Brand New Friend Page 5

  He asked the taxi driver to wait, then went up to the house and rang the bell. He was not surprised when there was no answer. He tried the burner again for form’s sake.

  As he came out a journalist from the pack shouted to him. ‘Are you the landlord?’ That got a laugh from some of the others who had recognised him. One or two shouted questions about Mark but he just waved and said nothing. He kept his distance, thought how uncomfortable it would be to be the real object of the journalists’ pursuit, but knew he’d be the same if he were with them.

  He got back in the taxi and asked to be taken to the Acorn Community Garden. It was in Wortley or perhaps it was Armley. It wasn’t an area he knew, and he didn’t see any familiar landmarks. When the taxi driver stopped he asked her to wait again and got out.

  In the daylight he could see the garden was surrounded by red brick terraces. He saw three men huddled in the lane that ran along the left side of the garden. They were smoking. One of them was dressed in a green fleece and for a moment he thought it was Mark, but as he got nearer he saw it was a much younger man. He was wearing cargoes and sturdy boots, as if he had come here expecting to work.

  Paolo asked the men if they’d seen Mark and they shook their heads. They didn’t seem wary of him, so he took their answer at face value. There was nothing else he could do here. He walked back to the taxi.

  The fleece. Sid was wearing a fleece from the garden but Mark said he hadn’t seen Sid for decades. Mark must think Paolo was stupid. Of course it was theoretically possible he’d bought the fleece in a charity shop, or been given it by a random other person, but only in the same way it was possible that the sun would not rise in the morning.

  Would Mark have recognised Sid if he hadn’t seen him recently? The old clothes, the pallor of the corpse, the eerie light of the lamps, all would have made it hard. Paolo had even known family members identify the wrong body after a time apart. But Mark had apparently known Sid immediately. Perhaps Mark was laughing at Paolo now and had been all along.

  He was about to get in the taxi, had reached for the door handle, when he heard a shout.

  ‘What the fuck do you want?’ He heard heavy steps coming up behind him fast. Laboured breathing. He turned swiftly, adrenaline coursing through him, flexing his knees, ready to attack or to get in the taxi and lock it.

  He saw a face, red and sweaty, eyes with pupils dilated, teeth bared. In what could loosely be called a smile.

  ‘Freddie,’ he said.

  13

  Freddie immediately commandeered Paolo’s taxi and directed the driver to Whitelocks. He sat in the front beside her, chatting all the way about a recent murder in the city and policing of city-centre bars. That was Freddie, never off duty. The driver recognised his name and seemed happy to humour him.

  Whitelocks ran the length of a narrow alley in the heart of the city centre, a traditional pub with a tiled bar, stained glass in the windows and hand-pulled beers. Paolo was still kidding himself that he might get back to Suffolk tonight but experience told him that there was no such thing as a ‘quick pint’ with Freddie.

  He had met Freddie Stone when they were both BBC journalism trainees in London. They were about as different as you could get. Paolo couldn’t wait to head back to the Middle East. Freddie was born in Leeds and considered life outside Yorkshire a painful exile. They somehow clicked when Paolo said he’d been at university in Leeds.

  Freddie left the BBC to become a crime reporter for the Yorkshire Post. He’d always liked writing more than broadcasting and he preferred a measure of freedom which broadcasting rules on impartiality would not allow. Paolo couldn’t remember the last time they’d spoken but with Freddie it was easy to pick up where you left off.

  Freddie told him he had left the Yorkshire Post and gone freelance. Paolo wasn’t surprised. Freddie was from another era. The days when being a crime reporter meant hanging round in pubs with off-duty cops. Press conferences and statements and on-the-record briefings were an interruption to the real business. Their only merit was to find out what lies the brass were telling the public and to work out why. Freddie would rather be dead than put a press release in the paper unquestioned. Now that was much of what a local journalist did.

  ‘There are online news sites now, where you can upload your own press release. Cut out the middleman.’ He shook his head mournfully.

