Rashid Iqbal

The priest died on a Tuesday. Rashid Iqbal heard the news from his son Tariq, who had heard it from the man who delivered the milk to the presbytery on Roman Road, and by the time Rashid closed the shop for lunch the news was all over Bethnal Green. Father Michael Connelly, sixty-eight years old, found on the floor of the sacristy by the housekeeper at ten in the morning, the telephone receiver still in his hand, the last person he had spoken to being a woman named Margaret from the housing office in Poplar, the conversation having been about a family on Morpeth Street whose boiler had been broken since January and whose children had been sleeping in the kitchen to stay warm. That was how Father Michael had died: in the middle of a telephone call about someone else's problem, the heart attack so sudden that he did not have time to put down the receiver or call for help or say the Act of Contrition or do any of the things that a priest was supposed to do in his final moments, the death certificate later listing the cause as myocardial infarction, the time of death recorded as 10:07 hours on the third of September, 1985.

Rashid Iqbal had come to London in 1962 from a village in Punjab, a village whose name he no longer spoke aloud because speaking the name made him remember the smell of the canal and the sound of his mother's voice and the way the light fell across the courtyard in the late afternoon, and those memories made it harder to face the morning in Bethnal Green where the light was grey and the air smelled of diesel and the rain fell sideways against the plate glass of the shop window. He had bought the shop in 1971 with money saved from twelve years of working in a textile mill in Bradford, twelve years of twelve-hour shifts in heat and noise and the company of other men who had also come from villages they no longer named. The shop was called Iqbal's Quality Grocers and it occupied the ground floor of a Victorian terrace on Bethnal Green Road, between a betting shop and a launderette, and it stocked everything that the neighborhood needed: tins of ghee and sacks of basmati rice, jars of mango pickle and packets of cumin and coriander and turmeric, fresh coriander that Rashid bought every morning from the market on Columbia Road, frozen samosas that his wife Samina made in the kitchen behind the shop and sold for thirty pence each.

The problem had begun in January of 1985. A man had come to the shop, a man in a good suit with a briefcase and a smile that showed too many teeth. His name was Mr. Harrington and he represented a company called East London Development Partners, and he had explained to Rashid that the entire block of Bethnal Green Road between Vallance Road and Cambridge Heath was going to be redeveloped, that the leases would not be renewed, that the compensation offered was generous, that the decision had already been made at the council level and was not subject to appeal. Rashid had listened. He had nodded. He had offered Mr. Harrington a cup of tea, which had been declined. Then he had gone to see Father Michael.

Father Michael had kept the records. That was the thing that no one understood until he died. For twenty-three years at St. Anne's on Bethnal Green Road, Father Michael Connelly had kept baptismal records and marriage records and death records, yes, the normal records of a parish priest. But he had also kept other records. He had kept copies of every planning application filed with the council since 1962, cross-referenced with the names of the developers and the names of the councilors who approved them. He had kept a file on every landlord in the parish, with notes on the condition of each property and the dates of every repair request and the responses or lack thereof. He had kept the document that Rashid needed most: a copy of the original lease for the shop, the lease from 1891, the lease that showed the shop had been in continuous commercial use for ninety-four years and that the tenant had the right of first refusal on any sale and that the development company's claim to eminent domain was based on a survey that had been filed with the wrong lot number. Father Michael had found the error in twenty minutes. He had written a letter to the council, citing the relevant statutes, and the development company had withdrawn its notice within a week, and Mr. Harrington had not returned.

Now Father Michael was dead and the file was somewhere in the presbytery and Mr. Harrington had called the shop that morning, the morning after the funeral, to inform Rashid that the development company was renewing its claim.

