As the sun went down at the end of the next day, Edie Wren and I sat outside the gates of Victoria Park in my old BMW X5 and we watched the lights come on in a march that was meant to be a call for an end to the killing.
Peace in the Park, they were calling it.
There were hundreds of lights, perhaps a thousand, the number growing all the time, and they made a universe of tiny stars piercing the soft summer darkness of Victoria Park. They were not the yellow and stuttering light of candles, they were not the kind of lights that looked like they could easily be extinguished. They were the bright and piercing white light of a thousand smartphones held aloft, a hard white light in the gathering twilight that made you think the stars were very close tonight. They looked like the kind of lights that would be burning long after we were all gone.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Edie said. She glanced at me. ‘Isn’t it beautiful, Max?’
‘Yes,’ I said, although rallies for peace always made me slightly nervous. I had never seen a peace rally yet where someone didn’t get their head caved in. But Edie was right.
All those lights shining in the darkness were beautiful.
I looked at her sharp-faced profile, leaning forward in the passenger seat, a dreamy smile on her face, and for a long moment I just watched her watching the lights shine in the park.
And I had to ask.
‘Is that it?’ I said.
She looked at me and then back at the lights. She smiled, sighed, took a fistful of quad muscle in my left leg and gave it a squeeze.
And I was amazed that I had waited so long to ask the question that had hung between us since the night – months ago now, just when the dark and cold was finally making way for the first rumour of spring – when I had gone to Edie’s home, rung the doorbell and stayed until morning.
One night.
Both of us had been in uncharted territory that night. We were at the end of a gruelling investigation into people trafficking that had begun with the discovery of thirteen passports and twelve young women dead in the back of a refrigerated truck in Chinatown, and ended with the thirteenth woman dying in our arms in a penthouse brothel. I was at a loss, owning up to some kind of loneliness, spending too long on the backstreets of Chinatown, feeling tempted by the invitations from doorways that greet a single man wandering those streets after dark. And Edie was in one of her periodic break-ups with her married Mr Big.
So one Saturday night – the loneliest night of the week, someone once sang – I drove to Edie’s flat on the wrong side of Highbury Corner and I rang her bell, ready to take my chances. And she took me in.
Sometimes you wait so long for something to happen that when it does – if it does – you are disappointed. But sometimes it is better. And when that happens, you suddenly know why you are alive. And you want that feeling again, of course you do, you want it more than anything, even if you suspect that it might never happen.
‘You were lovely,’ Edie said, her green eyes dancing between the lights and me. She tried to lighten the mood. ‘It wasn’t a one-night stand. It was an all-night stand.’
‘So you’ll be leaving a five-star review?’ I said. ‘That’s great. But that’s not what I’m asking.’
‘I know. But – and maybe you noticed – I am back with him, Max. He says he really means it this time – he’s going to leave his wife and move in with me and end all the sneaking around that makes me sick to my stomach.’ She shot me a desperate look. ‘And I have to try, don’t I?’
‘OK,’ I said, feeling foolish for being dumb enough to ask a question when I already knew the answer.
Is that it? Yes, Max, that’s it. Of course that was it.
‘And you’ll be fine,’ Edie said. ‘You’ll be beating the girls off with a big stick. Women love a man who is bringing up a child alone. I’ve seen the way they look at you when you’re out with Scout.’
For I moment I was tempted to tell Edie that Scout’s mother had decided that she should bring up our daughter but my heart was closing and I didn’t feel the urge to open it up.
‘It’s true,’ I agreed. ‘A cute little kid is even better for meeting girls than a dog. And I’ve got both. So watch out, world.’
We laughed, but there was sadness in it because we wanted different things and nothing could be done to change that fact, not even a beautiful night in a park full of fairy lights.
We had talked about it and now it was time to work.
‘What do they want, anyway?’ Edie said. ‘The Peace in the Park marchers?’
‘I guess they just want the deaths to stop,’ I said. ‘All this never-ending slaughter that we have started to think of as a part of normal life. Maybe they just want us to stop thinking of it as normal. It’s not a bad thing to want.’
‘What time does Victoria Park close?’
‘Dusk,’ I said. ‘Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. But not tonight.’
More people were still arriving at the park, the only large green space in those crowded East End streets.
We watched the crowds in silence, and I thought of all the other crowds that had been in this park before tonight to see the likes of George Bernard Shaw and Sylvia Pankhurst and The Clash, although not on the same bill, of course.
The marchers were of every age and race and creed but some of the young men walking into Victoria Park had their hair brutally shaved at the sides and back and grown out on top, the Depression-era haircut that George Halfpenny had made popular on Borodino Street. But I saw no sign of George or his brother Richard. More people were arriving. More lights were coming on. A Milky Way of white lights in Victoria Park.
And then finally we saw him. George Halfpenny.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Edie said. ‘Please give a big hand to your pound store prophet.’
