Black Day at the Bosphorus Café

by M. H. Baylis

  ‘We didn’t make a secret of it at uni – no one was interested in us. We were just a pair of geeks who held hands in lectures. But afterwards, I got into politics. And Aran’s family – they never officially came here. They were illegal. I told Millbank. They just said, ditch him if you seriously want to be selected.’

  ‘So you hid it from your bosses, too?’

  ‘No. We parted. Until I was selected. Then, I thought the pressure would be off. But then Aran started to find about the things his uncle was involved in, and it became even more apparent. If it came out…’

  ‘Bye-bye constituency.’

  ‘It was about protecting each other. Because we loved each other,’ she said sourly, a strange tone for a declaration of love. ‘I still love him. I still want him to come back.’

  Rex said nothing. He’d had enough, he thought, of telling people the awful truth. It didn’t make anyone happier.

  ‘She managed to grab Aran’s phone. Mina – I mean. When I was doing the walkabout, on Newroz, he was up in Sky City, at that flat, trying to talk to her.’

  ‘Talk to her? Drench her in petrol and threaten her, you mean.’

  ‘You don’t know what went on there. Mina grabbed his phone, while he was out of the room. He was pretending to fetch his lighter.’

  ‘So he told you that? Aran told you what he did, how terrified he must have made his little sister, and you still love him? You weren’t disgusted by that? Appalled by it?’

  ‘Of course I was!’ she shouted. ‘I was horrified! I was horrified when I realised it was her, it was Mina, lying there on the floor in front of us…’ Her voice died away.

  ‘So you knew then,’ he said. ‘I wondered about that. You seemed very in control – doing everything right until you looked at her.’

  Eve said nothing, just nodded.

  ‘And it was clear to you then, that Aran was part of it?’

  She shook her head, several times, before the words came. ‘I had no idea. I knew she was missing. I knew Aran and his uncle were looking for her. That was it. When I got out of Shopping City, and away from everyone, I rang him, and I told him. He seemed as shocked as I was. But something wasn’t right. I can’t explain it. I thought something wasn’t right. Normally, when anything upset him, he wanted to be with me. But he was avoiding me. That’s what it felt like. Until they got the last of her things back from the Police. Then he said he had to see me. And he told me.’ She cleared her throat.

  ‘And then you kept his secret for him.’

  ‘Mina was a bitch to him,’ she said, harshly. ‘You think, just because she died that way, that made her good? When they were kids, she teased him about reading slowly. Told lies to get him in trouble. Mina treated Aran like dirt for their whole life together, and nobody ever tried to stop her. They let her get away with it, her dad and her uncle, all those years, because she was a girl, and because she was pretty, and he was none of those things. Tell me you’d have spent so much time on it, if it had been him on the escalator. Tell me you’d have noticed the kid in the back of the café, if it had been an ordinary-looking boy. He was there, Rex, plenty of those times you were in there, playing the Great White Explorer. You didn’t notice Aran. And no one else did either.’

  Silence – while he racked his brains, while she recovered her cool. She was right, of course. Life wasn’t, as Eric Miles had said, full of snowflake-like perfections, it was full of ugly inequalities. The pretty girl got the attention. The wicked triumphed; the weak only became strong when someone else took their place.

  ‘So Aran snapped,’ she went on. ‘Yes. He went to the flat she was hiding in to get her passport off her, and burn it. She taunted him. He lost it. But he had no intention of setting her on fire. I know that. I don’t know for sure what happened to Mina. I don’t care. I just know. I’ve seen him looking after birds. Tiny birds, feeding them with a dropper, all night, every hour, making a splint that was this big…’ She held up finger and thumb, barely an inch apart. ‘For a broken wing. He’s not capable of killing.’

  ‘Unlike you. Unless you’re claiming someone other than yourself murdered Bilal Toprak.’

