On the basis that Father George was a priest and Wilko was, well, who really knew what Wilko was, but he was no fool, Lee told his drinking companions everything about the Boy with the Nosebleed case.

  ‘It’s probably got fuck all – sorry, Father …’

  ‘Oh, please don’t worry!’

  ‘Nothing to do with this dead baby, but you know once you’ve been in The Job it comes hard sometimes not to pass intel like this on,’ Lee said. ‘Mumtaz is all for keeping this close because of her young clients but I’m not happy. I mean, it is probably nothing …’

  ‘You sound as if you’re trying to convince yourself as well as us,’ Father George said.

  Lee smiled. ‘I dunno, to be honest, Father. I don’t do all this evil and ghosts and stuff you guys and Mumtaz do. I can’t handle all that. It’s just that …’

  ‘If there’s been something out of the ordinary going on around a crime scene, we need to know about it,’ Wilko said. He frowned. ‘These boys said this kid had blood on his face?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Hands?’

  ‘Not really sure,’ Lee said. ‘By that I mean, they aren’t. The whole encounter was a glance, not much more. Like I said, there was some old bloke at the end of the corridor looking at what the kid was doing. There was some blood down his front …’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘On the face of it, sounds like possible child abuse to me,’ Father George said. ‘Although one must be wary of pointing the finger wrongly in such cases.’

  ‘Part of the reason why we’re going so easy,’ Lee said.

  ‘George, look where this is,’ Wilko said.

  The two men locked eyes for a moment and then the priest said, ‘Well, yes …’

  ‘I’ll get another round in,’ Lee said as he got up to go to the bar. ‘Same again?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Lee himself was, after a long-term love affair with alcohol, teetotal and so ‘his’ would just be a Diet Pepsi. He also knew that his two companions probably needed some time alone. And he was right.

  ‘As soon as you told me about the baby, I feared the worst,’ Father George said to Wilko.

  ‘That house in Carter Court goes way back,’ Wilko said.

  ‘He never lived there though, did he?’

  Wilko shook his head. ‘Not that I know of,’ he said. ‘But I think it’s safe to say he practised in the cathedral.’

  ‘He was chancellor.’

  ‘The old queen must’ve known he’d carry on when she appointed him.’

  ‘Elizabeth the First was always fascinated by the Dark Arts.’

  ‘It’s an origin and a meeting point for so much,’ Wilko said. ‘It is London! It’s always been the epicentre and now it’s becoming the focus again!’

  ‘Focus for what?’

  Lee put their drinks on the table and sat down.

  Wilko looked at George and then at Lee and said, ‘I dunno for sure where you stand on the future of the United Kingdom, Lee …’

  ‘Seriously?’ Lee shook his head. ‘I think we have to see how it goes after we leave Europe.’

  The United Kingdom had voted to leave the European Union back in 2016. Now, on the eve of departure, which was due to take place in January 2020, prophets of both doom and the inauguration of a new British Empire were thick on the ground. Lee Arnold was neither, although he had voted to remain inside the bloc.

  ‘If you had to take a punt?’ Wilko asked.

  Lee drank and then said, ‘Shitshow.’

  The other two men nodded.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The father is besotted with the boy. Only son, isn’t it …’

  Mumtaz was familiar with what her father was saying. She’d been to school with the vast Rahman family – eight girls and one very spoilt, very fat brother doted on by his parents and his sisters.

  ‘But Baba,’ she said to her father, ‘surely that means that if Habib has done something wrong his father will forgive him?’

  ‘Of course!’ Baharat Huq said. ‘But it’s dishonourable what the boy did. Selling on the street like a tinker! That much I do know, even if that’s the limit of it! Farooqi is a pharmacist, a man of substance! Habib knows this! He knows that people will point at his dad and say, “There goes the pharmacist who can’t control his family!” You know this.’

  ‘Do I? Do I really?’ Mumtaz said.

