Telegram Home

by Kirsten McKenzie

  One of Meredith’s colleagues approached him.

  ‘Nice of you to join us this morning, Meredith,’ the customs officer said, his lip curled around Meredith’s name.

  ‘What happened?’ Meredith asked, counting the warehouses alongside the wharf, trying to figure which of them was on fire.

  ‘Now that’s the question isn’t it? No one knows what happened, but we know there’s a fire, and a damn big one at that. All hands on deck it was, except not all the hands were here, were they?’

  ‘I was working on an important file, hence why I brought a photographer with me,’ Meredith replied.

  ‘At least we’ll have pretty photographs of our burning wharves to remember them by, won’t we?’

  ‘Your mouth will get you into trouble, so I suggest you mind how you speak,’ Meredith snarled. ‘You’ve been lax in your duties, so it’s a good thing I’m here to tighten things up. One of my first tasks is addressing is the staffing—’

  ‘Ho, that’s rich coming from you, Meredith. Rumour is the higher ups want a word with you about the fire. Seems you were the last man in there yesterday. Something to do with… now what was it they said? Oh yes, that’s right, being on a wild goose chase. I hope you like your poultry well cooked Londoner, because that’s what’s about to happen.’

  Meredith’s lips flattened as the officer’s word hit him. He counted the warehouses again, but there was no mistake, warehouse #5 was aflame, the one filled with the Indian furniture and handicrafts imported by Williams and Kurdi. Meredith didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Laugh because the fire must have destroyed the shipment. Or cry because he’d lost the smuggling evidence to the flames.

  As the fire finished its ravenous meal, the crowd dispersed from boredom, leaving only the stragglers and hand-wringing importers waiting to learn the fate of their goods. Meredith abandoned the photographer, now engrossed in documenting the destruction, and made his way into work sinking into the chair behind his desk. His notebooks and files stared at him, challenging him to open them, to finish the job he started, but he couldn’t summon the energy. There were too many thoughts swirling around in his head to function on any level, the least of all being how the fire had started. The key to warehouse #5 was burning a hole in his pocket. He should have thrown it into the water when he had a chance, thereby claiming no knowledge of the fire’s origins. As it stood now, they could hold him accountable, which was ridiculous, he was the hardest working man in the whole port. Ridiculous.

  ‘Meredith?’ came a voice outside his poky cupboard.

  ‘Come in,’ Meredith called from his wooden swivel chair, shuffling the files on his desk.

  The door opened and in walked Mervyn Bulford, the Collector of Customs, the highest ranked revenue man in Liverpool.

  Meredith leapt to his feet. ‘Terrible business this fire, terrible. Any ideas on who started it?’

  ‘Sit down, Meredith,’ Bulford commanded, clearing off a chair before closing the door behind him and taking a seat. ‘Instead of summoning you to my office to discuss this further, I find myself here. Do you know how that makes me feel?’

  ‘No, Sir,’ Meredith replied, his face conveying utter confusion at Bulford’s attitude.

  ‘I’m informed that you were in warehouse #5 last night, so one assumes you are the reason for the position we find ourselves in.’

  Meredith’s face paled. ‘You must be mistaken, Sir.’

  ‘Mistaken? You dare accuse me of being mistaken? They saw you. By god someone saw you entering the warehouse and leaving the port itself some hours later. And you sure as hell weren’t working in the office. From what I hear, and from my own observations, work has been the least of your achievements. Cavorting with whores and wasting her Majesty’s resources seem to be activities you excel in. I’m only here because I didn’t want your taint in my office, and office I might add, that you’ll never attain while I draw breath.’

  Meredith spluttered, but Bulford carried on.

  ‘Pack your things, Meredith. Your services are no longer required. I have to face the importers who have lost everything, with a head on a plate, and it’s your head I’ve chosen… without difficulty.’

