Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘I understand, Mr Sajadi. You came from the south. The part that people here call Iraq.’

  ‘Yes. We came from Iraq because the British and the Americans said that all the Kurdish people should unite together and rise up against Saddam. Every night, on their radio station, in Kurmanji language, in Sorani, in Arabic. More promises. More belief. Trust in us, they said. They promised our leaders, at secret meetings in Geneva and London, of your support. So we did. It was our intifada.’ He smiled – a proud memory. ‘They took Ranya. Suleimanya, Arbil… Our fighters took all these towns from Saddam. On Newroz that year, they took Kirkuk. They expected you were coming to help, because you had promised, and they believed – but no one came. Then Saddam came back – Kirkuk was his prize, no one could take the oil and gas from his Kirkuk and get away with it. So everyone had to run. And you didn’t help. You sent us your old blankets.

  ‘We tried to run north, over the mountains, into Turkey, Saddam’s planes dropping bombs on the lines of people. The Turks wouldn’t let anyone in. No more Kurdish troublemakers, see? But I had connections. I got us across: Meda, my father, my brothers. Some soldiers caught us on the Turkish side, a river near to Kantar. We had gold. They didn’t want gold. Or money. It’s not the only real thing, you see. Just wanted Meda. Who was sixteen. And green-eyed. For one night. My sister was raped, Mister Tracey. Again and again, by Turkish soldiers. Then they left her by the side of the road, with the bottle they had emptied and the tins of fish they had eaten. Like rubbish.

  ‘So I picked my little sister up and I got her to a hospital, and I got them all to a safe place. And then I went away, to get money, find a proper place to live. I went to Mardin, where I saw the blankets. And when I was away, you know what they tried to do – my father and my brothers and my uncle, after all we had been through, what they tried to do because of their belief? They tried to hang Meda. For the dishonour, you see. To them. To them!’

  Rostam swallowed, as if he felt sick. ‘I got her out. To Germany. She was in a hostel for the refugee people and she met Keko. He had lost his first wife. He wasn’t Yezidi. His family religion was Muslim, but he was communist. And he looked after Meda. So I trust Keko. Not Yezidis. My people.’ He spat the word.

  ‘And when she had a daughter with Keko, you were close to her.’

  He nodded. ‘Especially after… after Meda died.’

  Rex remembered what Lawrence had told him. The road to Hamburg. The van that didn’t stop. He wondered if Sajadi had looked for his sister’s killer, if he was still looking.

  ‘I didn’t keep Meda safe. Or Mina either.’

  ‘I wonder how you can keep someone safe from themselves.’

  ‘You think she needed to be?’ Sajadi asked, turning out of the breeze to light a cigarette. Same bad hand. He dared people to look.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rex said. ‘I don’t understand any of it. And I particularly don’t understand why someone who was overjoyed about going to Turkey for a year would suddenly do that.’

  Sajadi peered closely at him, the leather collar flapping in the breeze. A soldier on guard: under the peak of the cap, his dark, smooth face gave nothing away. But there’d been a flicker of something. Rex couldn’t decide whether the news about Mina was a surprise, or if Sajadi was just surprised the third-rate local hack had found out by himself.

  ‘Can you understand it, Mr Sajadi?’ Rex dared.

  Sajadi threw the cigarette on the ground, carefully making sure it was not just out, but buried under the soil. ‘It… adds to my feeling that something is not right. That there is something we don’t know. And we need to know. I ask you – please – not to give up. Please. The police have their answer, and they’re not going to look. Continue to look for an answer.’ The truncated finger tapped a cheekbone. ‘People say you are good at this kind of thing. So please.’

  To Rex’s astonishment, Sajadi held out a hand. He proffered his, and allowed it to be squeezed vigorously, and almost pleadingly as Sajadi went on. ‘Whatever you can find, Rex, please, tell me.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  He sat at the prow of a 123 bus, sailing through the cranes and pile drivers that seemed to be refashioning Tottenham Hale in the image of some new, Dutch or Danish industrial town. After pleading for his help, Sajadi had, with typical abruptness, ordered him into the car, ignored him whilst barking at some underling on speaker-phone, and finally turfed him out at a bus-stop in the rain. Rex didn’t mind. The bus was often his office. And the ride gave him a chance to write up some notes on the poker machines. It was how he often worked – slotting one task into another, fitting the day’s proper agenda around the seams he was privately mining.

