by M. H. Baylis
No, what I do is just look at the daughter. Leah. The soft, coppery hair on her long, slender neck. The grubby undervest and petticoat I can glimpse through the holes in her Sunday frock. It has been so long. So cold. And there is no warm like that warm.
Then I grow hard, and it feels wrong, in this bare, quiet, freezing room, with these solemn women and their made-up God. So I recite my own prayer. I remind myself who I am.
I am George Smith, a gas fitter. I was born in Goff’s Oak, county of Hertfordshire, year of Our Lord 1869, joined Her Majesty’s Navy at 14, sailing under the Union flag, and a few more besides, for 25 years. Now I reside at 11 Scotland Green, lodge with a Mrs Vashti Cutter and her unwed daughter Leah. I have a wife and six children, back in Goff’s Oak, send them a four-shilling postal order every Saturday evening. Here are the dockets to prove it.
No, I’m not a hero. I’m just an ordinary subject of the King, doing what comes naturally when he witnesses an outrage on the streets of this fine borough. Honest. Ordinary. Upright. Upright as I can be with a spine like a corkscrew.
* * *
Rex and Terry had been the first media representatives on the scene, but by the time they’d made it back up Green Lanes to the offices of News North London, Sky and the BBC already had an army of tanned and blow-dried anchor-folk doing live broadcasts all over the borough. Sky had gone for the panic-inducing ticker-tape legend, ‘Jewish Family In Suspected Muslim Poison Plot’, while ‘Terror In London Park’, was the more restrained message at the bottom of the BBC screen.
Susan had both channels on in the office, and was flitting back and forth from her own inner sanctum to Rex and Terry’s desks as they updated copy and uploaded fresh images to the website. They were busy and focussed, yet a faint sense of futility hung over the whole enterprise. They’d stayed at the scene as long as they were allowed, taking pictures, interviewing bystanders, waiting to give their own statements to the police. There was no doubt they had the best insight into what had gone on at the park. What difference did that make, though, when everyone would just click the little icons on their phones and their tablets, and get live footage from the big players? News North London’s budget didn’t stretch to an ‘app’. Even if it did, the chances were that few would download it.
Yet everyone in the room cared. From the Whittaker Twins in their little ad sales corner, to the vast, unshakeable Brenda on Reception, everyone cared about their jobs, about the end product, and most of all about the sprawling, teeming, unloved area they lived and worked in. It was just that no one was sure anymore, in this new, pixelated screen-filtered world, whether caring was enough.
At the bottom of the TV screens, to occupy viewers during the inevitable dead time and pointless waffle of rolling news broadcasts, there were texts, tweets and emails from the general public. On her way past, Susan stopped and peered at them, emitting a slight grunt of approval.
‘Outrage,’ she said, tapping the screen with her pen. ‘This guy uses the word outrage. We should get that in. New Outrage At Tottenham.’
‘People will think it’s about Spurs sacking their manager,’ Terry said.
‘Plus Finsbury Park isn’t Tottenham,’ Rex added. ‘And you know what’ll happen if we get the parish boundaries mixed up.’
Just about the only thing that could really goad the local populace into tweeting, texting, emailing or phoning in its views was a geographical error. Confuse Wood Green and Tottenham, Crouch End and Hornsey – mistake any ancient parish for the one immediately to the north or south of it – and you’d be on the end of a public onslaught. Melting pot this borough surely was, but it had its own peculiar code: you might be stateless, or hail from a global region continually changing hands and borders, but once you got to Haringey, you made damn sure you knew which part was which. Maybe that was why the gangbanger kids kept stabbing each other over postcodes.
On the TV screen, the BBC reporter, a Tamil woman, stood outside the recently-opened mosque on Brownswood Road, where, earlier that morning, the boys had, it was alleged, attended a talk by an inflammatory preacher. As she spoke to the camera helicopters hovered overhead, stoking up the pulse rate. It wasn’t hard to imagine the scene unfolding inside the building behind her, as well as in the cafés and the halal butchers of the surrounding area. It would involve jackboots and Tasers, and a distinct lack of niceties. And quite possibly it would turn more young men into the sort of young men who were being hunted.
