On Monday morning, TDC Joy Adams and I drove to Borodino Street. She had brought flowers.
‘Is it all right?’ she asked me, nervously cradling the bouquet in the passenger seat of the X5.
I nodded. ‘It’s fine. But better get your warrant card out.’
The flowers for Alice Stone now filled the road. From one end of Borodino Street to the other, every centimetre of tarmac had been covered. The public had also been leaving their flowers around the Lake Meadows shopping centre but the affected area was so vast, a huge ruined swathe of the city that was still sealed off from the public, and the sprawling crime scene was surrounded by countless small pop-up shrines around street signs and lampposts.
Borodino Street, in contrast, was one unbroken sea of flowers.
We had taped off the pavements on either side of the road so that the public could pay their respects, say a prayer, leave their bouquets, take a photo on their phones or simply stand and stare at the outpouring of emotion, but there was a cordon of uniformed police officers at either end of the street to restrict the numbers allowed in at any one time.
‘I’ll wait for you,’ I told Adams.
Adams approached a female uniformed officer at the cordon – we don’t have WPCs in the Met any more – and when the young Trainee Detective showed her warrant card, she was allowed to jump the queue waiting to be allowed on Borodino Street. But Adams was not the only person to be allowed special access.
There was a priest staring thoughtfully at the flowers, and I wondered if he was the same priest that I had seen on TV, praying to a dwindling congregation.
I could not see his face, but he was clearly a large black man, built more like a retired middleweight boxer than a man of God. Adams exchanged a few words with him and then they stood silently side by side at the edge of that great tide of flowers.
I realised they were praying and I looked away.
When Adams returned I nodded to the far end of the street where perhaps two hundred people were listening to a young man speak.
‘The guy we want is over there,’ I said.
The young man who addressed the crowd was tall and long-limbed, his face somewhere between hungry and starved, a boy made of bones. You could see him clearly because the soapbox he stood on raised him head and shoulders above his audience. He looked as though he had stepped out of a photograph from between the wars. He was perhaps twenty-one and his hair was shaved at the back and sides and cropped short on top. I could not tell if the hair was a fashion statement or just poverty.
We stood at the back of the crowd. They were all ages, and most watched him without expression, as if he was part of the great spectacle of Borodino Street. Closer to the front, there were cheers and applause and shouts of agreement.
‘You fought their wars and you paid your taxes and you worked in their factories,’ he said. ‘You – and your parents and your grandparents – did everything they asked you to do. And your reward is their contempt. Your reward is changes to your country that you never asked for, changes that you were never consulted about and changes that you never wanted. You – and those who came before you – have given everything for this country. And your reward is a country that you no longer recognise. Your reward is leaders who despise you. Your reward is the murder of the brightest and the best of us.’ He paused to scrape his fingers through his Depression-era haircut. ‘Your reward is Borodino Street.’
He had one of those very old London accents, the kind that sounds almost Australian, untouched by affectation or higher education or moving out to the suburbs. He was not trying to be anything other than what he had always been, and what his family had been for generations. You no longer heard many accents like that.
He jabbed a finger towards the house on Borodino Street.
‘You know, there is a part of me that admires the Khan family,’ he said.
Murmurs of dissent in the crowd. Someone shouted an obscenity.
‘And I will tell you why,’ he said. ‘Because they have a strong culture, a proud culture, a culture that does not apologise for existing. I don’t blame them for settling in the weak, tired, overfed west where we are too feeble, too unsure of ourselves, to say – this country and all its values are worth preserving. And if we lack the courage to state that fact, my friends, then tomorrow belongs to them.’
When he was finished there was a smattering of wild applause among those closest to him but most of the crowd simply turned away, as if they would think it all over, or possibly forget about it immediately, as they were drawn back to the street full of flowers and the house that was still illuminated by police lights, even in broad daylight. As the crowd drifted away Adams and I pushed our way towards the young man.
I thought that someone who drew this kind of audience might have some kind of entourage. But he was alone apart from one short, broad-shouldered helper with exactly the same Buddy-can-you-spare-a-dime? haircut, a younger man with the aspect of a weightlifter or a baby bull. He was carefully placing the speaker’s soapbox on to the passenger seat of one of those rickshaws that ferry around foreign tourists and local drunks – three skinny wheels, the back two set wide apart to ferry the fatties and the worse for wear, a plastic canopy over the plastic seat as protection against the English summer. And I saw that it was not a soapbox at all. It was a crate for Indian beer.
Kingfisher, it said on the side, the King of Beers.
I showed my warrant card to the one who had spoken. Adams hovered at my shoulder, doing the same, still getting the hang of showing someone her warrant card.
‘I’m DC Wolfe. This is TDC Adams. Who are you?’
He smiled pleasantly.
‘George Halfpenny,’ he said. ‘Have I done something wrong? The other officers told me that as long as I didn’t obstruct their crowd control, then I was free to talk to the people.’
‘You’re free to talk until the mad cows come home,’ I said. ‘As long as you don’t whip up any trouble. As long as you stay on the right side of the law. As long as you don’t incite violence. As long as you keep the party polite. Understood?’
