by Gary Bell
‘I think you may be surprised by how many Muslims across this city have fallen through the cracks of the asylum process,’ he replied matter-of-factly. ‘In giving zakat we can only do our best to help, but it’s getting harder by the year.’
‘Zakat?’
‘Almsgiving,’ Zara answered for him. ‘Charity is the third Pillar of Islam.’
‘Precisely.’ He wrapped a single curl of his beard around one finger. ‘As a registered charity, our centre works closely with the Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum, but their last estimate suggested that there are up to three hundred unregistered migrants currently living in the city and surrounding areas. If an asylum claimant should fail, then more often than not they will find themselves forced onto the streets, into abysmal, desperate lives. We can provide them with tickets for hot meals at our community restaurant, if they come to us, and even a clean bed when we are able, but in the wake of recent events, with an increasingly negative portrayal of Islam, sponsors are getting harder to come by …’
‘Desperate lives,’ I repeated. ‘Have you found any links to human traffickers?’
‘We’re aware of the practice, but I’m thankful to say that there’s no connection to the mosque and its attendees.’
‘What about William Barber, the man charged with our victim’s murder? Are you aware of him?’
The sudden cloud behind his eyes told me that, yes, he most definitely was. ‘I know the sort he belongs to. We’ve had two mosques in the city attacked with petrol in the last year. Windows smashed, attendees attacked upon leaving. Just last week, one of our young girls was assaulted after madrasa in this very mosque. A group of grown men tore the hijab from her head and knocked her to the pavement. She is nine years old.’
‘Awful,’ Zara whispered.
‘Yes.’ He crinkled his nose and sighed deeply through the nostrils. ‘On your way out of the building, look over to your left, directly opposite the entrance. Perhaps you’ll have a better understanding of our current climate.’
I nodded. ‘Are there any other local mosques that you think might be able to help us with our inquiry?’
‘They will all open their doors to you,’ he said, getting up to stand before us in his discoloured white socks, ‘but the elders meet regularly, and I know that you will only receive the same answers I’ve given you today. As I said, we maintain a strong community between us.’
‘Thank you for your time, Dr Badour. We appreciate it.’
I held the stack of papers back towards him, and he waved them away with one hand. ‘Keep them, please. We have plenty of copies to spare, and the further they travel, the more chance we have of finding answers for the families involved.’ He opened the door for us then, and bowed his head. ‘Ma al-salāmah.’
‘Fi amān Allāh,’ Zara replied, bowing her head in return.
As instructed, I glanced to the left as we stepped into our shoes and out of the entrance, and saw words painted on the brick wall.
GO HOME.
‘Disgraceful,’ I sighed, flattening my hair with the hat.
‘Damn right,’ Zara agreed, following my eye. ‘As if I’d want to go back to St Ann’s, anyway.’
‘Doesn’t that bother you?’
‘Of course,’ she shrugged, ‘but I’ve grown up here. I’m used to it.’
‘That doesn’t make it right.’
‘I’m not saying it does.’
I lit a fag as we walked back to the car, the dome behind us blooming upwards like an emerald mushroom in the middle of the city, rivalling the spires of the church directly opposite; the two edifices were separated by St Ann’s Well Road, itself named after a spring once believed to have had magical healing properties for the blind. It was a crossroads of superstition, with none of the three managing to sway me.
‘That was impressive,’ I said, ‘what you did in there. You speak Arabic?’
‘Hardly. A few phrases here and there from my mum’s side of the family, that’s all. She was a strict Muslim when she first came over from Pakistan. Not so much after meeting my dad. I guess that caused some problems when I was little … She was only seventeen when she had me.’
‘And your father?’
She laughed. ‘Rotherham, originally. Not quite as exotic, I know. He teaches primary. Kids with learning difficulties, mostly. He’s a good man.’
‘So, you’re not … That is to say, you’ve never been …’
‘Practising?’ She smiled. ‘No. Let’s just say my lifestyle doesn’t quite meet the criteria.’
