by M. H. Baylis
Bond sighed crossly. ‘I’m not delivering a lecture to the Police Federation, Rex, I’m just talking to you. I think both, okay?’ He’d gone red in the face, Rex saw. ‘I think your Russian girl is probably tucked up in her kip safe and well in Moscow or Brighton. But sometimes I do get the impression it’s getting a bit tense out there again. That’s all.’ He wiped his forehead.
‘So have there been more incidents of one kind or another since all the Eastern Europeans arrived?’
Bond rubbed the loose skin of his neck, calming down. ‘I can’t give you any statistics. I just know what it feels like as a copper. And sometimes, it feels like we’re back in the bad old days. It feels edgy out there. Like everyone’s watching each other, in a not very friendly kind of way.’
‘Might be something to do with an ex-offender setting up a right wing anti-immigration group.’
Bond gave him a strange look. ‘Funny thing that, Rex. I checked Powell out when I got back. And there’s nothing on him at all.’ He started leafing through a buff-coloured file to the left of the pile the boy had just brought. He held up a finger, meaning Rex should wait a minute. ‘Yeah,’ he repeated, after a while, putting the folder down. ‘Powell hasn’t got a criminal record at all. Not even a late library book.’
‘But he’s on probation,’ Rex said. ‘And he’s definitely got at least one overdue library book. Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler.’
‘Yes, well the library book thing was a joke, Rex,’ Bond said, a little sharply. ‘The Police National Computer doesn’t keep records of that. It does mention if someone’s on probation, though. And Kieron isn’t.’
‘Kieron?’
‘Keith,’ Bond corrected himself. ‘Powell.’
‘Could it have been missed off?’
‘No chance.’ Bond sat up, moving the file into his desk drawer.
‘So…’ Rex struggled with his confusion. ‘All right. Regardless of his disappearing criminal record, are you going to ask him what his British Workers’ Action lot were up to last night? Three men, Mike. That’s what the girl said. I saw Powell acting extremely dodgy in the loos at the Salisbury last night – with two of his mates.’
Bond shrugged. ‘Investigations into the cause of the explosion are ongoing, and if and when we deem it right to update the media, we will issue a statement.’
Correction. Three things had happened to give him doubts about Mike Bond. And this was Number Three. ‘Mike?’ Rex waved a hand in front of the Detective’s face. ‘Have you suddenly been taken over by an alien robot?’
‘Look – I do a lot of favours for you guys,’ Bond said, lowering his voice and glancing around the office. ‘But sometimes you push your luck. We investigate the crimes. You write about them.’
‘And sometimes, I thought, we help each other out.’
Bond’s face was reddening again. ‘And you’ve given me – what? A criminal record that doesn’t exist. And a report of three men in a pub loo. Thanks.’
Rex shook his head. He looked down at his notebook.
‘So can I write that you’re investigating the British Workers’ Action Party in connection with the explosion at the squat?’
‘If you want to report something that hasn’t been said, or written, or confirmed, or denied by us, go ahead.’
‘But it would be a reasonable line of enquiry for the C.I.D., wouldn’t it? I mean – you’ve got three Eastern European girls being attacked, in the same way, in the same place. You’ve got a squat, in an area almost exclusively squatted by Eastern Europeans, being blown up by someone who shouts ‘Piss off back to Russia’, and you’ve got a group putting up posters saying that everyone from Eastern Europe needs to go home. You’d naturally want to talk to the members of that group, wouldn’t you?’
Bond opened the fingers of his left hand, and then closed them again – a hand-shrug. Rex didn’t know whether to feel hurt, or insulted, or laugh out loud. The truth was that Mike Bond, dependable, straight, Rock of Ages, Mike Bond, was being downright shifty with him.
D.C. Orchard, with his wide, shiny Edam-face, came downstairs at this point, pulling on a leather coat. It was a bad leather coat, Rex noted, the kind you’d buy if you wanted to look like a detective, but actually worked as a ticket inspector. ‘Scrap at the Eski Dostlar, skip. Turk with stab wounds and a chair through a Merc’s windscreen.’
