The Fortune Men
Page 29
‘It mean “my heart” in my language. Laura, listen, if they do this thing on Wednesday, if they really go ahead, I want you to keep strong, look after my boys as if you are their mother and father and don’t let them forget me, tell them when they get older that I died at sea, that’s why they don’t have no grave to visit.’
‘Oh, Mahmood, my love.’ She leans her forehead against the glass and he does the same.
‘And listen, if these people in here do kill me, you leave me in here until you find the man that did kill that woman. Even if it take fifty year.’
She nods.
‘But don’t worry, Laura, they won’t kill me.’
The warders change shift as Mahmood stirs a spoon through the breakfast bowl of porridge, trying to work up an appetite for the grey slime.
‘Thought you might like this …’ Perkins places a white cardboard box on the table.
Mahmood looks from the box to Perkins. ‘What for?’ he says, reaching with one hand for the lid, his fingers stroking the flashy embossed crest on top.
‘Just thought that you’ve had a steady diet of prison food for near six months and might fancy something different.’
Two cream horns sit in the carton, sugar crystals glistening on top of the flaky pastry, thick yellow cream and jam spilling out of the cones. Mahmood’s mouth waters at the sight of them but he closes the box and pulls it to his chest. ‘I eat later, after lunch.’ He doesn’t know whether to say thank you or not – to a Somali he wouldn’t – but Perkins stands there expecting something, so he throws him a ‘thanks!’ just to make him sit down and relax. ‘I play poker against you after breakfast?’
‘I don’t know if I can handle another drubbing, but if you say so …’
‘I go easy this time,’ Mahmood says, drawing the spoon to his lips.
Wilkinson brings in a stack of censored local papers, their pages excised if they mention the murder or Mahmood’s appeal.
‘You want first look at the racing pages?’ Wilkinson says, slapping the Echo, the Mail and Times on to the table. ‘I’m starting to sound like you now! Good grief, it’s bloody contagious.’ He laughs.
Mahmood chuckles along. ‘Next, they be calling you a savage too.’
A thud of steps rings from the corridor but Mahmood is only half listening to the footfall, his attention focused on the poker game with the warders, who are playing harder than usual. Mahmood has gambled one of the cream horns and is now afraid he will lose it. A few moments later, the door opens and the governor steps in, followed by his pen-pushers.
Perkins and Wilkinson drop the cards they had so carefully concealed, revealing losing hands, and stand to attention.
Mahmood slowly rises to his feet too.
The governor looks him straight in the eye, a telegram in his hands. ‘Mahmood Hussein Mattan, your appeal to the Home Secretary for a royal pardon has been rejected. You will be executed for the murder of Miss Violet Volacki on Wednesday, third of September, at eight in the morning. May the Lord have mercy on your soul.’
The Scottish warder carries in Mahmood’s brown suit, the one he had worn to trial, from the laundry. They have put the shirt, tie, jacket and trousers on a frame that makes it seem as if an invisible man is within, supine in the warder’s big arms.
‘If you want your wife to bring in another suit that’s also possible.’
‘So I look good for death, huh?’ Mahmood mumbles.
‘You’ve got your yard time in an hour, remember.’
He doesn’t feel it’s possible, that they can hang him in the morning while still talking softly of exercise and clothes.
The sky is not on fire but the sun is shining, as it has done many other days, with birds trilling callously from lopped-limbed trees. Mahmood crushes a beetle with his boot, grinding its body into small fragments that flicker with the embers of life. ‘They’re doing this because they haven’t broken me. If I had lost my mind and sat weeping in my own shit, maybe then they’d be happy to send me to a madhouse like they did with Khaireh. But I still stand and claim my innocence, so they have to finish me to protect themselves. Their lies and evil end with me.’ He had saved a cigarette to celebrate the reprieve, expecting, despite everything, that it would come through, but now he pulls it out from the foil and clasps it between his lips. He strikes a match against the wall. ‘If only I could set fire to all your walls,’ he says, inhaling deeply from the smouldering tobacco, ‘I would burn this prison down and let everyone go free, whatever their crime, no one should steal their freedom. Somalis have got the right idea, you wrong someone and you’re forced to look over your shoulder for the rest of your life unless you make amends. You deal with each other face to face. Only cowards live by prisons and cold hangings.’
He can see a pair of hats moving behind a grille on the upper floor of the block. They move left and right, as if by themselves, following his movements, the pale faces underneath criss-crossed by metal.
