The Tottenham Outrage Read online

  THE

  TOTTENHAM

  OUTRAGE

  M. H. Baylis

  To my beautiful wife, Emma

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Terror, Rex knew, could strike at any moment. Not just any moment, in fact, but at the very moment of highest road-confidence and car-handling aplomb. He could blithely conquer the dozen tangled exits of the Great Cambridge roundabout, or the roaring spaces of the flyover – and then, suddenly, while trying to shift from 4th to 5th gear, glimpse one of those makeshift, flower-and-photograph shrines tied by the grieving to the grey metal barriers at the sides of the road, and think: No. I cannot be here. Doing this.

  Sometimes there wasn’t even a trigger. He might just be idling in the traffic down Green Lanes, behind some van dropping off wads of pide bread and buckets of olives at one of the borough’s three hundred Turkish restaurants, when a snapshot of himself at the wheel would suddenly rise before his mind’s eye, and amidst the cold sweat and the thudding heart, it would be as if he’d never learnt to drive. Now, or before, in the old life.

  If you were acquainted with the bulky, suited man at the wheel of the rust-coloured car passing slowly down the Lanes, you might understand a little of his dilemma. You would know that there was more to the predicament of this man of 41, about to take a belated driving test, than met the eye. If you didn’t know Rex Tracey, on the other hand, you might see only a faintly familiar-looking man, rather gaunt in the face, a little tubby round the middle, with a hangover and an understandable longing on this bright, blustery March Monday to be anywhere other than in a traffic jam crawling through the heart of Haringey.

  Traffic jams were the worst. The longer he was still, the more time he had to ponder what the hell he was doing, and the greater the chance of that simultaneously cold and hot flush passing up and down his body, leaving in its wake the desire to crack open the door and flee. Out of the car, out of the borough. Perhaps out of the country.

  The van in front moved forward. Rex started up – and stalled. Horns sounded behind him. He swore. Terry placed a calming, priestly hand on the dashboard.

  ‘Fuck ’em. Take your time. Everyone stalls. They won’t mark you down for it.’

  He couldn’t run, of course, he knew that. He’d been caught in one of fate’s pincer movements, a little man swept up in big events. Like the simultaneous expansion and contraction of the borough he lived in, worked in and worshipped. There seemed to be more people arriving, certainly there were more flats being built. Yet more and more of the old bakers and grocers on the Lanes were closing down, with new signs appearing in their place, making dangerous promises like Cash4Gold and PayB4PayDay.

  Meanwhile the local newspaper for which Rex worked, the Wood Green Gazette, had uneasily morphed into an online news site called News North London, whose territory expanded every day, while its dwindling staff were required to put in six days’ work for four days’ money.

  A further development was that Rex’s boss, a formidable yet elegant New Yorker named Susan Auerglass, had strongly intimated that his extended news beat could no longer be covered on buses. He’d been able to ignore her until the photographer, his colleague Terry, had started moonlighting as a driving instructor to cope with the new mortgage he’d taken out shortly before the pay cuts.

  Hence: Rex, a man with every reason never to get behind the wheel of a car again, behind the wheel of a car again. New laws said he had to re-take his test if he hadn’t driven for a decade, which was exactly how long he hadn’t driven for. So here he was, with Terry, in Terry’s 1982 Vauxhall Chevette, taking one final lesson before tomorrow’s test. They often combined these lessons with assignments, and today reporter and photographer were heading south to Finsbury Park to interview a local author.

  The ancient thoroughfare they were on stitched a path from the high plains of Hertfordshire down to the stews of Islington, taking in a dozen ethnic enclaves in between. Green Lanes ought to have been, perhaps was, a symbol of the new, fast-moving, global society. But nothing, neither goods nor people, ever moved along it without a great struggle.

  ‘I swear they were digging the hole on the other side when I went by here first thing,’ Terry grumbled, as a bottleneck around some sewer-related digging finally eased.

  ‘What were you doing down here first thing?’

  ‘What’s this bloke written, anyhow?’ Terry asked, ignoring Rex’s query, as they passed under the railway bridge, with its greetings in seven languages. ‘Book about Finsbury Park is it?’

