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.