Delroy Thompson

Delroy Thompson was twenty-five years old and he worked three jobs: mornings at the community center on Russia Lane, afternoons loading trucks at the warehouse on Wick Lane, evenings behind the bar at the Duke of Wellington on the Hackney Road. He had come to London from Kingston in 1972 when he was twelve years old, his mother having sent him ahead to live with an aunt while she saved the money to follow, which she did, eighteen months later, arriving at Heathrow with a suitcase and an address written on a piece of paper and a hope that had already begun to curdle during the flight. Delroy remembered the day she arrived. He remembered the taxi from the airport and the rain on the windows and the way his mother looked smaller than she had in Jamaica, smaller and greyer and older, as if the distance between Kingston and London had compressed her.

The trouble had begun in the summer of 1984. Delroy's younger brother Winston, sixteen years old, had been arrested for a robbery at a jeweler's shop on Mile End Road. The police had come to the flat on Teesdale Street at four in the morning, six officers in riot gear because the report had described the suspect as a large black male and the police had assumed resistance, had prepared for resistance, had been disappointed when Winston opened the door in his pajamas and asked what was happening in a voice that still cracked with adolescence. Winston had not robbed the jeweler's shop. Winston had been at the community center on Russia Lane on the night of the robbery, playing table tennis with six other boys and Father Michael, who had organized the evening as part of a youth outreach program that he funded from his own pocket because the diocese had cut the budget for youth programs in 1982 and had not restored it. Father Michael had told the police this. Father Michael had testified in court. Father Michael had presented a sign-in sheet with Winston's name and the time, had presented the testimony of the six other boys, had presented his own testimony as a witness and as a priest and as a man whose word had carried weight in Bethnal Green for twenty-three years. The charges had been dropped. Winston had gone back to school. The jeweler's shop had never been robbed again, which suggested that the real robber had been scared off by the attention, or had moved to a different neighborhood, or had never existed in the first place, which was what Delroy believed because he had seen the case file and the case file consisted of a single eyewitness identification by a woman who had been standing across the street at night during a rainstorm and who had described the suspect only as "a coloured boy."

The appeal had come in August of 1985. The Crown Prosecution Service had reviewed the case as part of a routine audit and had determined that the dismissal had been premature, that Father Michael's testimony constituted a conflict of interest given his relationship with the defendant, that the sign-in sheet was not admissible because it had not been authenticated by an independent third party. The case was being reopened. Winston was being summoned for a new hearing. The burden of proof had shifted, and Father Michael was no longer available to shift it back.

Delroy found this out on a Thursday morning. He stood in the sacristy of St. Anne's, the same sacristy where Father Michael had died, and he looked at the boxes of files stacked against the wall, and he thought about everything that Father Michael had known and everything that no one else knew and the impossible task of finding one piece of paper among thousands, one piece of paper that could keep his brother out of prison.

Janet O'Leary

Janet O'Leary was a nurse at St. Leonard's Hospital on Kingsland Road, a thirty-eight-year-old woman with red hair going grey and hands that never trembled and a faith that had sustained her through twenty years of night shifts and bedpans and the particular loneliness of being Irish in London during the years when the IRA was bombing English cities and every Irish accent was a potential threat. She had come to London in 1965 at the age of eighteen, fresh from a convent school in County Mayo, intending to stay for two years and save enough money to return to Ireland and marry a farmer from her village and raise children in the green quiet of the west. She had stayed for twenty years instead. The farmer had married someone else. The children had never arrived. The green quiet of the west had become a memory that she visited once a year at Christmas, when the hospital gave her a week off and she flew to Dublin and took the train to Castlebar and sat in her mother's kitchen and listened to the wind come in off the Atlantic and felt, each time, the strange doubling of belonging and not-belonging that was the condition of the emigrant.

Father Michael had been her confessor for seventeen years. He had heard every sin she had ever committed — the lies, the theft of a chocolate bar from a shop when she was nine, the envy of her married sister, the anger at God for taking her father and not taking the men who had planted the bomb in Birmingham — and he had absolved her each time with a gentleness that made her believe, against all evidence, in the possibility of grace. But absolution was not the only thing Father Michael had given her. He had also given her the key.

