Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  He thought about approaching her, but then saw who she was with. Ashley Pocock, dressed down for the day in chinos and a bright, sporting sort of shirt, gave his sister a hug and then ran across Lordship Lane, car-keys in hand, dodging buses. Kyretia continued walking, a hefty string bag slung over the shoulder of her grey, suede jacket.

  Rex caught up with her, flashed his card, introduced himself. She stopped, eyeing him like a racehorse abruptly prevented from winning.

  ‘Why were you and your brother at Bilal’s inquest, Miss Pocock?’

  She fixed him with a teenager’s beam of contempt. ‘I wasn’t at the inquest, Mister Tracey. I was in the Magistrates’ being bound over to keep the peace. Ashley was there to support me.’

  He remembered Brenard saying she’d get the Naughty Step after the fight. ‘You were lucky. I hear the last person to break a police radio got life.’

  ‘I thought that was going to be me,’ Kyretia said, patting the heavy bag. ‘I even showed up with a toothbrush.’

  He smiled – unwisely, as it turned out, since this evoked another, regal look of scorn from the tall black girl.

  ‘If Ashley sees you bugging me…’

  ‘Tell him I was asking you about a word, Miss Pocock. Tatlım.’

  She looked shocked. He’d meant her to be.

  ‘The best translation would be “sweetie”, wouldn’t it, but that doesn’t sound as good. Doesn’t get across how loving it is. And I could tell how much you loved Mina from the photograph of the two of you at the Gay Pride rally.’

  She might have a hard outer shell, but now Kyretia’s top lip began to quiver. Rex made a silent, secret nod to the wisdom and discretion of Maureen, who’d said that Mina didn’t have time for boyfriends, and clearly meant much more.

  He pressed on, more gently. ‘I might not be your brother’s favourite person, Miss Pocock, but I do know something’s not right with what happened to Mina, and I’m trying to find out what it is. It’s unfortunate that you’re the person I’ve got to come to. But I won’t stop coming. Because I knew Mina for a long time, and I cared about her, just like you.’

  They went to the Jerk Shack. He’d avoided the place ever since the row with Ashley, but the sisters didn’t seem to remember. It was possible that people were always accusing one another of being racist in the Jerk Shack. They certainly did it a lot to each other in traffic, and in the aisles of the supermarkets. In Wood Green, where everyone was a racist in one sense, and no one was in another, the term was just another way of saying ‘fuck off’.

  Kyretia asked for an ice-cream shake, an order that seemed to take up a lot of the sisters’ concentration. Rex had coffee which, along with the ice-cream shake, didn’t come. He took out his pad in the clattering steaminess of the cafe, hoping none of his colleagues came in and interrupted.

  ‘You came in to talk to Jan. I saw you that time.’

  ‘I think Navitsky knows more than he’s letting on.’

  Kyretia licked lipstick thoughtfully off one, dazzling white tooth. ‘Well, he definitely saw them arguing a few times, in the office.’

  ‘Sorry – saw who arguing?’

  ‘Mina and Haluk. It’s his fault. It’s all his fault. Stupid Turkish dickhead. Mina went out with him once. Before she… You know. She wasn’t sure about herself. Not like me. She went out with the guy one time and he took her to Chicken Cottage. Dick.’ This time, Rex’s smile met with one back. ‘But he wouldn’t give up. Hassling her. Calling her. So what happens? Mina’s uncle gets the idea he’s her boyfriend and has him beaten up. That’s why she ran away.’

  ‘And why you beat up Haluk.’

  ‘Dick,’ she said again.

  ‘Yet when the police came, Haluk stuck to some story about you and him being lovers. Why did he do that?’

  She shrugged. ‘Because he’s a dick? I don’t know. Maybe he thought if he kept the Feds away, I’d be like grateful to him or something?’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why did Mina have to run away in the first place?’

  Her eyes widened. ‘You ain’t heard of honour killings? You think they’re all nice gentlemen, you fell for that? Mina’s dad with his nice BBC World Service on the speakers in the caff and that. Uncle Rostam and his generous donations. Truss me, yeah, these guys are old school. For real. Whatever they come across like. Mina was afraid they was going to murder her for having a boyfriend. And the only way to convince them she didn’t have one, would’ve been to tell them about us. Which would have probably got both of us done in. That’s why she ran.’

