Shadow Play

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘It’s all in the proportions,’ he said. ‘What more could you want than complete harmony?’

  ‘You understand,’ she said gratefully. ‘I’ve loved these houses for as long as I can remember, and fought for them for … oh, a ridiculous length of time.’

  ‘You live here?’

  ‘Not any more,’ she said, with a hint of bitterness. ‘But if you’d like to see inside one, I do know the occupants.’

  ‘Perhaps another time,’ he said. He could imagine what they ought to look like, and was afraid that they might have been let go, like the exterior, which might break his heart. ‘I would like to hear the story, though.’

  ‘I’m yours to command,’ she said graciously. ‘There’s a long version and a short version.’

  ‘Long version, please,’ he said.

  ‘Then perhaps we could sit down? There’s a café round the corner.’

  ‘You have to go back twenty years or so for the root of the problem,’ Mrs Fontaine said.

  The Italian café was quite new, starkly modern, and smelled so agreeably – and appropriately – of coffee, that Slider, who was not much of a coffee drinker, had ordered it for himself, instead of tea. In his experience, anyway, places like this couldn’t make tea properly. They used hot water, instead of boiling, and served it in wide shallow cups so it was cold before you got halfway down it. If tea wasn’t too hot to drink, in his view, it wasn’t hot enough.

  They had some nice-looking Danish pastries at the counter, so he bought two and carried the tray back to the table in the window where Mrs Fontaine was waiting.

  ‘Lovely, thank you,’ she said as he put the pastry down in front of her. He honoured her for not saying, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t really,’ or ‘Have to watch my waist,’ or any of the other whimsical get-out-of-greed-free cards women seemed to feel obliged to play.

  ‘So, twenty years ago – you’re talking about the nineties?’ Slider asked.

  She nodded. ‘There was a recession, if you remember, and a period of high interest rates. It pushed mortgage repayments up, people had no spare money, and houses like those in Davy Lane are expensive to maintain. Things started to get a little shabby and rundown. The end house was sold and the new landlord broke it up into bedsitters. And of course that just accelerated its decline. There were some railway buildings at the far end of the street, where the old coal wharf had been, and when their windows got broken by vandals, they resolved the problem by concreting them over, which was not a pretty sight. So, by the end of the decade, the street was not looking at its best.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘We had a Labour council at that time, and a rather Marxist element got control,’ she went on. ‘They disapproved of private ownership, and seeing that Davy Lane was in need of refurbishment, they took the opportunity to compulsorily purchase the five houses, with the intention of turning them into council flats.’

  ‘Pull them down, you mean?’ Slider asked.

  ‘That was the original intention. But there wasn’t much money around, if you remember, and when that idea proved too expensive, the plan was modified, and each house was to be divided into four separate flats for council tenants. But they couldn’t find the money even for that, and things drifted on in a state of limbo. Meanwhile, the former owners were allowed to stay on as tenants.’

  ‘And you were still there?’

  ‘At that point, yes. I had teenage children and my mother and mother-in-law were both living with us, so I didn’t want the disruption of moving.’

  ‘Of course. So what happened next?’

  ‘A change of council control. The Conservatives got in, there was a revival of interest in things antique, and the houses got listed.’

  ‘Grade II?’

  She nodded. ‘But there still wasn’t any money for refurbishment, and the council was trying to retrench, so they sold Davy Lane to a property company. The hope was that they would do the refurbishing, and we all felt frightfully bucked at the prospect.’

  ‘But what would your situation have been, in that case?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Oh, you put your finger on it. Of course, we had no security of tenure, and if they had brought the houses back to their true beauty, we’d have been moved out and they would have been sold for far more than we could afford to pay for them. But we loved them, you see, and we’d sooner see them made beautiful, even if it meant losing them.’

  ‘The Little Mermaid,’ Slider commented.

  She raised an eyebrow, and then got the reference. ‘Oh yes – she couldn’t kill the prince, even though it meant her own destruction. Well, I perhaps wouldn’t go that far, but I allow the comparison. In the end, of course, it came to nothing.’

