London Noir

OF MICE, MEN AND TWO WOMEN by JULIAN RATHBONE

Ranjit Singh owned a tiny corner shop in Walthamstow, one of the more run down suburbs of north-east London. Since he was some distance behind the high street and a good half mile from the nearest superstore and another good mile from the nearest street market it was a handy little business. His shop closed for eight hours in every twenty-four and during the other sixteen sold bread, milk, cakes, biscuits, crisps, newspapers, pork pies and sausage rolls, condoms, aspirin, and from a cold cabinet with a steel grill which was meant to be kept locked, Lambrusco wines, halfs of scotch and vodka, blue thunderbird wine, strong lagers and Kinder eggs.

Through a variety of means, including extortion with menaces, bribery, and other malpractices, a property firm called Casby, Casby, Casby and Sun, had acquired ninety-nine year leases on the three terraced properties next to the shop and planning permission to convert them not just into the usual six flats but, through cunning exploitation of the fact they owned three linked shells rather than three separate buildings, ten. There were actually no Casbys extant in the firm and Sun was Kai Won Sun late of Victoria Island, Hong Kong.

When he read the request for planning permission Ranjit had been delighted: ten families instead of six would mean that much more custom. He had been far less pleased though when the first skip arrived on his doorstep and the banging and crashing got under way as the dwellings were gutted, and planks and piles of wet cement appeared on the pavement. Worst of all the progress of his regular customers to his shop-door was impeded by trundling wheel-barrows and a startlingly beautiful Afro-Caribbean male who stood in the pocket handkerchief gardens of the houses and heaved into the skips the timber and plaster his mates chucked down to him. His name was Lennie Enfield.

Not that Ranjit was much bothered personally. He was rarely in the shop these days, leaving the work to his wife Amirya, and a succession of ill-paid school-leavers. A thin, dried-up man, prematurely aged at sixty, he was now deeply into study of the seven gurus of his religion and confined his shopkeeping to examining the accounts less attentively than he did the scriptures.

About Lennie Enfield’s beauty let’s just say it reminded elderly white females of Harry Belafonte in Island in the Sun, and while we’re at it we might add that Amirya’s recalled in the hearts of elderly white males the transcendent loveliness of Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, but a Gardner with an all-over tan. Amirya herself came from Trinidad and was well-westernized in her ways. However her parents maintained the formalities of Sikh culture, and her marriage to Ranjit, who did indeed hail from the Punjab, had been arranged.

Lennie was twenty, she was thirty and the oldest of the three children of her loveless marriage was already fourteen years old. All right, we all know that most arranged marriages are not loveless, but hers was. She was unlikely to have any more children since Ranjit had given up on sex as well as commerce.

Lennie fell in love at first sight. There was nothing romantic about it in the Mills and Boon sense of the word though Byron might not have found the cosmic energy of his lust alien to the Romantic Imagination. Nor would elderly white males who still remember Ava Gardner.

He waited though, after his first sight of her, not for seven centuries nor for seven years but seven minutes, until the shop was empty: then he swung through the chiming door and stood in front of the low glass-topped counter and looked across at her. His thumbs were hooked in the wide belt of his tight jeans, his biceps stretched the short sleeves of his green sweatshirt. Outside the late April sunshine danced through the motes above his skip and made an aureole round his bronze head, silvered the sweat, glanced off his shining skin, glittered in his single earring.

He flexed his pectorals and said: ‘Twenty Embassy, and please, woman, would you fuck with me?’

Since this precisely fitted the fantasy she had been working on ever since she clapped eyes on his torso through the shop window above the video poster for Basic Instinct just six minutes earlier, a fantasy that had caused her to give change for a placido when the customer had tended her a fiver, she was not surprised, or frightened. Indeed the fact that he had said ‘would you’ and ‘with me’, and ‘please’, though that probably related to the cigarettes, added tenderness to passion.

She smiled, those teeth, those full, plum-coloured lips, and sighed – that large heavy but well-shaped bosom – leant across the counter and, in a gesture that was almost maternal, brushed white plaster dust from his chest, letting her hand discover the hardness of the muscle beneath.

‘That would be nice, man. But where?’

