The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘I apologise if we’ve been slow to respect your cultural needs,’ Brenard said.

  Dordoff ignored the apology. ‘You have not been slow to come to our neighbourhood and spread suspicion and fear! These people are not only grieving over the sudden loss of their loved ones: they’re dealing with lies, malicious lies, spreading through the community, that accuse Chaya Bettelheim of poisoning her own family! Where did those lies come from?’

  Brenard held his hands up. ‘The officer responsible for that ill-judged line of enquiry has been taken off the investigation. I am also authorised to inform you that there has been a development, and it now looks highly unlikely that Chaya Bettelheim… well…’ The detective faltered as he looked at what were obviously the relatives of the dead woman. ‘We are not pursuing that line of enquiry,’ he concluded weakly.

  There was a change in the crowd; a tiny, almost imperceptible slackening, as if a knot had been loosened. Dordoff removed his hat, and scratched under his skullcap.

  ‘What is the development?’ he asked.

  ‘A forensic development. We have been able to conclude with certainty that the poison was neither present in the Bettelheim house, nor handled by any of the family prior to its being swallowed. I should add that it took time to arrive at that conclusion. Time we would not have had if we had immediately released the bodies for burial. We still need more time, and we’re asking for your understanding.’

  Rex sidled back towards Bond, asking quietly. ‘Is that true?’

  Bond nodded. ‘And it wasn’t exactly cyanide, either.’

  ‘So what was it?’

  Bond shrugged. ‘We don’t know yet. Something similar, but the symptoms are slightly different from what you see in industrial cyanide cases. There’s not a lot to go on because it was absorbed by the bodies so quickly. We’ve sent off tissue samples to the poisons lab, but they’re snowed under…’

  Rex looked back towards the ruck. Brenard and Dordoff, who seemed to have been appointed the family’s spokesman, were still eyeing one another tensely, but the rest of the group had moved apart, and people had begun to talk among themselves. Relations had been repaired, at least for the moment.

  Rex realised he was standing next to the fresh-faced young man who’d spoken to the cameras on the news that morning before being usurped by Dordoff. He stretched out his hand. ‘Rex Tracey. I work for the local paper.’

  ‘Limburg, Moses,’ came the reply, along with a handshake.

  ‘Chaya’s brother?’

  ‘Nephew,’ Moses Limburg said with a faint smile. He was a handsome boy, with rosy cheeks. ‘Big families.’

  Rex smiled back. ‘Can you think of any reason why someone would want to harm Chaya and her family?’

  Moses Limburg took a long time to reply. Finally he said softly: ‘An example, maybe?’

  ‘An example of what?’

  Limburg seemed poised to say more when Dordoff loomed behind, clapping a brotherly hand on his shoulder. The effect was marked. Moses reddened. ‘I – you get the wrong word when you use Yiddish all day, sorry. I meant like a spectacle.’

  ‘A spectacle?’ Rex looked from the kid to the tall man. Dordoff’s face conveyed nothing.

  ‘Yes, I mean, you know how terrorists do something to make a spectacle. To make everybody notice.’

  Rex was still thinking about Limburg’s reply when he got back to the office, armed with footage to upload onto the website. Had he really meant an example, but changed tack when Dordoff appeared? If so, what kind of example? And what role did the tall, athletic Dordoff have in it all? At the airport he’d waved away the cameras, to all appearances to protect the family. At the mortuary, he’d spoken on their behalf. Yet somehow he seemed more like an agitator. Then, as he ushered Moses Limburg away, more like a minder. Rex spent some time searching for Dordoffs and Daudovs on Google, but turned up nothing.

  Oppressed by so many unanswered questions, he went out and spent too much money on baklava. The soggy pastries gave him a queasy, sugar-fuelled rush which kept him going through the afternoon dip, so that he was ready to lock the paper just before seven o’clock.

  Alone in the building, he eyed Susan’s office. It contained a tiny shower, a facility which, though no word had ever been pronounced on the topic, was accepted to be out of bounds to anyone but her. Rex had used it before a couple of times in the dead hours of the night, drying himself with his shirt, and feeling as though he’d done something indecent.

  He felt sticky and grimy now, and he was just wondering whether the nuns in the convent would mind him showing up with the ‘Jesus and Mary Chain’ T-shirt he kept as a spare in his drawer, when the phone rang.

