‘Hi, Mand,’ he said when she picked up the call. ‘Mumtaz said you had some info about Barking Fair?’
‘Probably not what you were after,’ Mandy said. ‘But looking through Dad’s old toot I did come across one story he covered that happened in the park. Not the missing baby, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh.’
‘The story Dad covered happened in 1968,’ she said. ‘September …’
‘Fair season.’
‘Right.’ She read, “Police were called to an incident at Barking Park Fair on Saturday 21st September 1968 at approximately 7 p.m. A fairground employee, a woman, had fallen onto a cooking fire and sustained extensive burns. Thought to be a Hungarian national, it is said that the woman’s name is Mrs Horvathy. She was taken to the London Hospital at Whitechapel where she remains in a critical condition.”’
‘Blimey, why couldn’t she get out of the fire? What was she, ninety?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mandy said. ‘Maybe she was pissed. But she died. Two days later. Again, Dad only wrote what in effect was a note. He didn’t say anything about her age, her family – nothing. I suppose such people just pass through, don’t they. And what with her not being English … Apparently no suspicion of foul play.’
‘Seems the fair’s had its share of tragedy,’ Lee said.
‘Those things give me the creeps,’ Mandy said. ‘They’ve always got dodgy blokes working on the rides who take unnecessary risks and pinch your bum.’
‘They’ve never pinched mine,’ Lee said.
‘Oh, you know what I mean – girls’ bums.’
‘Does your dad’s report say where she’s buried?’
‘No,’ Mandy said. ‘Just another dead foreigner. People didn’t give too much of a shit back in those days.’
‘No,’ Lee said. ‘No, they didn’t.’
Then, when he’d put the phone down, he began thinking about Miriam Levy again. Had the search for her been less thorough than it should have been because the kid had been Jewish?
Another night of no sleep wasn’t going to do her any good at all. Sara Metzler got up and went into her kitchen. She opened the drawer where she kept her medicines and took out a packet of sleeping tablets. She took two.
She shouldn’t have gone to the Austerlitz house; it had unnerved her. She didn’t really know why. She had no connection to the family and Gunther Beltz, in spite of his past, had been perfectly pleasant to her. No, it was the house itself that had upset her and she didn’t know why.
Was it just simply due to the connection it had to the lost Jew, Rachel Austerlitz? Sara went back to bed and closed her eyes. She would feel better when the woman from England and her partner came. At present she felt very alone with this, even though she knew that if she wanted she could talk to any of her colleagues at the synagogue. But somehow she didn’t want to. She knew it was irrational, but that most of them were West Germans put her off. When the Wall came down in 1989, loads of them had moved east in order to take advantage of lower property prices and that still rankled. Very few easterners lived in big houses even now. Only those, like Gunther Beltz, who had clearly played the game on both sides of the old divide.
What secrets, she wondered, did he hold in the darkest recesses of his heart? And what evidence of those secrets existed in his house?
NINE
Irving Levy didn’t mind when they went to Berlin, as long as it was soon. Where they stayed was up to Mumtaz and so she booked them all onto a British Airways flight from City Airport in three days’ time, and chose a hotel that was central and, from the photographs online, looked comfortable. They would stay for four nights, which meant that they would arrive on the Monday and leave on Friday morning. There was little point being in the city at the weekend when so many businesses and services would be closed.
She was, however, nervous about Mr Levy’s state of health.
‘I hope he’s going to be up to this trip,’ she told Lee when he came back into the office with a bag of doughnuts for what he considered his breakfast. It was 11 a.m.
‘His doctor reckons he can go, so who are we to argue?’ he said. He sat down. ‘We’re more likely to get into that house with him in tow.’
‘I know you think that …’
‘Yes, I do,’ he said and fixed her with a look that said he wasn’t open to contradiction.
His phone rang. Mumtaz went to the small bathroom at the back of the office and splashed cold water on her face. She hated this awkwardness between her and Lee, but she didn’t know what to do to put it right. She knew that she was as much, if not more, to blame than he was. But she also knew that she had a lot on her plate. Even though Shazia wasn’t talking to her, the girl was starting university at the end of the month, and then there was the issue of an extra £150 a month for Wahid Sheikh. Lee would go mad if he knew she was hiding that from him, but she didn’t even know how to begin a conversation about it.
