The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘I was wondering if someone could take a look at this ring,’ he began, tugging at the gold band on his finger.

  The ring wasn’t coming off, but it didn’t matter because Mrs Greenhill said, ‘You can stop with the act. My son told me about you and I’ve seen your picture on the internet.’

  Rex was about to speak, but she went on: ‘I’ve got nothing to say about George. Nothing I’d trust you with anyway. So if you don’t mind, we’re very busy.’

  ‘I’m not here about George,’ Rex said, having prepared himself for this outcome. ‘I’m here about Yaakov Bettelheim.’

  The Indian lady made a tutting sound, the sort of noise people make at sad stories on the news.

  ‘He did work here, didn’t he? I’m not… I’m not here to make any trouble for anyone.’

  ‘You leave that to The Times, do you?’ said Mrs Greenhill.

  ‘You saw that rubbish? That photograph? Who were they meant to be? Some Lubavitchers from Manchester? Pathetic!’

  Mrs Greenhill showed just a flicker of surprise at this tiny amount of inside knowledge. It was enough for Rex to take the plunge.

  ‘My name used to be Treski,’ he said. ‘It’s a village in Latvia, I think.’ This little speech contained two lies, which he’d prepared just over an hour ago. He sensed Mrs Greenhill’s appraising glance. He’d undergone similar scannings in Glasgow and Belfast, as people weighed up his surname and his schooling and his physical attributes in order to determine what side of the religious divide he came from. He’d always managed to pass for Catholic up in Glasgow, perhaps because he was. Now, he could almost feel Mrs Greenhill giving him the benefit of the doubt, her disbelief thawing millimetre by millimetre.

  ‘I just want to tell people who Yaakov was. Not Yaakov the Hasid. Yaakov the mensch. Yaakov the workmate.’

  ‘He was a lovely man,’ said the Indian lady from her corner, as she stacked salmon-pink display trays in a pile.

  ‘He was,’ Mrs Greenhill said, lightly brushing one, exquisitely made-up eyelid. ‘Never late. Never off sick. Never – not even when that little boy went missing…’

  ‘Micah Walther?’

  ‘Yaakov and his friends were out all night looking for him. Still turned up here on the dot and did his shift.’

  Mrs Greenhill had been pretty, Rex realised, before a quarter-century of single motherhood took every spare pound of flesh away. She’d probably been one of the great beauties of a certain year’s crop of marriageable Chigwell maidens. How had she ended up with Dr Kovacs? ‘Do you think it was true – that Yaakov and his wife were planning to leave?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have been all that surprised. He must have had a bellyful of all that… mishegoss silly business with the divorce. You know about gittin and agunot?’

  ‘Gittin and… sure,’ he lied.

  ‘Well he had all that going on, for years, over a get. You see, Yaakov Bettelheim used to be a Belzer Hasid. Lots of them up there in Manchester. And Montreal – that’s where his first wife came from. But then he moves to London, and he decides he wants to go over to the Dukovchiner, and his wife doesn’t want to. So he asks his Rebbe, I mean the old Dukovchiner Rebbe, not the business they’ve got now, for a get.’

  ‘The business…’ he echoed. It was a technique. You zoomed back in, on the thing you really wanted to know about. In this case, the mysterious new Rebbe. Sometimes it worked. Not this time.

  ‘Hmm. And the Rebbe says yes, sure it’s fine, you’re divorced, here’s your get. But the Belzer Rebbe says she’s not divorced. So she’s agunah. A chained woman. Can’t marry. And you know what these Belzer are like.’ She held two bejewelled hands either side of her head, like blinkers. ‘Very, very Old Country. People kill over that sort of thing.’

  ‘Is that what you think might have happened? The ex-wife might have done it?’

  ‘Well, no, not her, sweetheart, she died. But I wondered if maybe one of her family did it, in revenge. I like Hasidim, Mr Tracey. Back there, it’s all Hasidim in the workshop, because they’re honest and they work hard. And it’s a filthy job many of them do, you know – all those chemicals – but you never hear one of them complaining, never see them taking a day off. The only thing is, some of them can be very clannish. Very vengeful. It’s a weird mentality, all that. It’s Jewish, Captain, but not as we know it!’ Mrs Greenhill added, paraphrasing Star Trek with a faint laugh.

