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.’
11
In any normal broken family it would have been different.
In any normal broken family we would have built on the success of that birthday party.
In any normal broken family there would have been stilted texts, awkward emails, sufficient contact to arrange for Scout to return to the house on the street where it looked as though nothing bad had ever happened, and spend some time with her mother and her mother’s new family.
But we were not a normal broken family and as the days drifted by after the birthday party, there was only silence.
I went downstairs for the mail and flicked through the bills, the restaurant flyers and the charity appeals. But there was nothing from Anne, and as time went by I suspected that there was going to be nothing.
This is what we dealt with, my daughter and I, and we dealt with it every day of our lives.
This is what happens. The absent parent has the very best intentions to put things right. They truly do. But then life gets in the way. There are distractions – other demands, far more urgent – and the child who was left behind is – at best – parked in abeyance and – at worst – forgotten.
Absent fathers do it. But absent mothers do it too.
And the feeling that pierced me as I stood with the takeaway flyers in my hand was sadness stained with anger.
Single mothers know this feeling.
And single fathers know it too.
I wanted more – what? Not love, because you can’t demand love, you can’t force love, you can’t summon it up when it is not there, or it’s buried deep beneath some new life.
I wanted more kindness.
That’s what I wanted from my ex-wife for Scout.
I wanted more kindness for our beautiful daughter.
As I walked back up to our loft, my knee throbbing with a dull rhythm, I noticed that there was one mystery piece of mail, my name and address in elaborate script written with a fountain pen – and I noticed in a moment that it was not written by my ex-wife. Stiff to the touch, but harder than a child’s birthday invite. It was an invitation of a different kind.
The Gane Family
Are sad to announce the passing of
Mrs Elizabeth Mildred Precious Gane On 3 July
A service conducted by Fr Marvin Gane will be held at St Anthony’s Church, Brixton on 17 July at two o’clock
Light refreshments will be served afterwards
At the Muhammad Ali Youth & Leisure Centre
Mrs Gane was the mother of a dead colleague. I remembered her as a tiny, soft-spoken lady who wore hats like the Queen and who had not lost her Jamaican accent after half a century in South London.
Her son, Curtis, had been a Detective Inspector when I first came to Savile Row. On the night that we raided a paedophile ring operating out of an abandoned mansion on The Bishop’s Avenue, Curtis Gane had stepped back on a derelict staircase to avoid a man holding a black carbon lock knife with a four-inch blade and had fallen two storeys, landing on his back and breaking the vertebrae connecting his head to his spine. Curtis never walked again and he never came out of hospital. If he had lived longer, we would have become friends. But there was not enough time for friendship.
The last time I had seen Mrs Gane was on the rooftop of West End Central on the day that one hundred police officers watched in silence as she scattered her son’s ashes to the wind. I felt a stab of sorrow at her passing as I looked at the invitation again. Father Marvin Gane was her other son. I should call him, I thought, as I walked into the loft with the black-edge funeral invitation in one hand and the junk mail in the other.
But then I stared at the TV and forgot all about calling him.