  ‘No, it was me.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But it wasn’t murder. I had to go to Bilal’s house and see him, because she rang him. At Sky City, when Aran went out of the room, Mina grabbed his phone and she rang Bilal, but he didn’t pick up. She was about to leave a message for him when Aran came back in. He says she threw the phone at him and she managed to get out of the flat. Aran ran after her and… well, you know…’

  ‘I know,’ he interrupted. ‘But you don’t, do you?’

  ‘I believe Aran. That’s all that matters. I haven’t tried to think what happened to her after that because I…’

  ‘Because if you did, you might doubt him,’ Rex said. She said nothing, merely looked down at her hands. He could, he knew, put her out of her misery now, tell her how Mina had really come to die in flames. But Reilly’s faith was as much a crime as her deceit. He’d met other women with that sort of faith: wives ‘believing’ in their rapist husbands, mothers not only ‘believing’ but providing the alibis for scumbag sons. Faith as a means of hiding. Sajadi was right about something. Belief without doubt was horse shit.

  ‘When Aran got back to the flat, he saw she’d made that call on his phone,’ she continued in a small voice. ‘He didn’t know whose number it was. He didn’t do anything. But his phone kept ringing. It was Bilal, obviously, ringing back, trying to find out whose phone the call had come from. And every time it rang, it reminded Aran of what had happened.’

  ‘It didn’t “happen”, Eve. Nothing just “happened” without your boyfriend choosing to pour petrol on his sister.’

  She gave a sullen nod. ‘He knew that. That’s why he couldn’t keep it together in the end. He broke down, and he confessed it all to me. He was lucky. He was in such a state, he might have told his uncle. I don’t know what he’d have done.’

  Rex looked away. She’d be finding out soon enough, he guessed, what the uncle had done.

  ‘I told him to get rid of the SIM. So he did, and the calls stopped. But Bilal wanted to know what had happened to Mina. He knew she’d been in hiding – he’d helped her to hide. She never told him why she needed to, but he wasn’t an idiot, he suspected it was to do with Sajadi. And he thought her death was, too. So he kept going to the shop, to ask Aran.’

  Rex nodded. ‘Like the girl in the shop said. Bilal came looking for Aran. I thought it must have happened after the social club collapsed. I thought it had something to do with that. But I was wrong. He said he was too late. He didn’t mean too late getting to the club. He meant too late to get Mina’s call.’

  And he thought of that odd comment the shop-girl had relayed, off-the-wall, an aside, really, but tellingly bitter. People like you don’t need that sign no more. Bilal’s own family had been ruined by the racketeers. Aran’s had escaped them. And now Bilal must have been sure they were connected to the death of his friend, Mina.

  ‘It made you anxious, didn’t it? The last time I was here, I mentioned Bilal’s visit to the supermarket. And you didn’t like me knowing that.’

  She gave a sullen shrug. ‘It doesn’t matter now, does it? Eventually Bilal caught up with him and Aran was… he was no good at lying. He let something slip about a flat. And of course, no one but Bilal and Mina was supposed to know she’d been in a flat. And now Bilal was really suspicious.’

  ‘So you went to see him. On that Friday morning. And, whilst doing a bit of pre-election leafleting, kill him.’

  ‘It isn’t like that.’

  ‘You didn’t kill him? Or you weren’t leafleting? I know you weren’t leafleting. Most of Effingham Road knows that.’

  ‘If you’ll let me answer,’ she said icily. Rex fell silent. She’d have done all right on ‘Newsnight’, Eve Reilly. If she’d made it.

  ‘I went to see Bilal on the Wednesday afternoon, and I told him the truth. He was working from home. He’d j
ust got in, with a load of shopping, he was unpacking it, with the radio on. There was no point in lying. I told him what had gone on…’

  ‘Do you get training in this? “Mistakes were made”, “an event occurred”. You know why I never wanted to profile you? Because I knew I’d get this bullshit. Tell the truth. Nothing had “gone on”. Your boyfriend terrorised his sister, and you killed a man to cover it up!’