  Rex took this in. He felt slightly unwell. The coffee and the shake arrived, but neither he nor Kyretia touched them.

  ‘So what do you think happened to her?’

  Kyretia shrugged, her great hooped earrings moving with her. ‘She was alive. I know that, because she sent me texts. But she wouldn’t tell me where. Said it wasn’t safe for me to know. Then she died. So someone musta found her.’

  ‘Her family?’

  ‘Her dad, maybe. Or her uncle.’

  ‘Not her brother?’

  She snorted. ‘He’s a birdwatcher.’

  ‘So you attacked Haluk because you blamed him. But why didn’t you just tell the police all this when they arrested you? Tell them what happened to Mina?’

  Back to the polar looks. ‘My dad went to the police nine times when those players started in on him. When they threatened to break his knees. When they put a dead dog in the back yard and called the Environmental Health. Nine times, and the police? The police gave him a diary, some skanky little notebook from W.H. Smith’s so’s he could note everything down in it.’

  ‘What “players”?’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t know their names, do I? Started in on the shop for money. He couldn’t pay. They broke him. And the police did nothing. They said he was just making it up because he’d drunk away the money and now he couldn’t make that stupid Royal wedding cake. And of course, all the police knew how much he drank, because he was always being thrown out of The Swan.’

  She sipped her shake. Made a face. ‘Something stronger?’ Rex suggested.

  They decamped to ‘The Seagull’, where the burly Baltic lads were coming on like gangsters with their big coats and their multiple mobiles. Few of them were anything of the sort, Rex knew, as he fetched two large brandies from the bar. The real villains slipped in between, like wraiths. So that even the police failed to see them.

  She scribbled her phone number on a beermat and he took it, thanking her. ‘Did Jan Navitsky do anything with this information – that Haluk was hassling Mina?’

  She laughed. ‘Jan? No. Why are you so bothered about him?’

  ‘Because he left very suddenly on the day Mina died. And there were rumours about him and Mina.’

  ‘What rumours? Oh what – you mean Hollow Wayne?’ Kyretia let out a great, delightful laugh, which temporarily silenced the pub. ‘That’s him! Jan Navitsky writes that thing.’ She shook her head. ‘Man, trust me. He sends them in to the newsletter guy from a tempmail. Last time one went in, I was first in the office the next day. My computer’s down. I go and try Jan’s. He hasn’t deleted his history. What’s his last site? Tempmail. He writes them about himself to try and look interesting. He’s a dick. All men are dicks.’

  Rex sipped his brandy, letting the warmth seep through him along with the realisation. He’d got a lot of things wrong. He’d forgotten, it seemed, that a lot of the people in his sights were just big children. They loved like children, were spiteful and furious when the love didn’t work out. And they pretended like children, too. Navitsky’s posturing in the gossip column wasn’t, really, that much different from a lad Rex had known at Manchester, who’d sailed into town, every weekend, dressed like Lord Byron, only to have the shit beaten out of him. Or the brash, orphaned boy from the Lincolnshire village. In the library, telling the pretty French girl he’d been all over Africa. When he’d never been south of Spalding.

  He looked at Kyretia, now hew
ing away at her phone keypad with long, neon talons, and he was sure, 100%, that she believed what she’d told him. She’d had time with it, of course. It was new to him. He feared the moment when it sank in. He took another drink.

  ‘You’ve no idea where Mina was hiding?’

  ‘Tower block?’ Kyretia said. ‘I don’t know. I went round all the ones I could get to.’

  ‘Why a tower block?’

  ‘A couple of her texts said “up here”. “It’s all right up here”. “Whatever people say about this place, the views are lush.”.’

  Rex was silent, thinking. There was one obvious place to look. He wasn’t going to go alone, though. He glanced up. Kyretia had drained her drink and was shouldering the huge bag.

