Girls Read online

  ‘What?’ Harpur said.

  ‘The “u” in our “Harpur”?’

  ‘Lineage,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Lineage, what lineage?’ Hazel replied.

  ‘There was a Harpur with a “u” in the Trojan horse with the Greeks. Bert Harpur, Bert with an “e”.’

  ‘We get remarks like, “Detective Chief Superintendent, my! Daddy is such a big, big lawman, isn’t he? He’ll save us all, see us right,” ’ Hazel said.

  ‘I must have a word with you both about handguns,’ Harpur replied. He had not wanted to discuss any of this with Iles. He did not like discussing much at all about Hazel with Iles, and this would be about Hazel, or at least about her boyfriend.

  Hazel’s voice took on frenzy: ‘Didn’t I tell you, Jill? Didn’t I? I said he’d be on that again because of yester–day at Morton Cross. And when he says both of us he means me.’

  ‘Were you, like, tooled up yourself for it, dad?’ Jill asked. ‘Should you be out there at your rank and age? Which weapon? Heckler and Koch? Smith and Wesson?’

  ‘This was a street battle up at Chilton Park in Morton Cross,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you he’d be on about that – where it was, Jill? Didn’t I tell you, Jill?’

  ‘We know where it was, dad – from the News programme. Floral tributes plastic-wrapped. The usual.’

  ‘It’s new,’ Harpur said.

  ‘What is?’ Jill asked.

  ‘A new location for this kind of thing,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Which?’ Jill said.

  ‘Gun battles. Turf battles: that’s gang fights for what they call “territory”.’

  ‘Yes, we know what turf means, dad,’ Jill said. ‘Their ground – where they can sell their stuff.’

  ‘There’s been a change,’ Harpur said.

  Hazel said: ‘Oh, dear! It all used to be in the docks area around Valencia Esplanade, the run-down streets, didn’t it, nice and sealed off, so it never mattered? You could let them get on with it.’

  ‘It mattered, but districts like Morton Cross were quiet and safe,’ Harpur said.

  ‘The burbs,’ Hazel snarled.

  ‘The suburbs, yes,’ Harpur said. ‘They can be very nice. It was my mother’s top ambition to have a semi-detached house in the suburbs. They did make it, eventually.’

  ‘So why don’t we?’ Jill said.

  ‘What?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Live in the suburbs,’ Jill said.

  ‘Mr Iles asked me that. Your mother didn’t fancy it,’ Harpur said. ‘Different generation. The word “bourgeois” was big with her. And not favourable. Suburbs equalled bourgeois.’

  ‘Meaning?’ Jill said.

  ‘Meaning all the things my mother prized and sought,’ Harpur said. ‘People who kept themselves to themselves. Up and over door on the garage.’

  ‘We’re all right here,’ Jill said.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Harpur said. They were in the long sitting room at Arthur Street, Hazel pacing about, Jill on the settee with a copy of The Sweet Science, a boxing book, open near her. ‘Were you tooled up, dad?’ she said. ‘Waist holster or shoulder?’

  ‘Do you know what was more or less my first thought when I got there yesterday?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Oh, let me guess, let me guess, let me guess,’ Hazel said. She put a hand on her forehead to help mental effort. It was satirical. ‘You thought, “Hazel’s boyfriend lives in Brant Road, near Chilton Park, Morton Cross.” Bourgeoisville.’

  ‘It’s true I’d heard a youth or youths were involved, as well as the others,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Youths! Who calls them youths, except police?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Yes, I did wonder about Scott,’ Harpur replied. He thought he would have wondered, anyway. But the chat with Iles sharpened things. So, was it a sick, automatic cop reaction, this suspicion? Did the speed with which it came help explain the hostility of people like Scott Grant’s mother?

  ‘You wondered about him,’ Hazel said. ‘Well, that’s all right, isn’t it, dad? You wondered, but he wasn’t there, was he? And he’s not dead. You’ve got the casualty names now, haven’t you?’

  ‘No, he’s not dead or in hospital or nicked,’ Harpur said. ‘But these days – this part of the city, full of guns. Suddenly, thick with gangs. I don’t say Scott is into all that but –’

  ‘I thought that’s what you were saying,’ Hazel said. ‘I knew, knew, you’d be saying it. Didn’t you think that’s what he was saying, Jill?’

