Then, about a month after that, disaster. Every single person in the street got a fresh postcard of their own front door, with nothing written on the back except a short URL. Mill typed in the address and sure enough the blog was back up, hosted on a new platform and with all the content that had been there before – only now it was worse. The same photos were there, but they had been defaced by digital graffiti. Somebody had written swear words across the pictures; not all the pictures, just some of them; about one in three. The swear words focused on very simple, very direct abuse: ‘Rich cunts’, ‘Wankers’, ‘Arsehole’, ‘Tory scum’, ‘Kill the rich’, and so on.
So this should have been a nightmare for Mill. Having gone away, the problem had now un-gone away. That should have been a perfect formula to produce the gloom that Mill, with his head in his hands, looked as if he was feeling. But that wasn’t what he really felt, not at all. What Mill mainly felt was curious. Most police work is routine. Mill didn’t complain about that since the job was the job; also, when the work wasn’t routine, and you didn’t know exactly what had happened, you still in some sense knew what had happened. If some drug-dealing toerag bled to death on an estate stairwell, even if you didn’t know who’d done it, you still knew who’d done it: some other drug-dealing toerag. Kosovan pimp shot outside a kebab shop, ditto. This case was not like that, and though the anthropology of the station prevented him from saying so, he was pleased it was up and running again. He had spent about forty-five minutes looking through the new material on the site, and his main feeling now was happy curiosity, with a twinge of something else. The new material felt, seemed, somehow different.
Taking the top folder down off the stack in front of him, Mill tried to focus on what it was about the new stuff that was hitting a fresh note. Talking it through with the DC who’d been helping him with the first wave of enquiries, Mill had reached a conclusion.
‘It could be an arty thing,’ said the DC. ‘You know, a performance. Something people are supposed to look at. To make them think, you know, stuff.’
He gave Mill a glance which clearly said: you should know, more your sort of thing than mine.
‘It doesn’t seem like that, though, does it?’ said Mill. ‘The photos are a bit shit, as opposed to seeming a bit shit but then when you look at them they’re actually quite good so it’s sort of art. You know that Fatboy Slim video, “Praise You”, where they’re dancing in a mall, really rubbish dancing, then when you look closely, you can see they’re really good dancers pretending to be crap ones? Well, not like that. This is bad photography which when you look closely looks more like bad photography.’
‘But he’s also done nothing violent. He doesn’t seem to single out individuals. It’s more about the houses.’
‘Yes – the houses and the place. It’s somewhere he knows well. And it feels like a he. A bloke. It’s a bit obsessive. A tiny bit OCD or Asperger’s. Going over the same thing over and over. He has feelings about the place, he knows it well. He walks or has walked past these houses over and over again. He’s boiling over with what he wants to say to the people in the houses. So, yes, it’s local. He’s local.’
And that was where they had left it. But now there was a whole load of new material, much darker and more abusive. Mill rummaged through the pile of photos and found the list of Pepys Road inhabitants he and the DC had made when they’d been working on the case, a few weeks before.
His mobile rang. Janie. Mill was pleased and also annoyed – why did his girlfriend always, but always, ring when he was in the station house?
‘I can’t talk.’
‘I know but I’m in Sainsbury’s, I want to do that kale soup I was talking about, the one with chorizo and garlic, but it’s got potato in it, are you still doing that low-carb thing?’
Janie was a serious cook and Mill, as he got closer to thirty, was starting to think about maintaining his weight. Being boyish was not always easy for a detective inspector, but it was better than being fat.
‘That’s correct.’
‘Is this because you couldn’t fit in those jeans? I told you, they’re Japanese, and a Japanese thirty is like an English twenty-six. You’re skinnier than you were when we met.’
They had been shopping at the weekend and Mill had had a denim crisis.
‘I can’t confirm that.’
‘Well, I’m going to make it anyway, there’s about a hundred grams of potato in the whole recipe. So long fatso, love you,’ said Janie and hung up. Mill tried to keep his face straight while he broke the connection, and didn’t quite succeed. Janie knew him too well.
