The Tottenham Outrage Read online

  It was just after nine and dark by the time he emerged, shivery and more than a little drunk. He’d managed to email in his copy using the pub’s free Wi-Fi, but there were still things to be done in the office. Buses travelling westwards, back to Wood Green, had to be caught from the top of the hill. He trudged back up the slope, sucking on some mints to ease his sore throat. He wondered how Terry was feeling.

  The women and their pushchairs had all departed the hill and gone inside, as had most of the children and the bearded, hatted men. The orange-vested shomrim guards kept up a reduced presence, but the pavements were crowded with Hasidic girls in long, navy skirts, heading home from what must have been a very long school day. He wondered if they were even remotely like other teenage girls. Then he wondered what other teenage girls were like. He didn’t know now, any more than he’d ever known.

  By the time he reached the top of the hill, the clock on the big Catholic church said nine-fifteen. He paused at the summit, more than usually breathless, then spotted a very different type of girl. Dark-haired, smartly dressed, in her late twenties, she was swearing at a black-cab driver outside the now-shuttered fishmongers.

  ‘You can’t pick and choose!’ she shouted. ‘If you stop and your sign’s on, you have to take the fare.’ The cab drove off and she stepped into the road, shouting and gesturing after it.

  Rex stopped. ‘Hello, Ellie.’

  His former assistant stared at him, flushed. ‘Fucking fat bastard!’ she said. ‘Asks me where I want to go then says he’s fucking going home!’

  Rex glanced around. ‘You might want to tone down the language a bit.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Ellie said, stepping back onto the kerb. She looked thinner, cooler, Rex thought, in her black shirt and trousers. She probably didn’t bother with food these days. ‘I hate this bloody place.’

  ‘I saw you earlier on, banging on the door of “Vegetables”. I was inside.’

  ‘What is it with those people?’ she asked, tossing her hair back. It still smelt of lemons, he couldn’t help noticing. ‘They’ve either got their blinds down or they stare out at you like you’re from Mars…’ She paused and looked at him. She touched her hair again, smiled. ‘How did you get on? Hey – have you got a favourite pub round here? Silly question. Where haven’t you got a favourite pub? Shall we have a quick one?’

  He was a sucker for a pretty face, and Ellie Mehta, half-Indian, half-Home-Counties-rose had one of the prettiest he’d ever worked alongside. He also rarely refused an invitation to a drink, even after he’d had several. But he still wasn’t thick.

  ‘I didn’t get anywhere either, Ellie.’

  The smile vanished. ‘I’m not after your crappy leads, Rex. I couldn’t give a shit. I just thought you might, you know, want someone to talk to.’

  ‘About what?’ he asked.

  ‘Jesus. Shit. FUCK. You haven’t heard, have you?’ The voice expressed sympathy, but she looked almost pleased.

  ‘Heard what, Ellie?’

  Ellie had grown up with three brothers, Rex recalled. Which partly explained why she was so very annoying. And also why she felt the need to play a round of ‘who can piss the highest’ with every man who came along.

  ‘Heard what, Ellie?’

  ‘About Terry.’

  Rex’s heart thudded. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He was arrested this afternoon. For murdering his next-door neighbour.’

  Chapter Two

  Terry Younger was formally charged with the murder of Dr George Kovacs at 7:31 am on the morning of Tuesday the 2nd of March. He was now in a holding cell, awaiting transfer to court to enter a plea. He left no one in any doubt what that plea was going to be.

  ‘I’m not fucking guilty!’ he rasped, hammering on the wall. ‘Not. Fucking. Guilty.’

  Amid the chorus of curses from the adjacent cells, many of which no doubt contained people who were very guilty, Rex put a calming hand on Terry’s shoulder. A lot of favours had been called in to get five minutes in the cell with him. He didn’t want to waste them.

  Terry sat back on the black plastic mattress, head in hands, the sudden rush of energy gone. A hard-living Geordie lad, fond of his brown ale and his fags, Terry always looked pretty rough. Now, rheumy-eyed and clammy in his strange blue paper suit, under the punishing strip light of the cell, he’d have passed for a cadaver. Rex wasn’t sure he looked any better himself. He hadn’t looked in any mirrors lately.