Mahmood turns his back on his peeping Toms and shuts his eyes. Removing his cloth cap, sunlight warms the bald spot on his crown. Extending his arms in front of him, his shoulders and elbows cracking loudly, he listens to his heart beating out a rhythm. ‘I will wrap the road around my waist like a belt,’ he sings, ‘and walk the earth even if no one sees me.’ Then he holds his palms out as if the sun is a ball he can catch.
FINISHED
Khalas
7.15 a.m. Wednesday, 3rd September, 1952
‘No, I won’t wear no damn suit,’ Mahmood repeats, pacing the cell.
He has stayed awake all night, drinking mug after mug of tea. He has prayed only once, in the middle of the night, a long sorrowful prayer with numerous prostrations. But now he feels electrified, unable to pray, sit, or even stand still.
‘Mahmood, please,’ Perkins pleads, unbuttoning his tunic, his face red.
‘What? Who am I dressing up for? It ain’t my wedding. You should keep me in your uniform if you want to keep my body too.’
‘Now, Mahmood,’ Wilkinson barks, pacing along beside him. ‘If you won’t dress, at least sit and eat something, I asked them to sort you out eggs and toast.’
Mahmood twists the tusbah between his fingers. ‘You think I can eat?’
A knock on the door and a covered plate arrives. Wilkinson puts a hand lightly on Mahmood’s shoulder and leads him to a chair. He puts the plate in front of him and lifts the cover. ‘Have the toast at least.’
Mahmood looks at the sickly fried egg and his stomach turns. He covers the plate and gestures to the warders to sit.
He is in the middle with his back to the cell door. ‘I just want quiet, so I can think.’
Perkins and Wilkinson button up their tunics and sit down. It is now so silent that Mahmood can hear the ticking of their watches. ‘Take off your watches, or stop them. You’re driving me crazy.’
Perkins and Wilkinson reach for their wrists and pull the crowns up simultaneously. Their breathing takes the place of the tick-tocks.
‘Stop breathing,’ he whispers.
Wilkinson’s hands are interlocked, his head bowed as if praying.
Time is now a liquid thing, sloshing around between Mahmood’s ears, impossible to measure apart from the metronome in his chest. He stares at the dirty cuffs of his pyjamas, at his hands, at the lines branching over his palms, and looks for a clue. Is it too late for a different fate to reveal itself?
The door opens and an old man in a hat enters the cell. He holds his palm out and Mahmood smiles and takes it. ‘You not kill me,’ he says, exhaling.
Perkins and Wilkinson stand and step back.
Without a word, the old man claps a thick cuff on one of Mahmood’s wrists and then turns him around to pinion both arms behind his back. Men pour into the cell behind him: the governor, the doctor, the sheikh, another, another, another, another, another, another, another.
Two warders grab his arms as the old man leads them, as if they can walk through the wall. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 …
Perki
ns and Wilkinson heave the wardrobe aside to reveal an entrance to another room. A noose hangs from the ceiling. The familiar cell swims around him and his mind cannot make sense of it. ‘You are wrong,’ he cries, struggling to tug his arms free. ‘You WRONG!’
8, 9, 10 …
Perkins and Wilkinson step aside and Mahmood looks back at them for some kind of recognition but they give none.
11, 12, 13 …
The executioners drag him to the wooden planks on either side of the trapdoor in the floor, and then hitch him up on to his feet. He holds his bladder tight.
14 …
The old man lifts a white hood over Mahmood’s head, while his assistant straps his ankles together. ‘Bis … Bismillahi Rah … mani Raheem.’
15 …
It’s dark now but he can see the shadow of the noose as it falls over his face.
He sinks again to his knees. The knot pushing against his jaw.
Khalas. It is around his neck. They pull him back to his feet.
Then comes the roar of the world giving way beneath him.
‘La ilaha, La
ilaha
illa llah
muham
madun
ru
su
ll
a
h.’
Epilogue
Laura Mattan was not informed of Mahmood’s execution and only found out when she went to visit him in prison. That day was the start of a decades-long battle to clear his name. After the execution the family moved to another part of Cardiff where they experienced extreme poverty and racist violence. In 1969, Harold Cover was sentenced to life imprisonment for attempting to murder his daughter by slashing her throat with a razor. Soon after, Laura, supported by Tiger Bay’s Somali community, contested her husband’s conviction. The Home Secretary and MP for Butetown, James Callaghan, refused to reopen Mahmood’s file despite the similarities in both cases and Cover’s hitherto concealed history of violence.