  ‘“Davy Lane Hopes Crushed”?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘A newspaper headline.’

  ‘Ah. Yes, well, nothing happened for a long time after the sale, and eventually we residents got together and demanded a meeting with the owner, and it turned out that they’d never had any intention of refurbishing. They bought the houses to knock them down and build a new block of luxury flats, but they’d run into trouble with the listing. They’d assumed they could get it overturned, but at the meeting they revealed that the council was refusing to budge. And in fact, a few months later the council added Davy Lane to the Conservation Area, which laid even greater protections on it.’

  ‘You must have been happy about that.’

  ‘Well, yes and no. It meant there was less chance of the owners developing the site, but if they weren’t prepared to put the money into refurbishment – which apparently they weren’t – we were no better off. And if they sold it with the protections in place, what chance was there that the new owners would want to refurbish? We were trapped with our unsympathetic landlords. It was at that point that I moved out.’

  ‘But you stayed on as chairman of the action committee?’

  ‘For what good it did. The houses were continuing to deteriorate, and in fact number five, the end house, got so dilapidated that it had to be vacated. When the owners boarded it up, we saw what they intended to do – let the whole row get so bad they’d fall down, and then the council would have to allow them to develop. It happened in Camden some years ago, if you remember. There was a big scandal about it at the time.’

  ‘I remember. So the council didn’t help at all?’

  ‘Well, we protested to them, as well as to the owners, but they weren’t really interested. By then they were getting excited about Westfield and the station rebuild, and I think they thought that if our terrace got fatally damaged in the mean time, it would be a problem solved.’

  ‘And what is the situation now?’

  ‘We’re in limbo. The council have reaffirmed their commitment to the listing and the conservation zoning, but they say day-to-day repairs are not their business and it’s up to us to pressure the owners. They won’t let the houses be knocked down, but they won’t do anything to help us keep them up. And of course you never talk to the same person twice, so every time, you have to tell the whole story all over again. Then that person says they’ll look into it and get back to you, and of course they don’t, so you send more emails, and telephone again, and a new person picks it up.’ She sighed. ‘It’s like walking up a down escalator.’

  ‘And the owners?’

  ‘They’re even worse. At least the council has an official duty and a stated aim to reply to you within a certain period, even if they fail to live up to it. The owners don’t have to talk to you at all. And they don’t. Complete absence of communication. Letters and emails go unanswered, and the phone is always on an answering machine. The only reason the other occupants are still there is sheer stubbornness. They know that if they move out it will delight the owners, because then they can leave the houses empty until they fall down. We’re all determined not to be beaten, but we haven’t anything else in our arsenal now.’ She sighed again, and cut the last of her pastry in two with her fork. ‘I’m
afraid unless we get another change of council we’re doomed. Labour’s in again at the moment, and they don’t care as much for antiquities – not deep down. And with all this public clamour for more housing, they might find it in their hearts to get rid of the protections in a good cause.’

  There was a silence as they both finished off their pastries. Then she said, ‘Can you tell me why you wanted to know all this? You mentioned a newspaper headline – what made you think of that?’

  He brought out the newspaper picture and passed it across. ‘It concerns this man,’ he said. ‘We’re trying to find out more about him.’

  ‘Oh, I remember this,’ she said. ‘Yes, our hopes were crushed. That was the meeting I mentioned, when we got the owners to talk to us at last, and they revealed they wanted to demolish and redevelop.’

  ‘Is that the owner – the man in front?’

  ‘No, he was from the building firm, the one that was actually going to build the new block. A very sharp operator, I thought him. I’m sure his firm was going to do well out of it. Silverman, his name was. AA Construction.’

  ‘They’ve changed the name now to Abbott Construction,’ Slider said. It didn’t seem to mean anything to her. He reached across and tapped Kimmelman. ‘What about this man? Was he with Silverman?’

