by John Barlow
John takes the page, flattens it out on the desk.
There’s a small photo of Lanny Bride looking preppy and surprisingly young in a dark suit and good-boy hair: Bride Takes On The High Street.
“I don’t even want to read this shit,” John says, wishing he had a cigarette.
“He’s bought a chain.”
“I thought he preferred piano wire.”
“Yeah, funny. Listen, Lanny’s changed. After last year, y’know.”
Last year, Lanny’s estranged daughter was killed. John found the bloke who did it. Everything changed last year. It was a mess. All of it.
“He hardly knew her,” says John.
“He went mental, you told me.”
“Funny, the guy who did it is still alive, far as I know.”
Freddy nods vigorously. “Exactly.”
“Exactly my arse. Lanny’s an evil bastard.”
Freddy stubs a finger on the newspaper. “Think about it.”
“I’d rather not.”
“The old Lanny? He had burger places, bars, lap dancing, amusements, car washes… He’s got rid of the lot. It’s all imports from China now. You know how much he’s worth? Lanny doesn’t need to be dodgy, not now. Word is, if you’ve got form he doesn’t want to know you any more. He’s kosher.”
John shakes his head. He’s known Lanny Bride since they were kids. Lanny used to hang around the old showroom. He was best mates with Joe, the two of them like a couple of yelping dogs waiting to be let off the lead, loving every minute of it. By the time they were fifteen they’d abandoned school and were running their own jobs. Thieving mainly, small stuff. But disciplined. They did things properly, planned everything, never got caught. And Lanny was the one, he was always going be the star. Smarter, quicker, nastier. Men like him? It’s in their blood. They don’t do kosher. They can’t.
“I’ll read this later,” John says, gathering the various bits of the Post off the floor and reassembling them, then stuffing the newspaper into his jacket pocket.
“Outlets,” Freddy says. “That’s what he’s bought. Chain of outlets.”
“What the hell’s an outlet?”
Freddy smiles. “You see? You’re out of date, mate.”
“Forget that. What about last night?” John says, pulling his chair a bit closer. He looks over his shoulder. Connie is still outside, huddled over her phone. “Did you see Roberto?”
“Last night? Yeah. Why?”
“When was the last time you saw him? And let’s have the truth, eh? Then we’ll have no bother.”
Freddy shifts in his seat. “I’m in there til about nine,” he says, low voice, no nonsense.
“Where you go before that?”
“Last night? Left here at six, had a few in town, couple a lads I used to play footy with. They were going off to meet their girlfriends, so I go get a burger up next to the Park Lane. I call in after that, eight-ish, or a bit after. Had a few, y’know.”
“Who served you?”
“What the fuck is this!”
“Rob’s dead. Someone killed him at the Park Lane last night.”
For a second or two Freddy stops breathing. He looks like someone shot him through the heart.
“Lanny doesn’t want the police involved,” John continues. “He’s asked me to find out who did it. And at the moment, my friend, it looks like you’re in the frame.”
It takes a while for Freddy to react. He sits back in his chair, face gradually screwing up as he tries to make sense of it all. Twenty-two years old? He could be fifty.
“Not a word to anybody,” says John, getting up. “Get your thinking cap on. Everybody you saw last night. Times, names, whatever you can remember. Don’t write it down. I’ll give you a call.”
Freddy nods slowly.
Outside, Connie is perched on one of the high stools there, looking down Hope Road. It’s only a stone’s throw from the gleaming, high-rise city centre, but it could be another city entirely, another time, dull and uninviting, and more or less forgotten. Except Tony Ray’s Motors, that is. The new showroom is ludicrously modern, its twenty-foot-high glass frontage describing an elongated letter ‘S’ from left to right like a massive crystal snake. On one side, taking advantage of the overhang of the roof, are three small tables with stools, a place to take your complementary espresso or have a quiet fag.
“Everything all right?” she asks, offering him a cigarette.
“Fine.”