The key was to a safety deposit box at Barclays on Mare Street. Inside the safety deposit box was a document that Father Michael had written in 1968, a document that he had shown to Janet O'Leary on an evening in the spring of that same year because he trusted her and because the document concerned something that she, as a nurse at St. Leonard's, was uniquely positioned to understand. The document was a report. It described an incident during the Blitz, the night of December 29, 1940, the night that the Luftwaffe had dropped one hundred thousand incendiaries on the City of London and the flames had been visible from Bethnal Green. A bomb had fallen on a shelter on Globe Road, a shelter that was supposed to hold sixty people but was holding one hundred and twenty because the warden had allowed in families who had been turned away from the Tube stations. The bomb had not exploded immediately. It had lodged in the roof of the shelter and had sat there, ticking, for four hours while the occupants prayed and sang and waited for the bomb disposal unit that never came because the bomb disposal unit was dealing with seventeen other unexploded bombs across the East End. The bomb had finally exploded at three in the morning, killing eighty-seven people, and the official report had blamed the Luftwaffe and the insufficient number of bomb disposal units and the fog of war. Father Michael's report told a different story. The shelter on Globe Road had been marked for reinforcement in 1939, when the war began, the reinforcement budget having been approved by the Bethnal Green Borough Council and the allocation having been made and the contractor having been paid. The reinforcement had not been performed. The money had been diverted, by a councilor whose name appeared in Father Michael's report, diverted to a construction company owned by that councilor's brother-in-law, diverted to build a block of flats in Hackney that still stood, that still generated rent, that still belonged to the councilor's grandson, who was now a member of Parliament for a constituency in Essex and who was spoken of as a potential minister in the Thatcher government. Father Michael's report was twenty-three pages long. It was supported by council minutes and bank records and witness statements from five survivors of the shelter, statements that Father Michael had taken in 1968 when the survivors were still alive and still willing to talk and still believed that the truth, if spoken clearly enough, might change something.

Father Michael had never published the report. He had shown it to Janet O'Leary and he had explained why: the councilor's grandson was powerful and the survivors were old and the church did not want a scandal and the truth, spoken at the wrong time and in the wrong way, did more harm than silence. He had asked Janet to hold the key. If something changed, if the moment arrived when the truth could be spoken safely, Janet would know. She would feel it. She would open the box and she would do what needed to be done.

Father Michael was dead. The box was unopened. The key was in Janet O'Leary's pocket, pressing against her thigh through the fabric of her uniform, and Janet O'Leary, a woman who had spent twenty years waiting for a sign, had never felt less certain of anything in her life.

Sandra Dalton

Sandra Dalton was thirty-one years old and she had four children under the age of ten and she lived on the fourteenth floor of a tower block on the Teviot Estate, a block that had been built in 1968 and had been deteriorating since 1969, a block whose lifts worked on alternate Thursdays and whose corridors smelled of urine and whose walls were covered with graffiti that the council painted over every six months and that reappeared every six months and one week. Her husband, Kevin, had left in 1981. He had not left for another woman or for a job in another city or for any of the reasons that men gave for leaving. He had left because the tower block had broken him, because the noise and the damp and the impossibility of finding work and the daily humiliation of signing on at the dole office had accumulated in him like the damp accumulated in the walls until he could no longer get out of bed in the morning, and then he could no longer speak, and then he was gone, and Sandra had not seen him since.

The trouble had started in March of 1985. A new family had moved into the flat above Sandra's, a man and a woman and three children, and the man had been loud from the first night, loud with his voice and loud with his fists and loud with the sound of furniture being thrown against walls. Sandra had heard the woman crying. She had heard the children crying. She had knocked on the door three times and had been ignored three times and had called the council and had been told that there was nothing the council could do, that domestic matters were private matters, that the police had been informed and had declined to act because the woman would not press charges and without a complaining witness there was no crime. Sandra had gone to see Father Michael.

