We lived in streets that reeked of junk food, where sooner or later every dark trash-strewn corner filled with kids planning raids on each other. Any emotion other than hate was considered unmanly. I learned to keep out of everyone’s way.
My mother was horrified by the idea of relying on anyone because she had been raised in gentility, and that meant being independent. Her relatives had all been connected with the church and in her hour of need none of them wanted anything to do with her – so much for the milk of human kindness. Soon we couldn’t afford even the smallest rooms in the worst neighbourhoods, and began sharing illegal sublets.
By the time I was eight (and living, I recall, in a squat in Kensal Green) she and I had started to fight. Maybe it was because we spent all our time together but we seemed unable to sit down without an argument. I loathed the way we lived, always on the move, and locked myself away in libraries just to be alone. Learning became the only thing important to me. My mother worked here and there, finding jobs the old way by knocking on doors: cleaner, shelf-stacker, bed and breakfast staff, those were the jobs that paid, even though it was cash in hand so she could be dumped at a moment’s notice. Sometimes I stole for her. It didn’t bother me. There are ways to survive.
When you move around a lot, sharing accommodation and using public spaces like parks and libraries, you talk to a lot of strangers and you get good at it. You listen for clues, study body language, spot weaknesses, watch out for tells. I read about the great magicians and how their understanding of audiences was as important as the mechanics of a trick.
When I was eleven I had a friend, Atena. Her parents ran a Greek restaurant in Green Lanes and Atena waited on tables, which was unlawful because she was not quite ten. She was small, and most nights she slept behind the serving counter on a specially made shelf, which would have given all the nice liberal London diners heart attacks if they’d known they were eating their salt-baked sea bass three feet from illegal child labour.
Eventually the inspectors caught her parents out and they lost the restaurant, and I thought: What if that happens to me? What if they come to our place in the middle of the night and find me sharing an illegal room with my mother and two complete strangers and their drugs or whatever illegal stuff they had on them? Where will I be sent? And how could I be sent anywhere when I hadn’t even been given a Christian name? When I was just a ghost kid?
To block out the sights and sounds of my life I read books on showmanship and magic; not the mundane manuals that showed you how to produce sponge balls or link metal rings, but ones that explained how deception worked on the mind. I was a fast learner. People are ready to believe anyone with more authority. They secretly want to have their choices praised. Deception works because people are lazy thinkers.
I returned to the library and started reading about the British police services so that I would be prepared for the day I would eventually have to meet them. Even then the idea had already formed in my mind. I just didn’t know it was there yet.
Part Five
* * *
The Bells of Stepney
Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.
James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis
42
Trickery
Script extract from Arthur Bryant’s ‘Peculiar London’ walking tour guide. (Meet at Stepney Green tube, keep your hand on your tuppence and your wits about you. Please note this tour is cheaper because it’s not very interesting.)
When billionaires decide to buy their houses in London because their kids liked the Paddington films, the same shortlist of place names always appears: Belgravia, Kensington, Holland Park, Notting Hill, Hampstead, hollowed-out neighbourhoods that look so much like film sets you wonder if a stroll behind them would reveal only chipboard and scaffolding.
The names of places in London’s East End resonate for a different reason. Whitechapel, Limehouse, Shadwell and Bow were marshy medieval villages built around churches that became central to the lives of immigrants. From the seventeenth century onwards the French and the Irish and the Ashkenazi Jews arrived, the Chinese and Italians and Germans, then in the 1960s the Bangladeshis.
In Stepney one house in three was destroyed during the war, and the effects can still be seen: small pockets of Georgian elegance left between the flat-packs of social housing. The area had a reputation for violence, overcrowding, poverty and political discord. Now it is quiet and residential, with a young middle class moving in. But those new residents would do well to look across at the Church of the High Seas, St Dunstan’s, which dominated the area for so many centuries. They’ll see what you see right now. A vast graveyard with hardly any headstones. That’s because thousands of plague victims were hastily buried here. Did no new coffins enter the ground because the sexton dared not disturb the foul soil? After all, this was an area that believed the air was so pestilential it could only be halted from entering wealthy London by the erection of leafy barriers.
Over the church’s main door are two carvings, one showing a ship, the other the Devil armed with a pair of red-hot tongs, because St Dunstan pinched Lucifer’s nose to make him fly away.
As a child I played on the bomb-sites here, recreating Spitfire battles, forever being warned by my mother not to fall through the rusty corrugated roofs of Anderson shelters. The neighbourhood children limped home with cuts and grazes and unspent bullets that they hadn’t been able to discharge despite pummelling them with bricks. Sometimes a child would bring an unexploded mortar bomb to school, which was usually good for half a day off. There was a breezy carelessness about the neighbourhood, held in shape by the rigid structure of family loyalty. I look at it now and feel the lack of atmosphere: no kids playing outside, no games, no songs, no Flash Harrys loitering on street corners. Now the dangers come from frightened children after dark, dying to claim their turf.
There’s a tip box on the way out, if you would be so kind. Don’t talk to strangers outside the tube station.
Stepney on a wet spring evening.