  When he’d finished there were still a couple of stops to go, so he made a call. D.S. Brenard was in high spirits, having just nicked a wife-beater who’d forgotten the sixteen rocks of crack in his coat pocket until they were processing him at the Police Station. In a helpful mood, he confirmed that he knew about the assault at Turnpike Lane last night.

  ‘Did it involve a bloke called Haluk and a girl called Kyretia?’

  ‘I won’t deny it,’ he said good-naturedly. ‘She was beating the shibboleths out of him.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Any reason given?’

  ‘He said it was a lovers’ tiff. She said nothing. Legal expert, our Kyretia – refused to speak.’

  ‘Pressing charges?’

  ‘The Turkish lad didn’t want to, but it’s out of his hands.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Kyretia smashed up WPC Akamba’s police radio while she was being restrained. So she’s going to be up before the beak. Prob’ly get away with 40 hours’ Naughty Step. Might not even put a brake on her glittering legal career, these days.’

  ‘And no indication of any reason for it, apart from the two of them apparently being the Taylor and Burton of the Turnpike Lane area?’

  Brenard chuckled. ‘Well that was one funny thing. Lizzie Akamba was the one picked it up. Sharp lass, that… The girl wouldn’t tell us anything, not even her name at first, so we asked the lad for her phone number. And he didn’t have it. We went through his phone menu, and he didn’t have a home number for Kye-re-tia, or a mobile number. And she didn’t have any for him, either. Bit peculiar for a pair of modern lovers, isn’t it?’

  Wasn’t it? He wanted to think about this some more, but they’d just gone past the Castle, and it wouldn’t be long before he reached his destination. There was another call he needed to make, away from all the listening ears in the office. He dialled a new number.

  Even the telephones in France sounded sophisticated, he thought, just before Aurelie’s husband picked up.

  Rex exchanged pleasantries and asked if he could speak to his sister-in-law. There was a pause.

  ‘She isn’t here today, Rex. She’s gone into Paris. Gone into the centre to get some more things for Sybille’s room… Curtains!’

  The classic lying pattern, he thought, as they flew past the Crown Court. Victor Eastwood had taught him that. A liar elaborated on the hop, adding more details as he went along, to firm up the essential untruth he’d begun with.

  ‘We’re concerned because she hasn’t been in touch for a while,’ Rex said, aware that his own voice had taken on a ridiculous French twang. ‘And the date for the move is getting closer.’

  ‘I know, Rex.’ said the husband, quietly. There was another pause. Rex sensed he wanted to say something else. In fact, he’d sensed some time back that Aurelie’s husband was unconvinced of the wisdom of his wife’s plan. ‘I don’t know what I can tell to you. Everything is booked for the… Aurelie will come on that date. I don’t know about myself because of the shifts at my job, but she will come. The room, it’s ready.’

  Rex hadn’t said the date. The husband hadn’t said it either. Because he didn’t know it. He didn’t even know if his wife knew it.

  ‘Is Aurelie all right?’

  ‘Mais oui, all right, of course, of course,’ the husband said ch
eerily, before claiming that his work-phone was ringing. Rex couldn’t hear any work-phone. But that was okay. He didn’t blame the man for covering for his wife.

  Back in the office, a new poem had arrived in the post for Lawrence.

  Jee, they like to claim

  Religion carries the blame

  Islam has nothing though

  On seven eight double o

  Crimes that shame

  Same neat writing, same second-class stamp, same lavender notelet set, Woolies, probably, circa 1986. But this time, arriving on a Tuesday. Something new about the writing, too: the first words of the first, third and fifth lines had been etched in heavily, so they looked darker and bolder, a stress the reader was meant to mark.

  ‘Seven-eight-double-oh,’ Terry murmured, tapping the letter lightly on the desk as if some further truth might fall off it. ‘An amount? How much was your council bloke asking for his bung, Rex?’