  Paolo got this with virtually every journalist he spoke to. It still amazed him that he was in the gilded bubble. He knew he’d had a lucky break. He’d been writing features aimed at ex-pats for an English-language newspaper in Cairo when a senior PLO official came to town and the person who was supposed to interview him was sick. Paolo was available, he understood the political context and his Arabic was good so he was sent. The official made an unguarded remark, the story got international attention, and Paolo found himself suddenly getting calls from the BBC World Service staff in Cairo. He did bits of work for them, which eventually led to him being taken on as a trainee. It was the opportunity he needed. With his ordinary background he doubted he’d have got taken on otherwise. And he certainly wouldn’t today.

  The irony was, back in the eighties, journalists ranked just above estate agents in reputation. Now, everyone wanted to be a journalist. Bright graduates would enslave themselves in unpaid internships for the privilege of making a columnist’s coffee or writing their children’s birthday cards (or if they were ‘lucky’, writing their column, uncredited and unpaid), all in the hope of getting the golden ticket. At least Tilda was in control of her work, even if she wasn’t making much more than them.

  ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ said Freddie. ‘Up at the garden.’

  Paolo’s fight-or-flight reaction was more acute than it needed to be, that was true. In those last months in Cairo he’d felt properly afraid for the first time in his career. His role as correspondent meant covering mainly news, politics and foreign policy. The occasional piece on local culture for From Our Own Correspondent.

  The Arab Spring and the dark events of its aftermath had meant he came closer to violence than he had before. And what happened felt more personal because Cairo was their home. That period had been so intense. Hope, fear, disappointment. Danger.

  He laughed it off in front of Freddie. ‘It was you I was worried for. Running like that, you could have had a heart attack.’

  Freddie had the face of a drinker and the belly to match. It led Paolo to reflect that you didn’t see beer bellies like you used to. People were bigger but they were big all over. Even in this, Freddie was old school.

  ‘So, what were you after?’ asked Freddie. He had this blunt northerner shtick going that wasn’t entirely show.

  ‘Same as you, I should imagine.’

  ‘I heard you were at the press conference,’ said Freddie.

  ‘How do you know that already?’

  ‘I’m not on the scrapheap yet.’

  ‘DS Afzal?’

  ‘Come on! I don’t deal with anyone below Superintendent.’

  Afzal must have told the Senior Investigating Officer that Paolo was at the crime scene. No doubt they were considering the implications.

  ‘Then you must know by now, a friend of mine is mixed up in this.’

  ‘You’re still calling him a friend?’

  ‘Force of habit I suppose.’

  ‘I’m not going to judge. I’ve told enough lies in my time. Only to get a story, though. I haven’t lied to my friends, or to myself, and he must have been doing quite a bit of both, I reckon.’

  ‘You’re sounding almost wise,’ said Paolo. ‘Must be the ale talking.’

  Freddie finished his pint and gestured at the guy behind the bar who indicated he would bring a pint over. The pub wasn’t exactly overrun at that hour, but still it suggested Freddie was well known here.

  ‘They’ve got a body and no ID,’ said Freddie.

  ‘Is Mark a suspect?’

  ‘Well if he’s not he bloody should be.’

 
‘But they’ve nothing specific.’

  ‘Forensics will need time to get to work. DNA might not help in a public place like that. Of course your mate will have handled the tools there, and so will a lot of other people.’

  ‘Tools?’

  ‘They’re thinking maybe a pruning knife. I don’t know. Gardening’s not really my thing.’

  ‘Nor me,’ said Paolo.

  ‘Whoever did it must have had blood on them.’

  Freddie went quiet. Paolo knew he was waiting for him to trade, although he hadn’t told him anything he couldn’t have worked out for himself. He said, ‘Know anything about the anti-fracking protests up at Threapton?’

  ‘Not much. Why?’

  ‘I’ve heard Mark might be involved.’

  ‘I’ve not been up there myself. I’ve seen the media coverage, local news and so on.’

  ‘How do the police feel about it?’