Bond stood up. ‘These Turkish social clubs,’ he quipped to Rex. ‘Ought to call them anti-social clubs. C’mon – you want a ride in a panda car?’
Rex declined the offer, knowing there’d be no point going to the Eski Dostlar Club on the heels of the police. Everyone would have clammed up tight. There’d be one, angry Turk sweeping up glass and blood, and an air of Byzantine indifference in all the surrounding premises. In any case, these incidents came and went, connected, mostly, to the business that went on at the back and above the bleak, strip-lit tea-houses. Years ago, back when he’d been on the dailies, he’d tried to research a piece about the secret life of these shuttered, anonymous little establishments and got nowhere. Got nowhere, and been given a careful shove as he left a shop doorway, gentle enough not to harm, firm enough not to be mistaken.
As Rex left, the ear-ringed boy was talking to a policewoman. Unnoticed, he stopped to listen.
‘Another one?’ the boy was saying. ‘When?’
‘One of the response teams just told me on the way in.’
‘Same thing as before?’
A phone rang, and Rex strained to catch what the WPC was saying.
‘Anna Semchuk she’s called. Ukrainian. Ally Pally. Throttled and scalped. But this time he got his dick out, so Sapphire are taking over.’
Rex felt a shiver of distaste. He knew that Operation Sapphire was the specialist Sex Crimes Unit. So, the attacker wasn’t just carrying on. He was upping his game.
Another phone rang, its sound obscuring the next few words. ‘A rubber glove?’ was the next clear thing Rex heard the boy say.
‘Not like a Marigold,’ the policewoman replied. ‘I mean like the ones we use. On a bush nearby.’
Something caused them to notice him at this point.
‘You need some help?’ the boy asked. He had a gentle, pretty face and something about it reminded Rex of Milda. After this fourth attack up at the Palace, Milda’s disappearance wasn’t going to warrant much attention.
Rex shook his head and went out. It was mid-morning now, and the day was turning blustery but fine. He bought himself some stronger painkillers in a little Greek Cypriot-run pharmacy, then went into the Caribbean bakery next door. It smelt delectable in there, of Christmas cake and warm bread. His sweet tooth stirred into action, he ordered something called a coco pattie and a cup of tea and was then somewhat alarmed to receive a small, fiery beef pasty inside a sweet-tasting bap. It was good, though, and as he chomped through it, he started to feel better.
At the counter behind him, a pair of men greeted one another: one wore a bus driver’s uniform, the other something civic with epaulettes.
‘Seen about all these attacks in the paper?’ the epaulette-man asked.
The bus driver sucked his teeth. ‘Wennem fine out some white boy doing it,’ – he glanced pointedly at Rex – ‘me celebrate, ’ca me sick a de dirty look. First girl me pick up this morning. Five o’clock. Naabady else ’pon de bus – so she naa wanta get on it. She tink a nasty big black bus driver gwan interfere with her!’
‘Raas.’
The men exchanged oaths, bought buns and left. Rex kept his head down until they had done so, aware, not for the first time, that the multi-cultural bonhomie of the area frequently wore thin, especially when there was trouble.
At least the codeine was having an effect now. His mind felt calmer, clearer. Back at the cop shop, he’d started to suspect Mike Bond. He still suspected Mike Bond, but he also knew that he was hungover, sad and in pain. When any of these three states affected him, his mind slipped into a certain groove. He had to recognise that, and change gear. If he
could. That was what they’d taught him.
The groove had begun to form after the accident. He could even pinpoint the day. Six days out of hospital. They were operating on Sybille again and he was in the back streets behind University College Hospital because he could no longer bear to be in that hot, sterile room with her parents and her sister and her sister’s mute, sickly twins. A newsagent on Gower Street had seemed unfriendly, and for some reason, he was unable to get this out of his mind. It had felt as if the newsagent had been staring at him – seen something in his face, perhaps, or thought he recognised him from some other place, and not liked the associations. On the pavement outside, unwrapping the packet of mints he’d bought, he got in the way of a pretty girl in boots and a fawn coat, and she’d set her mouth and her icy blue eyes in a scowl, as if he was pestering her. He’d scanned the faces of the next people who went by, to see if they were going to have a problem with him, too, and was not that surprised when they – another pair of prepubescent twin boys – stared at him in a shocked, affronted manner.