‘Woman,’ he said, and she fancied it was more a growl, the sort of growl a tom-cat makes prior to the moment of truth, than any noise Belafonte ever emitted, ‘next door we have twenty-eight empty rooms. An’ some of thems still ’as beds in.’

The affair was brazen. Ranjit was not popular in the neighbourhood: he gave tick to no one, not to Afros finding themselves out of bread of both sorts on a Sunday morning, nor to old cockney ladies who claimed they had been mugged on his very doorstep. When the children of BBC (Radio) producers came for adult videos he sent them back and made their parents collect the videos in person. Moreover, there was no Sikh community in the area: Ranjit had picked the shop from an Evening Standard advertisement and had not minded moving the five miles or so from Tower Hamlets. So no one in the near neighbourhood was going to tell him his wife was having it away with an Afro stud ten years her junior.

She found plenty of excuses to get out while the teenagers and school-leavers minded the shop: down the cash and carry for something he had forgotten, an open afternoon at the primary school, aromatherapy and reflexology classes, and the Asian Women for Peace Association were already on her list for calls in the few hours he allowed her to be out each afternoon. Once clear of the shop she had only to duck down a service entry and into the tiny alley that ran behind the terrace to where Lennie would be waiting for her at one of three gates, alone.

The old biddies told her: ‘Go on ducks, get it while yer can, they won’t look at yer’n ten years’ time, we won’t tell, and I think I’ll’ave a packet of the Belgian meat paste while I’m at it, my good-ness’e can’t really want 87p for a sliver like that can’e?’ And she sold the Afro kiddies ciggies, but still whacked them over the earhole if they tried to steal, which they respected her for, and when Ben, from opposite, wrapped a copy of Penthouse inside his Independent just as his wife came in to remind him to get some green lentils, she didn’t let on at all. She charged him though, of course. And in return for these little favours everyone kept quiet about her.

Lennie’s mates really were mates, even the foreman was only twenty-five and had not yet turned class traitor: when the contractor came round at an inopportune moment he always said that Lennie was the reliable one, the one he sent out for a kilo of nails or a five litre can of paint-stripper if they’d run short, when actually he was bonking Amirya in the upstairs back of number eight. And once, when the contractor, a podgy grey man whose car component business in the north Midlands had gone into liquidation two years earlier questioned the rhythmic beat on the ceiling above, the foreman explained that it was a minor plumbing problem they were getting on the top of, indeed Lennie was down B and Q looking for some washers right now.

And so in upstairs rooms, filled with dust, lit from open curtainless windows, often with only a bare mattress considerately left for them to lie on, they made rapturous sunlit love in just about every way you can think of. The air around them was laden with the perfume of narcissi, then lilac and finally roses; outside lascivious sparrows chirped rhythmically while the blackbirds sang smugly of territory held and eggs hatched in the depths of untended privet. Occasionally Lennie would bring a joint of best Colombian red, and once or twice, knowing her husband would be out way beyond when Lennie would have to go, and breath fresheners would have time to remove the evidence, she brought up a half of Bell’s with nan bread and a wedge of dolcelatte, These extra delights were not there to stimulate exhausted desire but rather to celebrate its happy satiation. No one had ever told them that sadness follows copulation, so for them it did not.

But one by one the mattresses went, new doorways smaller even than before were made good, and the heavy smell of modern gloss paints poisoned air that had been redolent with the sour sharpness of fresh wood shavings. Amirya longed for decent comfort. And so one Sunday evening late in May she told Lennie that since nine o’clock next morning Ranjit would be out, she expected Lennie to be in, and dammit, she’d close the shop. He, for his part, had come to tell her that since the full skips could not be collected until the late morning he and his mates would be down Hackney Marshes on another job until one o’clock, but he agreed they’d cover for him.

Among the shop’s most faithful customers were Ben and Amanda who lived across the road on the ground floor of a terrace house just like all the rest apart from its lilac door. Amanda was a social worker who moonlighted counselling the terminally ill. She could spot an abused child from fifty paces, inoperable cancer from forty. Ben was an assistant producer for BBC Radio Five. They had many friends, gave small barbecue parties on Sundays in summer when they could use the strip of lawn at the back, and attended various action groups supporting the more obviously deprived or endangered human sub-species, but drawing the line at the elderly who are difficult, depressing, and live next door. And occasionally, when she had a manuscript to deliver to her publisher, Amanda’s sister Beatrice came to stay.

