A phone was produced, and Rupert listened. “There is a group in front… I don’t care if they’re peaceful protestors… again, I don’t care if it’s legal, if you want all the candidates for this election in the venue you will provide safe passage… it is not just a small protest, it is a mob, now… we can get let in round the back? That sounds acceptable.”
“Round the back?” Hume hissed.
“No photo ops I know, but they won’t clear the front so it’s back or home.”
Hume considered this. Not going might be spun as running away, and he did want the chance to go toe to toe verbally with the other candidates. He had a bulletproof faith in his ability to speak. “Alright, we go in the back. But tell them there better not be any press round there.”
He leaned back in the car and watched the buildings go by and was pleased to see them turn down a small private road and through a gate to get to the rear of the building, which meant anyone following could be forcibly removed.
Soon the car was parked, and St. George was ushered inside.
“Hello, the debate is nearly ready,” a woman with a clipboard told him.
“Give me five minutes to have my makeup checked and I will be ready to go,” Hume replied.
“Yes sir.”
Dan Dobbs leaned back into the seat of his car and reminded himself that it had just been a night of debate and he was still mayor. That’s why he was in the back seat, with the driver doing the work taking him home, leaving him free to do essential mayoral things like go over in his mind how the debate had gone. Yeah, maybe he shouldn’t think of that because it didn’t go very well.
He considered himself the only serious politician among the contenders, with the rest being rabble-rousers and shit stirrers whereas he had years of proven policy and actions… but this was an election, when your promises weighed more heavily than what you had actually done, and this was a debate, when rabble-rousers were in their natural territory. It had been a strange night, with this editor going forensically over everything the mayor had done or said and scoring points all the way, while George or whatever he called himself ranted on to shouts of approval from the audience. Dobbs felt trapped between a demagogue and an accountant, and clearly his own policy wasn’t going to be enough. Still, he was, as he’d said, the most serious politician, so he was ready to deal with shit like this.
He closed his eyes and tried to relax as the car drove, to clear his mind ready to decide on how to proceed. He managed to reach a zen state and when the car reached Dobb’s home, he thanked the driver and went inside, pausing in the hallway because something was odd.
What had he just seen?
Dobbs turned around, and on the mat was a brown envelope. It hadn’t been there when he went out, and there was no postal delivery at this time of day, so it must be some charity thing or someone selling guttering. But why would they use an A4 brown envelope?
Dobbs bent down and picked it up, finding his own name printed on the front by a typewriter, the letters bearing all the hallmarks of such a device. That made the mayor tap his hands against it, look round outside and shut the door. Then he went into his kitchen, putting a light on along the way, and then sat down at a dining table which cost over nine hundred pounds.
The envelope was sealed, so he used a thumb to tear it open and look inside.
A single piece of A4 paper.
Green A4 paper.
He pulled it out and looked at it. The same typewriter print as on the front of the envelope, and a very clear message:
DANIEL DOBBS, I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING
QUIT THE MAYORAL RACE OR I WILL DESTROY YOU
Dobbs ran his tongue over his teeth. His heart sank, but not as much as he’d imagined it would.
Someone knew. Of course, they knew. Someone was always going to find out weren’t they, and now that person wanted to ruin his political career. Dropping out of the mayoral race would be a devasting blow to his reputation because everyone would assume something was up, unless he could get a doctor to admit him to a cancer ward. Of course, even if he dropped out what could he do next? Someone knew, had the details, would hold it over him. Maybe they would want money next. They always did.
Dobbs let out a deep sigh. He thought he’d be more panicked, more upset, but he actually felt like the inevitable had happened, and now he could finally move forward. It was time to report this to the experts.
He took his phone out and dialled a number he knew off by heart, and after just two rings it was answered.
“Hello, what service do you require?”
“I’m being blackmailed, and I want them found so I can deal with it.”
“That sounds expensive, but I recognise your voice Mr Dobbs, and I would be pleased to work with you again. Shall we arrange a meeting?”
It occurred to Mayor Dobbs that one disadvantage of hiring this private investigator was he didn’t actually know the man’s name. There was a kind of artform the PI used to always refer to himself obliquely, and as he was the only person who ever answered his phone, or turned up to talk, it just about worked. Dobbs thought that a little unfair as the PI knew who Dobbs was, but it was the only outward sign this detective strayed beyond grey areas and into black ones.
The PI was also scrupulously on time, so when he said he’d be there in twenty-five minutes the car pulled up in twenty-three and two minutes later there was a knock on the door.
Dobbs opened the door and a tall, broad man walked in without being asked, wearing black clothing over black skin. A head shaved down to stubble nodded at the mayor.
“Good to see you again Mr Dobbs.”
“And you.” Dobbs was unsure. “Come and see this.” They went into the kitchen and over to a letter Dobbs had left alone since he’d read it. “This is the blackmail. Someone knows.”
The PI read it. “Do they know? Is it possible? Not an opportunist?”
“They could know.”