  Jill said: ‘Well, I don’t –’

  ‘Oh, but you stick by him. It’s hopeless.’

  ‘Did you have to open fire yourself, dad?’ Jill replied. ‘Rapid? How many shots?’

  ‘I don’t know how easy it would be for Scott to stay out of it,’ Harpur said.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Dad’s worried about him, Haze,’ Jill said. ‘And he’s worried about you, because of Scott. You care. You’d be so upset if . . .’

  ‘If what?’ Hazel said.

  Jill said: ‘If something . . .’

  ‘If something happened to him,’ Hazel said. ‘Meaning killed. It won’t happen. He’s not into all that.’

  Harpur liked this room now. There was space here and light. Quite a respectful while after his wife’s death he took down all the loaded book shelves and redecorated without them. A lot of the hardback stuff she liked used to depress him and jut out from the walls too far, a sort of bullying – titles like Beowulf, Wolf Solent, Untying the Text and Edwin Drood. They seemed picked to get up people’s noses. Harpur didn’t know how anyone could read stuff with these names and similar, but he’d often seen her at it. Most of it was more than show. She’d run fortnightly literary chat meetings here. Jill had wanted to keep the boxing book and something called Joe Orton’s Diaries, but the rest they got shot of.

  To Harpur the room had come to seem habitable since the shelves went, at last OK for a home. When the girls were grown up he wanted them to look back on this room and think he’d made something friendly and relaxed of it, changed it from a library. He was not opposed to books, but he objected to books that seemed to badger you, by what they were called and/or by quantity. When the shelves were up and full of Megan’s volumes, the room used to give him tightness in the chest like the start of suffocation, though he would never have told her that because she felt a sort of reverence for books. She might have got this from her parents who lived in Highgate. But Mein Kampf was a book. He’d never mentioned that to her, either. Harpur did admit that not all Megan’s volumes sounded totally dismal, or Jill would never have saved these two.

  ‘It’s just like police,’ Hazel replied, some rage spit flying.

  ‘What is?’ Harpur said.

  ‘You, going on about Morton Cross, dad,’ Hazel said. ‘Called “guilt by association”. It’s famed. The Soviets. The Fascists. Senator Joseph McCarthy in America: “You lived next door to Alger Hiss, therefore must be a spy.” We’ve done it in History. Political victimization, as when Zero Mostel throws himself from a skyscraper window in that film on the movie channel.’

  ‘The Front,’ Jill said.

  ‘Dad, you think, Scott lives there in Morton Cross and there’s trouble, so –’

  ‘It’s not about guilt. It’s about safety,’ Harpur said. ‘And your happiness.’

  ‘You want me to frisk him?’ Hazel said. ‘You want me to fink?’

  ‘These lads’ – Harpur almost said kids, but the lip-froth and wrath from Hazel were already enough – ‘these lads compete, like all lads always, but for a lot of these lads competing means having a handgun, a rapid-fire handgun.’

  ‘For “a lot” of them, maybe,’ Hazel said.

  ‘Yes, a lot,’ Harpur said.

  ‘ “A lot” but not Scott. How do you know he’s part of it?’ Hazel said.

  ‘I don’t,’ Harpur said.

  ‘You said it would be hard for Scott to stay out of it,’ Hazel said. ‘Didn’t
he say it would be hard for Scott to stay out of it, Jill?’

  ‘Dad’s just scared for him, and you.’

  ‘You always stick up for dad,’ Hazel said.

  ‘He can’t help being a worrier,’ Jill said. ‘It’s his age and the rank. They get like that. And the widowerhood. All right, he’s got Denise, and she’s lovely. But she’s not here all the time, is she, and she’s not our mother? Plus she’s young and in the uni with plenty of student friends, men and girls, so maybe he won’t be able to hold on to her. She’ll have a degree. She can speak French. She even knows French poems. There’s one about a pelican that tears open its own breast to feed its starving young. Denise could discuss things like that with them if she went to live in France. She might go anywhere. It’s like he’s on his own. In some ways. That causes fret because we’re all he’s got for sure. He doesn’t want you to suffer.’

  ‘Yes, it might be hard for Scott to keep clear of it,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Of what?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Dad means the culture,’ Jill said. ‘Peer group pressures.’

  ‘Oh, here comes Form Three Sociology-speak,’ Hazel said.

