by M. H. Baylis
‘Bilal found out,’ Miles went on. ‘I don’t know how. He found out there were other things going on, things I didn’t even know about. I’m still responsible, though. Evil is like that. It only takes one person to give in.’ He shook violently, spilling some of his drink.
‘Maybe you’ve had enough, Mr Miles,’ Rex said. He didn’t like the way the man’s left eyelid kept quivering. And yet he did, to his surprise, find that he liked listening to Eric Miles. He was a good talker, even-voiced, but honest and expressive. Rex could imagine the sermons going down well in that spruced-up Gorbals accent. There wouldn’t be any more of them, he guessed, except in the prison chapel.
‘I taught for a long while. You knew that, I imagine. Later on, I went to Kenya, with the church I was involved with at the time, to build a school, in a very, very hard place. We joined up with some brothers from New Zealand, who’d been there for a while. I’ll never forget one of them. Young man. Knew his Bible backwards. One night, in the drink, telling me it was fine to have sex with the girls out there, because sex didn’t mean to them what it meant for us. And everyone was doing it. And it was a way for them to earn money. For school. So… so he was helping, he said.’ Miles swallowed, with difficulty, and wiped his face.
‘See, that disgusted me at the time. But I was no better, because that’s what happened in my council, too. People saw the evil going on around them, and took it for good. Or at least, for normal. And if everyone was doing it…’ He shrugged.
‘People like Tex Ochuba?’
‘Ah, well Tex isn’t the only cowboy in Dodge City.’ He laughed. ‘Bilal found out about all of it. He got together this – a dossier, I suppose, listing everything. Names, dates, figures. He showed me. It was very thorough. You know, if more documents, in local government, could be like that…’ Miles closed his eyes, once again, seemingly in rapture over a well-executed bit of paperwork. ‘Bilal was always a capable person, but he’d had some help with this one, I could tell.’
‘From who? Someone else on the council?’
‘I don’t know. Someone with some legal background. For all its conciseness, there was a wee bit of the ‘notwithstanding the heretomentioned’ sort of thing and… Well, you know. I suppose he could have made it up himself. But he’s no like that, Bilal… he wisnae, I mean. Not the sort to try it on. So when he said, you know, he’d get rid of his dossier if I put a stop to it all, straight away, I believed he meant it. But how could I? How could I stop all those people?’
Miles had changed colour in the course of their talk – faded from pink to fish grey. He was shaking all the time now, like someone intensely nervous. He was making Rex nervous, too. He was nervous for other reasons, in any case, having heard a tiny bleep from his pocket, indicating that the battery was about to fail. He prayed it would stay recording a few minutes more.
‘He must have been preparing to drop his bombshell any time. But in the meantime, well… Mother was making her own efforts.’
Ena Miles put a cake tin in the oven and set a timer. She seemed far more on the ball than her son.
‘I didn’t do anything to Bilal, if that’s what you’re imagining,’ Miles said. ‘I’m a weak man. That’s it. A weak man.’
‘What about Mina?’
He looked shocked. ‘Mina?’
‘Mina Kűçuktürk. She worked for you once, when you and Bilal were still with the Lib Dems. Then she died. I wondered if she’d found something out.’
‘No, but…’ Another painful swallow, while Mrs Miles sponged the work surfaces. ‘I guess it coulda worked either way, couldn’t it? Bilal told Mina, and she took the news to him. Or she found out from him, and told Bilal she knew.’
‘I’m not with you. Who’s him?’
‘Rostam Sajadi. Her uncle. He’s the one with the club and the flats. He’s a dangerous man.’ He looked Rex in the eye, a tough undertaking, since he was sweating and shaking so much. ‘I had no choice about accepting the stuff for the zoo. I didn’t want to go near him, but he told me he was doing it …’
Rex was silent, the truth of it washing over him. Sajadi: a dangerous man. Had Mina been right, then, to fear her uncle, to run from him? Was it time he began to fear Sajadi, too?
‘What are you going to do?’ Miles asked. ‘I– I don’t mind. I mean, I won’t be stopping you.’
Rex sat back. ‘Tell the cops. Print.’
Miles nodded. ‘And I go to face justice.’
‘You’ll do two-and-a-half tending tomatoes with some disgraced MPs, Mr Miles. I wouldn’t worry.’