An ancient avenue of tall claw-armed plane trees, their bark green from incessant rain, no passers-by, no one even walking their dogs.
The news teams that had threatened to stake out the terrain, lying in wait for the Oranges & Lemons Killer, had taken one look at the barren streets and hastened back to their newsrooms to report on the other main stories of the day. It was clear that nothing of interest would be happening around here.
Arthur Bryant felt the same way. St Dunstan’s was much larger than he had remembered but the land around it was too featureless, too bare and open. You couldn’t imagine Magwitch jumping out from behind a tombstone even if you could find one tall enough to hide him. The locals were locked indoors ordering pizzas and staring at their screens.
‘Maybe we should head back to the unit,’ said May, leading his partner across the over-clipped grassland. ‘There’s a forecast for more rain in half an hour.’
‘He has struck at every church in the right order,’ said Bryant steadfastly. He looked around and found nothing to hold the eye. ‘He will be here. Where’s Janice?’
‘A couple of streets over. Turn your headset down, I don’t want anyone knowing we’re police.’
‘Nobody ever mistakes us for police anyway,’ Bryant complained. ‘I haven’t walked around here in decades but it looks even more depressing than I remember it.’
‘It’s changing. They have an organic farmers’ market now, and yoga in the park. There’s no one here, Arthur. I don’t think he’s going to go through with any more. Four murder attempts in just under a week—’
‘There were six fatal stabbings of teenagers in four days just last week,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘Their killers’ motives were just as unfathomable.’
A crow left a tree, its branch springing up. Outside the churchyard railing, a boy was walking along the pavement with a plastic bag of shopping. White cords hung from his grey cotton hood. He bounced a little to his music.
‘Have you got any of those weird sweets on you?’ asked May.
‘What weird sweets?’
‘You know, those paper bags you have in your pockets full of sherbet saucers or shrimps or Spangles. You always have something they stopped making years ago. You’re a mobile sweetshop.’ He made a grab for Bryant’s coat.
The shopping boy checked his phone, carried on walking, disappeared behind some bushes for a moment, reappeared on his way to the open park gates.
‘All I’ve got is this.’ Bryant pulled out a tin of treacle. ‘It’s quite difficult to eat on the move. Oh, hang on a minute.’ He felt in the other pocket and produced some sachets of Marmite and a white chocolate Magnum in its sealed plastic wrapper.
‘How long have you had an ice cream in there? It must be liquid by now.’
‘Yes, but they’re quite nice to drink. You have to be careful you don’t swallow the stick.’
The boy was drawing level with them on the pavement beyond the railing, but was preparing to enter a gap in the churchyard railings and cut off the corner. Clearly most people did so; the grass was worn away in a diagonal path. He disappeared behind more bushes.
May looked disgusted. ‘You’re like a schoolboy who’s been nicking stuff at the local tuck shop.’
‘Things just accumulate,’ Bryant admitted. ‘Strangeways seems to like the Marmite sachets.’
‘I can’t go near him, he keeps trying to bite me.’
‘Yes, he’s not a people cat. He passes out if you make him jump.’
This time the hooded boy did not re-emerge. The change caught Bryant’s attention. He looked around. ‘Where’s he gone?’
‘Who?’ asked May.
‘There was a lad over there a second ago.’ The street was empty.
They began moving towards the gate. As they reached the pavement they saw a trainer-clad foot twitching, its heel repeatedly hitting the pavement – thump – thump – thump. The plastic bag lay on its side, a split container of curry oozing out. The boy was grunting and clutching the top of his left arm. Crimson through grey cotton.
‘He’s been stabbed. There’s no one around. How is that possible?’ May dropped to his knees and tried to remove the crying boy’s right hand from the wound so that he could assess the damage. ‘It’s a gash, about three inches long, not deep. Have you got any tissues?’
It did not surprise him when Bryant produced a full-sized tissue box from his coat. Ripping it apart, he wadded the tissues over the cut as the boy pointed towards the church.
‘Where did he go?’ asked Bryant, searching the street.
‘He must be in the bushes,’ said May. ‘Call the unit.’
Bryant looked at his phone. ‘I’ve got no signal.’
‘Go closer to the church.’
Bryant hurried off to make his call. May pressed hard on the boy’s shoulder. He checked the tissues and saw that the blood was still blooming. This is the real face of violence in the East End, he thought, a teenaged kid lying on the pavement with a stab wound.
‘You’re going to be OK, it’s not deep,’ he told the boy. ‘We’ll take care of you.’
He looked back towards St Dunstan’s. He could not turn fully around without easing his pressure on the cut. Through the dark trees he saw the leaves of a bush rustle and part. He could sense the changing shadows, the displacement of branches as someone stepped out.
The boy coughed. Trying to keep his hand pressed on the bloodied tissues, May twisted. The figure was moving into the long narrow avenue of trees. They provided him with all the cover he needed. At their end was the edge of a housing estate where he could easily vanish within the corridors and staircases.
The tissues were soaked crimson but the boy’s wound had started to clot. He was alert and trying to sit up. This time they would have a living witness. May showed his ID and conducted a search of the boy’s pockets.
