’s bony face, with its sunken eyes and its slightly parted lips. The light from the window cast shadows and he thought for a moment that the man was like that famous, phoney imprint of Christ on the Turin Shroud.

  But that wasn’t where he’d seen him before.

  * * *

  By the time he got back to Wood Green, the sky was turning purple. He was trying not to see things in the gathering shadows, not to feel unsafe on the manor he’d come to view as a part of himself. He’d spent an hour holding his wife’s hand in a stifling hot room at The Whittington, wondering how she could feel so cold when the place was like an orchid house. The doctor he’d spoken to – bouncy, cheerful, fresh out of Pony Club – said she’d be fine.

  Outside, among the smokers in their dressing gowns, he’d done the right thing and rung Sybille’s sister. He knew he couldn’t hide this from her. And if his wife was in danger then maybe, with leaden heart, he had to admit that she needed to be somewhere else. Aurelie had answered this time – bright, clear, sharp. She hadn’t gone off the rails. That was just something he’d hoped – an awful, selfish hope.

  ‘I understand, I understand,’ she’d said, feeling but not over-emotional. ‘It’s not good. But I cannot come before Saturday, Rex. You must ask the hospital to keep her safe there.’

  He sighed. You couldn’t ask for a loo roll with any confidence in the beleaguered Whittington. Rich Parisians like Aurelie just didn’t understand.

  ‘Well, if not that, then the police will arrange a guard, yes? You have told them already, of course? Now tell them that they must.’ There was a whispered background conversation in French, and then she returned. ‘My husband will make some calls to an associate of his in the Scotland Yard, okay?’

&nb
sp; Rex bit his tongue. One of the reasons Aurelie had crashed so spectacularly, he had often thought, was because life failed to meet her expectations. She’d grown up to assume, as the women of her swanky arrondissement did, that some money, or a word to a well-connected friend was bound to solve everything. But they’d been unable to do anything about the cheating husband, the sister in a coma, the parents withering suddenly to nothing, the son in prison for drug dealing. The husband’s friend in Scotland Yard would do nothing.

  He had to, though, so he’d moved on from the hospital to an awkward, two-hour session, sweating for his painkillers, in the bowels of the Police Station. He’d been bolstered by messages of concern from his colleagues – from Terry, from Brenda, from Brenda’s husband at the Coroner’s Office, Mike. A later one from Ellie: I heard. I’m worried for you. Let me know Syb’s ok. E x ‘I’, ‘I’m’, ‘me’ – Brenda was right about the self-obsession. But Ellie had texted, nonetheless.

  In the cop shop he’d reminded himself that coppers, even the good ones like D.S. Brenard, preferred fewer details, not more. Accordingly, in his short run-down to the detective, he kept Mina out of it, Mina, and her uncle, and the doctored YouTube speech, his worries about Bilal’s death, other things, too, although he sensed them all still there at the edges of his mind, a voiceless chorus gesturing for his attention. He said he might, perhaps, have trodden on some toes while researching a spot of standard Rotten Borough stuff at the council, but otherwise, had no idea who could be trying to kill him, or his wife, or why.

  Brenard, sharp as drill bits, wasn’t having any of it. ‘You are not a man, Rex, who has ever come to my nick because he doesn’t have a clue who might have done this or that. You come here, because you’ve got at least half a dozen barmpot theories, about who did this and that – the odd one, granted, very, very rarely, turning out to have some truth to it, despite all the pills and booze. So leave out the babes-in-the-woods act. Who have you pissed off?’

  Rex was silent. He remembered Maureen saying something about talking, and how it could be a relief, a joy, almost a liberation. Rex took a deep breath. But what could he say? There were only feelings, half-formed, doubts that existed more in his bowels than his brain. Brenard would listen, as he always did. And then dismiss them, which he also pretty much always did.

  ‘Look. I’m not bothered about myself,’ he said, finally. ‘My concern is Sybille. The nuns have a rather different idea of what vigilant means. Can’t you at least keep an eye out?’

  Brenard scratched his ear. ‘You know the answer to that. What we can do, in an expedited fashion, is run a trace on the IP address of whoever placed the advert in your paper, and have a look on the CCTV-feeds from Alexandra Park. But until we know more, watch yourself. Don’t get so drunk. Think about what you do. Don’t sleep next to your windows. Do sleep with a phone next to you – one that works.’

  * * *

  That phone, Rex noticed, as he now headed away from the bustling safety of the High Street and into the loneliness of Morley Avenue, was nearly out of juice. And it still had work to do.

  Eric Miles was wearing his smart, front-pleated suit trousers with a frayed, old tennis shirt. It had a faint pink bloom – something white that had been washed with red socks – and in an odd way it worked well with the man’s current complexion, which had turned full-on puce.

  The radio was playing gospel in the kitchen. Ena Miles was busily doing something with sugar and butter and the mixing bowl, and didn’t even turn round. Eric Miles, who seemed to have been expecting a visit, if not this one, offered Rex a drink from the bottle of Bell’s he was slugging his way through. Rex, who desperately wanted a drink, but gagged at the smell of Scotch, was forced to make do with lemon squash.

  They were about to speak when Ena suddenly murmured, ‘Vanilla Essence’, and darted off to a little pantry area behind. Miles brushed the famous lock from his eyes and smiled sadly.

  ‘She told me about the poems. I’m glad.’

  ‘Glad she told you, or glad she shopped you?’