The reporter repeated the descriptions of the missing men, then cut to an interview with the man who hired out the boats on the boating lake. Irish-looking, with a boozer’s nose, he seemed depressingly proud to have played a part in the whole affair, or at least to be on the telly talking about it. The Asian boys had hired out a rowing boat from him, he said, the same boat the as-yet-unnamed Jewish family had been on shortly before. The boys had rowed theirs over to a little island in the middle, where people weren’t supposed to go because it was for nesting ducks and geese, and he’d shouted at them. They’d obeyed him and rowed away, returning the boat earlier than necessary. He’d seen them walk over to the table where the Jewish family was eating, but that was all he’d seen. He’d had to go and answer his phone.
Brenda approached Rex with a cup of tea. She placed it at the very edge of his desk, and remained standing at a distance, observing him fixedly.
‘You look very pale,’ she announced.
Brenda, receptionist, sub-editor, mother of five and matriarch to the entire News North London staff, often accused Rex of looking pale. Or feverish, or thin, or bloated, or needing to have his bad foot looked at by another, better doctor. Today, though, her concern was tinged with something else. Something manifested by the way she avoided coming too close to his desk.
‘Brenda, I am not radioactive,’ Rex said, reaching across the desk for his mug.
She wasn’t the only one to have had the idea. At the teeming crime scene, while technicians in chemical attack suits moved with balletic precision, and a unit of soldiers tented the centre of the park under yards of opaque plastic, Rex and Terry had been measured with a Geiger counter. Later, in a Portakabin that had suddenly appeared on the athletics track, a chatty, snub-nosed young doctor had taken blood, saliva and skin swabs. No one knew what, if anything, had been sprayed at the picnicking family, or even whether it was related to their deaths. No one, understandably, was taking any chances. A laminated card now in Rex’s pocket told him what to do if he suddenly experienced any palpitations, blackouts or shooting pains. The trouble was, Rex experienced most of those symptoms in the course of an average morning.
‘It’s great copy guys, thank you,’ said Susan, elegantly sipping green tea from a silver flask-top as she came out from her lair. She was attired in layers of light-coloured shirts and waistcoats and scarves, giving her the look of a priestess. ‘So where now?’
‘The mosques, get some local reactions?’
The boss shook her head, a dark ringlet coming loose from the central bun, and pointing to one of the screens on the wall. At that very moment, the fat bloke from Sky News was standing outside a different mosque, the larger and far longer-established one at Finsbury Park, talking to a group of silver-bearded elders in astrakhan hats and waistcoats.
‘Everyone’s doing that. Get over to Stamford Hill. Find out what they’re saying there. Community in shock, that kind of jazz.’
‘We don’t know they came from Stamford Hill,’ Terry said.
‘A Hasidic family, in Finsbury Park. Where do you think they came from, Terry? Chelsea? They’ll be Lubavitch or Satmar,’ she went on, mentioning the two main groups of Hasidic Jews in the area. ‘And they’ll have come straight down Seven Sisters Road.’
‘Aye, in a clapped-out Volvo,’ Terry added, with a hollow chuckle. Nobody laughed back.
‘They weren’t,’ Rex said, suddenly remembering what Dr Kovacs had said, just before hurrying away from the scene. ‘They belonged to a different group. Dukavitch or…’
&n
bsp; ‘Dukovchiner?’
‘Yes,’ he said, surprised, turning towards Brenda. ‘How did you know?’
‘Because that silly child Ellie couldn’t spell the word,’ Brenda said. ‘And I spent a month correcting it every time she wrote it. Rex won’t remember,’ she added, to Susan. ‘He was off in Thailand with that doctor girl.’
Last year Rex had taken a four-month sabbatical, after being stabbed. He’d spent much of it in Cambodia, in fruitless pursuit of a woman, and in his absence the Dukovchiner sect had apparently made the headlines. Susan leaned over Rex’s keyboard, calling up the relevant issues from the archive for him to see.
‘Micah Walther,’ she read out loud, as an image of a gap-toothed, ringleted teenage boy filled the screen. The paper was dated September 2013. ‘Fourteen years old. His family were Dukovchiner.’