  ‘Something about the Outrage,’ Rex said tightly. He wasn’t comfortable talking while he was driving. ‘He insisted on meeting in the caff in the park.’

  It was true. The man had insisted to the point of rudeness, in fact, seemingly unaware how lucky he was to get a free mention in the media for his self-published local history book. Rex was not looking forward to the interview.

  After turning right onto Endymion Road, he reversed towards what had looked at first a very generous gap, but which seemed to have shrunk radically now that he was attempting to park in it. It didn’t help that the car behind contained a trim, elderly, bearded man, sitting in the driving seat and passing judgement on Rex’s parking skills with an assortment of rolling-eye and shaking-head gestures. Terry countered with a soft mantra of encouragement, but his pupil’s nerves grew increasingly frayed as he rued not just his failure to park today, but the inevitable failures of the morrow, which would take place under the gaze of an examiner, wielding a clipboard. With a sickening crunch Rex reversed into the bumper of the bearded man’s car. The man shot out of his vehicle as if he’d been jabbed with a spear.

  ‘I’ll sort it,’ Terry said, unbuckling his seat belt and reaching across to the wheel. ‘You get out and calm the old git down.’

  The ‘old git’ was in his mid sixties, neatly turned out in a navy blazer and pressed grey trousers. It was an unfamiliar look in these parts.

  ‘Insurance details,’ he snapped. He held out a hand, and when Rex didn’t immediately put paperwork into it, he clicked his fingers.

  ‘Perhaps we’d better assess the damage first?’ Rex said.

  Nothing had occurred to the man’s front bumper other than a slight scuff, but after some time spent on one bended, knife-creased polyester knee, scratching and sniffing and apparently tasting the damage site, the man felt otherwise. He stood up.

  ‘I’m assuming you do have insurance?’ he rasped charmlessly.

  ‘My friend has full cover,’ Rex said, gesturing toward Terry, seated in the now perfectly parked car. ‘He’s teaching me to drive.’

  The man snorted, and was clearly about to offer some sardonic comment when the tough, wiry frame of Terry emerged from the car, and stopped him in his tracks. He froze. ‘You,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Aye,’ replied Terry, inclining his long, buzz-cut Viking skull. ‘Me.’

  ‘You two know each other?’ Rex asked.

  ‘This is the bloke who lives next door,’ Terry said bitterly.

  Rex, and everyone in the office of News North London, had heard a great deal about the bloke who lived next door to Terry. About the dispute over the bins, and over the slamming of the shared front door, and how the tempers of both men had flared up within a day of Terry moving into the property eight months ago, and not receded since. They also knew about the man’s typewriter
, and his habit of operating it, loudly, in the room adjoining Terry’s bedroom, between midnight and six am, and about the man’s habit of communicating his dissatisfaction with his neighbour’s transgressions via a stream of neatly-written Post-it notes.

  After scrimping for years, and then dangerously over-extending himself to purchase a little Edwardian half-house in a street behind Turnpike Lane tube station, Terry had, as the editor Susan put it, landed himself a turkey.

  ‘Well since you’re here, I might as well tell you I’m not happy with the colour of that section of glass you replaced in the front door.’

  Rex saw the Geordie’s fingers curl and uncurl, his bony chest rise and fall. He was displaying remarkable self-control, Rex thought.

  ‘Actually, could we just swap insurance details and talk about the other business later?’ Terry said. ‘I’m supposed to be photographing some local writer bloke in the caff, and I’m late.’

  The man gave a thin smile. ‘If you went to “the caff” now you’d find your “local writer bloke” wasn’t there either. Because he’s standing on Endymion Road talking to the clowns who just crashed into his car!’

  It was not a great start, and the three men made their way in silence to the park. There had been a time when the mere mention of Finsbury Park conjured visions of discarded needles and gang rapes. Yet, thanks to an injection of Lottery money and the council’s somewhat Blitzkrieg-like approach, that was all in the past. They’d put in lighting, bulldozed the reeking catacombs of sin that had once passed for lavatories, dredged the Boating Pond (finding, in the process, a human finger), and tamed the hedges.

