by Eva Dolan
I keep going.
A Victorian soap advert painted high on the gable wall of a condemned mansion block. I’d noticed it across a building site, hidden there since its neighbour went up in the sixties and only revealed now because an office block has been demolished. A bulldozer was pulling on-site as I walked away, ready to obliterate that building too. This might be the only photograph of the sign in existence.
I pause for a bite of the sandwich I made hours ago and forgot. Bread and jam, just like when I was a kid and we didn’t have anything else in the house to eat because payday wasn’t until Friday. Jam or salt-and-pepper sandwiches, that was your choice. When I got out, got money, I’d think it was a total nostalgia trip to sprinkle cracked black pepper and kosher salt on a slice of fresh-cut sourdough bread, spread thick with white butter. Like I was reclaiming those years of poverty.
But here I am again, the snotty-nosed girl with the falling-down socks and the darned jumpers, living on nothing.
I start on the next picture, select the best shot, crop and tweak and save, and then there’s another in front of me and another and my back is aching in the swivel chair and my eyes are furring over, flakes of the mascara I didn’t take off last night gritty under my lower lids. The playlist has been running on repeat and I’ve lost track of time, grown cold and stiff-fingered.
My phone rings but I don’t hear it, only feel the vibration shake the desk.
Ella.
I whip out my earbuds and snatch up the phone.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asks, before I can say a word. ‘Is this it?’
‘No, Ella. Calm down.’
Through the sliding door I see how late it has got. Dark out now and the room reflected over the glass is small and messy, so stuffy I can almost see the staleness on the air. I switch the light off and open the door, letting the night breeze in.
‘Can’t you talk right now?’ Ella asks.
‘I can talk.’ I brace my hand against the door’s metal frame. ‘Ella, there’s a picture of you with him on Twitter.’
‘Who?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘There can’t be,’ she says. ‘I didn’t see him. Are you sure that’s who it is? You’re always saying everyone looks alike to you now.’
‘I’m not likely to forget his face, am I?’
I shudder as I remember his dead eyes staring up at me, staring right through me as we carried him along the corridor towards the lift shaft.
‘I’m sure I didn’t see him.’ She sounds genuinely perplexed. ‘I’d remember. Wouldn’t I? No, this is stupid. I didn’t see him at the party, Molly.’
I stay silent.
‘You and Carol kept giving me drink,’ Ella says, her voice dropping. ‘That’s the problem, I can hardly remember anything after I sat down with you two. That weed she was smoking – she kept blowing it into my face. You know how sensitive I am to it.’ A growl. ‘God. I didn’t think I was that out of it.’
Ella had been drunk, more than I’d ever seen her. I remember how she stumbled as she climbed on to the platform we built for her from milk crates. She got through her speech well enough but, now I think about it, it wasn’t the usual polished Ella talking; she’d rambled a little and beaten her chest, showing a more raw and inspiring version of herself. Until her foot slipped and we caught her to cheers from the partygoers, raised her up like Jesus.
‘Send me the picture,’ she says.
‘It’s probably best you just look at it.’ I tell her the username of the person who posted it and wait for her to find the image, knowing she has by the way she swears, softly, almost regretfully.
‘Molly, I honestly don’t remember this. Please, believe me.’
It sounds like the truth. I close my eyes, listening to the sound of her breathing, the traffic noise and music floating up from a bar on the river, the inevitable sirens, very close. Too close. I step out on to the balcony and see blue lights flashing across the front of the building as a patrol car pulls up. Derek and Callum are down there already, waiting.
Ella has heard the sirens too.
‘What’s happening?’ The panic is tight in her voice.
I want to shout down to Callum but it’s too late; the police are out of their car and Derek is moving towards them. He looks shaken and Callum is tense, holding back, arms wrapped around his middle. As if he feels my eyes on him, he looks up to the balcony and looks away again.
Did he see me?
Does he know?
