Now – 15th March
It’s barely light when I wake up. Callum is gone, his side of the bed still holding a trace of body heat. He’s always up at six on the dot, conditioned by his army days, but he usually wakes me before he goes and I don’t want to think about why he didn’t do that this morning.
In the kitchen I tune the radio to a local station, listen to their middle-of-the-road playlist as I make a cup of tea and shove the last slices of bread into the toaster. When the news comes on I turn the sound up, waiting to hear the report of a body found in a Nine Elms flat. But there’s nothing. Maybe it’s too soon for a press release or just not important enough to warrant one.
How many dead bodies surface every day in London? Heart attacks on parkland paths, late-night, drunken tumbles into the rivers and canals, hit and runs that might be murder and the endless assorted and boring ways we find to hurt ourselves and each other.
This death is nothing remarkable.
I doubt the detective I saw last night has woken up with the scent of the chase in his nostrils. Careers are not made like this.
I’m not expecting some genius to turn up here, but I still need to be careful. Look respectable, give them no reason to start delving. They’ll profile every single one of us. I need them to look at me and see an inoffensive sixty-year-old woman too physically frail to move the corpse of a full-grown man. The copper who comes will be young, I think; they all are now. I’m probably the same age as his grandmother; he’ll see me as a fossil tragically clinging to youth with my black-dye job and tattoos.
Until they check my record.
Or maybe even that will take on an inoffensive cast with the benefit of age. Will they look with condescension at my protests and battles, all stripped of energy and heat by the intervening years? Will they even be able to see the youthful me underneath this face and conceive of a time when I was unashamedly fierce?
In the bathroom I pull my hair into a loose ponytail, pin back my fringe, exposing my wrinkled forehead, the softness at my jaw and the hollows at my temples, decide to forgo the black kohl liner I put on every day, even if I’m staying in on my own. My face looks wan and unstructured without it, my eyes tired and sad; this is the woman I would have become if I’d stayed in Bedford. This is my mother’s perpetually disappointed face staring back at me from the mirror.
From the bottom of my wardrobe I dig out a pair of black leggings. I decide against a bra, pulling on a Sex Pistols T-shirt and a baggy cardigan three sizes too big.
‘What do you look like?’ I ask myself.
An old woman who can’t let go of the seventies. And like all the best disguises it works because there’s an element of truth in it.
The flat is a mess but the wrong kind of mess. Too many books strewn around, and they’re the wrong kind too.
I pile up the most damning ones on a shelf, spines facing inwards, clear all my paperwork away into the desk drawers, along with the tin where I keep my small stash of resin, leaving a pad of innocuous doodles next to the keyboard. My camera is sitting there too, expensive-looking, professional. I open up my latest batch of photographs so it appears that I’m working away untroubled: a row of pretty Georgian townhouses, front doors freshly painted, window boxes planted with winter flowers and ivy.
The other photographs in the room aren’t quite as inoffensive. Some are going to damn me if the copper looks at them.
The punks and club kids are fine, the drag queens and diamond geezers might even raise a smile. The Brixton riots, though, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, the police rampaging at Orgreave, their descendants itching to do the same at Occupy St Paul’s . . . those are the images that give me away, bristling with furious energy, clenched fists and clenched jaws, bloodstained shields and rigidly locked arms.
Out on the balcony I smoke a cigarette, thinking back to the peace camp at Greenham, looking at the ragged scar on the inside of my ring finger, thin now and paled. I can still remember the sharp taste of blood as I licked the wound and how quickly someone else took the bolt croppers off me to continue cutting the fence.
I hear them coming. Two sets of feet in the hallway, storm-trooper heavy, wanting to inspire fear behind every door they pass, even the ones they don’t plan to visit. It’s what they call high-visibility policing.
The knock is brisk, businesslike. I take my time answering, pausing to turn the sound down on the TV, and when I open the door I find two plainclothes officers looking at me. A lumbering young man with ginger hair and a spray of psoriasis wrapped around his neck above his stiff white collar, and a petite woman in a hijab and pinstripe suit who smiles warmly at me as she holds up her identification in fingers tipped with glossy purple nails.
‘Good morning, madam.’ Her voice is high and lightened by the particular inflection reserved for the elderly. ‘I’m DC Wazir, this is DC Gull, I wonder if we could ask you a few questions?’