  ‘I notice things like that, Mister Tracey, the words people say, because I’m training to be a lawyer. I’m a good lawyer. I won a Junior Bar bursary. I chose to go to Turkey next year. I could have chosen to do a placement at South Square – you heard of them, right? The Chambers in Gray’s Inn? I was offered. Four places, eleven thousand applicants. And the reason my brother said he knew someone who could help you with your pathetic skylight thing? It’s because he thought of me. He’s actually my half-brother, but he’s all brother to me. And he was going to recommend me. To help you.’

  ‘Would you have been able to help me much with a planning dispute?’

  ‘No. Ashley doesn’t know that, though, does he? Man’s just trying to look out for me, help me make some money for my trip.’ She sucked a tooth. ‘And I did help you as it turned out. I got him to drop that stupid complaint about you. You’ll be getting a letter about it.’

  Kyretia Pocock gave him an almost pitying look and walked out. As she passed the bar, a plastic gangster thought about making a cheeky comment. And then, clearly, thought better of it.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Predictably, Lawrence Berne knew a lot about Sky City and the shopping centre next to it. In the 1970s he had commuted to his job in a Wood Green accountancy firm via the railway station that had taken up the site before. He had been present at the very first, tempestuous public planning forums, held in ‘The Railway’ pub on account of asbestos having been discovered in the old council building. In the company of an assortment of local worthies, Lawrence had looked around the first of the new flats, with their fitted kitchens, and unique vistas over the shopping centre air vents. He knew the history behind Sky City’s advertised but absent ‘playground’, thought unnecessary because the Shopping Centre had included in its atrium one huge wooden, and ultimately unsafe climbing frame in the shape of a frog. If they should be pounced upon, Rex thought, by some pack of Romani mudlarks, high on Bostik, then Lawrence could probably lecture them all to death.

  He had, however, answered the call, as he always did, because, in his belted raincoat and his slip-on shoes, Lawrence Berne was a hero. Remarkably, he had held onto a copy of the original plans for the Sky City estate, making him a damn sight more useful than Terry, who’d disappeared to Soho on some unspecified, mysterious errand involving an old mate. Together Lawrence and Rex worked their way through the 201 housing units, arranged in tiers of five on sloped walkways, knocking on doors where they dared, peering through windows where they didn’t.

  After an hour and a half of this, up and down steep stairways, whipped by an odd, dust-carrying wind that made them feel as if they were wandering round an empty desert fortress, they’d got nowhere. At one door, a ramrod-backed Somali granddad had invited them in, taking them for representatives of the council, and more or less refusing to believe otherwise.

  Finally, though, as they were on the verge of quitting, a ghostly, paranoid-looking woman, with dyed black hair, and sporting more gold than Rex had ever seen outside a national vault, hovered at the crack long enough to whisper that she knew of one flat to which all sorts of people came and went, very quickly. ‘The one next up’, she said, trembling from cold, or nerves or something more serious. ‘It’s empty now, but there was people up there until last Friday. Lots of argy-bargy before they left.’

  They were now outside the unit above her on the tier, which had a lime green door and a matching knocker.

  ‘Someone, once, cared about this door,’ Rex said. ‘Even though they had rotten taste in colours.’

  ‘They didn’t care enough to lock it when they left,’ Lawrence said, pushing the door open. They came upon a laminate-floored hallway, awash with envelopes.

  Like all the flats, this was a small, simple means of storing humans: bedroom and bathroom one side of the short hall, kitchen and living room the other. Apart from one wooden chair, it was empty and clean. Very clean. In the kitchen, Lawrence sniffed the air demonstratively, as he ran a finger along the draining board.

  ‘No dust. Everything honks of that fizzy stuff Mrs B uses. Cilitt Bang. I’m not Quincey, but I’d say someone’s been here recently and left it very clean.’

  ‘But not bothered with their letters,’ Rex said. He said it to an echoing space, though, because Lawrence had already gone into the hallway.

  Rex found him out there, on his neatly-creased navy knees, rummaging through the envelopes like someone searching for a lost ring in a wood. Rex picked up an envelope. It was from the council. Addressed to a Mr Emicer Majlises. He went for another. It was also from the council. For a Sree C Amji Selim.

  ‘Odd names,’ Lawrence said. Rex opened an envelope. It was a receipt of sorts, informing the tenant that the housing benefit for that month had been paid to the landlord. He opened another one, and it said the same thing. Judging by the size and colour of the envelopes, over half of them were benefit receipts for Messrs Selim and Majlises.