‘No? In what –’ I stepped into the road for the driver’s side and was interrupted by the screech of a car coming to a halt behind me, causing me to jump out of my skin.
I spun, startled and irate, papers now scrunched in my fist, and found myself face-to-face with a slick black Mercedes, its fine German engine growling only centimetres from my chest.
From inside, its crew of three young black men were staring straight back at me.
‘Watch it!’ I bellowed, but they didn’t reply.
The nearest passenger, however, was outright glaring, and I felt the slightest niggle of recognition somewhere in the back of my mind.
He lifted his right hand up to the glass, pointed his index finger at my head like the barrel of a gun, and fired; then the tyres spun, and off they went tearing up the road and out of sight.
‘Great to be home,’ I whispered to myself, ducking into my car, feeling much too old and tired for that sort of shit. I reached across and unlocked the passenger door manually, and Zara climbed inside.
‘What was that about? You think they’re part of the congregation?’
‘I have no idea.’
I stuffed the collection of lost girls into the glovebox, alongside an empty can of de-icer, a fistful of receipts, some McDonald’s napkins and two unpaid parking tickets, and put the Mercedes to the back of my cluttered head. That would prove to be a near-fatal error.
We visited only three more mosques, receiving the same response from all, before taking the imam at his word.
15
When he wasn’t behind bars, Billy lived in a ground-floor flat in Cotgrave with his second wife Sarah and their young son, only a handful of metres away from our own respective childhood homes.
Like all the neat little buildings in the area, it had originally been constructed for the workers of the colliery, and, despite later being divided into flats, was almost identical to the house I’d grown up in, the one my mum had died in, which I couldn’t bring myself to look at as we drove past.
Even after nearly forty years, the memories evoked by those short roads and little brick houses hurt; I don’t think it’s something a person can ever truly get over; I don’t think a person ever should.
It was Zara’s idea to go and speak to the wife after we’d given up on the mosques, and I couldn’t think of a decent enough excuse not to go, put on the spot as I was. As first impressions go, however, the flat wasn’t what I’d been expecting when we pulled up in the cul-de-sac at nearly five o’clock. Missing were the English Defence League banners and St George’s crosses of my imagination, and from outside it looked like Sarah Barber maintained a tidy, if humble, little home.
Inside, though, it didn’t take long to recognise the signs of a strong man’s rage; doors hung slightly crooked in their frames, replacement latches didn’t match up to original hinges, and the beige feature wall of the cosy living room was punctuated with cracks and indentations, roughly the size of a large and weighty fist.
The woman also defied my expectations. Nearly twenty years younger than her husband, her voice was as soft as her curves, her mannerisms polite and her movements attentive. I couldn’t help but notice, once she’d invited us inside, that the bright, kind eyes she boasted in framed photographs along the hallway seemed wearier in the present. She was a tiny little thing, still dressed in her supermarket uniform of a purple blouse with orange trim, her auburn hair tousled from her day of stacking shelves.
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br /> ‘I hope we’re not disrupting you or your son, Mrs Barber,’ I said, removing my hat like a wartime officer delivering news of an overseas fatality.
‘Not at all, me duck.’ She poured us Yorkshire tea from a pot, the proper way, and then hurried in flustered, apologetic circles around our feet, collecting scattered Lego up from the carpet.
In this way she, too, reminded me of my mother. Struggling and stressed, but ever accommodating. The brave face of the working class. I’ve often wondered how much longer I might’ve had with my mum, had she not been too proud to see a doctor when the pains first came.
‘Olly’s having tea at his nana’s tonight,’ Sarah Barber said. ‘She picks him up from school when I’m working.’
‘Your mother-in-law?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, finally collapsing into a two-seater that ran across the living room at a right angle to our longer sofa. ‘No, Billy’s mam passed away about, Jesus, must’ve been eight or nine years ago now.’
‘Sorry to hear it.’