‘Sure, fire away.’ I lean against the doorframe, hands tucked into my pockets. ‘This is about the bloke who fell down the lift, is it?’
‘Can we come in?’ Wazir inclines her head and starts towards me before I’ve agreed.
I would stop her. The woman I need them to think I am steps back and lets them into the flat, asks if either of them would like a cup of tea.
‘I’m out of milk but I might have some powdered.’
Old people always have powdered milk. Young people never want it.
‘We’re fine, thanks,’ Wazir says. She makes a beeline for the gallery wall while Gull goes to sit down on the sofa, behind which the rat is still in its trap and I notice Gull’s nose wrinkle as he takes out his notepad. ‘These are really good. Did you take them?’
‘Thank you, yes I did.’
She moves along the wall, leaning in to see the detail. ‘It’s funny, nowadays everyone’s got a camera on their phone and we take pictures all the time but there’s a mile of difference between what a real photographer sees and what the rest of us do, isn’t there?’
I need to watch this one.
‘A lot of it’s about knowing which images to discard,’ I say.
Wazir nods. ‘My cousin’s a photographer – not like you are, he’s not an artist, he just does weddings and stuff, but he’s shown me some of the ones that don’t make it into the albums. He catches these moments and these looks that nobody wants putting down for posterity.’ Another smile, this one quicker and sly, an invitation to conspire. ‘I think they’re probably the more honest records of the day, though.’
‘It sounds like he’s got an artist’s eye.’ I fire the same smile back at her. ‘A lot of people wouldn’t spot that stuff at all.’
On the sofa Gull is getting impatient when he’d do better to watch his partner and learn from her. I suspect she’s taken in everything in this room already, made her calculations and adjusted her approach accordingly. She’ll probably be his boss soon and he won’t even understand why.
‘Is this the Camden sit-in?’ she asks, pointing at the photograph of Ella, with the baton coming down on her.
I nod. ‘Were you there?’
‘We both were.’
Wazir offers no further comment and I don’t follow it up, suspecting she’d like me to. She goes to the sofa and sits down next to Gull, who clicks his pen in readiness. I take a seat opposite them, cross my legs and fold my hands in my lap.
‘You’re Molly Fader?’ she asks. ‘Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it okay if I call you Molly?’
Fuck no. I don’t even want you in my home.
‘Sure.’
‘You’ve heard about the body?’
‘My friends found him,’ I say.
‘Do you have a lot of trouble here?’ Wazir asks.
‘Surprisingly little, considering. When people first started moving out there were a lot of break-ins, burglars looking to see if anything had been left behind. But I guess they’ve finally worked out none of us have got anything worth pinching.’
‘You’ve got some nice kit, though.’ Wazir glances towards my desk, the camera and the laptop.
‘I hide my computer when I go out. Or I take it with me. And I never leave the flat without my camera.’
‘Because that would be the day you’d miss the perfect shot?’
‘Sod’s law, right?’
‘Did you take it up to the roof party on the sixth?’
There it is. What she really came here to talk about.
‘No, I didn’t bother.’
‘So you do leave it here occasionally?’
‘It was a party. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be in a fit state to take good photographs.’ I shrug, give her a faintly embarrassed look.
‘What was the party in aid of?’ she asks.
I’m certain she already knows; Callum and Derek were both there at various points in the evening; they will have told her. But I tell her as well, watching her closely, seeing what precisely spikes her interest. Not a flicker when I mention Ella.
‘Was there any trouble at the party?’
‘It wasn’t that kind of crowd,’ I say.
‘Trouble can come from unexpected quarters.’ She opens her hands up, almost as if she’s suggesting that quarter might be her. ‘Were you involved in the organising of the party?’
‘A bit, at this end. I got a couple of the boys here to help set things up. Bought a few crates of beer and wine.’
‘That was very generous of you.’
‘It’s a good cause,’ I tell her. ‘The book’s proceeds are going to a local housing charity. God knows the council aren’t doing much to help.’
Wazir nods thoughtfully. Gull writes a few lines on his pad.
‘Do you have a guest list we could take a copy of?’ she asks.
‘Sorry, no. I just had a rough idea of numbers to make sure there’d be enough booze.’
‘Who would have one?’
‘Do you think the dead man might have been at the party?’ I ask, leaning forward like it’s a shock.
