by Debi Alper
I had no choice but to let him go.
I took the phone and punched in Mackay’s number. He told me they had contacted Philip Courtney as Della’s next of kin, but he hadn’t seen Della for ten years – at which time his sister had been a bloke called Derek. He wanted to contact someone who had known Della. The cops had told him about me, but procedure prevented them from giving him my number. They’d told him they would pass his details on. It would be up to me if I wanted to take it any further. Mackay gave me an out-of-London number.
I dialled. The phone was answered by a child’s voice.
‘Hello. Who’s this?’
I circumvented the question. ‘I’m a friend of your uncle who’s now your auntie except she’s dead’ would have been accurate, but a bit much for a four-year-old to handle.
‘Hello. Is your daddy there?’
‘Yes.’
I could still hear breathing on the other end. Kids are so literal.
‘Could you get him for me, please?’
‘OK.’
The phone clattered. The line went dead.
I sighed. Maybe it was an omen. I’d try again later. Or maybe I wouldn’t. I was just unpeeling myself from the cushions to check out the food situation when the phone rang. A slightly tremulous male voice spoke, in a middle-class accent.
‘Oh, hello. Did you just ring me? My son answered and accidentally cut off the call. I 1471’d it and got your number…’
I told him who I was. He seemed nervous and upset, but anxious to let me know he was grateful I had called. He explained, with much hesitation, that he and Derek – er – Della had lost contact not long after their parents had been killed in a car crash ten years earlier. I knew that Della had no visible source of income. She never seemed to work, but always had money. Reading between the lines, I guessed she had used part of the money she would have inherited to finance her gender change and Philip had been unable to accept his brother becoming his sister.
I could have been angry with him, but instead I felt sorry for him. He said he had no idea about Della’s lifestyle or who her friends were. He didn’t feel right about making ‘the, er, arrangements’ – which I took to be her funeral – in a way that would perhaps be inappropriate. I appreciated that. He sounded so different from my own family, and I liked the way he was trying so hard to get his mind and tongue round the name Della. We both knew how sad it was that she couldn’t have enjoyed that acceptance while she was alive. That’s the thing about death. You get no more chances to make things right.
I agreed to help as much as I could. Hell, I didn’t have much else on at the moment. The struggle against international fascism would just have to wait. He asked if I’d mind meeting him at Della’s flat. The cops had given him the keys, but I think he was too nervous to go in alone. I don’t know what he was expecting, some kind of Gothic horror show maybe. Or something pink and fluffy like Barbie’s boudoir. If he had really known Della, he would have realised her taste would be impeccable. I’d never been inside her flat either. But I knew Della.
26
I WOKE UP the next morning and guess what? Stan was gone, leaving nothing but crumpled sheets, a stack of notes on the pillow and a Post-it note saying Sorry. More than anything, I felt relief.
At 11.30 I chained my bike to the railings outside Della’s flat. As I did so, a tall, thin man wearing a Barbour unfolded himself from the driver’s seat of a Renault parked outside.
‘Hi, Philip. I’m Jenny.’ I smiled and held out my hand.
His grasp was loose, the contact brief. He blinked nervously as he withdrew his hand.
‘Shall we…?’ He indicated Della’s flat with a nod.
‘Sure,’ I replied. I followed him up the steps. He fumbled with the unfamiliar keys. Just as he produced the right one, the door opened and the same woman I had seen last time bounced out past us, laughing into a mobile phone.
Philip jumped and teetered on the top step. I steadied him with one hand and caught the door with the other. His hands were trembling, so I took the keys from him and opened the door to Della’s flat myself.
There was a soothing smell of jasmine. We walked straight into a large airy sitting room. The walls were hung with exquisite pieces of fabric patterned with scenes stitched in gold thread. Expensive rugs covered the polished-wood floor. The furniture was ancient mahogany, the settees thick and plush and covered with Indian embroidered throws. The effect was of a sumptuous sultan’s palace, yet was calm, comfortable and welcoming.
Philip Courtney drew his breath in sharply and looked around in wonder.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he breathed.
‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘And so was Della.’
He sank on to one of the settees.