  Her father sighed. ‘I am not one to say you should stay in your own community all the time,’ he said. ‘You know that is not me, but sometimes I think maybe you do spend too much time …’

  ‘Baba, I am not about to tell the world about the pharmacist Farooqi!’ Mumtaz cut in. ‘But you know the boys should have told what they saw to the police. I don’t feel good about—’

  ‘I don’t want to know! What they saw is not for me to know!’ her father said. ‘I will be judged when I die but don’t give me more worries now! There will be a simple explanation, whatever it was that happened, there will.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ she said. ‘You know a baby was found dead in St Paul’s Churchyard?’

  ‘And that has what to do with Habib and Lawrence? Is that where you are investigating?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘They are good boys! Lawrence is a bit of a dreamer but …’

  ‘I’m not saying a dead baby has anything to do with the boys,’ Mumtaz said. ‘I don’t think that for a moment. But I am uneasy, Baba.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Mumtaz knew that the only reason she could talk to her father so easily was because she wasn’t with him. On the phone and therefore at a remove from his piercing gaze, it was simpler somehow. And she didn’t really know what she was talking about.

  ‘I’m not entirely sure,’ she said. ‘All I can say is that it’s odd. The case itself, the area the incident happened in …’

  ‘Oh, tell me no more!’ Baharat Huq said. ‘You must talk to Lee about these things!’

  ‘I know, but …’

  ‘He is a good man, he cares for you.’

  ‘We’re very different, Baba,’ she said. ‘It’s not straightforward.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think it is,’ he said. ‘He would do anything for you, that man.’

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘No,’ her father said. ‘Listen to your father like a good girl! I have never in my whole life known things to be so bad in the world as they are now. And I lived through Partition. The world burns and floods because of the global warming and still the politicians and the captains of industry do bugger all. In twenty years’ time we will all burn to a crisp! Then the Brexit rubbish! Food shortages to come! Everyone at each other’s throats! Silly people going back into the past to Empire time and suchlike!’

  ‘I know this, yes …’

  ‘Yes, so we must stick together,’ Baharat said. ‘If someone cares for you, and you care for them, you must persist. There are so many dangers now. I don’t know what’s happening to this world, but it is not good and I don’t understand any more.’

  He had never been pessimistic and Mumtaz hated the way he had become so over the years. And if she were honest, she felt that way too. The world was dangerous yes, it always had been, but there was something toxic in the way that some responded to this now. It was as if empathy, particularly for those deemed ‘other’ in some way, was dying.

  ‘I don’t often talk about being Jewish,’ Father George said. ‘I changed my religion a long time ago. But I remain ethnically Jewish and so I remain sensitive to anti-Semitism.’

  One of Lee Arnold’s grandfathers had been Jewish. Like a lot of East Enders his background was tangled and ethnically mixed.

  ‘I know a few rabbis and they all say the same thing,’ George continued. ‘They’ve never seen so much anti-Semitism in their lifetimes. It’s not all about Palestine. There’s a whole, home-grown …’

  ‘Little Englander?’

  ‘More’n that,’ Wilko said.

  ‘What, you mean the “bring back the Empire” stuff?’ Lee asked.

  ‘More’n that,’ Wilko said.

  ‘Like what?’

  Wilko took a deep breath and said, ‘You know Hitler wanted to make Germany what he called “racially pure”? And you know that more recently the Serbs …’

  ‘Ethnic cleansing?’ Lee said. ‘Here? No, you’re shitting me!’

  ‘You think we’re immune to such excesses?’ George said. ‘Lee, don’t fall into English exceptionalism. We can do these things, same as any other nation. Look at all this anti-immigrant stuff that gets peddled these days.’

  ‘That’s a long way from …’

  ‘Lee,’ Father George said, ‘I don’t expect you to accept this but Wilko and myself, we have been noticing things for some time.’

  ‘Racism?’

  ‘Sort of,’ George said. ‘Well, yes, but we’ve been picking up an undercurrent of ethnic myths …’

  Lee shrugged. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like the idea of the once and future English king.’

  ‘Not Arthur, before you accuse us of getting all Hollywood. No, much older than that, linked to the pre-Roman invasion of the country. A notion of the survival of a purely English race.’