  ‘The gun fashion,’ Harpur said. ‘They get drawn in.’

  ‘Who?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Youngsters,’ Harpur said. ‘Boys fourteen or fifteen up.’

  ‘Into what?’ Hazel said.

  ‘The “this-is-my-patch-so-keep-out” wars. These are serious. They bring big excitement. They bring big money. Trafficking, mainly. Plus other activities.’

  ‘Which other activities?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Other activities,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘You know, Haze,’ Jill said.

  ‘What?’ Hazel asked.

  ‘He means running girls,’ Jill said.

  ‘Pimping?’ Hazel said. ‘Is that what you mean, dad?’

  ‘Crime patterns change. Villains slip in from abroad among genuine immigrants and asylum seekers. They don’t think like home-grown crooks. They bring a different kind of trouble. More complicated. With them, things overlap – drugs, women, protection, menaces. A bit of everything. And they back it all with guns. Guns are natural to them. Local gangs have to adjust, maybe copy in case they lose some of that precious territory. Some new British outfits are working Morton Cross. This gun fascination spreads down to youngsters who get little jobs in the firms – sometimes youngsters from ordinary, long-established, law-and-order families.’

  ‘Like bourgeois?’ Jill said.

  ‘The geography shifts,’ Harpur said.

  ‘I enjoy these talks,’ Jill said.

  ‘Which?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Like police talk,’ Jill said. ‘Like the important side of it – not just shoplifting or graffiti. Like looking at things wide.’

  ‘Widely,’ Harpur replied. ‘And you don’t need all the “likes”. We’ve discussed that before.’

  ‘What?’ Jill said.

  ‘ “Like”,’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Everyone says it,’ Jill said.

  ‘I don’t,’ Harpur said.

  ‘Probably you’ll catch up, like,’ Jill said.

  ‘Why should the changes affect Scott?’ Hazel said.

  ‘I hope they don’t. Just talk to him,’ Harpur replied. ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘What’s dangerous?’ Hazel said.

  ‘To join up with these people.’

  ‘Who says he does?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Nobody. But in case. In case he might. Ask him if –’

  ‘No, I’m not going to talk to him about it,’ Hazel said. ‘I’d sound like somebody’s granny or probation officer. And, please, dad, don’t you say anything to him when he’s here.’

  ‘Dad wouldn’t, if you don’t want it. You ought to know that.’

  ‘I don’t want it,’ Hazel replied.

  ‘No, of course I wouldn’t,’ Harpur said. ‘If anyone speaks to him it will have to be you.’

  ‘Well, it won’t be,’ Hazel said. ‘He’d know it came from you. He’d think I was pathetic, a dirty little messenger girl.’

  ‘Does he seem to have extra money these days?’ Harpur asked. ‘Better training shoes? Jewellery?’

  ‘What extra money?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Does he?’ Harpur replied.

  ‘Is this an interrogation?’ Hazel said.

  And perhaps it was. He should ease up, try a scene-shift: ‘I’d like you both to come out there with me.’ He wanted to get instructional and effective: fatherly, not oppressive. Ten years, maybe less, his daughters would have flown.

  ‘Out where?’ Hazel said.

  ‘Morton Cross, where it happened,’ Harpur said. ‘Chilton Park. I shouldn’t but –’

  ‘What for?’ Hazel said.

  ‘I just want you to see the streets,’ Harpur replied. But that didn’t quite say it, didn’t at all say it. He wanted them to see the streets and feel the paving stones and road tarmac under their shoes and brush against walls and thick front hedges so that the place and the dangers there were real to them, not newsreel glimpses made dramatic and distant and tidy by voice-over.

  ‘I know the streets already,’ Hazel said. ‘I’ve been to Scott’s house, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes, but this would be different,’ Harpur said: different because he’d give them a commentary on what he’d seen yesterday, seen and done yesterday, and describe the step-by-step awfulness of the fight. Although some of the step-by-steps then had been at a gallop, Harpur would take them over the ground more slowly, so he could do his tour-guide turn with good solemnity, and perhaps get some intelligent alarm going in Hazel about Scott. Harpur longed to make sure if he could that no more close contact with violent death came to the girls. They still had their mother’s murder to recover from.* A trip around Morton Cross would be graphic but not distressing. He reckoned that someone with a real talent for single-parenting could manage that kind of careful distinction. When they’d grown up and recalled these times, perhaps chatted them over, he’d like Hazel and Jill to feel he showed compassion and skill, as if both were natural to him.