  ‘Selim!’ Lawrence suddenly shouted. ‘Good Lord in Harpenden, why didn’t I see it? Miles – Selim. They’re all anagrams of Eric James Miles. Look!’

  Rex looked. ‘What about that letter you got? Not the last one – the one before. What did it say? Jee Islam Crimes…’

  ‘Those were the words that were highlighted. Another anagram of Eric James Miles.’

  They rose to their feet. It was a moot point who found it harder to do so: 64-year-old Lawrence, or 42-year-old Rex. Both were slightly giddy with what they’d found.

  ‘What exactly did the other three poems say?’

  ‘I can’t recall every word. They’re back at the office.’ Lawrence winked at him. ‘Madam can’t complain that you’re following the wrong trail now. Besides, she’s off at HQ all afternoon.’

  Brenda made no comment on the bulging carrier-bag of letters they carried past her reception area. She did, however, opine that someone who’d had death threats ought not to be running around the place so freely.

  Rex, who had been managing to forget the nasty little message in the classified column, batted the comment back. ‘I’ve never run anywhere, Brenda,’ he said. ‘What are you doing with that?’ he added, spotting the bottle of champagne on the desk. A label he remembered, for a reason he couldn’t.

  ‘Some sort of promotional freebie. No one here else wanted it,’ Brenda said defensively. ‘It’s not real champagne. It’s British.’

  Upstairs, in the office, they put the three poems together. The first two had confined themselves to making cryptic comments about the council: wasting public money and, perhaps, selling its services. The third had taken a more blunt tone: not only including an anagram of Eric Miles, but openly including the council’s phone number. And the final, hand-delivered poem, they now realised, carried almost a note of desperation.

  ‘Morecambe to Clapton.’ Rex read aloud. ‘Eric Morecambe. Eric Clapton. They’d kind of abandoned the subtlety, hadn’t they?’

  ‘Well, it was too subtle for us until just now,’ Lawrence said. ‘Andaman Port meaning Port Blair… Eric Blair – real name of George Orwell. This is someone who reads a lot.’

  ‘Or does crosswords,’ Rex said, as the answer leapt into the light. Ena Miles had gone missing on the day the last letter was hand-delivered. A faint dusting of flour
and allspice on the envelope because crosswords were not the only thing the former library assistant got up to in her kitchen, with its pudding bowl and its mixer.

  He remembered the flat way the old lady had spoken about Eric and his lack of ability. Most mothers did the opposite. Unless they’d been shocked out of the maternal fugue. Badly disappointed by the boys they’d borne and adored. Could that be it?

  ‘I think Eric Miles was in it. I think he was involved in the corruption. And he’s been shopped by his own mother.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Lawrence asked.

  ‘Bring it all down.’

  Rex sat down at his desk and started making notes. He wanted it all fixed in his head, but he still didn’t know the ending. He didn’t even know the next act.

  He’d barely started to get his thoughts in order when Terry came back, looking flushed and slightly twitchy.

  ‘This you’ve got to see.’ He sniffed loudly. ‘This is…’ He sniffed again as he went over to his laptop and fired it up. Rex wondered if the old mate in Soho had sold Terry a cheeky line or two.

  More publicly, what the mate had given him was a little grey memory stick, which went into the laptop and eventually led to the menu page of some kind of video editing suite. Terry clicked. Mina’s last YouTube pronouncement appeared. Terry moved a time-slider over to halfway through her speech. Meanwhile, outside, an emergency vehicle could be heard. It seemed to be stuck in the traffic.

  ‘My mate works for a post-production place,’ Terry shouted, over the sound of the sirens. ‘I asked him if he’d have a look at Mina’s thing, kind of frame by frame, like, in case there was something we’d missed. Look –’

  As the siren mercifully moved on, Terry let the piece play at its normal pace. It was footage Rex had watched many times before. Mina was sitting in front of a slatted white screen or blind, wearing a long-sleeved, wine-coloured top, no make-up, that wide, so publicly misconstrued hairband pushed up high on her forehead.