‘Tell me about her,’ he begged. ‘Please.’
So I did. I told him about her inimitable style, her sense of fun, her wicked wit and her irresistible personality. I also told him about her fierce loyalty, her dignity, her unflagging respect for others and her intolerance of ignorance. I didn’t tell him I had also detected a deep vein of sadness in Della. You could see it in her eyes at unguarded moments. Or late at night, when the party was almost over and fatigue was kicking in. I didn’t tell him about that. I had no reason to make this man suffer more than he already was.
There were a couple of black and white studio photos of Della in heavy dark wooden frames on the mantelpiece. I reached them down and handed them over to her brother. It was a while before he could bring himself to look at them. He listened to me talk, darting quick glances at the photos and then jerking his gaze away, his features contorted with pain. When I finished speaking, he dropped his head and finally made the connection. He looked into the eyes of the sultry beauty who stared unflinchingly back at him. Did he see a thirties-style diva, pouting for the camera? Or did he see the younger brother he had shared a childhood with?
He answered my unspoken question by handing me a large brown envelope. I tipped out a dozen photos, family snaps from the early seventies. A laughing couple in a huge garden with two boys. The older, thin and serious-looking. The younger, posing for the camera, the sun bouncing off his halo of cascading curls. There were birthday parties, recording the stages in lives that no one could have predicted would end in the way they had. There was a school photo. The older boy, still solemn, aged about ten. The younger, about five, with an irresistible grin revealing a gummy gap where his front teeth would have been if the Tooth Fairy had delayed her arrival for a few more weeks.
I looked up and saw that Philip Courtney was crying. I envied him. I made tea in Della’s spotless kitchen, handling her bone-china mugs with infinite care. Philip sipped, hiccupped and wiped his eyes and nose on a white linen hanky. It had been years since I had seen one of them. My father used to use them. My mum would accumulate a week’s worth and then boil them on the stove in a pot she kept for the exclusive purpose – I’m glad to say. I swallowed bile with my tea.
Philip took a deep shuddering breath.
‘About the – er – arrangements…’ he murmured, gazing at his hands as they kneaded the hanky like a child with a security blanket. He told me that the results of the post-mortem showed that Della had died from septicaemia, which in turn had led to massive organ failure. He’d been informed that her body could now be released.
He looked up at me at last, his eyes pleading. For a hideous instant my focus shifted and Della’s eyes, almost identical, were superimposed over those of her brother as she lay in that bed and pleaded with me to end her life. I clamped my own eyes tight shut. When I opened them again, it was Philip Courtney’s eyes that met them.
‘I want to invite her friends,’ he said in a hoarse whisper. ‘But I don’t know…’
Here at last was a Courtney I could help. I suggested he get some posters together. I would distribute them around the clubs, pubs and cafés Della used to frequent. He said it would be no problem. ’I could scan in a photo too,’ he said with pathetic eagerness.
His eyes welled up again as he picked up the photo frames and hugged them to his chest.
‘This is so kind of you,’ he breathed.
I shrugged. I couldn’t stop Della dying. And I couldn’t help her to die either. But at least I could ensure all the people who loved her had the chance to give her the best damn funeral south London had ever seen.
We left together. Philip said he would carry on paying the rent on Della’s flat for the time being – until he had the stomach to dispose of her belongings. She had left no will – died intestate as they say. I smirked as I imagined the puns Della would have come up with about that. In theory, everything she owned now belonged to him. He wanted to be sure he enacted what would have been her will as far as possible. I would help him of course. As far as possible.
27
I WAS ABOUT to push my bike through my front door when Ali appeared. He must have been waiting for me.
‘Jen. Come,’ he demanded and turned on his heel, knowing I would follow him as he went into Nick and Robin’s.
I bit back a sarcastic ‘Hi, Ali. Fine, thanks, and how are you?’ I knew from literal experience the futility of banging your head against a brick wall.
We went into the kitchen, where Robin was sitting at the table, hunched over the laptop and sucking the end of his plait.
‘Jen. Jen,’ Robin blathered. ‘Come and take a look at this. It’s unbelievable.’