He lights up and they smoke a while in silence, staring at the long purple shadow cast at an angle down the road from the nearest of the city’s new skyscrapers, just a hundred yards away.
One thing you get with Connie, apart from the occasional English non-sequitur, is discretion; if you don’t want to talk about something, she won’t ask. Her dad was a crook, but she went to Madrid Business School. She probably acquired a bit of discretion from both.
John gets the Yorkshire Post from his pocket, wrestling with the pages until he finds the business section. Flattening the paper out on the table, he tries to ignore the photo of a sneering-smiling Lanny as he reads:
Bride Takes On The High Street
The sale of Yorkwright Holdings to Leeds based businessman Lanny Bride was finally approved this week, after three months of negotiations. The sale includes the Gear Depot clothes stores, some thirty in the north of England and Scotland. Several of Yorkwright’s former shareholders were said to be uncomfortable about selling the company to Bride, who has long been associated with the region’s criminal world.
Bride, who has never been charged with any crime, has spent the past three years in Malta, the base for his thriving import business, supplying the European retail sector with Chinese goods. Now he has returned to England to oversee his most ambitious project yet, a plan to bring his new budget fashion stores to one hundred and fifty British high streets within five years. With his extensive contacts in the East, few would bet against him.
The takeover will be officially announced at Stamforth Golf Club’s annual Pro-Am golf tournament tomorrow…
“You seen that?” he says, watching as the newspaper is taken up on the evening breeze, before fluttering down between them.
“El Padrino,” says Connie, watching the loose sheets as they come to rest on the floor next to her, and placing a foot on them.
“Eh?”
She stubs out her cigarette, then bends down to gather up the papers.
“The Godfather. The second film,” she says, screwing the paper into a ball. “Michael Corleone promises his wife that the family will be completely legal in five years.”
“I’m glad Lanny hasn’t taken everybody in.”
She turns, admiring herself in the perfect curvature of the glass.
“I don’t care about Lanny Bride. I had enough of that growing up. You too, I bet. This is my business now. Ours. We make good money and we sleep at night. No?”
She flicks her head back a fraction until she’s happy with the lie of her mass of slightly chaotic, jet black hair. With that she returns to the showroom, not waiting for an answer. Which is just as well. Something tells John that Lanny Bride is going to be very prominent in his thoughts for the next few days. And that’s never a good thing.
The shock of death has worn off by now, replaced by a penetrating sense of inevitability, a full-bodied weariness in the knowledge that he’s been dragged back into all this. He reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out Roberto’s wallet, wonders what the hell he’s going to do.
The wallet is thick, the leather worn and stretched. There’s a driver’s licence and a security pass for the underground parking at his flat. Roberto Swales was his full name. No credit cards, just a wad of cash. Mr Swales was old style. John goes through everything twice, but it’s mainly receipts and cards for cabs and food delivery companies. Then, right at the back, pushed down so far that it’s stuck into the seem of the leather, is a smaller card, thinner than the others. The Ministry of Eternal Hope. What is
that?
The address on the card is Roundhay Road, a few miles out of town by the look of it. The address doesn’t sound familiar. The Ministry, though, that definitely sounds familiar.
He looks behind him, sees the silver Porsche sitting there in the showroom, sleek and beautiful yet vaguely ridiculous, a symbol of everything that had gone wrong with his life last year. He doesn’t even enjoy driving the bloody thing. It just sits there, depreciating rapidly.
But now he’s got a reason to drive it.
“Freddy,” he shouts, walking back inside, the glass doors sliding silently open for him. “Chuck us the keys for the 911, will you?”
“Eh? You never drive the Porsche…”
“Yeah,” he shouts over his shoulder as he grabs Jeanette’s MacBook from the Saab, “but I’m going to see someone who hates my guts. I need the wheels of a real pimped-up prodigal son.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Gaiety Bar, just out of town on the north side, had in fact been five separate public bars topped off with a futuristic double-peaked concrete roof. Built in the 60s, it was a symbol of the regeneration of the sprawling urban landscape, modern and optimistic, two fingers to the city’s dour, monochrome past.
