by M. H. Baylis
‘I didn’t mean –’
‘I know what you meant. No I was not close to him. He was a rude man. I discovered that in April 1994, when he killed off my fig tree by concreting over his garden, and I went round to complain. After that I never spoke a word to him. I was glad his wife ran off. Good on her, I thought.’
Rex had never considered the possibility that Kovacs might not live alone. ‘He had a wife? Where did she go?’
‘I don’t know!’ snapped Mrs Christodoulou. ‘One day she and the kid was there. Next day they weren’t. There was always rows. I guess she just had enough and went.’
‘When was that?’
‘Actually it was the day before he concreted his garden over.’
* * *
Vadim was driving. Rex had had to dampen the Russian’s enthusiasm the night before, because he was needed at the office, but they’d agreed a time to visit the Travelodge together. Vadim was keen to show off his new car: a BMW, complete with German number-plates and a German-speaking sat-nav too. This led to some confusion, and they ended up severely lost in the Tottenham Hale area. At one point they found themselves on Chesnut Road, now a street of almost cottage-like council homes. Rex remembered that the rubber works had once been here – Schnurrman’s, where the Outrage robbers had briefly worked in 1909, while plotting their raid on the weekly wages delivery.
They passed down other streets whose names he vaguely recalled, either because of the pamphlets on the Outrage he’d flipped through, or because more recent crimes had taken him there. Scales Road, where rows of bland, 1960s bungalows were broken up by dramatic, fairy-tale trees. Marsh Lane, wide and windswept – the Pumping Station on one side; on the other a vast, white Pentecostalist tent, where in the summer you could see wild Nigerian pastors blessing mobile phones and lifting curses.
They crossed the marshes that separated Tottenham from Walthamstow, where the Outrage had had its bloody final act after two deaths, 23 casualties and 300 bullets. Rex wondered why Walthamstow hadn’t claimed the Outrage for its own, along with William Morris and East 17. Then he wondered why he and Vadim were heading towards Walthamstow at all.
‘Vadim, we’re going the wrong way. This is east.’
Vadim struck the satnav a blow with the heel of his palm and did a U-turn. The blow didn’t cure the machine of its Teutonic leanings, but within minutes they found themselves back on the North Circular, heading in the right direction. West, towards the Borehamwood Travelodge.
After seeing Mrs Christodolou Rex had felt fired up, certain he was onto something. He’d tried the house on the other side, Number 326, and finding it empty, left a note asking the occupant to call him when she returned. Now, though, he was starting to wonder. After his accident, Rex had been ill. And in the hospital where they’d looked after him, they’d told him that seeing links everywhere was part of the illness – a sign that his imagination was taking over from reality. Was that happening now? Perhaps things really were as simple as they looked from the outside, and Terry had killed Kovacs in a fit of unneighbourly rage. He hated to think it, but that possibility, he knew, had to be allowed in.
If anything could cast doubt on that terrible idea, though, he wanted to find it. And he sensed the doubt would come from Kovacs. The crabby historian had been there when the Bettelheims died. Not only that, but he had definitely behaved oddly, fleeing the scene in what looked like panic. Not to mention being found dead himself just a short time later. And someone, described by the old lady as a Hasidic Jew, had been had been a visitor to Kovacs’ house. Surely these were real links, at the very least coincidences worth exploring, and not just figments of his imagination?
Yet what didn’t seem to link in at all was the other visitor – the black man. Had Mrs Christodoulou really never looked at him, as she maddeningly insisted? Could anyone in the Wood Green area fail to recognise Bird, even if they didn’t peer directly at him? Then again, what possible reason could a man like Bird have had to pay regular visits to Dr Kovacs’ house? It seemed so unlikely.
Rex took a call on his mobile. It was the man from the firm who’d been printing Kovacs’ book. ‘We found a few things, but I’m not sure they’ll be much use to you.’
‘What are they?’
‘Whoever did our place over dumped a lot of stuff in a skip down the road. There’s a chunk of pages that are definitely from his book. And a sort of… notebook I suppose you’d say. Nice old leather-bound thing. Handwritten.’
‘You’re sure that belonged to Kovacs?’
