*
As he stood in the lobby and rang Shakira’s doorbell, Barry noticed that the smell of urine finally seemed to have gone. That, at least, was some good news. He could hear the sound of a children’s TV presenter booming through the door, advising him excitedly that, apparently, Old MacDonald had a farm. The baby within seemed unimpressed by this news. It occurred to Barry that the combined noise may have overwhelmed the rather puny efforts of the doorbell to announce his arrival, so he rapped his knuckles firmly against the door. This, eventually, seemed to provoke a response. The voluble presenter was faded out and the door was opened.
“Miss Jackson-Lewis? I’m here from the housing association. I’m sorry to bother you, but, I was just wondering, did Miss Nicolescu leave an envelope for us with you? She might have said it was very important.”
Despite it being nearly midday, Shakira was still in her pyjamas. The floor behind her was covered by the accumulated cast-offs of a thousand failed attempts to stop her baby crying. She hugged the child to her shoulder, desperately bouncing him up and down to try to silence him. She looked like she hadn’t slept at all during the three months that her son had been alive.
“Iulia? From next door? Yeah, she left me an envelope. But she said I had to hang on to it.”
“And have you seen what’s in it?”
“What? No. I just took it and hid it away like she said,” Shakira shouted over the flensive wailing of her son. “Is she all right? Nothing’s happened to her has it? I know they’ve been after her – the Romanian crew.”
“Nothing’s happened yet, but I’m afraid we have reason to believe she may be in real danger. I need to ask you for the envelope now.”
“Oh God. I’d love to, but she said I should only pass it on to Miss Hampton in person.”
The baby’s screams continued.
“I understand that, but I’m afraid Miss Hampton’s on leave at the moment. I’m her boss – Mr Todd.” He flashed her his Monument ID badge. “I’ll make sure this is passed on to her, but we need to see the contents of that envelope. Urgently. Every second we waste is another second we don’t save her.” He looked into her eyes desperately. “It really is a matter of life and death,” he said.
Shakira looked at Barry with a mixture of panic and confusion in her eyes. Perhaps she wanted to phone Lucy and check if she really was on holiday. Maybe she wanted to phone Iulia to see if she really was in danger. But Barry could see that she definitely wanted to get back to silencing her baby’s cries.
“Hang on a minute. It’s just here.” She reached behind some DVDs on the bookcase and withdrew an envelope that had been concealed there.
“Thank you so much, Miss Jackson-Lewis. And, I promise you, you’ve done the right thing.”
“No worries. I just hope she’s all right.” Shakira closed the door and went back to Old MacDonald’s animal husbandry inventory and to her crying son.
Barry opened the envelope and saw the all-too-familiar photo of him, just as he had anticipated. He swiftly ripped it up and deposited it in a bin on his way out. He had at least neutralised that threat. For now. But, he realised, he hadn’t neutralised it for good. Shakira might phone up Iulia (when her son had finally stopped crying) to tell her what she’d done. And, even if she didn’t, she would probably chat to her when Iulia returned from work; after all, they were friends. At which point, Iulia could simply print off another photo. She might give it to Shakira again, for use in future. But, given what had just happened, it seemed far more likely that she would just head straight over to Monument’s offices and give it to Lucy herself (who, she would confirm, was not, in fact, on leave).
So, whilst the immediate threat may have been averted, in reality the threat posed by Iulia remained. And the possibility of her acting on her threat had, in fact, grown to a near-certainty. So further action was needed, and, as he walked back to Coleshill train station, it became all too apparent to Barry what that further action was. He’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Yet the more he thought about it, the more he realised that he didn’t have a choice. The choice was already made. But he still found himself shaking as he took a rather dishevelled business card from out of his wallet and dialled the number.
“Hullo, is that the Romanian Migrants Welfare Association?… Are you still looking for Iulia Nicolescu?… Yes, well I know where she’s living, but if I give you her details you have to promise me that you’ll act quickly.”
Barry wondered if the fact that he felt bad about what he’d done meant that he could still describe himself as good. He decided, sadly, that it probably didn’t. Frankly, however, he wasn’t sure if it mattered anymore. After all, just a few miles away, one of the last monuments to moral certainty was being ruthlessly demolished.
But somehow he wished that it still did.
Fifty
Barry faced a conundrum. He was supposed to be at a seminar, but his mind was somewhat distracted both by his recent exchange with Iulia and by the fact that he now had £20,000 of someone else’s money in his bank account. He felt the urge to pay a visit to the museum and art gallery, which was advertising an exhibition of work by E.R. Hughes.
The alternative was to go back to work. This was less pleasurable than an afternoon in an art gallery, but did at least mean that he wouldn’t have to explain where he’d been. He could just dismiss the seminar as rubbish and say that he’d felt his time would be better spent at the office. This had the advantage of making him appear diligent. Given that his promotion was not yet permanent, Barry felt that appearing to be diligent was probably the least he could do.
