Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘Your mate in Millbank could have texted me that,’ Rex said.

  Eve Reilly shrugged. ‘Take it or leave it. I’m busy campaigning, Mr Tracey, not crowing over the opposition’s misfortunes.’

  ‘Fair point.’ He remembered her recent efforts at campaigning, and how they’d turned out. It can’t have been a high point, finding a body – and not long after witnessing Mina’s death. He put his pen away. Something else struck him – something odd that Vonda had said.

  ‘Did you say you’d been working your way up Effingham Road when you found Bilal Toprak?’

  She frowned. ‘What’s this got to do with the council?’

  ‘Nothing at all. Off the record. I just wondered.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, staring at him. ‘Up.’

  ‘So ‘up’, as in, from the Green Lanes end towards Wightman Road?’

  ‘What other “up” is there?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. People have odd ideas about that sort of thing.’

  ‘Some seem to,’ she replied drily. He laughed at that, and she smiled faintly back. ‘Is there anything else?’

  ‘No,’ he said, standing up. A framed photo stood on a shelf right by his head. Young people in huge, padded parkas, binoculars, somewhere rocky and desolate. A flag flew on a low, white building. ‘Norway?’ he asked, as he pulled his coat on.

  ‘Vardo. A university expedition.’

  ‘Funny place for the PPE undergrads.’

  ‘I didn’t study Politics, Philosophy and Economics, Mr Tracey,’ she said, holding the door open for him. ‘I didn’t go to Oxford. Or Cambridge. I’m the only child of a single mum who worked nights in a sweet factory so she could afford the rent. It’s been covered in a lot of interviews. Maybe you should read one. Maybe you should interview me, properly, about why I believe in what I do, why I want to work for the people of this area, instead of just chucking my name in your paper whenever someone dies.’

  ‘We should run a profile,’ he said. ‘You’re right. And I’m sorry about… the way I was at the Inquest. It must have been a grim experience for you.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me. What made me angry was all these people making out the verdict was some sort of scandal. It’s disrespectful. Whatever it looked like, the science gave us the answers. Bilal Toprak was overweight, he had diabetes, high blood pressure, a recent bang on the head. I don’t know what else people wanted to make of it.’

  He held up his hands. ‘You’re preaching to the choir. I saw him when the club collapsed, remember? I heard he was pretty agitated afterwards, as well.’

  She nodded, distractedly, then seemed to tune in, frowned. ‘Who from?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You said – just before – you said you’d heard he was agitated.’

  ‘Oh. He seems to have gone into the Bosphorus supermarket, not long before he died. The girl serving there recognised him. Perhaps he was looking for answers.’

  ‘Answers about what?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘I’m guessing he wanted to know more about what happened when the building fell down. He couldn’t ask in the café, because it was…’ He trailed off. She was staring at him, but at the same time, seemed to be somewhere else. He waved a finger at her. She snapped out of it.

  ‘Sorry. Yes.’ She rubbed her forehead. ‘I was just thinking that would have been helpful at the Inquest. Anyway. It’s over. We know what happened. I just wish people would shut up about it now. I mean – if it had been some kind of robbery, they’d have stolen his laptop, wouldn’t they? Or his phone?’

  ‘You saw them there?’

  She nodded. ‘I didn’t notice them at the time but… I did yesterday.’

  ‘Yesterday?’

  She bit her lip. ‘I’m afraid I went back and looked through the front window. I don’t know why. Pay my respects, I guess.’ She shook her head, briskly. ‘Anyway, it was all there. I guess the family haven’t got round to clearing it up yet.

  * * *

  The bus that took him back towards Green Lanes was a regularly-threatened, ferociously-defended hopper called the W5, manned by motherly ladies who dished out lollipops to the younger travellers once a month. The rest of the time, as the little back-street buses soared up and down the hills like some Hebridean community outreach service, the drivers helped people on with their pushchairs, went extra-slow for the old people, and generally set about restoring people’s faith in humanity, in the city, and particularly in the city’s bus drivers.

  It was a pleasant journey back, with the little ones whooping on the steeper descents, and the odd, unexpected, dramatic view of Ally Pally gleaming on the hill like a fake Montmartre. He got off at the Arena retail park, normally a soul-sucking experience, with a certain glow. Then again, his pills had just kicked in.