‘I’m sure. He parcelled it up with the manuscript when he sent it to us – wanted us to use some of the pages for the back-cover design. I should probably be handing it to the police, shouldn’t I?’
‘Well, I guess that’s up to you,’ Rex said, trying to mask his annoyance. Why call him, only to announce that he wasn’t going to help? ‘But I don’t think they’ll be interested. They think they’ve got their man.’
‘Hmm,’ said the man, after a pause. ‘All right. I’ll pop it in the post to you.’
Rex hung up as Vadim drew into a hotel car-park, abutted by a low, red-brick conference centre. Not far away, just beyond the tailored verges and the uniformly trimmed laburnums, the M1 roared. This was the real England, away from the tin-shuttered spice halls and teeming, tribal highways of Haringey. This world was corporate, dull, neat: a landscape of business centres and motorway exits. He was glad he didn’t live in it.
The same two girls he’d seen in the footage were on the Reception Desk. Polish. Agnieska and Ewa. They were both pretty in a blonde way, and dismissive in a uniquely Slavic way that was rude yet without intending any personal insult. They didn’t remember the woman, or the name Bettelheim. Besides, guest information was confidential. Lots of women came through here, they added – alone or in company.
‘Do they all pick up packages at the desk?’ Rex asked.
‘Business people get things sent to here all the time,’ Ewa said, in a voice that sounded as if she was trying hard not to open her mouth. ‘We’ve got all the facilities.’
‘A woman in a headscarf doesn’t ring any bells?’
‘Why doesn’t she ring bells?’ Agnieska asked innocently.
Rex and Vadim left the girls snickering amongst themselves, and snuck round the back, to the laundry. It was Vadim’s idea. The cleaners and chamber-maids would hang out here, he said, something he knew from a stint working as a concierge in Frankfurt. They’d be on less money than the receptionists. Which meant more willing to help. Or more easily bribed.
It was a good hunch. The laundry smelt strangely comforting: of starch and steam and women’s sweat. It reminded Rex of his mother, who had done ironing for the neighbours. When he described the Jewish couple, a pair of African women in striped tunics cackled.
‘We know them!’ declared one, a motherly figure called Blessings. ‘Stay two hours, and go. Two hours, and go.’
‘What, they just…?’ Rex found he couldn’t say it. But the other woman, a tougher-looking, lighter-skinned woman called Gloria snorted.
‘They don’t have SEX!’ she more or less sang. ‘They jos’ use the rooms.’
Rex was lost. ‘What for?’
Blessings shrugged. Gloria displayed one gold tooth and then sucked it. ‘Watch TV. Look internet. Drink mini-bar. They use everything. Just not the bed.’
‘Why?’
Gloria and Blessings shrugged as one, not seeming that bothered, and hurriedly went back to folding towels and stacking carts as Agnieska from Reception appeared. Rex imagined she was here to turf them out, but instead she smiled awkwardly.
‘I thought you might come in here,’ Agnieska said, tightly. She spoke as if she were outside in a gale, without a coat. Maybe it had something to do with coming from a cold country. ‘I looked up that name you said, Bettelheim. It’s that woman, isn’t it? From the family in the park?’
‘Did she stay here under that name?’
‘They came a lot actually.’
<
br /> ‘They?’
‘The husband and wife.’
‘How you know they were husband and wife?’ Vadim asked, sharply.
‘The last time he was here, the man gave me this.’ She handed them a card. It was for a jeweller’s in Hatton Garden called J.R.R.S. The initials stood for Jewels, Resizing, Repairs, Supplies, and beneath that were the words: Yaakov Bettelheim, Senior Technician. ‘He noticed my engagement ring was loose,’ she said, twisting the silver band on her finger as she spoke. ‘He said he could resize it.’
Rex asked if he could keep the card. She said she didn’t mind. She was pregnant now, she added, bashfully, and the ring was getting tighter every day.
‘Have you any idea why they would meet up in that room?’
She shrugged. ‘To watch DVDs? That was what was in the package. You could feel it. Every week. DVDs.’
Why would a wife meet her husband in a hotel room miles away from where they lived to watch DVDs? Vadim and Agnieska seemed to have no more idea than he did. But perhaps Rescha Schild knew.