He was just tired, he’d told himself. But in a very short space of time, he’d fallen into a nightmare. In this nightmare, life carried on as normal. He ate, went to the shops, attended appointments with doctors and physiotherapists, visited Sybille in hospital, met up with colleagues from the job, even went to a 40th birthday party. But everyone – almost everyone, except the blind and small babies – stared at him. Into him. Their stares shrivelled up his soul. Everyone hated him. He was a pariah. And it was only right, because of the mummified creature who had been his wife in the hospital bed. Part of him knew they couldn’t know about all that, but still, on some unconscious, animal level, he clearly gave off a signal that he was wrong. Something that had to be killed off.
A few drinks could lift him out of the groove, as could painkillers that contained opiates. After the right amount of either, or both, he understood that it was all utter rubbish, delusions brought on by depression and guilt. But the next morning, the delusions would be back with a vengeance. And one morning, on the way into the office to have a chat about the future with his boss, he couldn’t stand the silent persecution any more.
‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ he shouted, hoarse and high-pitched, at his fellow passengers on the Northern Line. Nobody replied. They all stared down, except for one old, grizzled Rasta, who’d found it quite funny. But somehow, the act had made him feel elated. He’d accepted their war. And he was fighting. And he went on shouting – what the fuck are all you fuckers fucking looking at me for and other variants on that theme – through Waterloo Station concourse, down the steps and along the South Bank to the newspaper’s brand new riverside offices. He shouted it in there, too. And he never worked for a national newspaper again.
In the Mental Health Unit, and afterwards, at therapy sessions in a delightful old building on Highgate Hill, they’d taught him to see it as an addiction. That thinking that way, as if everything were joined up in some grand, arching, worldwide attack on him, was seductive. Painful. Helpful, perhaps. But also, in the end, deadly. A kind of psychic codeine.
When it happened, they said, he shouldn’t just accept what his mind told him. He just needed to write everything down in his journal, and carry on. Carry on trying to change his thoughts, carry on resisting them. And, they said, he’d have to do that until he drew his last breath, because there was no cure, only a way of handling.
Rex ordered another patty – curried goat this time, but without the accompanying coconut bap – and jotted down in his notebook all the things he knew, or thought he knew, or just suspected. He saw that there were several facts, papering over a large number of uncertainties.
Milda was missing. Someone was still attacking girls. Vadim had been burning Milda’s things. Bond had been strangely unhelpful. Powell had a probation officer, but didn’t have a criminal record. And he conducted meetings in pub toilets.
And someone, somewhere, whether connected to the foregoing or not, was trying to put the frighteners on him. It couldn’t be Vadim, because the first warning, the kid on the moped, had happened before he’d even met Vadim, and the second had occurred while Vadim was supposedly en route to Lithuania. Unless the kid on the moped was random. And Vadim had an accomplice. Or hadn’t gone away at all.
He picked up his phone and selected Ellie’s number. But he hesitated, remembering the morning meeting. It had been more of an inquest. The Estate Agents wanted to know why their half-page advert had been turned into a piss-take. So did Susan. Ellie had blamed Rex for not filing the correct copy before he’d gone out for the evening. Rex had blamed Ellie for rooting round in his files and pasting what he’d written into the mock-up without even reading it. The truth was that they were both to blame, but he more than her, on grounds of seniority. He’d said that, this morning. But possibly not with enough emphasis.
He rang her number, and he said it again. In the silence that followed, he told Ellie what he’d heard at the Police Station.
‘So there’s been another scalping up at the Palace. But you want me to go and cover a gang-fight at a Turkish social club?’ Ellie spoke slowly, with evident disbelief.