  ‘But Williams and Kurdi, there was evidence-’

  ‘Evidence? You want to talk evidence with me? Shall we discuss the evidence of the body of your liaison that you left behind? You disgust me. As a good Christian man, it disgusts me that you cavort with prostitutes, but to use a bonded warehouse to entertain your less salubrious proclivities? Now get out before the papers learn your name. And when I say ‘get out’, I don’t just mean the port, I mean town. We don’t want your type here.’

  And with that, Bulford left the room, leaving Meredith in full sight of half a dozen of his colleagues loitering in the hallway who heard every word.

  Meredith got up and scowled at them before slamming the door. Vermin. Blocking it with his bulk, he drew the strength to go on, although that seemed an impossible task at present. Wiping his sweaty palms on his trousers, he puzzled over the words of the Collector. He’d never once brought a girl onto the port, which was no place for women. He even resented having them in the workplace. The Collector must have been giving the wrong information. That someone had died in the fire was of no interest to Meredith. He didn’t know who they were, and nor did he care. Williams and Kurdi would pay for this development. They hadn’t ceased trying to ruin his career, ever here in Liverpool. They must have people on their payroll who’d tipped them off to his discovery. Had to be. They must have lit the damn fire themselves, sacrificing the inside man. It was the most likely scenario. That he’d left a lantern alight amidst a nighttime tsunami of tinder dry straw never entered his mind.

  And so it was with revenge in his heart that he stuffed his files and notebooks into his leather case. The blotter and ink pot went in too. He’d need those in the coming weeks. He’d prove to the Collector that he was innocent of any wrongdoing, just as he would prove who the guilty parties were.

  With his chin up, he sauntered out of his office, his bag tucked under his arm, nodding at the staring faces.

  ‘See you after Christmas,’ he called out, as if he was taking a short break instead of the ignominious termination of twenty-odd years of service.

  No one shed any tears or showed any surprise at Meredith’s exit, it was like a parasitic tumour being purged from the workplace. With Meredith gone, the mood lifted, and those required to work with him could breathe again.

  The Campaign

  A hammering outside woke Meredith from dreams filled with fragments of half-remembered moments and imagined slights, and he stumbled from his bed in a sour mood. He struggled into a robe, before wrenching the door open to find his landlady, a perpetual smoker whose only redeeming qualities were that she served a good fish pie and kept a clean house, if you ignored the deposits of ash left in her wake.

  ‘Mr Meredith,’ she said through a cigarette clamped between her thin lips. ‘An interesting read in the morning papers today…’ she said.

  ‘Pardon? And?’

  ‘The papers downstairs, in the dining room. Part of my morning routine, reading them…’ she tapped the ash off the end of the cigarette, watching it float down to the bare wooden floorboards.

  ‘Get on with it. I have a busy day,’ Meredith snapped.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think your day will be all that full,’ the landlady said, fixing Meredith with her wandering eye. ‘Papers say Her Majesty doesn’t want you working for her anymore. So, I must ask… how’ll you pay your rent?’

  ‘The papers have made a mistake-’

  ‘There was a photo of you in front of the fire, at the port. You’ve a very distinctive profile, Mr Meredith. I’ll not be too worried if you can’t make your board next week. You understand it might harm my reputation harbouring someone who lights fires, that it could upset my other boarders? The stories were crystal clear about how that poor boy died. Mentioned you by name, and everything.’

 
‘That’s ridiculous-’

  ‘You’ve got till Friday, then I want you out. I have to think of my other tenants,’ she said, before tottering back downstairs, her message delivered.

  Meredith shut the door, his jaw slack. The whole thing was preposterous, it had to be a huge misunderstanding. He never posed for any photographs, and now his landlady was accusing him of murdering a boy. The papers were printing lies.

  Still in his robe, he pulled his curtains to check the street below, half expecting to see the police outside waiting. The window framed the usual daily activities — delivery boys, nurses with prams, prattling women travelling in pairs, a stray mongrel foraging in the gutter, and Meredith’s stomach relaxed. There were no policemen waiting for him, no crowd gathered to witness his downfall. The landlady must have been drinking.