* * *
Rex returned to the office just after lunch. He was itching to go back to Stamford Hill, but it was Wednesday. Deadline day for the free paper, which consisted mainly of adverts and competitions, with the odd, filleted news or comment piece designed to lure people onto the website. Every Thursday morning he’d find copies of it strewn all over Ducketts Common. It made a mockery of the preceding night’s efforts. It still had to be done, though.
Rex, Brenda and Susan took in turns to do the final layout. It was his turn today, which meant a slightly later stint. He enjoyed it, though, for nostalgic reasons, tending the mock-up like some priest on a vigil, eyes itching under the lights, the office smelling nutty with coffee and sweat as the minutes ticked towards to that magical point when you pressed the ‘lock’ button and the paper was ‘put to bed’.
He switched on his computer. While it booted up, he watched Susan show some men out of her office. These days she was often cloistered in there with groups of men. Some were middle-aged, suited and hearty, with the look of local councillors. Others, like the group shuffling out now, were young and cool and studiedly scruffy. The specific purpose of these meetings was never explained, but Rex, like everyone else, knew generally why they were taking place. Because News North London was slowly, inexorably, going under.
‘It’s kind of like December without Christmas now, isn’t it?’ Susan said, stopping by his desk. As always, she smelt of fresh linen.
He knew what she meant. The constant updating of the website had taken the magic out of the process. The week no longer had a shape, no longer built to a delectable Sabbath-like point when you pressed a button and declared the paper ready. They might pretend that Wednesday was deadline day, but they all knew it was just a pretence. But he was surprised to hear Susan admit it.
‘Did you see your Post-it?’ she added.
He had not. Brenda understood Post-its in principle, but had not grasped the practical necessity of putting them where they would be noticed. This one was stuck to the side of Rex’s monitor, towards the back. It said, in neat, Junior-School-teacher’s handwriting: A nun called round for you. No message.
No message was necessary. He knew exactly who the nun was. And what she had meant to convey. So did Susan, who was still hovering by his desk, and Brenda, and the Whittaker Twins, and Lawrence Berne, and the thousand pairs of eyes that now seemed to be staring in at him from the sky outside. It was time to go up the hill. He could go tonight, once he’d sorted the paper out. Yes, that was what he would do.
He glanced up. Susan was still there, her mouth framing a question. It never came, though, because his phone rang. It was Mike Bond – Brenda’s husband, the coroner. He was calling from somewhere outdoors, and Rex thought he could hear shouting in the background.
‘Any more news on where the cyanide came from?’ Rex asked.
‘There is some news on that, but I can’t tell you now.’
‘What can you tell me, Mike?’
‘I’m at the mortuary. The Bettelheim family’s down here. It’s all kicking off.’
* * *
One sign of change was the beggars, Rex thought, as the bus crept down the High Street towards the junction. They were definitely working harder for their cash. Where an outstretched hand or an indecipherable hard-luck story on a scrap of cardboard might once have sufficed, now there were active scams.
The gypsy girls, for example, had veiled up and donned rucksacks and clipboards to pass themselves off as pious Turkish students soliciting donations for wherever happened to be the current Islamic crisis zone. Further down, a man who used to sit outside ShoeZone in a dirty tracksuit was now swathed in a vaguely Afghan-looking array of scarves and waistcoats. He had also taken to waving what purported to be the stump of an arm at people, although everyone but the newest of newcomers knew this was just his old, perfectly intact limb, with a MaxiCoke cup from Burger King shoved over its old, perfectly intact elbow.
They weren’t the only ones putting on an act, Rex thought. After all, most of the kids round here pretended to be Jamaican, even if their parents were Greek Cypriots. And if his last encounter with the Sunday supplements was anything to go on, the middle class lot up the road in Crouch End all wanted to live and eat and do up their flats as if they were Italians, or Japanese, or indeed anyone they were not. Perhaps that was what globalisation really meant. Anyone could be everyone they were not.
The bus turned right onto Turnpike Lane, and picked up speed as it passed under the railway bridge permanently festooned with Kurdish slogans and emblems of the PKK. There’d been yet another doomed attempt to turn the Old Pumping Station into a Mecca for fine diners. The current proprietors had resorted to painting enticing trigger words for the moneyed middle classes all over its windows, like magic charms or Pavlovian stimuli. Veal bones. Truffle oil. Prosecco.