Yes – and that was the thought. Whoever was behind We Want What You Have knew the street well or at least had strong feelings about it. He looked again at the list of names and opened up his web browser again to the new blog page. He scrolled through the list of names and cross-checked with the graffiti that had suddenly sprung up.
Mill’s notes said:
‘51 Pepys Road: Roger and Arabella Yount, two small children: banker and housewife, 40 and 37.’
Written across the top was ‘Tory cunts’. It was a handy generic insult for well-off people who worked in the City, and so yes, that might have been written by someone who knew them. Or it might have been a lucky guess.
‘42 Pepys Road: Petunia Howe, 82, widow, lives on her own.’
That had been defaced by ‘Wanker’. And that seemed odd. It wasn’t a word you’d use for a geriatric single woman, not if you were trying to be personally abusive. And if you weren’t trying to be personally abusive, what was the point of personal insults?
‘68 Pepys Road: Ahmed and Rohinka Kamal, 36 and 32, newsagent and his wife, two small children, shop downstairs living quarters upstairs.’
This had the word ‘Bell-end’. Now that was a very good insult, one of Mill’s favourites, but again, what had it to do with the Kamals? He had dropped into their shop to ask if they had been getting the cards – he had suspected that, since they lived in a shop and not a posh house, they might not. But they had, and had kept them, and were polite and helpful, so much so that he had only been able to get out of there after a cup of tea and two insanely sweet, highly transgressive gulab jamuns. No, the Kamals could not be described as a bell-end.
46 Pepys Road, Mrs Trimble and her son Alan, 58 and 30, divorced housewife and son an IT consultant. Single word ‘Plonkers’. Not a perfect fit but not 100 per cent off.
Ah, here it was. 27 Pepys Road. Mickey Lipton-Miller, agent and factotum for a Premiership football club; Mill hadn’t spoken to him but he knew he was the owner. The house was lived in by Patrick Kamo, 48, policeman from Senegal and his son Freddy, 17, a footballer. The graffito daubed over the picture of their front door said ‘Fat tossers’.
Mill and the DC together had done that interview, for the unlofty motive that they both wanted to meet Freddy Kamo. He had been very nice, almost speechless with shy politeness, and his dad was obviously a copper of the old school. He’d fit right in at the station. It had been interesting. But no sane person could call Patrick or Freddy Kamo fat. Something had changed. Whoever was behind We Want What You Have either didn’t know anything about the inhabitants of Pepys Road, or didn’t care.
E
ven before her mother had died, Mary had been dreading the funeral. The last weeks of Petunia’s life were the longest sustained period they had spent together since Mary’s childhood. That now seemed a terrible fact, and one which bore down heavily on her, with the weight of the trips to London she could have made, the weekend visits her mother could have spent in Essex, the holidays they could have invited her to join. A time would come when Mary would see things more in balance, and would remember all the reasons, the good reasons, why none of that had happened; but at the moment what she mainly felt was guilt for all the things she hadn’t done. Balancing that guilt was the time she had spent with her mother when she was dying, the long hard lonely days and longer lonelier harder nights. It had been a journey she had taken on her own. That was why she dreaded the funeral, a public acting out of her mother’s death, which, deep inside, she felt belonged only to her. It was her loss alone. It wasn’t really anything to do with all these other people.
And now here she was at Putney crematorium. Petunia’s will had been surprisingly specific: no church burial, just a cremation at Putney, ashes to be interred with Albert’s. Mary could remember her mother saying that Putney was the nicest of the London crematoria, but she hadn’t thought it had any practical bearing. Now she knew it hadn’t been a chance remark. Petunia must have been there a few
times before. Mary would have preferred a church, where good things happened to people as well as bad, where weddings and christenings had soaked into the walls over the years to counteract the effects of all the funerals. There was none of that with a crematorium, which was only there for one reason. But her mother had been right, this was a calming place: a low red-brick building with a half-circular driveway and a well-tended garden beyond; much nicer than the place in Wimbledon where they had burned her father’s body. You didn’t notice the crematorium’s chimney. The driveway was designed to let the cortèges come and go efficiently.
The late May afternoon was bright and clear, and it was warm, which was jarring; her father’s funeral two decades before had also been a nice day. You wanted rain and cold and gloom to match your mood, but Mary could feel herself growing flushed and sweaty as they stood outside under the portico, waiting to go in. Her mother would have wanted to be in the garden on a day like today.
It was interesting to notice the change in turn-out from her father’s funeral. That time, half the population of Pepys Road had come. But most of those people had sold their houses and moved, and everyone had lost touch, so there were far fewer people here this time, twenty or so, over half in some way or another family. Petunia – another surprise – had wanted the service to be read from the Book of Common Prayer. They had recruited the parish vicar for Pepys Road, who was – yet another surprise – a young woman, much younger than Mary, who when they met had just got back from a run around the Common and was still wearing jogging clothes. Mary knew about woman priests in theory but had never met one. The Reverend was bright and nice and immediately agreed to read the service, tapping the time and place and Petunia’s ‘details’, as she called them, into her smartphone, before looking up and smiling.
‘I know it looks funny, but I can back it up to my computer, so I’m less likely to lose it,’ she said. ‘I used to get through three paper diaries a year.’ Mary could see that she liked being more modern than people thought she would be. This meeting with the trim, practical, kind-faced priest made Mary feel sad. It gave her a sudden sense that it was
now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes and a BlackBerry gave Mary a glimpse of what life must have been like for her mother as she grew older.
But the priest read the service beautifully. Her speaking voice had been light and slightly breathy, perhaps from exercise, but her ceremony voice was richer and deeper.
I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.
I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God.
Petunia hadn’t believed a word of that, to Mary’s certain knowledge, but the language felt right, as a way of talking about the very last things. After all, it really was the end of the world, for Petunia anyway. Her father, a roaring, furious, militant atheist, would have been livid at the idea of the Prayer Book being read; so this was a final, a very final, very much overdue, form of insurrection on the part of her mother. For once she had done what she wanted instead of long-sufferingly keeping quiet. Mary smiled and sniffed and felt Alan squeeze her arm, right there beside her, all flesh, all fifteen stone of him in his best black M&S suit, and felt reassured. On her other side, Ben was doing a heroic job of not being bored and fidgeting as much as he wanted to. Graham and Alice both looked pale and composed and she felt a moment’s pride in them and herself for raising them. Mary said to herself: I haven’t done so badly.
The vicar read some more in her strong voice, and said a prayer for Petunia Charlotte Howe. Then she pressed a button, the curtains parted, and the coffin with Mary’s mother’s corpse in it trundled through a hole in the wall to, presumably, the fires beyond. Mary had expected more melodrama, a glimpse of licking flames perhaps – wasn’t that what happened in films? – but instead there was just that mix of the ceremonial and the municipal. She was glad of that; it could easily
have been too much. Outside, people drifted about, some of them coming up to Mary and Alan and Graham and Alice and Ben and others chatting to each other in small groups. Alan, who had been brilliant, had booked a room over a pub for food afterwards, so they could all go for a drink to let off steam after the ceremony. This was a chance to tell people about that. ‘Give them a drink and a sandwich,’ he said. ‘People expect it. Part of the ritual. Then they can piss off home.’
Home – that word had a different charge for Mary, now. Where was home? Maldon, of course. There was now nowhere else in her life, no bolt-hole, nowhere she could run away and hide, no mother to run to. This, the small-talky after-ceremony, was harder than the service itself had been. One of the men from the crematorium appeared in the entrance and disappeared back in again. Mary got the impression that lingering here was something of an inconvenience for the staff – maybe they had another cremation booked. In fact, thinking about it, they were bound to. But she could not find in herself any appetite for hurrying up, shooing people away, or any other form of being helpful. Not today.