  ‘I’m not as well connected with the bobbies as I used to be. And the higher-ups are more guarded. Everyone’s a PR professional now.’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘It’s not like the old days when you could have a few pints with the rank and file and find out everything you needed to know. They’re as likely to go the gym as the pub these days.’

  ‘They must like it, don’t they? Overtime and all?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Freddie. ‘Times have changed. Some will, but others are concerned about fracking. Then they’ve been radicalised by all these cuts. Seeing their jobs done by private security has made them a bit more sympathetic than they used to be. And a lot of them remember the Miners’ Strike.’ He chuckled. ‘Including a few who weren’t even born. They’ve imbibed it with their mother’s milk, whichever side their family was on.’

  ‘I can’t help wondering if it was someone from the police who tipped off the media. What if a police officer saw him at the fracking site and recognised him?’

  ‘Don’t be daft! All his contemporaries will have done their thirty years. There might be some in management, but most will be long gone.’

  Freddie had finished his pint and was looking askance at Paolo’s untouched mineral water. Paolo gestured at the guy behind the bar just as Freddie had done and two pints duly arrived.

  ‘Cheers,’ said Paolo, and took a sip, trying to remember the last time he’d drunk beer.

  ‘You got anything else?’ said Freddie. Paolo didn’t bother to say he’d given him Threapton. He guessed political intrigue wasn’t his thing. Freddie was more of a cops-and-robbers kind of guy.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I suppose you’re saving it for yourself.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Course you are! You’ve never been a desk-jockey. You’re like me, can’t resist the smell of a story.’

  ‘I’ve had my share of drama. I’m enjoying writing, reflecting, doing in-depth analysis...’ He was sure he meant the words but they sounded hollow in the face of Freddie’s scepticism. ‘How’s freelancing?’

  ‘Things are tight right now. I’ve even tried ghostwriting, but the advances are tiny. Sometimes I work directly with clients, for a fee. You know, the retired Chief Super who wants to write his memoirs. Can’t believe that no one will be interested, unless he was there for a high-profile case, and even then probably not if there’s nothing new. It’s better when they know their limits and are happy to produce a nice limited-edition hardback for the grandkids.’ But he said it through gritted teeth. Freddie needed an audience as much as they did.

  ‘So where’s your friend Mark now?’ asked Freddie.

  ‘I don’t know. You don’t think he’s been arrested?’

  ‘I’d have heard,’ said Freddie confidently. ‘I wonder what he’s up to. Do you think he did it?’

  ‘What do I know?’

  ‘Well we’ll have to find out, won’t we?’ said Freddie. ‘You never know, maybe when all this is over, he might want to write a book.’

  14

  Paolo was popular. He had friends everywhere. He had, in no particular order, going-to-gig friends, political friends, friends he could score off, hall friends, course friends, Arabic Society friends, friends he’d met on the stairs at house parties, friends of all those other friends, and friends who he didn’t even know how he knew them, he just did.

  Paolo had so many friends he didn’t concern himself with who he was going to share a house with next year. With so many friends, it was bound to fall into place. Then at some point it dawned on him that everyone else had, as if by magic, fallen into groups of four or five or eight. Groups that, once formed, had a sense of mystical inevitability about them. As if the participants, from the day of their birth in Kettering or Liverpool or Windsor, to parents with no obvious common traits, were destined to live together. And Paolo?

  Paolo didn’t have anyone to live with.

  Eventually he discussed it with a mate called Dudley. His real name was Dhanesh Gupta but everyone called him Dudley, pronouncing it with an exaggerated West Midlands mournfulness, because that was all he ever talked about. His only close friends in Leeds were two women students, one a first year and one a second, who he went to school with in Dudley. He went home every weekend to see his girlfriend Lucy, who still lived in Dudley. Otherwise, he mostly stayed in his room and studied so he could take off as many Fridays as possible and set off late Thursday for Dudley.

  Dudley didn’t have anyone to live with either and suggested they get a place together.

  ‘I thought you’d want to share with your Dudley friends.’

  ‘Anita’s moving in with her boyfriend and Jo’s going to France next year.’

  ‘Sounds good, but there aren’t many places for two people. Maybe we can team up with someone else.’