  ‘Not killed!’ she said, hotly, her cheeks flushing. ‘We talked. I mentioned what Aran had told me, about his uncle’s empty flats, and the council scam, and I said that gave us both something on each other. But he just laughed in my face. He said he wasn’t part of the stuff at the council, and he was about to bring it all crashing down. He said he’d let me fall with it. He showed me this dossier-thing. I had a look. It was like he said. He had enough to destroy them. I begged him to see reason. This wasn’t like Miles and the council, this wasn’t greed, this was an awful, stupid moment of anger, a family row, really, that went terribly wrong, in a way no one could have imagined.’ She glanced up at him, here, for approval or condemnation. He gave her nothing.

  ‘Bilal listened. He listened. I thought he might be seeing our side of it. But then he said it was wrong, and like it or not, the truth had to be told. So I hit him. I was so angry, I didn’t think. I hit him. It was just a slap. But he fell, and he bashed his head, and he shook a bit.’ Her voice trembled. ‘But he was still alive.’

  ‘So, instead of calling an ambulance, you put his shopping on the door-step, turned the music up, left his body in the bathroom with the taps running and buggered off with the front door open? What kind of First Aid course did you take?’

  ‘I froze. I tried to run through the options. I could ring 999 and say I’d been walking past or something, but when he got better, there was no way he’d keep quiet. I could ring anonymously, but he’d still get better and shaft me. Then I thought – this is ridiculous – the guy is injured, you have to help.’

  ‘Or, “if I save his life for him, he might keep quiet”?’

  ‘That didn’t occur to me!’ she said savagely. ‘I tried to move him. And that’s when he stopped breathing. He died in my arms. I could have rung someone at that point – Bilal wasn’t going to talk anymore, was he? But my DNA was all over him now, all over the house. I had no good reason for having been there. My only hope was to arrange it, so he could be found by someone else, and it not look like murder.’

  ‘So you dragged him upstairs to the bathroom.’

  ‘It kind of happened to one of my mum’s friends. She had, like a mini-stroke when she was coming back in from her allotment. Sort of lost it – left all the veg on the doorstep, went upstairs and ran a bath. Collapsed in the bathroom. Luckily, someone over the road spotted the front door had been open and these bags sitting there for hours and went over. So…’

  ‘Which you could have done when he was still alive, of course. But then he might have talked.’

  ‘It was hard. He was a heavy man. I didn’t mean to drop him against the tiles, it was just because I was exhausted, but in the end… I was sure they’d be able to tell, you know, that he’d had the bang on the head after he was dead, but I guess… maybe because of everything else, and because he was in running water, it wasn’t clear… I just left him where he was, half in, half out of the bath with his clothes on, and I ran the bath taps.’

  ‘Handily destroying the DNA, as well.’

  ‘Then I just turned his radio up, grabbed his dossier, shoved the shopping out on the door and ran. I forgot to wipe my prints off his phone,’ she added, as if this had just occurred to her.

  ‘I’ve got Bilal’s phone now,’ Rex said. ‘It’ll have all my prints on it, too. But you’re saying that all happened on Thursday?’

  ‘Thursday afternoon – late. The builders had gone by the time I left. But I felt sure someone would find him. How could they not – with the door open and the shopping out there?’

  ‘Maybe you should have known your constituency a bit better. It’s not High Wycombe.’

  ‘High Wycombe’s nothing like you think,’ she said, bitterly. ‘There are plenty of estates. Kids like me, one eye on the meter while they do their homework, hoping the money will last. You haven’t got a clue.’

  ‘I have, actually. The difference is, I don’t mention it in interviews, Eve. I don’t think being poor is any more worthy of a medal than going to Eton. I reckon not killing and not lying are more important.’

  ‘I didn’t set out to do either. I kept checking the news. All night. There was nothing on your website, or anywhere else. I had to go back and see. So I grabbed some leaflets and I went back on Thursday morning. And nothing had happened. The door was open. The music was on. People couldn’t even hear the music, because of all the building work.’

  ‘So why didn’t you just leg it again?’

  ‘I couldn’t bear it. And besides, this was a different day, different time. Busier. I’d seen a couple of people already. More people were recognising me after the walkabout and your piece about what happened there. Talking to me. Remembering they’d seen me, if anyone asked them. I realised it had to be me who found him. So I took the receipts out of the shopping bags and I went in.’