“And what is it, such information makes my task easier.”
“I’d rather not say,” Dobbs replied.
“Fair enough, your privacy will be respected,” but quite frankly no one in the room believed it. “I assume you have ruled out the police?”
“I’d be better off hanging myself with a rope than ask for their help.”
“Okay. Well I’ll need some details from you,” the PI produced an honest to god notebook and pen, “and then I will start getting this locked down. We’ll start with when the letter arrived, known CCTV, all of that, but I warn you, I will be asking who else might know of ‘this’, and where leaks might occur. Again, you can defer, but the deeper this goes, the more you might need to give. Insider attacks are common.”
“Great film,” Chandran said to his girlfriend as they walked out of the cinema.
“Oh no,” Aashi replied.
“What do you mean, ‘oh no’, it was a great film?”
“I’m not disputing the movie, it was cool, I just don’t want the way home filled with one of your film school lectures.”
“You make them sound bad.”
“Well they are, I’m not into tearing a movie apart. I go to the cinema to enjoy myself.”
Chandran laughed, “what happened to shared interests?”
“Watching is shared, enjoyment apparently is not.”
“I am enjoying analysing movies!”
“Putting the anal into analysing.”
The pair walked away from the cinema and through a car park towards the bus stop, not noticing that a group of people had started following them.
“All I’m saying is I enjoy movies, and when someone criticises every single thing about it on the way home it’s not fun.”
“Then what, darling, would you prefer to do?”
“Snuggle on the bus.”
“Okay Aashi, you got me there.”
“Where you fuckers from?” The voice came from behind them and was barked. The front pair carried on walking, but the voices behind increased in number
and volume.
“You’re brown, you look like fucking Indians, where the fuck you from, India?”
“Don’t ignore us,” another said, “this is our country.”
“Yeah, talk to your colonial masters you fucking Asian fucks.”
Aashi and Chandran sped up, but the footsteps behind them increased. When the front pair reached the bus stop Chandran had them keep going hoping for a pub or somewhere they could hide in.
That was when the running started. The lads behind sped up, leaving the girls they were with laughing, and in seconds they had formed a circle round the Indian couple, who they started shoving and spitting at.
“Not gonna talk to us, not gonna fucking talk? We fucking own your brown asses, monkey worshipping fucks…”
They carried on abusing. “This is our land, you’re our fucking guests…”
“And you can fuck off back home, that’s what you can do.”
“You think I can afford a house? Fuck can I, cos you lot are in them. Get a fucking job, you bastards.”
Chandran wrapped Aashi in a hug as one of the men, a white boy in a puffer jacket, punched him in the side of the head. Attackers now rained punches and kicks down onto the pair, who fell to the floor and huddled into a ball hoping it would protect them. That only increased the actions of the thugs, who spat on the couple as well as kicked them, before they panicked and ran off down the street followed by their laughing girlfriends who praised their manhood and made them promises for later that night.
Aashi started crying in shame and pain, and Chandran was gulping down the air as the adrenaline in his panicked body turned to agony. He pulled his phone out, but the screen was now shattered and unresponsive.
Vivaan looked at his phone. Earlier that evening he’d had a text from a friend to tell him that Chandran and Aashi had been attacked coming home from the cinema. Some white racists started on them, attacked them, and uniformed police officers had just arrived at the family house.
This was terrible of course, but while he knew Chandran and Aashi to say hello to and share a few drinks with in the pub, he was distant enough to both want to go to the cinema tonight himself, but close enough to be scared to go.
Things had got worse recently. No one of Indian heritage in this district of Morthern was going to tell you racism had been absent before, because everyone had encountered it, and he meant everyone. But before it had largely been subtle, stupid racist shit people said without realising they were being stupid and racist. Now… now since the click-hate had reached break out levels it felt like people were openly hateful, openly insulting British Indians, and now battering them.
This was something the campaigning members of his community would oppose, but Vivaan just wanted to go to the cinema. In such instances of confusion, he asked his brother.
‘Hey bro,’ he texted, ‘hear about Chandran?’
‘Yeah, fucked up shit. Wish I could get my hands on them bastards.’
‘Yeah of course. I wanna go cinema, dunno what to do? Don’t wanna get smacked.’
‘Don’t go on your own.’
‘Yeah good I wanna go right but what?’
‘Get your friends bro. We’re being attacked bro, get a team together. All this American ‘have a squad’ shit. We need squads. We’re gonna form squads. No one goes alone.’
‘Oh right.’
‘In fact, I wanna go too. So, you call all your boys, and I’ll call all my boys, and we go as a fucking gang, no one will fuck with us then.’
‘Yeah boys!’
‘That’s the fucking spirit. Time to gang the fuck up.’
Vivaan nodded at his phone. That was the answer. If groups of white kids were going to attack them, then they’d just round up larger groups of Indian kids. They would escalate this shit so they couldn’t be touched, and if they were attacked, they would out punch the fuckers. Surely this was what being friends with people was about, circling those wagons and hedgehog some enemies.