In 1996 the Mattan family won the right to exhume Mahmood’s body from an unmarked grave near the vegetable plot of Cardiff Prison and reinter him in the Muslim section of Western Cemetery. In 1998, the Criminal Cases Review Commission was established to investigate possible historic miscarriages of justice and Mahmood’s case was the first one accepted to go before its three Appeal Court judges. With Laura, David, Omar and Mervyn Mattan in attendance, as well as Harold Cover who had been called as a witness, the conviction was deemed to be unsafe and quashed, forty-six years after his execution. New evidence was found that clearly identified Tahir Gass as the Somali man seen by Cover outside the shop on the night of the murder. Cover’s identification of Mahmood Mattan as the suspect only came after the offer of a reward, and pressure from the police. Despite Gass’s conviction for the murder of a man in Newport in 1954, and his imprisonment in Broadmoor Prison, other suspects were later reported within the Somali community, particularly one sailor, Dahir Awaleh, who confessed to being the man the police were looking for before he fled to Brazil in March 1952.
The wrongful conviction and execution of Mahmood Mattan became the first miscarriage of justice ever rectified by a British court, but the harm it had caused to his family could never be undone. After witnessing her husband’s exoneration by the Court of Appeal, Laura told reporters, ‘If Mahmood and I had been living in biblical times we would have been stoned to death. He was a lovely man. The best thing that happened to me.’
In 2003, Omar Mattan was found dead on an isolated beach in Caithness, Scotland, dressed in black with nothing but a whisky bottle in his possession. A few months before his death, Omar said in an interview, ‘Until I was eight I was told my father had died at sea. Then one day the Salvation Army band was playing near our house and I went out to sing with them. One of the leaders said, “We don’t need the sons of hanged men.” That knowledge felt like a cancerous growth in my head.’
Laura Mattan never remarried and died after a long illness, in 2008; all three of their sons have also since passed away.
The murder of Lily Volpert is still unsolved.
Acknowledgements
This novel couldn’t have been written without the inspiration, knowledge and humour of Ahmed Ismail Hussein, ‘Hudeidi’. Zainab Nur and Chris Phillips also gave me their time, constant help and encouragement. This is a story that belongs to Butetown and I’m grateful for the generosity I was shown by all the people I doorstepped: Ruth Abbott, Natasha Mattan, Mohamed Warsame Berlin, Ismail Essa, Nino Abdi, Eric Abdi, Keith Morell, Steve Campbell, Betty Campbell, Steve Khaireh, Glenn Jordan, Chris Weedon, Dennis Arish, Abdisamad Mohammed, Red Sea House, the Butetown History and Arts Centre, Hayaat Women Trust.
Thank you too, in London and beyond, to Mayfield House Day Centre, Omar Haji Osman, Cabdillaahi Cawed Cige, Mahmoud Matan, Mohamed Ismail, Fatima Saeed, Michael Mansfield QC, Satish Sekar, Olabisi Oshin, Fadumo Warsame, Said Ali Musa, Mohamed Ali Mohamed, David Szalay, Gaby Koppel, Dr Hana Backer, Shani Ram and Marcus du Sautoy, Taiaiake Alfred, Yasin Samatar, Peter Vardon, Kitakyushu Moji Friendship Hospital, Abdirashid Duale and Dahabshiil, Andreas Liebe Delsett, Oslo National Library, the Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio Center, Razika, Andy and everyone at Santa Maddalena. The Society of Authors for an Authors’ Foundation Grant and Somerset Maugham Award. The staff at the National Archives, Kew, Peter Devitt at the Royal Air Force Museum Hendon, Taiaiake Alfred, Stewart McLaughlin and Wandsworth Prison Museum, Bodhari Warsame, Mary Actie, Savita Pawnday, and the staff at the British Library.
To my friends, thank you for your love and company over the years: Abdi, Robert, Kim, Danielle, Sabreen, Sarah, Lana, Bhakti, Michael, Aar Maanta, Emily, Amina Ibrahim, Yousaf, Katherine, Ayan, Jama, Zainab Rahim, and most of all, Mary Mbema.
To my wonderful team, I’m honoured to work with you: Mary Mount, Assallah Tahir, Chloe Davies, Alexia Thomaidis, Natalie Wall, Shân Morley Jones. To the sublime Caspian Dennis and everyone at Abner Stein, the Marsh Agency, Lubna, Sarah and Brooke, and Maya Solovej at Aragi, thank you. Nicole and John, I owe you so much.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published by Viking in 2021
Copyright © Nadifa Mohamed, 2021
The moral right of the copyright holders has been asserted
Documents from ASSI 84/135 are held at and used with permission from the National Archives.
The image on p. 367 is from The South Wales Echo, used with permission from Reach Newspapers.
Cover photograph: © Bert Hardy / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
ISBN: 978-0-241-99035-3
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