by M. H. Baylis
‘It stops those boys pestering – Sky Sports, gas company, electric, there’s always someone. Vonda says it for me, and I say for it her.’
‘You realise that if it’s someone with an interest in housebreaking, that’s like giving them a floor-plan. They’ll think it’s someone rich living in there – and someone who’s away.’
Jean took this in. ‘You’re right. It’s a very stupid lie. We need a new one.’ She chuckled. ‘Are you from the police?’
‘Newspaper,’ he said, showing her the card. ‘You’ve sent us some poems.’
‘Aah!’ she said, beaming. ‘Heavens! Come in!’
As the kettle boiled, in a kitchen covered with Christian homilies and ceramic trolls, it emerged that Jean Crosby had sent a number of poems to the old Wood Green Gazette, but years ago, in response, as Lawrence had said, to two competitions. She denied having sent any more recently – or even writing any poetry. She’d joined a writing group up at the Big Green Bookshop, she said, and had been advised to try historical fiction. She was clearly telling the truth.
So who was the baker-poet?
‘Your neighbour, Vonda… she never worked at the council, did she?’
‘Vonda? Ha!’ Jean chuckled, although she didn’t explain why the idea was so absurd. ‘No, just me. But what’s the council got to do with it?’
‘I’ll be honest with you. I can’t say in full. But there seems to be someone at the council sending us peculiar poems. Sort of… gossip, you know, but disguised. I’m trying to find out who. And I heard you’d left not long ago.’
The frank approach worked with women like Jean, as it had always worked with Rex’s mother. They’d outlasted husbands, raised, banished and welcomed back wayward sons; they expected lies. Especially from men. Honesty tended to knock them off their slippers. Jean cut him a huge wedge of fruit loaf and sat down with a sigh.
‘Well, it’s not me. If I’ve got a problem, I say. And I did say.’ She smoothed the apron down. ‘I didn’t like the new… thing… database. I said I was happy with the old way. Eric says to me, there’s only the new way now, Jean. Actually he called me June. He always called me June. I went to see… that girl in… what do they call it now? Human Resources? No – the “People Team”. People Team, ha! Of course. And she’s one of Eric’s… people, too.’
‘How do you mean – Eric’s people?’
Jean rolled her eyes. ‘He invited me to his Church. I go to Zion Baptist in Hornsey usually, but I went. I’m not, you know, a limited kind of person. Afterwards I told him, I said, Mr Miles, it’s just not for me – big television screens up there. People fainting all over the place. That was what did it, I think. He made up his mind. But it’s fine. If I’d hung on another six months, I’d be getting two pounds and twelve pence more a week pension, so. Ha!’
Rex finished his cake and said his thank yous. Jean saw him to the door, taking her apron off in honour.
‘But Eric’s “people” don’t all go to his Church, do they?’ asked Rex in the doorway. ‘What about Bilal? He’ll go to the mosque, won’t he?’
‘It’s more about whether you worship Eric Miles. I’m not sure Billy’s one, anyway.’
‘Not a Muslim?’
She frowned at him, as if he was being especially stupid. ‘On the day I had my little leaving… party there, I left my brolly upstairs. I knew I’d have trouble getting it back once I handed my pass in, so I went back up. I thought there was no one there, but when I was on my way out it sounded like crying. A man crying. It was Billy…’ She corrected herself. ‘Bileeli. The man just sitting at his desk, crying like a boy. And I asked him what’s up and he just said. ‘It’s a mess, Jean. A mess.’ I asked him what he meant but he just said it again and then he walked out. A mess. So.’
Outside, sitting amid the building noise in the little hidden, lawn-sized park that Falkland Road and Frobisher Road shared, he took out his phone to ring the council. He saw he’d had a text, from Ellie: Spotted something. Call.
Intrigued as he was, he didn’t call. He rang the council. A woman with a South African accent said Bilal was working from home. In some senses that was even better. Bilal lived just two roads down the ladder. Rex didn’t remember the number, but he did remember it was very close to the top end, and that it had a gate with a Cave Canem mosaic sign on it, despite the owner’s lack of pets or Latin. He set off.
So Jean hadn’t sent the cryptic poems. But she’d been revealing, in her solid, matriarchal way. Painting a picture of an increasingly cliquey council where the old, or those who resisted the ‘new way’, were squeezed out. And where, in the midst of the enthusiasm and the good works, somewhere, something had begun to go wrong.
