The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  * * *

  When Rex woke up, the throbbing head and the stale-bread taste of last night’s beer made him think he had a hangover. Instinctively he put out a hand for the glass of blackcurrant squash he always placed on his bedside table before going to sleep. He touched dusty, cold concrete. The surprise forced his eyes open, only for the light to send twin ice-picks of pain into each socket. He screwed his eyes shut and felt something hard being shoved between his lips. A bitter-tasting liquid washed into his mouth.

  Warm, flat beer. Zubr. The one Polish beer he refused to drink. He spat it out in alarm and tried to sit up.

  ‘Sorry. It’s the only liquid I have to give you. Thank God you’re okay. I got you in through the window all right but then you passed out again. I thought I’d killed you!’

  A figure swam into focus. It looked like one of the boys from the pub, holding a beer bottle. Skinny, in super-tight, pigeon-grey jeans and a red check shirt. Facial hair best suited to an Edwardian Sea Lord. And a pair of large, brown, doleful eyes that seemed faintly familiar.

  ‘Were you in the pub?’ Rex asked slowly, each syllable producing a new and surprising level of cranial discomfort.

  The boy shook his head, obviously confused.

  Rex realised they were in the basement, which did indeed extend all the way under the house, though there were no signs of Terry’s possessions among Kovacs’ boxes and files. He noticed a row of dictionaries along a wall shelf. Latvian-English. Yiddish-English. Russian-English. A grotty basement, but a serious workplace. He sat up and leaned against the cold, damp wall. It felt a little better. He touched his scalp gingerly. It was moist. He winced.

  ‘Sorry. I thought you were a burglar.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not?’

  In answer, the boy held up a business card taken from Rex’s wallet, which lay on the table.

  ‘Rex Tracey, Reporter, News North London.’

  ‘And who are you?’

  ‘Sam Greenhill,’ the young man said, pulling up the chair. ‘This is – was – my Dad’s house.’

  Rex nodded. The effort made him feel nauseous. That was where he’d seen those eyes before – on Dr Kovacs. Large, heavy-lidded, somewhere between Prince Michael of Kent and an old, sad bloodhound.

  ‘I thought you were under the patio,’ he said. ‘You and your mum. That’s why I was in the garden. Then I saw the light on.’

  The boy frowned. He looked to be about twenty, with an ungainly, uncertain manner, as if he’d somehow landed in his body quite recently and wasn’t used to it. ‘Why would we be under the patio?’

  ‘Something a neighbour said. About your dad concreting the garden over and you and your mum disappearing.’

  Sam snorted. ‘Disappearing? We went to live with my gran in Chigwell.’

  Rex suddenly remembered that the boy had lost his father. ‘I’m sorry about your dad…’ Sam made no reply. ‘You’ll have had a visit from the police, I take it?’ he went on. ‘You know the next door neighbour’s in custody?’

  ‘The bald Geordie bloke. A mate of yours, yeah? Since you both work for that news… thing?’

  Rex almost smiled. Not a paper. Not a website. Just a ‘thing’. The boy’s verdict was more useful than the advice of the dozens of focus groups and social media consultants Susan had shelled out for. Nobody knew what the fuck they were, anymore. And that was the problem. He forced his attention back to the conversation.

  ‘The bald Geordie bloke says he didn’t do it. I believe him. That’s why I’m here – to find out who did. Any ideas, Sam Greenhill?’

  Sam shook his head. The side-parting barely moved. Brylcreem and whiskers and pigeon-leg jeans. What a look. ‘I don’t really care who did it, to be honest. Dad was a bastard. Mum moved out with me when I was two, and he never had any contact with me at all. Never sent a birthday card. Never gave her a penny, either, even though he was loaded. That’s why I’m here. To see if the fucker left a will, and if we’re in it.’

  He waved a hand at the open box files. Rex noticed ink stains on the boy’s fingers, in many colours.

  ‘Any luck?’ Rex stood up. He felt a little dizzy, but more or less stable. He took a step back and felt something sharp dig into his back, just below the shoulders. Turning round, he saw a ghastly little iron hook protruding from the wall just below the beams. He touched his back tenderly. The hook had pierced his suit jacket.