When she returned to the office, Lee had just put his phone down.
‘I’m going out,’ he said.
‘Oh?’
‘That old ex-copper I had a lead on from Tony Bracci wants me to pop round,’ he said. ‘Turns out he was on the Levy investigation back in ’62. Probably be a good idea for you to come with me.’
And it was a good idea. This elderly policeman could possibly provide some more information about Miriam Levy’s disappearance. But being in a car alone with Lee wasn’t something she looked forward to. Enclosed and alone, awkward subjects could arise. Would they either just sit in silence or would he interrogate her about why she was behaving as if she was ashamed of him? It was a fair question. Even if it was one she didn’t want to hear.
She heard him say, ‘Well? Coming?’
And so she said, ‘Yes.’
The little bitch was off doing her own thing again. Amber knew it was half-price day and so the site would be heaving. Even those slutty mates of hers, Lulu Lee and Misty Dobos, were on the booths taking money. Where was she?
Gala Sanders had never felt that her daughter had given her much respect. David, her husband, was an easy-going man who came from a laid-back family of old-fashioned English showmen. All the kids in that family ran wild. The only person Amber ever really listened to was her nagyapa – a man who had largely ignored Gala for most of her life. Or so she felt. The reason her mother had given her for this was that Bela was a very moral man who couldn’t cope with the idea that Gala had been born out of wedlock. It was nonsense. The old man just didn’t care. Gala had always felt his ambivalence, which was one of the reasons why she’d refused to learn his language, or teach her daughter.
A big gaggle of kids in school uniform poked fivers for their half-price wristbands through the hatch at her and one of them said, ‘Eight.’
‘What, eight of you bunking off school, is it?’ Gala said.
One boy said, ‘We got teacher training day, innit.’
‘So why you wearing your uniforms?’ Gala said.
The kids drifted away leaving only abuse in their wake.
‘Old slag!’
‘Fuck you, man!’
‘Cunt!’
She’d heard it all before as had the people who came after the kids.
‘Two please,’ a bloke in a tracksuit standing next to a pregnant woman said.
‘Ten quid.’
The bloke handed over the money. Gala gave him his wristbands and then served a small group of pensioners.
Nagyapa and even her mother would have just taken the school kids’ money and let the buggers in. Their attitude was always ‘it’s their responsibility, not ours.’ It excused anything and Gala hated it. The only place it didn’t work was amongst family, and there you did as Nagyapa said whatever the outcome. Gala knew he was encouraging Amber to fly. That was probably where she was now, rigging up a temporary trapeze somewhere on the site, no doubt with the Twins in tow. Too scary to be exposed to the punters, Ping and Pong lurked amongst the caravans, always ready to do Nagyapa’s bid
ding. All Gala’s life they’d given her the creeps. The way they only spoke in whispers and then in ways only Nagyapa could understand. And what her mother had said about them, years ago, when Gala was a child, still resonated in her head now.
‘Don’t ever make Nagyapa choose between you and those two,’ Eva had said, ‘because he will choose them, every time.’
‘Cor blimey, I think everyone from Ripple Road to Faircross come out looking for that kiddie. I can still remember the mother screaming. As if she was being burned alive.’
Tommy Askew was in his early eighties. He had bright, intelligent blue eyes, a face that smiled easily and the twisted, shrunken body of the severe arthritic. Lee Arnold thought that life was a bitch.
‘Course, we was trying to conduct an organised search, and so when every Tom, Dick and Harry turned up, it made our job harder than it should’ve been.’
Lee said, ‘Did you interview anyone?’
‘No, that was CID’s job. But I nattered with people. I was just a constable at the time and so I was there to show the uniform and provide muscle in case the situation turned rough. But it never. I never had a problem with the travelling people, myself. I know they ain’t welcome everywhere, but on the two occasions I come across them, I never had no bother.’