  Effingham Road, guarded at its eastern end by a Greek baker’s and a Turkish jewellers, snaked from the Lanes back up the hills he’d just ridden down. There was, as Eve Reilly had said, no way to describe that route, other than ‘up’. He wondered what Vonda had been getting at. Perhaps she’d swallowed something during the 1968 Hornsey Art College Revolution, and never truly returned to earth.

  He had the idea of copying Eve Reilly and peering through Bilal’s window, just to see what was there. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to do it: a mawkish trace in him, perhaps, or else a sense of something still not quite right about the affair.

  Today, a wiry lady with short hair and a thick gold necklace was moving around the front room with a bin-bag. She looked up – he waved – she frowned and shook her head, turned her back. He rang the doorbell. Eventually, on the third ring, she answered it, chain on, wary. She relaxed a little when he showed her his press card.

  She was Cemile, she said, Bilal’s oldest sister. Her mum, who’d lost a son and a husband in one week, wasn’t getting out of bed. Nor was her own husband, but that was nothing new, she added darkly.

  ‘How did Bilal seem to you?’ he asked. ‘Before he died?’

  She shrugged. ‘He was upset. We were all upset because of our dad. That was normal.’

  ‘Of course. And he wanted answers, I guess.’

  ‘Answers?’

  ‘He went to some lengths to talk to the people who own the café opposite the club. They said he seemed quite troubled.’

  Cemile considered this, then nodded, slowly. ‘I didn’t know that. But yes, he would have seemed quite troubled. He was.’

  She started to take the chain off the door. Rex felt a tiny stirring of hope. Or perhaps dread. Was there something she wanted to share?

  ‘While you’re here, would you mind helping me get his desk out? If I leave it out the front there’s some boys on Freecycle who’ll take it away.’

  He went in behind Cemile. The place festooned with bin bags and cardboard boxes, reminding him of Sybille’s packed-up room and then, inevitably of death. Bilal had a desk in his living room and a tiny, joyless sofa. A man who always seemed to be working, even when he wasn’t working.

  The desk was solid, as Bilal had been. Despite the difference in physique, Cemile had the same manner as her brother, too: a kind of melancholy heaviness, like a piece of Ottoman furniture in a museum. Like the thing they were trying to shift, in fact, and couldn’t. They needed to take the drawers out. On doing so, they realised they were still stuffed with papers.

  ‘More binbags,’ she said, with a heavy sigh, wiping her hands on her sparkly black t-shirt. She looked around, tutted. ‘The roll’s upstairs.’ She went out.

  At the top of a box of things balanced on the sofa, was Bilal’s laptop. Eve Reilly had been right, Rex thought – if the man’s death had been motivated by robbery or political skulduggery, the laptop would surely have gone. While Cemile moved about upstairs, and then shouted in Turkish at someone, presumably the absent husband, on her phone, he had, and dismissed, the idea of firing up the lap-top. Then he saw the phone, slipped down the side of the box. He pulled it out. He switched it on. It came to life w
ith agonising slowness, while Cemile’s harangue continued upstairs. The battery was low.

  With the feeling that he was doing something very wrong indeed, he looked at the call menu. It revealed little: Mum, Cemile, Dentist, Eric Work, Eric Mobile, Eric Home, a couple of mobile numbers not attached to names. Rex moved on to the texts.

  There was a conversation between Bilal and Mina. Initiated by her, dated around six weeks back.

  Gf’s bro wx in Plan Off. Heard some things. U OK?

  With a thumping heart, he decoded it. Mina had found out about the corruption in the council via her girlfriend, Kyretia Pocock, sister of Ashley.

  There were too many back and forth messages to read, but as Rex scrolled inefficiently upwards, a few more struck him as important.

  Mina to Bilal: Cant act as lawyr. Nor K. Not qfd. But can read and advise.

  Mina to Bilal, again, 12th of March – just before she’d vanished. Now need yr help. Need swhre to stay. Safe. PLEASE.

  And another transmission, from Wednesday the 19th of March, two days before she died. OK. Sitting tight. Have you done it yet?

  And the last, on the day of her death; not a message, just a shortened URL. He clicked on it, unwisely, just as Cemile began to come down the stairs.