By the late 70s the gloss had started to come off the Gaiety. Peter Sutcliffe picked up his second victim outside the front door, leaving her on waste ground nearby, her head smashed in with a hammer and fifty-two stabs to the body. A decade after that, by the time the Yorkshire Ripper was locked away in Broadmoor, the Gaiety had become infested with petty drug dealers. It was boarded up in 1990. England’s post-war dream played out and extinguished.
Across the road from the Gaiety was The Ministry of Eternal Hope, housed in a shop on the end of a Victorian terrace. A registered church, but more of a hub of moral activism, the Ministry kept up a constant battle against the rising tide of filth in the city. Wherever there was a drugs raid, at the Gaiety or anywhere else, the Ministry would be there, mounting a peaceful picket outside until the press arrived and took up the crusade. They successfully pressurized the council into closing down several pubs and clubs, and in the window of their premises they displayed blurred photographs of local drug dealers at work.
Members of the Ministry also patrolled Water Lane and the Calls at night, trying to persuade the girls working the streets to stop, offering hot drinks and the promise of shelter; on Friday nights they would take down the details of cars crawling the area, and distribute fliers in the city centre the following morning, listing the model, colour and number plate of every car under the title Where Were You At Midnight? They were fearless, in-your-face campaigners, moral militants before it was fashionable. And they inevitably got their message across. Because who was going to argue with them?
Back then the man in charge was Minister Len Holt, tall and lanky with thinning, combed-back hair that gave him the appearance of a reformed Dracula. He was rarely out of the papers, this self-styled spokesman of decency, the kind of person who’d cross the road to reprimand youngsters for smoking or dropping litter, who’d confront thugs and drug pushers wherever they loitered, in the unshakeable knowledge that he was right, as if the protecting hand of the Lord hovered over him.
It wasn’t just the Lord, either. Holt had a direct line to the Deputy Chief Constable; one word from the Minister and you’d find yourself hauled down to Millgarth waiting for a duty lawyer to show up and hoping for the best. In those days Minister Holt was as much of an institution in Leeds as Tony Ray.
Where the Gaiety once stood there is now a community centre. John passes it as he makes his way up Roundhay Road. He glances across to the other side of the road, where the Ministry once stood. That’s gone too, like most of what he knew down here, close to the city. Within sight of the community centre there is now a mosque, so large and sumptuous that it seems to look down on the tightly huddled terraces of red brick houses with benign authority, as if it’s been there forever.
He continues up the hill out of town. This is the old Leeds, the one that still resonates with him, for all its faults, the vibrancy and implied hope of a place constantly in the process of renewal, where immigrants feel at home. Up here the temples and mosques seem no more out of place than St Aidan’s church, and probably do better business. When you walk past a grocer’s you always spot at a least one vegetable that is completely unknown to you. Over on Chapeltown Road the old synagogue is now a dance studio, and the Polish Health Centre has been given a whole new lease of life; those few remaining Poles from the post-War wave of immigration, on hearing the streets full of young people speaking Polish again, must wonder whether they’ve been miraculously transported back to Warsaw.
He comes to a stretch of the road lined on both sides with three-story red brick terraces. The buildings themselves are shabby and slightly crooked, as if their vertebrae are worn, their joints achy and undependable. But they also manage to be dignified relics of a bustling Victorian past, and the businesses they house, Punjaab Jewellers, Hasseen Exclusive Wear, Kaspian Hair and Beauty, are colourful, modern renditions of what would have been here three, four, five generations ago.
He exhales, immediately feeling at ease here, where the slow creep towards dilapidation is masked by vibrant, home-made shop signs. And behind each one, he knows, will be an immigrant trying to make a living, getting by on whatever they’ve got, just like his own father had done when he arrived in the city half a century ago. John’s probably eaten in every restaurant and cafe around here, from African to Bangladeshi, Kurdish to Caribbean, and every time he does he thanks God for immigrants. Without them Britain would still be eating boiled cabbage and gravy.
