The Tottenham Outrage

by M. H. Baylis

  There was mail in the shared hallway, both for Terry and for Kovacs. He divided it up, placing the dead man’s letters on the little table with the equally dead cactus on it, and keeping hold of Terry’s. As he sifted through the mail he remembered him that the printers had promised to send the bits of Kovacs’ book they’d salvaged from the skip. He made a note to chase them.

  As he was locking Terry’s flat, Rex saw a third door at the far end of the little hallway. He went to investigate. The door was stiff, but it opened. He peered in. Wooden steps led down to the basement. The unlocked door suggested the space was communal, but had Terry ever been down there?

  He returned to his friend’s unaired flat. The place smelled of man – a scent both sweet and brackish, with shaving foam prominent among other less easily recognisable odours. Rex wondered if his own house smelled the same.

  He tried to concentrate on the task in hand: finding things that a man might need while he awaited… what? Trial for murder? Paralysis and slow death? Both?

  He found he was grabbing items almost without thinking, like that game show where they had three minutes to stuff a shopping trolley with goods. With an effort he calmed down, gathering clothes and toiletries more methodically from the tidy, almost Spartan home. It didn’t help. His thoughts swung from Terry’s sad circumstances to the gruesome slaying that had taken place just on the other side of the hall.

  So far his own investigations had done nothing but turf up more questions. Who were Kovacs’ visitors? And who had called the police, with possibly vital information about the murder? And were the two regular visitors the same two visitors Terry said he’d heard arriving on the day Kovacs was killed? Where did Sam Greenhill fit in? And Dr Kovacs’ lengthy trips to the vegetable shop? Had he crossed paths with the Bettelheims there?

  Back in the present, Rex wondered about books. What was Terry reading these days? His normal fare was war photography. To his surprise, Rex found a cheap edition of the Koran – photocopied, by the looks of it – on his friend’s bedside table. He pulled out the bookmark: a leaflet, of the sort peddled daily on the High Street, raging about drone strikes and British troops. Rex put the bookmark back, and left the Koran where it was.

  He rushed back through a fine drizzle to find Terry exactly where he’d left him, staring from the sofa at the very same supermarket-based game show Rex had been thinking of earlier. He thanked Rex vaguely, but showed no interest in what he’d brought. The same was true for the cup of tea Rex made him, which sat growing a skin in a blue Istanbul souvenir mug. Rex decided it might not be the time to ask about Terry’s bedside reading matter, or the basement, although he was curious about both.

  Susan had told Rex to take as long as he needed. In reality, though, he knew he had to get back to the office. He was just contemplating how to broach this when Terry turned away from the screen and looked at him.

  ‘Go on, go,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right. I’m just sorry you’ll have to walk back to work instead of driving.’

  ‘Yes, well, I could have taken my test if you hadn’t got yourself charged with murder.’

  Terry gave a wan smile. Rex sat down again. ‘We’re going to sort this out, Terry. Trust me. There’s a lot of stuff that needs looking at. For a start, what spooked Kovacs so much at the park? Who called 999? What about the son? And Kovacs’ visitors? I think one of them might have been Bird.’

  Terry frowned. ‘The one who’s always outside the Council mouthing off? Get fucked.’

  ‘I don’t think anything is quite what it seems.’

  Terry turned back to the TV, which now showed a woman in a white bikini diving for pearls. Rex waited for a comment about pearl necklaces, or where Terry might wish to go diving, or at the very least, a chuckle.

  Instead Terry said, in a low, quiet voice: ‘I was planning to go back to Thailand, wasn’t I? In the summer. Shit.’

  He left Terry with two promises he might actually be able to keep – to bring home a Turkish takeaway from the Pamukkale, and a DVD of ‘Dr No’, Terry’s all-time favourite film.

  The drizzle had gone, leaving in its wake a cold, faintly promising dusk. The birds were doing a sort of springtime evensong, and the air smelt of mingled blossom and charcoal from the nearby kebab-houses. Rex was walking back towards the office along his quiet street of terraced houses, staring up at the cloud-streaked, pinkening sky and wondering where to buy or borrow a copy of ‘Dr No’, when someone suddenly emerged from the shadows. It took him a moment to realise who it was.

