Heavy stuff from the client and he wondered if he believed any of it. It could all have been fantasy: hangings, Jews, camps, odd shoes worn by an old lady. The spider was real death. He couldn’t quite decide whether the client had been playing with him. He started on the form: name, address, work, complaint.
He was Jago Browne. Born 1989. His mother was Carmel. Her parents were semi-lapsed Catholics from the western edge of Belfast and had left in 1972 at the height of sectarian disturbances in the hope of finding a less traumatic life. One daughter, the apple of her parents’ eyes. Just after her eighteenth birthday she’d gone to Cornwall with her two best chums for a week’s camping. Might have been the draught cider, or ignorance or an act of rebellion: a one-night stand with a deck-hand off a Penzance–Newlyn trawler. A one-night stand followed by a one-morning stand that had drifted into a one-afternoon stand. She’d thought his name was Jago, but it might have been Jack. Anyway, ‘Jago’ was Cornish and she had fastened on it once the sickness started in the mornings. Her parents had pretty much dumped her, couldn’t cope with their little jewel dropping their hopes and aspirations in the shit. That was his mother, and home was a council flat in a part of London where few wanted to be housed – Canning Town – but she was lucky to have a roof over her head. She was a fighter – and wanted love. Dave was the boyfriend who gave her a brother for Jago, and Benny had provided the sister. Neither Dave nor Benny had lasted long. She was a single mum, with three kids and a maisonette, within a bullet’s reach of the Beckton Arms. That was Jago Browne, and they didn’t need his childhood history or his education.
His flat was built into the roof of an apartment block in the Kreuzberg district, between the Landwehrkanal and Leipzigerstrasse, with an entry on Stresemannstrasse along which the old Berlin Wall had run. His workplace was a bank – the section dealing with private wealth management and advising on investments – in the old east sector, out beyond Alexanderplatz and the great tower. The boy from a sink estate in Canning Town had made it into the stellar world of international banking via a school that believed in merit, a university in the north-west, where he’d worked his brain raw, a merchant bank in the Bishopsgate area of the City of London, and on to Berlin. How had he done it? People liked him. Those who had stumbled across his path thought him ‘worth a punt’ or had felt good after giving him ‘a helping hand’. He would have said that he’d been in the ‘right place at the right time’ so he was on a two-year exchange with the bank in Berlin, and a German youngster was coping with life in Bishopsgate. He added the bank’s name to the form he was completing.
Under ‘complaint’, he put, ‘To report extortion and criminal violence’. It was almost eleven o’clock. It would take him the best part of an hour to get across the city and its former dividing line, beyond Karl-Marx-Allee and to the top of Greifswalder Strasse. By the time he got there the whole morning would have gone. In the section, they all worked like beavers at the direction of the FrauBoss, and Elke had been back on his mobile to ask when they should expect him – as if he had a criminal’s tag on his ankle. He pushed the sheet of paper through the grille. A uniformed woman took the girls to a side room.
Jago continued to wait. Earlier it had seemed a good idea but the excitement had palled. In Canning Town no one made witness statements. His act of defiance was to get out a cigarette, not light it but roll it between his lips. He’d give it five more minutes.