‘Two occasions?’
‘The Levy baby was one and then a few years later we got called out to an accident involving one of the travelling ladies.’
‘Was that the woman who fell on the fire in 1968?’ Lee asked.
‘That’s it,’ Tommy said. He took a couple of tablets from a bottle on the table next to his elbow and took them with water. ‘Sorry about that – painkillers.’ Then he continued, ‘That was an eye-opener.’
Mumtaz, who had up until that time been silent, said, ‘In what way, Mr Askew?’
Tommy shifted in his chair and grimaced as he moved. He said, ‘They still had freak shows back in them days. When we was called in on the Miriam Levy job, the brother of the baby had been inside with all the tattooed men and bearded ladies. To be fair, they was taking care of the little fella. Just normal folk, really. But then at the back of the tent were these – what they called? – ‘Siamese twins’. Joined all down one side they was, so one had the left arm and the other the right, if you see what I mean. Every time the Levy kid looked at them, he screamed harder, and I don’t blame him. They give me the right willies. Cold, dead eyes and strange fingers like twigs. I could shudder now just thinking about it. But anyway, when the lady died in the fire in ’68, I saw them again. But this time they weren’t joined. Most of them Siamese twins shows was a scam, but I was still shocked to see it.’
Mumtaz remembered what Irving Levy had said about the Siamese twins, how they had frightened him, and wondered whether he knew they had been a con.
‘Them two, the Twins, they found the woman in the fire,’ Tommy said. ‘Weeping like their mother had died. Turned out the woman weren’t nothing to do with them, although they was all Hungarian.’
Lee took his phone out and looked at his notebook. ‘Called Mrs Horvathy,’ he said.
‘That’s it,’ Tommy said. ‘Big woman. Had a husband and a little girl.’
‘So the Siamese twins were Hungarian?’ Mumtaz said.
‘That’s what they spoke,’ Tommy said. ‘The dead woman’s husband had to translate. But then it weren’t, according to old Sergeant Riches, who was my guv’nor at the time, suspicious. The poor woman had been practising some sort of act and had fallen in the fire and that was it. Stan Riches had no time for foreigners.’
He looked sad.
Mumtaz said, ‘What did you think, Mr Askew?’
The old man shifted painfully in his chair once again. ‘Me?’ he said. ‘I thought someone pushed her in the fire. I never looked closely at the poor lady. Last I saw of her was when she was being took to the London Hospital screaming her head off. But I did see that she had a rope round her neck.’
‘Like she’d been hung?’
‘Or something,’ he said. ‘Story was she’d been trying out some sort of escapology trick when she had her accident. But, not being funny, the woman had to be forty if she was a day and she was a good twenty stone. That, to me, was more than foreigners being odd. That was impossible. But then it was declared an accident, so what could I do? The fair moved on; the woman’s buried in Rippleside Cemetery. Catholic funeral. I was one of the few people who went.’
‘What about her family?’ Lee asked.
‘I never saw the husband or no one,’ Tommy said. ‘Just me, the undertaker, the priest and some woman done up like a Victorian widow. Probably one of them ghoulish types who like to go to strangers’ funerals.’
Luckily, neither her dadu nor her didima were at home when she got in. Shazia ran up the four flights of stairs to her bedroom, closed the door behind her and then stood panting against it. She hadn’t seen the man who had thought he was to be her husband for months. But then suddenly and strangely far away from his native manor of Newham, he’d turned up on Brick Lane. And he’d smiled at her.
Shazia had nearly screamed. Surrounded by posh girls in vintage dresses and Dr Martens boots, she hadn’t felt able to say anything to him. So she’d just run away. Wahid Sheikh, God damn him! She’d hoped never to see him again! And there was no reason why she should, unless …
Since she’d stopped speaking to Mumtaz, over him, she had no idea what might be going on with her amma and that accursed family. She had assumed, maybe because it was easier to do so, that now they had no hold over Amma in terms of what they could tell Shazia, that they had no leverage with Mumtaz at all. But then maybe she was wrong? The old man had looked so pleased with himself, she couldn’t help thinking that he had sought her out deliberately.
