Capital (42 page)

Zbigniew threw the bundles of money into the case and leaned backwards so his head was against the door. He could see it: a cottage with a garden, his father tending roses, his mother in the kitchen, music coming through the window, the fading warmth of an early summer evening in Poland. The life his father had worked for all his life, bought for him by his son who had made good in London.

‘T
hey love it,’ Shahid said to his brothers. ‘All this fussing, running around, calling meetings—’

‘There are no meetings, plural, this is the first,’ said Ahmed.

‘First of many – meetings, speeches, demands, fussing. It’s that great British middle-class battle cry: “Something must be done!” Same as the war. “Something must be done!” That can lead anywhere, with people like this. They’ll stop at nothing once they get their indignation going. “Something must be done!” ’

‘They didn’t do much about the war, did they?’ said Usman. ‘It probably didn’t have the same effect on property prices.’

‘That’s our neighbours and our customers you’re talking about. Talking rubbish about,’ said Ahmed.

All three Kamal brothers were hunched over against fat August raindrops as they swerved and slalomed around the commuters heading home from the Underground station. It was shaping up to be yet another lousy summer. Faced with the rain, Ahmed, typically, was trying to hurry, and Shahid, typically, was trying to take his time. Usman, also typically, was hanging a couple of steps behind and was trying to send signals that the other two men were nothing to do with him. Ahmed and Shahid had both separately been very surprised that Usman wanted to come to the meeting, but he seemed to be taking a special interest in what had been happening in the street. Normally
he acted as if everything to do with the shop was so far beneath him it was barely visible.

The brothers were walking towards a special meeting convened by the local police Community Action team. The gathering was being held in the hall attached to the big church on the Common – a first for all three of them, since they had never been inside a Christian church. The meeting had been convened because the phenomenon of the postcards and videos and blog, all with the slogan ‘We Want What You Have’, had, for the residents of Pepys Road, gone past the tipping point. It had begun with abusive virtual graffiti on the blog, and had escalated through abusive postcards delivered to the houses. Then there were three incidents of graffiti in the street; ‘cunt’ and ‘wanker’ were spray-painted on the side walls of the houses at numbers 42 and 51 – a place on the buildings it was hard to spot from the street, so it wasn’t clear how long the abuse had been there before it had been detected. Then envelopes containing truly disgusting things had begun to arrive at the houses: some residents were sent dog excrement in jiffy bags – reeking, horrible jiffy bags. And then, one night in late June, somebody or somebodies had run a set of keys down the cars parked on the even-numbered side of the street – every car, all along the street. The damage ran into many thousands of pounds. A number of residents had complained to the police, who had bounced the query back to the local Neighbourhood Watch to ask how many people had been affected. It was this criminal damage to the cars which really got the police’s attention. When it turned out that everyone in the street had had some encounter or other with We Want What You Have, it had been decided, just as Shahid said, that Something Must Be Done. Hence this meeting.

‘It makes them feel important,’ said Shahid. ‘This is a rare example of Usman being right about something. It gives them an excuse to talk about property prices. It’s the only time they’re ever allowed to talk openly about money, so it’s no wonder it gets them excited.’

They came into the church grounds and could see the side door to the hall, held open by a man and a woman talking. As they walked past they could hear her saying,
‘… that’s if it doesn’t drive prices down, which is a real worry, because …’

Shahid flicked his brother on the bum with a rolled-up copy of
Time Out
. Ahmed swatted him away.

The hall was a square room, decorated with posters of a Christian, charitable and ecological nature. One wall was dominated by a large stencilled painting of a white dove with a leafy green branch in its beak. There were a hundred chairs laid out in ten ranks of ten, and the room was about half-full with locals, some of them known to Ahmed by name and more or less all of them by sight. The woman who ran the Neighbourhood Watch stood at the end of the room on a low dais next to two uniformed policemen, one in his late twenties and the other at least two decades older. Ahmed smiled and nodded at everyone he recognised. People didn’t seem keen to chat. They were eager for the meeting to begin.

Roger Yount came into the hall, direct from work, his pinstripe suit emphasising his height and posture: the kind of figure to gladden any mother-in-law’s heart. Looking at him, women would often find themselves wondering: tall, rich, well-dressed, clean: why isn’t he sexy? Roger looked around the room, ignoring everyone until he saw Arabella, who was sitting with her head down composing a text message to her friend Saskia:

‘Can’t m8k libertys 2mrw, hws dy aftr? A x’

The two women had decided that they had a knicker crisis, and the plan was to go shopping for new ones. Arabella felt she had been so incredibly good since the non-appearing Christmas bonus horror, she deserved a little discretionary spending. She and Saskia would hit the shops, then a restaurant, then would accidentally drink a couple of glasses of champagne and then perhaps have a wander down Bond Street. Matya was looking after the boys. What was the point of living in London if you couldn’t splash a bit of cash about every now and then?

Mary Leatherby had come down from Essex for the day. Her builder had started work on renovating number 42, so she wanted to have a look at how things were going. From peering around, she
realised that she now didn’t know a single soul in the entire room. Zbigniew had told her about the graffiti on the side of the house, and the jiffy bag of excrement which had lain unopened on the floor until it started to stink. He had thrown it away, but not without calling Mary to tell her what had happened. Mary had wanted to come to the meeting to find out if anyone knew what was going on. Her plan was to catch the train home afterwards, even if the old house was habitable; she felt she had moved on. She didn’t plan to spend a single night there before the house sold.

Mickey Lipton-Miller was there, and not happy. The cards, the blog, the graffiti and nasty pranks, it was a wind-up, and somebody needed to get it sorted. Thanks be to God, his Aston hadn’t been parked in the street when the cars were keyed … If there was time, he was planning to hit his club afterwards for a G and T and a game of snooker. But work came first. And he had a theory about the bastard who was responsible for all this.

The woman who ran the Neighbourhood Watch stood and put her hand to her mouth while making a harrumphing cough – evidently this was her way of calling the room to order. A pool of silence began in the seats closest to her and then spread until the church hall was quiet, broken only by a mobile phone playing the opening bars of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and then abruptly cutting out.

‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she said. ‘I know you’ve all been concerned about this … this business. So I have invited our local bobbies to talk to us, and they’ve gone right to the top, so that Chief Superintendent Pollard, the divisional commander, has come to fill us in on the situation as it stands, and he’s brought Detective Inspector Mill. And then afterwards they will take questions. So without further ado, Chief Superintendent Pollard.’

The policeman was one of those men it was difficult to imagine without his uniform: he seemed to wear it on the inside as well as on the outside. He had a rough London accent.

‘I’m Chief Superintendent Pollard,’ he said. He found it hard not to sound menacing, so even stating his own name came across, faintly but perceptibly, as a threat. ‘I’m here about these occurrences. You’ve
been getting postcards. You’ve been getting DVDs. There’s stuff on the internet. Abuse. Vandalism. Harassment. Graffiti. Criminal damage. I don’t need to tell you, that’s why you’re here. What’s it all add up to? Who’s behind it all? My colleague Detective Inspector Mill will fill you in on the details. He is going to be in charge of the inquiry, with me’ – and here the older man made no attempt to restrain his air of threat – ‘keeping an eye on him.’

The other policeman stood up at the lectern. He was a well-groomed young man and as soon as he began speaking it was clear that there was some strange class reversal taking place, since while the Chief Superintendent spoke in broad cockney, the Detective Inspector was impeccably middle-class, verging on outright posh. It was as if the enlisted man had mistakenly been put in charge of the officer. The impression of the Detective Inspector’s poshness was enhanced by a gesture he made just before he began talking, when he brushed the hair off his forehead, as if he were worried it was going to get into his eyes. His hair wasn’t in fact long enough to get in his eyes, but this gesture was like an atavistic survival of a period during which he had a long, floppy fringe. So for a moment everyone in the room glimpsed him with that languid public-school hair.

‘Thank you, sir. Thank you all too, ladies and gentlemen. The question to which we’d all like an answer is, who is doing this? I imagine some of you at least will be thinking that the simplest way of finding out would be to trace the owners of the blog. We’re going to get it taken down, but that’s not the same thing as finding out who the person or persons responsible are.’

The inspector talked a little bit more about how clever they were going to have to be to find out who was behind the ‘campaign’ – that was his word. When he finished he asked if anyone had any questions. There was a little muttering and murmuring, and then Usman put his hand up. Beside him Ahmed went rigid with irritation and embarrassment. The senior policeman pointed at him. His extended finger looked as if it was making an accusation.

‘The gentleman there.’

Usman, putting on his sweetest and most reasonable voice, the one
he most liked to use when being deliberately irritating during family arguments, said, ‘How do you know the damage to the cars was done by the same person who did the other stuff?’

From the stillness with which the Chief Superintendent and the Detective Inspector greeted Usman’s query, and their failure to look at each other to decide who was to answer it, it was clear that they considered it an awkward question. The younger man spoke first.

‘Yes. I see where you’re coming from. The short answer is, there are indications which we can’t go into here. These … incidents fit into a pattern and therefore our advice, our judgement, is that they are the work of the same person or persons.’

The way the policeman finished, his body language and the intonation, did not solicit a follow-up question, but Usman gave him one anyway.

‘And harassment, that’s just something in the head, isn’t it? So it’s just in the mind of the person who feels harassed? Like, if I feel harassed by you, that counts as harassment?’

Ahmed sat next to his brother in motionless horror. I wonder, Ahmed thought, if I killed Usman right now, just struck him down dead, I wonder a. if Allah would forgive me and b. if a British jury of my peers would acquit me.

‘I think we’re straying from the point,’ the policeman said, smoothly. ‘The majority of the people in this room are here because they feel upset and distressed by these things that have happened. It isn’t fair to call it just “something in their heads”. People feel stalked by the individual or individuals who are doing this. So we’re going to find them and punish them, but we need your help.’ Then the Detective Inspector talked for a while about how everyone in the street could be the police’s eyes and ears, and how they wouldn’t be able to solve the crimes without everybody’s assistance. Ahmed could tell that his brother wasn’t quite finished, so he pinched his leg, hard, to get him to shut up. Usman looked at him, annoyed, and Ahmed looked even more annoyed back.

‘Will there be any compensation?’ somebody asked. ‘Are we eligible for anything?’

‘I fear that isn’t a police matter,’ said the Detective Inspector. He really was terribly smooth. There were a few more questions, and then the woman in charge of the Neighbourhood Watch stood up again, thanked the two policemen, and declared the meeting over. There was some more chat, people coming up to him and the Chief Superintendent and, basically, wittering on, and then he and his boss were able to get out into the fresh air on the Common for a quiet word between themselves.

‘OK,’ said the Chief Superintendent, lighting a cigarette as the two policemen headed back together across the open space. The rain and wind were such that he had to stoop over to do it. As a side effect of the weather, everyone around them was scuttling, heads down. A few yards away, two crows stood face to face, their luminous blackness seeming to absorb and reflect light. Mill thought, in his shiny uniform, the boss looks a little bit like a crow. ‘That’s the PR bullshit finished with. Keep checking the postmarks and the DVDs. See if forensics have anything on the cars. Then if something more happens, at least our arse isn’t hanging out the back of our trousers.’