  It seemed that Ellie’s contact, a Mauritian PCSO who’d been hopelessly in love with her for years, had been telling the truth. Terry had been picked up by a police response team, answering a 999 report of a disturbance from a female caller who’d said she lived in the road. The caller hadn’t seen anything unusual around the front of the house, but when the police arrived Terry was inside the downstairs kitchen of his neighbour’s dwelling – the neighbour bleeding profusely from a stomach wound, Terry standing over him with a vegetable knife.

  On his way to the North Middlesex hospital, Dr Kovacs had died.

  Terry had said nothing to the attending officers, except that the knife in his hand was his own, and that he felt fucking terrible.

  ‘I meant fucking terrible because of this bloody shivering, sweating thing I’ve had since yesterday. Not that I’d done anything to him!’

  ‘Has a doctor seen you?’

  Terry nodded. ‘I told them about that spray thing at the park. They just gave me Lemsip. They said no one else had reported feeling ill.’

  ‘So you were at home, having a hot bath, listening to your iPod,’ Rex prompted, trying to piece together what had happened since he’d parted company with Terry the day before. ‘And you thought you heard a noise.’

  Terry cleared his throat. ‘Aye. I thought it was in the kitchen, so I just hopped out and poked my head round the door, like.’

  It wasn’t hard for Rex to picture the layout of Terry’s new home, not only because he’d been round a few times, but because Terry had been discussing every byway of its purchase and renovation for months. The kitchen and the bathroom were downstairs, the living room and bedrooms at the top: a traditional set-up for Haringey’s half-houses, which were basically double-fronted terraces split in two down the hallway.

  ‘I saw I’d left the kitchen window open – I mean it was stupidly hot, wasn’t it – but there was nothing going on, so I shut the window and went back to the bath. But I’d managed to pull the plug out when I was getting out, and all the water was gone, and by that point I was shivering like a fucking rabbit. So I got dressed, and I made a cup of tea, and I drank it.’

  ‘And that’s when you heard the front door slam and the glass breaking?’

  ‘Same coloured glass I’d looked all over London for and then spent half a day fitting before the old git complains it’s not the right colour.’

  Rex remembered yesterday’s conversation with Kovacs at the park. It seemed a decade ago, in a simpler, happier time when their only concerns were things like parking, and local authors with shitty manners.

  ‘So I got me socks and shoes on, and went out into the hall, and I see all the glass has fallen out, and then I see his door’s open, over the hallway. And I just –’

  He clenched his fingers. The effort to suppress his feelings brought on a spasm of coughing. ‘I thought – you bastard. You went on and on at me for slamming the door and breaking a tiny bit of the fucking glass, and now you’ve gone and done it yesself. So I went in. I didn’t charge in, like… I wasn’t up to charging anywhere. I called out. But there was no answer. He had his jazz music on as usual, but I never minded that, really…’ Terry shook himself. ‘Then I went in and I saw him. On his floor. Blood everywhere. His eyes were open and he was breathing a bit, but he didn’t seem to know I was there.’

  ‘Thing is, Tel…’ Rex paused for a moment to blow his nose. ‘If that’d been me, I’d have dialled 999 straight away.’

  ‘And what if you’d looked down and seen it was your fucking vegetable k
nife he’d been stabbed with?’

  ‘You’re certain it was yours?’

  ‘It’s a proper ugly thing my sister sent from Cyprus, with an olive branch handle and a kind of… outline of the island carved into it. I thought I’d lost it in the move.’

  ‘So you picked it up?’

  I didn’t think! Okay? I felt like shit, I’d seen a dead family in the park, then the next-door neighbour’s lying on the floor with his stomach open… I just saw it, and I picked it up. I was weak as a kitten, man. I told them, there’s no way I could have stabbed someone!’

  ‘And it was just your luck that a response team had finished attending a domestic on Carlingford Road, and were thirty seconds away when the neighbour called 999.’

  Terry sighed deeply. His breath, like the whole cell, smelled tinny and foul.

  Rex swallowed painfully, feeling a pricking in the glands under his jaw. ‘Well, Terry, a decent brief like Bernadette Devlin will have all that knocked into a falafel wrap in no time. They’ve got fuck all except circumstantial.’