He slows down, reads the card from Roberto’s wallet again: The Ministry of Eternal Hope. But when he double-checks the address, there’s a Halal butchers. He parks up and gets out, looks around. The street is familiar but different, as if it’s put on new clothes; there’s a new pawn brokers, a boutique, a Polish convenience store…
Then he sees the nameplate on the door. The Ministry is exactly where it is supposed to be: upstairs, right above the butchers. They must have fallen on hard times, because this is definitely not a step up in the world for the eternal hopers.
He rings the bell. Not the best time to be calling. Worth a try, though. Andrew Holt’s shift will have finished at the home, and where else is a prick like him going to spend Friday night?
A crackly intercom buzzes into life.
“Yes?”
It’s him.
“John Ray here. To see Andrew Holt.”
A pause. On the street behind him a bus passes, the rumble of its engine tapering away almost to nothing before Holt answers.
“Come on up.”
The hallway is cramped but neat, on the walls several posters for prayer meetings and support groups; no mugshots of local badboys, though. A sweet smell hangs in the air, pleasant enough, but not what one might expect in a place that claims to be a ministry. He takes the stairs two at a time. Who’s to say a church shouldn’t smell of pot pourri?
“Not the person I expected to see here,” says Holt, standing in the doorway that gives directly onto the top of the stairs. “Welcome.”
He’s as tall as his father was, but not as imposing, the fire of righteousness replaced by something lukewarm and vaguely unimpressive. He moves aside, allowing John to enter.
The room is large, two rooms knocked into one, and there’s an air of institutional homeliness, right down to the old cooker at the back with a large metal teapot on it.
“You know what this reminds me of,” John says, noticing that the smell of flowers has been replaced by the faint whiff of joss sticks, “the old common room at school. You remember it?”
Holt smiles. “That’s what this is, really,” he says, indicating the scattering of old armchairs and sagging sofas. “A common room. We talk, and share. More of a meeting place than a church.”
“Less fire and brimstone than in your dad’s day, then?”
Imme
diately he wishes he hadn’t said it. The original Ministry burned to the ground about ten years ago. Len Holt died of a heart attack a day after the blaze.
“Yes, I suppose so. Less brimstone,” he says, still smiling. “The Church of Less Brimstone. We should use that on our posters. You want to sit?”
The two of them take a couple of beaten up armchairs in the middle of the room, the springs so loose that John finds himself staring at his knees and wondering how he’ll ever get up again.
“I’m afraid you can’t smoke in here,” says Holt.
“You caught me this morning! Very occasional smoker, I am,” John lies. For the past year he’s been getting through a packet a day, and hawking up a basinful of acrid phlegm every morning for his trouble. If the phlegm turns from yellow to green, he cuts down to half a pack.
They sit a while, riding the silence, letting things settle. But then it’s over.
“So,” Holt says, like a doctor waiting to hear a patient’s ailments.
“So,” says John, “this is, what, like a drop-in centre? Could a person come here if he was feeling, I dunno, confused, or low, or didn’t know where else to go?”
The question surprises Holt. His expression brightens.
“Yes, exactly that. Technically we’re still a church. But these days it’s more a matter of reaching out. Anybody, any faith, any background or predicament. If you… I mean, are you…”
“No, no, not me,” John says, quickly getting that misapprehension out of the way. The sudden spark of delight fades from Holt’s face as he realises that he’s not about to become John Ray’s father-confessor. “I’m looking for somebody.”
“We’re all looking for somebody.”
Holt says it with the same assuredness that his dad used to have, his words enunciated with a calm, unfailing purpose. It irritates John, like it always has, a person who knows they are right, the absence of doubt, of any questioning. But for as long as he can remember he’s also harboured a nagging respect for the Holts, father and son, the fact that they have stood so resolutely behind their beliefs, often in the face of danger. There’s something admirable in a person who’s willing to do that, something good and courageous, however big a tool they are.