  He dithered, as the speech Mina had posted on YouTube began to run on the little screen. He pushed buttons, clicked away, trying frantically to turn the thing off. Just in time, he realised the obvious course of action.

  Noisily, he helped Bilal’s sister empty the drawers into bin bags, and to haul the great oak desk down the hall, all the while trusting that the phone he’d just stolen wouldn’t fall out of his back pocket, and that Cemile wouldn’t hear the tinny little voice seemingly coming from his backside. Then as they were up-ending the desk in the doorway, the phone died.

  By way of the area’s most obliging phone accessories vendor, he headed home to plug the thing in. It didn’t fire up immediately, just got stuck on a cheery, blue logo, forever saying ‘Welcome’ but never letting him in. He took deep breaths, trying not to lose his temper. He had knackered dozens of laptops and phones himself, merely from losing patience with them.

  Could this phone hold the key to Mina’s death? It seemed to imply that she’d helped Bilal – as Eric Miles had guessed – providing legal advice while he compiled his explosive dossier. Then, as she came under threat – from her uncle, it seemed – Mina had called the favour back. Bilal had found her somewhere safe to stay. But someone had found out. Or betrayed her. Who was that? Could it have been Bilal himself?

  At last the phone came to life, re-starting on the recording it had crashed on: Mina, in front of the shabby blind in her Sky City refuge. It was still in the opening seconds of her speech, before she got into her stride, hesitantly but with gathering force discussing the dashed hopes for a ceasefire in Turkey, the tragically vain sacrifices of her Kurdish sisters.

  He was so used to hearing the speech, had played it so many times, on screens and in his head, that he almost stopped listening. It was only when Mina coughed that his attention returned to the words she was speaking, when he realised that the speech – this section of it, at any rate – was different from the version he’d heard before.

  ‘I’ve been involved in the political process since an early age. I went round leafleting when I was 14. More recently, I’ve been heavily involved in student politics as Diversity Officer for the Union. But I’m abandoning the political process now, I’m saying goodbye to democracy. Those of you who ask why may find at least some of the answers in Harringay and Tottenham Council, and the events that I know are about to take place there, the shockwaves that will follow. They, and my experiences on a Student Union dominated by people only preparing for high office in the countries of their birth, have led me, as a woman and a Kurd, to realise that the only true, honest struggle is one achieved by…’

  Although the counter said there were two more minutes, the frame stuttered, vanished, returned to the main menu of the cloud server site. He cursed, jabbed at a few buttons in irritation. Nothing happened. He pressed a few more. Instead of returning to the website, the phone took him back to the texts. Where, for the first time, he noticed a conversation between Bilal and someone not named, just a number. It was a number he knew very well. Just a string of digits, that kicked him in the chest.

  Suddenly, his urgent desire to see the final minutes of Mina’s true, hidden internet speech, vanished. It – and the questions it raised, such as who had edited it, and why – could all wait. And one thing could not. Because, he realised as he leaned back on his kitchen chair totting up all the question marks of the past few days, he had found Bilal Toprak’s killer.

  Did the truth, as Maureen and St Paul promised, set him free? It depressed him immeasurably, he knew that. He went back to work, mainly because he couldn’t stand to be alone with it.

  * * *

  Half an hour later he was penning an advertorial about the fabulous new dining and socialising opportunities opening up on the west side of Shopping City. Someone was clearing out the vacant units and replacing them with the ‘Tokyo Quarter’: a floorful of raw fish, karaoke, computer-gaming arcades and a ‘traditional Izakaya’, whatever that was.

  He sighed as he got stuck in to the briefing notes. Had he been in one of the nuns’ endless TV shows, he’d have segued straight from his kitchen to an assignation down some alleyway. Instead, he was back at the s: Haringey offices, listening to Lawrence nosily wolfing down a prawn baguette and neurotically checking his phone every few seconds.

  And if you fancy sake, instead of the same old Sauvignon…

  His phone rang while he cringed at the sentence he’d just penned. He closed his eyes.

  ‘Helena.’

  ‘Sorry. I missed your call. I didn’t hear the phone. Where are you? Are you all right, Rex? What’s happened? You didn’t come last night, I couldn’t get hold of you, I was worried…’

  He had to shout to get her to stop. ‘Let’s meet,’ he said. ‘I’ll explain. Can you be at my house in half an hour?’