  Today, a bright morning after a long, stone-grey winter, the area around the café was buzzing with kids and parents enjoying themselves with the vigour of the newly-freed. Even though the air was cool, and the park had a chewed-up look after the ice-melt, it felt pleasantly warm in the new, octagon-shaped café, sitting in the sun that came through the huge windows. The man – a retired history lecturer named Dr George Kovacs – was about to publish a book about the Tottenham Outrage, an infamous, politically motivated wages-snatch that had taken place in the area back in 1909. The book wasn’t actually out yet, due to what Dr Kovacs called ‘stupid and inexcusable mistakes by the printers’. This meant that Rex hadn’t been able to read any of it, which, irrationally, made Dr Kovacs even more irritated.

  ‘So what new light is your book going to shed on the story, Dr Kovacs?’ Rex asked, doggedly sticking to the questions he’d prepared.

  Kovacs had large, sad, spaniel eyes with prominent bags beneath them. He rolled them fractiously. ‘I’m not going to provide you with a synopsis of my book,’ he replied, in a prickly, precise manner that reminded Rex of Prussian officers in war films. His accent had a trace of Merseyside in it. ‘If you or your readers wish to know what’s in it, then you and they will shortly be able to purchase a copy from one of the three outlets I have already mentioned but will now mention again: the Big Green Bookshop, Muswell Hill Books or the Bruce Castle Museum Shop.’

  Rex started to speak but Kovacs interrupted him.

  ‘Suffice it to say, Mr Tracey, I have interesting new information, which throws light on the Anarchist terror group to which the robbers were connected. And on what happened to the money they stole from Schnurrman’s Rubber Factory.’

  ‘I thought both of the robbers were killed as they tried to escape,’ Rex said, glancing up at Terry as he made his way back from the toilet.

  ‘A comment which merely demonstrates your ignorance of the subject. One, Josef Lapidus, shot and killed himself at the end of the chase. Another, Paul Helfeld, was shot by the pursuing police and died two weeks later from his injuries. Neither was found in possession of the money stolen from the rubber works.’

  ‘And you think you know what became of it?’

  ‘Historians assess evidence and draw conclusions.’

  ‘I see. So what evidence makes you conclude that people might be interested in a robbery that happened here in 1909?’

  ‘It was the first hint of the Tottenham we live in now. Global, multicultural, connected. Latvian anarchists committing crimes in London to fund acts of terror in Russia. Robbing a factory so dependent on a casual, ever-shifting immigrant workforce that the bosses weren’t even aware Helfeld and Lapidus had been on the payroll under false names. A rubber factory, I should add, that processed latex from our colonies in Singapore and India into bicycle-tyres for use on the cobbles of Tottenham.’ Kovacs paused. ‘I have no idea whether that interests “people”, Mr Tracey. I imagine most “people” would rather read a footballer’s biography. My book is not written for them. It is written for the sake of history.’

  ‘Good luck with the sales,’ Rex replied, brightly.

  The bickering might have continued but for a sudden outbreak of shouting from the playground outside. They looked round. A tall, bearded youth in a combat jacket stood over a family of Hasidim picnicking at one of the wooden tables by the climbing frame. The youth said something, roughly, but not as aggressively as his first outburst, then laughed. Lobbing something into the bushes, he walked over to join his mates: a clutch of Asian lads dressed in a combination of long, Islamic-looking shirts and sportswear.

  ‘I just seen that lot out on the boating lake, giving it all this,’ Terry commented as he reached the table, snapping his thumb and fingers together to imitate a yapping mouth. ‘They don’t listen, do they – dressing up like that?’

  ‘Can we get on?’ Dr Kovacs groused. ‘I had an unexpectedly long walk this morning, followed by a traffic accident at your hands. I’d quite like to get home as soon as I can.’

  Rex suggested they go outside to take some photographs. It was getting warmer, and they positioned themselves under a sycamore tree next to the main playground. Kovacs glowered into the lens as Terry snapped away and Rex took the opportunity to study the boys who’d allegedly been making trouble on the boating lake. They’d now gone into the café, where they’d swiftly become mired in some sort of dispute with the Polish girls behind the counter.