  ‘Yeah, sorry, I should have warned you. It’s got me a couple of times, too.’

  ‘What’s it for, hanging hams off?’

  ‘Probably just to cause a bit of pain,’ Sam said. ‘Anyway, I can’t find anything resembling a will. It all seems to be about his book. Pity. I was hoping to go back to my mum with some good news.’

  ‘She knows you’re here?’

  Sam laughed, his face briefly becoming almost beautiful. ‘She’d totally kill me. I know why – there’s a process. They try to find out if he lodged a will anywhere, and if he didn’t – and there are no closer next-of-kin – we can apply for probate and all that… But mum needs money now. Her business is going down the spout. Up the spout… whatever.’

  ‘What business?’

  ‘She sent me to a good school and now she’s paying my course fees, and she deserves something, you know? She deserves something. It’s a jeweller’s, in Hatton Garden.’

  Rex asked the name of the jeweller’s. He wasn’t surprised by the answer. J.R.S.S. The place where Yaakov Bettelheim worked as a Senior Technician – at least according to his business card. More and more strands were threading their way between the Bettelheims and Dr Kovacs. Was Mrs Greenhill the link?

  Or… was it her delicate-featured, handsome son, with the skinny jeans and the ink-stained fingers? Rex was pretty sure that Terry’s origins and accent hadn’t been mentioned in any of the media stories, and the single photo being circulated was an old one, from last year’s Wood Green Gazette, in which Terry had a reasonable head of hair.

  So if Sam Greenhill knew that the accused was ‘a bald Geordie’, then he knew far more than he was letting on.

  Chapter Four

  Brenda had brought in her celebrated ginger flapjacks this morning. She baked twice a week, bringing a portion of the produce into work in a tartan tin with a picture of a Scotch Piper on the lid. There was a lot more produce these days, probably due to Mike, Brenda’s husband, being on a strict diet after his heart-attack.

  The toasty, gingery smell gave Rex hope as he came through the doors. Hope which vanished as he saw Brenda at the Reception desk with Lawrence Berne, cheeks bulging. They were poring over something, and they froze as he walked in. Whatever it was, Brenda pulled it out of sight swiftly.

  ‘Ginger-jack?’ she asked, thickly, proffering the tin.

  ‘I’d rather see what you were just looking at.’

  ‘My sonnet about the roadworks on Laker Street,’ Lawrence said, hastily. He was wearing a tie with little golf-balls on it. ‘I loved the cuts you made. It must be very tricky, editing a sonnet. If I was wearing a hat, I’d take it off to you.’

  Brenda chuckled, as she invariably did at Lawrence’s jokes, however poor. Frowning, Rex went up the stairs to the main office, where he soon discovered the secret.

  SECRET LIFE OF TRAGIC PARK PARENTS

  That was the headline. Underneath it was the byline: Ellie Mehta. And in a paper for which, as far as Rex had known, she didn’t even work. Her first splash for her new bosses, he assumed, as he read through the article in the copy of The Times Susan had left open on his chair.

  ‘She stiffed you good and proper,’ Susan said, for once visibly rattled. ‘What did she do – come on to you?’

  Rex blew his nose. His cold had at last shown its hand, the early sore throat and chills giving way to rivers of snot and a permanent light-headedness. Not to mention the sore-headedness resulting from last night’s encounter with Sam Greenhill. ‘Come off it, Susan. The last time anyone came on to me was VE Day. We met in the pub. I thought she wanted to
talk about Terry, but…’ He remembered how the conversation had been steered towards Stamford Hill, and how easily all that Class A information had tumbled out of his drunken mouth into her greedy, heartless ears. A flush of shame crept from his wrists to his throbbing scalp.

  ‘The little cunt,’ Susan said. The word sounded twice as ugly in her polite, East Coast accent.

  ‘On the plus side, no one has to waste any more time wondering what the Bettelheims were up to at the hotel.’