  Rex replayed a snatch of what she’d just said. A filthy job. All those chemicals. He was about to ask more when a phone rang in some back part of the office and she said, ‘Oh, there he is now,’ and went to answer it.

  There was silence in the shop. Rex took it all in. The place reminded him of an aristocrat’s flat he’d visited once, in Knightsbridge. Money, fabulous, unbelievable quantities of the stuff all around it, but inside everything faded, a little bit worn, twenty years out of date. Hatton Garden was like that, too. There were vaults, he knew, underneath its pavements. Men were said to walk the streets with packages worth millions, but behind the reinforced doors there was just old wallpaper and the scent of pine air-freshener. The Indian lady, who’d been kneeling down behind one of the glass display cases suddenly spoke.

  ‘Everything is close up,’ she announced. ‘That is what you need to say in your newspaper. Like in India, some castes of people we wouldn’t let inside the house. But we need them. To bury the dead. Take the rubbish away. Same thing here.’ She pointed towards the back of the shop. ‘Those people in the black hats. They write the special scrolls, don’t they, for the doors? Slaughter the meat. Circumcise babies. You need them, see? But you do look down on them. You do.’ She touched her left eye. ‘I see. I’ve been here ten years.’

  ‘So you know Sam?’

  Mrs Greenhill returned just as the Indian lady was about to reply. ‘I’m going now, Mrs G,’ she said, gathering up a light beige jacket and a handbag. ‘Anything you want?’ She turned to Rex as she opened the door. ‘Sam’s a good boy to his mummy,’ she said, flashing an ingratiating smile in the direction of her employer.

  ‘I thought so too,’ Rex said when she was gone. ‘Breaking into a murder scene isn’t the cleverest thing to do, but it takes a lot of nerve.’

  Mrs Greenhill rolled her eyes, acknowledging both her son’s folly and Rex’s compliment. ‘If Sam had told me beforehand he was looking for a will, I’d have told him not to bother. George wrote to me a year after I left him and said he was leaving it all to the Goldsmiths College library. The whole fortune. Anyway, after my phone call, I don’t need it anyway.

  ‘It was good news?’

  ‘I’ve been waiting a month for him to make up his mind about buying the place. Indian chappie. We get a lot of business from them’ – she made a sweeping motion around her neck, miming necklaces – ‘because of all the gold they have for their weddings and that. That’s why I hired Reena. He’s going to keep her on, he says, when he takes over.’

  ‘New adventures ahead, then,’ Rex said. He noted that she’d said a month. If that was true, it ruled Mrs Greenhill out of a money-motivated murder. Not her son, though. If Sam hadn’t known that a buy-out was on the cards, he might have killed his father in vain. That, combined with the boy’s comments about Terry, made him worthy of another look.

  From the way she’d started stacking up boxes, Mrs Greenhill made it apparent that she wanted to end the conversation. Rex had a few more things to ask, though.

  ‘Was there really a fortune?’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t Roman Abramovich, no, but he had quite a bit. His family up in Liverpool had been wealthy. They supplied things to the port and the docks, stuff for shipping and loading and all that. And he inherited it all.’

  ‘But he just lived in a little half-house in Tottenham.’

  ‘Well, that was his philosophy. He was the kind of man who’d spend five thousand pounds on a record player, but just have bits of cloth nailed to the pelmet instead of curtains. He wasn’t mean – he was even quite generous, you know…’ She p
aused and showed him an oblong ring, an emerald surrounded by diamonds. ‘Bought me this. Not for our engagement. Just because we saw it. That’s what he was like. Some things, I guess the things that matter to most people, like having a nice house and nice food to eat, he just wasn’t bothered about. He’d have a Renoir on the walls and eat beans cold out of a tin. I mean – he didn’t really have a Renoir but… he spent fifteen grand on his watch.’

  Rex recalled the dandy shoes, the muted sense of power given off by Kovacs’ old Rolex. ‘Eccentric.’

  ‘No… That’s too nice a word for George. Clever. Very clever – he could learn a language in six months. And sharp. His lectures were actually very funny.

  ‘You went to them?’

