“You’re such a mother hen, Denny.” Annette laughed up at him. “Are you sure you’re not a schoolteacher? We’ll be good, we promise. And you remember to have some fun.” He thought she’d come closer than she realized, and he’d better at least look like he was in the spirit.
By that afternoon, he’d discovered it wasn’t hard. Notting Hill was a kaleidoscope of sound and color and movement. DJs spun reggae from the great stages, steel bands marched, the costumes were an outrageous blaze of color, and everyone danced. In between, they ate jerk chicken, and corn, and Jamaican peas and rice from the stalls. They’d long ago given away all their badges. There were more black faces than white in the crowd, and everyone seemed moved by a spirit of bonhomie. Strangers danced together in the sun, the women with the morning’s cardigans tied round their waists like Caribbean skirts. On Elgin Crescent, three uniformed constables broke into a dance routine. They’d obviously practiced their choreography, and the bystanders cheered with approval when they finished.
The police presence had been friendly and conciliatory, and if there had been any scuffles, he hadn’t seen them.
At last, tired and thirsty, they’d decided to head back to the Tabernacle. The smells were getting to them—not just the street-stall foods, but sweat, and spilled rum and beer, and most of all the eye-watering stench of urine. The Carnival provided temporary toilets, but there were never enough, especially for the beer drinkers. The pavements were littered with cigarette ends, spilled food, and crushed cans of Red Stripe.
The group had turned into Westbourne Park Road when he felt something slippery under his shoe. Looking down, he saw a crushed ice cream cornet and a puddle of melted ice cream. He was wiping his sticky shoe against a clean spot on the pavement when a prickle at the back of his neck made him look up.
They wore white T-shirts emblazoned with scarlet interlocking Ws, the symbol for Whitewatch. Five abreast, walking westward down Westbourne Park Road, swinging beer bottles held loosely in their fingers. Five, he thought, like the five men who had attacked Stephen Lawrence. Five white men. They wore chains in their belt loops.
He stood, slowly, instinctively reaching out to thrust back the people nearest him. Annette. And Marvin. The constant thump from the steel bands seemed to fade until he heard the thud of his own heart. Then, he focused on the man in the middle. His brain froze, stuttered, refusing to match the face to the situation.
It was Mickey. And Mickey was looking straight at him, grinning.
“Nice pink sash you’ve got there, girlie,” Mickey called, and the others hooted and laughed. They were drunk, or high. Or both. He could see it in their unsteady swaggers, and in their glazed eyes. For a wild moment, he wondered if he’d been targeted. He’d known Mickey had been put in a right-wing group, but he’d never dreamed it was this one. He’d told Red Craig his protesters meant to march at Carnival. Was this the response?
And, then, he wondered if Mickey meant to out him.
“A pansy, playing with coloreds and half-breeds,” said the man on the right. They all laughed, and there was an ugliness to it that made his hair stand on end. Mickey, he thought, what the hell are you doing?
He felt Annette step forward, heard her draw breath to speak. He shoved her back.
“Bugger off, you lot,” he said to the men, but he looked straight at Mickey. He kept his posture nonconfrontational, his voice even.
“You gonna make us?” jeered the man on the right.
A black man stepped out of the now-silent group of onlookers, right in front of the gang. He was young and thin, his face ashy with anger. “You bastards,” he shouted at them. “You don’t belong here. This is our Carnival. Get out.”
Mickey’s eyes went cold. Denis had an instant to think, Jesus, he’s lost it.
There was a flash in the corner of his eye. He turned his head, glimpsing a professional camera held by a large fair-haired man, his face half obscured by the camera body.
He threw an arm up, half in fury, half in protest. Then, just as the halo cleared from his vision, he saw the bottle fly from Mickey’s hand. It struck the young black man in the head. The man fell to the curb, writhing and moaning, blood pouring from his scalp.
There was a great collective sound from the crowd, a gasp of outrage, and people surged forward. Denis shouted at them to get back, the command voice instinctive. In the distance, police whistles began to blow. Mickey rocked on the balls of his feet, still looking triumphant, ready to take on a fight, but the others were shifting uneasily. As the whistles grew louder, they began to back away. Mickey gave him a last look and turned on his heel.
Denis knelt by the fallen man. He looked for something, anything, to staunch the bleeding from the head wound. His hands were already bright with blood from trying to assess the extent of the injury. Something white landed beside him and he saw that it was Annette’s cardigan. Groping for it, he felt a jab to his hand. When he looked down, he saw that he’d sliced it open on a shard of the broken bottle.
Ignoring the cut, he did his best to wrap the man’s head, shouting, “Someone call 999.” Then a pretty black woman knelt beside him, holding a toddler by the hand. “Wes,” she said, “let’s give the man your T-shirt, love.”
He started to caution her to get the child back, away from trouble. But when he looked up, Mickey and his gang had melted into the crowd.
As soon as Melody arrived, she could tell Doug was full of news. But she made him show her what he’d done in the garden first, while there was still light. “No wonder you got a sunburn,” she said, gazing at the pristine slate of newly dug beds in the twilight.
“You’ll still help me, won’t you?” Doug asked.
“Of course I will,” she said, but all her ideas and her energy for the project seemed to have vanished. Filling those empty beds now seemed an insurmountable task. “We’ll talk about it at the weekend.”
They went in, and only when she had her tea did she let him begin.
Doug told her everything he’d learned that day from Kincaid.
She couldn’t take it in. Shaking her head, she said, “Ryan didn’t kill himself? But . . .” She felt numb. Ryan Marsh taking his own life had been the overriding fact of her existence for nearly two months. She’d dreamed of him putting the gun to his head, seen his blue eyes gazing at her from his smudged face as he pulled the trigger. She’d wondered, over and over, if there was something she might have said or done that would have stopped him. She’d wondered, if he’d been so haunted by the horror of the death in the fire at St. Pancras, if she would ever escape it.
Suddenly, she was furious. “Duncan didn’t tell us? Why didn’t he tell us?”
“He hadn’t any proof. And—”
“We could have found proof. We could have—”
“And that’s the other reason he didn’t tell us,” Doug broke in. “He was afraid that if Ryan had been murdered, and we started digging, we’d be in danger, too. Now look what happened to Denis.”