  ‘Fancy a quick half when you’ve tucked him up in bed?’

  It was Ellie Mehta, somewhere crowded and jolly. After something, no doubt.

  ‘You think I’m going to trek over to some cunty joint in Hoxton at seven o’clock?’

  ‘I’m just down the road in The Salisbury,’ she shouted, above a clatter of glasses and a roar. ‘Catching up with some old flatmates. Come on. I want to know how Terry’s doing. I do care, you know.’

  He missed all of that, the nights getting sloshed when the job was done. Lawrence’s recent mention of Diana had made him realise how much he missed something else: the company of a woman. A woman’s eyes. A woman’s interest. Her otherness, and warmth, and smell, especially when she was close to you in the sudsy, glowing snugness of a pub-bar. Besides, he wanted to talk to anyone who might listen for a few minutes about the weirdness of the day, about the darkness that surrounded Terry and the Damoclean sword that seemed to hang ever lower over the job he loved.

  But there was his wife. He had a wife to visit. And he’d promised.

  ‘See you in half an hour,’ he said into the phone, and hung up quickly.

  In the event it was more like twenty minutes, and during that time Rex went through several changes of heart. All became clear, though, as he passed through the wooden doors into an arena at once sacred and everyday.

  His favourite local boozer was rammed with young men in check shirts and elaborate whiskers, giving it the look of a Wild West saloon. Most had only been there to support a band whose early slot was now finished, and within ten minutes the cavernous Victorian drinking palace was almost deserted. He’d steeled himself for an encounter with Ellie’s former flatmates, anticipating a mix of skinny, belligerent boys and tubby, flinty girls, but in fact he’d found her sitting alone at a little booth, with a pair of pints on the table in front of her.

  He’d also steeled himself to resist her blandishments and not give away too much. She’d already asked about Terry. So he’d talk about Terry. Everything else was off limits. With Ellie, he’d found, it was best to set rules in advance.

  He sat down opposite her. She began by saying she couldn’t stop thinking about Terry, which no doubt was a preamble to asking him to get her a Visiting Order so she could go and interview him in Pentonville. But then she said she couldn’t face seeing him. She would write him a letter instead. And she wanted to help in any way she could.

  ‘So the story has nothing to do with it, then?’ he said, then instantly regretted it. She looked genuinely hurt.

  ‘We were all mates,’ she said, patches of red appearing on her cheeks. ‘I don’t know why that has to change just because I work somewhere else.’ She started zipping up her bag, lips tight. He recognised the signs.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘We are mates. Sorry. I’m a twat sometimes. And you can help…’

  ‘You are a twat,’ she said, but stayed, and let him tell her about the mysterious 999 caller, and about Dr Kovacs’ sinister concrete garden. As she listened, she kept rubbing her thumb with her index finger. Rex knew the gesture. She was itching to make notes.

  ‘What does it look like round the back of the house? Nice, professional concreting job? Or something he did himself at midnight?’

  Rex realised he hadn’t looked. It was a good question. An ageing
history lecturer was unlikely to be a dab hand at concreting. Or, if he’d just buried his family under the turf, to hire a gang of Wembley-Irish bhoys in to do the work.

  Ellie went off to fetch another pair of pints, promising to do some digging of her own when she got the chance.

  ‘Now tell me about Cambodia,’ she said when she returned. ‘We haven’t had a proper catch-up since then.’

  A catch-up. His wife had used that term, whenever she went off to have drinks with her friends. Because that’s what they did. They caught up. Exchanged information about one another. What did men do? They either took the piss, or they competed to see who could piss the furthest, same as when they were twenty. Or fourteen. Or seven. God, he missed women. He missed his wife. He missed Milda, the strange, winsome Lithuanian artist with whom he’d often drunk in this very pub before her death up at Alexandra Palace. He’d been with someone else the night they found her body. With Diana…

  ‘Cambodia… Well, she seemed very pleased to see me. We had a great few days – visiting the temples, going on the lake. Nice.’

  ‘Nice in a knickers-off way?’

  ‘Nearly.’ Even the mere mention of knickers made him feel how empty and sterile his existence had been since then. The nearest he got to ladies’ underwear these days was walking past it to the booze aisle in Marks and Spencer. ‘She said she needed more time…’

  ‘Oh.’ The tone of that single syllable amply conveyed Ellie’s view that ‘needing more time’ was not cause for optimism. A woman understood that, clearly, whereas a man, or at least this man, had little chance of doing so.