As she began to calm down, Shazia went and sat on her bed. She was going to university at the end of the month. What could the old bastard do to her now? She knew the truth about her father’s death. In spite of the fact that he had been her father, she understood why Mumtaz had let him die. She wasn’t sure she wouldn’t have done the same herself. It was the fact that her amma had used her as part of a battle she hoped would eventually undermine the Sheikhs’ hold over them that had caused their rift. Seemingly it had worked, and Shazia had wondered whether she should contact Mumtaz again and make things up with her before she went to uni. But seeing the old man again had changed her mind. By the expression on his face, he hadn’t given up his pursuit of the Hakim women – quite the reverse.
‘We had that park apart searching for the Levy baby,’ Tommy said. ‘Scoured every bush and flower bed. We even had blokes in the boating lake and what was, then, the lido. Went through all them poor buggers’ vans – they didn’t have much, poor sods. We found nothing. Not even the toy the kiddie was supposed to have taken with her. Course the locals blamed the fairground folk and they blamed the locals. Wasn’t much fun at the fair for several years after. Fights between travellers and locals, that sort of thing.’
‘Do you have any sort of theory about what happened to Miriam?’ Lee asked.
‘I think she was took,’ he said.
‘Did you dig?’
‘We did, but how deep down would a body have been at that stage? No, I think she was took and, for what it’s worth, I think she was took by someone outside the fair.’
‘Why?’
He smiled. ‘People like to think that because most of my family was in the police that that’s how we’ve always been. But we have a past. Me great-grandfather was a traveller. Dad remembered seeing members of his family when they stopped down at the old Creekmouth Village years ago. Wouldn’t talk, but then travelling types are tight-knit. It’s how they stay safe. Folk blame ’em for everything. But for me, that’s lazy. And it’s dangerous. Look at what Hitler done and you can see where that goes.’
When Lee and Mumtaz emerged into the litter-strewn streets of Thames View, they both felt sad. Lee lit a fag, and looking around at the bleak early sixties architecture, he sa
id, ‘Christ, this place is a shithole.’
Mumtaz said, ‘Must’ve been nice when it was built, especially for the people who had experienced the flooding back in ’53.’
‘Yeah, but look at it now,’ Lee said.
Admittedly, it was a dull day, but the small, down-at-heel shopping centre at the heart of the estate looked like the sort of place where people got mugged.
As they walked back to Lee’s car, Mumtaz changed the subject. ‘Do you think the way the police searched the park back then was thorough?’ she said.
‘Probably not by the forensic standards forces who can afford to use such technology apply today,’ he said. ‘Plus great gangs of locals would have confounded things. All those sorts ranging about doing their own things. Anyone could have taken the kid and I think Tommy knows that. I think that’s why he thinks it was a local rather than a traveller.’ He shook his head. ‘And then there’s that toy the kiddie had, which I don’t think Irving remembers …’
TEN
Germany. It wasn’t that Irving had avoided it, he’d avoided almost everywhere. Except Amsterdam and Jerusalem. His father had taken him to the Dutch capital back in the seventies, mainly to meet his diamond contacts in what was, arguably, the city of diamonds. Jerusalem had come later, when he decided to go just after his mother died. It had been a trial. Too hot, too loud, too violent, and the food disagreed with him. He’d felt nothing when he’d visited the Western Wall. But then maybe that was because he wasn’t a Jew?
Lee Arnold offered him a mint, more to pass the time and probably to help with the PI’s cigarette craving, but Irving declined. City Airport’s departure lounge contained all the usual retail outlets that airports tended to offer – Smith’s, Costa, Boots. What was different about it was that it overlooked what had once been the Royal Albert Dock. When Irving was a child, some relative – he couldn’t remember who – had brought him down to the docks to see what was, then, a hub of British industry. In reality it had been declining even then. All long gone now, the airport had been built opposite the new steel and glass Newham Council offices. And that was strange. To fly somewhere from an airport in the East End, for God’s sake. Who would ever have thought it?
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