Callum leads the PCs inside and I know where they’re going, which floor they will stop climbing at, exactly what they are going to see. My stomach lurches and I bolt through the living room to the bathroom, where I drop to my knees so heavily I set off the rat trap behind the toilet. I throw up bile and coffee, my eyes stinging.
I spit out what little is left in me and sit back against the bath, hearing Ella’s voice, a dim and distant version of her which, for a second, I think I’m hallucinating, until I realise my phone is still in my hand, the call live.
‘Molly?’ she asks desperately, almost shouting. ‘Are you okay?’
‘They’re here,’ I say. ‘The police. They’ve found him.’
Ella
Then – 26th November
A mobile phone trilled into the quiet of the Reading Room and Ella looked up in annoyance, along with two-thirds of the people there, towards a young man several desks over who fumbled to get the phone out of his pocket. He apologised, his face flushing, the ringing continuing, echoing around the cavernous space and bouncing off the glass that protected the collection of books and manuscripts. Finally, just as he brought the phone out, it stopped ringing.
There were huffs and sighs and a woman with a cut-glass accent muttered, ‘About bloody time.’
Ella was the only one still looking at the guy and she gave him a reassuring smile, because she’d done the same thing herself the first time she came into the British Library’s holy of holies. Was sure she’d switched her phone to silent, only to have it blast out a plunging, polyphonic ringtone at full volume a couple of minutes after she sat down.
Quickly the room settled back into its habitual near-silence.
This was what she needed. Somewhere to sit quietly for a few hours, no laptop, her phone definitely off, just a pen and paper and the latest draft of her thesis to read through. Except she couldn’t hold more than a few words in her head before she found her mind drifting.
This morning she’d woken to a text message from Ryan Quinn.
‘They’re coming for you, bitch.’
Dylan was still asleep next to her, radiating more body heat than any man she’d ever slept with, like he somehow generated his own microclimate. She was glad he hadn’t seen the message or her reaction. She had no intention of enduring another lecture from him. Somehow she’d managed to get out from under his proprietorial arm, dressed quickly while he slept, and left the flat, heard him call her name as she closed the door.
She stuck the pen in her mouth, bit down on the plastic and felt it begin to give between her back teeth, stopped before it shattered.
‘Ella Riordan?’
A woman stood behind her, dark-suited and severe-faced with her blonde hair scraped into a ponytail. Nearby stood a young man who might have been an estate agent if not for his stillness and attention and the other half-dozen small tells that said ‘copper’.
‘Am I under arrest?’ Ella asked.
At the surrounding desks all work had ceased.
‘We’d like you to come with us, Ms Riordan.’ The woman spoke in a monotone. ‘We can arrest you if you’re not prepared to come along voluntarily.’
‘I have a right to know why I’m being hounded.’
The woman leaned in. ‘We’re not bit players in your publicity campaign, Ella. Collect your things and stand up.’
Ella was aware of the room’s attention on them as she packed her papers into her satchel. ‘This is what happens to people who peacefully protest in Britain
now, is it?’ she asked. ‘You come to where we’re studying and drag us out like criminals.’
‘Save it for your blog,’ the young guy muttered.
They escorted her out of the Reading Room and Ella held her head up high. As they passed through the main doors, into the grim morning, the woman took hold of her elbow and turned her on to Ossulston Street, where a car was waiting for them.
It was an unobtrusive gunmetal saloon with another man driving, old and bald, and he didn’t move as the woman palmed the top of Ella’s head and shoved her in the back, came around and got in next to her. It suddenly occurred to Ella that they might not be police at all. How many people had she pissed off? How much money had she cost developers with her stunts? All those accusations she’d made about bribes and corruption and money laundering – was this how they would come for her? No, she told herself, as she felt her breath growing short.
No, she knew exactly what this was about. Quinn had been kind enough to warn her with his message this morning.
Woolwich: that was why they’d come for her and where they were heading.