I could still picture Jan Barber as I’d known her in my youth: peroxide hair, fag in her mouth, breasts pushing up out of her dressing gown at any time of the day. The lads and I would make an extra special effort to call for Aidan.
It was bizarre to think of her as an old woman, never mind dying.
‘How did you meet Mr Barber?’ I didn’t know Sarah. She must have been a child when I left the area, so I hoped I could hold on to anonymity a little longer.
She thought about it, sipping tea, eyes wide in the lamplight, and then shrugged. ‘Everyone round here knows Billy. We started seeing each other about eleven years ago. Got married after I fell pregnant.’
‘He has three children from previous relationships, doesn’t he?’
‘That’s right. Mikey still stays over from time to time, but he’s seventeen now and, well, you know how boys are at that age …’ She trailed off, leaving a big empty space and a look that said it all. ‘Then he had the twins, Lottie and Lizzie.’
‘Do they have much to do with their dad?’
‘No,’ she scolded. ‘No, their mother wouldn’t allow that.’
‘Why not?’ Zara interjected sharply, pencil poised over a spiral-bound jotter that she seemed to have pulled out of nowhere. ‘If you don’t mind me asking?’
Sarah buried her nose into the vapour rising from her teacup; I noticed a chip in the bottom of the ceramic. ‘We don’t get along,’ was her flat reply.
‘Because of your husband?’ Zara was pressing with the subtlety of a shotgun, and it showed in Sarah’s writhing shoulders.
‘Is this relevant to the trial?’
‘Maybe,’ I assented. ‘We’re just trying to get a better sense of context. I hope you’ll forgive me for saying it, but your husband hasn’t been entirely communicative so far.’
I could feel Zara bristling, dying to interpose, but she kept her opinion private.
‘Well,’ Sarah sighed, ‘if you must know, it’s me their mam hates just as much as Billy, if not more. We started seeing each other while the two of them were kind of still together, I s’pose. Billy had moved out by then, but Becky was pregnant with the girls, and the whole thing was …’ she frowned, pondering the word, ‘messy. A fitting start for things to come, eh?’
I nodded, the scratch-scratch of Zara’s pencil filling the room.
The next part was awkward, but she had teed it up better than I could’ve hoped for.
‘Mrs Barber,’ I said, ‘I don’t like asking you this, but if there’s any chance it could help to pin down your husband’s whereabouts on the night in question …’
‘You’re going to ask me if he was having an affair, aren’t you?’
‘I understand that it’s probably not something you want to discuss, but, honestly, adultery would be an improvement on a murder charge right now.’
I was sorry to see her tired eyes redden.
‘He’s out a lot of the time,’ she muttered. ‘I knew that was the case when we got together, he’s always been like that … I think, in a way, all Billy’s women came to him with the same arrogance I had back then. We all thought we could change him. That it would be better with us. That he’d be better …’
She needlessly straightened the chequered throw that was folded over the two-seater, then returned her arms to her front, crossed and always guarded.
It amazed me, as it had with countless thugs throughout my career, that this timid, attractive and very ordinary woman could ever have paired up with the wrecking ball that was her husband. I looked at the wedding photo framed on the ledge of the television cabinet, and it really put their sizes into perspective. Her big, beauty queen hairdo only just reaching the shoulder of his suit jacket, her pregnant belly tight in white satin.
Beside that photograph was another, taken years before at what must’ve been a fancy-dress party during Billy’s twenties or thereabouts; an odd juxtaposition it was, seeing him smiling like that, having what appeared to be genuine fun in his camp cowboy costume, dressed in a black hat and fringed buckskin like Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, surrounded by friends. Thirty years later, and he’d still be playing cowboys and Indians if he could. There were familiar cheering faces in the background, all from the social club, and I even spotted Sean McCarthy storming across the dance floor with a pint in what looked to be a replica of Hugo Boss’s all-black SS uniform, a lifetime before he stepped into the get-up of the local constabulary. Classy, I thought. That’s how he’d been back then, always keen to shock.
I was still gazing at the photograph over the top of my teacup when my eyes shifted to the frame beside it.