  She peered, then straightened. ‘Oh, I recognise him. No, he was there with the owner. I don’t think he was anyone important – I think he was just the driver. We saw him a few times, when they made visits to the street. He’d be sort of following them about.’ She smiled. ‘Rather like a bodyguard. In case we started throwing bricks, I suppose. I don’t think I ever spoke to him, but he looked rather a tough.’ She looked up. ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘I’m afraid he’s got himself killed.’

  ‘Killed? In an accident?’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. She thought a moment. ‘I’m sorry – you can’t be thinking any one of us – on the Action Committee, I mean – could have had anything to do with it? We’re desperate, but not to the point of committing murder.’

  ‘No, I wasn’t thinking that,’ Slider said. ‘This man – Leon Kimmelman is his name – is a bit of a mystery, and we’re having difficulty in finding out anything about him. This picture was one of the few records we found of him, so we hoped if he was involved with the Davy Lane project, one of you might have known him.’

  She shook her head. ‘Only by sight. He was just a figure at the back of the hall, if you know what I mean. Gave the impression of being a loyal bulldog, that’s all.’ She looked at the picture again. ‘You can just see, in the shadow, his boss coming out, and he’s walking in front.’ She looked up and smiled. ‘Like those FBI chaps who walk in front of the President of America, in case anyone shoots at him. Absurd!’

  Whether the absurdity was hers, or Kimmelman’s, he wasn’t sure. ‘And who was the owner?’ he asked.

  ‘A property company called Target,’ she said. ‘In the person of somebody called Holdsworth, Charles Holdsworth. One of those people who is all charm, except that their smile doesn’t touch their eyes. A real politician.’

  ‘He was an MP?’

  ‘No, I mean he was practiced in the political arts.’

  ‘A schmoozer?’ Slider tried.

  ‘Yes – good word.’

  ‘And Kimmelman was his driver?’

  ‘Yes, driver. Bodyguard. General bag-carrier, something like that. The man at his elbow.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Slider. It explained why Kimmelman was paid a salary by Target. It didn’t explain why Holdsworth said he didn’t recognise him.

  ‘So who on earth would want to kill him?’ Mrs Fontaine went on. ‘Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?’

  ‘It’s certain that someone hit him. Whether they intended to kill him we can’t tell, but they certainly intended to do him serious harm.’

  ‘And you think it was something to do with Target?’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘Well, if they behaved over other properties as they did over Davy Lane, they’d have made plenty of enemies,’ she said.

  Slider decided to round off the day with a visit to Abbott Construction. Jack Silverman was not in the office, but he spoke to a very helpful young woman who evinced a refreshing lack of suspicion when he showed his warrant card – indeed, she brightened up, as though her day had been dull so far and she hoped Slider might represent a change of speed.

  ‘Coal Sidings Road? Oh, that’s one of the zombies. That’s what we call them,’ she explained with a grin. ‘The living dead – stuck in limbo waiting for planning permission. The planning system in this country’s a nightmare,’ she offered, free of charge. ‘They’re always complaining about not enough houses being built, but it can take a couple of years to get a new development through planning, which plays havoc with your cash flow.’

  ‘I imagine so,’ Slider said encouragingly. ‘But Coal Sidings Road – is there a particular problem with that?’

  ‘Some old listed buildings,’ she said promptly. ‘Hopeless case. I always say it’s not the living dead, it’s the dead dead.’

  ‘So there’s no chance of getting the listing removed?’

  ‘Not an earthly. I don’t think the owner’s even trying any more. That one’s dead in the water, believe me. It’ll never get built. Which is a shame, because it was a good plan. A youth outreach centre on the street level, with a gym and theatre and everything, and luxury flats on the floors above. There was some question about the roof line being too high, but there’s always ways round that – parapets and set-backs and so on. And anyway, Westfield has made that sort of thing moot anyway.’ She shrugged.

  ‘It must be a disappointment for your boss,’ Slider suggested.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she allowed, ‘because we’re not exactly snowed under with work, but there you are. You win some, you lose some,’ she concluded with a perky smile, and the ease of someone happily on Schedule E for whom profit and loss was someone else’s problem.