It was an ugly 1960s police station in need of overhauling, the reception area battered, the reinforced glass protecting the desk sergeant peppered and crazed like it had taken a shotgun blast. She was walked to a claustrophobic lift and then up through white corridors that smelled faintly of damp and singed wiring and gave on to a row of interview rooms.
A bolt of remembered discomfort hit Ella’s stomach as she was taken inside and told to sit down. It looked just the same as the one she’d been taken to after the Camden demonstration, her first time being cautioned.
Now she was expecting the caution and she waited until the policewoman, DS Conway, had finished before she said, ‘I’d like my solicitor to be present. I won’t speak without him here.’
Conway sighed. ‘If you want legal counsel you’ll have to go down to the cells and wait for him to arrive. He might be tied up in court all day. You don’t want to spend the night here, do you, Ella?’ She attempted a concerned face, wholly unconvincing. ‘We’ve only got a few questions.’
‘Patrick Milton,’ Ella said, then recited the number she’d memorised almost two years ago, when Molly gave her it, saying he was one of the good ones. ‘I’m perfectly happy to wait.’
In the custody suite they stripped her of her belongings and put her in a cell where the padded bench was still warm from its previous occupant, and she did what everyone said you shouldn’t in this situation, laid down with her back to the door and tried to have a nap.
Coppers put out the line that only a guilty person could sleep in a cell because the last thing they wanted was to question you fresh and rested. Her father had told her that. Chuckled when he said it.
Last night she’d discussed this with Dylan. Spilled everything she could about Quinn and what he’d done and they worked out the best way to handle it. He was furious with her, disappointed and hurt that she’d not trusted him until she was so terrified she had to tell someone. But he calmed down eventually, after she’d stroked and placated him and explained that he was the only person who was smart enough to help her through this.
‘You haven’t done anything, Ella,’ he’d said. ‘That’s all that matters here. Whatever they accuse you of, whatever they threaten you with, just hold on to that and they can’t touch you.’
She closed her eyes and drifted off, the sounds of the people in the other cells always at the edge of her consciousness, calling out for bathroom breaks and food, a woman crying as they locked her up. Gradually those noises faded and she slept properly, dreaming for the first time in months of riot shields and angry eyes distorted by helmets, of the crush of the crowd and freedom beyond the cordon and how for a moment it had felt like she was flying, before her legs were taken from under her and the ground came racing up to her face.
The cell door opened with a clang and she started awake, turning over to see the woman who’d brought her down.
‘Solicitor’s here.’
Patrick Milton was waiting for her in the interview room with a bottle of mineral water and a chocolate bar ready on the table. Ella smiled at his dishevelled brown suit and the knitted tie hanging askew over a mismatched checked shirt.
‘Do we need a few minutes?’ he asked Ella.
She was aware of DS Conway waiting for the answer too, ready to draw her own conclusions from it.
‘I don’t even know why I’m here,’ she told him.
‘Let’s see what they have to say for themselves, then.’ Patrick pulled out a chair for her, ever the old gent, then sat down with his hands clasped loosely on the table. Ella noticed a slight tremble running through them, saw Conway notice it too and hoped it would make the woman underestimate him.
Conway watched Ella in silence as her constable set up the tapes and Ella forced herself to hold the woman’s gaze, noting every line around her unusually blue eyes and how red her lower lids were, as if she had allergies. It would be easy to write her off, scruffy and dull-looking as she was, but she knew that these were the most dangerous coppers, the kind you never saw coming.
Conway opened a file and removed a series of photographs, lying them out methodically in front of Ella, her face in a disapproving pout.
They showed a line of protestors outside an estate agent’s office in Woolwich, its interior new, pristine white, and several figures in dark suits looking out angrily at the people keeping their customers from the door on their first day of trading. Ella was among them, alongside Carol, whose face was half hidden by a scarf and sunglasses. Many of the others had covered up too but Ella knew their names, remembered the police cordon and the officer filming from behind them.