‘I’m not worrying,’ he said blankly. ‘I don’t mean that kind of justice.’ He let out a sudden noise, somewhere between a shout, a sigh and a retch. Even Mrs Miles, rinsing out her jay-cloth, reacted to it. ‘I get mum’s pills cheaper if I buy them in hundreds,’ he wheezed. Then he shuddered.
It seemed an odd thing to say. Rex was about to ask Eric Miles what he meant, when the man suddenly grimaced, lifted up a hand as if warding something off, shook violently and slipped from his chair onto the floor. It was suddenly obvious why he’d mentioned the pills. Rex leapt up.
Miles was twitching on the varnished floor. Ena Miles turned from adjusting the dial on her oven and looked down at her son, curious. Then she looked at Rex.
‘It isn’t right, is it?’
‘No,’ he said, dialling 999. ‘It isn’t.’
A short while later, as the ambulance drove away with Eric Miles and his mother in the back, he used the phone in the hallway.
‘I’ve got something. It’s big. I’ll be in the office. How soon can you get there?’
‘I spent the afternoon being hairdryer-ed by the Managing Editor. He says if you’ve had death threats, you shouldn’t even be allowed in the building.’
‘What do you say, Ellie?’
A long pause. ‘I’ve got a career too, you know! This isn’t fair. I knew you were going to be a fucking nightmare.’
‘Ten minutes. Give me ten minutes and if you’re not impressed, I’ll take the whole problem off your hands. I’ll resign.’
A sigh. He thought he heard her talking to someone. ‘I’d just pulled.’
‘Bring him along, he can do a bit of colouring in the corner.’
‘Twat.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Brenard rang the next morning, just after ten, as Rex was approaching the Bosphorus Café with fried eggs in mind. From a distance the place appeared to be shut, but before he could be certain, he felt his phone buzzing in his pocket.
‘What do you think?’ he asked.
In the small hours of the morning, he’d emailed Brenard a file from the office. A recording of his interview with Eric Miles. Scans of the Housing Benefit letters. He and Ellie – in half-hourly contact with a frazzled Sentinel deputy, working from home and dashing between laptop, knackered wife and teething twins – had cooked up a strategy. Hand the story to the local cops and the Serious Fraud Office in return for privileged access to the arrests and the office-ransacks, then run it big before anyone else got wind. Terry was expecting so many photo-worthy moments over the next 48 hours that he’d got a mate haring down the M1 from Consett to help.
‘I always thought they were too good to be true, that lot. I’ve passed it up to Borough Command – there’s a strategy meeting at eleven.’
‘So you’ll be letting me know what comes next.’
‘That’s not a given,’ Brenard said tersely. ‘I was actually calling to discuss your other problem. There’s news. Don’t panic,’ he added, hastily. ‘Your wife’s fine, the nuns are fine.’
‘I knew that,’ Rex said. ‘I’ve checked already. Twice. What’s your news?’
‘CCTV on the park showed up nothing. Just mums, kids, canned lager enthusiasts, dogs. No one heading in the direction of the fence between the park and the convent. The IP address of whoever who put your death notice in the paper is an internet caff in Finsbury Park. They’ve started keeping a customer log, because of… well, you know, various agencies tellin
g them to keep a customer log – who’s been skyping their mates in Mogadishu and all that. There’s a name. John Major.’
‘Great. Have you arrested him? Did Norma put up a fight?’
Brenard ignored him. ‘Does the name John Major mean anything to you?’
‘Apart from the big specs and the unlikely shag revelations, no.’
‘No one else has used that ID over the past six months and the owner doesn’t remember what the person looked like. We’ll just have to keep an eye on things. Have you had any more threats?’
‘Nothing. How’s Eric Miles?’
‘Recovering. Look after yourself, Rex,’ Brenard said. Rex wished he hadn’t said that. As he looked over at the shuttered-up Bosphorus, he remembered the last time John Major had interfered with his consciousness. The photo in Keko’s flat. Of another bland, grey man in big specs. Some noted Kurd? A beloved relation? He wished he’d asked.
He certainly wouldn’t be finding out today. Despite the blinds being down, the door of the Bosphorus was open, and everything inside was being covered in brown dust-sheets. The Hungarian girl spotted him, and came over to the doorway.