  Terry stared at him with grey eyes, forlorn as a Tyne drizzle. ‘Yeah. Fuck all. Except I’d reported him to the Council Noise people last week, because of his fucking typing all night, and when they refused to come out, I sort of, lost it a bit on the phone and said something.’ He hung his head. ‘I said if someone didn’t sort things out I was going to end up stabbing the bastard.’

  With an effort, Rex stayed upbeat. ‘Okay. An angry outburst in the middle of the night. I’m sure the Council Noise Team hear a lot worse.’

  ‘Turns out he’d reported me, too.’

  ‘Kovacs? To the Council?’

  Terry shook his long, shorn head. ‘Day after that, I went to Get-It-In for some fags, and he was in there, giving them a load of shit about the expiry date on the milk. You know – he’s always got some argy-bargy going on in there, or else the fucking newsagents.’

  Rex nodded. It fitted easily with his impression of the man.

  ‘So when he’s gone out, like, I said to the shop guy, you want to sell him some really out-of-date milk and poison the old git. But he was still there. Probably getting a free read of the papers. And he went and reported me to the police for making threats. Said he’d show them a Post-it note I’d written to him, telling him to ‘drop dead’. I was on the list for a little visit from the Old Bill, apparently.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Then they came anyway.’

  The door opened. Rex was faintly relieved to see the slight form of D.S. Brenard standing there. He was a good copper: intelligent, honest, thorough. But the best copper in the world could hardly deny the fact that Terry looked guilty as hell.

  ‘Good luck,’ Rex said, patting Terry on the upper arm. Neither was the hugging sort. ‘Fingers crossed for bail. Ring me if you can.’

  Terry stood up and straightened his shoulders, determined to look tougher than he felt. It was a wise strategy, especially if he ended up on the remand wing in Pentonville.

  ‘Rex, I didn’t do it,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘You’ve got it.’ There was nothing else Rex could say. When Terry had left, he turned to D.S. Brenard. ‘You know Dr Kovacs was with both of us earlier on in the day at the park?’

  ‘Terry told me,’ the Welsh detective replied. ‘We’re looking at all the angles.’

  ‘The angle to look at, I’d have thought, is why Kovacs left the scene so suddenly after the family was found dead. I’m wondering if he saw something. And maybe someone else saw that he saw.’

  ‘Like I said, Rex,’ Brenard replied, a slight edge to his voice. ‘We’re looking.’

  ‘Seems a bit odd, though, doesn’t it, that the witness to one lot of murders is murdered himself a few hours later?’

  Brenard rubbed his head. He was going grey, Rex noticed. ‘If Dr Kovacs witnessed anything. And if the person who was found holding the murder weapon and had repeatedly threatened to stab or otherwise kill Dr Kovacs didn’t actually murder him.’

  Behind them in the cell, Terry embarked on another painful-sounding coughing jag.

  ‘Well in any case, he needs medical attention,’ Rex said. ‘We’ve both felt ill since we were at the park.’

  ‘You’ve probably got what my missus and three of the kids have got,’ said Brenard, in his lilting Valleys accent. ‘Either that, or you’re both allergic to Shalimar.’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘Shalimar. It’s a ladies’ perfume, and it’s what lab tests have just confirmed was sprayed at the Bettelheim family. Ordinary perfume. Smelly, but completely harmless.’

  * * *

  Rex met Susan in the Jerk Shack, a café stall in the basement of Shopping City. All the major coffee chains could be found in the Wood Green area, but people who liked drinking coffee, rather than three-quid mugs of hot milk, got theirs from the Shack.

  They sat over a pair of steaming cups on high stools, while Rex filled her in on his chat with Terry, and they worked out how to handle things from a news perspective.

  ‘My instinct is to fill the whole front page with the word “INNOCENT”, but we can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ Rex asked. He knew the answer, though.

  ‘Because we have to be seen to be clear-headed and impartial. We can’t let anyone assume that we’re only supporting Terry because he’s one of us.’

  ‘What about: “I’M INNOCENT”?’

  Susan nodded. ‘I’m innocent. A photo of Terry. Whatever facts we can legally get away with. And an appeal for information. It’s the best we can do.’

  They sipped their coffees in silence for a while as the espresso machine hissed.

  ‘I always thought, if anyone at the paper was going to end up in big trouble, it would be you. But you’re actually okay, aren’t you?’

