He blinked in surprise. He hadn’t heard anyone call him that for ages, for years. He used to love the way the MC would introduce him, with the swooping emphasis and stress on the words that was unique to boxing. ‘Aaand in the Blue Corner,’ Blue stretched to two syllables, ‘Berrloo’. ‘All the way from Tottenham (Tot — Ten — Haaam!), North London, Enver, the Iron Hand Demirel.’ For an instant he could hear the roar of the crowd, invisible to him and his opponent in the bright, white light of the ring, the universe shrunk into a tiny square. ‘Are you ready to rumble!’ The smell of sweat and blood would still be there from the previous fight, hanging in the air like perfume, the canvas floor of the ring speckled rusty red here and there. And then he blinked again and he was back on the canal towpath, the glory days gone, the future contracting. ‘Demirel means “Iron Hand” in Turkish, ma’am,’ said Enver, by way of explanation.
‘I know that, Sergeant,’ said Hanlon.
Mirchison, a tough, angular Scot, may have lost the fight, but not as comprehensively as Enver, who had won the fight but lost the war. Mirchison had a powerful right hand and in the course of the eight rounds Enver suffered a detached retina in his left eye, which led to him losing his fight licence from the British Boxing Board of Control. He could never box again, not legally. It was the end of his career. It was then that he’d joined the Met.
‘Well, Sergeant. Boxing’s loss is our gain.’ She turned and looked at the top of the lock gates for a while, lost in thought. The gates seemed to fascinate her. Her eyes kept drifting to them.
‘I’ll be seeing you again, Sergeant,’ she said in a tone of finality. ‘There are things I’ll have to talk to you about regarding this murder.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Enver dutifully as he watched her walk away. She was joined by a tall, bearded, burly plainclothes officer who had been waiting for her at a respectful distance. Enver watched as she acknowledged him and he inclined his head down closer to her level so they could talk discreetly as they walked. You could tell by their body language that they were very much at ease with each other’s company. He wondered if they were seeing each other, they seemed so intimate. For some reason he felt a sudden stab of jealousy.
He tried to shake free the image of Hanlon as he too turned and made his way back to his car. He had a lot to do.
10
Kathy cleared up the remains of the breakfast from the table in the living room. Peter had left for school some twenty minutes before. The ground-floor flat that Clarissa had found them was perfectly located for Peter’s secondary school, which was about a quarter of an hour’s walk away down (relatively, she thought ruefully) safe streets.
This part of North London, Finchley, was actually where Kathy was from. She’d been born at the Whittington Hospital down the road in Archway, some forty years earlier. She’d always lived in London and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. There is a saying in German: the air of a city makes you free — ‘Die Luft einer Stadt macht frei’. That more or less summed up her attitude about the capital. London always seemed to her a city of infinite possibilities. After her husband’s death, she had sold the house in Barnes, needing to downsize. It was bought, to her amusement, by some French people. She wondered if maybe there was a Gallic equivalent of A Year in Provence — Une Année en SW13 — a nostalgic French look at the charming, rustic English Barnes, peopled by amusingly stereotypical English people, and it was almost with a sense of relief, of coming home, that she had decided virtually immediately to return to Finchley. There was no question in Kathy’s mind of leaving London.
The narrow streets of Finchley, with their small, pale-grey houses, seemed to welcome her back. And look, Peter, she had said, there’s the archer outside East Finchley tube station. The archer waited, as he had always waited, his bow perpetually readied as he knelt to defend East Finchley from its foes. It was where she belonged. Barnes was where Dan belonged. Dan had been quite posh. He’d been taken to the theatre a lot by his parents as a treat, he had gone to a private school, and his mother had a tagine and an Aga before anyone had heard of things like that.
Without Dan, life in Barnes was pointless. Not so Finchley. She remembered how she had always felt as if she were on an island in the borough. It was an island bordered by Mill Hill on the periphery of London, Muswell Hill, isolated without an underground, gateway to Ally Pally and poor relation of now cool, hip, Crouch End. Then to the south, Highgate with its cemetery and vampire and Karl Marx, and Jewish Golders Green. To the north, the countrified Totteridge and Whetstone. Coming back was coming home. She knew she’d made the right decision when she saw the statue of the archer again, her old friend, frozen in time and space, kneeling as he endlessly fired his arrow from his bent bow.
There had been the odd occasion walking the streets that she had grown up in, when the sense of the past had almost overwhelmed her, when she was momentarily not Kathy Reynolds, aged forty, mother of Peter and Overseas Business Development Manager for PFK Plastics, but Kathy Markham, aged fifteen, in her tartan school uniform skirt, hair in pigtails, school shirt a dazzling white and with creases ironed into it that could almost cut you they were so sharp, living where Margaret Thatcher, the milk snatcher, was the local MP. Who could have ever imagined her first senile, now dead, or that Meryl Streep would play her in a film? Her mother, now in a home, senile too, had been a champion ironer. Anything that could be ironed was ironed — socks, pants, you name it, everything.
Now she had a laptop; then she would have had pictures of Adam and the Ants and Duran Duran, cut from Smash Hits, painstakingly glued on to her schoolwork folder.
Sometimes her current self seemed insubstantial and ghost-like, as if she were haunting East Finchley like a time-travelling spirit, as if her younger avatar was more real. Some afternoons it wouldn’t have surprised her to see her younger self coming home from school, laughing, with a satchel on her back, while she stood, a wraith, looking wistfully on from the other side of the road.
Life was so much more fun then. It certainly wasn’t fun at the moment; it was bloody hard work, coloured with problems and bordered with tragedy. Fun had upped sticks and left a long time ago. The death of her husband had coincided with her mother losing her mind to dementia. She gritted her teeth and got on with things. What else can you do? Whatever her younger self had imagined, it wasn’t this. This life wasn’t in the script. What, she often wondered, would have been the reaction of her younger self to the older woman she had become, had she been able to see her? Bemused, thought Kathy. I always wanted to be self-confident when I was young, she thought. I am now. I always wanted to be a success. I am now. And I used to fret about my looks. I’m the wrong side of forty and I can still turn heads. I should be grateful really, but I’m tired. I wish I could go back to when Dallas was on the telly and me and Karen Jenkins would go to the wine bar. Wine bars were new then. She fancied Bobby Ewing but I kind of liked Ray, in his tight jeans and checked shirt, even though he walked in a funny way, almost bent double — perhaps it was the cowboy boots.
Her friend Karen would take the piss out of him sometimes and say, ‘Hey, Kat, who’s this?’ and do a Ray walk and imitate his accent, which used to have her in fits. Well, Dallas is back, she thought, but I’m not going to watch it now. I don’t want to see them all old, or dead. I’d rather remember them as they were. And sometimes we’d go to Cinderella Rockefeller’s in North Finchley and lie about our age, and dance to Donna Summer and Kajagoogoo and Gloria Gaynor and Sylvester. Later, of course, it would have been Wham!