  ‘So bollocks,’ Lee said.

  ‘Bollocks can be dangerous,’ Wilko said. ‘If you know what I mean. What we’re talking about are people on the far right of Hitler. They’re few, as far we can tell, but they are fanatical and they do believe that they are the genuine real-deal original Brits. They’re also very likely to be manipulated by less delusional, more political, actors.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lee asked.

  ‘I mean they ain’t got no limits, this bunch,’ Wilko said. ‘Which means that if more conventional right-wing actors want something really out-there done, then look no further.’

  ‘And then there’s the occult …’ George said.

  Lee raised a hand. ‘Hang on! Hang on! If you’re gonna go all weird on my arse then I’m gonna need a fag!’

  The three men got to their feet and, drinks in hands, they went outside.

  ‘Wilko, I’ve known you a lot of years,’ Lee Arnold said. ‘And you’ve always been interested in this stuff. I remember you telling me about the Highgate Vampire when I first met you. Where’s your proof for this?’

  In the early 1970s alleged vampires had been apparently ‘sighted’ in north London’s Highgate cemetery. It had of course turned out to be a hoax, but a lot of people had really believed that the undead walked abroad in the cemetery at the time. To be fair Wilko, a child at the time, hadn’t – but the case had left him with a ‘nose’ for the occult, or so he liked to tell people.

  ‘Where do you think?’ Wilko said.

  ‘Wilko and I have identified troubling sites on the Internet,’ George said.

  Lee laughed. ‘Mate …’

  ‘You may scoff, Lee,’ George continued. ‘But we’re not talking about websites you can just go online and stumble across.’

  ‘Oh.’

  The priest meant the so-called ‘Dark Web’, where there existed portals into the netherworld of extremism of all stripes, including misogyny, pornography, religious mania and racism. Lee knew that the police monitored activity on it to some extent, but he wouldn’t have pegged old Wilko as a computer-literate adept.

  George, in part, answered his question. ‘Wilko keeps his ear to the ground.’

  ‘It’s amazing what some of them kids coming into The Job from university can do these days,’ Wilko said as he drew heavily on his fag.

  ‘And then there’s me,’ George said.

  Lee, also dragging hard on a fag, looked at the priest.

  ‘Deliverance work is, shall we say, throwing up some unusual cases these days,’ he said.

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like those whose peaceful existences have been disturbed by the invocation of toxic entities, by those who would do them harm.’

  ‘And in English?’ Lee said. Father George sounded like Mumtaz in full-on psychologist flow.

  ‘Some of my black parishioners have been frightened out of their wits, and threatened by, events in their homes they cannot explain,’ he said. ‘And while I have no doubt that many entities beyond the grave can be horrifically racist, I also have no doubt that those who are invoking these forces are racist too.’

  ‘So the spirit of Oswald Mosley sent to do a bit of poltergeist work by the BNP family next door?’

  Father George smiled. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘And maybe, something like this murdered mixed-race baby too …’

  EIGHT

  ‘What did Brown say about the tunnels?’ Wilko asked Jordan Whittington when he came on shift the next morning.

  Jordan was early and had bowled into the canteen to get his morning coffee when he’d come across the older man. Sitting down opposite him he said, ‘Not much. To be honest though I think it’s Father George who’s wound him up the most.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, come on Wilko,’ Jordan said. ‘All that exorcism stuff is a bit much. If Father George’s parishioners have got a beef with their neighbours then they can make a complaint to us.’

  ‘You know it’s not that easy,’ Wilko said.

  ‘It is!’

  Wilko sat back in his chair. ‘Listen Jordan,’ he said. ‘I know everyone here thinks I’m a bit of a weirdo. To your credit you’ve always given me a listen …’

  ‘You know so much about London,’ Jordan said. ‘It’s like sort of a secret history. And I do think you’ve got a point about this baby. There is something weird about how it was killed. But I don’t get this fear you have, mate. I don’t. I think that maybe you’re reading things into stuff that isn’t there.’