  ‘What are you going to say?’ Her voice trembled. He hated himself.

  ‘Not here. I’ll see you in half an hour.’

  He started packing up his things. Everything else could wait. Everything else, it seemed, except Lawrence, who was lurking at the side of his desk giving off a faint, fishy smell.

  ‘Absolutely no need to interruptitate yourself with this now,’ he said, placing a sheet of paper on Rex’s desk. ‘Just thought it might be of interest.’

  Rex found himself looking, in spite of himself, and while trying to retroactively un-hear Lawrence’s use of interruptitate. It was a German newspaper article, topped off with a picture of a crumpled car and a mugshot of a rather pleasant-looking Turkish bloke. He waited for Lawrence to provide some interpretation.

  ‘Seems this chap was a hitman for a number of crime groups – rumoured to have carried out the odd one for the PKK, too. You know, the Kurdish thingummy.’

  ‘So what’s happened? He crashed his car?’

  ‘No, he’s just gone on trial for making someone else crash their car. That was his speciality, you see. Death by vehicle.’

  * * *

  When she arrived he was looking at a map of Cyprus – in particular at a town on the northern coast, in the part now owned – or stolen – by the Turks. It had two names, as many places did on that island. The Greeks called it Lepithos. To the Turks, it was Lapta. When she arrived, achingly pretty with a bit of damp blossom in her hair, she glanced at the screen and her face fell.

  ‘It’s bit like riding your bike down a hill, don’t you think? That whole business – fancying someone. Liking them. Starting to feel like you’re falling for them…’

  He wished he hadn’t asked the question because she nodded, half-eager, half-unsure.

  ‘It’s dangerous. You can end up in a heap at the bottom. Worse than that, though, you can not realise that your tyres are knackered. Broken,’ he added
, to her puzzled face. ‘You’re going so fast, that things whizz by – all these little things you ought to notice, but you don’t.’

  She hadn’t even taken her coat off. He wondered if he should be more hospitable, offer her tea and so on, but that, surely, would be a kind of insult.

  ‘I should have noticed that you said all your meetings here, with the Greeks, were in their church. You told me twice. And yet when I met you down Lawrence Road, near Toprak’s factory, you said you were looking for the community centre.

  ‘I should have realised that the champagne you bought me, it wasn’t some special one from a Cambridge college, it’s just called Trinity Hall. You can buy it in Morrison’s.’

  ‘I didn’t know that either!’ she said. ‘I came out of the college, went over the road to a shop and there was the champagne. I thought it was the college champagne. I was in Cambridge. I didn’t lie. I went to Cambridge.’

  ‘OK. Maybe you did. But you were still lying about what you were doing, pretending you were doing your old job. Lying to everyone. Including me.’ She made no response to that, so he carried on. ‘I couldn’t understand it – that time I suggested we go out, instead of coming here, and you accused me of trying to keep you away, of having secrets. Because you see, people often do that. I’ve seen it a lot, in my line of work, but I couldn’t see it, when it came to you. You thought I had secrets because you did.’

  She still said nothing. Her lips twitched, as if she might be about to speak, or cry, but nothing happened. He didn’t want this, this long brow-beating, him angry, her silent. He’d have preferred her to throw something, slap him, shout, deny it, argue. He’d have preferred never to have met her.

  ‘One of the other things I noticed, but didn’t pay enough attention to, was how you ran away when Bilal and his father showed up at the meeting. And then how long you stared at that photograph of Kemal and his friends, on the coffee shop wall. Because they were the Siyah Tilki, weren’t they? The Black Foxes. The unit that everyone feared and loathed. After the war, many of them moved to Trabzon, where the government gave them nice jobs, in the police. But during the war, they murdered Greeks, and they raped women and girls. Kemal and your parents came from the same town, didn’t they? Lapta. Lepithos. And you found out that it was Kemal Toprak who murdered your mother’s husband, the father of your brothers, and who raped your mother, in 1974. Kemal was your father. So you came here, to find him. Maybe you meant to kill him, but the bent council did the job for you. Then maybe you went for Bilal instead. Perhaps you only meant to talk to him but it got out of hand. I know you went to his house, to see him, on the day he died. I’ve seen the texts, Helena.’