  ‘I was one of his students.’ She sighed. ‘My little rebellion I suppose. All the other girls were marrying nice accountants and lawyers with prospects. He was like this fiery intellectual with fancy tastes and a Beatles accent. Silly. It was all right for a year. … Then we had Sam. He shut me out completely. Left me little notes on the table. ‘I can’t stand your shrieking common voice.’ That was the last one he wrote to me, before I grabbed Sammy and left. He wanted it to be just him. His books. His teaching. His writing. He said to me once, it was my fault – I should have known, the men in his family were no good as fathers. But how could I have known what his dad had been like, or any of the rest of them? His parents were dead when he met me. All I knew is, he came from Liverpool, and they’d had a big business. That’s all he knew, as well, to be honest. There was meant to be some big mystery about them. I don’t know what. Something to do with a diary. He always said he’d spend his dotage finding out.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. He cut off completely. Never saw Sam. Never showed any interest in seeing him. Now –’

  She came out from behind the counter, with the obvious intention of ushering him out.

  ‘Can I just ask, did your – did Dr Kovacs have any contact with anyone else? I mean, any family or friends?’

  She gave a small laugh. ‘He didn’t even invite them to our wedding. Everyone there was someone from the university – a colleague. He didn’t have anyone. Sad, really.’ For a moment her face looked genuinely full of pity, before a shadow passed across it. ‘It was his own bloody fault, though. He used to say, “I can’t be around other people because I’m too clever, and they’re all so stupid.” What’s the use in being clever if it makes you alone like that?’

  Her question hung in the air for a few seconds as she twisted a ring around on her finger. Then she started moving over towards the shop door. Rex stalled for time, pretending to fiddle with his coat buttons. Someone had paid regular visits to Kovacs. And a neighbour had bothered to call the police when they thought he was being harmed. Who?

  ‘He seems to have some sort of social life nowadays, mind you,’ Mrs Greenhill added, ‘But I doubt it’s what you or I would call friends.’

  ‘So you have had some contact with him then?’

  She sighed. ‘My Mum died early last year. She made me promise I’d contact him one last time… try and make him have some kind of contact with his son. So I went over there and saw him. Must have been… May? Something like that. I ended up feeling sorry for him. His rigid little life and all its routines. Walking all that way for his groceries every morning.’

  ‘Walking where?’

  She didn’t seem to have heard. ‘He made a joke when he opened the door. He said – you’re the former Mrs Kovacs. Now I’m the former Mr Kovacs.’

  ‘What did he mean by that?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know – but he was quite a changed man. Much thinner. Smaller, somehow. He’d had three heart attacks, he told me, so he’d retired early, summer of 2012, and he was okay, but his doctor had told him to exercise. So he could only see me between eleven and twelve, he said, because of that, and all the things he was busy with. He was well stuck into writing that Outrage thing by then… and he’d taught himself Latvian, and now he was learning Yiddish. He’d just got back, with his little bag of shopping, when I arrived at his door.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Stamford Hill. He had a favourite little fruit n’ veg shop there, he said, and he liked being the first one through the door so he knew he was getting fresh. Just like a little sad old man.’

  * * *

  By mid-afternoon, he was back in Tottenham. At the Police Station, the desk-boy with the huge tribal bore-holes in his ears recognised him of old and buzzed him through. Limping painfully, he climbed two flights of exquisitely tiled stairs towards the hot, bright attic occupied by C.I.D.

  Tottenham nick was meant to be closing, all its staff moving to some new-build palace of light and space just off the Seven Sisters junction. It never seemed to happen, though, and the cops remained stuck in a Victorian museum piece. There was even a fern motif running along the decorative walls and curved banisters. It was the only Police Station people actually asked to come and visit.

  Halfway up the stairs, Rex felt his phone buzzing. He didn’t recognise the number, but thinking it might be one of the people he’d been trying to find all day, he answered it.

  ‘Rex, the nuns say you haven’t been up to visit in three weeks.’

  He felt a flush of guilt and annoyance. ‘It’s only just over a fortnight, Aurelie,’ he said, flushing again, this time in embarrassment at the lameness of his response.

  ‘I am in London now, visiting for a few days,’ his wife’s sister said. ‘Why don’t you come up?’