This was, however, to prove easier said than done. Monument’s offices had been located in Kingsbury precisely because it was virtually inaccessible by public transport from anywhere where Monument’s tenants might actually live. Barry had got a train into the city centre from home that morning and had bought a return ticket in the expectation that he would be at the seminar all day. He had arranged for his wife to drive him to Sutton Coldfield station that morning and to pick him up from there in the evening. But none of that would help him get to Kingsbury now. He decided that the best thing to do would be to head back toward Walmley and ask his wife to pick him up at the station. He could then drop her back home before heading on to Monument’s office in the car.
He didn’t anticipate any problems with his wife’s availability. After all, her job hunting had taken something of a back seat since Christmas, largely, it seemed, because she insisted that she was too sick to look for a job. But Barry was well aware from their twenty-seven years together that his wife was not really sick – or at least not in the conventional sense. She may well have been ‘worried sick’, but that wasn’t really the same thing. She clearly was worried about Lauren and her apparent unwillingness to communicate with her mother anymore, and this had somehow transformed itself into a series of headaches.
As their doctors’ surgery was closed over Christmas, she had not had the opportunity to seek an expert medical opinion and so had sought comfort from the internet. This had convinced her that she had a brain tumour or, possibly, multiple sclerosis – she couldn’t be quite sure. But what she could be sure of was that whatever she had was serious and possibly life-threatening.
When she eventually saw Dr Mughal, he assured her that this was unlikely to be the case. He had, however, agreed to refer her on for a CT scan, “Just to put your mind at rest, Mrs Todd.” They were still awaiting an appointment to come through, but, in the meantime, his wife was convinced that she was too ill to look for a job.
But Barry didn’t really feel that guilty about getting his wife to ferry him about, particularly as she was using the car that his industry and guile had provided in order to do so.
“Hiya love. It’s me. Can you pick me up at the station in about forty minutes?”
“I thought you were in town all day?”
“Well, I w
as, but the seminar wasn’t very good. I thought I’d come back and go into the office.”
“The office? How are you going to get there?”
“Well, I was going to drop you off at home and then drive in.”
“But I need the car.”
“What do you mean, you need the car? You’re supposed to be sick. Why do you need the car – my car?”
“I need to go down to Warwick to see Lauren.”
“What for?”
“She’s not spoken to me for weeks – I can’t get her to answer her phone. She’s unfriended me on Facebook! I need to speak to her, Barry.”
“But why today? She’s upset, I get that, but sooner or later she’ll calm down.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know that her and this boy will probably break up – that’s the way it is with youngsters – and when they do she’ll want to talk to her mum. But don’t go chasing around after her; it’ll only annoy her more. Just come and pick me up. The next train’s due in in about forty minutes.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
“I can’t do that, Barry. I’m already here.”
“What?”
“Listen, Barry. Listen to me. I wanted to catch her before she went to her lectures, but she wasn’t in. They said she’d stopped over at her boyfriend’s. At her boyfriend’s, Barry! Does that sound to you like they’re about to break up?”
“I didn’t say they were about to break up. I just said—”
“I’ve phoned and she doesn’t answer. I need to talk to her – to explain about my headaches. I need to prepare her, in case the news is bad.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake! There’s nothing wrong with you! They’re just headaches.”
“You can’t say that! You don’t know what they’re like.”
Barry sensed that people around him were starting to stare. He took a deep breath and decided to try a calmer approach.
“So you’re at the uni now?”
“Yes. I’m on campus. Apparently, she’s due to come out of a lecture in a bit. I’m waiting outside to try to catch her. There’s no way I can make it back to you in forty minutes.”
Consequently, Barry found himself having to get a cab back to Kingsbury and he was not in a good mood, therefore, when he arrived back at his desk. The unfortunate fate that had befallen Marilyn, the ‘situation’ with Iulia, and the argument with his wife had all cast a shadow over his day that not even the arrival of £20,000 in his bank account seemed able to dislodge.
His first visitor was Angela. She was carrying a set of car keys.
“Barry, I saw you getting out of a cab a minute ago, and it made me think of these.” She jangled the keys to Langley’s Jaguar.
“Oh. What about them?”
“Goodness, you look miserable. Perhaps I can cheer you up.”
Barry very much hoped that she could, but rather doubted it.
“Obviously, we’ve asked Langley to return all his company property whilst he’s suspended, and that includes his company car. It’s just sitting in the car park at the moment – which is hardly very safe – and we’ve been wondering what we could do with it. As it’s officially the housing director’s car, we wondered if you’d like to look after it for us? Temporarily, obviously – just while we get things… sorted out.”
“That’d be great. Yes, thanks,” Barry replied without much enthusiasm.
“It’s a bit bigger than that little red sports car you’ve been going around in, and not quite as low slung. I thought it might suit you a bit better.”
Even when she was giving him a free car, somehow Angela managed to make it sound like an insult.