‘Sad, huh?’
‘I don’t know – is it?’
‘Boss is decided to retire. Place finished. He gone to Germany for bit. Just kept me on to clean up it.’
‘Too many memories, maybe.’ Looking in at the forlorn room, he remembered Kyretia yesterday, although it seemed a lifetime ago, telling him that Mina had hid from her uncle and her father. He knew, as he’d known then, that she was mistaken about Keko. When the kid was in the corner doing her homework, her dad was always coming over, interrupting her with milkshakes and little snacks. Devoted, besotted, proud.
That was when she’d been a child, of course. There were cultures – cultures who shopped at the Morrison’s, sunned themselves on Duckett’s Common, just like everyone else – where girls seemed to become something ‘other’ as they grew into women. Something dangerous, to be contained, wrapped up and feared. Not in Mina’s household, though. She’d been encouraged to go to school, to university, to be involved in the world. Keko could never have threatened his daughter, let alone harmed her.
Sajadi was a different matter, though. Rex couldn’t see the man perpetrating one of those so-called ‘honour killings’ on his niece when he’d once saved his beloved sister from one. But perhaps business, to Rostam Sajadi, was a different sphere to blood. If Mina had found out about the flats, and the council corruption, and told Bilal, then her uncle might have wanted her silenced.
And what else was he capable of? Rex remembered how he’d gladly been scooped into Sajadi’s car, outside Sky City, blindly believing that the man had just been parked there, thinking about his dead niece. Wasn’t it more likely that he’d been following Rex? He’d known where he worked. Found out, from somewhere, that Rex had been asking questions about him. Like an idiot, Rex had shook Sajadi’s hand and agreed to help him – never guessing that this was just a ploy to keep him on-side. There was no mystery behind the death threat in the newspaper. It was obvious who was behind the fire at the convent, too. Could he have also started the fire that claimed Mina?
He was so lost in these grim musings that he barely registered the Hungarian girl flitting back into the café and rummaging for something behind the shrouded counter. She re-emerged, with a couple of sheets of paper in her hand.
‘There was a shelf in the back they called always Mina’s Shelf.’
Rex nodded. The younger Mina had probably kept her schoolbooks on it, since the café was where she’d sat every evening.
‘Boss cleared up it. But I think these were fell behind. I am going straight this afternoon to Hungary, so…’
She handed him the papers. They seemed of little importance. One was from London Metropolitan university: Getting Here For Your Interview. It made him sad to think of that – the girl with so much promise, heading excitedly to her new life, directions in hand, then taking a wrong turn. Or being pushed down one, by those she’d loved. He put the piece of paper in his pocket.
The second was a brochure for some sort of military-based weekend course. He remembered the army-run Fitness Classes for which Mina had had a schedule on her wall. The ‘training’ Navitsky had referred to, in preparation for her year in Turkey. This was a more serious version: it involved assault courses, target practice, evasive driving, hostile environments. Had Mina paid money to learn things like that? Because she’d been trying to protect herself? Perhaps he should be doing more to protect himself.
It was hard getting up the street, as always: double buggies, a bus-stop every ten yards, someone blocking the flow by having a chat or tying their shoelaces every twenty. If someone wanted to do him harm, they had ample opportunity here: a knife to the guts, a gunman on a motorbike, a car that didn’t stop. Then again, such opportunities were available all the time, and so far no one had taken them. Was it just a warning, then, the death notice in the paper? It was possible, but what about the fire at the convent? That could so easily have claimed lives.
He forced himself to keep moving, keep focussing on the positives. He’d cracked a big story. No one would try anything at the moment, too obvious, too visible. The cops were looking. And Helena was due back at tea-time.
In her last message she’d expressed a longing for traditional food, so he’d booked a table at Kytherea, a Cypriot place in the unlikely suburban dinge of Winchmore Hill. It was considered so authentic that the Cyprus High Commission ran a monthly staff shuttle-bus up from their headquarters in SW1. He felt hungry at the thought of it. And of her.
At the reception desk Brenda appeared to be hosting a coffee morning. There were flapjacks out, mugs from the kitchen, and Lawrence was making a pair of unidentified stout old ladies roar with laughter. They all went quiet when Rex came in. One of the pair, he realised, was Jean, lately of the council.