‘Understood. I have no intention of inspiring hatred or breaking the law. I just want to talk.’ There was the glitter of passion in his eyes. ‘I just have some things that have to be said.’
I nodded. ‘But why are you here, George? Why are you here night after night after night?’
‘We came down here – my brother Richard and I’ – he indicated the fridge-shaped young man with him, and now I saw they were brothers, that they shared more than the brutal jarhead haircut – ‘to pay our respects to Alice.’
Something inside me flinched at the unearned intimacy of using only her first name. But then I knew the entire country felt the same way. DS Stone was Alice to everyone now.
‘Three people died at the same address,’ Halfpenny said, staring at the house. ‘One was a police officer – dedicated, selfless, brave. The other two were fanatics, murderers, men who believed they pleased their god with slaughter. I think we have a duty to remember Alice, don’t you? We all have a duty to keep coming back.’
‘Tell him,’ his brother Richard said.
‘It’s OK,’ George said quietly, soothing him.
The baby bull pushed himself forward.
‘We are the Sons of Saxons,’ he said.
I heard TDC Adams chuckle behind me.
‘What’s that?’ I said. ‘A band?’
‘The Sons of Saxons are a cultural preservation society,’ George Halfpenny said, untroubled by the possibility of mockery. ‘We believe that the cultural identity of this country is worth preserving. We believe that one thousand years without being invaded has produced a country that is unique in the world.’
‘You’ve got a lot of rabbit,’ Adams observed.
She meant that he talked a lot. And it was true.
But George Halfpenny ignored her.
‘The Sons of Saxons are not a band, Detective,’ he told me. ‘It’s an idea. The jihadists taught us that, didn’t they?’ He indicated the floodlit house. ‘Men like the Khan brothers. An idea is the most powerful thing in the world. But I promise you, there is nothing sinister about our motives.’ His eyes were shining but his expression remained pleasant, his words reasonable. ‘Honest, tolerant patriots have been sneered at for too long. We have been despised for loving our country, for believing that our traditions and culture are worthy of love and worthy of protecting. It’s not about hating anyone. We’re not sieg-heiling skinheads, Detective. It’s about love. Love for our country, love for ourselves. But they sneer at the likes of us.’
‘But who are they, George?’ I asked.
He smiled gently. ‘We both know who they are. The big shots. The elite. The educated, the rich, the ones in the big houses. You know who they are, DC Wolfe. They hate the people who built everything in these islands. We get called bigots, racists and simpletons for daring to love our country, for believing it is worth preserving, for feeling pride in the past, for not quietly slipping into the mists of history. The Sons of Saxons believe it is time to stop apologising for who we are and who we have been for a thousand years. May I go home now?’
‘Where’s home, George?’
‘Camden Town.’
‘Is this your rickshaw?’ I said.
‘It would be kind of stupid to steal someone else’s rickshaw in front of two detectives from the Metropolitan Police,’ he said.
‘Don’t get smart,’ Adams snapped, and I saw the steel in her.
George Halfpenny laughed.
‘I’m a rickshaw driver,’ he said. ‘That’s what I do for a living.’ He grinned at me, and I saw that nobody in his life had ever given a thought to his teeth. ‘We are coolies in our own land now, Detective,’ he said. ‘This is the gig economy. We are men who work with our hands in a land where nothing gets made any more. We are men with strong backs with nothing to carry, a warrior race with brave hearts and nobody to fight. We are factory workers after all the factories have closed down.’
Adams was right.
He really did love to hear the sound of his own voice.
‘Save the speech for the next performance,’ I said. ‘Listen, son, as long as you don’t break the law you can do what you like. But I’ll be watching you.’
‘Thank you.’
‘He called you son,’ said his brother, shocked.
‘It’s all right, Richard,’ George Halfpenny murmured.
He looked at the tide of flowers on the street.
‘It’s fitting we are here,’ he said. ‘It feels fated. Borodino Street. I wonder how many people know this street is named after a great battlefield.’
I felt a schoolboy memory stir.
‘War and Peace,’ I said. ‘Tolstoy. Borodino was the battle in War and Peace.’ I remembered that the raid when we lost Alice Stone was codenamed Operation Tolstoy. ‘I knew it rang a bell.’
‘That was one of the battles at Borodino,’ George Halfpenny said. ‘The Russians against the French in the Napoleonic Wars in 1812, seventy thousand casualties, the bloodiest day of the Napoleonic Wars. The Battle of Borodino. And then there was the Battle of Borodino Field in 1941, the Russians against Nazi Germany on the same fields, fighting to keep the invaders from the gates of Moscow. Borodino was a sacred site of patriotic wars, the killing fields where invaders were repelled. That’s why it is so fitting for us to be here.’
‘You know your history,’ I said, only trying to be friendly as he climbed on to his rickshaw, his brother Richard sitting in the passenger seat like a stumpy potentate on a plastic throne, a protective arm around the Indian beer box.
And finally I had offended him.
‘I’m uneducated, Detective,’ George Halfpenny said, and for the first time I glimpsed the righteous fury in him. ‘But that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.’