  Abbott had some parking down a service road round the back of the building, where Slider had left his car, and as he was driving out he passed an incoming black Mercedes. The driver, as Slider saw when they were still approaching each other, was Jack Silverman, but he decided on the instant not to stop and talk to him – time was getting on and he had a meeting to go to this evening. Silverman didn’t seem to register him until they were actually passing, when he glanced sideways at him and then did a double-take. Slider kept looking ahead, rather than have to acknowledge him, and was past and out into the side street in a jiffy.

  Back at the factory, he relayed his information about Davy Lane to his assembled troops.

  ‘Target again,’ Atherton said. ‘Everywhere we go, we stub our toes on them.’

  ‘It gets better,’ said Swilley. ‘I’m still looking into them, but you know the chap at Blenheim said they’d been divesting? Well, he wasn’t wrong. It’s just a shell company now – no economic activity for nearly two years. And what I was going to tell you,’ she interrupted Atherton, who had opened his mouth to speak, ‘is that the directors of Target are Charles Holdsworth, Mrs A Holdsworth, and C.E. Holdsworth.’

  ‘A family company,’ Gascoyne remarked, scribbling on the whiteboard.

  ‘So Holdsworth owns Target, which paid Kimmelman a salary, and he didn’t know about it,’ said Atherton. ‘Very lax accounting practice.’

  ‘I’d like to find out who Target sold Davy Lane to,’ Swilley went on. ‘Because if it’s such a dud, who would buy it? Wouldn’t it be interesting if he sold it to Farraday?’

  ‘But he owns Farraday,’ McLaren objected. ‘He’d be selling to himself. What’s the point of that?’

  ‘If he sells it for less than he bought it for, he consolidates the loss,’ Swilley said impatiently. McLaren continued to look obtuse. ‘Tax dodge,’ she translated.

  ‘Oh!’ he said, enlightened.

  ‘That’s pure specula
tion,’ said Atherton. ‘And, if it were true, peculation.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Swilley asked impatiently.

  ‘He’s blinding you wiv vocab – pay no attention,’ said Hart. ‘What I want to know is, what’s the point of all this property development bollocks anyway? What’s it got to do with Kimmelman? It’s his murder we’re interested in, not some trashy old buildings.’

  Slider managed not to wince, and merely murmured, ‘Georgian.’

  ‘Holdsworth said he didn’t recognise Kimmelman or know his name,’ Atherton pointed out. ‘He denied him thrice before cock-crow.’

  ‘That’s only twice,’ Swilley objected.

  ‘Give him time,’ said Atherton. ‘I’m prepared to allow that a director doesn’t necessarily know all the people he employs, but when it comes to his own driver, surely even the biggest egotist would have a vague feeling he’d seen him somewhere before?’

  ‘Certainly friend Holdsworth is becoming more interesting,’ said Slider.

  ‘But what’s it got to do with the murder?’ Hart said irritably. ‘And the blackmail on Gingernuts Rathkeale?’

  ‘How d’you know his—?’ Fathom began, and Atherton cut in hastily.

  ‘Maybe nothing,’ he said. ‘Maybe Kimmelman was just an annoying bloke and somebody got fed up with him and clobbered him. But we can only go on what we know, and we know Holdsworth lied about knowing him.’

  ‘Can we go after him, boss?’ Swilley asked eagerly. ‘Holdsworth?’

  ‘Don’t get carried away,’ Slider said. ‘Remember we don’t have any direct evidence against him. I don’t see any harm in popping round to ask him why he doesn’t know someone who worked for him, but we don’t want to frighten the horses. If he is guilty of something, I’d sooner he thought we didn’t know about it. He’s more likely to give himself away if we don’t put him on his guard.’

  ‘Be subtle, you mean,’ said Atherton.

  ‘Well, that lets you out,’ Swilley said.

  ‘What are you talking about? Subtlety is my USP.’

  ‘You kidding me?’ Hart broke in, out of solidarity. ‘You got copper writ all over you from your face to your size elevens. Honest but stupid, that’s what the guv’nor wants.’