‘Vonda and I wanted to see you,’ Jean said, delicately wiping crumbs from her mouth with an embroidered hanky. ‘So we thought, while we’re in town…’
They sat on the awkward foam blocks, next to a plant that looked artificial, but apparently wasn’t.
‘We read your piece about the Inquest into Bilal’s death,’ said Vonda, who was taller and a little younger than her neighbour, with a Bohemian look comprised of long scarves, craft jewellery and vivid nails. ‘And it’s wrong.’
Jean nudged her. ‘What we mean is, we spotted a few things.’ She removed a little notebook from her handbag, polished her glasses, and began. ‘The second time you mention Eve Reilly, you call her Eva.’
‘Oh. I’m sorry. That’s the kind of thing our sub-editor is usually good at rooting out,’ said Rex, looking directly at Brenda. ‘I’ll make sure it’s corrected before the print edition’s out on Friday.’
‘Also, she’s not 33,’ Vonda said. ‘You got that off the Labour Party website. She’s 36. I know that because of that Guardian profile where she said she was “born in the year of Blair Peach, Maggie and the Iranian Revolution”.’ She snorted. ‘Looks 45 with that new hair anyway.’
‘She won’t be getting your vote, I take it.’
‘I’m an anarchist,’ Vonda said, adjusting her bright green cardie. ‘Ever since the ’68 sit-in at Hornsey Art School. I was there, darling. And Jean’s Conservative.’ She returned to the subject of Eve Reilly. ‘And she was rude to Jean on that walkabout thing in Shopping City. Wasn’t she, Jean, rude to you in the Costa?’ She looked at Rex. ‘Before you got there, that was.’
‘Quite the different lady when the world’s press aren’t around,’ confirmed Jean. Rex thought he detected a touch of irony.
He thanked them for dropping by, and they, for their part, thanked Brenda for the flapjacks. But a certain troubled look remained on Vonda’s face, and just as she was leaving, she added: ‘Can you settle an argument? When it’s a thing like an Inquest, do you copy down every word, in shorthand or something, or record it?’
‘A mixture of th
e two. I make sure any quotes or direct references are accurate.’
‘So she did say she’d been going “up” the road then. How odd.’ She smiled. ‘I suppose it depends on what your “up” and your “down” are, doesn’t it? My… sort of chap – Wilf – lives in Effingham Road. And he says he cycles up into Islington. I’d call it down, wouldn’t you?’
‘Well, erm…’
Fortunately Vonda didn’t seem interested in a reply; she headed off towards the delights of Wood Green, arm-in-arm with Jean, her unlikely friend. Rex went upstairs, bothered by the encounter without quite knowing why. Was it what they’d said about Eve Reilly being rude on her walkabout? He hadn’t been there, of course, when that had happened. But had there been other things about that day that he’d missed?
Until the police made their intentions plain over the council revelations, there wasn’t much to be written up. For a while he concentrated on the print version of Bilal’s death, discovery and inquest, sourcing, with a private nod to Vonda, a particularly unflattering photo of Eve Reilly in her new hairdo.
After a short briefing with Ellie, he then went out to cover a lighter, local tale, involving an artisan bakery near Priory Park, at the middle-class end of his turf. Someone had painted YUPPIES OUT on their windows, the third such assault on themselves and the trendy beer shop next door. The police maintained it was the work of bored local kids. Rex’s view, expressed to vigorous agreement from the tattooed, baffled young baker, was that no one under 40 even knew what a yuppie was. He left, with a warm, delicious-smelling loaf in a paper bag, and headed up the hill to visit his wife.
Sybille seemed flushed, and dry mouthed, although Rex wasn’t sure if that was from the effects of the smoke, or just from being in the Whittington hospital for 24 hours. She was in one piece, at any rate, but it was sad to see her stuck in her bedroom, surrounded by cardboard boxes, when she’d been enjoying the garden room so much. The fire and water damage, Sister Florence had said sadly, meant it was unlikely Sybille would get to spend more time in her favourite room before she left. And that point was now approaching with inexorable speed. Aurelie had rung that morning to say she’d managed to change the bookings. She was coming two days earlier now. On Thursday.