I almost dropped the cup.
There I was, grinning loutishly with almost thirty lads in Forest gear including Sean, Mike Smith, Paul Sinclair and, crucially, every one of the Barber brothers.
Sarah must’ve registered whatever horror had struck my features, as she followed my eye to the photograph.
‘Yeah, that’s Billy there on the left, a long time before we were together. Sad, really. It’s one of the only photos he has of him with his little brother, Aidan.’ She sighed again, ignorant of the hooligan at Aidan’s side, the smaller, angrier version of the man sitting across the room. ‘Aidan died in the late eighties. Down the pit, same as the rest. I don’t think Billy’s ever got over that. He’s crazy about his brothers.’
I nodded stiffly, shaking the ringing sound around in my ears, the alarm now warning me to get out of there fast, to snatch the photograph and bolt.
I managed to prise my eyes away, trying to remember who the hell had even taken it, but I’d been a few drinks deep by then.
‘What was your husband doing for a living, before the arrest?’ Zara asked.
‘Oh, just all sorts, really …’ Sarah mumbled, eyes on the carpet. ‘Proper work is hard to come by these days, you know? Gets a bit of labour here and there, but he’s struggled ever since they filled the pit.’
Zara looked up from her scribbling. ‘And what happened on that morning your husband came home? Your neighbour says she had no choice but to ring the police out of concern for your safety. For the safety of your boy.’
‘Who, Denise?’ She glared up at the ceiling, and there was a surprisingly fierce strength behind it. ‘She’s a pathological liar.’
‘What makes you say that?’ I asked through a dry throat.
‘Everybody knows it. She got herself in a mess a couple of years back for making false allegations. Claimed that these two blokes had raped her after a night out. The whole thing was a load of shit, if you’ll pardon me saying so.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘What, you mean apart from hearing it all through the ceiling? Silly cow didn’t know that one of them, whichever was behind her I suppose, was filming it all on his phone. He turned up to court with footage of her kneeling on the floor begging, and I mean literally begging, for them both to –’ She managed to compose herself before the literal finish line. ‘Well,
I’m sure you can imagine … Her kids were in the flat and everything. You should’ve heard the racket. She ought to check her own bedsheets before getting her nose into someone else’s business.’
‘That’s … enlightening,’ I said. ‘Did Mr Barber’s last counsel know about this?’
‘No idea.’
‘But on that morning,’ Zara returned, pressing harder, waggling her pencil in the air, ‘you’re saying your husband wasn’t aggressive with you?’
Sarah’s feet started tapping; cheap, black work pumps bounced off the carpet. ‘He’s a very loving man, our Billy. You might not believe it to meet him. I’m not saying he’s a soft man, not by any means, and he’s opinionated when it comes to politics, but he can also be the most tender, loving person you could hope for. He has a lot to live up to, I think. His image, and what it means to be Billy Barber. Do you understand?’
I understood exactly what she meant, and as I glanced into the small adjacent kitchen I found myself thinking, strangely, about all those bottles of champagne I’d shared with judges, barristers and even politicians over the years. None of them would ever know that, to me, champagne would always be the plastic-corked Pomagne Mam used to break out on Christmas morning in our own identical little home. What strange secrets we keep.
‘As for aggression …’ Sarah went on, pushing her forearms hard against her knees, planting her feet to the floor. ‘You might not know this, but marriage is complicated.’
I tried to ignore the pale strip of skin on my left hand.
‘He’d only ever hit me once before that morning … He loses his temper a lot, throws his weight around a bit, but that was the only other time he actually did it.’
‘What happened?’ I asked, soft as I could manage.
‘It was around a year ago.’ Sarah mumbled. ‘Halloween time … It wasn’t all his fault, though. I lost my temper. He lashed out, sent me into the wall there …’ She indicated one of the cracks I’d already noticed in the plasterboard.
‘I’m sorry,’ I managed, ‘but do you remember what caused the argument back then?’