  ‘Both. I’m glad it’s out there and that it can stop. The funny thing is, she wouldn’t even have been writing them if…’ Miles shook his head, took another drink, winced. Rex couldn’t help smiling at the face he made – like a baby trying a slice of lemon. Miles noticed and grinned.

  ‘I don’t like the stuff much, either. Jackie – my father… it was his drink. He always got it down with ginger ale. Masses of it. And you know what? When he died, the doctor said, if he’d drank it neat, he’d probably still be here.’ He looked at Rex through rheumy eyes, waiting for a response. ‘You don’t think that’s remarkable? I do. Things are designed. That’s how I know God exists. Some things come together so cleverly. It’s like a snowflake. Something that clever, it couldn’t be chance. But it’s not just nature. The things that destroy us, too. Like the ginger ale.’

  The man was sweating, Rex noticed, although the back door was open and the room was cool.

  ‘That was how it all came together and I started…’ He frowned. ‘I went onto a wicked path, Mr Tracey, but it started in such a simple, innocent kind of way. An ordinary weekend, eighteen months ago. Shilpa – the carer you met – I’d promised to pay her two weeks in advance because she was buying a new car. But my bank cards had got eaten up. I hadn’t got to the NatWest to get her her money. And then Naji, from three doors down – he used to live three doors down, I mean, he’s in St Albans now – tells me his whole property chain is about to collapse because he never got planning permission for his shed. It’s a tiny wee thing, I mean… Here’s a man, a decent man, needs a bigger place because his daughter’s had to come to live with them and her baby… And it all comes down to one piece of paper. Just a letter, so the solicitor could say he’d seen it, and that would be it. I’ll always remember what he said – “If I was back in my country,” he said, “I could pay someone for that bit of paper and we’d be all right.” And I started thinking, well. This was why I left the Party, stood as an Independent, got voted in. Promising people I’d cut through all the crap, use commonsense, just look after their interests. This man needs help. You see? It all started fitting in, like someone putting these little bits of a model together. Then he just comes out with it, and says it. “Come on, Eric – what if I gave you five hundred quid?” How did he know I needed exactly five hundred quid to give Shilpa? He didn’t know, of course. Someone… something, that’s the only way I can see it, it was arranged, to fall into place like that. He gave me the five hundred quid. Shilpa got her car. Naji got his house. And how was that any different, really, to him paying a solicitor or an architect or a planning consultancy fee?’

  He looked up, seeming to seek approval as his mother came back with the vanilla essence. She paid him no attention and he gazed sadly back into his glass. His hand shook as he took another sip. Just as Miles blended the shipyards with Highland tweeds, Rex thought, he made a strange mix of a man calmly facing his future whilst falling apart. He had turned, at last, in his downfall, quite interesting.

  ‘I meant that to be an end of it, but then Naji mentioned it to someone he knew. And Mum was getting worse back then. Alzheimer’s. Shilpa was saying she couldn’t cope with her, she’d have to leave. But they’d tried her on this drug, at the North Middlesex, for a few weeks, and it was brilliant. She was baking again. Doing the crosswords. Then they said, well, thanks for taking part in our trial, but it’ll be ten years or so before you can get this from your doctor. So I tried to get hold of it. It’s no’ that hard, actually, there’s the internet and… well, other ways now to get something much the same, but it costs. So I had to sell another letter. Sign-off on conversion of a carport into a garage. Nothing. See? No one harmed. Set up for me, Mister Tracey, wisnit, beautifully?’ Miles asked, swilling the whisky around his glass, Glasgow roots coming up like the vapour. ‘Waiting for me to make my choice.’

  ‘I’m glad you think free will played a part.’

  ‘Of course! I just hadn’t
reckoned on the free will of others. I tried to make up for doing the drugs-thing by selling another one – late-night license for a nightclub up near Ally Pally, nae bother tae anyone – and with the money I bought a new minibus for the Church. I said that was it. But it just went on from there.’

  ‘I can’t believe it was that easy.’

  ‘Nor me. But that’s still how a bureaucracy works, Mr Tracey. Pieces of paper. People, with the authority to issue them, and other people, with the authority to say they’ve seen them. That’s it. Hasnae changed since… the Pharaohs in Egypt, probably.’ A dreamy look passed across the man’s sweating face: an administrator, dazzled by what administration could achieve.

  ‘I didn’t mean easy to do it. I meant – easy for you, Mr Miles. An apparent man of conscience.’

  Miles nodded, the dreamy look abruptly gone. ‘I wonder how many more times I‘d a done it if had been just me. But secrets are like water, aren’t they? Always find a way out. Always.’

  ‘So someone found out? Who? Bilal?’

  ‘I’d have been lucky if it was him, or the police, or someone like that, but it wasnae. It was a very bad person. He was the real owner of the club I’d got the license for. And he said he’d ruin me if I didnae work with him. He owns a lot of flats. Masses of them. Bought too many when they were still super-cheap. More than he could get the tenants for.’

  ‘Up at Sky City?’

  ‘There, and elsewhere. So we worked out a way of renting out all the empty properties to people who didn’t exist, and claiming housing benefit for them. We got mother to come up with the names. Do you know – she remembers thousands of names – literally – old novels in the library, ticket-holders….’ He tapped the side of his head. ‘It’s all still in there. I didn’t realise she knew what I was up to, though, and she’d stopped using the names from her memory. Started making them all out of my name.’ They both glanced at the apron-clad Mrs Miles, as she switched the oven on.