  ‘She had to go back to work at the hospital, and I went off round the country. Up north. Over into Laos.’ He smiled. ‘I even found an opium den.’

  Ellie made an impatient gesture, not interested in this detail.

  ‘So, then I came back. We arranged to meet in this nice colonial-style bar in Siem Reap. I had a white suit on, and I was smoking at the bar, and I’d lost some weight, and I felt like I was in a film.’ He sat back on his beer-stained velvet stool, for a moment back in the orient, hearing the whirr of the fans, feeling the chill of the glass on his fingers, sitting on that terrace at the edge of the black, throbbing jungle night, so dense and fragrant and steamy it felt like a bathroom. ‘And in she walks, looking absolutely beautiful. And with her was this fucking great Viking in cut-off jeans. When I’d arrived he’d been away in Bangkok learning some new surgical technique or something…’

  He took a morose swig of beer.

  ‘So they were on a break and she was having doubts and then you came along…’ She filled it in, effortlessly.

  ‘The worst thing is, he’s not a twat. He’s interesting. Quite funny. Certainly not thick.’ He remembered Kjell explaining the different idols in a temple on Wat Bo Road as in the background a choir of monks softly chanted through the incense smoke. He remembered longing to pick up the nearest joss-stick and stick it somewhere unforgivable.

  ‘Sounds like he has a massive ego more devoted to saving the world than devoting itself to her… and when she’s had her jungle fling with him…’

  ‘I can confidently expect her to put her dreams behind her and come back and settle for the local journalist with the fucking limp? Right.’

  He’d said this a little too savagely. People turned round, and the barmaid stopped taking glasses out of the washer.

  ‘Rex, come on. She’s out there, on her own. What’s she meant to do? Light a little candle in front of your picture every night? Most people… most people want a shag every now and then. Everyone. Even those nutters down in Stamford Hill do it once a week. On the Sabbath. Did you know that? That’s why you see hundreds of Bulgarian gypsies flogging roses up and down the road at lunchtime on Friday.’ She chuckled. ‘To all the rabbis on a promise.’

  It seemed a little out of the blue, this sudden reference to the story they were both trailing. But it was a welcome diversion from the sad topic of his sex life.

  ‘The people of Stamford Hill are freakier than you’d imagine.’ He pulled the keycard out of his pocket, and told her what he’d discovered at the Travelodge – that before their deaths Yaakov and Chaya Bettelheim had paid regular visits to a hotel, apparently to watch DVDs together.

  ‘Rude DVDs?’

  ‘I don’t know. According to the staff nothing else, you know, went on in the room…’

  ‘Maybe they watched rude DVDs, then rushed home and did it through a sheet with a hole in it.’

  ‘I don’t buy that sheet thing. Anyway, it is just possible, Ellie, that sex has nothing to do with it. Perhaps they just… watched films.’

  ‘Why go all the way to the Borehamwood Travelodge to watch The Muppets?’

  ‘Maybe because they’re not supposed to have anything to do with–’

  ‘– muppets?’

  ‘Modernity. DVDs. Naked flesh. Bad talk. I don’t know. Aren’t they a bit like the Amish?’

  ‘Who are constantly in the news for various kinds of illicit shag-ging. Trust me. This has got sex all over it… Or else they were Mossad agents, picking up instructions from their spymaster. Or Hezbollah agents, posing as Jews.’

  ‘You really think that?’

  ‘It’s got to be weirder than a married couple going to a hotel in the afternoon to watch Hollywood blockbusters. You can have that tip for free.’

  * * *

  Rex may not have possessed the sharpest of street instincts but, living where he did and coming home so often in a befuddled state in the small hours, he’d developed a personal checklist that more or less worked. As he neared the parade with the hairdresser and the driving school, his checklist told him that the group of boys on the pavement outside it had more than a casual relationship with bother. Was it the faint, bonfire whiff of skunk weed that trailed behind them? The skewed trousers, the studied, rolling gait? Or the way one of them, meerkat-like, repeatedly swivelled this way and that in search of danger or opportunity? At any rate, the clues stacked up enough for Rex to hang a right and walk down Langherhans Road. Terry’s road. A longer route: duller, darker, but also, he hoped, safer.

