10
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.