  Rex smiled. From anyone else, it could have been rude. From this slim, dark, elegant New Yorker-in-exile whom he’d known for twenty years, it was almost a compliment. He’d had his big trouble, and come through it. Not least because of Susan. And Terry.

  He felt okay in another way that morning. Since D.S. Brenard had told him about the perfume, most of his more worrying symptoms had mysteriously disappeared. Now he felt as if he was getting a cold – a nasty cold, but even so, just a cold. He wondered if Terry was experiencing the same sense of relief. He doubted it.

  The music changed, and people winced. The Jerk Shack was run by twin sisters, whose only discernible difference was in musical taste. One liked old reggae and ska numbers. The other, whenever she got the chance, switched them off in favour of urban, shouty stuff.

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ Susan said, crumbling a bit off her pastry but not eating it. ‘Like, there could be a link. Maybe Kovacs did see something. Or recognised someone in the park. It’s worth exploring. But there’s one problem.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It sounds like there were dozens of people who’d have liked to put a knife in Dr Kovacs. Maybe you should talk to Lawrence.’

  ‘Lawrence? Why?’

  ‘He might know if Kovacs stepped on any toes or ruffled any feathers while researching his book.’

  Lawrence Berne wrote News North London’s ‘Laureate of the Ladders’ column, which offered amusing ditties on subjects of local concern, like closing libraries and mounting levels of dog-shit. He also covered Arts and Local History, and had, as Rex now recalled, been quite annoyed that someone was bringing out another book on the Tottenham Outrage. A few years back Lawrence had been in talks with a Radio 4 person about doing a centenary documentary about it. He still regarded it as his own personal territory.

  Even so, wasn’t his boss’s new angle a bit far-fetched? Surely local historians only murdered each other in TV crime dramas?

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ Susan said, zipping up her handbag. ‘Even if the guy’s book never comes out, the Tottenham Outrage is going to stay in the news.’

  She was right. It might have happened over a century ago, but the doomed robbery
offered perennial good value for local newspapers. The terrorists’ wages snatch had given way to a lengthy chase across the Tottenham and Walthamstow marshes, featuring a hijacked tram, a stolen milk-cart, the slaying of a teenage boy and a policeman – not to mention the firing of some 300 bullets.

  In the aftermath a number of ordinary citizens had been commended for bravery, and, this still got a mention whenever a Tottenham resident committed any notably selfless act. The Outrage also got name-checked whenever policemen were shot, and whenever recent immigrants were being blamed for crime – two rather more frequent occurrences. Rex had read a couple of passably interesting pamphlets on the original event over the years. He might even have attempted Kovacs’ book, if it had actually been available. And the man hadn’t been such a twat.

  ‘I gotta run,’ Susan said, stepping down from her barstool as if there were a definite, correct way to do this, and she’d learnt it. ‘Seeing the bank manager. The stuff on Stamford Hill was A1. Lots of reader comments underneath. And on the forums. Getting Terry off the hook is important, but don’t let the other stuff go cold, okay? We’ve still got a paper to bring out. Kind of. Oh…’ She pulled out a phone – or a silver ovoid incorporating that function along with many others – and waved her fingers over some central part of it. ‘Nearly forgot. Sylheti Stores. You know it?’

  ‘The cash-and-carry on Turnpike Lane… Yeah, I know the guy who owns it.’

  ‘Mr Rahman. He left a message this morning. He’s been getting funny packages. Something like that. Can you look in? He asked for you.’

  Rex felt a stab of alarm, remembering an unpleasant interlude the year before, when anonymous gifts of raw liver and handcuffs and wheelchairs kept arriving at his door. But that was all over, and the sender – his wife’s nephew, it had turned out – was safely back in Paris. The tragedy that had provoked the boy’s cryptic campaign, though, was far from over. It never would be. Rex realised he hadn’t seen his wife for over a week. Maybe longer.

  But now his presence was required in a large aromatic shed on the end of Turnpike Lane. He set off down the High Street, past a spanking new set of wooden benches outside the Council Housing Office. These had been of little benefit to the locality, except to give the street-drinkers somewhere to sit that was better than the crappy narrow red shelves attached to the bus-stops. One of the regulars, a man known locally as ‘Bird’, was on a bench now, necking a deadly 10% brew called Navigator.