The crowd outside the entrance to Victoria Park was parting to allow a rickshaw to enter. George Halfpenny, his face drenched in sweat, acknowledged a burst of spontaneous applause with a curt nod as phones were pointed at his face. Young men with the same brutalist haircut touched the side of his rickshaw, as if the converted tricycle had healing properties. As usual, his brother Richard sat in the back like some stocky, overfed little pharaoh.
A Styrofoam cup of coffee hit the top of the rickshaw.
Not everyone was a fan, it seemed.
A small gang of the local youth were jeering and giving the finger to George Halfpenny.
There were perhaps a dozen of them; the boys – and they were mostly boys – were all wispy beards and New York Yankees baseball caps, caught between the faith of their fathers and the sports franchises of the west.
There were two girls with the little gang and one of them was Layla Khan.
She already looked older, taller, her black hair longer and a hard mocking look on her face.
‘What’s Layla doing here?’ Edie said, like an irritated big sister. ‘If any of these marchers realise who she is …’
The locals laughed as Halfpenny pedalled his rickshaw into the park. They followed in a jeering little gang, Layla in the middle of them, looking like she was having a fine old time. Edie watched them go, biting her lower lip.
‘You want to give George Halfpenny a tug?’ she asked. ‘We need to know where he was when Ahmed Khan was killed.’
‘Not here,’ I said. ‘We’ll do our TIE on George somewhere a bit less crowded.’
We left the BMW X5 outside the gates and followed the crowds into Victoria Park. Full darkness had fallen now but the park was lit by the white lights of those countless phones and by the orange glow that hovers over the city at night. The press of the people increased the deeper we went into the park. Edie and I tried to stay together but she was slowly being carried away from me by the current of the crowd, as if caught in a riptide.
And then, almost close enough to reach out and touch if I had the room to move my arms, I saw the priest.
And I realised that I knew him.
And I saw that it had always been the same priest on Borodino Street.
The large black priest who had knelt to pray before a dwindling congregation the first time I had seen George Halfpenny. The priest who had prayed by the side of Joy Adams when she brought her flowers to the shrine for Alice Stone.
And the priest who had come to the hospital to visit his brother Detective Inspector Curtis Gane in the final days of his life.
He was Father Marvin Gane of St Anthony’s Church, Brixton.
He stared at me now as that great crush of humanity moved deeper into the park, but if he recognised me as the colleague of his dead brother, he gave no sign.
And I saw that Father Marvin Gane, the priest of Borodino Street, was no longer praying.
He was waiting.
The crowd had stopped at the bandstand. The rickshaw was parked beside it. There was meant to be a series of speakers for Peace in the Park but I saw only one.
George Halfpenny had already ascended the short flight of steps and was staring out at the crowds. As his brother Richard stood just behind him, as motionless as a postcard of a Rottweiler, George Halfpenny began to speak.
‘Before the other speakers arrive and give you the usual meaningless, virtue-signalling platitudes about how united we all are and how easily medieval religion fits into a twenty-first-century democracy, I would like us to remember a police officer called Raymond Vann,’ he said.
Somewhere out in the darkness, someone shouted an obscenity. Heads turned towards the harsh sound, and then back to the young man on the bandstand.
‘Raymond Vann was let down by the police, let down by the legal system, and let down by the leaders of this country – all those tenth-rate men with first-class educations.’
‘Go back to Soho!’ shouted one London voice in the darkness.
‘When you go back to Pakistan!’ shouted another.
Laughter. Applause. Jeers. Obscenities and heads were turning, ready to take it to the next level. I could feel peace receding into the darkness and looked around for the tousled red hair of Edie Wren.
I could not see her.
But I saw that the heckling was coming from the right of the bandstand. The gang of local youth we had seen at the gates had swollen in number. There were twenty or thirty of them now. Layla Khan was still at the centre of them, a big grin on her face.
‘Those leaders did not understand Raymond Vann and they do not understand you,’ George Halfpenny said. He looked out at the crowd. ‘You are the heirs of a thousand years of freedom, a freedom that has been won by men like Raymond Vann. You—’
And then there was another kind of light in the darkness.
The sudden flare of fire as a rag soaked in petrol was lit.
In the brief flash of light I saw laughing young faces, their eyes shining with hatred, and then suddenly the flaming bottle was arcing through the night. It hit the metal fence that surrounds the bandstand and exploded with a whoosh of air and fire.
George Halfpenny fell backwards.
Richard stared at him, dumbfounded.
And then all hell broke loose.
‘Kill the bastards!’ someone shouted. ‘Kill the lot of them!’
And suddenly the air was full of missiles. The crowd were throwing anything they could find in the vague direction of the gang of locals. Bottles, rocks, cans of drink. Most of it fell well short. But in the sudden flare of light from the fire, I saw Layla in the middle of the locals. She was not laughing now.
‘Layla!’ Edie shouted.
And I saw that Edie was ahead of me, closer to the bandstand, trying to push her way through to Layla.
‘Edie!’ I shouted, then something hard and metallic smacked against my neck and sent an ice-cold spray down my back, and when I looked up I had lost sight of her.
There were screams and curses and punches wildly thrown as people struggled to get away from the violence or into the thick of it. Young men with Halfpenny haircuts, their faces twisted with fury, were already lashing out with boots and fists at the local youth. Heavily outnumbered, the locals fought back. Layla stood just behind the frontline, edging away from the violence while sticking up two fingers at the crowd with all the venom of an English archer at Agincourt.
Police in riot gear were shoving their way towards the trouble but they had hung back too far at the start of the evening.
I looked for Edie but I could not see her and cursed.
Then I saw something strike Layla Khan and I saw her go down. I forced my way through the crowd, who were mostly anxious to go in exactly the opposite direction. When I found Layla she was on her hands and knees in the middle of the violence.
I scooped her up in my arms. Then Edie was by my side. She placed her hand high on Layla’s forehead and her fingertips came away wet with blood.
‘Let’s get her out of here,’ she said.
One of the locals, a tall youth with a failed beard and last season’s Arsenal shirt put his hands on me. Still holding Layla against me, I crisply bounced my forehead off the bridge of his nose. Edie kicked his legs from underneath him and he went down hard.
We joined the crowd trying to get away from the trouble and we did not look back.
Layla twisted in my arms and stared at me bleary-eyed.
‘Do you want to get yourself killed?’ Edie shouted at her. ‘Why the hell are you here?’
‘Because you –’ Layla shouted back, taking in the police, the crowds and everyone with a George Halfpenny jarhead haircut – ‘are down here.’
As the crowd thinned, Edie brushed Layla’s hair from her face and winced at the sight of the egg-sized lump on her head, just where the hairline began.
‘Hospital,’ Edie told me.
‘No,’ Layla said. ‘Not hospital.’ She struggled from my arms and swayed unsteadily on her feet. ‘Take me home,’ she said. And suddenly she was a child again. ‘Please, Edie.’
So with Layla holding on to Edie for support we left the park and began walking towards Borodino Street.
‘I’m sorry about your grandfather, Layla,’ I said. ‘He was a decent man.’
She watched me impassively, waiting.
‘I held him when he died and I will never forget it,’ I said. ‘And what I will remember is that he died saying your name. He was worried about you, and full of love for you.’
Her mouth flinched. She looked at the ground, letting that long black hair fall over her face. Edie patted her back.
‘And I know that your grandfather wouldn’t want this for you, Layla,’ I said. ‘Whatever you think you are doing tonight. Whatever you’re drinking. Whatever you’re smoking. Whoever those boys were. Your grandfather would want something better for you.’
It was a nice speech. I was quite proud of myself.
But Layla Khan just laughed.
‘My Papa-Papa wanted me to be a part of this country,’ she said. ‘His generation wanted to integrate.’ She said it like it was a dirty word. ‘Smoking, drinking, fucking.’
‘Hey,’ Edie said, looking affronted. ‘Your mouth, young lady.’
‘How do we integrate when you wouldn’t want to live next door to us?’ Layla asked me, and I had no answer for her.
And then Edie chuckled.
‘What have you done to your hair, girl?’ she said, stroking Layla’s head. Layla tugged at her fringe and now I saw that her jet-black hair was tinged a garish shade of crimson.
‘It’s Boots own-brand Neon Red,’ Layla said. ‘That’s what it said on the bottle. Don’t you like it?’
Edie grinned at her. ‘You always look pretty,’ she said. ‘Neon Red or no Neon Red.’
We were standing outside the house now, the front garden still stacked high with the debris of the search teams. I stood on the pavement and watched as Edie walked Layla to the front door. Layla still clung to Edie, and it was as if she was reluctant to let her go.
Her grandmother opened the door. Behind Azza Khan, I could see that the floorboards and parts of the ceiling were still torn open.
‘Layla was in the park,’ Edie said. ‘There was trouble there tonight. You should keep her home until it passes.’
Edie paused, and I realised that she had never heard the woman speak a word of English.
‘Mrs Khan,’ Edie said. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
Azza Khan looked evenly at her granddaughter.
And then she took the girl’s pretty face in one rough hand.
At first I thought the old woman was examining the girl’s injury.
But then I saw that she was looking at the trace of lipstick on Layla’s mouth, and the cheap red streaks in her sleek black hair and that she was smelling whatever the girl had been drinking or smoking.
‘I understand very well,’ Azza Khan told Edie.
And then the old woman’s open palm cracked hard against Layla’s face.
‘Whore,’ she said. ‘Just like all the little teenage whores in this country.’
Layla’s tears came immediately, and they were the hot and bitter tears that come not from pain but humiliation. She fled sobbing up the staircase.
Edie made a movement to follow her but Azza Khan moved to block her way. The old woman shouted after her granddaughter.
‘Remember who you are!’ she called up the darkened staircase. ‘Remember your father! Remember your uncles! Remember your family! Remember where you belong, Layla!’
Then she looked at Edie and smiled apologetically, almost embarrassed by her perfect English.