  ‘And pretended you’d just found him. Whilst canvassing and leafleting on Friday. Except you made the mistake of saying you’d gone up Effingham Road, which made a few eagle-eyed locals wonder why they’d had neither a call nor a leaflet. You’re lucky most of the road is people working three jobs and sending the cash home, or you’d have had a few more queries.’

  She shrugged. ‘I thought I’d covered everything.’

  ‘No. You just thought about your seat, didn’t you? It was never about saving Aran. It was about saving your job. Nothing could get in the way.’

  ‘Well why should it?’ she almost shouted, the pink patches re-blooming, like sea anemones, on her cheeks. ‘Why the hell should it? None of that shit was anything to do with me. I worked fucking hard to get here. You say you know. Do you know? I doubt it. I doubt my journey was anything like yours.’

  Her hot breath seemed to hang in the still air between them. Rex stood up.

  ‘Aran tell you much about the Yezidis?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘They have this god, who’s a peacock, who was cast out of heaven. One of their legends says he was cast out of heaven for what he did in the Garden of Eden. He tempted Eve, you see. Dragged her away from paradise.’

  Eve shrugged. ‘A story.’

  ‘I lied about Bilal’s phone,’ he said. ‘I did have it. But I handed it in to the police on my way here. It doesn’t matter what’s been deleted – it’s all still there. Mina’s frantic call to Bilal. Bilal’s calls to Aran. All there, forever. So if I were you, Eve, I’d get on the blower to your Media Team.’

  * * *

  By five thirty, the waiting room had a saggy, sweaty look, like an airliner after a long flight. Crumpled magazines on the chairs, bits of tissue on the coffee table, a gum wrapper that hadn’t made it to the bin. Even the receptionist looked like she could with a scrub.

  But Rex Tracey was dapper as a daisy. Shaved, cologne on the cheeks, his hair parted, cool in a white shirt and the one suit that had survived, on account of having been abandoned at the drycleaners for six months: a biscuit-coloured linen affair. He hoped and trusted that the appointment about to begin would mark an important change for him, the beginning of a relationship that had been waiting to happen for a long, long time. And needed to, if he was ever to really live. With himself, and with others.

  The previous patient left the room. After quite a while, something on the receptionist’s desk trilled like some exotic bird. ‘Rex Tracey?’ she called out – unnecessarily, since he was the only person now waiting. ‘Please go in.’

  She was tapping at her computer as he walked in. She swivelled on the chair, smiled warmly.

  ‘Glad you could make it,’ she said.

  ‘Me too, Maureen,’ he sai
d, as he lay on the therapist’s couch. ‘Me too.’

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR:

  While there may be many geographical, demographic and commercial similarities between Rex’s beloved borough and the real borough of Haringey, in North London, the council referred to in this story, ‘Harringay and Tottenham’, is as fictitious as its employees and its activities. Any similarity to real persons, events or institutions is coincidental.

  About the Author

  M.H. Baylis is a novelist, journalist and scriptwriter. He worked for the BBC as a storyliner on EastEnders (where he helped devise the ratings-grabbing Valentine’s Day murder plot and made Dot Cotton consume cannabis), before moving to Kenya and Cambodia, where he trained local scriptwriters and created TV dramas for the BBC. After a spell living in a remote mountain village on the Pacific island of Tanna, he returned to Britain to take up his present role as television critic for the Daily Express. Baylis’s first crime novel, A Death at the Palace, was published to much acclaim in 2013, followed by The Tottenham Outrage in 2014.

  As Matthew Baylis, he is the author of Man Belong Mrs Queen (2013), which was a BBC Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’.

  Copyright

  Published in paperback in 2015 in the UK by Old Street Publishing Ltd

  This ebook edition first published in 2015

  by Old Street Publishing Ltd

  8 Hurlingham Business Park, Sulivan Road, London SW6 3DU

  All rights reserved

  © M.H. Baylis

  The right of M.H. Baylis to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly