Then – 26th January
The pre-theatre crowd were out in force when Ella turned on to Bateman Street. The pavement outside the Dog and Duck was thick with bodies, the frosty air full of easy chatter and laughter that billowed white. A hard-faced young woman in a matted fake-fur capelet was moving between them, cradling a single copy of the Big Issue wrapped in plastic, asking for any spare change. She’d timed it well; the crowd was softened up, made generous by drink and the prospect of a good evening and the guilt that they could afford to drop so much money for two hours’ entertainment.
Ella heard her pitch as she passed by.
‘I’ve got a place in a hostel, but they charge.’
And a woman with a broad West Country accent saying it was shameful that she was expected to pay for a safe bed at night, while she opened her purse.
Ella wondered if the story was true. Knew there was a fair chance that somewhere, maybe nearby, a man she considered her boyfriend was waiting to take the money, spend it on whatever he needed to get him through till morning.
She hoped the girl would keep back enough to save her from sleeping out tonight.
Inside the tiny Victorian pub bodies were rammed wall to wall, people leaving the bar slowly, inching their way through with drinks held high, light from the chandeliers bouncing off bottles and wine glasses. She loved this place. It reminded her of the old Ealing films she’d watched on Sunday afternoons with her dad. And the first time she’d read Hangover Square, a gift from a boyfriend who thought she needed to expand her literary horizons.
It was like this, she thought, wood-panelled and Minton-tiled, small round tables loaded with empties, golden light smeared across faces touched by alcohol and anticipation, the blurriness of half-formed ideas and just-remembered gossip. The phones ruined the fantasy, but there were fewer out than in most pubs, and ones she saw were turned towards the building’s antique flourishes, people wanting to capture this, as if they knew it might not last.
Maybe it wasn’t quite like this back then, she realised. What was missing was cigarette smoke, thick and blue, and the sense of incipient danger bubbling up behind the bonhomie.
Quickly she found herself pressed against the bar. She ordered a half pint of St Austell, eyeing the other real ales they had on offer while the guy pulled hers. The thought that her father would love this place prompted a smile, which didn’t last long because she knew she would never be able to bring him here.
When she turned away from the bar she saw Martin Sinclair waving at her from a table down the back. The bench either side of him was taken up by a crush of people lost in their own spirited parties, but he grabbed a stray stool as she made her way to him and set it down.
‘You did well to get a seat,’ Ella said as she went in for a brief, polite hug.
‘I’ve been here since three,’ he told her, with a smile that hitched higher on the left than the right, a souvenir from an old injury he claimed to have picked up when he was covering the riots back in 2011. ‘I’ve been busting for a slash for an hour.’
She slipped into his spot while he went to the gents and looked over the notes he’d been working on. They were written in some incomprehensible journalist’s shorthand she supposed he was old enough to have learned when he started out. Underneath was a proof copy of a book on the history of the protest movement in the twentieth century. Sinclair was putting together something similar himself, she knew, and she guessed he had it to study his competition. When she flicked through it she saw sections underlined and notes scribbled in the margins, questioning the author’s analysis and the reliability of their sources.
Ella stopped when she saw Molly’s name.
Molly Fader – an art teacher turned professional agitator and photographic chronicler of the Greenham Common protests – was strongly suspected of involvement in the attack, which left PC Gareth Kelman in a coma, but no charges were ever brought.
On the opposite page the young PC stared out at Ella. He was fine-boned and pale-skinned; highly breakable, Ella thought, despite the hard stare and the short back-and-sides of near-military severity.
The author had found an old image of Molly, and Ella was surprised how little she’d changed. Her long, poker-straight hair and blunt fringe were the same, although that crow’s-wing black came out of a bottle now. Same deep-set eyes and sharp, high cheekbones, but without the softening of the last thirty years she had a bandit vibe about her. The photograph looked like one taken by police monitors, a line of women with banners and signs thrust up in the air, faces wild and raging. Molly held a loudhailer, her mouth wide and her fist pumping the sky as the shutter snapped.
Ella had heard about the protest camp there before, but Molly always claimed she’d gone along as a photographer, never did anything more than take supplies and help get the word out.
Why had she lied about that? It seemed like something she would be proud of if she was guilty, and furious about if she was innocent. Either way Ella thought it was a subject she’d be likely to have discussed with her. The fact that she hadn’t made her uneasy.
