estimate of how much cash was in the case. Only one thing to do, count it. Best time to count it? Now. He sat down on the floor beside the suitcase and got started. The counting was much harder work than it might have been, because although the money had once been clamped together by rubber bands, there were two problems. For one thing, many of the bands had eroded, and the money was now loose. For another, the clumps of cash were irregular in size. They hadn’t been counted and then put in bundles; the bundles were random. So there was no alternative except to flick through the dusty, chalky notes one by one and make a tally after every ten – after every hundred pounds. In this way Zbigniew found out that the suitcase contained ?500,000. He also found out, because he emptied the case to count out the money, whom it had belonged to. On the bottom of the case there was a label saying it was the property of an Albert Howe, Esquire. The label and the handwriting looked old but not antique. Mrs Leatherby’s mother had been, in Zbigniew’s estimate, in her eighties when she died; so his best guess was that the suitcase and the money belonged to her husband, Mrs Leatherby’s father.
Zbigniew threw the bundles of money into the case and leaned backwards so his head was against the door. He could see it: a cottage with a garden, his father tending roses, his mother in the kitchen, music coming through the window, the fading warmth of an early summer evening in Poland. The life his father had worked for all his life, bought for him by his son who had made good in London.
Part Three
August 2008
64
‘They love it,’ Shahid said to his brothers. ‘All this fussing, running around, calling meetings-’
‘There are no meetings, plural, this is the first,’ said Ahmed.
‘First of many – meetings, speeches, demands, fussing. It’s that great British middle-class battle cry: “Something must be done!” Same as the war. “Something must be done!” That can lead anywhere, with people like this. They’ll stop at nothing once they get their indignation going. “Something must be done!”’
‘They didn’t do much about the war, did they?’ said Usman. ‘It probably didn’t have the same effect on property prices.’
‘That’s our neighbours and our customers you’re talking about. Talking rubbish about,’ said Ahmed.
All three Kamal brothers were hunched over against fat August raindrops as they swerved and slalomed around the commuters heading home from the Underground station. It was shaping up to be yet another lousy summer. Faced with the rain, Ahmed, typically, was trying to hurry, and Shahid, typically, was trying to take his time. Usman, also typically, was hanging a couple of steps behind and was trying to send signals that the other two men were nothing to do with him. Ahmed and Shahid had both separately been very surprised that Usman wanted to come to the meeting, but he seemed to be taking a special interest in what had been happening in the street. Normally he acted as if everything to do with the shop was so far beneath him it was barely visible.
The brothers were walking towards a special meeting convened by the local police Community Action team. The gathering was being held in the hall attached to the big church on the Common – a first for all three of them, since they had never been inside a Christian church. The meeting had been convened because the phenomenon of the postcards and videos and blog, all with the slogan ‘We Want What You Have’, had, for the residents of Pepys Road, gone past the tipping point. It had begun with abusive virtual graffiti on the blog, and had escalated through abusive postcards delivered to the houses. Then there were three incidents of graffiti in the street; ‘cunt’ and ‘wanker’ were spray-painted on the side walls of the houses at numbers 42 and 51 – a place on the buildings it was hard to spot from the street, so it wasn’t clear how long the abuse had been there before it had been detected. Then envelopes containing truly disgusting things had begun to arrive at the houses: some residents were sent dog excrement in jiffy bags – reeking, horrible jiffy bags. And then, one night in late June, somebody or somebodies had run a set of keys down the cars parked on the even-numbered side of the street – every car, all along the street. The damage ran into many thousands of pounds. A number of residents had complained to the police, who had bounced the query back to the local Neighbourhood Watch to ask how many people had been affected. It was this criminal damage to the cars which really got the police’s attention. When it turned out that everyone in the street had had some encounter or other with We Want What You Have, it had been decided, just as Shahid said, that Something Must Be Done. Hence this meeting.
‘It makes them feel important,’ said Shahid. ‘This is a rare example of Usman being right about something. It gives them an excuse to talk about property prices. It’s the only time they’re ever allowed to talk openly about money, so it’s no wonder it gets them excited.’
They came into the church grounds and could see the side door to the hall, held open by a man and a woman talking. As they walked past they could hear her saying,
‘… that’s if it doesn’t drive prices down, which is a real worry, because…’
Shahid flicked his brother on the bum with a rolled-up copy of
The hall was a square room, decorated with posters of a Christian, charitable and ecological nature. One wall was dominated by a large stencilled painting of a white dove with a leafy green branch in its beak. There were a hundred chairs laid out in ten ranks of ten, and the room was about half-full with locals, some of them known to Ahmed by name and more or less all of them by sight. The woman who ran the Neighbourhood Watch stood at the end of the room on a low dais next to two uniformed policemen, one in his late twenties and the other at least two decades older. Ahmed smiled and nodded at everyone he recognised. People didn’t seem keen to chat. They were eager for the meeting to begin.
Roger Yount came into the hall, direct from work, his pinstripe suit emphasising his height and posture: the kind of figure to gladden any mother-in-law’s heart. Looking at him, women would often find themselves wondering: tall, rich, well-dressed, clean: why isn’t he sexy? Roger looked around the room, ignoring everyone until he saw Arabella, who was sitting with her head down composing a text message to her friend Saskia:
‘Can’t m8k libertys 2mrw, hws dy aftr? A x’
The two women had decided that they had a knicker crisis, and the plan was to go shopping for new ones. Arabella felt she had been so incredibly good since the non-appearing Christmas bonus horror, she deserved a little discretionary spending. She and Saskia would hit the shops, then a restaurant, then would accidentally drink a couple of glasses of champagne and then perhaps have a wander down Bond Street. Matya was looking after the boys. What was the point of living in London if you couldn’t splash a bit of cash about every now and then?
Mary Leatherby had come down from Essex for the day. Her builder had started work on renovating number 42, so she wanted to have a look at how things were going. From peering around, she realised that she now didn’t know a single soul in the entire room. Zbigniew had told her about the graffiti on the side of the house, and the jiffy bag of excrement which had lain unopened on the floor until it started to stink. He had thrown it away, but not without calling Mary to tell her what had happened. Mary had wanted to come to the meeting to find out if anyone knew what was going on. Her plan was to catch the train home afterwards, even if the old house was habitable; she felt she had moved on. She didn’t plan to spend a single night there before the house sold.
Mickey Lipton-Miller was there, and not happy. The cards, the blog, the graffiti and nasty pranks, it was a wind-up, and somebody needed to get it sorted. Thanks be to God, his Aston hadn’t been parked in the street when the cars were keyed… If there was time, he was planning to hit his club afterwards for a G and T and a game of snooker. But work came first. And he had a theory about the bastard who was responsible for all this.
The woman who ran the Neighbourhood Watch stood and put her hand to her mouth while making a harrumphing cough – evidently this was her way of calling the room to order. A pool of silence began in the seats closest to her and then spread until the church hall was quiet, broken only by a mobile phone playing the opening bars of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ and then abruptly cutting out.