  Meredith dressed. If journalists were spreading lies about him, he needed to clear his name and time was running out. It was already the morning of Christmas Eve, and the people who needed persuading of his innocence, of the injustice, would be travelling home for Christmas, and there’d be no one to present his evidence to until the new year, and by then, the press would have finished vilifying him.

  He raced downstairs to the dining room, snatching the newspapers from the table. There was no mistaking the identity of the person photographed against the backdrop of the warehouse fire. The realisation that he’d brought the photographer to the port hit him like a tonne of bricks and he slammed his hand against the table, rattling the crockery laid out for breakfast. That conniving reprobate. Garth Moodie would rue the day he crossed him. Meredith would ruin him; have him prosecuted for taking lewd photographs, or engaging in unnatural sex, or something. There was plenty of evidence in the photographers studio. But Moodie was the least of his concerns, he’d keep. It was Williams and Kurdi who required immediate attention. And once breakfast was over, he’d deal to them, permanently.

  His stomach full, he retired to his room to gather everything he needed for his investigations to continue, there were other ways to skin a cat. He’d taken the papers from breakfast so his fellow boarders couldn’t read the printed lies about him.

  Meredith slipped a small pistol into his bag, together with his gun licence. Since the Cornermen had used guns in their terrorisation of the Liverpool population, anyone with a pistol outside of their house needed a licence, not that the gangs paid any heed to that. He didn’t want to give the press any more ammunition.

  His notebooks and files went into the bag. He’d spent hours last night pouring over the finer details of what he considered one of the most complex smuggling operations ever conducted on Her Majesty’s soil. He just needed a confession to tie everything together. A confession had such a delicious ring to it. Enough of inviting all and sundry to live in this great country. What England needed was more Englishmen, not Arabs and their funny way. He couldn’t acknowledge he enjoyed a fine pot of coffee with his breakfast because of the trade with the Ottoman Empire, which started in the 1500s.

  Meredith checked his room, ensuring everything was in its place, his valuables hidden from temptation, and the fire damped down for the day. Thanks to the newspapers he’d devoured, cover-to-cover, he’d formulated a plan. An Englishman turned Muslim was opening a Mosque in Liverpool, tomorrow, on Christmas Day, the holiest of days. And Meredith had a good idea of who might be there — his favourite smuggler, Mr Samer Kurdi himself.

  The First Telegram

  For Samer Kurdi, Liverpool would be the turning point in his life. Raised a trader, by a trader, living an entrepreneurial life from the moment he could walk. Although he was a successful entrepreneur in business with Robert Williams, a Christian Englishman, Samer’s Muslim faith guided his work and life. And with no family in England, and Robert on urgent business in India, he’d travelled to Liverpool not only to oversee the arrival of their latest shipment from India, but also to witness England’s first functioning mosque opening on Christmas Day.

  Samer Kurdi reached for the folded newspaper when a diminutive uniformed bellboy appeared.

  ‘Mr Kurdi? There’s a telegram for you,’ said the bellboy, slipping a slim envelope onto the plate at Samer’s elbow.

  Samer tipped the boy and took a sip of his tea, making no hurry to open the missive waiting for him. Telegrams never delivered good news, so whatever it had to say could wait until he was ready.

  Breakfast at the North Western Hotel was a busy affair since the 330 room hotel servicing the Lime Street Railway station had become a key venue for business conducted over breakfast. Men whispered over toast and marmalade, steaming pots of tea and coffee at their elbows. The blackness of their suits the dominant colour of the room, as if shadows of the men who’d been before had remained in the seats, until there was layer-upon-layer of residue left behind, building into one homogenous bespectacled man, who thought himself too busy and important to breakfast with his family.

  Samer wiped his mouth clean of food and lay the linen napkin next to the china plate. His hand hesitated above the telegram. On the other side lay the unopened newspaper, also waiting for his attention, but curiously he had no interest. He enjoyed living in the bubble of travel and the anonymity it brought with it. No one knew him, therefore cast no suspicious glances his way. The court case in London had impacted both him and Robert Williams. Associates looked at them askance, communications had dwindled. Imperceptible changes but Samer felt them. And as much as he tried to ignore them, their whispers wriggled into the darkest corners of his mind, taunting him, questioning his choices.