  Rex sighed. He was used to his sister-in-law’s angry, impetuous demands. One of them, one festive winter night, had come close to destroying his marriage before he destroyed it himself. But the chaotic, slurred tone of the old Aurelie was gone. The woman on the phone sounded clear. And determined.

  ‘I can’t. I have to work.’

  ‘This is not what Sybille deserves, Rex,’ she said, before hanging up.

  He continued up the stairs. The call had unsettled him. She had sounded so positive and forceful, as though she were standing right by his ear. Normally, talking to Aurelie was like talking to someone lost at sea.

  Upstairs, behind a desk laden with yellow folders, sat D.S. Brenard, neat and slight in his shirtsleeves. He had a day’s growth of stubble, Rex noticed, and his eyes looked sore.

  ‘If you’re after a quote about the bloody nonce hostel next to the school, ring the Press Office,’ he growled.

  ‘You know something, D.S. Brenard. Until yesterday, you were the only police officer I’d never heard swear before. Now you’re at it all the time.’

  ‘All four kids, wife and mother-in-law off with the flu, and me next,’ D.S. Brenard said, like someone reciting a list. ‘Five open GBH cases on my desk. This afternoon – four thefts, one arson, a suspected firearms, and a bloke going round trying to push women into the traffic. No problem – for twelve CID officers. Except I’m losing two, two more have got the frigg… the flu, and half the rest are on a course. Honour killings. How to spot the signs.’ A grim chuckle turned into a paroxysm of coughing.

  ‘Maybe I can take up the slack,’ Rex said, pulling up a chair.

  D.S. Brenard eyed him balefully. ‘What are you after?’

  ‘Quid pro quo.’

  ‘If you’re withholding information about a murder investigation then I’m not doing any quid pro quo with you, Rex. I’m going to get on the blower to Commander Bailey and he’s going to personally come down here and fuck you.’

  Rex held up a hand. ‘I’m not withholding. I’m offering something I have only just discovered and confirmed in the last 24 hours.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  Rex told the Welshman about his encounter with Sam Greenhill in Dr Kovacs’ house. He also told him about his efforts to contact Sam Greenhill after leaving Hatton Garden that afternoon. No sign of him at his art college – indeed, he’d missed an important presentation that morning. No sign of him at the digs he shared up in Palmer’s Green. And
every sign that he’d been at his father’s house before the evening Rex found him there.

  Rex fished out his mobile. ‘Someone’s had a go at Kovacs’ garden gate.’ He showed Brenard the picture he’d taken. ‘It could have been someone practising stabbing up Dr Kovacs before they did it for real. Could have been his son.’

  It wasn’t the best photo, and Rex had the distinct sense that he was being humoured. Nevertheless, D.S. Brenard nodded and made a note. Then he folded his pad over. ‘Thanks. Anything else?’

  Rex smiled. He’d deliberately saved the best for last. ‘Actually, yes. Dr Kovacs wasn’t present only when the Bettelheims died. He also frequented the same shop as the Bettelheims. And I’ve got reason to wonder if the owner of that shop…’

  ‘If you mean Yitzhak Schild, he’s not the owner, his wife is,’ Brenard interrupted. ‘Are you about to tell me Schild used to visit Dr Kovacs’ house?’

  Rex nodded, numbly. ‘How did –?’

  ‘Door-to-door enquiries in Stamford Hill. Schild told one of our officers that he and Kovacs were friends.’

  ‘You believe that? Not exactly natural soulmates, I wouldn’t have thought.’

  ‘Well, whatever you’re thinking, Rex, on the Monday afternoon Dr Kovacs was killed, Yitzhak Schild was waiting at his rabbi’s house to speak to him about a religious matter. As verified by his rabbi’s assistant, Mr Simeon Dordoff.’

  ‘Dordoff. That would be the same Dordoff who was at the mortuary yesterday?’

  Brenard nodded. ‘His official title is a gabbay. Means kind of a right-hand man to the rabbi.’

  ‘Apparently it’s Rebbe…’ Rex recalled the conversation in Mega Glatt Meat Mart, when he’d been told that the Dukovchiners’ new Rebbe had forbidden them to eat meat, then that they were without a leader. ‘Anyway, I wasn’t even sure they had one,’ he said.