‘All the same, aren’t they?’ Terry said. ‘Black hats and beards and Volvos.’
‘They have different groups, though,’ Rex said. ‘They all started in different towns in Eastern Europe and… I don’t know, some of them like Israel and some of them hate it. That sort of thing.’ He looked towards Susan for confirmation, but she merely shrugged.
‘Kids again,’ Brenda said sorrowfully to herself as she looked at Rex’s screen. ‘Always kids.’
‘What happened to him?’ Rex asked.
Susan shrugged. ‘CCTV on the railway station showed him heading towards the study-house to meet his father. He never got there.’
‘And they’re still looking for him?’
‘Someone is, I hope. We did a lot on it at the time, but… teenage frummer boys with skullcaps don’t get quite the same public response as blonde toddlers.’
Susan could sound hard. But Rex knew there was an intensely decent human being underneath. One who’d given him a job when all his other doorways had closed. One who cared about this grimy, fascinating patchwork-quilt of a borough as much as he did. ‘Read the archive,’ she went on. ‘Ellie couldn’t find out much about the community, but I’m not sure how hard she really tried…’
The mention of Ellie Mehta, formerly the paper’s Junior Reporter, had soured the air. She’d left after insisting on a pay rise just as everyone else was taking a cut, and then abruptly gone to work for far less money on the Daily Telegraph. Although Ellie was alive and well, living just down the road in a fashionably horrid part of Hackney and making daily appearances in a major newspaper, she’d become a sort of mythical pariah figure in the office. The regular malfunctioning of the printer was blamed on Ellie Mehta, as was any new computer glitch, and the recent disappearance of a Canon EOS 1DX camera.
‘Anyway,’ Susan said. ‘Let’s meet at six. We’ll refresh at eight tonight, okay, people?’
‘This was supposed to be my afternoon off,’ Terry grumbled, as the boss sailed back into her office. He wiped his forehead. ‘Is anyone else boiling hot?’
‘It has got a lot warmer outside,’ Susan said.
‘In March,’ Brenda said. ‘Climate change.’
The working day had changed in this new, digital age. In addition to meeting the traditional once-a-week deadline for the old Wood Green Gazette – which still existed, as a free ad sheet with a bit of news and comment slapped on the front – they had to update the website every evening, shifting the placement of stories, adding new material in response to the day’s events. A good hour’s work followed that, too, responding to tweets and posts, ensuring all the links were working and the old material correctly archived. Technology was supposed to make everything easier, but Rex found himself working harder than he’d ever done before. If he were honest, he didn’t always mind. It stopped him brooding about what had happened in Cambodia. And before. It meant less time for drinking, too.
Not that he felt much healthier for it. In fact, now that Terry had mentioned it, he did feel hot. Outside, the sun was now shining in a cloudless sky, and down on the High Street below shoppers were strolling about in T-shirts. Rex wasn’t reassured, though. He took the card out of his jacket pocket and read it. It didn’t mention fever. He glanced across and saw that Terry was looking at his own card. They grinned at one another, partly from embarrassment, partly from something else.
‘Why don’t we go out and take a few pictures, then you can get off home?’ Rex suggested. ‘I’m sure you’re aching to get back to your lovely neighbour.’
‘Did I tell you what the scabby bastard said to me last week?’ Terry said, sniffing loudly as he started assembling various bits of camera kit in a canvas bag. ‘Instead of sitting up in your bedroom typing all night, right next to the end of my sodding bed, why don’t you just go downstairs and do it in your living room? And you know what he says?’
‘Why don’t you go sleep in your bathroom?’ Rex said.
The story had already acquired legendary status. As had Terry’s response, which he’d written on a Post-it and stuck in the shared hallway. Meeting the notorious neighbour in the flesh had done nothing to diminish his image – quite the opposite. Except for that final moment in the park, when his prickly manner had evaporated. It hadn’t just been sadness or shock on Dr Kovacs’ face. Rex was sure he’d seen something else. Something closer to fear.