Was this something too big for Molly to trust her with it?
As she was about to turn the page Sinclair came back carrying two more drinks. She cleared the books away to make space for them, moving aside the empties he’d accumulated during his afternoon stint.
‘I thought I’d best take advantage of the lull.’ He nodded at the book. ‘Load of old bollocks, that is. You can’t go into those groups off the back of freelancing right-wing think pieces and expect people to talk to you. Eighty per cent of that book’s come direct from the police. Unfiltered. Unexamined.’ He went for his pint. ‘Bloke might as well be auditioning for a press officer’s position at the Met.’
Ella showed him the page she was looking at. ‘What’s this about?’
Sinclair wiped the beer off his top lip. ‘Molly not told you about it? I thought you were her amanuensis.’
‘No Geordie should ever say that word.’ Ella smiled. ‘I’m surprised you even know it.’
‘You Durhamites don’t have the monopoly on pretension,’ he said, grinning back at her. ‘She should write her memoirs, though. It’d blow this shite out of the water.’
Ella sipped her beer, seeing how he swayed slightly on his stool. He’d been here three hours already and it was showing on him. She wondered if he was up to the event they were due at soon, whether she should be drinking, in case he took more chairing than she’d prepared for.
‘So, what’s the truth?’ she asked. ‘Did Molly attack that copper?’
Sinclair took a theatrically deep breath. ‘Young PC Kelman was a piece of shit. That’s the truth. I’ve interviewed dozens of women who were at the camp and they all say the same thing – Kelman was a predator. Wasn’t shy about using force when force wasn’t required. You know the type.’
‘Don’t I just,’ Ella said, glancing automatically at her right arm, even though the scar was hidden under her jumper.
‘Kelman didn’t keep it in the field, though. He assaulted a woman who’d been arrested. Right there in the station, while she was down in the cells.’
‘Did she press charges?’
‘It was a different time,’ Sinclair said. ‘Look at how hard it is to get charges to stick even now. We’re talking thirty years ago. The general population still trusted the police back then. The woman didn’t even report him.’ He took another long mouthful of beer. ‘And that didn’t look good for any of them, because it looked like the protestors were waiting to take their own revenge.’
That didn’t sound like Molly, but some of the women she’d introduced Ella to . . . yes, she could believe it of them.
‘One night Kelman’s on his way home, stops off at his bookie’s. And when he comes out someone’s waiting in the bushes for him. They jump out and smack him across the back of the head with a hammer, leave it right where he dropped.’
‘A copper coming out of a bookie’s?’ Ella asked. ‘Surely there would have been loads more likely suspects than Molly and her friends?’
‘That was the thinking until he came out of the coma a few weeks later. Kelman said it was definitely a woman. Said he smelled her.’
A waiter shouted out an order and Sinclair called him over, took a bowl of thick-cut chips off him and a basket of fat, battered scampi, passed back a few empties to clear some space.
‘He smelled her?’ Ella said, putting a molten-hot chip in her mouth. ‘That’s hardly compelling evidence.’
‘This is coming from the police, remember. There’s absolutely no evidence to back it up.’ Sinclair shook salt over the chips. ‘It was most likely a smear campaign.’
‘You don’t think she did it, then?’
‘You know her better than I do. What do you reckon?’
‘I can’t see her doing something like that. In self-defence maybe, but not in a premeditated way.’ She snagged a piece of scampi, ate it while she tried to picture Molly crouched down in some bushes with hammer in hand, watching and waiting; pictured her springing up and striking a man across the head without a moment’s hesitation.
No, she couldn’t believe it.
More likely Molly was the one the police picked to smear because she was vocal and influential, the woman who’d drawn most attention to herself and become a target because of it.
‘What happened to Kelman?’
‘He survived. Did very well for himself, as a matter of fact. Served with distinction in the Battle of Orgreave.’ Sinclair shot her a tight and humourless smile. ‘Wound up as a chief superintendent. Currently insisting he had nothing to do with covering up abuse at a Cumbrian boys’ home.’ He took a few chips, spoke again with his mouth full. ‘Shame Molly didn’t hit that rotten apple a bit harder, hey?’
Sinclair’s voice seemed very loud suddenly, the bark of laughter that followed almost obscene. At the next table one couple were leaving, gathering shopping bags and coats, while another pair waited to take their seats, as Sinclair launched into a well-worn diatribe about the miners’ strike. Ella knew she was expected to give the right encouragement in the right places, knew also how easily he could spin this subject along a road she didn’t want to go.