  ‘We didn’t get that far, did we?’ Rex said stonily and then, regretting it, added, ‘Could be a point though, Tel. I heard today that the Yezidis consider some numbers very important. Mina’s mother and uncle are Yezidis,’ he clarified, to his puzzled colleagues. ‘A Kurdish kind of sect, from Iraq.’

  Lawrence instantly started typing something. Ellie sat on the edge of Rex’s desk. ‘Jee Islam Crimes,’ she repeated. ‘J.I.C?’

  ‘Semirc Masli Eej,’ added Brenda.

  ‘Who’s he? Bloke who runs the phone shop opposite?’ asked Terry.

  ‘It’s Jee Islam Crimes backwards. I won a prize once on holiday for reciting the whole of ‘Rule Brittania’ in reverse,’ Brenda added.

  ‘Must have been a fun holiday,’ Rex said. Brenda pretended to be annoyed and everyone laughed. It suddenly felt like old times, everyone together, joking, working out a problem.

  ‘Yezidis like the number seven,’ Lawrence said, looking up from his screen. ‘Because they believe God sent down seven angels. Nothing about eight or zeros, or seven thousand eight hundred… Why would my anonymous poems have anything to do with the Kurdish girl’s uncle, anyway?’

  Rex shrugged. ‘It was just a thought.’

  There was an awkward clearing of the throat from behind the group and they turned to see Mark Whittaker fiddling with the end of his tie, a sixth-former forced to address the parents. ‘We, erm, have to deal with the council a lot because they take out big notices most weeks and erm, 7800 is the last bit of their number. The main… main sort of general, erm, number… it’s 0208 112 7800.’

  He melted away as he had appeared, blushing at the edge of his collar, leaving everyone wondering how he’d ever flogged a single ad. But Lawrence was nodding happily.

  ‘We had that rhyme about the ark – obviously the zoo. And then the second one…’ He produced it from his desk drawer and recited. ‘An A for a penny, a B for ten…’

  ‘Someone suggesting there’s corruption in the council?’ Rex said. ‘Like Planning Officers asking for bungs?’

  ‘Not yet proven,’ Ellie added.

  ‘So who’d be sending letters like this?’ Terry asked.

  ‘Someone with a grudge? Someone who’s recently left the council? Or been chucked out?’

  Half an hour later, Rex was back over the now-sunny High Street to the bookie’s where he’d met Tex. He wasn’t looking for Tex, but the little, unfortunate-looking man who’d helped him, for a fee, before. He wasn’t there. Nor was he in the bookmaker’s inside Shopping City, Rex discovered, after a journey which required him to go past the spot where he’d stood only four days ago watching Mina fall to earth. The escalator had been boarded off, but it had been out of order for months anyway. A bunch of flowers had been left at the side of them, with a plain card, and one word written on it. Tatlım. A Turkish word, one he heard all over the borough, but very specific nonetheless. He took a photo of the message and left.

  Then, further down towards Turnpike Lane, he spotted the grim little man, as mesmerised by a glowing poker console as some medieval denizen of Toteham might have been by the nearest chunk of stained glass. As Rex went in, he saw to his dismay that the person at the adjacent machine was, once again, a glowering Ashley Pocock.

  ‘We have to stop meeting like this, Ashley.’

  ‘This is harassment,’ said Pocock.

  ‘I came to see him,’ Rex said, gesturing to the man who had, a couple of seconds before, slapped the screen in disgust at his recent loss. ‘But now you’re here – where can I find your sister?’

  Pocock sucked his teeth at him and barged out.

  ‘Thought not,’ said Rex. He held out a fiver to the little man at the other machine. ‘Care to expand on your recent comments about Tex Ochuba?’

  The man frowned. ‘Care to what?’

  ‘You said Tex was a cunt. I wondered why. And I wondered if Tex’s alleged cuntiness was why you no longer worked at the council.’

  The man stared at the note. He still wore his Council Works jacket. A name over the breast pocket, US army style, a change Eric Miles had brought in, Rex remembered, to give the council ‘a face’. McKenzie.