Father Michael did not call the council. Father Michael had learned, over twenty-three years in Bethnal Green, that the council responded to pressure in proportion to the embarrassment it would cause if it did not respond. He had a file on the Teviot Estate. The file contained letters from seventeen families, each letter describing conditions that violated the Housing Act of 1980 and the Public Health Act of 1936 and nine other statutes that Father Michael had memorized like scripture. He had sent the file to a reporter at the Hackney Gazette, a woman he had known since she was a girl in the parish, and the reporter had written a story, and the story had run on the front page, and the council had sent a housing officer to the Teviot Estate within a week and the family above Sandra had been relocated within a month and for the first time in six months Sandra Dalton had slept through the night.

Father Michael was dead and a new family had moved into the flat above Sandra's and the noise had started again and the reporter at the Hackney Gazette had retired and the council had a new housing director who had never heard of Father Michael and who would not answer Sandra's telephone calls. The file was somewhere in the presbytery, in one of the boxes that lined the walls of the sacristy where Father Michael had died, and Sandra Dalton had four children and no time and she was standing in the rain outside the locked doors of St. Anne's Church, holding a letter from the council that said there was nothing the council could do.

Tommy Baines

Tommy Baines was sixty-two years old and he had been drinking in the Duke of Wellington on the Hackney Road since he was fifteen, which meant he had been drinking in the Duke of Wellington for forty-seven years, which meant he had outlasted six landlords and two world wars and the demolition of the street where he had been born and the death of every friend he had made in the first forty years of his life. He was a small man, stooped from a lifetime of unloading lorries at the Billingsgate fish market, his hands permanently scaled and smelling faintly of cod even after washing. He had never married. He had never left Bethnal Green for more than a week. He had never done anything that would be recorded in a newspaper or a council minute or any of the documents that Father Michael had collected with such care. But he had watched. Tommy Baines had been watching Bethnal Green for forty-seven years, and his memory was the kind of memory that the modern world had forgotten how to value, a memory that held not facts but connections, not names but the spaces between names, not events but the invisible web of relationships that gave events their meaning.

He knew, for example, that the man who had tried to evict Rashid Iqbal was the same man who had tried to buy the land under the community center on Russia Lane, the land that Father Michael had protected with a covenant that Tommy could not have explained but could have pointed to on a map if anyone had thought to ask him. He knew that the police officer who had arrested Winston Thompson was the same officer who had arrested three other black boys on the Teviot Estate in the previous year, and he knew that the officer's brother worked for East London Development Partners, and he knew that the brother had been seen drinking with a councilor from the housing committee at a pub in Shoreditch on the night before the community center's funding was cut. He knew that the councilor whose grandfather had diverted the shelter reinforcement money was still alive, was ninety-one years old, lived in a nursing home in Wanstead, and received Christmas cards from a sitting judge at the Old Bailey. Tommy Baines knew all of this. He had never told anyone because no one had ever asked, because the knowledge that Tommy Baines possessed had no recognized form, no file, no document, no evidence that a court or a newspaper would accept, because the modern world measured truth in paper and Father Michael had been the only person who had ever understood that some truths were measured in the length of a glance across a pub or the way a man's hand shook when he lit a cigarette or the name that someone did not say when asked about his family.

On the night after the funeral, Tommy Baines sat in his usual seat in the Duke of Wellington and he saw Delroy Thompson behind the bar, the boy's face drawn and his movements slower than usual, and he saw Janet O'Leary at a table in the corner with a glass of whiskey that she was not drinking, and he saw Rashid Iqbal standing in the doorway of the pub looking for someone, and he saw Sandra Dalton walking past the window with her youngest child in her arms and her face set in the expression of a woman who had stopped expecting anything from anyone. Tommy Baines watched them all and he understood, with a clarity that forty-seven years of watching had taught him, that Father Michael's death was not an ending but a beginning, that the priest had been the hub of a network that no one had drawn on paper but that everyone had depended on, and that the network was now breaking, node by node, each person isolated in their own disaster, each disaster connected to every other disaster by threads that only Tommy Baines could see.

He finished his pint. He stood up from his seat. He walked to the bar and he looked at Delroy Thompson and he said, "I need to talk to all of you."

And because Tommy Baines had never said anything like that in forty-seven years, Delroy Thompson listened.