Beatrice, whose given name was Veronica, wrote detective stories set in mid-Victorian London and against the background of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement which she had researched to the bone and beyond. Her publisher, who ran a small but flourishing business with a cheerful efficiency quite alien to the industry in general, and all from a couple of rooms just two stops down the Victoria Line, believed that if only she would settle on the one detective, Thomas Carlyle say or Ford Madox Ford, he’d have the next Ellis Peters on his hands.

And on that Sunday evening Beatrice walked into Ranjit Singh’s shop and asked for a bottle of wine. Always she forgot, until the very last minute, to bring a bottle. Amirya remembered that it was Sunday, checked that it was past seven, unlocked the cabinet. Beatrice, fumbling inside found a Lambrusco medium white; Amirya gave her change for a five pound note, and watched the thin rather drab middle-aged lady cross the road. Beatrice bumped into the skip and coming out from behind it she was almost knocked down by a pick-up truck that swung into the kerb and parked between the skip and Ranjit’s Transit van.

‘Daft bat,’ Amirya said to herself, but already her heart was beating faster, for the pick-up was Lennie’s.

Monday mornings are the deadest part of the week for corner shops. Consequently when his fellow students (themselves mostly shopkeepers in the same mould) proposed to him they should meet Monday mornings in the Sikh temple in Tower Hamlets to attempt to fathom their fathomless scriptures, Ranjit willingly agreed. Thus Amirya was able at last to compound the last betrayal: she took Lennie into the matrimonial bed.

It did not suit him. It was too soft and it creaked. The room was dark and cluttered with furniture Lennie stumbled over, it was filled with smells more alien than those of paint. For the first time in his life, the organ they had nicknamed ‘Marley’ refused to perform. Poor Lennie. He was upset.

‘Every little thing goin’ to be all right,’ Amirya murmured as she gently but ineffectually caressed it. It stirred, thickened, but as soon as she pulled him in towards her, or attempted to mount him, flop it went again.

Lennie was humiliated, hurt, deeply bothered, and finally, as macho men do (and really he was not much more than a lad) when something they can’t explain interferes with their manhood, became very angry. He smashed his fist in the bedhead, stormed round the room shaking and scolding the recalcitrant member, and let out a howl of frustrated pain as inadvertently he hurt himself.

Neither heard the return of Ranjit’s Transit, the click of the multiple locks, the dull rattle of a chain, the squeak of his foot on the stair, but Lennie saw the door handle turn and got in behind it just as it opened.

Amirya sat up in bed holding the sheet in front of her breasts.

‘Ranjit, why have you come back so soon, my dear?’

‘I forgot to take with me my copy of the holy writings of the sixth guru. But Amirya, what are you doing in bed, my dear, and why is the shop below closed?’

A heavy brass vase presented itself to Lennie’s hand, or so it seemed to him, and he used it to hit Ranjit on the head. Ranjit sank to his knees, shook his head, attempted to get up. Lennie lifted off Ranjit’s turban and hit him again, this time from above and with more conviction.

The night before, at supper, with the Lambrusco safely in the fridge and the single candle glowing sweetly over a bottle of Tesco’s Corbieres, Ben had asked Beatrice one of the three questions authors always get asked: ‘And what’s the next one going to be about?’

(The other two are: And what name do you write under? to which I always answer: Frederick Forsyth, and Where do you get your ideas from?)

Now the other two are boring, but this one touches a chord: you’ve just finished what you knew was going to be a masterpiece, but now you’re not so sure, while the idea that lies behind the next one is a surefire all the way winner. Beatrice expounded, attempting to sling wholewheat spaghetti with green lentil bolognese on to her fork:

‘I have cats, you know that… No, don’t laugh. And what has always of course made me sad about them, is the way they play with mice.’ She spoke in the clipped, controlled way she usually adopted after two glasses of wine. ‘So like prolonged torture, although of course they don’t know that. Now the other day Molly, my silver tabby, brought in a mouse. I intervened of course and as a result the mouse escaped and hid under the piano. I can’t move the piano, and Molly can’t get under it. The mouse was safe. But it did not stay there. It came out and allowed itself to be caught again… In short, and this is what my book will be about, the mouse was a willing victim. Seeking to renew the pleasure of being hunted and toyed with, out it came again.’

‘You mean, some species are willingly preyed on because they enjoy it?’ asked Ben. ‘And you are going to write a detective story about someone who wills her or himself to be a victim? Because they enjoy it.’

‘Something like that. It goes like this, I think. The mouse gets a huge adrenalin rush, then it’s caught, and carried, the way a cat carries a kitten, and at that time I think it probably feels secure, loved. Then the cat puts it down and tries to make it run again, and when the cat at last hurts it, it does run. Then the whole pleasurable sequence all through again. But if the mouse does get away to a spot where the cat can’t get it, it has to come out again…’

‘You may have something here,’ said her sister. ‘It makes evolutionary sense too. The lemming impulse. Rodents are terribly successful survivors. Pleasurable death at the hands of the hunter eases their overcrowding problem… and on the other side it helps to keep the not too successful predators fed, who in turn play their part in keeping rodent numbers down to a viable level…’

Clearly she was not going to stop if no one made the effort: that’s a training in social sciences for you. Ben made it with the wine, but not too much, they might be forced back on to the Lambrusco, and asked what was for dessert.

‘Rhubarb crumble: our first picking of the year. I’ll go and get it. But really Vron, I think that’s a jolly good idea.’ [So do I, and it’s mine! J.R.]

As they were going to bed Beatrice overheard Amanda say: ‘It’ll be autobiographical you know. Vron was born a victim, such a wimp.’

The following morning Ben and Amanda, already dressed for work (he in check shirt and jeans, she in business suit, high heels and frothy blouse), cleared away the muesli bowls and instructed Beatrice on how she should let herself out when the time came for her to leave. Unpressured by clocks she sat at the table, dressed in a long cotton dressing-gown over Viyella pyjamas, nursing a mug of Sainsbury’s Keemun.

‘When do you have to be at your publisher?’ Amanda asked.

‘Eleven o’clock.’

‘Lucky for some,’ she glanced at her watch. ‘Oh come on Ben.’

‘Please leave the dishes. I’ve got plenty of time,’ Veronica murmured.

But Ben had no intention of leaving any unnecessary opportunity for his sister-in-law to break anything. Whenever she came to stay she broke something: last time it had been an art-deco teacup, quite rare, a wedding present.

‘Now, I’ll leave the spare keys on the table by the front door just in case you want to go out and come back in again…’

‘I shan’t.’

‘But you may,’ said Amanda with uncalled for sharpness.

‘But if you don’t, then you don’t have to touch them. Simply pull our front door to behind you, and then the outer front door, making sure that in both cases they are properly latched. All right?’

‘Of course. I’m not an idiot, and I have done it twice before.’

‘Come on, Ben, don’t just stand there. Vron, have a bath if you want, make yourself coffee or whatever if you feel up to it, we must dash.’

Swift kisses all round, and the double closing of outer doors. Even from the tiny kitchen at the back Beatrice (who hated to be called Vron or Veronica, even by her sister) could hear the repeated chugging of the Lada, but at last it fired, and they were gone. Yes, she thought, a bath would be nice. But first she must attempt to reconstruct a large armchair out of the put-u-up she had slept on. It was the sort of task she found particularly difficult.

Amirya was shocked and frightened, but the contemplation of her husband’s brains sharpened her very capable intellect and in twenty minutes she had worked out a plan. Lennie of course, once he had washed human tissue, some of it still palpitating, from his naked torso, could do nothing but sit on the edge of the bed and, head in his hands, rock and moan.

‘Lennie love, here’s what you must do. Lenn-ee, kill that row or I call the police right now, all right? Listen. I’m going to take the van down to near Tower Hamlets and dump it, then I’ll go to my sister’s in Leyton, where she’ll tell the pigs when they come I’ve been there since nine o’clock. While I’m gone you bag the ol’ man up in plastic bin liners an’ put him in one of those skips. Then you clear off right out of here… No, no. You stay until the skip’s been took, then you clear off out…’

Lennie was not devoid of imagination and various unwelcome scenarios scrolled down his inner eye. ‘But what if when they get to the dump the plastic tears, or… or anything.’

‘Listen love. It’ll be on the top of the skip, so when they tip it off, first in the pit, first to be covered. Anyway once the skip’s gone you buzz me at my sister’s and then you sod off.’

‘What’ll you do?’

‘I’ll come back here and clean up so no forensic scientist in the world will get the least littlest clue as to what happened. One thing I do know is cleaning. One good thing… you were naked when you did it, nothing on your clothes.’

‘An’ after that?’

‘I stay at my sister’s an’ from there I sell the shop: it’s half in my name anyway. Then I move up north, with the kiddies, buy another shop and then I ask you to come, like if you still want to. All you got to do, lover, is get that on the top of a skip. OK? Now I’m gwine to get dressed and you should do too. No, honey, I’m not interested in Marley right now. You shot the sheriff and it’s a question of first things first. Oh, oh… oh. All right.’

Later she murmured: ‘Honey, I reckon you just shot the deputy too. Now. Get dressed.’

Time flew for Beatrice. She pottered unsteadily about the ground floor flat, reconstructed the armchair, folded the duvet, had a bath, made herself a coffee and by the time she had done all that it was a quarter past ten. She checked her overnight bag for her washing things, her pyjamas and dressing gown, and above all for the manuscript she was about to deliver (Murder on Denmark Hill by Beatrice Burne-Jones), picked up the keys, remembered what she had been told, and put them down again. She let herself out into the tiny lobby, paused for a moment, thought really hard: had she left anything behind? No she had not, and she pulled the inner front door to, made the latch click, then leant against it to make doubly sure it was properly locked. Then she turned to the outer door, put up the catch, turned the knob of the yale lock, and pulled. Nothing. She pulled again. It must be stuck. No. She bent down and found by the doorknob a second brassy key hole: writers of detective stories know a thing or two about locks – she recognized a mortice. She turned, hammered on the second front door, the one that led to stairs and the upstairs flatlet, but knew it was useless. The occupant had left shortly after Ben and Amanda for the primary school where she taught, and against all her usual habits, had double locked the outer door.

Writers of detective stories also know a thing or two about locked room mysteries, but for the life of her Beatrice could not see how she was going to get out of this one.

Lennie was strong, and after the initial shock had worn off, not naturally squeamish. Ranjit was small and slight of build and it was not much of a problem to get his legs and lower torso into one big black bin liner. The top half was messy, but he got over that by pulling a white swing-bin liner over the old man’s crushed skull. Then he found some parcel tape, and used it clumsily and in large amounts to fasten the two bin liners together. This was the worst part really: the tape stuck to itself, and to the wrong bits of the bags, to his fingers. He found it almost impossible to hold the edges of the plastic where he wanted them to be, and manipulate the tape at the same time. But he managed.

Then he humped his five-foot-long parcel over his shoulder and got it down into the shop. The next problem was getting it on to the top of the nearest skip without anyone seeing him: Amirya had been adamant about that. He went back upstairs, and peeping round the lace curtain waited until the coast was clear, the street empty. He did not have to wait long. Monday morning, half-past ten, everyone was at work or school, or almost everyone. Only a young woman, part ethnic, was across the road and for some reason bending down over the letter-box of the house opposite. It did not occur to Lennie to wonder why. The young woman straightened and walked briskly away, round the corner, was gone, leaving the street to a large and ugly ginger tom who sidled along the low garden walls opposite.

‘Help! I say help! I need help.’

Five minutes earlier the young part ethnic lady who worked flexitime as a cashier and shelf filler at Tesco’s half a mile away, had heard the plaintive cry. But she could not work out where it was coming from.

‘Over here. I’m behind the front door of number five, speaking through the letter box.’ The flap was sprung and very difficult to lift from inside and keep open. But Beatrice had managed using her Parker pen which she had now wedged in the gap so it kept the flap open. ‘I’m locked in the lobby and I can’t get out.’

‘How did that happen then?’

‘The upstairs tenant must have double-locked, using the mortice. She never has before. And I’d already pulled my sister’s front door shut, leaving the key inside. It’s what they told me to do.’

‘I don’t see how I can help.’

‘Well I think you can. This is my address book. It has my brother-in-law’s work number at the BBC, Broadcasting House, and I am sure if you could get through to him they’ll let him come home to release me…’

‘No miss. I can’t do that. I’m late for work already, you keep calling and I’m sure you’ll find someone soon.’ And she hurried away. Damn, thought Beatrice.

On the other side of the road Lennie opened the shop door and was in and out with his awful black parcel in ten seconds flat, draping it across the high pile of rubble that more than filled the skip. He locked the doors behind him again and went back to the upstairs bedroom to wait for the skip truck to come.

Presently the large ginger tom leapt up on to the skip and began scratching round what Lennie knew very well was the head end of the parcel. Presently he could see the white of the inner bag, then hair and…

‘Oh shit!’ cried Lennie, aloud, and grabbing up the parcel tape again he shot back out into the street. The cat hissed and scatted, and he hurled lumps of cement after it trying desperately for the sort of accuracy that might make it reluctant to come back. Then he got to work again with the tape that seemed more unbiddable than ever and absolutely refused to stick to anything wet… And apart from the blood, it had begun to rain…

‘Help. I say. Help. Please.’

He looked all round, up and down the empty street. Even the cat had gone.

‘Over here. I’m locked in behind the front door of number five.’

Heart thudding now, Lennie came between the skip and the back of his pick-up, crossed the road. He stooped, looked beneath the wedged letter flap. He couldn’t believe it. He could not believe it. There was a woman behind the door, a grey thin middle-aged biddy, just the sort that spies on everything that happens. Peering through the slit, she must have seen everything.

‘How long you bin ‘ere?’

‘Oh, about twenty minutes I think, not more…’ Lennie groaned inwardly: she had, he thought, she had seen everything. ‘Listen, here’s what I want you to do…’

But Lennie was not listening. He ran back into the shop, setting the bell jangling behind him, locking himself in again. What to do, what could he do? He was done for unless… he’d killed once, could he kill again? Yes. He’d have to, it was the only way, but how? How? He paced about the shop, banging his forehead, wringing his big black hands, wracking his brains, then, Sunny Jim, it came to him.

Beatrice could not believe her bad luck. Only two passers-by in twenty minutes had appeared to hear her, and neither seemed prepared to help. She was beginning to feel desperate, claustrophobic, it was after all a tiny space she was in, little more than a metre square and two metres high, trapped between three locked doors. She tried bracing her back against the wall and her feet against her sister’s door, but soon realized it was quite useless. She was nowhere near strong enough. Every time she heard footsteps she got back on her knees and cried out through the slit again, help, help. She could hear the footsteps stop, she could guess how they looked around for her, and then hurried on from the ghost-like cry before she could tell them where she was.

But now, at last, someone seemed to be coming, was it the man who had come from the other side of the road? She rather thought it was. And what’s this, has he thought of some ingenious way of getting her out, a black plastic spout through the letter box, fluid from a red plastic can splashed about her feet, the smell of petrol, and what’s he doing now? A packet of Sunny Jim firelighters? Is he mad, am I mad?

‘Stop it, please stop it,’ she cried, as he fed the white waxy rectangles one by one through the slit, each one burning on a corner. She managed to extinguish the first three, but on the fourth the petrol exploded with a dull whumph. Bracing her feet against her sister’s door once more and her back against the wall opposite, she forced herself up, foot by foot, inch by inch above the flames, but into the smoke. She realized she was not shouting, screaming, and she wondered why not. She realized that she had never been so excited in her whole life, that never before had she felt so alive, so at one with an elemental universe whose existence she had suspected but never before experienced. The fumes drugged her, she breathed them in with a welcoming abandon, fell dizzy, and dropped fainting into the tiny inferno three feet below. Almost her fall was enough to put out the flames, almost… Never had she felt so happy and her last thought was: I’m right about mice.

‘Why, I don’t understand why?’ her sister wailed later that evening.

The policeman tried to explain.

‘We think she must have seen something she shouldn’t have seen out in the street. A mugging maybe, something like that.’

‘But that’s not possible. She had terrible eyesight, tunnel vision, could only see properly with glasses that made her eyes look like oysters. She only wore them to read. She can’t have seen anything…’