‘In south London. In a snowstorm.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Mr Weathers, if you continue to withhold information from me I will return you to Vice and I will inform them that you have been uncooperative. Do you know what the prison sentence is for procuring and exploitation? You’re looking at two years as an absolute minimum. Young girl, unfriendly judge, you could get five.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What were you doing in south London?’
‘We went to see a doctor.’
‘A doctor who performs abortions?’
‘I think so, yes.’
‘And what was this doctor’s name?’
‘I couldn’t say, sir.’
‘I think you could, Mr Weathers. I think you remember exactly who it was.’
‘I don’t know that this person has broken the law.’
‘Then they’ll come to no harm from us, will they, Mr Weathers?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t like to talk about race, Mr Weathers, because I believe we should all be blind to such things. Human beings are human beings, aren’t they, Aloysius?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And the Bible tells us we are equal.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘But we live in a fallen world, Mr Weathers. And our prisons are, arguably, the most fallen part of this fallen world. And in prison the colour of your skin matters, Mr Weathers, it matters very much. Coloured inmates are not trusted, Mr Weathers. If something goes wrong, if there’s a little theft or a fight, I can imagine who will get the blame. And that’s before you think about the company you will need to keep. For your own protection, Mr Weathers, you will need to form a close association with other coloured inmates. Men who have robbed and murdered and imported drugs. Men who sell guns and cocaine and girls into prostitution. And in the course of those two or three or even five years, you will form a strong bond of reliance on these men. A bond of reliance that will follow you into the outside world. That will follow you through all your time in this country, that might even follow you back to Jamaica if that was where you needed to go. These things, Aloysius, these things are the things that shape our lives. Not just our lives. The lives of our wives and children; even our parents. So, I’m going to ask you again. What was the name of the man you met with yesterday evening?’
‘Her name was Dr Jones, sir.’
‘And where does Dr Jones work?’
‘On Drewstead Road.’
‘Did she admit performing an abortion on Miss Green?’
‘No, sir. She said Miss Green had asked for one but had been unhappy about the way it would be done and after that she’d gone away again.’
‘And this was after the thirtieth of October?’
‘No, sir. No. Iolanthe Green had gone to see her days before she disappeared and she hadn’t seen her since.’
‘Has anyone seen Iolanthe Green since the thirtieth of October?’
‘No, sir. Not that I’m aware of. Miss Treadway was trying to ask this Mark man a question about it but then the police arrived and I fell down.’
‘That’s enough, Mr Weathers.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Let’s move on to some of your coloured clients …’
***
Having spent seven hours in a cell and a further hour being questioned Samira was finally released with a caution at half past ten. Ottmar stood beside his daughter as her caution was read to her, squeezing her shoulder in case she was about to cry. When Anna asked at the desk she was informed that Aloysius was to remain in custody but no, he had not yet been charged.
They walked back to the Alabora in silence. Samira led the way, her eyes downcast. Where Neal Street met Shaftesbury Avenue they stopped. Ottmar stared into the dark interior of his cafe. It was too late to think of running a lunch service now. He heard Ekin inviting Anna to eat with them upstairs. He experienced a moment of utter hopelessness, as if some group of strangers were once again taking control of his life.
If you had asked Ottmar in 1938 where he would live and die, he would have told you Cyprus without hesitation. He had been twenty-four then, helping to run a small magazine in Nicosia. Ottmar was the only Turkish member of the unpaid staff but he mixed happily and freely with his Greek colleagues. They worked out of the house of Melanippus Paphos who had inherited both his father’s vast agricultural estate and his mother’s bohemian instincts. He shared his palace-like abode with sixteen servants, far more than anyone of his lifestyle might have needed, and his lover, Theodore, with whom he founded ανεξάρτητης σκέψης – Independent Thought – which Theo liked to proclaim the voice of modern Cyprus.
Ottmar spent his days working as a secretary to the Turkish policeman Captain Dal in a northern suburb of Nicosia and crossed the Pedieos every night on his bicycle, dreaming of the romantic adventures of the mind which awaited him in his future life as a poet and scholar. His mother begged him to set his eyes on Istanbul and try for a scholarship to the university or even a clerical position in his uncle’s department. But Ottmar was in love with his own country and dreamed only of writing epic poems in the Ottoman tradition. Flying down the dirt streets of Nicosia, Ottmar’s mind would spill over into verse.
… we rose that day and dressed for the bloody hunt
The deer feeling our presence strained against the ground itself
And reared on their hind legs as if they might take flight
And Anwar spoke of the dragon Evren
Who slayed three hundred men before he was brought low from love …
And the bicycle wheels spun on and Ottmar’s mind raced faster and faster as if his soul and his ambition might through force of yearning and creation break through the barrier of the humble man into which they had been poured.
When war broke out in 1939, the magazine lost half its staff overnight. Ottmar’s mother argued that he should represent his community against the Nazis by joining up but Ottmar had no more desire to die than he did to go and seek his academic fortune in Turkey. He had a clear and beautiful sense of his own future and his main goal in the present conflict was to still be alive at the end of it.