  The pull of the telegram beat out the beckoning newspaper, and he opened the crisp monogrammed envelope.

  Addressed to him, it was from their shipping agent in Liverpool, the man he was to meet after the Christmas festivities.

  Fire at port. Warehouse destroyed. Everything lost. Meet me at the shipping office 2pm.

  Samer’s stomach threatened to disgorge his breakfast and the other diners shimmered in his narrowing vision as he struggled to maintain his composure. The words everything lost seared into his heart. The money he and Robert had invested in that shipment far surpassed anything they’d done before. Shipping furniture and homeware was riskier than the usual shipments of cloth and tea and required a much greater investment. Although it wasn’t only furniture they’d imported this time. The last shipment contained a quantity of opium. They’d argued about continuing to import it, and despite the importation of opium being legal, Samer considered it a fool’s errand. The writing was on the wall, and his entrepreneurial spirit warned him that opium was on the way out. The Chinese were increasingly vocal about their distaste for the trade, and yet the English carried on as though the harm the drug caused was pure imagination.

  Samer didn’t know what to do. If the fire had destroyed their shipment, he should return to London to meet with their insurance agent. At least they’d be able to salvage some funds from the loss. But that didn’t address the loss of revenue from the goods they’d sold through their catalogues - Robert’s most recent business improvement. It worked well for their American competitors, so Robert had sunk thousands of pounds into printing and distributing catalogues for customers to preorder their goods, all handled by staff based in Liverpool, where the rents and labour were cheaper. How they would reimburse those customers was a headache he didn’t want to handle alone, but Robert had sailed to India to source new products and to secure a better deal on the opium they’d had such a profitable run with, despite Samer’s protestations.

  He folded the telegram into quarters, slipping it into his waistcoat pocket. The only way to handle the disappointment was to know that it was the will of Allah. That there was a reason which would become clearer as time passed. He could not change history. They’d lost the shipment but life must go on.

  Samer signalled to a hovering waiter and ordered another tea with honey and shook open the newspaper. Emblazoned on the front page was an image of an all-to-familiar warehouse engulfed in fire. But it wa
sn’t the fire which drew his eye, it was the profile of a man on the left of the shot, someone he knew far too well - Clifford Meredith. This changed everything.

  The Port

  Samer abandoned the newspaper on the table, sweeping past the waiter returning with his fragrant tea and honey. His shipping agent had requested a meeting this afternoon, but Clifford Meredith’s involvement created an added complication. Samer’s guts twisted, lending an English pallor to his middle eastern complexion.

  The bellboy hailed a cab for him. Although the telegram arrived still sealed, the staff at the hotel knew the contents intimately — there were no secrets in a hotel, no matter what the guests thought.

  Samer’s ride to the port was equal measures too short and too long, and he could smell it before he saw the shell of warehouse #5, the acrid smoke hung over the port, fine ash clinging to the red bricks of the remaining warehouses; warehouses miraculously untouched by the fire, either through sheer luck, but more likely through the efforts of the firemen from Liverpool’s new auxiliary fire station at Langton Dock.

  Samer shoved a handful of coins into the driver’s waiting hand and stepped down from the cab. Macabre sightseers loitered at the gates, each vocal in their thoughts on the tragedy.

  The shipping agent’s office was a riot of noise, for it wasn’t only Samer’s cargo lost in the fire. Warehouse #5 housed goods belonging to countless importers, both small shipments and shipments much larger than his own. The anguish on every importer’s face was identical, regardless of the value of their freight. Most businessmen lived life on a finely balanced set of scales. To lose one’s investment could send a man’s family to the workhouse in the matter of weeks. His own financial position was not so precarious, but he was yet to communicate the loss to the insurance company. He still had that to do.