  McKenzie finally took the note and stowed it fast. ‘The place changed when the new lot got in. I don’t mean just the – wassit – councillors and that. The rest. Works, engineering, secretaries and that. They’re all in it.’

  ‘In what?’

  ‘Up each other’s arses. They all go up that hippy church, and when a job comes up, it goes to one of their mates. That’s what it was like in Works. You’re not in, you’re out. So I was out. Just in time, I heard.’

  ‘Why?’

  The man glanced round, as if about to tell Rex something important. But then he said, ‘Try and go up the Works Department. That’s my advice. Try and go up there.’ Mr McKenzie ostentatiously busied himself with the racing pages of ‘The Star’ and a biro, signalling an end to their dealings.

  ‘Try’ was the right word. The council was a place that attracted angry people to its doors. They were angry about housing benefit and dog mess and stained mattresses on the street and getting sent the wrong bills, and if they weren’t the sort to write cross emails to the newspaper, then they were the sort to come down to the big hulking fortress on Station Road, to thump the answer out of someone.

  Hence: protecting the officers of the council from attack, three of the Congo’s finest prop-forwards beefily stacked behind a desk in paramilitary garb, themselves behind locked, glass doors. If you wanted to get even that far, you had to go into a little booth just by the entrance, pick up a phone and state your business. Rex stated his. They gave him a number for the Works Department and told him, unceremoniously, to ring it.

  He tried another tack. He rang Bilal Toprak instead, inventing some ponderous zoning query that might appeal. Bilal said he could see him in an hour.

  He had a feeling he was wasting his time. Even just standing here for a few minutes outside the council offices, he could see proof of what he already knew to be true. There were women in full hijab working at the council, and men in turbans. The idea that everyone went ‘up that hippy Church’ as the disgruntled McKenzie had put it, was rubbish. No doubt there was some cronyism, as in every large organisation, but there might be plenty of other valid reasons to get rid of a glum, charmless Works employee with a gambling habit. So why was he bothering? Just that last look of McKenzie’s – and those words, ‘just in time’, and the glance over the shoulder, as if he’d been about to say something important. Rex couldn’t ignore that.

  He had some time to kill before the meeting with Bilal, and so, as another spring shower sprinkled upon on Wood Green, he sat at a bus-stop googling for bakers and cake shops in Tottenham. There were a lot: the Turks and Greeks and Serbs, in particular, had a dangerous weakness for layered things dripping in honey and nuts. But they, along with a more recent crop of Brazilian and Portuguese outfits, were easy to discount on the grounds of their names. That left three others in the zone, all within about ten minutes of the Seven Sisters Road – where, i
rritatingly, he’d been earlier in the day. He caught an inexplicably slow, inexplicably crowded bus, and got off, like everyone else, in a foul temper.

  The first on his list, at the end of Philip Lane, called itself a Traditional West Indian Bakery. It turned out to be a thriving, single storey unit, between a gospel music shop and a halal butcher. If Kyretia had literally grown up on top of a cake shop, as both Navitsky and Haluk had said, it couldn’t have been here. Unless someone had lopped the top off.

  Nor the second, on the Seven Sisters Road just by the new Police Station, recently opened on the site of a former dress shop, and, calling itself a patisserie. Oversized coppers, bulked out with their stab vests and pepper sprays, were bursting out of the place onto the pavement.

  The third, however, at which he arrived with just twenty minutes spare before his appointment back in Wood Green, offered some hope. Humming Bird Caribbean Bakers was shut, and gave off the impression of having been shut for some time. It also had a flat over it, a buzzer on a door at the side. No name.

  A man answered. ‘I know Kyretia was a good friend of Mina’s,’ Rex said. ‘And I wondered if she could tell our readers more about the sort of girl she was.’ Click. He wondered if the man had not believed him. Then a buzz, and the door opened.

  Like the clay beneath the pavements, there was a core population in the area, unchanging in dimensions or in nature. People moved in and out of it, yet it endured, and it was distinguished by a kind of poverty that involved owning more or less nothing. Eryl Pocock belonged to this stratum: existing in a pair of cold, damp rooms, with one sofa, one table and three folding chairs.