He found a phone, a sheathed knife and a small plastic Ziploc bag. Thinking it might be drugs, he unrolled it carefully. Inside were ten twenty-pound notes. He looked back and saw Bryant on his phone, leaning against a tree.
May wiped the wound again and saw now that it was only surface. He had seen plenty of self-inflicted cuts before. Releasing the boy, he started to rise. No, he thought, no. He began moving towards Bryant, who was now ambling into the church.
He broke into a run, but Bryant had vanished inside.
‘Get out!’ he shouted. ‘Arthur, get out!’
He saw the flash before he heard the blast, a deep echoing note that funnelled through the nave and burst from the entrance in a haze of gravelly dust. He felt a hot wind in his face.
Pressing a tissue over his nose and mouth he headed inside as the orange-grey cloud billowed over him. The stained-glass Christ in the apse had gone, and the unanchored front pews had been blasted backwards. The main stone structure and wooden fixtures of the church had not been damaged. The explosion had been highly localized.
He looked around for Bryant but found no sign of him. There was no fire. At the base of one of the stone columns he followed a thick smear of blood.
With a sinking heart he stepped back along the pew-strewn nave, searching for any sign of the body. No, he thought, no, not after all we’ve been through, not like this. How far could Bryant have been thrown?
On the floor lay a Bible, its pages blasted apart, as if there had been a visitation from an angry god. When he raised his eyes he realized he was looking at a ragged figure crumpled against the wall, beneath one of the low side arches. Behind him, something fell from the balcony and cracked on the tiled floor. Waving the dust from his face, he went to the body and eased himself down beside it.
He found himself looking at a short, barrel-stomached man in jeans and cowboy boots. Where his head should have been was a tattered grey stump. The rest of him had been dashed across the stones.
When May emerged he found his partner standing behind the church’s thick protective wall. He appeared unharmed, although he was covered in more dust than usual.
‘Were you there when I ran in?’ May asked.
‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see anything. I still can’t.’ He removed his glasses and gave them a rub.
‘Your ears – one of them is bleeding.’
‘Yes,’ said Bryant vaguely. ‘I’ve gone a bit deaf. My hearing aid fell out. It’s OK, I have another one.’ He concentrated on fishing it from his pocket while May tried to wipe his bloody ear.
‘Will you get off me?’ Bryant asked. ‘It’s only a scratch. You shouldn’t be charging about. How’s the poor devil in there?’
May looked surprised, which was a feat considering his hair was already standing up. ‘How do you know?’
‘Trickery,’ he said, shaking out his hat. ‘He has to stay one step ahead of us each time.’
‘He paid the boy out there a couple of hundred quid to stick himself with his own knife,’ said May. He ran outside, heading back to the spot where he had left him sitting on the pavement. There was no one there now.
May turned about, desperate to find anyone who could help. The houses opposite might have been shuttered against a storm. Had the noise of the blast not carried?
One man stood in the porch of his house, vaguely staring over in the direction of the church. ‘Did you see a boy running?’ May shouted. ‘Black kid, tall, grey hooded top?’
The man stared back as if looking right through him.
His headset buzzed at his collarbone. He’d forgotten the sound was turned low. ‘Next street, White Horse Road,’ said Janice Longbright. ‘I’m on the corner.’
They arrived to find Janice with the boy pinned against a garden wall, his wrists locked together with a plastic tie.
‘How did you do that?’ May asked, amazed.
‘I could see you from the pavement. You ran off and this one upped sticks and came my way, so I thought I’d better bring him down.’
‘Yes, but how?’
‘I threw my brick at his shin.
’ Longbright always kept half a house brick in her bag, and had a deadly aim. ‘He’s going to be limping for a while.’
‘Hey, sonny, who are you?’ he asked the boy.
‘His name’s Jemaine Clarke,’ she said, patting him on the head. ‘Go easy on him. He didn’t know he was being used as a decoy. He just wanted to make some quick money.’
‘I knew it was too good to be true,’ said Jemaine. His nose was running. Longbright wiped it.
‘So next time follow your instincts,’ Longbright suggested. ‘Let’s get your shoulder looked at, and don’t worry, no one’s going to tell your mates that you stabbed yourself.’
43
Upside Down
‘There’s been a bomb at St Dunstan’s, Stepney, one fatality,’ Colin Bimsley called across the operations room. ‘It’s all a bit confused. Hang on.’ He listened for a moment. ‘I’ve got Janice on the line. The old boys are all right. She arrested a sixteen-year-old lad. The body of a man is being recovered from the church’s interior.’
‘Sixteen? He can’t be the right one,’ said Meera.
‘You don’t think sixteen-year-olds are capable of murder.’ Sidney looked up, presenting a statement of fact.
‘They were right by the church,’ said Colin. ‘The boy was paid to be a decoy, just like last time. They’re taking the victim to St Pancras. There, now you know as much as me.’
‘Which isn’t much,’ said Meera. ‘All you’ve told me is that it’s happened again and will keep happening because no one can stop it.’
‘You’re looking at me as if it’s my fault.’
Bryant & May - Oranges and Lemons Page 30