  ‘You frightened me,’ he said.

  Rescha Schild, wearing a short, belted gabardine mac over her shoulders like a cape, gave a short laugh. ‘I can’t be the most frightening person round here, can I?’

  ‘Probably not. Are you visiting someone here…?’

  ‘Visiting someone, yes,’ she said, smiling again and biting her bottom lip in a way he found rather appealing. ‘I was looking for you. I went to your office, and the big lady there told me where your house was, but I got a bit lost.’

  ‘I hope it’s not to give me another tip-off. The last one got me in a lot of trouble.’

  She frowned, adjusting the raincoat over her shoulders. ‘A tip-off?’

  ‘The hotel card. Why did you want me to have it? Did you know what Chaya Bettelheim and her husband were doing?’

  She took a deep breath, fiddling with the coat again. Why wouldn’t she just do it up? ‘I had an idea. And I had an idea that some people would have been very angry.’

  He remembered what Chaya’s nephew had said at the mortuary. An example. ‘Which people would be angry? People like Dordoff?’

  She tucked her hair behind her ears. ‘The Rebbe is having a tish tonight. They haven’t had one for many months. Lots of slivovitz. You might hear something, or see something.’

  ‘About Dordoff?’

  She shot him a pained, almost angry look. Because he was wrong? Or because he shouldn’t keep saying aloud what she plainly wasn’t prepared to. He supposed she was giving him a useful lead. But something stopped him from trusting her.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me that George Kovacs was a regular customer?’

  She looked up, puzzled. ‘You didn’t ask. Anyway, we weren’t talking about him. What does it have to do with the Bettelheims?’

  They had, in a sense, been talking about Kovacs, because she’d mentioned seeing Terry on the street. But she had a point. The two incidents were inextricably linked, to Rex. There was no reason why they should be to her.

  ‘How long was he a customer of yours?’

  ‘Not so long. About a year. He met Yitzie first, at the hospital, last winter. They both go to a… heart clinic. He wanted someone to help him practise his Yiddish.’

  ‘Why was he practising Yiddish?’

  She frowned. ‘Perhaps to do with research? He told Yitzie he was writing a book, about that robbery. I don’t know. After that, about a year ago, he started to come in the shop, buy some cookies, some fruit, talk to my husband, then go.’

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘Every day. Early. He liked to be the first through the door. But some weeks he didn’t come. He went away a lot. To Liverpool, once or twice, I think. But mostly abroad. Latvia, a lot of times, he said. Also New York, then Sydney, and Canada, Hungary…’

  ‘Did he say what he was doing in all those places?’

  She shrugged and winced again, as he’d seen her do in her doorway.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asked. ‘You look uncomfortable.’

  She nodded, waving a hand vaguely over the upper part of her body. ‘I get some pains. It’s a hard job. Lot of lifting.’

  ‘I still think it’s odd. George Kovacs was almost a friend of yours, but you didn’t mention it to me.’

  She laughed, a bitter sound. ‘I’m a woman. You know what every Jewish man says in the morning when he gets up? “Blessed are you, Lord our God, who has not made me a woman.”’

  Rex laughed slightly, but he realised she
was serious.

  ‘So I don’t have male friends, Mr Tracey. Why I didn’t you tell you something. You didn’t ask.’

  ‘But you’re telling me about this thing – the tish – tonight.’

  She shifted the mac across her shoulders again. Like all Hasidim, Rescha looked like someone from another era. But hers wasn’t 18th-century Poland. She looked more like a woman from the Sixties. Alice band, lots of eye make-up, long legs. ‘I want the truth to be found out. And the police won’t find it.’

  ‘Why are you so sure of that?’

  ‘Have you heard what they are doing over by us? A policeman walks into one of the shtiblach – that’s like a prayer-house – finishing his hot dog. They send two officers – two men – to ask questions at the Girls’ School. They didn’t even ring the Principal first to say they want to come. So nobody will talk to them. So soon they’ll go away and give up and say, “the community did not get justice because the community has not co-operated.” Same as they did with Micah Walther, same as they do whenever one of the black boys gets stabbed or shot. You aren’t stupid, Mr Tracey, and at least you try not to offend people.’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve had complaints.’