‘We need to check that out,’ she says in a perfectly neutral tone. ‘So, who would be best for us to ask?’
‘Ella, I suppose. Ella Riordan. She organised the Kickstarter, so she sent out the invites.’
Wazir asks for her details and I give her them, address and mobile number, feeling like it’s an act of betrayal, but what option do I have? If we’re innocent we’d both want to help.
‘How long have you known one another?’ It sounds conversational but this is not a conversation, it’s an interrogation without the benefit of legal advice or the protection of recording equipment.
‘About two years,’ I say.
‘Are you close?’
‘We’re friends, yes. She’s been very helpful in spreading the word about the evictions here and providing support to the residents. It’s important to try and raise awareness of what’s happening but it’s not easy if you don’t have press contacts. Ella has lots of them.’
It was supposed to come out casually, but my fear makes it sound like a warning, an overcompensation.
Wazir stands and Gull follows her lead, tucking his notepad away into his jacket pocket, giving me a flash of ugly petrol-blue lining and a dry-cleaning ticket. Again he sniffs and I smile this time, thinking of him wondering all day whether there’s something wrong with him. That ammonia and rotting-meat smell is going to linger in his nostrils for hours.
I walk to the door and open it; he goes out first. Done with me. I wish he’d come alone.
‘Thank you for your help, Molly.’ Wazir hands me a card. ‘If you do think of anything that might be useful, please don’t hesitate to call.’
‘Of course.’
I close the door and wait until their footsteps have receded along the corridor before I allow myself to heave a deep sigh of relief.
For a few minutes I pace around the flat, light a cigarette I forget to smoke. I go out on to the balcony and see their car is still here.
I call Ella. There’s music playing loudly at her end and she apologises, tells me to hang on a second while she turns it down.
‘The police have just been here,’ I say quickly. ‘They’ll be coming to you soon. They want a guest list for the party.’
‘This is bad.’
‘It’s normal,’ I tell her, trying to use a soothing tone, wary of infecting her with my nerves. ‘You need to tread carefully, though. The woman – Wazir – she’s smart, she’s going to try and draw you out. You need to give her enough that she thinks she’s got your measure, okay? Don’t clam up, don’t get combative, but don’t be too passive either. They know what you are, Ella. They’ll be expecting resistance.’
‘Okay.’
Is she taking this advice in?
‘Ella?’
‘I’m good, Molly. Really. I’m ready.’ A knock at the door her end but it can’t be them, not yet. ‘Look, I have to go. I’ll report back later.’
She ends the call.
I don’t like this. Twelve hours ago she was crying her eyes out down the phone, talking about running, taking her passport and hopping the Eurostar into Paris, disappearing off the face of the earth.
Somewhere between then and now she’s calmed down and I can’t help but think the only person who could reassure her to this degree is her father.
Has she put aside her fears about how he will react to finding out she’s killed someone? Has she realised he’ll do anything for his little girl?
Is that who was at her door?
Three hours from Durham to King’s Cross. If she called him last night and he took the first train, he’d be arriving around now, sweeping in to use his reputation.
Or, more worryingly, help her formulate a story that he knows his fellow officers would buy.
Because nobody knows how to get away with a crime like a copper. They’ve heard all the lies and excuses, they’ve watched bravura performances by men who’ve killed their wives and wept through half a dozen press conferences, they’ve seen people confess to crimes they didn’t commit and deny ones where the blood is dry and cracked on their hands.
I look at the photograph of Greenham Common: a woman being dragged away from the fence by three men twice her size. One has her hair twisted around his fist, the other two hold her legs. In the foreground a toddler in a padded snowsuit looks on crying. The image is black and white, but I remember the suit was a grubby red and the little boy’s nose always snotty. The boy had been sleeping in his mother’s arms when the police came for her. They picked the boy up and sat him on the floor, dumped him there like a bag of rubbish. No thought for who would pick him up with his mother arrested.
That’s the kind of man Ella’s father is.
If he wants to get her away from us all, show her the error of her ways, extract her contrition, he’ll cut through as many of us as necessary to achieve that.
I go into the bathroom and find the softest, chunkiest kohl pencil in the cabinet, slowly ring my eyes with it, smudging it up over my lids with my thumb, then pull my hair free from the ponytail and roughly shake my head until I look like me again.
But I don’t feel like me.