But then in 1942, Ottmar found his life turned upside down by a curious succession of events. In January Theodore and Melanippus were arrested on the orders of an incoming chief of police and charged with buggery. Melanippus paid handsomely to have the charges dropped but the reputation of the magazine had been tainted. They suspended Independent Thought, rented a house on the south coast of the island and disappeared from view.
In July Ottmar met Ekin Battur, an eighteen-year-old high school student. Her father – a planning officer for the local authority – had been arrested in April in relation to accusations of corruption at the planning department and had been held for weeks without being charged with any crime. Towards the end of his fifth week in detention his family were informed of his death in custody. The body was released without ceremony. The cause of death on the certificate stated only: misadventure.
Ekin wrote a letter making a formal complaint against the police and this she delivered to the offices of Captain Dal and the hands of Ottmar Alabora. Ottmar read the letter she left with him and so stirred was he by her family’s evident torment that he proceeded to write an opinion piece on the dangers of turning a blind eye to police brutality and submitted it to the main Turkish daily.
By Wednesday he had lost his job with the police. By Friday the windows of his mother’s house had been broken and her doorstep piled with shit. By Saturday his mother was on a bus heading for her cousin’s cabin in the rural north.
Ottmar no longer knew where he belonged. He was not a good Muslim; not, according to his mother, even a good Turk. He was in a minority on his own island; he had no job of his own, no degree, no training; he had broken up his little family and he had no firm reason to believe that he would make it as a poet – whatever making it as a poet actually meant.
And so like many young peop
le faced with a big dilemma he chose to run in more than one direction at the same time. In his marriage to Ekin he appeared to run towards his Turkhood while at the same time he set in motion the events and favours he would need to leave his Mediterranean home for ever.
***
‘Mr Wingate, thank you for meeting with me. I’ve never been in a newspaper office before; it’s all quite glamorous.’
‘If you say so.’
‘It’s the clatter of it all, you know. The typewriters all going. Not like our offices at all. The sound of the police station, I used to say to my wife, the sound of the police station is the sound of dinosaurs eating reeds. Chomp, chomp, chomp. Not natural typists, most of us. And yet there we sit, world-weary and footsore, and type our way through the blinking forms wondering if anyone will ever read them. And as the day goes on the chomping gets slower and slower until eventually you hear a great creak at four o’clock and one of the dinosaurs has fallen over. Goodness! Sorry. That was a bit of a digression. My name is Detective Sergeant Hayes. I’m investigating the disappearance of Iolanthe Green. I know you interviewed her on the day she vanished. The interview in the newspaper was quite brief and I was wondering if I could see a transcript of the notes?’
‘I could probably find them if you gave me a few days.’
‘I don’t have a few days. A woman is missing, possibly dead. Go and find the notes. I’ll wait. Thank you.’
‘I dare say I still have the shorthand pad around somewhere. Oh yes, what d’you know, here it is.’
‘How many of those do you have?’
‘Dozens. I never throw anything away. My whole life’s just a series of interviews. Just one rump-numbing question after another. You’d think after this many I’d have learned a bit of truth.’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘I’ve learned that humans lie to themselves. And then I sit down and copy out the lies and tidy them into a story.’
‘Does everyone lie?’
‘Everyone who’s anyone. Especially if they were nobody to start with. Nobodies who made it need a story; sob story, fairy story, they need something to explain it. Don’t know why. Maybe so they don’t hate themselves for having got there.’
‘Or because they want people who didn’t make it to like them.’
‘What did you want from the Green interview?’
‘I don’t know yet. Let’s start with what you left out … I have a copy of the paper here. Can you tell me what else is in there?’
‘She talks about her family. She talks about her childhood and being poor.’
‘Does she talk about her father? Or her mother?’
‘Not really.’
‘Her brother?’
‘Yes. She talks about him being killed in Japan.’
‘Good. Tell me about that.’
‘So some of it’s in there … how hard it was not having anyone left. Then later on we go back to him and she talks about … Oh, yes … okay … “Nathaniel was so angry to have missed the war; he was determined not to miss the peace. He went out there as a midshipman on the USS Missouri.” And then I tell her that my father was a commander in the Royal Navy – and actually I followed him in myself for a while – and I believe he was there in Tokyo Bay at the same time as her brother. And she says “perhaps they sailed past each other”. And I ask her how long he was in Tokyo before the accident and she says “only a few weeks. He was with some of his unit delivering grain and the roads were a mess and the Jeep he was in turned over.” And then I ask her—’
‘Hold on. Sorry. He was a midshipman? That’s like a trainee officer, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘He’d done very well for himself. Young lad from a tenement, no university training, no connections and suddenly he’s an officer cadet. Does that sound likely?’
‘Oh well, if you’re going to start picking it apart! None of it makes sense, Hayes. You read her past interviews and the dates, the details. Every time she tells her story something changes.’
‘Did it occur to you that this might be rather helpful in our investigation of Miss Green?’
‘Well, it’s occurring to me now.’
‘Anything about a man called Cassidy?’
‘Cassidy … Cassidy. Not in my notes.’
‘And did your investigations uncover anything about a pregnancy?’
‘A what?’
‘A pregnancy.’
‘She’s pregnant?’