I sat down on the wooden bench next to him. Ali took up position standing behind us.
‘OK,’ Robin said, flicking his plait back over his shoulder. I dodged as it whistled past my nose. ‘So as you know, I was going in to check out the Net, to see if I could come up with anything useful about Koi Korner. You see, that’s how you use the Internet. You don’t really know what you’re looking for, but you search through looking for connections you might not have–’
‘Spare me the IT consultancy, Robin,’ I interrupted. ‘Just get to the point.’
‘OK. Ahem. Right.’ Robin wriggled on the bench. ‘So I went into a search engine and entered “Koi”. See?’
As he spoke, his fingers tapped the keys and the screen illustrated his words. Lists and brief descriptions of websites that included the word ‘koi’ in their title appeared.
‘OK,’ Robin said, floating the cursor arrow down the screen. ‘As you can see, this lot all look fishy – but only in the literal sense.’ He tittered. I clenched my teeth. ‘So,’ Robin continued, ‘I thought an outfit like Koi Korner would be bound to have a website, but it’s not there, right? So – bit of lateral thinking here, which after all is what net surfing is all about. What you do is…’
‘Ro-bin…’ I warned.
‘Oh. Right. OK. So I thought, how about initials? What if they decided they don’t want to hobnob with the usual koi polloi…’
I stifled a groan. From behind me I could hear the grinding of teeth as Ali sent out waves of restrained energy.
‘…so I typed in KK. OKK-KKK K-KK.’
‘Robin!’ I snapped.
This time he jumped. I clamped my feet on the floor as the bench tilted. His fingers hit the keys again. The screen dissolved and was replaced by another.
Who’d have thought there would be so many? There was KKE – Kidz Klubz England, promoting good spelling practice obviously not a priority for them; KKF – Kirk, Knapsford and Fitch, insurance brokers; KK Ingram – some guy who had a web page devoted to his poems… Robin scrolled down through the endless lists. I was losing patience.
‘Look. Is this going anywhere, Robin? Cos if not, I’ve got plenty…’
Ali cut me off with a restraining hand on my shoulder.
‘OK, OK, go on then,’ I sighed.
I looked at Robin. A few weeks ago, he would have boasted that he hardly ever touched anything that wasn’t natural. Now here he was, his fingers welded to the keyboard, his eyes riveted to the screen. Maybe we’d been right to be wary of this stuff. Maybe it did have the power to reach out and suck you in. On the other hand, if it had the power to confer power – in the form of knowledge – we couldn’t reject it outright. But so far there seemed to be precious little of that.
Robin continued scrolling, past Kinky Kettles and Kick KFC, and then it was there. At the bottom of the screen, the little arrow hovered and pointed at another K. Robin clicked and it was highlighted. KKK – the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
I sucked in my breath sharply.
Robin nodded. No jokes or puns now. ‘Do you want to see?’ he whispered. ‘You’ll need a strong stomach…’
‘I don’t know,’ I replied, turning to look at Ali. ‘My reactions have been a bit hard to predict recently…’
Ali locked eyes with me for a long moment. Then he broke the connection and focused back on the screen.
‘OK.’ I turned back. ‘Let’s go in.’
So we did. And there it was. The unashamed gateway to the white Christian revivalist movement. The guys with the white sheets, pointy hats and burning crosses. The guys behind the lynchings and the fire-bombings, the hatred and the terror. And here was their website.
‘Shit,’ Robin breathed, shaking his head. ‘Freedom of speech is a double-edged sword when it allows the likes of these maniacs to promote their evil.’
The website consisted of four pages. The first was headed THE KNIGHTS America’s oldest, largest, most professional white rights party. Just in case you hadn’t got the message by now, there were a couple of pithy slogans: ‘It’s time for whites to stick together.’ ‘Bringing back the dream.’
You could click to give your opinion on a supposed news item about a black church who allegedly vandalised their own premises; or you could watch an internet TV show called This is the Klan; or subscribe to the White Patriot. You could also ‘visit’ their gift shop, where you could buy T-shirts, hats, flags, cards, earrings, key chains, books, videos etc.
