Identity Crisis by Ben Elton

Author:Ben Elton [Elton, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Literary
ISBN: 9781473508330
Google: DQ-DDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2019-04-03T22:00:00+00:00

37. Latifa’s Mum

Winnie Joseph lived in a flat in one of the numerous social-housing tower blocks that clustered round the Westway just past Hammersmith en route to Heathrow Airport. Sad grey sentinels, standing silent witness to everybody else in England buggering off to somewhere else. Depressed, crumbling, dangerous, bleak. The residents caught in decades of limbo, for ever in danger of being herded out of London altogether if the property-developing dreams of a post-Brexit ‘bounce’ ever came to pass. But also for ever hanging on the hope of the radical improvement promised by left-wing councils waiting for sufficient signs of life in the UK economy to make borrowing something other than a fantasy.

Meanwhile the only thriving industry and local employer remained drugs and its associated trades of sex and violence. Gang rule brought equal misery to members and non-members alike.

Not many police officers ever ventured beyond the front entrance of Barbara Castle Tower, but DC Sally Clegg didn’t look much like a police officer. As she ascended the stairs to the eighth floor – the lift worked, but she didn’t fancy getting trapped in a confined space – she wondered whether she’d feel more or less safe if she was wearing a uniform.

Clegg was deputizing for Matlock. He had absolutely refused to take time off from investigating an unsolved murder to ‘reach out’, as Janine from Press had put it, to the mother of the victim of a completely different one. But #VictimSoWhite was refusing to go away and Janine had been insistent that somebody officially linked to the Sammy investigation should visit the principal surviving victim of the Latifa investigation. The idea, as ever, was to reassure her that the Metropolitan Police considered the murder of a black cis woman as seriously as they took that of a white trans woman.

Clegg found Winnie among her photographs and memories. It was a cosy flat. There was a constant throb of contrasting drums and basses, hips and hops emanating from surrounding flats, but Winnie’s was a place of calm. She had the TV on but with the sound down. ‘It keeps me company,’ she explained. ‘My husband’s gone and my two sons only come around every now and then. Latifa used to visit each day. She was living with me at the end, which was why she got killed. A nice good-looking girl like her was always going to be a target. We asked you for more policemen to come around. We asked you to stop the gang-bangers hangin’ about and scarin’ us all. But you never did a thing. Then one day one of them killed my girl.’

Clegg could only stare into the peppermint tea she’d been offered and mumble something about stretched resources.

‘Not so stretched you ain’t got time for a chief inspector to get on the TV every five minutes sayin’ some white woman was a hero because she used to be a man, apparently.’

There wasn’t much Clegg could say, except reassure Winnie that the police really did think black deaths were as important as white ones.

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