Lost River (14 page)

Vincent Bowskill lived in a tower block near Yellow Park. Fry arrived as the setting sun was casting its shadow right across the low-rise housing in Gordon Avenue.

High-rise towers. Not much community cohesion here. It seemed to Fry that decades of short-sighted architectural policies had done more to destroy communities than any amount of immigration could. For years, Birmingham had been known as the ultimate concrete jungle. The inner ring road had created a cement collar separating the centre from the rest of the city, and driving pedestrians underground. At least it was reversing its direction now, trying hard to rid itself of that concrete image.

Poor maintenance and social issues had resulted in the residents becoming unhappy with the towers. Rivalries had broken out among groups of residents, and many were uneasy about people suffering from HIV/AIDS living in the towers. A report in one daily newspaper had quoted a resident who said that she wore protective gloves when she touched the buttons on the lift, for fear of contracting the disease. Birmingham City Council had been deluged with complaints about waste facilities, and about a man who had previously threatened suicide being re-housed on a high floor of one of the towers.

And this was the Chamberlain Tower. That was a man who got everywhere. Fry had a feeling there used to be a hotel called the Chamberlain Tower, too, on Broad Street. It probably had a different name now, rebranded for new corporate owners. Or to avoid confusion with this place.

Estates like this were a policing nightmare. The main problem was the grassing code. Reporting someone for a crime brought vilification and harassment. Yet any experienced copper knew that many of those who claim to adhere to the code would sell out their friends in a heartbeat under the right circumstances, to get a hit of heroin or to save their own skin.

In Perry Barr, Fry knew she was standing on the edge of gang country. To the west, Handsworth and Hockley were the territory of the notorious Burger Bar Gang, while Lozells, Aston and Nechells to the south and east were the patch of the Johnson Crew.

Somewhere near here was a spot known as Checkpoint Charlie – if you crossed it at the wrong time you might end up dead. It was the disputed frontline between two of Birmingham’s most ruthless criminal gangs.

The Burger Bar Boys had become nationally infamous after a gunfight with the Johnson Crew left two girls dead at a New Year party in Birchfield Road – seventeen-year-old Letisha Shakespeare and eighteen-year-old Charlene Ellis. The attack was carried out as retribution for the murder of a Burger Bar member, Yohanne Martin. And so the cycle went on.

Last year, a report produced for Birmingham City Council had listed more than eighty schools described as recruiting grounds for violent street gangs. Children whose families had a gang connection used it as a badge of honour in the playground. It was a world away from anything that Jim and Alice Bowskill had experienced, and alien to the lives of most parents, thank God. But there were many families right here in the northern districts of Birmingham who were faced with the daily reality of teenagers growing up with
only one ambition – to become a member of the Burger Bar Boys or the Johnson Crew, or one of the many other gangs who operated in Birmingham. The Blood Brothers, Real Man Dem, the Ghetto Hustla Boys – the list was endless. Police intelligence systems creaked under the pressure of untangling all the links; when feuds flared up, allegiances were broken, and brothers could end up on opposing sides.

As a child, Fry hadn’t quite realized that everyone dreaded finding themselves on the outside, not a part of the gang. She thought it was her own weakness of character that drove her to seek acceptance from her peers. It made her wince now to think of her teenage self, hanging around in the corridors of her comprehensive school, trying to attach herself to a group. It was only as an adult that she’d learned it was the same for most kids of her age. Some were so desperate to belong that it became a question of any gang that would have them.

Being a member of the herd was a primal instinct – probably the deepest, most powerful instinct of them all.

But here, it was all about drugs. That was where the money and the power came from. And that was in spite of the fall in street value. In the right area, you could buy a gram of coke for a couple of tenners, enough for twenty lines. Cheaper than a latte at Starbuck’s, they said. Well, it was cheaper because most of that coke was actually baking soda, or crushed powder from painkillers like Phenacetin and Benzocaine to simulate the numbing effect of cocaine. Analysis had shown that some street coke was as low as nine per cent pure. Sometimes it contained worse than baking soda. Cockroach insecticide and cat worming powder, for example.