  It was a classic Haringey tableau, he thought: kids at play, a United Nations force of knackered mums, gnarled old men with worry beads – and a small number of under-occupied young men spoiling it for everyone else.

  He looked back at Dr Kovacs, squinting into Terry’s lens. The man was an anomaly. The blazer and the trousers had a grim sheen on them; old but not great when they’d been new, either. On his feet, though, was a pair of soft, dove-grey boots that might well have been made for him. His watch was an old-looking Rolex – again something quietly announcing wealth. A man who cared about the details, perhaps, but not about the bigger picture. Did that make a good historian?

  Suddenly a scream pierced the scene, then seemed to drain it of life. It wasn’t the usual playground shriek, from a child going too high on the swings or being dragged reluctantly home. This was an adult scream. A woman’s scream.

  Everyone stared towards the farthest of the wooden picnic tables. A slim blonde woman – her fashionable sheepskin boots and her high ponytail announcing which side of the park she lived on – held an identical-looking little girl by the hand. The girl gazed tearfully up at her mother, who in turn stared down at the table, muttering something over and over to herself.

  Slumped inertly around the picnic table was a family: a mother, a father, a girl, a boy and an infant. Their heads rested on the slatted wooden surface, among assorted tupperware and bowls and cups. They might have all suddenly fallen asleep. But they were not asleep. The groups of people who fearfully approached the table knew it, as did all the people who had remained rooted to the spot with sudden dread. With a gust of spring wind, a black felt skullcap rolled from the table onto the sandy soil, picking up a shred of damp, pink blossom on the way. A child’s chubby arm dangled loosely in space.

  ‘They look like them freaky ones up in Gateshead,’ Terry whispered. ‘Orthodox.’

  ‘Not Orthodox,’ Dr Kovacs said quietly. �
��Hasidim. Hasidic Jews. From the Dukovchiner sect.’

  ‘How can you tell?’ Rex asked, staring in horror at the way the older boy’s blond ear-curls had spread out like seaweed across the table.

  ‘The woman. Most Hasidic women wear wigs. But not Dukovchiner. They keep their own hair.’ Kovacs’ voice appeared to choke up. Rex glanced up and was surprised to see how pale the man had gone. Their eyes met.

  ‘I have to go now. I’m sorry,’ Kovacs said suddenly. He hurried off towards the main gates, turning just once to look back at the picnic tables.

  ‘Has anyone called the police?’ Rex asked, realising as he spoke that a dozen people, including Terry, were doing exactly that. Meanwhile, the blonde mother who’d discovered the bodies was pointing a finger at the Muslim boys who’d emerged from the café. She began to advance on them threateningly, her little girl, for the moment, forgotten.

  ‘What did you do to them?’ she shouted, patches of red forming on her cheeks. ‘I saw you. I saw you spray something at them!’

  Immediately, without answering, the boys scattered, two charging through the sandpit with their shirt-tails flying, one running out of sight behind the café building, and the big army-jacketed one – the one Rex had down as a sort of ringleader – bowling right past him along the path. Sirens began to wail in the distance. A child sobbed and an old, ship-sized Turkish granny recited ‘Horrible thing, horrible thing’, like an elegy.

  * * *

  I pray with them sometimes. I don’t know what E and T would say to that. I like that they don’t know – something of mine after all those years we three spent shivering together, knowing each fart and scratch and dawn-rising cock and nightmare of our fellows.

  On their Sabbath, Widow Cutter and her daughter pray in their house. Remind me of Old Believers a little. Some I once hauled timber with in Yakutsk called themselves ‘priestless ones’. Widow and daughter won’t have any truck with the smooth, fat-faced, frock-wearing extortionists, either, and I admire them for that. Admire the way they kneel, on the hard boards, in front of the bare wall. Don’t even have a cross. So I kneel with them, a little way behind, out of respect. Don’t really pray, of course. Haven’t prayed since I was a boy, with Grandfather beside me. Stopped saying prayers when a soldier on a horse ran the old man through like a shashlik.