  Ellie knew full well what they’d been up to. After the pub she’d gone to the Travelodge herself and proved so persuasive or obnoxious that someone there had talked. Unhappily for Rex, and very happily for Ellie, another envelope had arrived in the post for the Bettelheims that same afternoon, and they’d let her have a look. ‘Meet The Parents’ and ‘The Bourne Identity’. The DVDs all came from a charity called Hayim Hadoshim. It meant ‘new life’ in Hebrew, and it helped people from strict religious backgrounds to find a new existence outside them, and to understand the modern world. The Bettelheim family had been planning to jump ship. Perhaps that was why they’d been picnicking in the park that day: dipping a toe in the water of this other world in which they were hoping soon to immerse themselves. Perhaps it explained other things, too.

  Ellie hadn’t been drunk at all. She’d got him drunk, though, and then wrung him dry before disappearing into the night to finish her story. Maybe that was why she’d been fiddling about with her phone. She’d been recording him. Or letting her boss know she was onto something.

  ‘I’ve been having an interesting discussion with Commander Bailey,’ said Susan. ‘He’s in charge of the North-East Division of the Met, and he’d very much like to prosecute you for hindering a murder enquiry.’

  ‘How have I hindered it?’

  ‘By not telling them what you’d found out.’

  ‘Well they know now.’

  ‘Later than they might have done.’

  ‘A technicality.’

  ‘Not the way Commander Bailey sees it.’

  Rex sat down, and stared at the article. It was illustrated with a picture of some modern-looking, dark-clad Hasidim, who were neither the Bettelheims nor even members of the Dukovchiner sect, nor indeed anything at all to do with the story. But one thing still didn’t make sense.

  ‘Hang on – how do the police know this story is anything to do with me? It doesn’t mention me.’ The story very carefully didn’t mention him, in fact

  ‘Jesus, Rex. Can’t you work that out? Bailey did the old “reveal your sources” line on Ellie. And she revealed them. She didn’t just steal your story. She landed you in it too. Did you fuck her one night and leave without saying thank you or something?’

  ‘I assure you I would say a full and very sincere thank you to anyone who slept with me. You realise this opens up a whole new set of possible motives for the Bettelheim murders?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘If leaving the sect is something so serious they have to creep off to a motel to prepare for it, then maybe… maybe someone else didn’t want them to do it. Or wanted to punish them for trying.’ Make an example of them, he thought, suddenly recalling the words of Moses Limburg outside the mortuary. ‘Yesterday, I met the nephew –’

  Susan held up her hand. ‘If you’ve got something, tell the police. This whole episode has made me realise something, Rex. We’re supposed to be about local issues, and we’ve been losing sight of them. Look –’ She reached behind her for a fresh edition of the free paper. ‘Page one – Finsbury Park Poisoning. Page two – Inside Stamford Hill’s Hasidic Community. Page three – Kovacs Murder. It’s page four before we get to the dog shit on Duckett’s Common, page six before the Literacy Bus closure. And this is the stuff people care about! The stuff that affects them every day.’

  Rex sighed. There had been a time when he’d have argued with her. For many years he and Susan had tussled in this very room over whether ‘issues’ or ‘stories’ were what people wanted. At this moment, though, he was pleased, relieved even, to hear a little of the old Susan.

  ‘I don’t mean we stop digging for Terry. We don’t stop for a minute,’ Susan said, addressing the mostly empty room as if it were some hushed, packed-out stadium. ‘But we don’t have to publish a daily update, and we don’t pretend we’re in the business of solving murders. Readers will soon stop caring if we do. We need to give them what matters to them.’

  ‘Kiddy-fiddlers,’ Lawrence said, as he breezed into the room with another flapjack in a tissue.

  There was an embarrassed silence before Susan said, ‘I beg your pardon, Lawrence,’

  Lawrence sat down. ‘My old mucker in the Council, Soapy Dave…’ He paused, evidently hoping to be asked about the hilarious circumstances whereby Soapy Dave had come to be called Soapy Dave. No such enquiry came. ‘Soapy Dave says some private company is applying to turn the old West Green library into a halfway house for ex-cons. A hundred yards from Flint Street Community Primary.’