As Fry walked towards Chamberlain Tower, a black youth passed her in the doorway. He was wearing a green T-shirt, marking him out as a member of BMW, Birmingham’s Most Wanted. ‘Stay Mean, Stay Green’ was their slogan. He probably had it tattooed on his biceps. She knew not to look him in the eye.

Inside the tower block, she reluctantly entered a lift. Battered stainless-steel walls, graffiti still visible where someone had tried to clean it off. Obscene messages surrounded her like ghostly writing.

And as soon as the doors closed she remembered the smell. No matter how often a lift like this was cleaned, the enclosed space would never lose its distinctive odour, that stale stench of desperate humanity, people leaving their mark like territorial animals.
I woz here. F
* * *
off.

The sixteenth floor. As the stinking lift juddered open, she felt as though she was about to enter a graveyard, to disturb the dead by knocking them awake. She was reminded of the cemetery at Warstone Lane, the tiers of catacombs, each of the burial chambers sealed up and forgotten. But behind these doors weren’t the long dead of Victorian society. These were the modern living dead, the forgotten detritus of twenty-first century Britain. She pictured the residents of Chamberlain House sitting comatose in front of their TV screens, the volume turned up to drown out the real world. Eyes glazed and brains in neutral. Zombies, or sleeping vampires. It was probably best not to disturb them from their graves. Not unless you came mob-handed, and armed with a stake.

She found herself walking empty corridors and cold landings, with long rows of doors on either side. She sensed eyes at spy holes, heard dogs growling behind closed doors, a distant scream echoing down a stair well.

Flat 1620. A scarred door like all the others. She felt sure the spy hole was being used in the pause before her knock was answered.

‘Oh boy, look who it is.’

‘Hello, Vince.’

‘Di, you’re looking good.’

‘Oh, sure. Can I come in?’

‘I guess.’

Vincent Bowskill had put on weight since she saw him last.
He was too chubby now to walk the way his mates did, like the youth who’d passed her downstairs – the arrogant swing of the hips, the jut of the shoulders. He didn’t wear his clothes they way they did any more, either. Of course, Vince was well into his twenties now, no longer a youth.

‘Have you been to see the old folk?’ he said, leading her from the hallway into a tiny sitting room.

‘Yes, they gave me your address.’

‘And you thought you’d call and see if I was behaving myself. Cool.’

Fry tried not to look too hard at the contents of Vincent’s flat. Not because she might be shocked, but because she was doing her best not to be a police officer. It was nothing to do with her if Vincent had left signs of drug use lying around his sitting room. Like a crude crack pipe, converted from a Ventolin asthma inhaler. She hadn’t seen that at all.

Vince’s mother had been Irish, his father Jamaican. But he was as Brummie as anyone she knew, and spoke like it. The mix of genes had given him a honey-coloured skin and dark eyes that could have been his fortune in other circumstances. But Mum had died of undiagnosed breast cancer, and his father hadn’t been seen around for some years before that. Vince had already been adopted by the Bowskills when she arrived at their home in Warley with her sister.

Fry supposed he must be around twenty-eight now. And he’d never had a career – not a proper one, anyway. She was baffled by people who didn’t know what to do with their lives. But if she asked Vince about his plans now, he would only get irritated.

‘So – are you working?’

Oh, it came out anyway. She just couldn’t help herself.

‘Yeah. I got a job.’

‘Really?’

‘I work at a restaurant in Handsworth.’

‘A proper restaurant?’

‘It’s Indian. Is that proper?’

‘Yes. Well, that’s great, Vince.’

‘Glad you approve.’

A woman came out of the kitchen. A blonde with black roots, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, with bare feet and bright red toenails.

Vince gestured at her. ‘Oh, this is Candy.’

‘Candy?’

‘It’s my professional name,’ she said.

Vince laughed. ‘Don’t say too much to Di, she’s a fed.’

‘What?’

‘The filth, the Old Bill. She’s a copper.’

Fry cringed inwardly when he said the last phrase. It came unexpectedly, and she wasn’t prepared to hear those exact words again, spoken in Vince’s Brummie accent.

He was looking at her oddly, maybe wondering why she wasn’t the same Diane he’d known.

‘So, you want a brew, right?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘A beer?’

Tm okay.’

Fry could hear a TV set babbling in the background. She wasn’t quite sure whether it was in the bedroom, or in the next flat, audible through the thin walls.

‘Are you all right living here, Vince?’ she said.

‘Oh, it’s a palace, Sis. You’re just not seeing it at its best.’

‘I’ll take your word for it.’

Hearing him call her ‘Sis’ felt good. They had never been all that close, she supposed. But they had shared part of their lives, living the same experience for a few years. It was enough to create a bond, even between two people who were so different. She was glad that Vince remembered it.

‘They said they were going to demolish these flats years ago,’ he said. ‘Then they ran out of money. So we’re still here.’

‘I remember.’

Yes, a few years ago, Birmingham City Council had paid out more than a million pounds in compensation for a mass high-rise eviction that need never have happened. Five thousand pounds was paid to each tenant to clear these tower blocks after they were earmarked for demolition. But after two years of the flats standing empty, the authority had said residents could move back in, as the need for social housing soared during the recession.

‘They’ll get around to it, I suppose,’ she said.

‘Yeah, right. Still, it’s cheap. I’m not exactly rolling in it, as you can see. And there’s a great view from up here, if you like other tower blocks.’

Fry knew he was speaking differently to her than he would if he was talking to his friends, the young men he hung out with on the streets. He wasn’t uneducated – the Bowskills had seen to that. He could adapt his language to the circumstances, could get a decent job if he wanted to.

And she was glad of his ability to talk to her in a way she understood. There was never any point in trying to learn the street language. It changed from estate to estate, from tower block to tower block, each little community developing its own particular argot, its own terms for the police, for money, for crack cocaine. It meant they were only completely understood by people from the same small area, from the same background, maybe only by those in the same gang. Now
that
was community cohesion.

‘Jim and Alice worry about you,’ she said.

Vince lowered his head. ‘Yeah, they’ve been good to me.’

‘I hate to see them disappointed.’

He waved his hands. ‘No, look, I’m doing okay. I left all that other stuff behind.’

‘Are you sure, Vince?’

‘It’s for kids, man. Kids who don’t know any better. Too many people get hurt with that shit. You know what I mean?’

‘Of course I do.’

He stroked the girl’s arm. ‘Besides, I got other things on my mind now.’

‘Will you stick with the job, though?’

Vince shrugged. ‘There’s not much else, Sis, until they sort this country out. There are loads of young lads around here who want to work. But, you know, what they want to do is bricklaying, plumbing – that sort of job. A good trade. But right now, if you want to sign up for a plumbing course, there’s a twelve-month waiting list. What use is that? The papers talk about this “broken Britain” thing, don’t they? Well, if you don’t want a broken Britain, if you don’t want a broken Birmingham, you got to give these kids the chance of a job.’

Before she left, Fry couldn’t resist another sweep around the room. The makeshift crack inhaler had magically disappeared.

Vince opened the door and checked the corridor before he let her out of the flat. The screaming in the stairwell had stopped. Fry wasn’t sure whether that was a good thing, or not.

‘Sis?’ said Vince quietly, as they stood outside his door. ‘Are you okay now? You’re doing all right, aren’t you?’

She looked at his face. His dark eyes were full of worry. He badly wanted some reassurance.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, don’t worry. I’m doing all right.’

‘Cool. Take care, eh?’

‘Sure.’

Fry heard the door close and bolts shoot home as she walked down the corridor. She wanted it to be true that Vince would turn out okay. He was a good-looking boy. She hoped that he wouldn’t end up with his pretty face immortalized in a crime-scene photograph.

She took the stairs all the way down. Yes, it was sixteen floors. But she would have walked sixty to avoid being shut in that lift again.

Night was falling fast on the estate. The tower blocks stood as dark monoliths, the open spaces harboured invisible dangers.

Heading back into the city, Fry could see the lights of the Expressway. Cars streaking through the darkness, like insects flitting through the dusk. They said it was a jungle out there. The smaller animals hid in their burrows, desperate to stay safe. But larger beasts still stalked the streets, calling to each other in the night.