  ‘I’ll come, dad,’ Jill said.

  ‘Oh, you would,’ Hazel said. But Harpur knew it meant Hazel would come, as well. She could not let the younger girl have a special trip with him, even a trip Hazel didn’t want.

  As they drove towards Morton Cross, Jill said: ‘Better not go too slow, dad, or they’ll think you’re a pimp yourself with two underagers on offer.’ She was in the back but crouched forward to make sure all her contributions got heard properly by Harpur. She believed in herself. She always believed he needed her advice. Hazel had the passenger seat alongside Harpur. Sometimes, the girls’ savvy appalled him. Possibly they meant it to. How old was he before he understood the word ‘pimp’? And would he ever have used it as a joke to his father or mother? He had to hope this dire know-how kept his daughters alert to the dangers around. In a disintegrating world, perhaps only worldliness worked. The present trip was supposed to give them a stack more about these dangers.

  Brightly, hungrily, Jill said: ‘Now, dad, tell us how the whole thing goes. You’re in your office and you get a call, right? “Shooting at Morton Cross, sir.” Did they have details this soon? Number of guns? Injureds? Deads? Some of your people would be already on the scene, yes? This is like the armed rapid response vehicle etcetera. Volvo estate? You want to get out there fast, but, obviously, you wouldn’t have a weapon aboard while you’re dealing with reports and dossiers and such on your desk. Or you’re in a meeting when the message comes? Something like that. You got to get to the armoury and draw something, have you? Or do they let you keep something plus ammo in your office safe? You wouldn’t go with nothing, would you? What did you take? The H and K – “police preferred weapon” I read in one of the papers? Flak jacket? When you’re driving in a flak jacket is it, like, all bulky and awkward, like Marlboro man? And you’d be driving fast – unmarked car but interior blue flashing light. This would be what’s known as an “
incident”. Shooting is an incident, and you think you got to get there even though Detective Chief Super. Where’s the weapon – waist or shoulder or just in your pocket? Navigation screen in the car telling you the route? Radio or phone to let you know all the time where the battle’s moved to? Are you alone? Was Ilesy with you in the vehicle? Other cars and ambulances with you? Are you in charge once you get there, like taking over? You’d be what’s called Gold, wouldn’t you – Gold being top command? Or Mr Iles? Assistant Chief, so even Golder.’

  ‘I’m embarrassed,’ Hazel said.

  ‘Well, yes, you would be, Haze,’ Jill said. ‘Embarrassed Scott or someone like that will see us around Morton Cross and think we’re nosing and trying to nanny him? A trio of us, and one of us the police. We could be noticed.’

  ‘ “Someone like that” being his mother. You know what she’s like. She’d want to know what we’re doing here.’

  ‘It might be an idea to tell her,’ Harpur said.

  ‘No thank you,’ Hazel said. ‘She’d make a fuss.’

  ‘What sort of fuss?’ Harpur said.

  ‘Her sort. Loud – in the street.’

  ‘But saying what?’ Harpur replied. ‘We’re here to look after the safety of her son.’

  ‘Are we?’ Hazel said.

  ‘She can’t object to that,’ Harpur said.

  ‘This is just your say-so, your guesswork. But, in any case, I don’t want her to know we’re here to look after the safety of her son, if we really are. And I don’t want her son to know.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’d make a fine nanny, Haze,’ Jill said.

  ‘Keep out of it, will you?’ Hazel said. ‘Just stick with your stupid gun talk and Gold talk, off TV drama. Dad, I’m sorry I came. Can we turn around and go home, please?’

  He ignored this. It took him some effort, but he ignored it. Perhaps when Hazel was grown up she’d look back on today and think him overbearing and heartless. Oh, well. He had to do what he could to save her from possible big pain now – this week, next, not when she reached thirty-five – big pain now if Scott remained unwarned, peer-grouped and sucked in by the culture, and as a result caught a bullet or two. Harpur found to his disgust that he could visualize an impressive cortège along these pleasantly wide, tree-edged, bonny streets, Scott’s mother in the lead car after the hearse, maybe still loud, but loud with weeping.