‘Time for another quick one?’ she asked.
He drained his glass, slammed it down. ‘Yes. Good woman.’
Ella took out her phone at the bar and made a note to check up on the case of PC Kelman once she got home tonight. She suspected there would be little about it online, but she wasn’t prepared to ask Molly what had happened without knowing more than Sinclair had told her.
She wasn’t sure she even wanted to know. If Molly confessed to it, what then?
If it was a mistake or a slur, it seemed strange she’d not mentioned it. Wouldn’t Molly have loved one more story about how corrupt the police were?
Ella slipped her phone away. Maybe it was best not talked about. Or not yet, anyway. Molly was so fixated on the campaign to keep Castle Rise occupied that there didn’t seem to be room for anything else in her mind. They’d lost another family today: a mum and three kids all packed up and gone off to grandparents in Slough, one spare bedroom and a four-berth caravan to house the lot of them.
Another five flats would empty out over the coming weeks, all owned by the same buy-to-let landlord who had been holding out for the very best price. While her tenants scrambled around for alternative accommodation, finding no help from the council and with the local housing charities all stretched beyond breaking.
At least one couple were going to end up on the street, Ella knew, unless something miraculous happened. Molly was calling shelters for them, churches and hostels, writing letters to their MP.
Back at the table, Sinclair had moved into her seat and was slipping his books into his messenger bag.
‘I had an interesting call about you,’ he said as she placed his beer in front of him. ‘Ta.’
Ella sat, took the last chip in the bowl. ‘I hate sentences that start like that.’
‘I was contacted by a guy in Wandsworth nick. He’s trying to sell a story about you. Wants to send me a visiting order, get an interview set up. Tell all, he’s saying. Career-ending.’
Quinn.
Ella tried to keep her face blank.
‘You know who it is?’ he asked.
‘I have an idea, yeah.’
‘Is it true what he’s claiming?’ Sinclair seemed to have sobered up instantly, no more matey chatter, back into investigative-reporter mode.
‘If it’s the same crap he was claiming when he was arrested, then no, it isn’t.’ Ella held his gaze, saw the faint trace of interest evaporate. ‘Ryan Quinn has had it in for me for a long time. He thinks I’m a fake, basically. In it for the glamour.’
Sinclair smiled. ‘I figured it was bollocks; you wouldn’t be stupid enough to get involved with anything like that.’
‘Quinn made an idiotic move and it achieved nothing but getting him locked up and making the rest of us – who protest peacefully – look like animals.’ Ella heard the anger in her voice and felt it in her chest, forced herself to speak calmly. ‘He’s doing the police’s job for them. The thing is, I don’t even think he realises that. He thinks he’s a hero. A martyr for the cause.’
‘He’s not the first bloke to do more damage than good like that,’ Sinclair said. He checked his watch and reached for his pint. ‘Drink up, we’d best be getting off.’
Outside, the theatre-goers had migrated to their plush seats, the young beggar moved on to fresh and busier patches. Sinclair was talking about the event, checking whether she was prepped, asking her how she wanted to structure it then telling her how he wanted to do it. Ella answered distractedly, kept walking when he stopped to light a cigarette, and only realised she’d lost him when she turned towards the empty pavement. He caught up with her, laughing about her inability to hold her beer and how you could apparently take the Durham out of the girl once you’d taken the girl out of Durham.
Ella laughed along, acting on autopilot. She followed him through the front door of Foyles, where his face was plastered large and lightly photoshopped in the windows and on boards near the staircase he ran up ahead of her.
Pull it together, she told herself. People are watching you.
By the time they reached the top floor, she found him already talking to the events manager, warmly shaking his hand. She played her part, trailed them into the green room, answering more questions and turning down a drink then requesting a jasmine tea if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, listening as Sinclair asked about the size of the audience and then rang his PR, who was stuck in an Uber with a driver whose satnav was broken.
‘That’s what you get for not supporting the cabbies, Imogen.’
He looked at Ella and she smiled like she meant it but even as they emerged on to the small stage, into the polite applause and the lights, she was thinking about Quinn and what would happen to her if the next journalist he tried actually bought his story.
It would be the end of this.
The end of everything.