‘Can you tell us what was going on here?’ Conway asked.
‘Your people were there,’ Ella said. ‘I’m sure you know what we were doing.’
‘You were protesting against the opening of this business.’
‘Peacefully protesting, yes. As we have every right to.’
‘It didn’t remain peaceful very long.’ Conway cocked her head. ‘Did it?’
‘We weren’t the ones who instigated the escalation,’ Ella told her, throwing her chin up in defiance, back there in the moment. ‘Have you charged any of the people responsible yet?’
‘I can’t comment on that. It’s a separate investigation,’ Conway said. ‘How do you feel about what happened there?’
‘It’s a separate investigation.’ Ella gave her the merest hint of a smile. ‘I shouldn’t comment.’
Conway glanced at her constable, a brief eye-roll. ‘Oh, but they intersect, Ms Riordan. How long had you been campaigning against the opening of that estate agent’s office?’
‘Since the summer, when they forced out the charity that was based in the building. They were using the upper floor; we wanted the owners to allow them to stay on while they rented out the ground floor to Brighams.’
‘The owners have a right to do what they want with their property, surely?’ Conway shrugged. ‘Who are you to tell them otherwise?’
‘We didn’t tell them, we asked them to consider the option.’
‘And when they decided against it, you tried to block the legitimate business occupying the building.’ Conway shook her head. ‘Those are the tactics of a protection racket.’
Ella turned to the constable, who had said nothing more since he’d set the recording equipment up.
‘Do you live here in Woolwich?’ she asked.
‘That’s none of your business,’ he said.
‘I’m going to hazard a guess that you can’t afford to live where you work. Unless you’re renting a room in a shared house. Forget renting somewhere by yourself, forget buying.’ Ella’s voice rose slightly. ‘Brighams are why hundreds of thousands of people like you and me will never be able to own our own homes. They move into an area, inflate prices, aggressively pursue buy-to-let landlords and socially cleanse entire boroughs.’ Ella stabbed the table with her finger. ‘T
hat’s what we were protesting.’
The constable gave her a dead-eyed look. ‘But you didn’t stop them, did you?’
‘Not that day, they didn’t,’ Conway said.
Ella stiffened in her seat as another photograph came out of the file: Quinn’s mugshot.
He looked proud of himself as he stood in front of the height marker and stared down the camera lens, amusement and contempt shaping his features. Ella had stood there herself and she’d felt fear, despite her anger and indignation. Quinn looked as if this was the culmination of a life’s ambition.
‘Do you know this man?’ Conway asked.
‘Yes, that’s Ryan Quinn.’
‘And how do you know him?’
‘Quinn’s an anti-gentrification activist,’ Ella said, letting some of her disgust for him come through. ‘I’ve run into him at events.’
‘He’s an ally of yours, then.’
‘I don’t think either of us would say that. Quinn believes I’m a fraud because I refuse to engage in direct action and prefer to use peaceful forms of protest and try, wherever I can, to foster dialogue and open lines of negotiation.’
Conway made no comment, only rearranged the photos so the one of the protest lay on top. ‘Is Quinn in these photos?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Ella said, looking at the images for a moment. ‘He was there that day. I remember him trying to stir things up. He was spoiling for a fight.’ She reached for the bottle of water. ‘Ironically, when it did kick off, he was nowhere to be seen.’
‘Did you speak to him after the protest?’
‘No.’
It was a lie and Ella saw that Conway suspected as much, but doubted she could prove it. Her only contact with Quinn from that point had been via a ghost phone she’d since dumped in Regent’s Canal and she knew Quinn would have been even more careful with communications at his end. He’d boasted of how his computer system was programmed to self-destruct unless he keyed in a code twice a day, putting it beyond the reach of the Met’s tech department.
Ella took a drink of water, watching Conway tidy the photos away, saw there were still more of them.