The lower part of Green Lanes had been screened off behind tall metal barriers, forcing Rex and Terry to pick their way southwards through Tottenham. They were less than a mile away from a suspected terrorist murder in a much-frequented park and yet, at least from his seat in Terry’s Vauxhall, Rex could see no sign that the local population knew, or cared.
Things were different once they headed down the broad Edwardian slopes of Stamford Hill into what had been, since the early 20th century, the heartland of the Hasidic Jewish community. The shops were all open as usual: Minsk Housecoats selling the distinctively Hasidic range of long Puffa coats and modest, navy-striped knitwear; Richler Fish with its windows of carp and herring. Plenty of customers were passing in and out: homburg-hatted men in what must have been, for the day, impossibly heavy overcoats; women with bobbed, dark-brown wigs and pushchairs; and kids, dozens, hundreds of kids, everywhere. But outside every Jewish business, as well as several of the vast, beetling villas used as prayer-houses and schools, were the shomrim.
The shomrim were one aspect of the community that did occasionally make the news. Dressed in distinctive fluorescent orange tabards with Hebrew lettering on the back, they acted as a subscriber police force for the community. Occasionally, they were accused of racism when they challenged and chased black and Turkish youths who often hadn’t done anything wrong. More rarely, a shomer became a media celebrity when he interrupted a mugging or rescued a baby. Amidst the rollercoaster of controversy and congratulation, few people recognised the day-to-day business in which the shomrim were engaged, for little or no money: patrolling school crossings and guarding buildings.
‘Last time I seen them all out like this was during the riots,’ Terry croaked. He’d coughed and wheezed the whole way there. ‘This has got to be something to do with the park, hasn’t it?’
‘Let’s ask them,’ Rex said. ‘Can we park up somewhere?’
‘Why don’t you have a go? You’re the one who needs the practice,’ Terry said. Rex ignored him. He shifted about in his seat. He’d gone from feeling hot in the office to shivering in the car. Now he felt as if his hair hurt. What was wrong with them him??
They stationed the car down a side street, next to a small business whose bright, egg-yolk-coloured sign said: ‘Solly Scissorvitz Haircuts: classic, fashion and ritual’. As always before a long walking session, Rex swallowed a couple of painkillers to numb his left foot. Ever since a car accident a decade ago he’d had arthritis in it, and he walked with a limp, which grew more pronounced as the day wore on.
Terry commenced taking snaps with a practised discretion which Rex had never ceased to admire, holding his camera at chest height, and appearing to be examining something on its top control panel whilst actually photographing passers-by. Periodically, to est
ablish his innocence, he took long, wide shots of roofs and sky and street signs. It was a vital subterfuge in this borough, where people’s reasons for being camera-shy ranged from the cultural to the criminal.
Rex looked around for people to talk to. He soon recognised a face amid the lines of guarding shomrim. Outside the Beis Rochel Satmar Girls’ High School stood a short, almost tiny, dark-featured man, legs wide, arms folded, a fedora cocked back high on his head. You might have thought the man slightly comical, if you hadn’t heard of Mordecai Hershkovits.
Hershkovits, whose small ear-curls and modish hat announced him as a scion of the forward-looking, politically active Lubavitch sect, ran classes for the local kids. Not Hebrew classes, but workshops in the deadly art of krav maga. This was a martial art developed by the Israeli Army, in which, it was said, disciples could learn six ways of paralysing an opponent with only their thumbs. True or not, Hershkovits’s offer to teach it to the Stamford Hill boys, and even the girls, had divided the religious Jewish community, and a considerable chunk of those outside it. At the height of the debate, he’d rather spoiled his case – or perhaps strengthened it – by using krav maga on a pair of Bulgarian scaffolders who’d refused to move their truck from the entrance to a Clapton synagogue. Both had spent time in hospital.
Mordecai Hershkovits looked now as defiant as he had on the day he’d received a two-year suspended sentence and 300 hours’ Community Service. Rex had interviewed him then, on an icy morning a few years ago, and found himself liking the man. He wondered if Hershkovits would remember him.
‘Ah, same blue suit,’ the little man said, as Rex approached. ‘When are you going to get a new one?’