‘Chances are, Operation Sapphire are going to tell us nothing about this fourth girl. Not in the next 24 hours or so anyway. And we need to keep covering the other stuff. You’re good with blokes, Ellie. You’ll get more out of them than me.’
‘Are you being straight with me?’
‘Of course,’ he lied. A more important reason was that the old men in the club would underestimate this slip of a girl with her big handbag and her notebook. They’d flirt with her and give her lumps of Turkish delight with glasses of cardamom tea. And tell her more than they ought to.
‘Hundred-to-one it’s the usual protection racket shit and you won’t get much. But it’ll be good experience.’
‘And what will you be doing?’
He smiled wanly at his own reflection in the café window. ‘Visiting some prominent local estate agents. And grovelling.’
* * *
The darkroom was cool and musty, and he had always loved it in there. Not just the privacy and the darkness, but the order. Here were the chemicals: developer and fixer and cleanser. Here was the paper. The trays and the drying line, and the clips. To the side was a separate workbench where he kept the enlarger, and mended the cameras. Something about opening up a camera gave him a light, trembling feeling in his stomach. Like he’d felt when he was a boy and saw things he shouldn’t have.
He didn’t need to win the newspaper competition, of course. His camera bag was a beautiful buckskin one, produced to publicise the launch of the Leica iii g in 1955. He’d snapped it up at a church jumble sale in Winchmore Hill. And in a Save the Children shop, right next door to the very same church, he’d found a Chinese copy of the Linhof tripod, identical to the original except for a slight snag in the foot shape. If you knew what to look for, you could get professional camera equipment for next to nothing. But he had had this idea, a silly idea; it made him blush when he thought about it. He thought that he might win the competition, and if he did, he would give the bag and the tripod to the girl.
She was pale and bird-like, with the softest, whitest skin. Like something that shouldn’t have been allowed to exist, and only did so in constant peril. She reminded him of the girl he’d strangled in the hospital bed, all those years ago on a Christmas night. She reminded him, less clearly, less frequently, of something about himself.
She had been standing on a bus-stop bench when he first met her. A hot, June day. Over in the roaring bypass emptiness of Tottenham Hale, they were building, chewing further into the marshes, expanding the retail park to include a restaurant and a cinema and a big hotel, and for miles around, even down at London Fields and Victoria Park, you could see the three cranes they were using. The girl had a Lomo – an extremely rare tri-speed 35 mm model released by Zenit in 1991 – and she was standing on the bench, pointing her camera over the fence behind to
photograph the cranes.
‘They’re like birds,’ she said, blinking at him through thick, gawky spectacles. ‘Big, river birds.’
‘Cranes!’ he joked. But she didn’t understand that there were two kinds of cranes in English, and after a short while, he gave up trying to explain. Sometimes, he liked to use a cheap little digital just to give him some ideas about the composition – he wasn’t a stick-in-the-mud – and while he waited for his bus, he flicked through the images he’d been taking.
Without invitation, like a curious sparrow, she came to his elbow and peered down at the screen. ‘You are taking only just the drivers?’ she queried, looking at him with a mixture of amusement and concern. It was close and muggy, and he could smell her sweat. Like fried onions.
He told her that he liked crane drivers. That he’d always wanted to be one himself. Because they sat there, so alone, so high up above the city, and they had so much power to see everything that was going on. They were like gods. She seemed to like that idea, laughing a rather deep, beautiful laugh and sending the smell of mints in his direction.
‘Yes. Like gods. Maybe the crane drivers could see we were going to meet before we did!’ she said. And then the bus came swinging round the huge roundabout, and she got on it with him, and he had an idea that she just did it because she was interested in him, although that hardly seemed possible.
The bus went north, alongside the Watermead Reservoir before heading west on the North Circular. They sat together at the front, upstairs, something he’d never done. He supposed it was a place you sat if you had children, or if you had ever been a child. And neither of those applied to him. It was a new way of seeing the city, he realized: the solitary training shoes on the top of bus-stop roofs, the fat, naked Indian in a second floor window over a betting shop. He saw more. He thought he would do it again, when he could.