  The only time Dudley went out was to gigs and he and Paolo often went together. That night they were waiting for the Go-Betweens to come on at the Warehouse. Paolo didn’t much like the Go-Betweens but he owed Dudley one as he’d agreed to come with him to The Blue Aeroplanes.

  Paolo had mentioned the gig to Claire on Saturday but she’d been non-committal. He’d bumped into her in Headingley when he was on his way to see a friend in Lupton Flats. (Of course he hadn’t gone there hoping to catch a glimpse of Isabel, she wasn’t even in the same block!) Claire was running a stall outside Safeway with leaflets and a petition against testing of cosmetics on animals for the city group. Mark was with her. He could tell she was hoping he’d come to help and looked annoyed as he made it clear he wasn’t stopping.

  Mark wasn’t listening, he was talking earnestly to a smartly dressed woman about ethical alternatives to her preferred Lancôme foundation, as if he were on the cosmetics counter in a department store. It was hardly the stuff of revolution. Paolo had been trying to resign from the committee ever since he realised that he had no chance with the peroxide-haired woman but Claire said they had yet to find a replacement.

  Dudley was leaning against a wall in the Warehouse between the entrance and the bar. Paolo kept his eyes open for people he knew. Dudley looked fixedly into his pint. Paolo was thinking about another drink (Dudley had already said he was pacing himself, he had a nine o’clock lecture the next morning, and Dudley never missed lectures). He was preparing to push through the bodies to the bar, maybe buying two pints so he wouldn’t have to repeat the experience any time soon, when he saw Claire. Claire and Isabel.

  Claire was drunk. She waved at him enthusiastically, quite unlike her usual perfunctory acknowledgement, and pushed through the crowd towards him.

  ‘This is my friend Isabel,’ she said. It occurred to him that while Isabel had occupied his almost-every waking thought since he first saw her at the benefit gig, she probably hadn’t even noticed him.

  ‘We met at the paternoster lift in the Roger Stevens building. I was too scared to get on. I thought if you didn’t get off you went round the top and would be upside-down!’

  ‘Really,’ said Paolo. ‘No one’s ever said that before.’

  Claire was oblivious
. ‘So we got in and then on the right floor she took my hand and lifted me off. She’s so cool.’ Claire took Isabel’s hand now, as if to demonstrate.

  Isabel’s sleeve fell back and Paolo saw the scars on her wrist, highlighted by the pale skin. He couldn’t see the underside, the veins, whether she had cut there as well. He thought of that delicate unseen place, of her pulse, imagined it under his lips.

  ‘We’re going to share a house!’ said Claire. She was like a toddler who had drunk too much orange squash. He wondered if she’d been on more than just Murphy’s but remembered he had got into a circuitous argument with her at a party once when she’d expressed her disapproval of dope because it was a cash crop. She’d asked him plaintively how he could smoke joints but not drink Nescafé, at which point, naturally, he’d just giggled.

  ‘So you’ve found a place?’ asked Paolo.

  Claire’s face fell. ‘Not yet.’

  Isabel hadn’t spoken. Her face expressed nothing. Her pale skin and fair hair seemed almost translucent in that light. He wasn’t sure if she was irritated or flattered or embarrassed by Claire. She didn’t look at him. She was barely in the room. How had Claire – Claire – managed to ensnare this goddess?

  The band was coming out. Abruptly, Isabel turned and made her way to the front of the crowd. Claire shrugged and followed her.

  Dudley liked to stand at the back, nursing his pint like a middle-aged dad. He hadn’t joined in the conversation or shown much interest in Claire or Isabel. But now he said, ‘I suppose we could move in with them.’

  Claire came to his room in halls a couple of nights later. She needed a cheque signatory for the city animal rights group and he was the easiest to get hold of.

  ‘We need money for soya milk,’ she said. ‘At the community centre they only supply cow’s milk and not everyone likes black tea. Or coffee.’

  He nodded as if he too considered this a matter of grave concern. For once he was glad she had come to him. It would give him a chance to ask.