  She didn’t reply, just looked him up and down, as if appraising potatoes in her shop. ‘The tish is tonight. About nine o’clock, in the new shtib they’ve found. It’s Number 7, Bruce Grove. If you’re bothered, you’re bothered.’

  She nodded curtly and veered off left towards the bus station. No van, he thought, as he watched her stockinged legs march briskly away in their flat lace-up shoes. Was that because of the Sabbath, or because she couldn’t drive it? Yitzie had said it belonged to her, though – as did the business, according to Brenard. There must, he thought, as he turned right onto the teeming High Street, be a lot of tensions in that household. A lot of tensions in her community, too. The woman seemed convinced that the Bettelheims’ killer was one of her own kind. There must be a reason why she was so sure.

  * * *

  It was an old part of the borough, or at least a part of the borough that hadn’t been bombed or turned into council blocks. Bruce Grove featured a mix of Tudor castles, Georgian villas, early Victorian alms houses and Edwardian music halls – many either rotting into the ground, or taken over on short leases by one doomed venture after another. The Portuguese bakery was one that had lasted, given fresh life by a new wave of incomers from Brazil. The Snooker Hall, too, with its sinister, windowless frontage, seemed to endure yearly stabbings, shootings and arson attempts, without ever quite becoming extinct.

  From his vantage point in the harsh, almost chemical light of the railway station exit, Rex watched groups of Turkish and Caribbean men heading into the Snooker Hall, and checked his watch for the eleventh time. Lawrence should have arrived twenty minutes ago. He wondered if he was going to have to visit the tish alone.

  That didn’t really matter, of course, but he’d been surprised by Lawrence’s tepid response to the venture. When Rex had suggested that a practising, Yiddish-speaking Jew would be a useful guide to the proceedings of the tish, he’d expected Lawrence to be flattered. Instead, he had said, rather irritably, that his Yiddish was rudimentary, and whatever Judaism those ‘black-hatters’ practised was a long way removed from his own. The man who routinely referred to himself as a ‘daft old Yid’, made endless quips about bacon sandwiches and had a repertoire of stories about Uncles called Solly and disastrous bar-mitzvahs had seemed almost insulted to be linked to the Hasidim living out their own, very Jewish lives, barely a mile away from him. Rex was reminded of what the Indian woman had said in the jeweller’s shop on Hatton Garden. Perhaps there was a kind of caste system in operation, with the pious of Stamford Hill right at the bottom.

  In the end, what had persuaded Lawrence was the address. Number 7 Bruce Grove was a listed building. Once home to the Quaker scientist, Luke Howard, it now boasted a blue plaque, though in these straitened times, no organisation, civic, charitable or cultural, would take responsibility for maintaining the building. For a while some Trinidadians had run a bar in the basement called Port-of-Spain, which was overlooked by the authorities until it exploded in flames, taking a chunk of the rear ground floor with it. According to Lawrence, the building still contained a lot of original coving, and a magnificent spiral staircase. It was the prospect of seeing these that had winkled him out on this chilly, breezy night.

  Or perhaps not, since Lawrence was distinctly not where he’d said he’d be, and not answering his telephone either. Between clutches of short, stern-looking men clutching pool cues, Hasidim flitted by on their way to the tish. At one point there’d almost been a crowd of them, filling the still evening air with footsteps and cigarette smoke and barely-voiced twitterings of Yiddish. Then the crowd had become a trickle before dwindling to nothing. Rex wondered if the tish had already started. He sent Lawrence a final, curt text and went on his way.

  The building was screened off behind a high, wooden hoarding. The official route in, it seemed, was to heave apart two huge plyboard panels, and clamber through the gap before they sprang back together. Rex did that, then picked his way across a rubble-strewn forecourt and mounted the stone steps to the entrance. The metal anti-squatter door had long since been prised off, and he walked into an empty, crumbling hall lit by a thousand flickering tea-lights.

  Stronger light shone from a doorway to the right of the hall, behind the vast, carved staircase, and there was a rumble of male voices in the dank, mineral-tinged air. He was about to head towards it when he heard a cough and a mutter behind him. He swung round.