  It had been an odd, truncated evening with Ellie. He’d become drunk in an unusually short space of time, it seemed to him, and started talking about himself with uncharacteristic intimacy. She’d gone quiet, begun to fiddle with her phone, and then suddenly declared a need to be getting on home, even though it was only half-past eight. She’d talked a lot about sex too, which wasn’t exactly like her. Rex wondered if she’d been drunker than he’d thought. He hoped she’d was okay getting home. He should have made sure.

  A guilty sense of unfulfilled obligations was still with him as he passed Number 324. He remembered Terry’s words under the migraine-lights of the holding cell. ‘I didn’t do it. I need your help.’ He had achieved little so far. But what else could he do? And then there was the ever present, never adequately fulfilled duty he owed his wife.

  He stopped at 326, the house where he’d dropped the note. No lights on anywhere. Peering through the letterbox, Rex saw his note where it had fluttered down onto the parqueted hallway. She hadn’t been back.

  A blue, wavering light glowed from the front room of 322. Mrs Christodoulou had the TV on loud. By the sounds of it she was watching the worst sort of programme for a nervous old lady living on her own: a cop show.

  However, safely enveloped as she was in sirens and terrible dialogue, Mrs Christodoulou wouldn’t be alarmed by the sound of him creeping round the back of Number 324. The house was detached on the right, Kovacs’ side, and a narrow passageway led to a rickety wooden gate that fell open at a touch of its pitted, flaking surface. As the door swung back, a security light on Mrs Christodoulou’s wall flashed on, illuminating the garden-facing side of the gate. Rex saw that it was covered in scratches and cuts, as though it had been hacked with something sharp. He wondered if the police had noticed it. He took a picture with his phone.

  Up some steps at the back was a narrow gar
den, divided, ridiculously, into two even narrower strips by a low chicken-wire fence. Most gardens round here were split up, but generally their owners had done it sensibly, horizontally, affording each occupant a relatively private patch of their own. The straight-down-the-middle approach here breathed pettiness and dispute. Rex could picture Dr Kovacs insisting on this millimetre-precise division to some poor co-resident who’d fled years before Terry arrived.

  Terry’s patch looked wild: grass and bush mostly, overhung by a massive, blossoming sycamore on the side belonging to the mysterious, absent female neighbour. Kovacs’, by contrast, looked like the top floor of an NCP car park: a flat, concrete space, with a stack of breeze-blocks in one corner. He wondered what type of personality did that to a place that could have flowers and fruit in it. Someone who didn’t want the responsibility? No, that was Terry, and if you were like that, you did what Terry had in fact done – just leave nature to claim it back. Something else had motivated the concrete. An inner bleakness? Or an external secret that needed hiding?

  It was a bright, chilly spring night, the light from the street lamps bouncing back off the cloud to tinge everything orange. He paced the length of Kovacs’ concrete strip, noting that it was uniformly smooth. A professional job then. He turned and looked back at the house.

  Dr Kovacs had lived alone. But a light was on in his house.

  A window was open, too.

  On both sides, below the ground floor windows, there was a recess where the tip of another window disappeared into the ground. The house had a basement. That explained why he’d come up those steps after the gate.

  A light was shining from the strip of window visible above ground.

  Terry had never mentioned a basement.

  Keeping to the edge of the garden, Rex crept towards the house and bent down to peer through the basement window. It was a low room, spanning the whole of the bottom part of the house, and was lit by a single fluorescent strip. He could see the edge of a simple, wooden table, with what looked like box files on it. Elsewhere, all around, stacked in piles from the floor to the wooden beams, were dull brown archive boxes, some named, others numbered. There was a bottle of beer on the table, among the files. And the curling remnants of a doner kebab in its paper. Was someone living down there? A squatter hiding out, reading through Kovacs’ archives out of sheer boredom? Unlikely. But someone had been there, and recently. He remembered Mrs Christodoulou talking about Kovacs’ regular visitors – a black man, and a Hasidic Jew. Did they have some business down here? Rex straightened up. He reached in his pocket for his phone to call the police. There was a glint of reflected movement in the screen as he held it up, then he heard a grunt behind him, then a dull thud, before the searing pain in his head gave way to falling and blackness.