He couldn’t understand it. He’d been worried about his finances – and not getting the director’s job – for so long that he had assumed that, once these issues were resolved, his life would be sorted. But here he was, with the job he’d always wanted and more money than he knew what to do with, yet his life seemed a bigger mess than ever.
He wanted to work his way through the thirty-six emails that had come in whilst he’d been out of the office, but before he had a chance to start, he had another visitor at his office door: Jean.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Barry, but we’ve just had a call from the police. They’ve been called to an incident at one of our flats. A ‘Iulia Nicolescu’?” Jean said, reading the note stuck to her finger.
Barry started. “Oh yes. God, is she all right?”
“They don’t know. They’ve not found her. A couple of guys kicked her front door in, apparently, just as she was returning from work. Bundled her into the back of a van and drove off. The police are saying we need to get someone round to secure the property, so Lucy’s on the case now.”
“Well, that sounds terrible. Let’s just hope she’s OK, eh?”
“Yes. The police are very concerned for her welfare. Lucy says you’ll know what that’s all about.”
“Yes, yes. Terrible business.”
Barry could feel himself redden, and the beginnings of a tear well up in his eyes. He was struggling to breathe and he felt a comber of sickness surge from the pit of his stomach toward his gullet.
“Are you all right, Barry? You don’t look good. Not at all.”
There was so much he wanted to say, but he realised that he couldn’t. He wouldn’t have known where to start, even if it was possible for him to say anything – which, of course, it wasn’t. Not now.
The ocean between him and the rest of humanity could not be traversed anymore, and indeed was growing. The currents were taking him further and further away and he seemed powerless to stop them. Jean was standing not ten feet from him and yet she may as well have been on the moon.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” he said. “It’s just very upsetting news. I knew there were people looking for her; that’s why we moved her out to Coleshill in the first place. You just never imagine… Lovely girl.”
“They always are, aren’t they? At the beginning. Lovely girls. Just fell in with the wrong sort, I suppose.”
A stabbing pain in his heart added itself to Barry’s list of ailments. “Yes, that’s it. That’s it exactly. She fell in with the wrong sort.”
The two of them fell into a gloomy silence before Jean asked, “Are you sure you’re all right, Barry? You don’t look well at all. Is something bothering you?”
Indeed there was, but it was not something he felt able to explain to her. “How do we get it back, Jean?” he asked instead. “Back to like it was before, when Neville was here.”
“You mean before all this stuff with Langley?”
Barry didn’t quite mean that at all, but it seemed a convenient entry point to the conversation he wanted to have. “They’ve told you, have they?” he asked.
“Well, not officially, but everyone’s talking about it. Obviously, we know the money from The SHYPP is missing, and then the police came round and arrested him. It doesn’t take a genius…”
“No. No, it doesn’t,” said Barry. Although, on this occasion, a genius might have been helpful.
“The thing is, Barry, housing associations haven’t changed in isolation. We’ve changed – all of us. We seem to want a special caste of people to go around being good on our behalf, and then we express shock and horror when they behave exactly as the values of their age tell them they should!”
“What do you mean?”
“Post-modern people don’t really believe in goodness anymore – or at least, they don’t believe that goodness wins. People want to believe it, but they can’t. And they often feel awful about that. But they’re reassured by the fact that there are people who still seem to – people like Neville and, yes, even Sally. By giving money to charities, people feel as though they’re believing in goodness, kind of by proxy. And that makes them feel better about t
hemselves.
“But, actually, if goodness doesn’t win, then why should we expect anyone to bother? How can we expect housing associations to value compassion and philanthropy when the rest of the world measures success only in terms of money?”
“Yeah. I guess so,” said Barry. “Maybe that’s what was different about Neville. He always said if you did the right thing then the money would take care of itself.”
“Yes, he did, but it was more than that. He really believed that being good couldn’t be based on what you got out of doing something. He felt – and maybe it sounds naïve, but I believe it too – that if we’re only doing something because we’re rewarded for doing it, then we’re not really doing good. Even if we’re helping the homeless or healing the sick. Goodness is about what’s in our hearts.”
Barry shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“If we forget that, then morality just becomes a matter of what we think might make things better – or what we think we can get away with.”
“Is that why people do it, do you think?” asked Barry. “Because they see everyone else get away with it?”
“I don’t know, Barry. I’m sure everyone has their own story. I know Langley had to look after his mother, for instance, and that must have been a drain.”
Barry started. “You what?”
“His mother. She had a stroke. That’s why he gave up his job with Debenhams. To come up here so he was near her. He’s round there practically every day. He’s all she’s got since her husband died. Left everything to his mistress. That’s why Langley was so desperate to get the director’s job – he said he needed the money to help pay for her care plan. But maybe it just wasn’t enough… It’s all terribly sad anyway.”
Barry had clung on for so long to the belief that he was a good man who’d done a bad thing, because he believed that it mattered somehow – that it made him better than Langley. But now he realised you could be a bad man who did a good thing, and it amounted to pretty much the same.
Acts & Monuments Page 28