  ‘Think I’m a tinfoil-helmet merchant.’

  ‘No! But you have to admit it is all a bit conspiracy-theoried up. I know there’s been a lot of that lately, given the current climate …’

  Wilko sighed. Then he wrote something down on a piece of paper in his notebook and handed it to Jordan.

  ‘Be round my place when you get off later,’ he said. ‘Got something to show you. I’ll even make you a spot of tea.’

  ‘This is insane,’ Habib Farooqi said to his best mate Lawrence. ‘You can’t nick off your mum!’

  They were outside the school. Loz was smoking a fag while Habib was shoving handfuls of chocolate barfi into his mouth.

  ‘Your mum’s going to go proper mental if she’s got no money!’ Habib said.

  ‘I know!’

  ‘And what about your little brothers? What if your mum’s got nothing for tea? How much did you take?’

  ‘A ton.’

  ‘Hundred quid?’ Habib shook his head.

  ‘Kym wants a grand,’ Loz said. ‘Me mum had just got her child benefit, innit.’

  ‘Shit, Loz!’

  ‘Can’t we go back to selling that cream again?’ Loz asked. ‘I mean we never done nothing wrong. It was just we saw that boy …’

  Habib still had some of the contentious capsaicin cream. But that wasn’t the point.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘But man, I’m a Samsung Galaxy and another grand down.’

  Then Habib saw something, or rather someone …

  Lee had gone straight from his flat to his obbo job in Chigwell, leaving Mumtaz in charge of the office on Green Street. Nobody, or almost nobody, was expected to call, but she had paperwork to catch up on.

  It was just gone midday when Mumtaz’s mobile rang.

  ‘Is that Marian?’ a familiar female voice asked.

  ‘Yes?’

  It could only be Danielle.

  ‘It’s Danielle,’ she confirmed. ‘You know, from …’

  ‘Of course,’ Mumtaz said.

  ‘Just wondering if you’re gonna be around today or …’

  Mumtaz had wondered that herself. Given that Arthur Hobbs had been hostile, she had thought she might give EC4 a rest. But then there was still the issue of the boy …

  ‘I met that old man, Mr Hobbs, this morning,’ Danielle said. ‘I’m going round his house this afternoon. I thought you might like to know.’

  Had Mumtaz said, albeit inadvertently, anything that might have made Danielle think she was afraid for someone in that house? She couldn’t think of anything.

  ‘Why’s he invited …?’

  ‘He seems to like me,’ Danielle said. ‘I s’pose we’re a bit similar in that neither of us is posh. Not like most of them round here.’

  ‘Yes, but why has he invited you?’ Mumtaz repeated.

  ‘He asked me before,’ she said. ‘Said we could have a cup of tea together, look round the old bits of his house. I’m so bored …’

  Mumtaz felt the hairs on her arms stand up. This was making her anxious even though she didn’t know exactly why. After all, why shouldn’t an elderly man invite a young woman into his historically unique house? Except that Danielle wasn’t interested in history, she was merely a bored young woman who was pregnant – and vulnerable.

  She said, ‘I’ve serious doubts whether Mr Hobbs will allow me to come with you.’

  ‘No, he won’t,’ Danielle said.

  ‘But maybe I’ll take the Tube over,’ Mumtaz began. ‘To be on the spot … For you …’

  ‘For me?’ Danielle laughed. ‘What, you think he might kidnap me or something? I could probably get him down with one punch!’

  ‘No, I …’ But she wondered. Why was Hobbs interested in Danielle and how had he managed to work out that Mumtaz wasn’t who she claimed to be? Had she maybe come across him before? Professionally? Had that one small slip of the tongue she’d made in the pub given her away? And why did the old man unnerve her so much? She had no actual proof that it had been Arthur Hobbs who had silently terrorised Loz and Habib when that bloodied boy had answered the door to them. It was very likely to have been him, but … She’d not, so far, seen a blond boy, like the one Habib had described to her on the streets of EC4 – but then maybe he was still in that house …