The second page offered other ways to get involved – including the invocation to pray. Just who did these people think they were praying to? I’ve never been big on organised religion, but could anyone tell me which god it was that approved of this vileness? You could click again for nation-wide immigration-office phone numbers if you had the urge to report anyone you suspected of being an illegal immigrant.
There was a strangled groan behind me. Ali ran to the sink, turned the cold tap on full and stuck his head under the flow.
Robin and I looked at each other.
‘Keep going,’ I said.
He wiped his brow on his sleeve and moved the cursor down. Page 3 was a poster advertising the 16th Annual White Christian Heritage, Culture and Craft Festival in the town square in Pulaski, Tennessee – ‘the birthplace of the Klan’. Somehow the fact that it was in the town square – official, accepted and respectable – seemed the most shocking aspect. This all-day event boasted that it was the only festival in America celebrating white Christian culture. The unique nature of the celebration was clearly a source of pride for them. For us it provided the only smidgen of relief. There would be crafts, food, educational displays, speeches, raffles, games, clowns, a cake walk and a whole lot more! ‘Fun for all the family’, they promised. Holy shit.
‘At least that couldn’t happen here,’ Robin murmured.
‘Not yet,’ I replied. ‘Carry on.’
The final page had the single virtue of being short. You could copy and paste their ‘cool banner’ to add a link to their site. Cold water dripped down my back as Ali leaned over and punched the laptop’s ‘off’ button.
‘Oy!’ Robin howled. ‘You’re not supposed to switch off without shutting down properly first.’
He turned to glare at Ali, but then shrank as he met Ali’s smouldering gaze.
‘OK. OK. Let’s cool it,’ I soothed. ‘What does this actually mean for us? Does this prove beyond doubt a link between this bunch of nutters and Koi Korner? I mean, it’s just initials isn’t it? It could be a coincidence.’
‘Gaia doesn’t believe in…’ Robin spou
ted.
‘I know, I know,’ I interrupted. ‘But if they are related, then what’s the connection between them and Stan? It has to be more than the programme his production company was making if Koi Korner is in the picture…’
Water was still pouring from Ali’s hair and face.
‘Della,’ he said, with his usual word economy.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘That’s right. How does Della fit in?’
A thought hit me so hard it knocked the breath out of me. I saw Della in that bed. I saw the urgency in her eyes. ‘Narth-tee thcuh,’ she had said. I’d tried so hard to interpret the meaning. And was so triumphant when I thought I had. Like a warped game of Chinese whispers, I had thought of Della’s famed vanity and had heard ‘nasty scar’. But what if’ ‘nasty’ was actually something else? ‘Nazi’, for instance. And could ‘scar’ be wrong too? Could it be ‘scum’?
I stood up from the bench and walked to the window. The garden was beginning to bloom. Splashes of colour dotted the flowerbeds. Shiny tight leaves were unfurling on the rose bush.
I turned back to face the others. ‘The Scene,’ I murmured. ‘The answer has to be somewhere on the Scene.’
28
ALI AND I left together. As I opened the front door, I stopped and sniffed the air.
‘Ali – can you…?’
I didn’t get the chance to finish the sentence. Ali pushed me aside and ran out on to the path. There was an unmistakable stench of burning.
‘Keys. Quick,’ he gasped, thrusting his open hand at me.
I pulled them from my jeans pocket. I ran back inside, past a bemused Robin, through the kitchen and into the back garden. Pulling aside the filthy tarpaulin that covered our tools, and sending a thousand disgruntled woodlice scuttling for cover, I yanked the coiled hose back through the kitchen door. Robin was still on the bench watching me, his jaw slack round the end of his plait.
‘Fasten this on the tap,’ I yelled. ‘Quick!’
Robin leapt to his feet and took the nozzle from me as Ali ran back in from the front. He grabbed the other end of the hose and together we hauled it through the flat. My front door was open. Orange flames danced in the hallway behind it. Water trickled from the end of the hose, then shot out in a torrent as the jet forced its way through the kinks. We aimed at the base of the fire. The flames shrank and died as they were replaced by clouds of dense smoke.