  Susan made a celebratory circle of thumb and forefinger. ‘A1, Lawrence. Let’s roll,’ she purred. ‘Let’s freakin’ roll.’

  * * *

  By lunchtime, Rex was munching a warm cheese and spinach borek on the top deck of a 341. He was bound for Hatton Garden, the old jewellers’ quarter on the edge of the City. This was in no way, he told himself as he surreptitiously wiped his fingers on the seat, a defiance of Susan’s orders. She’d specifically said to keep digging on Terry – and after last night’s meeting with Kovacs’ son, he had every reason to dig in his ex-wife’s shop.

  Susan had also charged him with turfing up some more straightforward, local interest stories, and he’d spent a productive morning doing just that. After the events of the last few days it had felt rather comforting: ringing up mistrustful Primary School Headmistresses; hobnobbing with the burqa-clad mums down at the playground, making his English extra clear so that they could understand his questions about the dog shit. It was familiar, what he’d done for years, what he was, he supposed, since he survived by doing it, very good at.

  Yet something had kept nagging at him throughout these investigations. It was like the thirst he felt for an ice-cold Okocim, intensifying from mid-afternoon until the moment he snapped the first ring-pull back and poured the stuff down his throat. Or like the ache that passed in a Z-shaped meridian from his damaged foot to his right lung and up to his left eye before he’d swallowed the first of the day’s codeine pills. Perhaps it was just another addiction, this need to be out there searching for something forbidden and forbidding. He’d wrapped it up and locked it in a basement of his soul when a decade on the nationals as an investigative journalist had come to an abrupt end. But then the questions surrounding his ex-girlfriend’s death had forced him to revisit that basement last year. Now it was back again. A hunger he couldn’t ignore.

  As he read Ellie’s piece for a third time, he found he also couldn’t ignore what had happened outside the mortuary, and that strange choice of words from Chaya’s nephew. He’d said ‘example’ because he’d meant to say it, Rex was certain of that, and only back-tracked when the imposing Dordoff came near. Before that, Rescha Schild had tried to convey something important to him about the Bettelheims, but seemingly been too afraid to say it outright. Did she – this woman seemingly on the edge of the group herself – know what they had been doing up at the Travelodge? Or know why they had been killed? Take it to the police, Susan had said, if you think you’ve got something. But what did he have?

  He gazed out of the window. The bus was circling Newington Green. He could get off by the Primary School, change buses and be at the door of ‘Vegetables’ in ten minutes. He changed his mind, though, and stayed on. He felt almost certain now that the murders of Kovacs and the Bettelheims were connected. There was Kovacs’ behaviour at the park, for a start, and now he knew that the man’s ex-wife had worked with Yaakov Bettelheim. Somehow that felt like the angle of entry. Somehow, also, for all his doubts and theories, it felt
as if poking round Stamford Hill was never going to help Terry.

  Hatton Garden looked much as it had done on the blustery spring afternoon in 2001, when he and Sybille, his wife-to-be, had gone in search of wedding rings. A wide, quiet, blossom-lined street, more like a Parisian suburb than a jewellers’ district just off High Holborn. The shop fronts were mostly the same. They probably had been since the 1970s. Why update them? People were always going to want diamonds, with or without fancy modern signage.

  He couldn’t remember where they’d bought their wedding rings, only that the man who sold them had been eating tomato soup throughout the transaction, which had amused Sybille and irritated him. Perhaps it had even been on the site of the present-day J.R.R.S., with its wide, green awning and the black-and-gold tiled motif around the bottom of the window and the door. He pressed a buzzer, and was admitted into a cool, dazzling room of pinks and whites and golds.

  Much of the colour emanated from a pleasant-looking, slightly overweight Indian lady, whose sari-draped form was not only rain-bow-hued, but also situated next to a vast and fussy floral display on the counter. He suspected that the other lady – angular, severe, black-haired in the puce cashmere twin-set – was Mrs Greenhill.