  Dimly, in the dancing light of the candles, he made out two men in a corner, on the other side of the central stairs. One was slim and dark, the other fat and blond. Apparently they hadn’t seen Rex, and the dark Hasid was handing a small, canvas bag to the blond one. It clinked and clattered as the blond man rolled it up and stowed it in his dark overcoat. The transaction had a furtive air to it, confirmed when the two men noticed Rex. The dark man hurried away, looking down to avoid eye contact. The other man stared at Rex, transfixed, lips moving silently.

  ‘Hello, Yitzie,’ Rex said.

  ‘Wh – why?’ was the best response the man could muster.

  ‘What’s in the bag?’ Rex said, pointing to the man’s pocket.

  ‘Nothing,’ Yitzie growled. ‘Books.’

  He pushed past Rex, who blocked him.

  ‘Tell me about your friendship with Dr Kovacs. Did he lend you books too?’

  Another group of men came through the main doorway, sporting high, circular fur hats and long, velveteen coats. With surprising swiftness, Yitzie pushed Rex into their path and almost ran towards the brightly lit room. By the time Rex had made his way inside, Yitzie had secreted himself in the heart of the black-clad throng filling the long, thin room. Clearly he was a man who didn’t want to talk. But why?

  A thought struck him as he walked towards the main room. That Yitzie might have been his intended target. Too afraid to name her husband outright, Rescha had pointed Rex to where she knew he’d see him, find him doing something incriminating. But what had he been doing?

  Rex had done enough research on the internet to find out that tish was Yiddish for ‘table’, and in Hasidic terms, it referred to any occasion on which a Rebbe ate in public with his followers.

  He couldn’t see a table, though, or a Rebbe, only a sea of men in coats and hats. The crowd was an amorphous tide of black, seeming to surge forwards and backwards in the shimmering light of myriad flames. It contained a multitude of noises. Here two red-faced men bellowed drunkenly at each other across the room; there, people softly murmured prayers while they rocked back and forth on their heels. Somewhere a melody was being played, a repetitive sea-shanty of a thing, picked out on a hidden guitar or banjo, while a dozen or so people sang and clapped along. The smell in the room was incredible: the medicinal whiff of strong alcohol, the moth-balled coats and hats, the sweat and the hair and cigarettes and candl
es and the fungal damp of the old building combining to make Rex feel almost drunk. A hand patted him on the arm, and he looked round to see a pale, freckled and beaming face, ringed with earlocks. Its owner handed him an open bottle of some straw-coloured liquid.

  ‘Drink!’ the face commanded, slapping him on the arm again. He took the bottle and swigged. He felt as if he’d swallowed a plum pudding with a stick of dynamite in it – fire exploded across his body and he bent over in a paroxysm of coughs. When the tears subsided, he saw a circle of men around him, old and young, smiling and nodding approvingly, felt a host of hands patting him gently across the back and shoulders. Someone offered another bottle and he drank again. This time they laughed and clapped.

  Dimly, through the rush of intoxication, he registered how surprised he was. He hadn’t expected to be made welcome. In fact he’d expected to be thrown out as soon as they realised he was among them. As more friendly hands guided him towards the middle of the room, he realised he wasn’t the only un-Hasidic attendee. He spotted Vik, the famously grumpy man who ran KumarKabs on West Green Road: shiny of pate and gazing around benevolently, he now resembled an Indian god on a mantelpiece. Elsewhere Rex thought he caught a glimpse of a black leather cap stuffed with rasta dreadlocks. Clearly, the Dukovchiner weren’t as reclusive as people said.

  Invisible from the edge of the room, a long, thin trestle table stood in the centre. It reminded Rex of the birthday parties of his childhood, decked out with a paper tablecloth, and cardboard cups and plates. A handful of men sat on folding chairs, mostly ignoring the meagre spread of small, silvery fish and some kind of thick potato-cake. They were all singing, or humming, and stamping their feet to the melody coming from elsewhere in the room. All except the tall, muscular, red-haired young man who might have passed for a Welsh rugby player, and who gripped Rex in a handshake only just the right side of assault.