The Pumping Station marked a geographical caesura. As you moved past it, you entered a region that was still scruffy but had more in common with the adjacent areas of Crouch End and Muswell Hill. Here you saw dads looking after babies. People who drove camper vans and made sourdough bread and learnt the ukulele. It wasn’t so much about income, perhaps, as outlook.
Tucked behind the main thoroughfare, with Ally Pally looming up above, was the low, modern building that housed the mortuary and coroner’s office. As he walked down towards it, Rex remembered another time Mike Bond had summoned him there – a dark night last year, when he’d had to identify the remains of a former lover. It was one memory among many. The truth was, his job often took him to Hornsey Mortuary, and often in response to a call from Mike.
He spotted Brenda’s husband, his wavy white hair dancing in the light breeze, his grey suit echoing the saggy, surprised look of a body suddenly thin after decades of being fat. He was standing a little way from the building, talking to a WPC as a small crowd of black-coated Hasidim milled around the entrance. They seemed to be arguing both among themselves and with the uncomfortable-looking line of policemen who stood directly in front of the doors. In their midst Rex recognised the tall, muscular, red-headed man he’d seen on TV, greeting family members at the airport.
‘What’s the beef?’ Rex asked, as he joined Bond. ‘And don’t say kosher brisket.’
‘This isn’t the time for jokes,’ Bond replied shortly. ‘This lot are really upset. They’re not unlike your Muslims, see. Desert cultures – they want to bury the bodies as quickly as they can.’
‘And the police won’t release the bodies before the inquest?’
Bond nodded. ‘And we can’t hold the inquest until the pathologist has completed some tests on the Bettelheim boy.’
‘The teenager? What tests?’
Bond shifted Rex away from the WPC and lowered his voice. ‘Needle marks. Both arms. Plus, evidence of a nasty subcutaneous infection, which cleared up, but left some scars. No mention of anything on his GP’s records.’
‘They had a GP
?’ As he considered this, Rex caught sight of D.S. Brenard, standing over the road, talking earnestly into his phone.
Bond frowned. ‘They’re just normal people, Rex. Normal people with rules that sometimes bump up against ours.’
Something suddenly changed the mood of the crowd, and it surged forward. The tall red-head grabbed one of the door handles. Rex studied him. There was something odd about his face. It was strong-jawed, thick-necked. The face of someone who played sport, which in itself seemed somewhat unusual for a Hasid. But that wasn’t it.
‘Sir, I will arrest you if you do not desist,’ said a young, sweating copper.
‘Do whatever you like,’ the man declared, in a loud, American accent. ‘We’re taking our dead!’
Rex began to film on his camera phone as a scuffle broke out. A hat was knocked askew, shins and groins were kicked, faces reddened. Incredibly, there was no swearing.
And then there was.
‘For fuck’s sake pack it in or I’ll pepper-spray the lot of you!’ D.S. Brenard roared as he ploughed into the thick of the brawl. It provided just the shock everyone needed. The crowd pulled back. The big red-head kept his hold on the handle of the mortuary door, then finally backed away after a warning glare from Brenard.
‘Right,’ Brenard said, with the controlled menace of a teacher in the playground. ‘This is the situation. The mortuary is open between the hours of 8am and 8pm. During those hours, a maximum of two people will be permitted to stay in a room adjacent to the bodies. Between the hours of 8pm and 8am, I understand there will be a special kind of candle in a protective box, which will be kept lit out here, and which can be tended by as many of you as you like. The bodies, Mr Dordoff, will be released when the inquest is complete. Any further attempt to remove them before that time will be treated as a criminal offence.’
The voices of protest rose up again. This time, it was the flame-haired man, the one Brenard had called Dordoff, who roared for quiet.
‘So it’s only once a group of highly distressed people who’ve travelled halfway around the world come and beg, that you agree to some basic, humane concessions! Or perhaps it’s only because the media are here?’ he added, shooting a piercing blue gaze at Rex. The man didn’t have a beard, Rex realised. That was it. He wore earlocks – impressively long ones. But he was clean-shaven.