As Rex turned into Effingham Road, he was instantly confronted with a clot of hi-vis and flashing vehicles. There were the ubiquitous skips and steel-poles and Krakow lads in hard hats down here, too, but they’d all stopped working and were standing about in clutches, smoking, all staring in the one direction.
Turkish pop was blaring at tooth-shaking volume from a house two down from the top. The front door was open, and Tesco bags full of shopping sat clumsily poised on the lip of the porch. An ambulance door was being shut, and close by, a suited detective was handing a pale, sobbing, rosette-sporting woman into the care of a black WPC. He wondered, in the absurd way trifles strike us in the midst of bigger things, if this was P.C. Lizzie Akamba.
He knew who the detective was: it was D.S. Brenard. He recognised the sobbing woman, too, with the red rosette dwarfing her little grey jacket: prospective Labour MP, Eve Reilly. And as a uniformed policeman emerged from the house and shut the gate, he had a good idea who was in the ambulance.
‘I don’t want to call you an ambulance chaser, Rex, but…’ said Brenard.
‘Either that or they chase me. What happened?’
The detective cast a morose eye towards the front door as the music was finally switched off. ‘Missy here was doing a spot of canvassing. Comes to this one. Sees shopping bags on the porch, like. Door’s open. Loud music. Thinks she’d better go in.’
‘Really? I wouldn’t.’
‘Me neither, but she’s a black belt and all that, isn’t she? Haven’t you read her leaflets? Anyway, she clocks there’s water pouring down through the ceiling. Goes up – whatshisname’s in there – the council feller, Bilal Toprak, in his bathroom. Fully clothed. Half of him in the still-running bath and a cracked head.’
‘Unconscious?’
Brenard cast his eyes down, old-school, reverent. ‘Dead as the double LP, Rex.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Until the Toprak family was informed of the latest tragedy, Bilal’s death had to remain off the news radar. At first Ellie had been keen on an unspecific piece about the prospective Labour MP finding a body whilst out canvassing, but this idea was blocked by her own boss at head office. In the meantime, there was plenty of background to be written in, and plenty of speculation to be indulged around the office. This ranged from Brenda’s mutterings about ‘a curse’ on the Toprak family, to Lawrence’s theory of delayed shock killing Bilal after his having witnessed Kemal’s death, to Terry’s off-colour suggestion that Bilal and the Trabzonspor club might just have employed the same shite builder. Everyone had a view. So much psychic energy was expended on this that Rex only recalled Ellie’s text message several hours later. And when he asked her about it, she was at first unable to recall why she’d written Spotted something. Call.
Then, at a nudge from Brenda, it came back. The copy of MetLife, the student rag Rex lifted from the University, had ended up on Ellie’s desk. Flipping through, and coming across a slot called @FashionFails, she’d found an old photograph of Mina.
@FashionFails was a regular column in which students, and the occasional, eager-to-please staff member underwent ritual humiliation by supplying photographs of their former, misguided selves in unfortunate, now-dated clothing.
‘I don’t see what’s wrong with most of these outfits,’ Br
enda said, as the magazine was now displayed to Rex.
‘You need to be young, I guess,’ Terry said.
‘I don’t get it, and I am young,’ Ellie said.
Nobody commented. The point, in any case, was not the outfit being worn by the twiggy, awkward sixteen-year-old girl in the blurry photograph, but the fact that she was in the old offices of the Liberal Democrat party in Crouch End. There, stuffing envelopes in the company of Eric Miles and Bilal Toprak, was the younger Mina. She’d been political at a young age. Rex had remembered the rosette, just not the colour.
‘And two of those people are now dead,’ Brenda said portentously.
‘And Bilal made out he didn’t know her,’ Rex recalled.
‘Well, there’s a whiff of Billingsgate,’ Lawrence said. He whistled through his teeth. ‘The deaths, the letters, the council… Could they really all be connected?’
They used the white board in Ellie’s office to sum up everything they knew so far.
‘Mina dies, in what looks like a political protest. She is highly political, confirmed by friends and relatives as well as her web presence. But it’s not clear what she was protesting about, and her internet posts imply she thinks suicide pointless.’
‘Plus the when and the where,’ Lawrence added. ‘Remember? Why do it at the scrag end of the shopping precinct at the scrag end of Eve Reilly’s tour?’