Vivaan started messaging his friends, explaining he and his brother were putting a squad together, and people replied with praise and promises to come. Everyone secretly wanted to be in a friendly group, and the perfect way to unite people was to oppose violent pig-ignorant fuckwits with a posse.
A short while later the doorbell of the family home started ringing, and it barely stopped until twenty lads and a smaller number of partners had gathered. No one in Morthern would fuck with them now. Confidence was high, and they could enjoy themselves.
“Thanks very much for your time, I want to assure you that we as the Major Crimes Unit take this very seriously.” Sharma finished by shaking the hands of Aashi and Chandran, and then she and Lindleman stepped outside.
“So, are you going to take this personally?” Lindleman asked.
“I am a police officer of multiple decades standing,” Sharma replied, “who mixes with every community in Morthern, I am not going to go ‘Dirty Harry’ because someone of a similar skin colour got beaten up.”
“Fair point.”
“I am a serious detective and ready to investigate properly.”
“In that case, let the hunt begin.”
Sharma rolled her eyes, “we are serious detectives, that includes you, remember?”
“Oh yeah. Sadly. So where will we be going first?”
“Couple come out of cinema, couple get followed, so I assume we’re dealing with people stupid enough to get caught on CCTV coming out of said cinema.”
Lindleman nodded. “Funny thing, how hard must police work have been without CCTV? Now it’s fucking everywhere, all these spur-of-the-moment violent fucks get caught on it. What did people do in the sixties?”
“Whatever they wanted,” Sharma replied. “But it’s your turn to drive, it’s my turn to control the stereo.”
“Okay you can drive.”
“That isn’t how this works.”
“I am stepping back from the driving.”
“You can’t dodge the hard bit, that’s the point of it being the hard bit.”
“Right,” Lindleman was thinking, “if the driving is hard, and the stereo is fun, why doesn’t the person driving get to pick the songs as compensation for, well, driving?”
Sharma scratched her cheek. “If you put this much thought into catching criminals you’d be as good as Grayling and Maruma.”
“Yeah but there’s two of them.”
“There really isn’t.”
“You got me there, you got me there.”
“Hello, what movie would you like to watch?”
Sharma leaned into the ticket booth. “We’re the police and we’d like to speak to the manager please.”
“Oh, oh right, sorry, we haven’t been showing porn. That was a one-time mistake and the person responsible has been sacked.”
Sharma and Lindleman looked at the man behind the counter, then at each other.
“Can I ask…”
“No Rob, you can’t. It’s not about that,” Sharma said turning to the staffer, “we’re investigating an assault and we believe your security cameras may have captured the assailants, so no one here is in any trouble, unless they didn’t press record this evening in which case I am going to shout very loudly at your boss, but not you.”
“I’ll go get her,” said the staffer who very much wanted to see the second option happen.
A few minutes of browsing huge posters later and a woman appeared. “Hello detectives, I’m the manager. What can I help you with?”
“We’d like to study your CCTV please, we’re after some attackers we believe used the cinema.”
“Oh yes, of course, follow me, we have a dedicated system which records everything that happens here and keeps it for two months,” she said this as if she deserved a medal.
Soon the detectives looked into a small room, in which a security guard leaped up. A screen was in front of him, divided into many smaller sections.
“Steve here will help you,” the manager said.
; Sharma looked at Lindleman, “can you drive one of these?”
“I could land a rocket on the moon using one of these.”
“Steve, go get a coffee” Sharma ordered. Then she and her colleague sat in the chairs and looked around them. “This place stinks of cheese. Cheese crisps.”
“When did we start disliking dairy?” Rob asked.
“When I don’t get them.”
“Well fuck a duck, what have we here!” Lindleman exclaimed.
“You haven’t touched anything yet.”
“No, look at the screen, the door.”
Sharma leaned forward. “Is that a fucking school trip.”
“No, it is a gang of young Indian people clearly reacting to tonight’s events by coming down here in fucking coachloads.”
“White supremacy equals sold out performances, who knew.”
“Right, so Mrs serious, are we focusing or not?”
“We are focusing. We have the precise time the movie ended so do your stuff.”
“With my magic fingers.”
“You can leave that particular skill for your husband.”
Lindleman operated the PC and soon had a crowd on screen leaving the cinema. “Okay, so, that pair look like the victims.”
“Yep, that’s them, clearly walking through. So, let’s remind ourselves of the descriptions they gave us and…”
“Woah, woah, woah, that’s them. Look at the fucking hate on their faces,” he pointed to a group following, all with sneers on their faces.
Sharma looked to her notes, then back up, the descriptions matched, which wouldn’t convict anyone in court of an actual assault but was a great starting point.
“Right, get a copy of this footage, we have photos. Clear CCTV, crisp images.”
“Yeah, but I know who they are.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, one of them.” Lindleman pulled his phone out and dialled. “Alright Mr Google.”
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