‘Mr Wingate, I am speaking strictly off the record. This can’t appear in any stories. But I believe that Miss Green may have been or is roughly three months pregnant.’
‘Good God. Do you know who the father is?’
‘No. Lately she’d been seeing a musician in Soho but the dates don’t work.’
‘Well, I … Right. I see. Goodness. It’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’
‘To be honest with you, sir, at this point in the investigation it really is.’
‘You know … I actually have some other notes if you’re interested. The stuff for Harper’s as well as for The Times. Would you happen to fancy a drink, Sergeant? There’s a bar just next door …’
‘If it would help, Mr Wingate. Lead the way.’
***
‘Come on. We’ll take the comfy side before someone else sneaks it. Sorry. Hold my pint a moment. There we go. Right. Where were we? Yes. Okay. Lanny Green. I realised some months ago that the Irish thing must be some kind of lie. And if the Irish thing was a lie then where had she come from? I thought for a while that she might be Mexican. Lots of Mexicans pretending not to be in Hollywood.
‘I met her at a shooting party in Hampshire where I’d been sent to do a funny piece on brash American actors and the English gentry. She was having a high old time, playing Lady Macbeth in a risible-sounding film where they’d stripped her of most of her lines and all her clothes. She’d been filming around a ruined church or something on Lord Vellam’s land and they were wrapping around the twelfth, so he’d invited her and Grisci to shoot with them. Except Grisci is some kind of Trot and flew home to Italy rather than spend the weekend with the blue bloods. So there was Iolanthe, all short skirt and silk knickers, draped over the eighteenth-century sofas and drinking her way through the best wine cellar she’d ever encountered.
‘Lord Vellam allowed me out on the shoot on the understanding that I couldn’t actually shoot anything and that I was not to mention some of the foreign visitors joining him because they’re not the sort of people that the readers of Harper’s like to imagine in the great houses of England. Iolanthe was much too drunk to shoot anything. She’d been drinking wine like it was water all through lunch and then she hadn’t any proper clothes for the countryside and her heels were sinking right into the mud so she had to take them off. By the time we got to a decently hidden spot she was filthy and Lord Vellam and his son were sick of all the moaning and swearing.
‘I took her off into the woods, mainly so that we wouldn’t both be sent back to the house in disgrace and she squatted under the trees in her nothing of a skirt and moaned about how she was about to be sick and could I get her some water. And I attempted to interview her while she rattled on about her tragic bloody childhood, which would have made excellent copy except that it really wasn’t that kind of piece. Just as she said she was feeling better she threw up all over my shoes and I had to clean her up with leaves and a handkerchief.
‘Of course then the shooting starts and Iolanthe absolutely goes to pieces because there’s bangs all around her. And she starts sobbing and saying that they’re killing all the little animals and that she hates men and posh people and the English and guns and war and she’d still have a brother if we hadn’t decided to help all the fucked-up people in Japan. God, Hayes, it was a long afternoon I can tell you. Finally, the shooting stops and I drag her back to the house where she goes to sleep in an armchair. I’m staying the night but she never appears at dinner so I listen to how ghastly everyone thinks she is and then
I retire to the billiards room and listen to all the men saying they’d give her one anyway.’
‘My admiration for these people is not exactly growing.’
‘Iolanthe or the toffs?’
‘Any of them, really.’
‘I’ll tell you a secret, Hayes. It’s a newspaperman’s secret. Human beings are awful. All of them. Complete arseholes to a man and woman. The less effective arseholes float through life on a river of excrement and the really effective arseholes build factories full of people who are forced to supply more excrement to keep the river flowing.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d like another pint?’
‘I think it’s time for whisky.’
‘Coming up.’
***
‘Go on, then … Iolanthe had failed to come down to dinner.’
‘Right. Well. Never found out what happened to her that night. Probably unconscious and put to bed. But the next morning she surfaces at breakfast, looking a little wan. I take her off into the garden and she tells me stories about Grisci and his boyfriend – none of which I can use. Then there’s some awful luncheon with lots of huge carcasses of fish on the table and I’m forced to sit next to Vellam’s son who hates newspapermen and won’t talk to me.
‘That evening there’s a hunt ball and Iolanthe disappears in the afternoon with the chauffeur to visit a hairdresser. Vellam’s son then informs me that I’ve had all the hospitality I’m getting and can I please go home. So I do. I drive back home and write up pretty much the same piece that I would have written if I’d never been invited at all. Because really, who cares … Anyway, the editor at The Times got it into his head that I was the one who “knew” about Iolanthe Green. So I was sent to write another profile on her and I decided to do a bit of research and I called up some old articles and her story just didn’t really make any sense at all.’
Harold Wilson Is Not a Fascist Dictator
Thursday, 11 November
Anna had never been into Ottmar’s flat before. After the colour and decoration of the cafe she found it very sparse and cold. There was a single wall-hanging in bold geometric shapes, but the sofa and the chairs were brown, the rug was brown, the mantelpiece held only a square clock and a picture of Rashida in her first-form class at school. In the corner was a work table with an electric Singer and neatly piled curtain fabric in duck-egg-blue brocade.
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 16