Rex added it to the board. ‘Most importantly, she was excited about going to work in Turkey, with Kyretia Pocock, whose brother is…’
‘Ashley Pocock, who’s still thinking about suing us,’ Ellie concluded.
‘Who was fishing for a bung,’ Rex reminded her. ‘Who is lying about my abuse of him, and spends his days putting huge wedges into the poker machines. As does one Tex Ochuba, whose Works Department doesn’t do any work, but seemingly dishes it out, via an agency, to people straight off the bus. One of whom, since we know there was a maintenance worker up there that day, and we know it wasn’t Tex Ochuba, might be the person I saw on the balcony at Shopping City just after Mina fell.’
‘The person you perhaps saw,’ Terry added.
‘I know I saw paint handprints. I don’t believe they’re Mina’s, and we know where Tex was getting his staff from. Meanwhile, higher up the council, we’ve got a cryptic whistleblowing poet with a fondness for lavender and baking; Bilal, sitting in tears about the ‘mess’ and lying to me about knowing Mina and her uncle. Two buildings crumbling, one with fatal consequences for Bilal’s father, Kemal, followed two days later by Bilal’s own very peculiar death – fully clothed, drowned in his bath with the front door open and the radio on.’
‘Didn’t you say Mina was in love with someone?’ Brenda added. ‘You forgot that.’
‘I think she was,’ Rex said, remembering the flowers and the endearment on the card. ‘But I’m not putting that up here until I prove it.’
‘So what about the uncle?’ Lawrence said, jabbing the earends of his spectacles towards the board and clearly rather enjoying himself. ‘Rostam.’
‘Her lover was her uncle?’ Terry said. There were groans.
‘What was it you told me?’ Lawrence went on. ‘He claims to hate the PKK, Kurdish activism, and so on, to be just a successful businessman, but turns out he’s a decorated hero of some legendary Kurd versus Arab battle in Iraq.’
‘Lies about his past…’ Rex mused. ‘So what else could he have lied about? But on the other hand he begged me to find out what I could. He adored Mina. Keeps a present from her in his car. Same goes for the brother – just a bird-nerd. More interesting, in my view,’ he went on, taking up the marker pen again, ‘is the Students’ Union President, Jan Navitsky, with whom Mina regularly clashed, who flew out of the country on the day Mina died, and is said to be funny around girls.’
Ellie frowned. ‘So what are you saying – this guy’s been missing ever since?’
‘No, he came back a few days later – claims he jetted off to accompany his step-mum back from hospital – even showed me the photographic proof.’
‘So why are you suspicious? Actually, look, it’s not important,’ Ellie said, folding her arms and sitting down. Rex sensed he was losing her. ‘I agree there are question marks. But that’s all we have. Yes, it looks as if there might be something dodgy going on at the council, which Bilal knew about, and someone else out there clearly wants us to know about, too. Maybe that has something to do with Bilal’s death, maybe not. The only links between all that’ – she pointed the board – ‘and all this stuff about Mina, are just coincidences. She worked with Bilal – well, she was a political sort of girl, and before he was tempted away from the Lib Dems by Eric Miles, he was a political boy. Bilal denied knowing her – well, she was the 16-year-old, probably painfully shy envelope-stuffer who came into the office a few times while Bilal was forging ahead in local politics, so why would he remember her? As for your man at the top of the escalator, Rex – if he was there, if you saw him, if he was one of these illegals employed to do the maintenance works, if he saw Mina’s death, then, ultimately, so what? He saw her death. You’re not going to find him.’
‘So?’
‘So, sorry. I think you’ve got all these doubts because you knew Mina, you cared about her, you were horrified by what you saw, you felt a bit paternal towards her…’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Well, whatever you felt.’ She put both her hands together on the desk and leant forward, like Susan did in her Eisenhower moments. ‘I don’t want any more time or money wasted in this office, on this story. Got it? Sort out whatever’s been going on at the council. Bust it. But accept Mina’s death for what it is.’
She’d addressed it to the whole room, but everyone knew she only meant one person, and they were all waiting for his response. He gave it – a sober, chastened nod. But he kept his fingers crossed behind his back.
And the next day, a Saturday morning, in his own time, he went, with the newsletter photo, to a modest but smart little house in the Noel Park area. A sub-district of orderly Victorian villas to the east of Green Lanes, Noel Park had been London’s first Garden Suburb, although these days it boasted fewer celebrity residents than the one in Hampstead. There was one well-known Noel-Parker, though. Down Morley Avenue, a dainty, tree-lined street of speed-bumps, red bricks and gabled porches, dwelt Eric Miles.
A workman – shaven-headed, shy, Slavonic – was fitting some sort of complicated lock to the front door. He motioned to Rex to walk in. Rex called out, ‘Hello?’ but no one replied. Encouraged by further nods and gestures from the workman, he went uneasily a little way down a bright painted, tiled hallway until he came to a kitchen where a tall, thin, stooped and white-haired old lady ran at him with a vegetable knife, aiming for the artery that ran up his neck.
There was no hate in the old lady’s pale eyes, no fury or coldness. Rex saw something worse: nothing. Instinctively, he put a hand upto protect himself.
Fortunately a fat, cheery, Tamil lady in a green nurse’s dress appeared at that moment, heading in via the back door from the garden, herbs in a colander.
‘Ena!’ she said firmly. ‘No!’
At a few further, peremptory words, the old lady allowed herself to be disarmed and seated at a chair. Rex rubbed his neck, his heart thudding as he explained who he was.
‘Sorry,’ the nurse said. ‘She’s nervous of strangers. DON’T LIKE OUTSIDE ISN’T IT?’ she shouted at the old lady. ‘BUT YOU STILL TRY AND GET OUT, ENA? NAUGHTY ISN’T IT?’ She looked apologetically back to Rex. ‘Got out yesterday. Had police, everybody, looking for her.’
Rex remembered Ellie’s request for the website. A woman down Morley Avenue. Had it been Mrs Miles?
The nurse looked at him expectantly. ‘So, s: Haringey? Is that social services, police, what is it?’
‘It’s a newspaper. I wanted to see Eric.’
‘Ah. I thought it was about Ena. He’s not here. Gone church. Only Ena’s here. Eric’s Mum. Sit – it’s ok – sit.’
She motioned to the table where the old lady was sitting, with an open book of crosswords. Nervously, Rex sat. She had a big, brainy-looking forehead, he realised, like her son.
‘LOVES THE PUZZLES DON’T YOU ENA?’ bellowed the nurse. ‘Crosswords,’ she added, for Rex’s benefit. ‘Used to be librarian.’
‘I was a library assistant,’ said Ena Miles, quietly and precisely, looking up from her puzzles to meet Rex keenly in the eye. She was telling him that she could hear perfectly clearly. ‘First in Glasgow, then down here. Forty-two years. Now it’s just crosswords.’
‘Not just that,’ the nurse said softly. ‘Come on.’
‘I’ve always liked libraries,’ Rex said.
‘Eric never reads,’ Ena said flatly.
‘Good talker though, innit, Eric is, Mrs M?’ said the nurse, putting a hand on Ena’s bony shoulder. ‘Has to be. For Church and council and that.’ She hadn’t bellowed this, but spoken like a friend. In response, Ena Miles had briefly put a veined, bird-like claw on top of the Tamil nurse’s fingers. Things often weren’t quite what they seemed. These women liked each other.
‘Yes, good at that,’ said Ena. She started crying. ‘Oh my Jackie. Where’s Jackie now?’
Rex didn’t know what to say. He took in the kitchen – new and immaculate, a gleaming mixer on the worktop, next to a nippy little digital radio, next to the sort of big, chipped brown pudding bowl his own mum had used. A space shared between a middle-aged man and an elderly woman. Could he have ended up like this, too, if his mum had lived? Rex declined biscuits, left a message for Eric Miles, said goodbye, and went. The pale workman smiled broadly, as if it was safe to do so, now that Rex was leaving.
He took a long walk back, through blossomy, sunny streets down to Lordship Lane, and then headed back along Westbury Avenue towards his home. The route took him past Bosphorus Continental, the odd, ancient, handwritten notice about the magazines still fading slowly in the window. He went in. A headscarved girl with glittering eyes and loud earphones was sitting at the counter. He asked after Aran. She gave him twenty Marlboro. He asked again. Reluctantly she let one, tiny, hissing earbud out of the folds just long enough for him to state his business a third time. ‘He’s not on today?’ she said, or rather queried. Then she frowned. ‘Was you the guy what was…?’ A look of alarm flashed across her face, then she shuddered, shook her head. ‘No, course you’re not.’ She looked all set to restore her live-feed to Miley Cyrus, but Rex stopped her.
